Hopeful Mysteries

“Mrs. Feyen, do you like professional football teams?” This comes from George, one of my 8^th grade students. He’s asking me about football because I’m wearing a Notre Dame t-shirt today. I probably shouldn’t be wearing it; it’s not very professional, but every so often I get dreadfully homesick for the Midwest and this morning as I got dressed I decided to pull Notre Dame over my head and feel a little of South Bend on me as I walked through the day.

I wore a cardigan and a scarf with it and figured nobody would notice I was wearing a t-shirt. George notices, and now he’s asking me about the NFL. While I like everything that has to do with football: tailgating, the stadiums, fall, old, grey depressed towns that transform into vibrant, storybook places for 48 hours, I know nothing about the sport, professional or college.

“Let me guess,” George says, shifting his backpack to his other shoulder. “The Chicago Bears.”

I smile. I never hear them referred to as “The Chicago Bears.” Just, “the Bears,” and the “s” is drawn out a bit. George reminds me where I am – in Maryland, in Redskin territory, in a classroom of 21 of the rowdiest, craziest, 8^th graders I’ve ever come into contact with. Trying to teach them is like trying to keep the lids on 21 pots of boiling water. On better days, I call them hippogriffs. On the days they bring me to my knees, they are grizzly bears.

I shouldn’t take any of this personally: the eye rolls, the snickers, the talking while I’m talking. Most days, standing in front of them feels like I have my fly unzipped or toilet paper hanging from my butt. That’s how they look at me, if they look at me. Most of the time they are either looking at each other, falling asleep, or so zoned out I think I am teaching the dead. I usually drive home from school crying, trying to figure out where I went wrong.

They are my grizzly bears, though. As ruthless, conniving, and ridiculous as they are, I adore them. They make me laugh, they are dead silent when I read out loud to them, and when I can get them to trust me and themselves, they are poets. We take walks in a patch of woods behind the school and they write in the second person using all five senses. They can write a sonnet about baseball or their little brothers, all in iambic pentameter. Their writing is vulnerable and gritty. They can be lyrical and they can be stark. You’d never see it in class, though. It only comes out on paper, when they are writing with the lights off. Their preference. They are most comfortable in the dark.

“George,” I say as I erase the whiteboard. “I don’t think I can say I like the Bears, but I do root for them.” I turn towards him and say, “they break a lot of peoples’ hearts on Sundays in the fall.”

George laughs. “Yeah.” He leaves the classroom and I am by myself, looking around. Candy wrappers are everywhere. Assignments I took hours grading are balled up and lying next to the garbage can. There’s writing on the whiteboard, something about peaches. I think it’s a dirty, menacing joke aimed at a student in the class, but I’m not certain. I’m also not sure which student this is aimed at, nor am I sure how this got here in the first place. How did I not see a kid writing on the whiteboard?

As much as these students break my heart, I am addicted to the contrast they bring. I believe my faith lives in that contrast.

We are studying Romeo and Juliet right now, and day they meet Sampson and Gregory, they gasp in what I’m certain is delight when they hear Sampson talking about thrusting women against walls. When we get to the part where Gregory and Sampson contemplate the size and beauty of their reproductive organs, I feel like I’m conducting class in a frat house.

“I had NO IDEA how dirty this play is,” one kids says, delightedly.

When Romeo describes his love of Rosaline, “feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,” we discuss why the opposites contribute to the definition of Romeo’s love. “You can feel it more,” one of them says.

We try to do the same thing to describe the word, “crush:” perfect confusion, sorrowful happiness, paralyzing giddiness. They all smile, and I smile, too. I remember so well those days.

“Romeo kind of likes this mood, doesn’t he?” I suggest.

“Yeah,” they all say, knowingly.

“Now you try,” I tell them, handing them a piece of paper.

Loud secret is used for "mysterious," blurry focus for "art," and my favorite, hopeful mystery for the word "bless."

I tell them I’m going to cry for how good they are. “Read mine! Read mine!” they say, reaching their papers towards me. I take their work, and they put their heads on the table, shy now. I always tell them good job. I always tell them I love what they write. It’s as close as I can get to saying I love them.

When Mercutio and Tybalt die, I have them make webs around their names and we write down all the things they were: inappropriate, angry, possessive, rude.

“Is that all they were?”

No, they say. Mercutio was hilarious and he was a good friend. Tybalt was fiercely protective of Juliet.

I tell them Mercutio and Tybalt were nasty and awful, but that’s not all they were. “If we believe they were made in the image of God, then nothing they do – nothing anything any of us do – can separate us from His love.” I stagger when I say this. I’m always stuttering and tripping over my feet when I talk to my 8^th graders.

This class might give me nightmares. They might make me second guess everything I do, but they show me how to live in the contrast. I think it’s where the smiles are bigger, the laughter is heartier, and grace is at its most palpable.

We are cleaning up the classroom during the last five minutes of class. I’m trying to pass back papers, and kids are shooting baskets across the room with them. I get hit several times and realize they’re probably aiming at me. One girl has hip pinned another girl to the wall. Another kid is doing some sort of rendition of “Bring in the Noise, Bring in the Funk.”

George is sitting at his desk, whistling. He has perfect pitch, and I can hear him above all the ruckus. He is whistling the Doxology. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”

George reminds me where I am. George reminds me of my blessings. George, and all his classmates, help me believe in the hopeful mystery.

The Martian

“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”   ––David Foster Wallace

There was a lot to enjoy in Ridley Scott’s The Martian. Intriguing science fiction, a beautifully austere landscape, an admirable main character––Mark Watney (Matt Damon)––who was innovative, resilient, funny, and humble – all made the film great entertainment. But, for all it was, it could have been much more.

What is the difference between entertaining science fiction and classic science fiction? Isn’t it the human element that makes a story last in the memory of a culture? Scott’s Martian, focused on Watney’s science of survival, left out Watney’s humanity. As one reviewer wrote: “The relentless focus on technical achievement, in the absence of the complexity of the characters—in the absence of cultural identities and emotional connections, backstories and ambitions, the drive of will and ideological commitment, of fantasy and distraction—is the very antithesis of artistic creation.” The Martian would have tipped into the realm of something weightier if it included more of this aspect of Tracy K. Smith’s poem “The Weather in Space”:

                                                When the storm

Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing

After all we’re certain to lose, so alive—

Faces radiant with panic.

For more humanness, there should have been more questions. Bowie knew this when he phrased the title of his song as a question, “Life on Mars?” His title lends ambiguity to the confusion of Earth-bound scenes in the song. Is the song expressing the desire to escape the familiar? Is it the experience of feeling alienated in the familiar? Ambiguity, instead of Watney’s super smart solutions to difficult problems, would have eased the film into the realm of lasting art because it would allow the audience to consider possible interpretations. As Neil McCormick said of Bowie’s song, it is “at once completely impenetrable and yet resonant with personal meaning.” When Watney shaves a wooden cross because it is the only material at his disposal that is not flame-retardant, he says to the cross, “I'm assuming you'll be all right with this considering my situation.” His comment shows deference, but a simple moment of hesitation before he began would have raised more questions in the audience’s mind about the range of emotions––fear, doubt, hope––that Watney must have been experiencing, considering his situation. Wouldn’t it have let the viewer put their own “personal meaning” into that one motion giving it a far greater scope? It’s the murky non answers that lead us to deeper discovery. McCormick continues: “Bowie’s abstract cut-up lyrics force you to invest the song with something of yourself just to make sense of the experience, and then carries you away to a place resonant with intense, individual emotion.” The Martian would have had universal appeal if it moved through the shadows, rather than delivering the up-front explanations of Watney’s self-dialog.

Watney didn’t leave a wife, girlfriend or children behind on Earth. For that reason, the broader scope of longing was absent from his motivation to get home and be reunited with them. He did have parents waiting for him. And the letter he wrote to them in case he did not make it home was – nice. But it wasn’t tense, or fraught, or mirroring any aspect of missing them from millions of miles away. Overlooking the Martian landscape, its desolation, emptiness, barrenness, its loneliness, he was in control and reasoned, "I could die for that, something bigger." Knowing Watney was surrounded by sky and martian dust, silence and lostness, we should have felt desperation in that letter.

The Martian could have shifted into a movie about the human spirit instead of individualism. There was a weak attempt to play up a sense of lost community with banter when Watney (by now we know he’s a brilliant PhD) was again able to communicate with his coworkers. They teased him good-naturedly saying things like, “We have to do your job, but how hard can it be, you're just a botanist.” He told them immediately that his potential (though we could say at that point in the movie, probable) death on Mars was not their fault. A little resentment toward them for leaving him would have gone a long way in connecting to something human in all of us about betrayal and abandonment. Something transcendent would have anchored us in the Mars storm––something to resonate with our own times of alienation and lostness.

The ending invoked MacGyver solutions when Watney aligned his craft to a ship passing overhead with the use of a ball point pen after NASA’s efforts failed. Leaving out this innovative way for Watney to rescue himself single-handedly, would have given us room to wonder about his return, about life and death and sacrifice.

Hollywood will do what Hollywood does, exaggerate a situation to play up a hero’s strengths. But this American spirit movie had all the elements it needed to be something classic. Something human.

Put Weather In

It can’t make sense everywhere. I assume it has a temperate climate bias. Or, to be more precise, a four-season climate bias, yet it’s arguably one of the most lasting pieces of colloquial insight bequeathed to us from the recent past:  “March comes in like a lion and goes out like lamb.” Or vice versa. That’s the allure of the phrase, I think, its seesaw mechanics. Pay attention to this one month, this little adage promises us, and you too can predict the weather. It’s tempting to make weather simple. The weather in any given place is distillable to a few features, to northeasters and lake-effect snow and Santa Ana winds. Where I live, any given day is likely to be ruined by wind, first and foremost from the northwest, straight out the arctic, and second from dead south, straight out the furnaces of hell.

I have wanted few things more than to be a weather connoisseur. Not to hide behind complaints and clichés but to distinguish between gradations of northwest winds. To really know a hundred of types of rain.

Or to have special insight about what’s coming. To have a trick knee that could forecast blizzards. (“Is there going to be a blizzard tomorrow?” a checker in a small town grocery store asked me once. I didn’t know, I confessed. “The old people say there is. They feel it in their bones.” We got 10 inches.) To predict precisely the first frost of fall by the blooming of goldenrod in the ditch. To know the rain is coming because, as a man once told me, “the martins are hunting the mosquitoes close to the ground.”

My calendar almanac does this another way, by including the names for Ojibwe moons—names which sound poetic simply because they connect more directly the world of things with the bodies and hearts of people: Snowshoe Breaking Moon (March), Maple Sap Moon (April), Wild Rice Moon (August), Little Spirit Moon (December).

Perhaps I’m gaining in the weather department. Not long ago, we got a wind from mere degrees north of due west, a direction from which we hardly ever get wind. Not a biting or vindictive wind, not lashing or blustery, raising the voices of trees and dropping them suddenly, as in a violent argument. A continuous but respectful wind out of the west, like slipping into a pool that is exactly your body temperature, like a stranger who seems familiar with your town ahead of time, who respects it without being asked to, even though he’s just passing through.

“Put weather in.” So read a quote I posted on a writing bulletin board when I was a high school teacher. Which is a way to say pay attention. Which is a way to say distinguish. Which is a way to say be a connoisseur.

Online, someone hypothesizes that there’s religious imagery to “in like a lamb, out like a lion,” since Christ is both lamb of God and lion of Judah. And so he is. And so he is the God of March.

Simply Enough

When you harvest the crops of your land, do not harvest the grain along the edges of your fields, and do not pick up what the harvesters drop.    —Leviticus 19:9

At first, it’s frightening to say “Enough is enough,” but after a while it gets easier. These are words that we say mainly when we are frustrated or angry; they sound like a threat. But really, when I stop to think about everything I have—what I need, what I want—I’ve discovered that I have enough—food, clothing, furniture, a satisfying job, nights out, and hair products. At first, it may feel like denial, and who wants to deny themselves?

Saying enough, lets me look at what I do have. I have a son and two daughters, I have two grandchildren. That makes me happy. I love them. I like to write, and I get plenty of opportunities to do that. For a long time after my divorce, I flirted, I dated, I considered another long-term relationship. Now for over a year, I have been decidedly single. This state of being has felt like a blip in my life at times, and like desolation at other times. But then I have simply enough of everything else in my life—and that makes me feel pretty content with my lot in life. At first saying enough, I have enough, sounded like I was settling for less, which is not part of the modern dream I’d been chasing for many years.

During this Lenten season, I’ve decided not to accumulate any more stuff, except for the things I need to live in my ordinary world. Enough. I intend to live out the season with awareness of all that I do have. I’ve been spending more time working on my relationships, checking in on people I haven’t been in touch with. I’ve been devoting more time to writing—which is my way of meditating and reflecting. I won’t buy that new loveseat I was thinking about buying. I’ll put off that purchase a little longer. Actually, I do need, really need, new walking shoes. I have a pair that is wearing down fast. But you know what? I can wait another month to get those shoes.  

A couple of years ago, I started trying to do simply enough after I had a conversation with a dear friend. We were both feeling overworked and overburdened. My friend is no ordinary friend; I’ve known her since before first grade, so she’s like family to me. She heads a Social Work program in child welfare at a university, and I teach English and writing to high-schoolers, and occasionally to college students. We work too hard, we concluded, after going over all that was weighing us down work-wise. What could we do about our careers, which were overwhelming every other aspect of our lives? Enough. We would start practicing doing enough. What were the essential functions of our jobs? We each made a list of tasks that needed to be high-quality; then we made of list of tasks that needed to be good enough, and not more; finally, a list of tasks we could probably delegate. Could we do this? Could we each let go of the need to do more than enough at work?

It’s been a long process, but yes, we could. Sometimes we still check in on the phone or talk in person when work starts to occupy a bigger place in our lives than we want it to. That’s when the questions start: What is essential? What has to be done and done well? What can you let go of, if not forever, then for a while? Having a friend to touch base with has certainly helped me to learn what is significant and what’s minor. This process, the practice of doing, producing, and having simply enough on the job has worked its way into other areas of my life. I think you have to say enough to find contentment. The practice of simply enough leads to a state of gratitude. Don’t take more than your share. Leave some things for others, yes. It’s a generous gesture.

Three Roads

“Look for contrast, look for repetition—you’ll find your melody.”    —Larry Sayler, violin teacher, Northfield School of the Liberal Arts (2005-2009)

My former colleague Larry Sayler said the words above to a sixth-grader during morning convocation at my school in 2008. His topic was the sonata form. He'd just played a particularly tricky one—a late example, perhaps by Mahler—on his beloved instrument. The boy’s hand went up. He was having trouble, he said, figuring out what exactly he should listen for inside of what seemed a jumble of noises. Where was the melody? He knew it was there, for he had learned that from Mr. Sayler already. But how could he tune his ears to hear it?

Mr. Sayler’s response immediately spoke beyond the subject at hand, and has become central to the way that I teach, for it resonates with the metacognitive process that underlies the understanding of every subject at hand: the progression the ancients called the trivium.

Grammar (broadly speaking, the defining and assembling of the basic units of any subject), logic (the practice of discerning how such units interrelate), and rhetoric (the communication of what’s being discovered) is central to any search for meaning. In this way, to discern import within a given work of literature (and perhaps within any given life?), one must

—distinguish and define individual “grammatical units” within the work itself (in the language of music, these take the form of notes and measures, key signatures, tempo; in literature, we speak of diction and syntax, etymology and connotation, images and meters, alliteration and personification)

—in order to find patterns within and among those grammatical units (what sounds are repeated? what images? what words? which words are dissonant? what images? which sounds?)

—so that we may arrive at an articulation of a theme, a meaning, that’s at play within the work (The etymology of “salvage” on the first page of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf contains the tension between the pagan and Christian world views that defines the Anglo-Saxon work as a whole)

Thus, whether reading The Tempest or Native American myths, The Divine Comedy or A Christmas Carol, a book-length poem in medieval literature or a back-page print advertisement in capstone rhetoric, we look for patterns of congruence and antithesis in order to arrive at meaning, the integrity of which we test in class discussion and essay-writing.

And, once we learn to discern themes playing within a given work—once we learn to distinguish meaningful patterns within a work—that book or poem or essay itself becomes, in essence, a unit of grammar, one that can be compared and contrasted with other works within its time, or with contemporaneous historical or scientific events that have become “grammatical units” to the students via their other classes. (In what ways is Macbeth lodged against—and within—the forces that gave rise to the Gunpowder Plot, and the cultural forces at work in its aftermath? How did the ideas of physicist Niels Bohr find passage into the poetic consciousness of one of his dinner companions at Amherst College in 1923, Robert Frost?)

What’s more, these larger grammatical units—these poems and plays and novels—though rooted in time, can be compared and contrasted with other grammatical works across space and time. (What lines of thought and feeling connect the Elizabethan Dr. Faustus with the Romantic Dr. Frankenstein? How does Plato’s Allegory of the Cave intersect with Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation”? Why does the rhythm and syntax of a line in Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek echo those of a line of William Wordsworth’s, written two and a half centuries before, and an entire ocean away?)

To read literature is to enter what Sven Birkerts calls “deep time,” a contemplative space where one can discern “the shadow of import alongside the body of fact.” In our classroom, the trivium’s three roads lead us into that space .

We read slowly. We read aloud. We talk about what we’ve read. We write about it. We strive to be people, as Henry James once wrote, upon whom nothing is lost. We want to hear the music.

The Reader’s High

I am a trail runner. But when I tell you that, you will get the wrong idea about me. You will picture someone with gleaming calf muscles and a wardrobe stuffed with Lulu Lemon gear.

That’s not me. I am the type of runner people roll down their windows to cheer on because I look like I might keel over. I am short-legged and hippy and I take frequent walk-breaks.

And no, I’m not downplaying my athletic prowess for modesty’s sake. Want proof? A man once stopped me on the trail just to remark, “Wow, I’ve never seen anyone running this far up. How do you do it? Is the trick to just go super slow like that the whole way?”

Yup. It is.

Despite all the huffing and puffing and the occasional backhanded compliment, I can’t quit trail running. I’m hopelessly in love with the runner’s high.

It’s usually somewhere around mile three. My body throws an endorphin party and every organ’s invited. It’s usually around the same time I’ve reached the curve in the trail that shows the whole valley spread out before me. And it’s always enough to keep me coming back for more, to keep me hitting the trail even when I’m achy and slow.

I’ve never joined a running group or trained in any official sense. One day I just decided to see how far I could go without stopping. The process felt natural to me, and for inspiration, I found myself drawing on an unlikely (and very nerdy) source—reading. Specifically, reading the classics.

I’ve always had a fascination with books that look daunting. They feel like a steep hill waiting to be climbed. They require the same sort of grit, and they provide a similar reward. At the moment, I’m halfway through Middlemarch by George Elliot. And as much as I’d like to tell you I’ve been riveted by every line, that would be a lie. Some moments have felt like a very slow trudge.

But then, last week, I came upon the most beautiful passage. I’ll try to describe it, but I think part of its impact may have come from the way it burst forth after pages of rather dreary narration.

Dorothea, who has wound up in a rough marriage partially because of her overly pious, prideful nature, tells her husband’s cousin Will that she is now learning to live “by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

Will understands, and listens, and Dorothea feels heard and valued for the first time. Will is in love with Dorothea, but she doesn’t know it. There’s just a charge and power to the whole scene.  Eliot finishes with the charmingly apt description:

“They were looking at each other like two fond children who were talking confidentially of birds”

When I came upon this scene, something similar to a trail runner’s high flowed over me. Sandra Scofield, in The Scene Book, describes scenes like this as focal points. They are “where the essence lies, the point at which everything changes.”

And isn’t life like that, too? Think back over your week—there are probably whole hours that got swallowed up in the ordinary. Hopefully, though, you can also conjure up in memory at least one swift rush of joy.

As a teacher, February and March can be dreary months. Days can tend to drag on, weighted down by the mundane. When I find beauty on the trail and in literature, when I experience these micro-rushes—a beautiful run, a perfect scene—I’m reminded to seek this out in my daily life, too.

A Displaced Person

(Wikipedia image)

Flannery O’Connor changed my life. Her work located me. Sought me out from the top corner of a near empty shelf of a quickly-going-bankrupt mass-market bookstore. I read one story and knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life in any and all words and places and ideas I could generate. I have never regretted it, even if the writing life has brought unsubtle revelations about who I really am and how far away I may be always from the person I see myself as.

My attention was drawn back to O’Connor after David Griffith’s article in The Paris Review about her “least anthologized” short story “The Displaced Person”. I urge you to read the piece, regardless of your political leanings. Then read the short story. Or vice versa. On display is the inherent power of fiction; how it can carry a “dark moral force without recourse to didacticism or sentimentality.”

The idea of displacement Griffith talks about in O’Connor’s story was reinforced just last week. Again from that high-on-a-shelf kind of unexpected angle: a trilogy of graphic novellas we picked up for the kids at the library. It’s called “Lost & Found” by Shaun Tan. These three short illustrated stories are immaculately drawn, layered with rewarding and minute details. There is an astounding force at work inside each frame.

The middle story in the collection, “The Lost Thing”, strikes at the heart of why I continue to feel displacement in my own life. How it continues to be a “question about belonging in the absence of any direct language”. The story illustrates the journey of a lost, voiceless creature and the narrator who tries to find a home for it somewhere in the city. After some missteps, a unique and unexpected home for the creature is uncovered. This placement of the creature, finally, reveals a startling idea: where a displaced thing ends up may in fact not be the place it actually belongs.

Exactly a year ago now my family and I intentionally displaced ourselves in hopes of finding a community to which we could belong. We had outgrown our home in a number of real ways and we couldn’t stay. We moved deeper into the midwest. A small town, still in Ohio. We have no business being here, outside of work. And yet here is where we are. Like the odd, eschewed characters of Tan’s story, we “are happy enough.” But still the irk of not belonging is persistent and indirect. It sweeps over us in quiet strokes on Sunday mornings, in silent nights on our unlit street.

Griffith points out that many of O’Connor’s stories deal with displaced persons. And how they are always subject to violence whether as the perpetrator—or, as “The Displaced Person” shows despite the faultless and hard-working Mr. Guizac—as the victim.

I know where I am. And here life is comfortable and cozy. I am happy enough, too. I do not openly wish for a change. After all, like O’Connor’s Astor says, “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.” But I know how a simple glint caught by the corner of the eye can violently change my life. So I merely hope I don’t become “too busy doing other things” to fail to notice. Because I am—and may always be—a lost thing.

Food for Thought

“It tastes healthy,” my friend benignly replied to my increasingly inquisitive gestures in the church potluck dining hall. The substance before us had the color of chocolate mousse; it had the consistency of chocolate mousse; it certainly felt like chocolate mousse on the tongue, but upon taking a mouthful, it immediately introduced itself with that telltale vegan, no sugar added, and nutrients aplenty sensation. It wagged its tongue at the sweet sultry flavor that chocolate offers—no sir, this stuff boasted dates, avocados, and coconut milk!

Now, I actually have a pretty strong affinity for quirky health-filled kitchen concoctions. Pinto bean brownies, dessert hummus, beet breakfast bars with chilli peppers and cardamom, gingered lentil goji berry cereal: these are things that find their way into my edible creations. Someone might call my concoctions bizarre, but most nutritionally minded people I know would call them wholesome, or guilt free, or maybe even innocent: and they would mean it as a compliment. Still, though, there is no denying it, sugar-free, dairy-free, gluten-free food generally has that healthy taste about it. And to be honest, as a metaphorical concept, the whole healthy food versus yummy food dichotomy deeply troubles me. I struggle against the thought because as someone who aspires to a spiritually enriched life, I feel that the polarization relegates my pursuits to the healthy tasting section of the potluck table: the brownish, runny bland dish in a homely, well-used crockpot that people look at probingly before quickly darting to the next dish.

Several years ago I found it quite convenient to partake in an exclusively strict superfood laden regimen. I had some spare time on my hands so I figured taking the effort to prepare really healthy stuff would be a good experiment in how it made me feel.  For months I ate sprouts, beans, kale, spinach and tofu—it was a banquet of nutrition packed awesomeness. And then a friend of mine, who happens to be an excellent cook, came to stay with me.

During the week together we feasted on homemade buttery shrimp bisque, Greek pasta salads that luxuriated in feta cheese and oil, crème brulee and cake so delightful that I could have written romantic odes to it. Meal after meal I quietly moaned to my friend, “I didn’t know food could taste this good.” Every meal was like a Dionysian festival betwixt my lips.

When my friend left and the culinary expedition ended, I felt as though I had two stark choices for restocking my refrigerator: sprouts or stroganoff.  I approached my food choices as I sometimes subconsciously approach life: I could make the healthy and responsible choice or the delicious and enjoyable one. My mouth, accustomed to the sweet joys of butter, sugar and cream howled for satisfaction, my body, slightly sluggish but staunch, quietly demanded some veggies. I had to make a choice, there was only room for one.

What I am seeing more of is that, as a general concept, enjoyment and responsibility are not necessarily as dichotomous as I sometimes have been led to believe though. Surprising as it is to me, my pursuits can’t quite be compacted down to the category of a vegetable or a cake. This is particularly applicable to a nuanced spiritual perspective. In an excerpt of Miroslav Volf’s book, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World, posted in Christian Century, he says:

In choosing between meaning and pleasure we always make the wrong choice. Pleasure without meaning is vapid; meaning without pleasure is crushing. In its own way, each is nihilistic without the other. But we don’t need to choose. The unity of meaning and pleasure, which we experience as joy, is given with the God who is Love.

This is truly magnificent news, for it tells me my dichotomy is off. Love personified has constructed a world in which, when approached from a spiritual lens, proffers things both beneficial and satisfying. Our spiritual awareness, far from making us and our world the unappealing undercooked onion puree in the potluck of life, enhances flavor.        

On Flashlights and Wanting to Believe

As I write this piece, in part, out of fondness for my pre-Internet childhood and an old love affair with a boxy and rabbit-eared television, I can see us. We are sitting rapt – my two little sisters cross-legged beside me, our faces iridescently lit by the FBI flashlights that spear the dark glaze of an eerie and abandoned field. I can see Mulder and Scully pushing the light forward, toward us as we lean into it, intersecting one another like the glowing crossbeams of their flashlights.

I have forgotten many things about being a child, but piercingly clear is the part of my childhood and adolescence spent watching The X-Files. I remember the metallic smell of the antenna in my hands as I worked toward the delicate arrangement that would render a clear screen. I remember the big bowl of popcorn and pushing through angst and fear to deliciously tremble week after week as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully dodged monsters and aliens, their faces tense with the work of believing and proving what no one else could.

And it was worth it – the increased fear of a dark room, the occasional nightmare about spaceships or shape-shifters. It was worth it because as Mulder famously told us and as the opening credits stated week after anticipated week, “the truth is out there.”

Having grown up in the world of faith, in belief in the humanly impossible—in arks and Ascension and water into wine—I didn’t find Mulder’s words hard to accept. My whole world was informed by the supernatural, by the persistent grip of redemption and grace and by what I couldn’t always see and couldn’t always touch. I cheered for Mulder’s tenacious desire to uncover truth, for his skeptic partner Dana Scully’s increasing ability to begin to believe with him, too. And as they struggled with the paranormal, I sensed how faith in what couldn’t be seen or touched could become the foundation against which all the experiences of my life, even the frightening and unexplainable ones, were contextualized and illuminated. I even saved money to buy an expensive flashlight that I told myself was for reading beneath my bed covers. Really, I think I wanted it to illuminate my dark room the way Mulder and Scully’s search illuminated the space between me and the television on nights The X-Files came on.

One day, The X-Files went off the air. Soon after, I went to college. And I only kept a flashlight inside the glove-box of my car on the chance I had a flat tire and not because I anticipated a situation that involved the goose-bump pull of a dark field. Somewhere, in my movement through the long corridor of my twenties and early thirties, the unexplainable became too easy to explain with despair and disillusionment. Time has a way of relieving us of our wonder and expectation, of dimming our flashlights and making darkness seem more commonplace than even the simplest light. After the usual bouts with time that produced deaths and divorces and friends moving across the world, it was the joy that baffled me, the surprise that someone I loved did not die or divorce or move far away.

A few months ago, it was announced that David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were going to revive my old friends, Mulder and Scully, for six new episodes. In honor of the show’s new season, I began re-watching the old episodes. And I was surprised at how completely I had forgotten about the unbelief. And I’m not talking about Dana Scully, the skeptic to Fox Mulder’s persistent enthusiasm. I’m talking about Mulder, whose energy of faith was its own kind of light in the dreariest and most hopeless of circumstances:  “It’s hard, Scully,” he said. “Distrusting everyone and everything—it wears you down. You even begin to doubt what you know is the truth.” Stunned, I thought about how his words articulated a disillusionment buried in my own movement away from wonder. I understood what Mulder meant: the work of belief can be exhausting.

The revival of one of my favorite series has reminded me of the longing, of the unquenchable desire that is the human struggle to believe. Tonight, another episode will air. The flashlights will glimmer into focus. Mulder and Scully will reappear across my living room. And if they, years later and in middle age, can still be pulled into the fray of search and hope, if they can still be compelled to ready their flashlights and hit the dark and eerie fields, I can, too. Maybe I will call my sisters, remind them to turn on their TVs, and pop a bowl of popcorn. Perhaps, at the first sound of the theme-song’s whistle, I will become 14 again—a total nerd, a total dreamer, a total fan of the insatiable human capacity for belief that relies both on the resilience of imagination and the mystery of faith and that resurrects itself into the most unsuspecting life when she has forgotten to believe resurrection can happen.

Love Me Tender. Laugh Me True.

The professor had this to say about my work, “Sometimes I get the feeling that you are sitting at your desk and just cracking yourself up.”  She was wrong. I didn’t have a desk. I sat on the bed, at a coffee table at Starbucks, on the train, or on the yoga mat that doubled as an accent rug. She was right about one thing, though. I make a habit of cracking myself up. I had to. I was working full time and in grad school so tears came easily and regularly. Laughter was a bit more elusive. The yoga teacher would begin class by having us set an intention for our work, something that would carry us through the convoluted poses, the unnatural stillness, the words I didn't know. As I sat before whatever surface that got the opportunity to hold the weight of my blank page, my intention was quite simple. It wore brown slacks, a grey shirt, and a tan hat. It contorted its face into funny shapes, it held wordless conversations with headless manikins, it tapped dance in the middle of movie set, and when the big moment came it belted out, “Make ‘em laugh.” My dance students look at me with wide eyes when I ask them if they know the combination well enough for me to turn the music on and stand off to the side. “It’s just hard,” one of them says. “We lift our left leg,” she pauses and performs a small, personal version of the combination. “Then the right and then the left again.”  I nod. “It’s so complicated!” she tells me again. “It really isn’t.” It isn’t like you are an octopus. You only have two legs.” I am serious, but they laugh. They foil my plans to be the “humorless dance teacher” and they laugh. Their eyebrows fall away from their hairlines, and they tell me they are ready to dance. We are rarely short on sources that encourage us to feel our feelings in the corners of dark places, especially in the arts. The goal of a lot of the “successful” works seems to be drama, conviction, introspection, berating self-reflection. It is far too easy to find failures and shortcomings to dwell on and to replay the never-ending movie of images things that we could have done better, or the millions of other choices we could have made. But we have other options. We can laugh. Not a snicker at something stupid, or an academic chuckle at an intelligent joke, but a full-bodied guffaw over something that is actually and simply hilarious. By doing this, we give ourselves a few seconds of love and relief. In the time it takes to squint the eyes, throw the head back, and forget that the world can be a sad and horrible place, we experience an appreciation for our lives and all of the twists, turns, and choices that brought us to the moment that invites us in to take a load off and have a drink. In the movie, the girl who took some creative writing classes in college tells the author that his narrator is narcissistic. The author, wearing khakis and a white t-shirt, both wrinkled, shrugs and says, “Well, somebody’s gotta love me.”

I laugh at this every time.

Living Water

I always try to pick just the right moment to tell people. That moment is sometime between realizing that they are one of those who will need to know, and the point when they figure it out on their own. Although I frequently share intimate details of my life, in writing, and with my bank teller, or a new acquaintance, there is one thing that I hold back until the last minute.

I have hyperhidrosis, which is believed to be a disorder of the parasympathetic nervous system. What this means is that I sweat excessively, mostly from my hands and feet, although everyone who has this condition is affected a little differently.

The paragraph above is usually what I tell people who are about to give me a professional massage or a pedicure. I’m still nervous every time I say it, but I’ve learned that these are the conversations most likely to go according to plan. These people are professionals.

Whenever I start dating someone new, I begin thinking about when I should tell them. My goal is always to do it before we hold hands for the first time, to minimize the shock, and the revulsion. Although no one has ever reacted badly at first (one boyfriend told me he liked knowing when my anxiety was heightened, so that he could attempt to soothe me), I cannot count the number of times that my beau of the moment has removed his hand from mine, wiping his palm on his pant leg. My sweat stands between me and the intimacy I crave, sometimes.

I was in single digits when I started to notice this phenomenon. My reading confirms that this is fairly standard for those who suffer without another underlying condition to explain the symptoms away. As a nine-year-old, I knew that a pencil was likely to slip through my fingers if I wasn’t paying attention, I couldn’t wear sandals, and that hardback books were my best bet at the library (I was once charged for water damage).

In my teens, I went the way of drugs. At the time, my only option was to put a highly concentrated antiperspirant on my hands and feet, wrap them in saran wrap, and cover them with socks and gloves overnight. The antiperspirant burned and dried out my skin, but the sweat got through. After too long, I stopped.

I used to plead with God to take away this condition, frustration twisting deep in my stomach. It seemed like such a small thing for God to do. But it hasn’t changed.

I have learned to live with my extra sweat. I shy away from synthetic fabrics and an abundance of cinnamon. I bought a mat made for hot yoga so I don’t slip. I wipe my hands discreetly before meeting someone new in a handshake. I am patient when I explain the water damage on my phone to the guy at the Apple Store.

Sometimes, my senses overpower me and I squirm. In those moments, I want nothing more than to run my hands under ice cold water while wearing a pair of absorbent socks. My boyfriends are not always the ones who pulled away, sometimes I was the one who couldn’t stand the humidity anymore.

I know that my sweating is outside of my control, something that came to me unbidden. Still, I can’t help but wrestle with shame when holding it up to the light. My sweaty hands are connected to me, a part of me, just like my heart and my lungs.

I have learned that when something doesn’t make sense to me, my best bet is to sit with it, even pour it a cup of tea. In these interactions, I have to force myself to be civil. I cannot say: “why are you here?” so instead I say: “tell me about yourself.” I ask: “could you possibly be living water?”

I believe that our bodies are intentional, that they are the best lens for us to experience the world. I believe that it matters that I am five foot two and a half, that my knees contain tendons that like to hang loose, and that my hands and feet sweat more than most.

My sweaty hands and feet have taught me to be patient with myself, and with others. They have taught me to take myself less seriously. There might be more, I need to schedule another time for tea. Along the way I have also learned that healing doesn’t always take the form I hope for. Some days it looks like sidling up to Jesus and slipping my hand in His, not worried about rejection. He already knows all my stories.

Breathe Lightning

“Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.”     ― Joseph Brodsky

On days when the sun is shining across the oak outside my door, and colors I didn’t know it possessed bloom in the bark’s inscribed lines – gold, green, sage – I like to think about the concept of limits. The Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky, spent 18 months in a labor camp in subzero temperatures along the Arctic Circle. Some have said of this time that “Brodsky’s exile was the best year of his life...because it gave him time to read and write.” Brodsky agrees, “Even sitting there between those walls, locked up, then being moved from place to place, I was writing poems.” Brodsky’s writing flourished in confinement.

This paradox has a parallel in the art world. Post-expressionism was a revolt against Expressionism; an attempt to put the rampaging genie back in the bottle. It countered Expressionism’s fluid and mainly angst-ridden style with one placed inside limits. As Carlo Carrà suggested, it put things “in the space allotted to them.” Consider Edvard Munch’s The Scream (Expressionism) and Anton Räderscheidt’s House Nr. 9 (Post-expressionism) side by side.

The Scream seems to overflow the canvas in its intensity, while House Nr. 9  is rendered in parallels, angles, and is fixed within its borders. The painting’s strength comes from creating its essence within its limits. The overflow of emotion in The Scream plays on our senses, but so do the constraints of House Nr. 9. Its lines and muted colors present a stable backdrop for the mysterious couple. Who are they and what is their relationship to each other? Is one a door-to-door salesperson; are they lovers; is one an angel in human form? The window’s acute angles form a cross on a hill. Räderscheidt creates mood and room for imaginative interpretations within the stylistic constraints.

Don’t immovable lines seem counterproductive, and limitations seem to keep us from accomplishing our good work? Even in what might be considered an unfettered life, Emily Brontë’s prison imagery would have made the exiled Brodsky feel at home. Anne Carson’s poem, The Glass Essay, speaks about the poet and novelist:

Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons, vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters, locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls.

Outwardly, Emily Brontë didn’t seem to have lines hemming her in; she was free to write and roam the moors. Whatever the constraining forces were that shaped her writing, Emily yielded to them. Carson’s poem continues from Charlotte Brontë’s perspective:

Charlotte talks firmly and calmly about…

         Emily’s total subjection to a creative project she could neither understand nor control, and for which she deserves no more praise nor blame than if she had opened her mouth

“to breathe lightning.”

What is God creating in the midst of your parallel lines, your locked windows and aching walls? Do you dare? Breathe lightning.

Somewhere Between Tom Brokaw and The Misfit

I blame Tom Brokaw. Or someone, anyway, west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies. This might qualify Walter Cronkite, too, who was no doubt the most powerful white man of my youth. The news itself, it might be said, was the direct descendent of Puritan plain style, the most complex stories broken down into a few short sentences delivered by stolid white men in serious, accentless tones with direct eye contact. And Midwestern English had a starring role.

Spellcheck doesn’t recognize the word “accentless.”

The idea itself is illogical, like water without wetness. Language by nature has an accent. The idea that Midwestern English is accentless is therefore obvious bunk. Still, for generations it was the language of the news. Generations after Brokaw and light years from Cronkite, the Midwest continues to suffer from their legacy, the idea of accentless language.

Or the Upper Midwest does—maybe the northern plains—I’m not sure where to locate it. Certainly west of Chicago. Chicagoans’ accents are crystalized, their identity sure. Though also south of the Coen’s Fargo. North, certainly, of Hannibal, Missouri. Mark Twain’s writing is among the surest of itself, rooted, but Twain is a Southern writer. Sure, the Midwest feels affinity for Twain, but primarily in a kind of envy, as wannabes.

As a writer, I spent years trying to neutralize my voice. First, I tried to leave the Midwestern accent—or non-accent—behind by trying to sound smarter: I spent years trying on the greater non-accent of academia. That is, I thought as a writer I was supposed to climb to some position high above the biases and stereotypes of accented English, so I tried to leave Midwest English, a supposedly accentless English, for Academic English, a really accentless English.

I know it doesn’t make any logical sense, that being smart means you know there is no objective point of view or accentless English, but that’s certainly not the impression academic writing gives off.

Something has also changed about Midwestern English. Its supposed clarity has become equated with simplicity or facelessness. In fact, I sometimes wonder if the era of Kronkite and Brokaw hasn’t left a vacuum, if it hasn’t left us with Southern accent envy. This would help to explain the way Duck Dynasty has colonized the Midwest and why I see a Confederate flag displayed in the window of a tiny town (population: 50) I commute through every day—in Minnesota.

So, I'm trying to return to the Midwestern accent again—or, more precisely, to the accent in this part of the Midwest, south of Fargo, west of Chicago, north of Hannibal—to hear it, to align myself specifically with it. What are the ins and outs of the English spoken in my backyard?  What has the language itself sheltered within its peculiar constructions and idioms?

But where do I turn for help?  To Southern writers, where else?  When Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit says about Jesus, “He thown everything off balance,” we know we’re in the middle of it, in the middle of a mind, in the middle of a place, in the middle of a theology. The best writers both align themselves with an accent, the diction of a place, and enable us as readers to get inside it, too. They both affirm it and hold it up to the light.

Which drives me to a second source: to the men at the downtown coffee shop, to the women at the supermarket deli, talking their Middlewestern talk, here in flyover country, the land of Tom Brokaw.

Finding Livelihood: An Interview with Nancy J. Nordenson

I first read Nancy’s work in 2006 when one of her essays, “Nothing Can Separate,” was published in Relief’s inaugural issue. My friend Karen Miedrich-Luo, Relief’s first creative nonfiction editor, recruited me to come on first as reader, and then as nonfiction editor. In 2007, Karen and I formed an online critique group along with Nancy and another Relief essayist, Jill Kandel. Karen, Nancy, Jill, and I now count five published books between the four of us – including Jill’s prizewinning memoir, So Many Africas: Six Years in an African Village. The four of us continue to challenge and encourage one another nearly ten years later via the online group.

Back in 2010, after more than three years of online friendship, I met Nancy in the flesh at NonfictioNow in Iowa City. I immediately liked her as much in person as I had online. Nancy is humble in all the best ways, considerate of others, wise and careful when she speaks, insightful, deep, and brilliant. And her writing is the same.

In 2013, Nancy and I both applied and were accepted for a weeklong summer writing residency with the Collegeville Institute at St. John’s University in Minnesota. In our application materials, we hadn’t revealed that we already knew each other, and yet we were paired as roommates, writing all morning, lunching together, reading or writing until late afternoon. With the day’s work behind us and the evening gathering still an hour or so ahead, Nancy and I would sit together and talk about our writing and our lives over slices of Dubliner cheddar and a glass of red wine. I vividly remember reviewing Nancy’s manuscript for Finding Livelihood (tentatively titled A Work in Progress) and earnestly discussing structure and treatment. “This is an important book,” I assured Nancy. “You will find a publisher.” But Nancy wasn’t as certain, and I’m no prophet. It’s hard to get a book published traditionally, and for most of us it takes a long time, with lots of perseverance and plenty of rejection along the way. Nancy came close a couple of times with agents and publishers, and she used those rejections to rework and strengthen aspects of her book and proposal until finally she landed the manuscript with Kalos Press.

Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure was published in spring 2015. Read this book! Finding Livelihood finds beauty in both blessed and difficult circumstances as Nancy examines employment and unemployment, labor and rest, hardship and security, and the (for me) nebulous concept of vocational calling –  all without glossing over the pain that undergirds so much of life. The book is honest, artful, and lyric.  

~~~~

Lisa Ohlen Harris: First off, Nancy, please tell us about Kalos Press.

Nancy J. Nordenson: I’m thrilled that Finding Livelihood landed at Kalos Press. Kalos is a small press with a name rooted in the Greek word for beauty. It aims to give voice to literary fiction, memoir, essays, and Christian reflection that are outside the mainstream Christian publishing industry and are “beautiful in their literary form, and also excellent in their fulfillment of purpose.” I feel honored to be part of that vision and am so thankful for their kind and talented team.

LOH: At the end of 2008, I had the honor of editing your second publication in Relief, an essay titled, “A Place at the Table.” And that was the essay that launched Finding Livelihood. How did the essay – and the entire book project – come to be?

NJN: A year before I wrote that essay my husband had come home from work late one night, holding a cardboard box filled with his stuff, and told me he’d lost his job. I had recently started graduate school in the Seattle Pacific University (SPU) MFA program, a long-held dream of mine, and was on the verge of cutting back on my full-time medical writing work in order to give this graduate work my fullest attention. But this job loss changed everything and there was no easy answer. I needed to keep working more while going to school. The alternative was to drop out, which I didn't want to do. He felt “called” to his work; I felt “called” to the program; we were absolutely committed to our two sons in college, our mortgage, to putting food on the table, paying for health insurance, and so on. It all became very complex and difficult. While I had long been pondering the topic of work, and doing some writing about it, this time of his job loss is where all the experiences became a critical mass and said, “You need to look at me.” The many workplace stories that Dave and I had shared with each other during our decades-long marriage and now this new story we were living of a slashed income and mutually frustrated “calls” raised complex questions about the nature and experience of work. I wrote the essay “A Place at the Table” to deal with his job loss, to make peace with it, but it became the crystal for the book. I pulled in earlier writing about work and kept writing in order to make peace with work, to explore where it fit in a lifelong spiritual journey.

LOH: Finding Livelihood isn’t really a memoir. I suppose I would call it a themed essay collection – is that fair? How would you describe the structure of the book and its purpose?

NJN: I think of it more as a book-length essay, or idea-driven linked essays. From a book publishing perspective, I realize we are cautioned about calling anything an essay, lest readers get scared away, but essays have always had an important place in literature; consider, for example, the work of Annie Dillard or Joan Didion, two of my perennial favorites. Finding Livelihood has more structure than a collection of essays all on the same topic, so that’s why I don’t think of it as a collection. While the style is lyric, making the structure a little less obvious than a straight-forward book, there is a rationale for the way the essays are placed, how one leads to another, and how by the end, there is movement toward a changed way of looking at the questions triggered by work.

LOH: I had the privilege of watching this book form over the months and years and many drafts and revisions of essays compiled in these pages. When did you know you had completed the manuscript? How much restructuring and revising did you do for the book as a whole?

NJN: My Relief essay, “A Place at the Table,” was written in 2007 – with some of the writing from other essays dating back further than that – and the manuscript was accepted for publication by Kalos Press in 2014. The process took a long time, as you’ve noted, not only because I work full-time at another job, but also because the issues at stake took a long time to think through, work through, and find ways to write about. I was writing it organically and not from a pre-project outline. I haven’t even kept track of how many times each essay was rewritten or revised. There were two milestone moments that are worth mentioning here. The first was about mid-way through the project when I figured out the over-riding three-part structure. That helped me see the movement or trajectory of the book but also helped me see where there were gaps that needed more thought and writing. The second milestone moment came at the project’s final step. I had thought the book done, but something still didn’t seem right. At a writing friend’s recommendation, I hired an editorial consultant to read through the manuscript and give me her opinion. To sum up her response: the reader needed more help; the leaps I took may have been obvious to me, but the reader needed more landmarks, more pass-offs. I followed her advice. I checked into a hotel in the Mill district of Minneapolis and worked for 4 days. After that – but for a few more reader helps added a couple months later – I knew the manuscript was complete. The book still relies on the reader’s ability and willingness to take imaginative leaps, but I hope the reader senses that during those leaps, I’m there holding a hand.

LOH: Do you have any advice for writers who have themed essays or meditations – something that’s not a didactic treatment or straightforward memoir?

NJN: From my experience with this project, the advice I’d give to a writer of essays or meditations is to write broadly, deeply, and organically for a long time – be patient with yourself and the project – but then at some point, submit to a guiding structure. In revision, respectfully help the reader follow your thought train but do so in keeping with the project’s voice.  

LOH: And when an essay is complete, send it off to a literary journal! Essays from Finding Livelihood have appeared in both spiritual and secular journals, including Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Relief, Comment, Under the Sun, and Indiana Review. Did you consciously write for a Christian audience, or did you temper your writing to speak to a broad audience? How aware were you of audience or market as you were writing? What would you have to say to a Christian writer who is interested in publishing broadly for a religious and secular audience?

NJN: I didn’t set out to write for either a Christian or non-Christian audience; I set out to write something that would help me, and later readers, to explore this complex issue of work. Since I’m a Christian, that faith is at the core of what and how I write, but holding that faith in common is not a pre-requisite for a reader to join me on the page to ponder work, as evidenced by the secular journals that printed essays from the book. When editing and revising the book, I very much wanted the book to be accessible to readers who may not share my faith and so I made choices in favor of on-the-page hospitality. Those choices typically involved a check of voice and tone as well as quality improvements, rather than compromises of belief. I also wrote with the assumption that despite our culture’s religious diversity and the large numbers of people who claim no faith, Christianity is an ancient religion that continues to have an active place in the world today; therefore, its tenets and practices are still a kind of cultural currency and are not foreign to most readers.

LOH: After nearly ten years of friendship focused around writing and faith, I want to publicly express my gratitude for you, Karen, and Jill, and for what our critique and support group has meant over the years. We formed out of a far-flung handful of writers who connected via this startup literary journal and a Yahoo listserv. I’m honestly not sure I would have kept writing through the months and years of rejection and discouragement if I hadn’t had the three of you in my corner.

NJN: Writing is such a solitary endeavor, and there are so many rejections along the way, that there is something nearly miraculous that happens when you are connected with other writers who only want to further each other’s work and together you are a community. I think back to the week you and I were roommates, a pairing we did not orchestrate, at that summer writing workshop at the Collegeville Institute. The most important part about that week in the story of this book is that it gave me a place to talk about it with people who were writers and thinkers and who cared about this topic of work. I remember talking with you about my new table of contents when we were roommates, and your response assured me the book was now more whole and unified. What a gift and relief that was. What a gift our email-based writing group has been. What a gift the community that has grown up around the Glen workshop and the SPU MFA program has been. What a gift the community around Relief has been. Back in 2006, I read about the launch of Relief in a post on someone’s blog (I think it was J. Mark Bertrand’s blog) and submitted an essay, “Nothing Can Separate,” for its inaugural issue. It was accepted – my first ever published creative nonfiction essay – and received the Editor’s Choice award. I later served as a nonfiction reader for a little more than a year. The vision of Coach and Kimberly Culbertson to create Relief opened the opportunity for a community of writers and readers to meet together on the page, as well as in person and online. I'm excited for the future of Relief with Daniel Bowman at the helm as editor-in-chief. I know Daniel through SPU and have long admired his great passion for connecting art and faith and for connecting people to create community. That is what Relief has always been about.

View to a New Mythology

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”      —Marshall McLuhan

Our views on the world are framed for us by myth. This is how it should be. Mythologies imagine the ancestry of humankind and give us frames of reference for origins, values, relationships and more. They're our points of departure for everything we are. But mythologies in a world of science and certainty are hard to come by or keep. But we need them, so modern myth-makers, from gadget companies to masters of cuisine to politicos to religions, fill in the blanks for us. Their modern mythologies suggest that we are the royals of our own realms. That we can live our ideal. That life can be stable, comfortable and happily unconsidered. And even though our world is a big round ball, the arcing horizon is a safe, convenient limit. So we can exist in circles of norms, majority's rule, the way we do. How we roll. We may play, learn and work in a consistency of comfort while the rest of the world, the suffering world, is disclosed only at our pleasure. And how we see the difference, say, between Somalia and Sonoma, or Damascus and Notre Dame, or Nepal and Manhattan, is through the soaring windows of our mythological frameworks.     

Roland Barthes was a semiologist and philosopher and wrote an important book in the 1950's, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. One of the essays in that book, “The Eiffel Tower.” articulated a modern intellectualist view of the world. And though it was written sixty years ago, it sounds startlingly familiar. Here is an excerpt:

The Eiffel Tower is a comfortable object, and moreover, it is in this that it is an object either very old (analogous, for instance, to the ancient Circus) or very modern (analogous to certain American institutions such as the drive-in movie, in which one can simultaneously enjoy the film, the car, the food, and the freshness of the night air). Further by affording its visitor a whole polyphony of pleasures, from technological wonder to haute cuisine, including the panorama, the Tower ultimately reunites with the essential function of all major human sites: autarchy; the Tower can live on itself: one can dream there, eat there, observe there, understand there, marvel there, shop there; as on an ocean liner (another mythic object that sets children dreaming), one can feel oneself cut off from the world and yet the owner of a world.

The tower's metaphor translates to many others: the Tower of Babel and the World Trade Center come to mind of course. But how about soaring personalities: celebrities and politicians, authors, directors and artists we look up to? Don't we enjoy seeing ourselves in their light? And if it's true, that these mythologies make us, then how can we parse the popular Christian paraphrase, in but not of?

The remedy is to come down from our high places, submit to a kind of disembodiment, or dislocate from our self-enlightened sources, and re-imagine life in relationships, in difficulty, in the pain and grief, and every now and then, in fulfillment. Jesus' first sermon tells us to attend everything in a mythology of his humiliation: the divine come to earth; the crown laid aside; the architect become servant.   

In a story told in all four gospels, Peter, James and John wanted to live on the mountain where Jesus was transfigured. They wanted to build booths, or small houses, to contain and persist in the bright sensations of their mountaintop experiences. On the way there they had argued who would sit closest to Jesus. And afterward, at the bottom of the hill, they found the other disciples unable to heal a boy. So Jesus drove them to their knees saying, These spirits come out only by prayer. And seeing it, knowing he's talking about me, I want to say with the father of the boy, Lord I believe; help my unbelief.

And here we see at ground level, the Eiffel Tower is a gateway.

So, Lent is here. Let's do something crazy. Let's fast the frames: the television, the computer, the phone. Let's pick up a pen and write a letter on the back of a service agreement. Let's live on a buck twenty-five for a week of days. Let's wander with a wanderer and wash her feet with expensive perfume. Let's embrace a modern-day leper. Offer a cup of cool water. Read this poem* to a stranger. Walk down the bright mountain in silence together, lie prostrate on the grass, empty our insides until something leaves and our enemies are welcome inside. And let this be the ground of our mythology. From its low-ness, from our own low beginnings, may it transform our towers into doors.

^{* "You've Got To Start Somewhere" by Deborah Landau} 

Unforgivable

There had to have been an episode of The Cosby Show where one of the kids meets a hero and is disappointed; I guess I’m not a big enough fan to remember clearly, despite the hours of it I watched growing up.

In my mind it’s Vanessa, who gets backstage tickets to a concert. When she and her friend get to the after party, the band just wants to drink, smoke, and generally carouse, and the good Huxtable child leaves early. I must have seen that story a hundred times as a kid. Celebrities, 80s TV taught us, were unpleasant people when the show ended.

Permit me to clear my throat archly.

Now that some 40 women have accused Cosby of raping them, it’s hard to pretend it’s not what it seems. The guy probably did some ugly stuff. Repeatedly.

Just like Vanessa at the backstage party, I feel hurt. A part of me that believed in the basic goodness of that show and the people who made it has been crushed.

Nobody (I hope) is saying that this hurt compares to that of the 40 women, but I can’t speak for them. I can only speak to the little corner of this scandal that really hits home for me.

As it happens, my wife and I were six seasons into rewatching The Cosby Show when all this started. And we were loving it. The humor holds up pretty well, but it’s also comfortably familiar, a reminder of our childhood when the world seemed smaller and simpler.

But what does it mean to put away childish things? It can’t mean the cynicism that more or less embraces the brokenness. And anyway, shall we really call the optimism of The Cosby Show childishness? Simplistic, perhaps, at times sentimental or trite, but surely also an admirable model of a family who tries to do right by one another, of parents who apply firm discipline with compassion, of a couple who love and respect one another.

I know some people will try to expunge Cosby from their lives, unable or unwilling to forgive his crimes—and I get that; rape is ugly and unconscionable. Emotionally, I won’t be ready to go back for some time, myself.

Analytically, however, I can imagine some future when we will click on the show in Hulu and begin the work of aesthetic healing. Art, for all its continuity with life, never bears a direct relationship with it. I’ve seen indignant bloggers impatiently insist that Bill Cosby is not the same as Cliff Huxtable. Fair enough, but then the reverse is true, too. What Bill Cosby did as Cliff Huxtable exists beyond the actor’s life in the realm of art.

Wayne Booth accounted for this discontinuity by positing an implied author between the real person and the work he or she created. He was well aware that real persons could be guilty of sins seemingly incompatible with writing your favorite book. In the act of creation, he thought, an author inhabits his or her best self, the parts of the self we all wish we could always be but can only sometimes actualize.

Scripture, too, as we are quick to forget, teaches that we have all sinned mortally and, by rights, should be beyond redemption. It doesn’t really matter that you didn’t do what that guy over there did. And it ought to teach us humility and grace rather than the politico-ideological purism that substitutes for moral thinking online.

Eventually, I think, to watch The Cosby Show will not feel like a tacit “pass” for his crimes. Eventually we’ll watch it and remember the good that those people did in creating that show. We will not forget or minimize the actor’s faults but maybe we will begin to forgive him for his deceptions. Like mature Christian adults, we’ll praise what is praiseworthy and mourn what is broken.

Dark Night: The Illness Narrative

“Pale horse, pale rider done taken my lover away,” a line from an old spiritual hymn, is the inspiration for the title of Katherine Anne Porter’s novella, Pale Horse, Pale Rider. I taught this text, a rare narrative of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, to my students last semester because it provides an accessible introduction to stream-of-consciousness writing. More importantly, Porter’s story is autobiographical, as the author herself nearly succumbed to the flu. Through stream-of-consciousness, she shows the effect of a collective trauma on the individual psyche, a dark night of the soul.

The novella is set during World War I and opens with Miranda, a young newspaper reporter in Denver, sunk deep into nightmare. On her horse Graylie, she tries to outrace a “lank, greenish stranger” riding a pale horse. It soon becomes clear that this rider resembles one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, referenced in Revelations. In this dream, she does outrace Death; it isn’t her time to die just yet. Fragmented memories and images of death pervade the story—with “this funny new disease,” the Spanish flu bringing on a pandemic, even as young soldiers prepare to go overseas to fight and perhaps die. We’re with Miranda as she falls in love with a soldier, Adam, and as she becomes increasingly ill, struggling through semi-consciousness and delirium. The “pale horse, pale rider” spiritual, which Miranda and Adam sing, turns out to be horribly ironic because in the hymn, the pale rider eventually takes everyone but the storyteller.

Stories of illness serve several purposes, and one is to develop empathy in the reader for both the sufferer and those who care for ill loved ones. These narratives can show how the psyche experiences pain and how the soul aches when threatened with loss. When Miranda finally does recover from the flu, she discovers that Adam has succumbed to it while she herself was too ill to be aware of events around her. The novella then can be seen as a memorial to this Adam, and to Porter’s Adam who was also lost to the flu.

At the same time I taught Pale Horse, Pale Rider, I read a new book of prose poems, Stay, by Kathleen McGookey. By coincidence, a strong through-line in the poems is the illness and death of the poet’s mother and father. The father declines progressively from a “brain disease,” while the mother’s demise is sudden, from a deadly cancer. In Stay, the speaker’s shock and grief is laced with exhaustion, anger, and even brief moments of happiness and contentment. The poems give us a more intimate look at how wide-reaching the effects of illness are on an individual and her family.

In “Disease, in the Particular,” the speaker admits that her father’s brain disease “is real, stark, and incurable, so slow, so nearly imperceptible its progression, so—can I say this?—gentle, and so gentle his decline, how can I not cry?” And in this poem, the speaker knows she must accept what is terribly unacceptable: “I cannot hope to lift him out of his stiffening limbs and set him down shiny and baptized into the rest of his life.”  The poem works against any romantic notions of the father’s decline, showing the reader in particular that at some point our loved ones will move inexorably toward death.

“Sometimes the Ache Sleeps” delves deeper into the father’s illness and the mother’s sudden bout with cancer, while the speaker herself mothers an infant son:

When my dad reached unsteadily from his wheelchair to put my baby’s sock on, the baby clapped and waved. When I helped my mom to the bathroom, she whispered, My little girl. By then the ache was all around us.

In these few lines, we’re aware of the metaphor of pain, the symbol of life inherent in the baby, and the psychic turmoil in the speaker, who cannot fully experience the joy of the new child in the midst of the illnesses that will soon claim both her parents.

For the poet of Stay and the storyteller of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the painful reality they impart to us is that a loved one’s illness and death bring on conflicting emotions in the sufferers and survivors—love and grief, ache and anger, to name a few—and that recovering from such loss is not straightforward. Their stories remind us that not all illnesses can be cured, no matter our prayers, because to have a life here and now is to have a gift that we will someday have to relinquish.

The Think System

Over the holidays, my mom popped in our battered VHS tape of The Music Man. This was my favorite movie as a kid. Somehow I never grew tired of watching Professor Harold Hill dupe the citizens of River City, Iowa.

Hill is a total fraud, but he’s so slick that the town believes his promise to form a boy’s band. Under his spell, the troubled youth stop being troubled, the tightly-wound maiden librarian unwinds, and the whole town gets together in the park and dances the Shipoopi. Everyone is too delighted to notice the lack of an actual band. He excuses away his lack of musical knowledge with “The Think System.” He tells his band, “if you want to play the Minuet in G, think the minuet in G.” The boys nod solemnly and warble in unison, “La de da de da de da de da, la de da, la de da…

Half-way through the movie, I realized I’d found my writing resolution for 2016. I’m giving up “the think system.”

See, the discipline of daily writing is grueling. Facing down a blank page at the end of a day of work is daunting. Submission is nerve-wracking and painful, and rejection is inevitable but still discouraging. It’s much easier to just think about submitting, or think about what it will be like once I’ve submitted, or think about which residencies I’ll attend whenever I find time to apply, or think about searching for a writer’s group that will help me hone my craft.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima expresses this same idea when he says, “active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with the love in dreams.” He is, of course, speaking of Christianity, but the quote applies to writing, too, as it does to most disciplines.

I’m not saying writing should never be joyful. What’s life without a little Shipoopi? We must have moments of joy to cling to. A breakthrough in revision, an acceptance letter thanking me for “sharing delightful work,” memories of a sunrise kayak session at a writer’s retreat…I hope every writer has similar moments to return to on hard days. But those are the exception, not the rule.

At the end of the Music Man, Harold Hill is put on trial, and to save him, his “band” miraculously manages to squeak out a horrible rendition of the Minuet in G. After a moment of stunned silence, the parents of River City rise to give a standing ovation. They loved it! It turns out River City didn’t need music, when they needed was an experience. It’s sort of a beautiful, if illogical, premise. By believing so fully in his lie, the town has transformed it into their truth.

It’s a sweet and clever ending for a musical, but it’s not the way I want my own story to end. I don’t want my daydreams of success to become my best product or to give my own mediocre work a standing ovation and call that a happy ending.  

So this year, when I catch myself thinking about writing instead of doing the work, I picture the River City Boy’s Band, singing the Minuet in G over and over and never touching their instruments. And I get back to the real work, harsh and fearful as it is.

Resistance

By Masao Nakagami [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Jack White found the pulse of “Seven Nation Army” at a sound check in Australia. "What do you think of this?" he said to a friend who was passing by, before launching into what would become one of the most famous guitar riffs in history. ("It feels less like someone wrote it than it was unearthed. It's something that's always been there," Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine told the BBC in 2014, a decade after the song's release). The song that, in time, was to come of that riff has been blasted from stadium loudspeakers across the world, has stood atop Billboard's rock chart, and now holds a place in Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs of All Time. "It's all right," White's friend said.

“It’s almost great when people say that,” White continued, "because it makes you get defensive in your brain and think, no, there’s something to this. You don't see it yet. It's gonna get there. You gotta have some imagination, you tell yourself."

White’s story, recounted in the documentary It Might Get Loud, brought to mind a passage from In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, by Walter Murch, in which the Oscar-winning editor of Apocalypse Now and The English Patient likens the dynamics at play between a director and his editor to those found within a certain kind of dream therapy:

“In dream therapy there is a technique that pairs the patient—the dreamer, in this case—with someone who is there to listen to the dream. As soon as possible after waking, the dreamer gets together with his listener to review the dreams of the previous night. Frequently there is nothing, or just a single disappointing image, but this is usually enough to begin the process.

“Once the image is described, the listener’s job is to propose an imaginary sequence of events based on that fragment. An airplane, for instance, is all that is remembered. The listener immediately proposes that it must have been an airliner flying over Tahiti filled with golf balls for a tournament in Indonesia. No sooner has this description been offered than the dreamer finds himself protesting: ‘No, it was a bi-plane, flying over the battlefields of France, and Hannibal was shooting arrows at it from his legion of elephants.’

“In other words, the dream itself, hidden in the memory, rises to its own defense when it hears itself being challenged by an alternate version, and so reveals itself. This revelation about bi-planes and elephants can in turn prompt the listener to elaborate another improvisation, which will coax out another aspect of the hidden dream, and so on, until as much of the dream is revealed as possible.”

“We are mysteries to ourselves,”poet Geoffrey Hill found himself saying when questioned by The Paris Review. What could be more true? If we knew ourselves as God is said to know us, we’d have no need of art. Negotiating resistant distance is central to the creative act.

When a poet like John Keats is composing, for example, as literary critic Sven Birkerts once observed, “it is not a case of the poet’s inventing lines, but rather of his finding sounds and rhythms in accordance with the promptings of the deeper psyche. The poet does not rest with a line until he has released a specific inner pressure.”

And perhaps because it is born of resistance, art can engender meaningful resistance in others. “Tyranny requires simplification,” Geoffrey Hill says in the same interview. “[A]ny complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualifications and revelations . . . resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.”

In 2011, White’s song became an anthem of the Arab Spring; it was featured on a Democracy Now! broadcast after Egyptian-born writer Mona Eltahawy opened an influential column this way:

“As the people of my homeland, Egypt, stage a popular uprising against the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, the White Stripes keep singing in my head: ‘I’m gonna fight ’em off /A seven-nation army couldn’t hold me back!’

“I don’t know if Jack and Meg of the White Stripes are watching the breathtaking developments taking place in my country. However, their thumping, pumping ‘Seven Nation Army’ is a perfect anthem for the defiance and adrenaline-fueled determination that must be propelling the tens of thousands of courageous, protesting Egyptians.”

In It Might Get Loud, White is telling his story to Jimmy Page and The Edge. He was thankful for his friend’s resistance. It helped him find his song.

“I kept at it,” he said.

Bookmarkings

At a writing workshop, I’m asked a question I’ve often been dishonest in answering: “What writer(s) have influenced/influence you the most?” On such questionnaires, I carefully write the canon worthy names. Sometimes T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson make the cut. Or Flannery O’Connor, Shakespeare, Marilynne Robinson, and W.S. Merwin. But I know my list is lying. I know that no matter how many modern and classic and award winning names I identify and no matter how much each of those writers have and do influence me on a near daily basis, I’m never really telling all the truth unless I include her.

Unless I talk about L.M. Montgomery.

If I’m being the kind of honest that disdains pretention and doesn’t care what the list “should” say, I would talk about being 12 years old and saving to own every single book Montgomery ever wrote, even the out of print ones. I would tell how at recess or hiding in the quiet of my closet, I filled notebook after notebook with stories and poems in attempts to emulate her style, to make the kind of stories I wished she were still alive to write. If I’m really telling the whole truth, I would talk about just how much I longed to be part of the stories she told because her work was a creation so splendidly rendered that I wanted to touch it all with my own hands or at the very least, use those hands to reach out toward it all with my own words and stories.

Most famous for her writing the Anne of Anne of Green Gables, the endearingly stubborn red-haired orphan with an unrivaled imagination and penchant for seeing beyond the bleakness of her circumstances, Montgomery saw over twenty novels into publication during the turn of the 20th century, an era not well-known for “taking seriously” its few successful female writers. And while I find, particularly as a woman, her publication record deeply impressive, I fell in love with Montgomery’s voice long before I quite realized there was anything incredibly meaningful about her lonely position as a successful woman author in the early 1900s.

It was Rachel Lynde and the brook that babbled into submission as it passed her home that did it:

It was reputed to be a headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade. But by the time it reach Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door….

And the first taste of November concentrated into words:

It was November--the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines. Anne roamed through the pineland alleys in the park and, as she said, let that great sweeping wind blow the fogs out of her soul.

Of course, there were so many discoveries. So many perfectly chosen words and in those words, so much knowing and feeling known. Most of all, L.M. Montgomery’s books worked like a place that after years of visiting, begins to feel, to become, something like a home.

About ten years ago, I lost my childhood home. It still exists, but for hard as well as necessary reasons, my family packed up and left it behind. They said goodbye to the rye grass pastures and the wrap around porch my grandfather built; they left it all the way you leave someone you will always love and always regret leaving. They moved on to a new town and began all over again. And when, states away, I traveled home for holidays and visits, I felt I never really came “home.”

A few weeks ago, on a work errand that sent me hours south of my own home, I found myself on the road that bent past the old house and land. And so hungry for home, I nearly stopped on the side of the road to scoop up a fistful of dirt I was considering placing in my empty Sonic cup until I could get back and rehome the soil in a mason jar I would tell no one about.

I didn’t stop, though. I drove on, and before bed that night, I rifled through my shelves looking for something to help the ache. And I found Montgomery and Anne and her journey towards home, ironically, comforting me in the loss of mine.

It’s important to pay homage to the often unsung writers who grabbed hold of us in the really formative years, the years where the concrete of  bones and brains were just beginning to set, and one good sentence pressed in the soft plaster would leave its mark forever. There is something comforting about how a book, or a perfectly loved authorial voice, can work like a placeholder in our lives and offer us the stability necessary to venture into the darker and complex stories, the new towns and jobs, even the tragedies and gray endings that spill forth from the great literary canons and life experiences we learn to embrace or tolerate later on. Those first guides don’t cease to be important as we move into more complicated stories and lives. If anything, the first books become even more essential.

There are books that can take us home; there are places inside the lines that somehow make a home for us to come back to. Montgomery’s works, so important to the child I was, are also just as meaningful to the adult I am, bookmarking a sense of home for me and cutting a path toward the other writers and the other homes I would and will know.