I was younger yesterday

Today I have something fun to tell you about, a blast from the past. A new and ambitious friend, Greta Holt, has started a blog about courage, but not the kind of courage that sends you parachuting off a plane or climbing Mount Everest, although I suppose it could. The courage she's writing about is "mostly the quiet kind," meaning the courage that can fill any ordinary day for her readers. As Greta puts it, this courage is "the listening, helping, working and thinking kind." Greta recently read my first book, Just Think: Nourish Your Mind to Feed Your Soul, and asked if she could include one of its section as a blog post. Of course I said yes. Please please click through to her blog, "Courage and Humility: Explorations" and read "Math, Wisdom, and White Sand" ("I was Younger Yesterday" was its original title in JT). While you're there, I hope you'll dig into some other posts in her brand new and very thoughtful blog.

~~~

[Photo: taken last fall at an exhibit at the American Swedish Institute here in Minneapolis: "100 Days of Creative Balance" by designer and artist Tia Salmela Keobounpheng. To see many more photos of this exhibit, click through at the link to go to her page at MN Artists.]

What's next for this blog plus a look at what's gone before

Last weekend, as an historic April blizzard dropped 18 inches of snow here in Minneapolis, I spent many hours on my laptop moving my blog from the site where it's been for 14 years over to the blog's page on my newer website, The Livelihood Project. (Here's the link for the blog over there.) I haven't closed the old website yet but likely will before year's end, redirecting the URL. As I moved content, I had the chance to revisit some posts I hadn't read in many years. While I didn't transfer over every single post– some of them just need to fade away–I was pleased that many stood the test of time.

Please bookmark the new site and plan on visiting it. If you are a subscriber, you'll soon get posts mailed out from the new site, through Mailchimp, but I still need to do a bit more work to transfer the mailing list. If you don't already subscribe but would like to, click this link. It will also give you option of subscribing to my Dear Reader newsletter as well.

Given that I just took a fresh look at my 740+ posts, I thought it would be fun to choose a post from each year beginning in 2004, a time when blogs were still a new thing. These posts really aren't "the best" but somehow caught my attention now. The links go to the posts on the new site. If you're curious, enjoy!

2004: Day one (the first post)

2005: Comic books as a work of providence

2006: The eye that blinks

2007: When the lights go down

2008: Pick a day, any day

2009: Grace on the floor and in the theater

2010: Mystery at the table

2011: Report from a funeral

2012: The art of work

2013: New Year's intentions

2014: A rule and writing

2015: The person(s) behind a book blurb

2016: To be a person on whom nothing is lost

2017: The free and the brave and the kind

2018: An ordinary day on repeat

~~~

[Photo: taken of the undulating bench designed by Gaudi at the Park Güell in Barcelona. It was the first photo header I had for this blog.]

Blog tour 2014 update: baton fully passed

Baton is not quite the right word to use within the context of a tour, but I'll use it anyway because it does the job. You may recall my blog tour post a couple weeks ago (here it is) in which I was tagged by friend Cathy Warner and so answered four questions about writing and tagged two friends who write and blog to then answer the same set of four questions who then would tag two more friends and so on and so forth. This is a quick post to say that both of the writers I tagged have now posted their responses. You can read Adele Konyndyk Gallogly's post here. You can read Margie Haack's post here.

Here's a sampling from Adele's responses:

"I write what I do because it is an honest way for me to wrestle with the world and the many mysteries, pains, and subtle miracles of being human. When I can sit with these tensions and capture what is true about them by creating something from them, it is deeply satisfying."

Here's a sampling from Margie's responses:

"I want to write to give people hope that we are not alone, that there are potentially other ways of looking at things. I want people to know there may not be answers, but there is Someone who is not surprised by any of our scheisse and loves us still."

I hope you'll click the links and get to know these two writers!

~~~

[Photo: a green waterfall of ground cover seen on a walk.]

2014 Blog tour

Thank you to my friend Cathy Warner who invited me to participate in this "blog tour." What that means, in case you’re unfamiliar with the term, is that a blogger answers some questions (determined, I suppose, by whomever first launched the current blog tour) and then tags two additional bloggers who then answer the same questions and tag two additional bloggers each and so on, allowing for the tour to expand exponentially until everyone in the blog-o-sphere has been tagged or enough new invitees eventually call it quits. I met Cathy through the Seattle Pacific MFA program. She is a poet, an essayist, and an editor of the "Good Letters" blog in addition to being the writer of her own blog, “This or Something Better.” Her first book of poetry, Burnt Offerings, was recently published. You can find Cathy's responses to the blog tour questions here.

The questions in this blog tour are:

• What am I working on?
• How does my work differ from others in its genre?
• Why do I write what I do?
• How does my writing process work?

What am I working on?

The most exciting thing on my writing plate right now is bringing my next book, Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure, to completion. I’m thrilled that Kalos Press is publishing it, with a release date sometime in 2015. Although the manuscript is written, there is editing and revising to do and lots of other getting-ready sorts of things. I’m also starting to think about the next book project and have been making some notes and doing some reading. It’s too soon to say what that is yet, however; I’m still figuring it out myself. Another thing I’m working on is this blog. After calling it quits in April 2013 I recently started it up again and so am allocating a good portion of my writing time to posting at least a couple times a week.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

I write in a genre that goes by many names – creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, lyric nonfiction, personal essay, lyric essay. People who write in this loose genre have a personal slant to what they write, so their work, in terms of approach, content, tone, and structure, is largely a function of who they are. At a basic level, therefore, my work is unique because I bring my own experiences, interests, processing style, and voice to a project. One of my interests is faith and I often bring those kinds of inquiries to the page, which isn’t the case with much of mainstream creative nonfiction; similarly, mainstream spiritual writing does not commonly take the form of creative nonfiction. Regarding approach, my work tends to be idea-driven. While I draw on personal experience, I am more interested in following an idea or a question than in following my own narrative. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit wrote that "In essays, ideas are the protagonists, and they often develop much like characters down to the surprise denouement.” Yes to that.

Why do I write what I do?

Usually I write because I’m trying to figure out something, trying to answer one or more questions. When I wrote Just Think, the questions were how do you serve and love God with your mind and how do you keep your mind strong and steady when life seems increasingly unsteady and complicated. When writing Finding Livelihood, the triggering question was along the lines of how do you make peace with work (or lack thereof) when it's not all passion and bliss, although that question evolved and expanded throughout the writing. 

How does my writing process work?

My process is very slow! Let me say I’m in awe of writers who can put out a book a year or write long weekly essays for blogs or other websites. I’m on the seven-year plan. It takes me a long time to write anything. Books for sure but even an essay is likely to have sections in it that I first wrote down or started playing with years before the essay was written. Partly that’s because I work full time and write creatively in the after hours and there’s only so much time to go around, but it’s also to no small degree because I find it takes a long time for questions to be answered or for thoughts to mature to the point of sending them out into the world. I write by hand much of the time and then archive lots of random writing in one long Word document that spans months and even years. I go through it and pull things out when it seems to be the right time to work on them. I print things out and cut them up and arrange them on my floor or tape them onto index cards to shuffle around. I am trying to find ways to better use electronic archival, retrieval, and writing systems but can’t seem to fully let go of the hands-on physical approach.

Next up!

Thanks for reading. Now let me introduce you to the two writers I’ve tagged to pick up the baton for this blog tour.

Adele Konyndyk Gallogly is another writer I know through the Seattle Pacific MFA program. She writes fiction, essays, and book reviews, with a focus on justice issues. She also writes a robust blog, "The Greater More, The Smaller Less.”  You can read Adele's blog tour post here.

Margie Haack writes a print newsletter called “Notes from Toad Hall" and a blog called "Toads Drink Coffee." Her memoir The Exact Place was published by Kalos Press in 2012. She and her husband founded Ransom Fellowship, which publishes Critique, a thought-provoking print magazine that my husband and I have been reading for years. Read her blog tour post here.

Adele and Margie will be posting their answers to these questions on their blogs. I’ll let you know when their posts are up, but in the meantime I hope you take some time to peruse their other posts and publications.

~~~

[Photo taken a number of years ago in Chicago on Michigan Avenue in front of Fourth Presbyterian Church and the John Hancock tower. It was the Sunday after Easter. Blue ribbons had been tied all over this tree that was still dormant from the winter. I used to have this as the banner of my blog.]

Starting again

Welcome!

Just over a year ago, I closed this blog. About six months later I began to miss it and so started playing around with new blog options on other blog platforms. More importantly, though, I'm back where I started because I missed the body of work that's been growing here, slowly, since 2004, and also the readers who know the way here.

For those of you who are here for the first time, here's a snapshot about me. By day I'm a freelance medical writer. After hours, which I'm loosely interpreting here as early mornings or late evenings or weekends or other cracks of random time, I do another kind of work: creative writing, spiritual writing, essaying. I don't think of it as a hobby I play around at, or a craft that I've mastered, but rather a spiritual vocation that I practice imperfectly. Just a couple weeks ago I signed a contract for a book manuscript I've been working on for a number of years and nearly two weeks ago my son and beautiful new daughter-in-law said "I do," so it's a good time for me to start something new even if it is by returning to something old.

I'll keep the same general pattern of posting a bit of an eclectic mix to this site but will try to add more process notes and thoughts arising from those creative after hours than I've done in the past. I hope you will find the posts here useful or enjoyable, and at times both. I hope they provide camaraderie for your own creative and spiritual life.

~~~

Justice, Beauty, Grace, and Other Big Words

Praying for Justice

This Lenten season I’ve been in a small group that’s been reading the stories of Jesus leading up to the cross. Last week the story was the parable about the persistent widow, meaning a woman who had no financial means or societal protection since she was no longer provided for by a man. The widow repeatedly goes before a judge, a godless judge, and asks for justice. Give me justice! No! Give me justice! No! Give me justice! No! Finally, the judge is worn down by her persistence and gives her what she asks. He gives her justice. Jesus ends the parable by saying if even a godless judge will eventually reward persistence and give justice, God will certainly answer persistent prayers for justice, and quickly. In the group we wrestled with how some prayers seem never to be answered, let alone quickly, despite the apparent promise in the parable. We wrestled with the factor of time, persistence, why the waiting, how to be patient when to us “quickly” means a day and to God it may mean a thousand years.

The sermon that followed on Sunday focused on the same parable, and here the minister emphasized that this parable isn’t about any kind of prayer but prayers for justice. And the person needing justice isn’t just anyone but a widow, a character type used throughout scripture, along with orphans and aliens, to represent the powerless, those for whom justice is most lacking. The minister gave statistics for groups suffering injustice today: 27 million in human trafficking; 2 million kids in sex trafficking, with 1 girl per day taken from the Mall of America for that purpose, according to the FBI (disclaimer: at one time it was thought to be this number but it’s more complicated than this now with the use of cell phones and websites that lure and trap girls). Pray for justice, keep praying for these groups, he said. Don’t stop.

I went home and thought more about this, about how often I forget to pray for issues of justice, about the promise of quick responses to prayers for justice, and about those statistics. How easy it is to look at big problems and big statistics and see no movement. How easy it is to lack imagination for the effect a single prayer may have on the margins. But maybe the statistic for kids in trafficking would be 2 million minus 1 tomorrow because of my prayer this morning, and minus 10 the next day for 10 more people who prayed. Maybe that 1 or those 10 are indeed rescued quickly and miraculously. Maybe the number would be 4 million were it not for those who never fail to keep praying for justice. Maybe a prayer goes up and a girl who would have been tagged just inside the west entrance of the Mall of America instead is quickly and divinely shielded from the man who was about to tag her. The thought that a single prayer may indeed be answered quickly in terms of justice to a single powerless person creates urgency. There’s no time to waste, no day to skip.

Reading Stack: Image Journal and the Lexicon of Art and Faith

The current issue (75) of Image journal features a series of short essays on the “lexicon of art and faith” by fourteen past contributors. Each was given the assignment to think deeply about the big words that are part of that journal’s common lexicon: beauty (Erin McGraw); mystery (Robert Cording); art (Theodore L. Prescott); story (Brett Lott); presence (Julia Spicher Kasdorf); community (Kathleen Norris); human (Linford Detweiler); discipline (Jeanne Murray Walker); form (A. G. Harmon); freedom (Joel Sheesley); image (Matthew J. Milliner); incarnation (Martha Serpas); suffering (Robert Clark); word (Richard Chess).

Here are some excerpts from “The Word-Soaked World: Troubling the Lexicon of Art and Faith.”

Erin McGraw on beauty: “Once we’ve been in the presence of beauty, and once the more crotchety among us have batted down the strange resistance to feeling our hearts moved, we are forever vulnerable, limping like Jacob after the angel’s blessing. We know what beauty is, and from now on we will be seeking it or shrinking from it. Why should we hope to attain such a state? Why should we call it good?” You can read Erin McGraw’s essay on beauty in its entirety here.

Robert Cording on mystery: “Our time is marked by our supreme belief in Enlightenment rationality. We are all too ready to say that a word like ‘mystery’ is a nostalgia; we limit the meaning of ‘mystery’ to a quantity of the unknown, thereby opening the possibility that the inevitable acquisition of further knowledge will reduce that which is unknown and, in the future, erase the unknown entirely. A mystery is simply something to be solved--if not now, then later. But the biblical usage of ‘mystery’ (from the Greek mysterion) refers not the quantity of the unknown but rather to the quality of the known; it refers to awe rather than ignorance.”

Kathleen Norris on community: “We do not belong to a church because it’s a self-selected group of like-minded people with whom we feel comfortable. We are there because God has called us to a be a community of faith. We are called there by love, and are asked to love the people who are there, even if we may not like them very much. Hard as it is to believe, it’s this unlikely, contentious, and motley crew that God has gathered to be accountable, both to God and to one another.”

Joel Sheesley on freedom: “If freedom is something that we apprehend metaphorically rather than by definition, it means that we are ever probing to fully grasp its tenor. We are searching for it in every conceivable direction. We yearn for it. Saint Paul sensed that the whole creation is yearning for its liberation, its freedom signaled by the resurrection of Jesus and the hope of resurrection within all his followers. This freedom is no escape, but rather a reinvestment in a world undergoing transformation.”

Robert Clark on suffering: “With such words, whose etymology and resonances are so vast, so rooted and entangled, be careful that what you mean and what you intend (two more overlapping words) do not come to loggerheads. Do not tell me suffering is a blessing, for I will despair; do not tell me it is a curse, for I will despair again. Do not tell me either--since both imply God’s deliberation--for I will not know what to make of such a God at all.”

This issue also includes an interview with Luci Shaw, a poet, writer, adventurer, and overall lovely wise woman who has long been one of my role models.

Image is a quarterly literary and arts journal that publishes work that is “informed by--or grapples with--religious faith.” You can read more about it--and subscribe--here.

 

Giving Up Chocolate for Lent

My good friend Rebecca Kasperak has been a contributing blogger this Lenten season at the blog ExperiLent. In one of her recent posts about giving up chocolate for Lent, she writes, “Semi-sweet chocolate’s velvety texture, its minor jolt of caffeine, and my responsive endorphins light up my pleasure sensors for a brief respite and escape.” I couldn’t agree more. She goes on to examining the connections between craving and longing and grace, and suggests “cravings are arrows to grace.”

“I often approach God with a full heart and mind and schedule. I envision grace, without realizing it, as a gift that tops off my life, like non-dairy whipped cream, something partially hydrogenated that puffs up to fill in the cracks. Nothing obtrusive, you understand, but something that smoothes out the bumps. I often stumble over the truth that grace is a free gift from the consuming love of my life. This Lent, even though I’m giving up chocolate, I’m also trying to shed some hackneyed views about grace, to allow a healthy emptiness to set in, to not rush to fill it with other sweet things.”

You can read her whole post here: “Cravings crack open space – chocolate, emptiness, and grace.”

 

Final Word

Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood was first published in 1948. Edited by Mary Strong, the book is a collection of anonymous letters.

“The time has come for you to march against this tide of darkness and carry your lighted lamps quietly, steadily. Heal yourselves, your bodies, your characters; get out of this slough of indefiniteness and bewilderment; come in where you belong and give this tragic world the infinite qualities of the Spirit when you let it have its way with you as channels for joy, beauty, and truth.” -from Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood

~~~

Exploring On The Page and Otherwise, With a Bit of Mid-Winter Longing Thrown In

Three-Part Harmony

Ross Gale, a writer and creative consultant, just started his second online creativity series, "With Flames Upon Their Heads." He invited a group of writers to respond to the questions: What is the role of the creator? How does being a creator inform our work? Do you see yourself as co-creator? Re-creator? Gale describes the series as a "conversation, a meditation, and an inspiration."

My post went up last Monday, “Three-Part Harmony.” It’s a mini-essay and shows my thoughts about writing as creating, discovering creation, and participating in creation. I hope you’ll check out my post and all the others that are being posted daily for a couple weeks. Keep Ross’s blog bookmarked as you're sure to see lots of good things developing there in the future.

The first series, "Bereshit Bara," ran last summer with posts from 13 writers addressing the question of what triggers the first creative impulse. If you missed it, it's not too late to hear from Shannon Huffman Polson, David Clark, Adele Konyndk and others.

Reading Stack: The Prairie in Her Eyes

This book, with a cover the colors of autumn, caught my eye on a library table and I added it to my stack. Published by Milkweed Books (2001), The Prairie in Her Eyes by Ann Daum is part of its now gone “The World As Home” nonfiction series, which had been “dedicated to exploring our relationship to the natural world.”

Explore is what essays do best. Essays don’t teach. Although the reader of any essay, if it’s a good essay and if she’s a good reader, usually comes to the last sentence knowing more about the world and humankind than when she started. Essays don’t preach. Although the reader may certainly turn the last page only then to turn his life, or his thoughts or heart, in a new direction. Essays don’t give steps one through five for accomplishing anything, although they may sneak in tips, and certainly a reader may indeed accomplish something a result of reading an essay that he or she had never before considered.

I liked this collection of essays, and I like that Milkweed allows their nonfiction book chapters to be called essays if that is what they are. “Essay” is nearly a four-letter word these days in the publishing industry (yes, I know, essay is five letters). "They don’t sell; they’re too hard for the average reader; they aren’t immediately useful to the reader." Call the essay a chapter instead and hope the rose still smells as sweet. But I digress.

Daum’s essays are about growing up and living as an adult on a ranch in South Dakota. They are grounded in the world, in life, thingness, yet are about something bigger and universal, another mark of a good essay. Read them and you’ll be thinking about loss and grief, about courage, about returning to where you’re from but have never been as if coming home, about fear of death, nature’s beauty and cruelty, abundance and desperation. (Warning: there’s also gross chicken ranch stuff, which will make you only want to eat free-ranch chickens, if that.)

Daum’s tone is steady and calm, delivering no big epiphanies but lots of quiet ones, the best kind. One essay after another, Daum trusts the reader to take them as an offering, not to make them more or less than what they are--not a guide for living but a witness, a testimony.

Once the grass is up, all these mares will go to pasture, and then my evenings spread to include walking over prairie to inspect udders for any signs of milk or waxing. I love walking out to check the mares. In a wet year the prairie will be alive with frogs and locusts, nighthawks and meadowlarks. The grass stretches as far as I can see; farther. The mares move across the hills, even with their pregnant bellies, with the grace of wild things.

More On The “Essay”

If you’re interested in the essay as either a reader or a writer, you’ll want to know about Patrick Madden, a professor at Brigham Young University. He’s written a lovely book of essays called Quotidiana (University of Nebraska) and has a website by the same name, dedicated to the cultivation of the classic essay. I've heard him speak a couple times, the latest being at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College last year. He’s very entertaining and full of knowledge about the history of the essay and its place in our current literary culture.

To add my support to the cause of the essay I may be more intentional about posting mini-reviews about essays and essay collections here in this space.

Final Word

This quote came at me from multiple directions this week. Because it fits the essay theme of the entries above, and because I always long for the sea, particularly a warm sea since it is now mid-winter, and have other land-locked friends that do as well, I'll share it here. It's attributed to Antoine de Saint Exupéry, author of the classic The Little Prince, as well as a wonderful memoir-in-essays, Wind, Sand and Stars.

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

~~~

I hope you can do some exploring this weekend, on paper or out in the world.

[Note: the photo is an extreme close-up of brush strokes from a painting of the sea by Vasili Nechitailo. Gorgeous, isn't it? I don't think there was a "no photography" sign up when I took it.]