Make stuff, learn stuff

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Film director Pete Docter gave something back to the audience in his acceptance speech for Best Animated Feature for Inside Out at the Academy Awards last Sunday. If you haven’t seen Inside Out, it’s a wonderful film about an 11-year-old girl who becomes miserable after a cross-country move.

Here’s what Docter said:

“Anyone out there who’s in junior high, high school, working it out, suffering — there are days you’re going to feel sad. You’re going to feel angry. You’re going to feel scared. That’s nothing you can choose. But you can make stuff. Make films. Draw. Write. It will make a world of difference.”

Adults were listening too.

It reminded me of advice given by Merlyn the magician in King Arthur’s court as told in The Once and Future King by T.H. White.

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something . That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world ways and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn anatomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics—why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”

~~~

[Photo: taken from a back car window of the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge.]

Gathering 2015: a review of this year's posts

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[NOTE: The links in this post are no longer correct]

I spent a couple hours this morning reviewing my blog posts from 2015. In The Art of Thinking, Ernest Dimnet wrote, “To keep no track of what one learns or thinks is as foolish as to till and seed one’s land with great pains, and when the harvest is ripe turn one’s back upon it and think of it no more.” I agree with Dimnet and so look back at posts, journals, book notes, and other evidences of – and learning from – this life journey, this blog being a piece of that. I believe in being a student of one's life.

But I also reviewed my posts in order to gather them together in one place with some kind of organizing structure for readers' use. New subscribers have come on throughout the year and may find this a handy list of posts, and even regular readers miss posts or may like to revisit posts. Here they are – well, most of them – grouped into categories. 

A couple preliminary comments: 1) this is the year that Finding Livelihood came out so that category got a heavy weighting; 2) these categories are fluid and artificially narrow - for example, most of the posts could be under a single category of "paying attention to your life" or "living with intention" or "living a meaningful life," and the posts for books could be distributed under multiple categories, and the posts "on hope" could just as well be listed as "on love" or "on pilgrimage."

I offer this list to you as a place in which to dip in and read, to peruse at random or with strategy, in the hope that whatever words you choose to read or re-read may come alongside you as you wind up your 2015 and launch whatever is next.

On astonishment and gratitude:

On pilgrimage and choices:

On love and community:

On leisure, rest, sabbath:

On books and the ideas they contain:

On writing and creativity:

On hope:

On Finding Livelihood:

On work: 

~~~

About this blog:

[Photo: taken of the Christmas day landscape. True color, no filter.]

One lifetime isn't long enough

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It would take lifetimes to do all I want to do. I’m just finishing a new online class; the stack of books to read grows; the list of books and essays I dream of someday writing grows; there are so many publications to which I’d like to subscribe and have the time to read. Multiple careers still intrigue me. Life is so exciting in this way. I worry I’ll never get it all in—and I won’t. Nevertheless, it makes me happy that I think this about life. Watching the news can be so horribly depressing, but then I look at the stacks of books and think of the host of ideas represented, consider emails from friends about what they’re up to and interested in, and enthusiasm wells inside me. With all that we’re told is going wrong in the world, is that enthusiasm based on escapism or naiveté or could it be an awareness of an alternate reality, one in which truth, beauty and goodness, faith, hope and love are alive and well, a reality that the news correspondents aren’t paid to report on, that the viewing public would find of little interest, that doesn’t influence the course of history—or does it

~~~

[Photo: taken several years ago at an exhibit at the American Swedish Institute - sorry it's not too sharp. I don't know who Hilma Berglund is but I'm sure we're kindred spirits.]

The person behind a book blurb: Bret Lott

Bret Lott is the next endorser I'll focus on in this series that I started last week with Luci Shaw. Bret is the author of 14 books, both literary fiction and nonfiction, the former editor of The Southern Review, and professor of English at The College of Charleston. While I've briefly met Bret a couple times, I don't personally know him. He started teaching in the SPU MFA program the year I graduated. Fortunately, though, I had the opportunity to hear him speak as a guest faculty lecturer and as the keynote speaker at a Glen Workshop. Since I don't know him, it speaks all the more highly of his generosity and kindness that he would read my manuscript, particularly over the busy Christmas season, and offer his good word about it.

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My first reading of Lott's work was Jewel, the 1991 novel that became an Oprah Book Club selection. Actually, I didn't read it; I listened to it as an audiobook when driving alone one gray day from Minneapolis to Chicago. I remember sitting in my car at a rest stop, tears on my cheek, listening through to a chapter's end. Since that reading/listening experience, I've come to learn more about Bret Lott, and, importantly, to learn from him about writing and how to be a writer of faith. He cares passionately about writing with integrity: integrity in the use of words; integrity in the way words are used in the context of faith and art; integrity in terms of whether the end result of the words will be a blessing to the reader. Read his books on writing – Letters and Life: On Being A Writer, On Being a Christian and Before We Get Started – and it's not hard to feel the energy of that integrity.

It's interesting to find that Bret's writing rubs up so often against the topic of work, as in labor and jobs. It's one reason I reached out to him to consider endorsing Finding Livelihood. His father was a working man – worked "for Nehi, for RC Cola, for the food brokerage" – who always showed "his children, the importance of doing our best, and the proof of that labor: his provision for our family." In Letters and Life, Lott writes: "So is it at all a surprise that the first book I ever wrote, my first novel, was about an RC Cola salesman who finds a kind of solace in his work, and that throughout all I have written there runs a thread of salesmen, and cashiers at grocery stores, and firemen and plumbers and work and work and work?" As he makes clear, writing is the work given to him; I'll add that he does that work superbly.

Here are some passages I commend to you from Letters and Life and Before We Get Started:

"Here is our truest beginning point of an understanding of the creation of art by the Christian: the created world has a moral order to which we must submit, and through that submission and only through that submission will harmony and beauty and truth even begin to be approached by us who profess to practice art. Further, we do not commit art in a vacuum but are a part of society—of humanity—at large, and therefore we indeed have a role in that society, a role that can and will contribute to the harmonization of human activity at large. We have been blessed to be a blessing." (from Letters and Life)

 

"And then, in the writer’s answer to whatever has called him to write, and in his willingness to look at each word with fear and trepidation coupled with faith that speaking it will be an act in obedience to what has called him to speak it, those words will line up, will breathe, will become the vast army of sentences that will take up residence in the new Israel every story, novel, essay, and poem ought to be." (From Before We Get Started)

You can learn more about – and from – Bret in this video interview with John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture, filmed after the publication of Letters and Life. Towards the beginning of the interview, they talk about the theme of work that shows up in his writing.

 I hope you'll visit Bret's author page on Amazon and pick out something wonderful to read!

Finally, here's what Bret wrote about Finding Livelihood:

"This is an absolutely timely book, and an absolutely beautiful one too. Ms. Nordenson examines what it means to work, and does so in a lyrical, practical, moving, and spirit-filled way. In giving us her personal stories and universal observations, we are given as well the means by which, in these difficult days, to make sense of what it means to work. I like this book a lot for its voice and vision, and especially for its hope."

~~~

[Photo: Bret Lott, used with permission.]

Writing from a messy room: on the authority to write

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A cartoon in The New Yorker a couple issues back can easily strike fear into anyone who writes anything for anyone else to read. The cartoon shows a guy at a typewriter in the middle of a chaotic room, and a woman at the room's doorway, on the phone, asks "Did you send your editor the final pages of 'Organizing Your Life'?" If you don't have it all figured out in your own life, where’s the authority to share what you've written? That fear certainly rose up when I wrote Just Think; after all, who was I – no PhD at the end of my name – to share my thoughts on using one's mind well in daily life? With this new book coming out in April, here it is again: who am I to write a book about work with a capital "W"? Still no PhD at the end of my name. Sneak a peek into my office on a routine workday and it may be evident to you that I don't have everything figured out. But I'm okay with that.

Writers who write from the position of expert, those who make promises of new and improved lives for their readers, do have a high burden of proof to meet. Evidence must support claims. Writers who write from the position of being shoulder-to-shoulder with readers have a different kind of burden of proof to meet, but perhaps just as high: that they've thought deeply about their subject and written honestly and with eyes open.

I believe in not having all the answers before starting to write. I believe in writing along the way and in the direction of answering a question, maybe lots of questions, even if they can't be fully answered. I believe in being a student of one's work and a fellow traveler to whoever reads it. I hope that gives you readers of this blog encouragement or permission, if you had any doubt and need that, to write about whatever topic is calling to you, whether or not you have a PhD – or MDiv or BA – at the end of your name.

~~~

[Photo: Le Penseur (The Thinker) by Rodin; taken at Musée Rodin in Paris.]

In the company of writers who write by hand

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Last week I had coffee with a new writer friend, and we found many points in common between us, including the practice of writing by hand. There are studies that explain how the movement of hand across page opens creative pathways in the brain in a way that typing at a computer cannot. If I didn't need to move on to client work very soon this morning, I'd find some of those links and post them here now. But my practice of handwriting when writing creatively isn't based on studies. It simply works better. The quality of the end product is higher (in my opinion, for me). The aesthetics of pen and paper and the slide of the hand is more pleasing. It's not that I stay in handwriting mode. Things move from paper to electronic documents eventually, but this is where it usually starts. This isn't true for my medical writing, although even then I often first write a fair amount in the margins of papers.

She and I talked about strategies we've used to keep track of what's in the notebooks filled with handwritten material. Tags? Indexing? She told me she once read something by the novelist A. S. Byatt about her notebook indexing system, and so later that night I looked for it online. While I didn't find that, I did find a Paris Review interview with Byatt, in which she said this about writing by hand:

"I write anything serious by hand still. This isn’t a trivial question. There’s that wonderful phrase of Wordsworth’s about “feeling along the heart,” and I think I write with the blood that goes to the ends of my fingers, and it is a very sensuous act. For that reason I could never learn to write what I think of as real writing with the cut-and-paste on the computer because I have to have a whole page in front of me that I wrote, like a piece of knitting. On the other hand I do my journalism on the computer with the word count. I love the word count. I can write a piece now to the word, to the length, and then I put the word count on and triumphantly it says three hundred and two. It’s a quite different thing. But I’ve never written any fiction not with a pen. I sit out of doors with very large numbers of very large stones and other objects on top of the pieces of paper that blow away in the wind. I’ve got a cast-iron mermaid and an enormous ammonite that a French ethnologist gave me that came up out of the bed of the road. I put these on the paper and I sit there scribbling in a kind of tempest. It’s great fun."

I'm pleased to be in the company of writers like Byatt and my new friend. I like choosing to write in a way that's more pleasing in terms of process and outcome than in a way that's faster and more efficient. If any of you readers happen to know of a paper in which Byatt describes her indexing system, please let me know. I'd also love to hear how you readers write creatively: your blogs, stories, sermons, notes to self.

~~~

Revisiting an interview: Ron Hansen on writing as sacrament

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One of the pleasures of subscribing to a finely bound journal is that instead of throwing away an issue as the next one arrives, you can stack them all together on a shelf and treat them like books, going back to them whenever you want or need. Quite awhile ago, Imagejournal (2008; volume 57) published an interview with Ron Hansen that I go back to periodically, as I just did this morning.

Hansen is a novelist and English professor at Santa Clara University. At the time of the interview he had a new novel out, Exiles (Farrar Straus & Giroux), which is about the shipwreck in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Regarding the fact that Hopkins was unpublished in his lifetime and people thought he was an "eccentric nut," Hansen wondered “What does that say about our sense of trust in God? What does that say to you, in this day, as a writer, about your sense of reputation and doing God’s will?” With insight into Hopkin's own sense of reputation, Hansen told that Hopkins once wrote “Christ is the only literary critic.”

I admire that abandon; even more I admire the faith that a divine aesthetic is the highest and that it can be sought. The challenge of course is in refraining from equating Christ’s aesthetics with the prevailing literary (or nonliterary) mileau of one’s particular culture or subculture. It’s not surprising that Hopkins was one of those writers that practiced a deep and necessary connection between writing and prayer.

Hansen talked about how many writers of faith think of themselves as exiled, as unable to say the unsayable except only through cunning, how it takes courage to claim oneself as a religious person. Hansen said he thinks of writing as a sacrament, a visible sign of an invisible grace:

“Writing witnesses to something that’s happened to you, or to some power that’s moving through you. In writing, you’re trying to communicate what’s been going on in you spiritually and make it somehow tangbile to others. You’re trying to give it life. And that’s what the sacraments are intended to do. They're symbols of something that God is actually doing to us”

~~~

[Photo: taken of a beautiful sky, although not today's sky, which is also quite beautiful but in a different way.]