Festival of Faith and Writing, 2008: Kathleen Norris

(As memory of the conference recedes, it's harder to fill out my notes, but will do the best I can.)

Kathleen Norris spoke on the last day of the conference. In her opening comments, she referred to The Christian Century and Dale Brown, former Calvin professor and Director of the Festival of Faith and Writing, who is now at The Buechner Institute.

Norris commented on the importance of daily faithfulness, marked hospitalities, and the cloud of witnesses (the rich tradition of Christian thinkers who continue to challenge us). She complimented Calvin, stating that the Festival is legendary, as a premiere event, among writers and editors in this country.

She began with "Morning Worship," an invocation poem by Mark Van Doren, a deeply religious Columbia professor and poet.

Norris is currently doing final edits on her latest book, Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life. The early church included acedia in a list of sins. Norris came across it in the writing of Evagrius, who described it as a "bad thought" that beleagures a person for hours. It instills a hatred for place and manual labor, is easily offended, longs for the past. Its ultimate terror is an inducement to leave one's vocation, to lose faith in God.

Norris felt the powerful connection to an idea that keeps writers writing and readers reading. She learned to discern when she was undergoing an attack of acedia, felt called to explore it, and began to collect articles.

Early Christian monks were the first psychoanalysts. Evagrius developed a list of "bad thoughts," which included eight temptations from prayer. Acedia, pride, and anger were the worst. Acedia was later subsumed into the idea of sloth, or physical laziness, which separated us from an insight into spiritual sloth, or despair.

Acedia involves not caring, or being unable to care, spiritual morphine. A victim becomes callous, unable to commit to place or relationship, perhaps taken up with busyness. It has become a problem in our culture, a condition for which we have lost a word.

Norris keeps a commonplace book. She slogged through tons of material, in writing the book. She enjoyed a quote from Eugene Ionesco describing middle age as "metamorphosis in reverse." We start as a butterfly and turn into a caterpillar.

Aldous Huxley wrote an essay on acedia. It began as a demon for monks and became a virtue in 20th century literature. (laughter) Acedia is similar to the French ennui; its root is anger and hatred, a hatred for life.

Some of the popular movies in the last year have been very cold: No Country for Old Men; There Will Be Blood. (One of them almost drove her to watching The Sound of Music. Almost. Laughter.)

Do we get the art we need, or the art we deserve? The news media is in denial. The culture is asleep. People would rather see Brittany than so many people engaged in combat.

Wordsworth refers to "savage torpor." Baudelaire became weary of the need to live 24 hours a day. He found some refuge in beauty and joy.

Philip Larkin wrote a related poem, "Days." Striving to answer brings the priest and doctor in a long coat.

G. K. Chesterton says maybe God says every morning, "Do it again," to the sun, and every evening, "Do it again," to the moon. Maybe God makes every day separately and never gets tired of it.

Norris has been a caregiver for the past ten years, for her father, her late husband, and now her mother. Meaning. She described Kate Daniels writing about seeking love on an ordinary evening in an ordinary home. It takes faith, hope, and prayer. Do what needs to be done. Do the small tasks. Life itself is a liturgy. Christ finds us in the small tasks, when we're tired and hungry. Sometimes the most loving act is to empty a bedpan.

She found a quote on acedia in a James Bond novel, near the end of To Russia, With Love.

The word "acedia" has always had currency among monks. Claude Peifer states that, on natural grounds, its arguments are unassailable: "Why bother?"

New perspectives can help. Art. Even cartoonists. She shared a couple of cartoons she's kept. One depicted a spouse taking out the garbage, stopping to view the stars.

William Stafford (gifts?) speaks of the "quality of attention." Notice.

In Infamous, the Capote story (a writer's movie), the Harper Lee character asks the all-American question, "What's next?"

Kierkegaard, whom Norris still sees as friend after many years of reading, wishes for "possiblity," either/or, an eye eternally young, ardent.

How can a person be born again who is old? How can I keep open to possibilities? Keep writing. Allow other writers to be spiritual guides.

Robertson Davies wrote of acedia as a loss of interest in important things.

Don't allow affronts to fester, spiral. Sometimes you have to work at this, in a religious community.

Acedia in youth presents itself as lust, using people for distraction. As we get older, it causes us to push people away. It causes a hardening of attitude toward community.

Honor the storytelling impulse as a saving grace. It reminds us why we are made in God's image. Metaphors and connections are out there. God's bounty is never exhausted. Practice.

"Age of Reason," by Kathleen Norris.

Picasso: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. "

Norris ended by sharing a poem by her late husband, David Dwyer, a "tired Catholic." (His mother was a scientist with a devout faith.) He enjoyed mathematics. They had had a conversation about the possible meeting between angels and inaccessible cardinals (a mathematical concept), which led to his writing "Higher Arithmetic."

Q&A began here-- After the shootings at Columbine, a friend of the killers commented, "At least they did something."

A Philosophy of Boredom, Lars Svendsen.

There is a difference between acedia and depression. All monks contend with acedia. They work through the romance of the call, hit a wall, and go on, like a runner. Prayer and reading the Psalms conquers acedia.

In response to a question about writing, Norris spoke of the tyranny/ democracy of the blank page. She often writes in the morning hours. Her books are generally memoirs with a larger subject than her own life. Dakota used farmers' voices and history as a base. The Cloister Walk used monasticism, and Amazing Grace, the church.

When she was asked if being a caregiver made if more difficult to write, Norris replied that maybe it did, but she's never been the kind of writer who wanted to have just a cat or a plant.

Twenty-four hour news channels push us toward acedia; they overwhelm, render us impervious to care.

Evagrius says the gift of anger can be used in the right way, not against others. There are good thoughts to combat the bad. Zeal is a true fervor for something.

Further reading: Kathleen Norris, In the Midst of a Busy Life
Kathleen Norris, Plain old sloth - A Case Of Soul-Weariness: God is with us in darkness or in light

Festival of Faith and Writing, 2008: "Wendell Berry and the Life of the Church"

Dave Crowe, Darryl Hart, Jack Leax sat on this panel, which was moderated by Jason Peters, editor of Wendell Berry: Life and Work. (Stephen at Rebelling Against Indifference also shares notes. Mine are a sketchy outline.)

Jack Leax, from Houghton College, referred to Berry's The Long-Legged House, and the relationship of memory to the present and the future. Memory is a source of hope.

He spoke of Jayber Crow, and the Bible-based culture of Port William. We remember the past as it is, not as it was. He mentioned the life of the community, and death. Gradually, eventually, the knowledge wears in that someday we'll belong to memory, and it won't be our own.

Leax said that rather than being "cultural Christians" many evangelicals are cultural consumerists and hedonists.

Berry reaches back to appropriate a vocabulary that no longer means what it once did.

To hope is not the same as to expect. To expect is to risk disappointment. Hope collaborates with ?. (I'd like to know what that word was.)

Leax moved on to Berry's "To Become A Man." The impulse to move toward wholeness is grounded in Biblical faith.

He spoke of "The Burden of the Gospels." The abundant life is not reducible; it is earthly and heavenly, physical and spiritual, divided only as it is embodied in individuals. There is one great life, and it is hardly institutional at all.
*****
David Crowe, from Augustana College described how "Faithful Readers," his church reading group, works. (He attends St. Paul's Lutheran in Davenport, IA, where Peter Marty, son of the religious scholar, pastors.) The group began in 1997, with forty people. Twelve to twenty-five show up regularly. They meet once a month, on a Thursday night, for dessert (important!) and discussion. The members, sharply analytical, include no other English professors. They are interested in human dilemmas and ethical questions, from a non-ideological position.

The group read Wendell Berry's What Are People For? Many had trouble with some of its ideas. The essay "God and Country" led to a good discussion of Christianity and ecology, honoring the relationship between a thing and its Maker.

Crowe made a point from Jim Corder's article "Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love." (I made a note to look this up.)

Our ideology about our private choices must be called into question.
*****
Darryl Hart, from Westminster Seminary, author of The Lost Soul of American Protestantism, shared a passage from Berry which Eugene Peterson recommends reading with the word "parish" substituted for "farm."

Berry criticizes the church's disrespect for rual congregations. It regards the country as a place to be exploited, to train young ministers and to fund denominations. It is indifferent to the people who most closely interact with our ecosystem, and to the ecosystem itself. The institutional church identifies with the industrial church. It champions the economy and Ceasar.

Agrarian motifs are dominant in the Bible.
*****
A member from the audience asked for (fiction?) reading recommendations. He was told A World Lost, is a powerful story. A Place on Earth is the second (Jayber Crow?) novel. Remembering is the most difficult.

A professor in the audience stated that Berry's nonfiction goes against a deep and profound narrative within which most of us are raised. He spoke of the need for strategies to move students from resistance to a countervailing narrative, to keep them from building a wall.

Fiction makes people more open. It opens up amibiguities, makes it possible to address them in our lives. Fiction has its own charms and seductions.

Jason Peters introduces students to Berry with "Why I Am Not Going to Buy A Computer," "Waste" (What Are People For?, and "Getting Along With Nature" (Home Economics).

Another teacher said Berry's work also meets resistance among most of his students. This does not bother him; at least they're engaging it.

People are more open to fiction. Stanley Hauerwas says it makes ideas more palatable.

When we remember, we create.

David Kline, Amish farmer and friend of Wendell Berry, says Berry's Unsettling of America kept him from walking away from 300 years of wisdom.

A member of the audience asked how Berry's work is received in other countrires. Peters responded its reception is similar to ours: a mix of anger and adulation. Berry has had two audiences with Prince Charles.

Another person asked about reading Berry's poetry in the church. Leax said it's difficult. He doesn't worry about the church, but isn't sure it's fair to Berry. Language is used differently in [his?] poetry and in the church.
* * * * *
A wall of glass behind the panel of authors opened onto a wooded courtyard. During the session, a round robin flew onto a tree branch, and occasionally shifted from one to another during much of the hour.

Further reading: Jon Sweeney, Review of Wendell Berry: Life and Work, ed. Jason Peters, with impressive list of authors.
Brother Tom Murphy, O. Carm., Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky
Audio: Darryl Hart, Wendell Berry's Unlikely Case for Conservative Christianity

Festival of Faith and Writing, 2008: Yann Martel

Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, spoke the second evening, in a nearby church large enough to accommodate the crowd. His sense of humor came into play even as he was being introduced (mistakenly, as the author of two, rather than three, books). "Is there life after The Life of Pi?"

Martel stated faith in God is an opening up, freedom to love. Sometimes it is so hard to love.

. . . .remind ourselves of creation and our place in it.

When signing The Life of Pi, he often inscribes the book with the dedication, "May you reach the coast of Mexico." This was the first time he'd addressed a whole audience of "Mexicans." (laughter) For those who hadn't read the book, he explained that reaching the coast of Mexico represents salvation, redemption in some way.

How did he reach the coast of Mexico? He considers himself an apprentice.

Life of Pi was published September 11, 2001. He left New York City on September 10, 2001, on the last flight to Toronto.

Martel believes that small creative acts that seek connections will fight the kind of ignorance that led to 9/11.
* * * * *
On the last day of 1996, he embarked on his second journey to Bombay, India, where he began work on a book. He intended to write a book set in Portugal, but it wasn't working. His purpose for being in India was gone. He was in his early 30's, and in an existential crisis. He decided to let go, and travel through India, in a state of openess for a story.

There is an abundance of religious manifestation in India: Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs, animists.

Martel is a Canadian from Quebec, a very secular state. The Catholicism of the past was spent by the early 60's. A quiet revolution took place. Within a period of two to three years, the churches of Quebec emptied themselves, by the millions. Priests de-frocked. His parents escaped the backwardness of Quebec; he was born in Spain.

Quebec leaped forward, and became very progressive. People found new gods; his parents chose Art. He was dragged to museums as a child, rather than church. He had an intellectual childhood marked by books read. Books formed his character. Books give you more lives. They helped shaped him.

His first college major was Anthropology, which he found boring. His second choice was Philosophy, which his mother had studied. Trent University was a breeding ground for atheists and agnostics, at the time. Proofs for the existence of God don't work, but they hone the mind. He was influenced by materialistic philosophies.

Martel began writing when something was not right with his life. He met a crisis, and sought to achieve understanding. Some of the philosophy courses seemed dry, at age 19. He wrote bad plays, short stories--took pleasure in bearing witness to the world. His mother encouraged him. We need people who love us unconditionally, when we write badly. (laughter) He published literary fiction, which sold poorly.

Reason is a tool, empowering. It does not in itself give reason to use it, though he thought it did, at the time. He was tired of using reason to demolish things, by the time he reached India.

It was hard to find mainstream manifestations of religion in Canada. In India, there were temples and pilgrimages everywhere. He decided to write about a character who had faith (which was not reasonable): Pi.

He fell in love with the subject. He wrote like an anthropologist, wanting to get inside faith. He read texts of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. He visited churches, temples, and mosques. He turned from seeing faith as childish to seeing it as the most fascinating engagement with life, in the deepest way. He went from being on the outside of things to the inside, a religious person.

Secularism has become the way to manage pluralistic societies. It has become dysfunctional and intolerant.

Pi practices three religions. Hindus worship and make offerings at churches. They accept Christ as another facet of the core reality of the universe. Martel responded to reality on the ground, in India, by putting organized religion at a distance, to be able to focus on faith, to find what the religions had in common.

Part One of Life of Pi is prologue--concerning animal behavior, Pi's childhood, and religion from a secular background. Part Two relates the tale of a shipwreck, resulting in a boy at sea, in a boat with a tiger. Part Three is an interrogation.

God is not in the story in the Pacific. God is in the stories, the fact there are stories.

Two stories come out during the interrogation--one with, and one without, animals. There is no evidence for either story, just the stories themselves. Pi has suffered. He wants his suffering to be accepted; it would lessen his burden. Which is the better story? Part Two is anecdote. The listener in the book chooses the story with the animals. Pi responds, "Thank you, and so it goes with God."

The story without animals is a cruel story. One story is reasonable, one unreasonable. The author tried to make the unreasonable story so unappealing that the reader would make a leap of faith to the other story.

The island is just beyond reason; it requires a reader to make a leap of faith, and be better for it. No religion is ever entirely reasonable.

Life is an interpretation. We can choose which stories to believe, how to interpret events, what happens to us. Why not choose the better story?

(The Q&A may have begun here.)
Martel does not mention truth in the book. He doesn't like using the word "truth" outside areas that can be tested empirically. He doesn't feel he knows the truth. He acts on faith, despite a lack of clear evidence. (It may have been here that I have a memory of him saying that if he went out that night, and was hit by a bus and killed, he had faith he would fall into the arms of Jesus. That kind of faith is different than what he sees as truth.) He thinks familiarity breeds contempt, in areas of reason. Some people feel he is reducing religion to story. Christians look at life after absorbing the story of Jesus, not directly.

A member of the audience asked about his website, "What is Stephen Harper reading?" Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, doesn't value the arts. He treats the government as if it is a corporation needing to maximize profit. Wealth doesn't make us happier. Joy has been lost in parts of the West.

Yann sends the Prime Minister a book every two weeks, with a letter explaining why he chose that particular boook. It's usually under 200 pages. The man is busy. (laughter) It's usually in English, and a fairly accessible classic. Martel aims to "increase [Harper's] stillness." His first gift was Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych, his most recent, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

Another reader asked about the choice of "Richard Parker," as the name of the lion on Pi's boat. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story about a shipwrecked boat; the starving survivors ate a fellow shipmate, Richard Parker. Years later, in an actual shipwreck, several sailors ate the cabin boy, who was also named Richard Parker. They were later charged with murder, but received a light sentence, in a history-making case. (People hadn't been faulted, previously, for engaging in violence to survive.) Martel turned the victim into a victimizer, in his book, as sometimes happens in real life.

By the conclusion of Martel's fascinating presentation, I decided Life of Pi must be a very interesting book; I will read it.

Further reading:
Rebelling Against Indifference, FFW-Yann Martel
PBS Online Newshour interview
BBC interview
Guardian interview
Charlie Rose interview (video)

Festival of Faith and Writing, 2008: Kathleen Norris and Scott Cairns

Listening in on the dialogue between Kathleen Norris (poet and author) and Scott Cairns (U. of MO professor, poet, and memoirist) was one of the highlights of the Festival, for me. Sometimes, in my notes, I wasn't quite sure who said what--they went back, forth, and forward so evenly and quickly on a number of topics.

The moderator started by asking them to share their journeys. Cairns grew up in the General Association of Regular Baptists. He read books that led him toward the Presbyterian Church. Eventually, wanting more of a prayer life, he read his way East.

Norris was raised Methodist, with a Presbyterian mother (who had grown up in South Dakota). Her family was musical. Her father's father was fired from a West Virginia pastorate for playing the banjo; her father's family then moved on to South Dakota.

When she was growing up in Hawaii, her father led church choirs. She received a foundation of Bible stories from the church. When she grew older, she attended a more intellectual church, where she learned theology without faith. She went to the prep school later attended by Barack Obama (she's proud to say :-).

Norris chose to attend an extremely secular college, largely because of its lack of a math requirement. She took psychology and literature classes looking (she now realizes) for religion. She was educated to believe she had left religion behind, was too sophisticated for it.

After graduation, she worked for the Academy of American Poets, in New York City. (Here she referred to Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Great Falcon, for a reason I failed to note.)

Kathleen and her husband moved to South Dakota, where they lived for ten years before she found the nearby monastery. (She went to hear Carol Bly do a reading at Assumption Abbey in North Dakota.) She was impressed by the Benedictines' morning prayer. She began to explore their practices, and went on to become an oblate. As such, she now has a family, and is at home wherever she goes, in Benedictine monasteries. Blind grace.
* * * * *
Cairns found a love of God and the world, though not always individual people, as he grew in faith. In the Orthodox Church, he finds a fullness of faith that some of us are slow to find, if we were raised in pared down versions. It really is our tradition, too. When he joined the Church, the Greek priest chrismated him. He didn't convert, but embraced finally the fullness of the faith, our common inheritance, the tap root. Christian monasticism predates the splits in the church.

He finds a sense of stability in the monasteries, where men and women pray the same prayers every day in the same spaces, and have been for hundreds of years.

Norris: Doesn't plan to become Catholic.

Cairns: Sometimes the harder choice is to stay put and help those in community discover depth.

Lectio divina is reading the Bible meditatively, for wisdom, not information.

Norris: The point of hospitality is not conversion to Catholicism, but to help make one a better person.

Cairns: The monks engage in efficacious prayer, and not just for themselves. The monk enclaves prayer for us. What shape would the world be in if they weren't praying?

Norris: Benedict advised praying the Lord's Prayer at least three times a day. If one is too angry or depressed, others will carry you along. Our society is so narcissistic. Monastic people know it's not about them.

Cairns: Christianity isn't principally only about what you think. You need to perform, live, emobdy it. Hear and do. Perform. Own it. Be. What you believe is not the same as what you think. Belief is embodied.

Norris: When she had trouble believing the Creeds, early on, a monk told her to view them as speaking in tongues. She didn't have to understand and agree with them.

Cairns: The divine liturgy of the Eastern Church speaks things into being. Worship is full-bodied. You become the Christian you're called to be, over years and years. The church calendar has its full effect. There is consolation when you sin; you can get up and continue. “I fall down; I rise up. I fall down; I rise up. I fall down; I rise up.” The difference between Judas and Peter was the ability to accept/believe in forgiveness. You can open up or close down, in response to sin.

Norris: The Benedictines commit to both stability and openness to change. They remain in community for life.

An audience member asked about sacred space--
Cairns referred to a theology of God's presence. He experienced it especially on Mt. Athos, in Greece. He sensed a great cloud of witnesses.

Norris has found sacred space in South Dakota, Manhattan, and Honolulu (where she is caring for her mother).

In monastic space, specifically the guest house, one receives the gift of
silence. It opens up possibilities you haven't seen, to consider life, open up the future.

Norris: The film “Into Great Silence,” follows a community of Carthusians, who make the Benedictines look like playboys. (laughter)

Cairns: There is another sense that any spot on the globe is capable of being given attention. Stillness can be found. Learn to still distractions. A scattered person is able to collect.

Sometimes the space is in human encounter. Jesus makes this possible.

Norris shared that she had met a woman in the handi-van when she was accompanying her mother. The woman's son was in a wheelchair. She shared that her upbringing had been very painful, so she worked hard to give her children the love she hadn't received. She also volunteered to counsel at-risk youth at the local high school, to give them love. Norris was in the company of a saint.

Cairns feels he didn't leave his tradition; he traced it to the tap root. The fullness of faith is a beautiful thing. His first response was gratitude, his second, to share it with others.

The Paulist Press publishes Classics of Western spirituality. He read them after leaving the Baptist Church, before joining the Presbyterians.

Thomas Merton wrote a collection of desert stories.

Storytelling is a form of evangelizing. It's not an attempt at persuasion. The reader has freedom. It's a form of testimony.

Cairns: There is literature that predates the split in the Church, an underground stream of poetic, mystical thought. One moves from thinking to performing. Beauty matters; the body matters; the earth matters; every choice matters. There is a way of affirming and a way of unknowing, negation.

You can take ideas too far, get distracted from faith, performance.

Norris?: Some in the early church believed religious discussion leads to arguments. We should live scripture, rather than interpret it. Accept it in a deep way. The Word in the Desert.

Cairns: We are least faithful when we're anxious, fearful, or irritated. We argue when we're anxious. It pulls us off The Ladder of Divine Ascent.

A member of the audience asked how to avoid developing a cafeteria style of Christianity. Norris responded that she couldn't become an oblate until she had joined a church. The local church was in a difficult situation at the time, but she needed to be grounded in community. A number of Protestant ministers have become oblates.

Prayer life is the heart of the matter. It protects us from delusion and over- or under-emphasis. We're doomed to error if we're articulating without prayer. It's the first step to renewal, recovery. Prayer and community are key.

An audience member questioned Mt. Athos's refusal to admit women, and was offered Ormelia, a nearby women's monastery, as an alternative.

Kathleen Norris has a sister who's brain-damaged. She takes her sister to see movies she (Norris) wouldn't ordinarily see. She has seen comedies that contained objectionable material but depicted characters compassionately. When humor and compassion come together, it's inspired.

Cairns: Orthodox have the best coffee hour.

Bread that's blessed but not consecrated is sometimes shared for healing.

An audience member asked a question about where to find support: Trust others for support, to be carried in prayer on days you need it. A habit, or rule, of prayer is step one. Everything else will follow along. Make your need known. You can email prayer requests. You can use set prayers. Silences in the middle leave room for prayers from the heart. The Psalms are the prayers Jesus knew. You can start by picking one line and repeating it.

Further reading:
Rebelling Against Indifference, "Looking Backward, Looking Inward"
Jeff Gundy, Flesh Becomes Word: The Incarnational Poetry of Scott Cairns Mars Hill Review, Scott Cairns Interview
Image Artist of the Month, Scott Cairns
Greg Wolfe, A Conversation with Kathleen Norris on Language and Worship, Calvin Institute of Christian Worship conference (audio)
Kathleen Norris, Dakota and Other Holy Places, Christian Century
Kathleen Norris, Plain Old Sloth, Christian Century
Dick Staub interview: Kathleen Norris, Christianity Today

Festival of Faith and Writing, 2008:Metaphors of the Writing Process

Leslie Fields (mother, author, fisherwoman, and Seattle Pacific writing instructor) and Paul Willis (author and professor at Westmont College) led this session. They've collaborated in a previous workshop, with Paul speaking about nature writing from a recreational perspective and Leslie from a resource-driven one.

Willis, a rock climber, compared writing to climbing. He feels fear at leaving solid ground an urge to return to it—find root. There is a limit to the amount of pre-planning he can do; he has to adapt as he goes along, test various moves, sequence holds. He finds holds—words. They must be discovered, not forced.

A short poem is a boulder climb, an essay, rope-length. A novel takes several ropes. Sometimes one is forced to abandon a route, to come back down and start over.

Metaphors give with one hand and take away with the other.

Both climbing and writing are an adventure, raise adrenalin levels, and are accompanied by a sense of danger, suspense. There is relief at finishing a draft or a climb. Both start with an exploratory act that takes courage. The use of climbing as a metaphor may increase the fear of getting started. It may encourage premature closure.

Some writers revise as they go; others blast through and come back later to revise. If one is too slow and careful, he may be too reluctant to delete parts that need to be cut.

How deeply ingrained are our metaphors? Can they be changed?

Paul: “I have fought the good fight; I have finished the course.”
The lion lying down with the lamb.
A community pilgrimage, singing a song of ascents.

Would a different metaphor change the process or the product? Would it reduce a fear of losing, or falling off?

One of his colleagues uses the metaphor of Rumpelstiltskin. He starts with straw, in a draft, and spins it to gold.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote the growth of a seed depends on potential, plus quality of air, soil, and water around it.

Baking—mixing materials and allowing them to bake.
Carpentry—putting other people's stories together.

Annie Dillard describes writing as rowing in a current, which picks up and carries one into rapids.

C.S. Lewis spoke of writing as birdwatching. He saw pictures. If he kept quiet and watched, they joined themselves together.
* * * * *
Leslie Fields opened by stating the world was spoken into being, and at the heard of each thing is God's word for it. God is the God of all truth. Everything is His, and interconnected. All creation is linked. Creation is now rife with death and disorder. It has a language to speak, but most of us have lost the ability to hear it. We need help to recover unity, to bridge the dissimilarities of the world.

She has spent summers on an Alaskan island for the past twenty years. She has sometimes felt trapped, like one of the barnacles she sees there.

Sylvia Plath writes that metaphors are used to bridge: (1) one thing with another, and (2) the seen with the unseen, invisible, intuitive, mysterious.

Metaphors can give guidance, direction, assistance. They can prescribe, limit, or direct too much.

She started her career by writing poetry--for five years. She saw writing as walking through a field of flowers, picking what she wanted. When she shifted to studying journalism in graduate school, writing became a stone quarry; she was building pyramids. Information was content poured into form. Authorial intent was important at all times. There were no surprises.

Writing became a field of flowers again when she transitioned to writing creative nonfiction, which involved less directing and controlling of her work. It became more about being there, investigating. Control is about efficiency, time. Time spent on many drafts is not time wasted.
* * * * *
The audience shared their metaphors for writing. One woman sees herself as a potter working with clay. She selects the clay, prepares it, pulls out stones and seeds, then wedges, slices, pounds, and kneads it. She puts it on a wheel to shape and open, dries it, and glazes it. Then it's heated in a kiln, with the temperature rising slowly, to 2,000 degrees or more (sitting, coming under criticism). It cools it slowly. The clay questions the potter, “What are you doing?” There are many ways the vessel can be ruined during the process. There are many options in form and space, angle and shape. (She has also compared her writing process to stages like seasons.)

Another writer compared her writing process to moving: packing, having a garage sale, learning about a new place (doing research). Experience with both gives an edge, over time. What do you do a lot, that you can use as a metaphor? Another metaphor she shared was that of doing yoga, going as far as she can into a pose initially, breathing into it. With repetition, she reaches it, eventually.

Another audience member saw her writing process as drawing from the compost heap of her memoires, experiences, training, etc.

Doors are opened and closed by metaphors. Another writer does strategic planning in the course of her job. She it, like the writing process, as a funnel, taking various elements, preparing, and narrowing them into form. She went caving in New Zealand, on an underground river, two miles in a darkness illuminated only by headlamps. She couldn't stop until she got out at the other end. This metaphor can limit her writing process. Once she starts, she may not allow more information in. She may not be able to put the work aside and rest when she needs to.

A man compared writing to exploring a cave, being open to what lies ahead but not entirely sure where you are going.

Another saw writing as sailing a boat on a large body of water with the Holy Spirit as the wind pushing the sails. He reads the charts to avoid rocks and find areas to explore. He can't see the destination ahead of time. Abandoning the boat is a tragedy.

In closing, Professor Willis spoke referred to the Muse, as the oldest metaphor for the writing process.

Festival of Faith and Writing, 2008: Can Christians Tell the Truth?

A panel presentation by Vinita Hampton Wright (author, editor, and workshop coordinator), Leslie Leyland Fields (author, salmon fisherwoman, and Seattle Pacific writing mentor), and Debra Rienstra (author and Calvin professor).

Reinstra stated in her introduction that an author's ruthless honesty is a gift to us. She described how difficult achieving a deeper level of honesty was for her in her book Great With A Child, a collection of essays about the birth of her firstborn. She had a conflict with her parents soon after she brought her baby home from the hospital. It took six years of re-writing drafts for her to process the change in family dynamics that precipitated the tension. Writing helped her reach a deeper level of objectivity and understanding.
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Wright began her segment by commenting that fiction is not as dicey as memoir; a fiction writer's view of truth can be embodied. She read from her book The Soul Tells A Story, sharing changes a person can expect if they choose to embark on a journey of creativity. An artist scares people, partly because she tilts the status quo; she can't keep quiet.

She spoke of Velma Still Cooks in Leeway as being a story about “how to forgive people in your own church.” She had to be careful about viewpoint and choice of narrator in the book. The main character took on some qualities of her grandmother and, according to some friends, herself. (This is one of the best books of contemporary Christian fiction I've read.) Wright also discussed her choice to be honest about the intensity of the temptation toward adultery that her character in Dwelling Places faces. Her directness offended some readers.
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Fields draws from her family's years of summer salmon fishing in the Gulf of Alaska for much of her nonfiction. She has also dealt with her painful childhood, including her father's schizophrenia. She views writing as a form of confession: telling the truth about God, ourselves, and our struggles and tensions. We begin with things as they are. She quoted Flannery O'Connor, “Render justice to the visible universe.”

David spoke honestly in the Psalms. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus moves from confession (hunger, thirst, persecutions, meekness, mourning) to revelation. A state of blessing will follow an admission of the truth; we will receive more than we have lost. The longing carves out the space that will be filled. Confession to experiential truth leads to a revelation of God's truth.

Through Fields' experience raising her family, she's come to see that children aren't here for our fulfillment, but to serve God. (She's writing a book on Christian parenting myths.)

When she was able to accept her father's inability to love, she was pushed to a deeper revelation of God's love. She again quoted O'Connor: “Intrude upon the timeless that is found in every situation by a single-minded respect for the truth.” She reached a place of affirming the truth--that fathers should love their children--and was able to cry for both her father and herself.
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Back to Rienstra, coordinating the panel: How does the Golden Rule apply to confessing sin, as a writer? It's hard to see the truth fairly. We can work the way to our own truth but it still may not be fair to others. One may need to guard against “competitive confession,” an issue referred to by Anne Lamott (Reinstra). People don't want to read about perfect women (Fields). Humor may help in dealing with frustration of everyday issues (Reinstra), but is not appropriate in the midst of tragedy (Fields).

Wright stated that, in some ways, preachers and prophets of our age have been replaced by stand-up comedians. Tell who you are. Tell the truth.

Leslie made a case for dealing honestly with tragedy. Some Christians too often take things that are hard and make them funny. Engage and follow through; try to come out on the other side.

Rienstra suggested that we have an ongoing dialectic between tragedy and comedy, which is resolved in romance, in the Christian story. It's hard to know and tell the truth. One must work at it.

Wright said that if you don't tell the truth, people won't believe you. We must seduce people into paying attention.

Festival of Faith and Writing, 2008: Luci Shaw, part 2

Luci was introduced as a committed friend, wife, mother, grandmother to seven, and great-grandmother—courageous, risk-taking, bungee-jumping. (See The Crime of Living Cautiously.)

In this session, Luci demonstrated how she bridges the distance between a few words in her journal and the final draft of a poem.

She spoke of the importance of learning to pay attention. The word “attention” comes from the Greek attendero (sp?), which means “leaning towards” or “reaching into” something.

The imagination is a great foundation for creation. We're ready to receive during the course of our daily lives. Nothing is too mundane for a poem to illuminate, carry into insight. We are flooded with sensory impressions—sounds, smells, touches. She used the quality of the Festival schedule as an example; addressing the senses by investing in good quality material and design communicates importance we place on content.

She is open to seeing something that is beyond her. The Holy Spirit is the muse to whom she listens. The poet Paul Mariani once told her, “Your spiritual discipline is to follow your craft.” She lives and writes out of enthusiasm rather than duty.

Flannery O'Connor wrote that a writer who is truly Christian cannot write anything that does not reflect belief. Luci tries to write from a fresh angle, and to avoid being propagandistic. She uses metaphor to pierce, illuminate. O'Connor also said that art requires a delicate adjustment of inner and outer worlds, in such a way that they illuminate each other.

Shaw is a camper and a gardener. She's interested in the cycle of life, in the transition of seed to leaf to flower to fruit to decay to humus. We live in a coherent world, though there is plenty of chaos in it; it is broken because of greed and longing for power.

Shaw serves on the board of Image magazine, the fifth largest literary magazine in North America. Persistence has resulted in its steady growth. We have to persist, to become poets. It's part of who we are; we don't write one or two poems and claim to be a poet. We must build a body of work.

In the Post-Modern view, nothing has meaning. Poetry allows decay to be revealed.

Here, Luci shared a journal entry about a trip to Lumee Island; she spent a day on its pebble beach, off the coast of Bellingham. She felt that the experience needed to be translated into words, recorded. She keeps the journal with her all the time, to be able to record in the moment. The words in her journal grew into the poem, “At West Beach, Lummee Island.” She used stanzas, providing space to ponder.

Description develops into a personal understanding. She finds meaning in observed phenomena. She becomes part of the landscape; it becomes part of her.

In her journal, she recorded a Nooksack River camping trip with a friend. On these trips, they cook, knit, and sleep.

It is important to develop a vocabulary, to have a wide range of words available to you—for their rhythms, beauty, power. She studied Latin in school, and then New Testament Greek as a minor, in college. That education helps her see through words to their derivation. She uses an etymological dictionary to check original meanings of words, and see how they have changed.

For example, the words cata and act (sp?) in Greek combine to mean “break down.” The word cataract can refer to the breakdown within an eye or in a stream of water (fall).

She went on to share “Liturgy, Nooksack River, North Fork,” which traced back to her journal entry from the camping trip.

Metaphor speaks to her personally. She guards against writing message poetry. She wants her words to work “beneath the skin,” subversively.

She read “A Few Suggestions for an Insubordinate Idea.” Try to develop an independence that can see things in fresh ways, put creation's elements together in fresh ways.

She has scores and scores of “unborn poems,” in her fields, not finished.
We work under the ether of our own understanding of what we're doing. Sometimes students want prescriptions for writing poems. She can't just lay out rules to follow.

She shared “Litchfield Woods: Believing the Light,” May 1999. (I think she wrote this in response to the trip back and forth to visit Madeleine L'Engle, who was in the hospital at the time.)

Luci writes journals by hand, then edits and revises on the computer. She's very conscious of the use of paper these days, so doesn't print and save all the drafts, as she used to. She prints drafts on the back of used paper.

Poems have their own direction. You follow their line. Adverbs and adjectives are often used too much, which blurs instead of clarifying. Allow the strong anchor words (nouns and verbs) to carry the poem. Allow the skeleton to stand tall and show itself. The reader can fill in gaps and become part of the creative act. Readers are creators; allow them to form an image in their mind.

In response to a question about dating the poem, she said she added the date to memorialize a moment in time, in her relationship with Madeleine. She sometimes uses an epigraph, a line to inform the reader how the poem may develop. It's a personal choice. She's not a structuralist, not formal. Free verse allows breadth and freedom to work. We are at the service of the word itself, in humility.

Learn to attend. Receive the art; be able to recognize something of value beginning to happen. Craft is exercised in forming the shape, the line breaks. She sometimes counts the lines and sees what they are divisible by, then experiments. Verse, re-verse: form a line, go back to the beginning in the next line. Maintain continuity; structure so most effective.

(Here an audience member recommended Google Docs for drafting; each draft of a poem can be saved, without wasting paper.)

She was asked how she knows when a poem is finished. She quoted Frost, saying you have a sense of closing. "You feel like God on the seventh day." (Dorothy Sayers)

She has three friends who are good poets, who she emails poems to, for feedback. She works for economy. She tries to abbreviate to a point where the poem is clear, sharp, and focused. She leaves necessary white space. After highlights, she gives rest, pauses to show, “This is important.” Like a mat around a photo or a painting.

Luci believes there is truth in the universe. God has made it. Some of the metaphors we pull out of it reflect his truth. Several people have told her they've come to faith through her poetry.

A member of the audience asked about her writing schedule. She said she is not a person of routine. Her family is close, and they do a lot of entertaining and are very involved in their church. She doesn't adhere to a routine unless she has a deadline.

She does a lot of experimentation, re-vision. We need to grow as artists, as our lives continue. She reads other poets constantly. Growth and maturity affect writing. It takes years to find one's true voice. It's not just an easy thing. She continues to experiment, to find fresh and original ways to use words. She is discovering truth. She feels God has given her a gift; her goal is to use it, but not out of ambition.

D.S. (Don) Martin, in the audience, made a comment or asked a question, and was introduced as a good poet. He's Canadian, has a chapbook, and has a book coming out soon.

Sometimes words come with a rhythm. The iambic beat of the heart is often used. She takes a break from it from time to time, to avoid monotony. Breathing and walking rhythms can be used. The body is very involved, in being attuned to what works.
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It was a blessing to hear Luci Shaw speak, after years of reading her poetry.

Further reading: Luci Shaw, Tribute to Madeleine L'Engle
Speaking of Spirituality, Jon Sweeney's explorefaith interview
eerdmans interview
Luci Shaw, Art and Christian Spirituality: Companions in the Way

Festival of Faith and Writing, 2008: Alan Jacobs

(It was early; the night had been short; I arrived early, flew to the bookstore, and returned a few minute into the presentation. I apologize for gaps or errors. Read the book!)

I first encountered Alan Jacobs on C-span, a few years ago, on his The Narnian book tour. I enjoyed the book's window into Lewis's time, place, family, and friends.

At this conference, Jacobs shared from the content of his latest book, Original Sin: A Cultural History. He traced a history of religious and social thought on the persistent stain of sin.

Early in church history, some Christians began to believe sin continued to imprison the soul even after death. They interceded for relief of the dead, and passage to heaven. There was a sense of the democracy of the dead and dying.

A pilgrim returning from the Holy Land shipwrecked on an island, where he met a hermit who claimed to have heard wailing souls of the dead. They begged for intercession by the living to speed their progress toward heaven. Demons were heard complaining of hindrances caused by prayers, especially those from the Abby at Cluny. When the pilgrim reached home, he shared the hermit's story with Odilo, a tenth-century abbot of Cluny. Odilo was moved to place greater priority on prayer and designated November 2 the Feast of All Souls, to remember the dead.

The idea of original sin was both a scandal and a comfort. Rousseau, in the 1760's, disputed it. He advocated freedom for children, believing constraint led to rebellion. (In practice, he found his own sons had “no disposition to obey.”) (laughter) In contrast, John Wesley gave a sermon on the education of children, in which he described them as "little atheists" who had no inclination to obey. (Rousseau sent his six children away to be raised by others; Wesley raised his own.)

What we think about our innate disposition has many implications for art, education, etc.

Jacobs shared Wendell Berry's response to a reader's protest of his essay, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy A Computer.” (The reader evidently wrote his conscience was clear, with regard to owning a computer.) Berry responded that almost all our consumption is extravagant; if our conscience is clear, we may be dead! (laughter) The conscience is like a smoke alarm; it's silence may mean the absence of either fire or a battery.

Belief in original sin opens the possibility of being aware of a divided self, of asking, “What is wrong with us?” The alternative is to be whole, but lost.
Prudentius demonstrated the dramatic character of inner division in his play Psychomachia. Everyman is the most famous play dealing with soul struggle, but depicts the soul following the battle, as it faces judgment. Castle of Perseverance is another medieval drama on the subject.

In contemporary culture, Tom and Jerry cartoons sometimes represented the inner tension as an angel and a devil advising disparate paths. The arguments of the devil were more entertaining, and usually won the day. (laughter)

The first temptation mankind faced was external. Those that followed were not. They combined pressures of outer demonic forces and our inner sinful nature. The devil on our shoulder has power only because of our inner weakness.

In his reading of The Lord of the Rings, Tom Shippey, Tolkien's best critic, describes Frodo's relationship with the Ring as affected by both internal and external forces. Eventually, at some point, his will and the will of the Ring are no longer separable.

Augustine wrote that we follow God's will rather than our own, with the goal of molding to the external until our inner sinful will is weakened.

In another modern morality tale, John Barton directed Ian McKellen in Faustus (1974). He had the actor using puppets to play the good and bad spirits—an effective representation.

The divided self is our inheritance.

R.D. Lang, a Scottish psychiatrist, felt people diagnosed with mental illness were often particularly sensitive to true social and personal incoherence. Voices they heard often told the truth. Normal people have been put to sleep.

To be undivided--having a clear conscience--is to be normal, but lost. To be a divided self is the best we can hope for in this world.

George Whitfield, minister, orator, and friend of Benjamin Franklin, was sometimes heard by as many as 30,000 people at a time. His preaching had an extraordinary influence on his audience. Awareness of the burden of original sin often led to conversion. He was a comfort to the insulted, degraded, and poor, but offended those with prestige. Those who felt they had no righteousness of their own to renounce were happy to hear Christ came for sinners, that God loves us just as we are, and asks only for repentant hearts.

An element of modern culture believes pain and suffering is always and only evil. Christianity teaches God is at work to redeem pain and suffering. There is something which can be learned from it before it is eliminated.
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(I think questions from the audience began at this point.) Fine judgment is called for in using medication to treat [mental, emotional?] pain.

There are echoes of the doctrine of original sin in other cultures; some rabbis approach it.

The doctrine of original sin allows us to have a dark view of human nature and still be optimistic. Rebecca West, one of Jacobs' favorite writers, is not a Christian. She believes in sin but not redemption. Many Christians don't believe in original sin. It's an Augustinian idea, western. The Orthodox use different language to describe it.

Further reading: Atlantic interview, 10/00 (A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love)
PBS Frontline interview, 12/03 (on being an evangelical Christian and an academic)
The Inexpressible Apocalypse, Touchstone, 9/04
Religion & Ethics interview, 11/05 (The Narnian)
Rumors of Glory, Books & Culture, 2007
Publisher's Weekly interview, 2/08 (Original Sin)
Listening: Mars Hill Audio interview, 2000 (on Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy)