Tag Archives: writing

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Thought for the Day, on Writing and Life

Novelist Luis Alberto Urrea was one of my favorite speakers at FFW. I went to his session with Debra Dean and they were a hoot together.

Here’s a paraphrase of something he said:

If you’re writing about matters of faith, you have to be vigilant against cliche and grandiosity. 

So go through your work and look for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir—those moments with the angelic choir, bathed in light and going “ahhhhhhhhh.” Take those out. Faith is too messy and gritty for them. Instead, replace them with James Brown.

May your day be funky, friends.

 

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On the Eve of FFW

I leave this evening for the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College, a gathering I’ve been hearing about for years but never been able to attend. I’m eager to soak it all in, hear some inspiring speakers, deepen friendships, and network. If I’m feeling extroverted enough, my little box of Sabbath in the Suburbs postcards will be empty when I come home.

I’ve been to tons of writing things over the years: workshops, conferences and such. They provide a huge boost of energy and mojo. And if there is a lot of posturing and jockeying for attention, they can also bring out demons of competitiveness. I can’t account for why these group dynamics occur in some gatherings and not in others. Probably a chemistry thing—one or two people can really shift things into an unhealthy place. With any luck and grace, I am not one of those people.

However, there’s no denying that I am a person of ambition. I thrive on competition, particularly in academic pursuits. When this is channeled inwardly—when the competition is with myself—it’s a great source of motivation. When it’s not, well, let’s just say that Robert and I still do not speak of The Canasta Incident.

This has been a topic of discussion and reflection for me recently. You know how themes and ideas will keep coming to you when you’re working something out? That has happened to me. I appreciated this article by my friend Becky, who wrote about healthy ways to be driven to develop one’s skills.

And a friend shared this article about two best friends who are highly competitive in the area of Olympic-level kayaking. The relationship spurs them on to be better and better. I find this thrilling and hopeful:

Both Ashley and Caroline are training hard – the former near her home in Maryland, and the latter down in North Carolina. Caroline says it’ll be tough to face each other at the upcoming Olympic trials, since “we both want to be number one.”

But if nothing else, she says, it’ll strengthen their friendship… and their skills.

“It’s a very positive thing,” she says. “We push each other.”

Ashley agrees: “Ideally this year we’re pushing each other to get to that next level, to be able to compete with this international crew. Ideally, we’re training each other for the Games.”

I have been blessed to have mentors and spiritual directors who have said to me, “Stop trying not to be competitive or ambitious. Instead, keep pondering how to use that gift in a life-giving way.” Unhealthy competition means comparing oneself to others, making one’s self-worth about achievement, and being selfish and unsupportive. Healthy competition believes in abundance: one person’s achievement does not diminish another person’s; there is room for many offerings of gifts. It also means striving for personal excellence in one’s life, art, or whatever.

After all, competition is scriptural! Paul writes that we are to outdo one another…
in showing honor.

So be it.

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Update on the Memory Project

source: CaityQuilter.com, a very intriguing blog

Several months ago I posted about a new practice I’ve undertaken: to record tidbits about the kids in individual journals, one sentence per day. You can read about the project and rationale here. Since there were quite a few people who were interested in the practice, I thought I’d provide an update and some thoughts.

The Blue Room is a place for inspiration, but also truth telling: I am still at the memory project, but if I manage one entry per week I’m doing well. This creates a mental struggle. I envisioned these journals as a place to record the everyday jewels of parenthood that are easily forgotten over the years. But if I let too much time elapse between entries, I end up wanting to make sure the Big Important Milestones are recorded. This requires more mental energy than I’d expected the practice to require. The whole point was to write the first thing that came to mind, no matter how ordinary, but if I’m having to sort through the past week to find the most journal-worthy thing… well, that’s too tough and becomes a barrier to doing it at all.

Also, the fact that there are three of them, and I feel the need for some parity, works against me. Part of what’s fun about the journals is that they’re not just baby books, which means the thirdborn’s should have just as much content as the girls’. (I love Erma Bombeck’s old bit about her kids’ baby books; by the time her last child came along, the sole contents of his baby book consisted of a pie crust recipe torn from the newspaper and tucked into the otherwise empty pages.) I feel like I should write in each journal each night, but sometimes there’s more going on with one kid than with the other two.

Like most spiritual disciplines and parenting practices, I see this practice evolving. My ultimate hope remains the same: to present each child with a handwritten book of quotidian wisdom and observations from their childhood. And if I end up handing them a book with 15 months of memories followed by a lot of blank pages, well, that communicates something worthwhile too: that life is about experimentation—starting more projects than one could possibly finish. Completion can be an elusive thing in life, but there’s something valuable in the undertaking.

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A Rising Tide Lifts All Books

The cover of Ruth's devotional guide. Don't you want to go to the Holy Land?

My friend Ruth Everhart and I both have Lent Devotional guides coming out this year. You can read about both of them here at RevGalBlogPals.

It is easy to get into competitive mode with one’s creative endeavors, and to feel like if one person does well, then that means less of the pie for you. And let’s be honest—few of us are going to order two Lent devotionals. (Let’s be honest even further and say that for many of my readers, one Lent devotional is a stretch. Ahem.)

But Ruth and I are in a writing group together, and we scheme about creating a writers’ guild that would support, cross-promote, maybe even co-publish our work. If she does well, I’m happy. It’s also good for me. And vice versa. And if either of us does well, it’s good for the RevGals, the grandmama of online communities that I was honored to help form more than six years ago. (Grandmama? Yes. It’s kinda like dog years.) And one hopes that the reign of God is somehow illuminated too.

But what we all want, at the heart of it, is to write and be read. So order one of these books.

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Fellowship of Prayer: Preview

Clergy, DCEs, church education committees… this is for you.

I was grateful for the opportunity to write the Lent Devotional Guide for Chalice Press, available for order here at the low low price of $2.95. (E-PDFs available too!) Some of you have asked me if there is a place to get a preview of the content. For a while there wasn’t, though I see now that they’ve put up a link to the first few entries. But how about a preview here at the Blue Room too? Here are the first few entries to give you a feel for the whole thing…

Introduction

Dear Reader:

As a child, I loved going through my grandparents’ encyclopedias. A favorite section was on the human body, with intricate, full-color diagrams of the circulatory system, muscles, nerves. Each system was illustrated on its own clear plastic page, so you could view it on its own, or you could lay them on top of each other—organs on top of arteries on top of bones. And then there was the skin that covered everything underneath it—an entire universe, encased in human flesh, fearfully and wonderfully made.

Life feels like this—layers upon layers, laid on top of each other. There are carpools and dinners with friends, oil changes and books due at the library. There are friends in the hospital, bills to pay, tensions with a family member, a presidential election looming, a never-ending onslaught of news and punditry. There’s that guy on the park bench, his worldly possessions crammed in a purloined grocery cart. There’s the sweet little girl in your son’s fifth grade class who just arrived in the U.S. and speaks no English. There’s the neighbor who gets on your last nerve. There’s the church committee meeting.

Life goes on as usual during between now and April 8, but with a new layer: the season of Lent. For some of us, Lent means intentional scripture reading, or giving up an indulgence through Easter, or an increased commitment to prayer, or daily reading of the book you now hold in your hands. But our life of faith is not just a set of tasks like any other. It is the circulatory system, our lifeblood, the heart that pumps life into us and keeps us going. Or perhaps it’s the nervous system, the center of feeling and awareness. Or perhaps it’s the skin—the flesh that enfolds everything else we do.

Lent can be all of these things, and more, if we give ourselves fully to the season, its themes, and its practices. Take a deep breath, and let us begin.

MaryAnn McKibben Dana

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Ash Wednesday • Feb 22

We Are Dust

Read Psalm 51. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

Tonight, many of us will attend worship services in which we receive ashes on the forehead along with the stark words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” In a death-denying culture, it is one of the more radical things we do. Anthony Robinson, a pastor and writer, served a congregation that decided to have an Ash Wednesday service for the first time, followed by a community concert. When Robinson looked out on the crowd that night, his sermon about sin and brokenness clutched in his hands, he realized that many people in the sanctuary were from the greater community. How would they react to an extended time of confession? Would the imposition of ashes feel weird or punitive?

The next day he was walking with his wife in a sketchy neighborhood in town—lots of folks sporting tattoos and piercings. A young woman with both of these, plus wild multi-colored hair, stopped him. “You’re that pastor from last night, aren’t you? What you did, and what you said—it was so meaningful. It was awesome.”

We are dust, and to dust we shall return. We are dust, all of us—the pastor and the wild-haired young woman, and the toddler and the nonagenarian. Our time is short upon this earth. Only God endures forever. In the meantime, what are we living for? What are we willing to give ourselves to? We long to belong to something larger than ourselves. But what is that something? The ashes, marking us with the cross, proclaim the answer. We belong to God. Even in our frailty and finitude, a good and powerful God loves us. That is the gospel message of Lent.

Dear God, help me to live in hope this Lent. I am your child. Amen. 

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Thur • Feb 23

From the Ashes

Read Isaiah 43:18-19. Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing.

Her name was Isabella Baumfree, but most of us know her by the name she chose for herself, a free woman: Sojourner Truth. A gifted preacher and activist for abolitionism and women’s rights, she aroused controversy whenever she spoke. On one occasion, when she was greeted by hissing and booing, she responded, “You may hiss as much as you please, but women will get their rights anyway. You can’t stop us, neither.”

One day, while preparing to speak in Indiana, word came that someone had threatened to burn down the building if she spoke there. Sojourner said, “Then I will speak upon the ashes.”

The message is clear: nothing would stop Sojourner Truth—not hatred, not intimidation, and certainly not a lit match touching dry wooden beams. If necessary, she would stand tall on the charred remains of that building, a living testimony that oppression and ugliness are not the final word. Liberation, beauty, truth—these things prevail.

Ashes are a reminder of our mortality, to be sure, but they are more than that. They are a reminder that life can erupt from death. God’s creation testifies to this again and again, as forests are decimated by fire, only to burst with green in seasons to come. Lent testifies to this too.

You are about to do a new thing, powerful God. Give me eyes to see it, and the words to testify to what I see. 

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Thanks for all of your support and encouragement, friends. If the devotional suits your needs or that of your congregation, I’d be honored if you checked it out.

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Friday Link Love

Jo Rowling

First, I love all the responses to the Sunday School post. Let’s keep that conversation going, shall we?

And now…

J.K. Rowling’s Writing Process in Her Own Words — Shelley Souza

This is just a fun read for HP fans, and obviously of interest for writers too:

Her compelling cast of characters came to life in her imagination because she never faltered in her belief that Harry Potter was the story she was meant to write.

It took me five years to work out this very long plot. On that train, I came up with lots of the characters you meet at the school. Loads and loads of detail, but not really the narrative. It’s as though, subconsciously, for years, I had been preparing for writing Harry Potter.

During those five years this mass of material was generated, some of which will never find its way into the books, will never need to be in the books. It’s just stuff I need to know, for my own pleasure—partly for my own pleasure and partly because I like reading a book where I have a sense that the author knows everything. They might not be telling me everything but you have that confidence that the author really knows everything.

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Good list, geared toward pastors. They all resonate, especially the one about not just reading leadership/administration books. I easily get sucked into those, because they are required for the transformation training I’m doing, they’re easy to read, and yes, they’re useful. Instead I have this weird idea that in this, the first year of my fifth decade, I want to only read literature that was written before I was born. Sort of a way of getting perspective on just how short a time I’ve been on this planet. So much of what I read is of the moment. Not sure I’ll do that but the thought intrigues me.
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The Seven Laws of Leanness — Women’s Health Magazine
Good reminders here. There really is no trick to it, folks.
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So every six months I have an automatic tickler that reminds Robert and me to have the safety reminder discussion with the kids. How do you call 911 and why? What’s the fire plan? What about going with strangers?
I clipped this article several months ago, which talks about how confusing the “don’t talk to strangers” thing is. Because sometimes you have to.

It’s all part of rewriting the rules of stranger danger. “That message is not effective,” says Cirillo. “Stranger danger portrays a man jumping out of a bush with a trenchcoat on, and children are trained to look just for that.”

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children agrees; like Cirillo, the Center focuses on teaching kids to speak up for themselves and never go anywhere with anyone they’re not supposed to be with. But cases like Leiby’s happen and we need to talk to our kids about how to handle them — namely, scream loudly, “You’re not my mom” until someone pays attention and never, no matter what, get into a car or go into someone’s home unless you’ve got parental permission.

But in refining the stranger danger axiom, Cirillo prefers to teach children about “tricky people” rather than zero in on sinister strangers. Who are they? “Anyone who tries to get you to break your safety rules,” she says.

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And on a happier note… if you are a pastor, educator or worship leader with kids in your congregation, you need to be reading Worshiping with Children. It’s just chock full.

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Have a wonderful weekend, folks.

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How It’s Going

Just a quick note to say I’m still alive, still writing the manuscript.

People keep asking how it’s going, and offering encouragement, and I’m so thankful for the the support and interest. It’s hard to say how it’s going, because I don’t know how much detail people really want, but also because I’m not sure myself how it’s going, in the sense of it going “well” or “poorly.” It’s going. It’s a slog. I’m ready to be done but in some ways the most important work is happening now and in the next few weeks, when I’m refining and shaping and hopefully wrapping this puppy up.

Here’s the best I can do:

Steeper, actually.

I keep thinking of climbing Mt. Washington (New Hampshire) back in July, which was a bucket list thing. My mother-in-law, who climbed it with me, told me about a place called Heartbreak Hill. That’s the place where you think you’re almost done because you can’t see anything but blue sky above you. But you come up over the ridge and discover to your horror that there’s a whole ‘nother section of mountain. You look up and see a huge pile of boulders, and people scurrying on them, tiny like ants, if ants wore bright red fleece and cargo pants.

And you look down at how far you’ve come, and instead of being psyched by the many miles you’ve traveled, you think, “This should be the end. For all the work I’ve done, I should be at the top.” But it isn’t the top. And you feel very sad and desperate for a while, because there’s no way short of catastrophic injury to get carried off this godforsaken mountain. And then there’s this bargaining thing with the universe—Could I please, please trade places with somebody else on this planet? Preferably someone at sea level, but I’ll take my chances with pure randomness.

And you think about the phrase, “The end is in sight.” It’s what you say when you’re almost done with something, but the problem is, the end is sitting atop a pile of rocks that aren’t so much walked as scrabbled. So the end in sight isn’t all that much of a comfort.

And once you accept that the rescue helicopter’s not coming, you eat some banana chips, and you do that thing you’ve been doing this whole time. The only thing you know to do, one scrambling step after another, which seems like a very inefficient way to go, but nobody’s come up with anything better.

How’s it going?

The end is in sight.

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The Memory Project

I’ve written before about my one-sentence journal, in which I write a micro-entry for each kid. The idea is to do it each night, but it’s usually more like three times a week, and that’s fine. The point of the single sentence limitation is to make the practice manageable. It also calls forth a little discernment to identify the most important nugget that I want to remember each day. It’s got a little bit of the Ignatian examen in it, actually.

Right now I’ve been putting them all into a single Moleskine volant notebook. It was what I had available when I started, and I wasn’t sure I was going to stick with it. That was in December, and I’m still going strong. I could keep buying new journals and continue as I have been, but I began to wonder about format and organization.

Does it make sense to have all three kids together in one journal? Or might each of them want an account of his/her life someday? I hope so, but I’m not sure. I would have loved to have something like this. As I think about my childhood, of course there are significant events I remember, but I wish I had more of a sense of the everyday flavor of our life.

Let’s face it: I don’t scrapbook, though I admire the art form. I’m pretty sad with photo albums in general. But writing… I can do that. I like the idea of giving a small stack of journals to my children as they become adults. Such journals would not represent “the facts” of their growing up so much as how their mother saw them day by day, year by year.

Another question: should I be typing them? I rejected this quickly. The one-sentence journal is the thing I do right before falling asleep, and I’m not thrilled with the thought of cuddling up with the laptop to do this. The lack of backup is a concern, but the aesthetic factor outweighs that. I have gone paperless in so much of my life that it’s a real counter-cultural thing for me to be writing by hand. But I do wonder how much longer we’ll be writing by hand.

I thought about buying three ten year journals, but ultimately decided to go with something more flexible. So I bought a few of these Eccolo journals. Caroline’s is a dragonfly, Margaret’s is a Celtic knot, and James’s is the tree pictured above. They’re small but packed full of nice quality paper.

So—this is my Memory Project. A one-sentence journal for each kid, completed a few times a week, more or less, for a period of years—more or less. Feel free to join me in this project, or share in the comments what kind of artifacts you hope to pass on to the next generation—your own children, or others.

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Friday Link Love

Hope you folks in the U.S. have a wonderful Labor Day… We’re making a special outing to Wolf Trap to see Cathy Rigby in Peter Pan, but mostly we’ll be getting the kids ready for school. Margaret goes to kindergarten! Amazing.

Away we go:

Animated Sheet Music

Watch the sheet music go by as Miles Davis and his bandmates play “So What.”

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Samuel Morse’s Reversal of Fortune—Smithsonian

It wasn’t until after he failed as an artist that Morse revolutionized communications by inventing the telegraph.

Let’s hear it for Plan B!

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David Allen on Dealing with Interruptions—GTD

That cheap three-sided piece of plastic on your desk holds the key.

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Finding Time (to Write)—Anne Lamott

No one needs to watch the news every night, unless one is married to the anchor. Otherwise, you are mostly going to learn more than you need to know about where the local fires are, and how rainy it has been: so rainy! That is half an hour, a few days a week, I tell my students. You could commit to writing one page a night, which, over a year, is most of a book.

 

 

 

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Because I Will Reflect on Anything… Even a Facebook Kerfuffle.

Why yes, don't mind if I do.

Quite the kerfuffle on Facebook yesterday over this devotional about the “spiritual but not religious.” People felt very strongly about it, and I even got defriended over the discussion. And because I will ponder anything, even a FB kerfuffle:

If you want commentary on the piece itself, I recommend this and this, and my friend Martha offered her own meditation on “SBNRs” (written several years ago) here. This blog isn’t really about the post itself, except I wanna say this: I’m kinda over the word “spiritual.” I think the shift is toward something different that doesn’t have a name yet: embodied? incarnational? grounded? integrated?

Anyway, today I’m thinking more about writing, how we communicate and how we reflect on that communication.

Many clergy friends gave virtual high fives that the writer finally said what needed to be said about the shallowness that often emanates from some who call themselves spiritual but not religious. Others admitted the tone was snarky and smug, too focused on the speck in the SBNR’s eye and completely ignoring the log in the church’s, and not a great thing to have out there if we claim to be an evangelistic people. But, they argue, the germ of an idea was sound. (My husband, a product manager, offered, “Sounds like a classic venting-about-the-customers thing. Everybody does it, but not to the customers.”)

My personal view is that voice cannot be separated from message. Tone is not a dropcloth that can be removed with a flourish and stowed away, revealing the true work of art underneath. It’s baked right in. “Set aside X and Y and her point is valid,” some folks said in defense of the piece. But I don’t think you can set those things aside.

My writing group deals with this problem often after several years together. I’ve been told more times than I can count, “I know what you’re trying to say because I know you and the experience you’re describing, but it’s not at all clear from the words on this page.” or “I get your point, but you come off really sarcastic here—was that what you were going for?”

That’s what the kerfuffle was about. Words on a page. (OK, screen.) People who know the writer personally consider her a lovely person. I have no reason to doubt that. But that’s beside the point when it comes to this piece of writing, which should be evaluated on its own merits. Does it work? Does it work in this genre? Does it communicate what she wants to communicate?

This completely freaks me out, by the way. Come fall 2012, it will be my words that are evaluated. Maybe even critiqued. Maybe even critiqued harshly and pointedly. There may be readers who cross the line and make it personal. But not all sharp critique is personal. Remind me of this next year, Gentle Readers, when some doofus on the Internet makes me cry. Help me sift through what’s helpful but hard to hear. Help me find a safe place to put that. And help me take everything else, tie it to the tail of a kite, fly it into a strong wind, and cut the string.

But the stuff I write doesn’t get a pass just because I’m a nice person.

That’s the work of community. That’s what the piece tried to emphasize—and failed, in my opinion, because of what was used to leaven it.

One final thing. On the Internet, there is no place for the church to talk to itself internally without the general public listening in. That includes, sadly, a lecture given by the speaker to a room full of pastors, which is readily available too. That’s neither good nor bad, it just is. We live in Terry Benedict’s casino in Ocean’s 11: “In my hotels, there’s always someone watching.”

All right then… what’s next?