Unscripted

Finding something to write about each day is harder than it sounds… which is only to be expected. But the power’s in the writing, and the trying…

Writing last night’s post brought back memories of NaNo, and last November. I talk a lot on this blog about creating with the tools we have to hand—whether that’s words or sacraments or flowers [link]. And in November, perhaps more than any other time for me, I had to create something new.

One year ago tonight, I was wedged against the cold window of the airplane with a purple notebook and a pen, starting a novel. Probably flying over the Dakotas, or someplace equally as empty; it was too dark to see the ground. I was flying home to Boise, after five months at my dream internship in Minneapolis. And I was terrified.

I was leaving for a good reason: I was ready to create a life in California, closer to the man who would become (was becoming?) my partner. That life wasn’t scary; it was exhilarating. But it was still a couple of months away. Logistically it made sense to stop over at my parents’ house in Boise for a couple of months first. Even though I felt it might have been easier just to fly right over.

Minnesota was easy by now; I knew my way around. By November I finally felt at home in the maze of skyways crisscrossing the city. I knew how to get from the bus stop to the office, from the coffee shop to the grocery store if need be, without ever setting foot on the sidewalk. I even felt ready for the legendary Minnesota winter. I did not feel ready for the familiar Idaho fall, for neighborhoods I knew too well where most of my friends had moved away. I did not feel ready for a life without structure.

And then I remembered my friends talking about NaNo. And I decided: I might not have figured out what to do with my life, but in the meantime I was going to write a novel.

I made up my mind to do this, of course, about a week before NaNo started. There are Wrimos who plot their stories out months in advance, I’ve learned; they know pretty much where they’re going to end up before they get there. I, on the other hand, barely knew where I was beginning, let alone what was going to happen from day to day. If you look back at that purple notebook, most of the early pages are full of bracketed sections in large scrawled capitals: WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE???

But I kept writing. A couple thousand words a day. Mostly written well after midnight when I was too tired to do anything but splatter indiscriminate words on the page—but still the novel kept growing longer.

And another crazy thing happened, as I wrote: I met people. Many of them were other writers, people crazy enough to bring their laptops to Old Chicago on a Friday night. Others were old acquaintances willing to sit in the Flying M coffee shop and drink pot after pot of tea with me as I scribbled—who slowly became good friends. I introduced and re-introduced myself not as “student” or “editor” but as “novelist,” and if it got me a few weird looks, it also always started a conversation. I hung on to that.

And on November 30, “novelist” became a title I could claim in earnest: I hit my goal with words to spare! Sure, my characters hadn’t finished their ragtag quests, but they also hadn’t disappeared. I’d finished the book, I was one month closer to California, and by sheer grace I had a life that made sense again.

This life in California, this life I love more than anything— with Drew’s help, I’ve had to create it from scratch. There’s not a school or internship script here either; there’s not a ready-made way for making friends like the student life committees used to work so hard to give us. I’m glad I didn’t fly over Boise, that I had the chance to write my cheesy messy novel. Because when I got here, I knew that unscripted life is possible.

Speaking of the novel: When I shut the notebook in the end of November, my characters had ended up in an enchanted city with tunnels of glass that hovered in the sky. Didn’t see that coming. But when they/we got there, it seemed familiar.

NaBlogWriMo

It doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it? NaNoWriMo definitely sounds more snazzy— that is, National Novel Writing Month, which started today. All over the country, people are sitting down to try and churn out the first 1666 words of their story, and committing to keep up that pace each day this month—for a total of 50,000 words, the length of a short novel. I participated in NaNo last year, and making it to that final word was one of the most exhilarating experiences I’ve had as a writer.

Of course, last November I had no job. This year I have three. Keeping up with my own small writing projects is a challenge in itself. Which is why I’m not going to attempt a second novel this month. It deserves more focus than I’ve got to give.

But the ambition and sheer cheek of the “Wrimos” still inspires me. And so I’m going to attempt my own twist on November this year, in a way that makes more sense with my current practice: rather than trying for 1666 words of a novel per day, I’m going to write a new blog post each day in November.

A different project, to be sure, but blogging and “noveling,” as the Wrimos call it, actually have a bit in common. Tonight I want to talk about one of the most important reasons why: Blogging is public.

NaNo is all about providing motivation and discipline for writers—and nothing inspires motivation like knowing the world is watching. Showing up to the write-ins or telling friends your wordcount invites more people into what is usually a somewhat lonely process. The more people I told about my goal, the more I tried not to disappoint them—and the bigger cheering section I had as I approached the finish line.

This year’s blog takes that “public” nature one step further. Blogs by their very nature are public—most of them are open for anyone on the Internet to see. And compared to working on a private project like a novel, this is a bit more of a risk. Tonight I’m not giving you just a number. I’m giving you words, and inviting you to read them. In comparison, my cheesy fantasy novel (last year’s NaNo) is still sitting under the bed. I haven’t even read it all the way through since I finished. (Cheesy fantasy melodramas are more fun to write than to read, I’ve found.) That isn’t an option this year. Pushing through November isn’t about polished writing, it’s about writing, period. Some of my posts will be rougher than others, and if I commit to this blog, I won’t be able to hide that from you, my audience and my community.

Which freaks me out a bit, not going to lie. But the public design of a blog also has its advantages. Blogs leave room for interaction, for conversation, in a way no other form can. You’ve got a comment box right there in front of you, after all. That takes the isolation out of the writing process, and provides a reason for me to step forward when I would really rather pull a pillow over my head and go to sleep without writing another word.

So, friends, if you care to be my audience/community/hecklers/supporters/peanut gallery this month, I invite you to jump in, and see where this project takes me. Happy November!

Mutant Christians and Mushy Faith

I’ve got interfaith dialogue on the brain right now. It probably started with Drew’s great series of posts exploring religious pluralism. And now, between the “Ground Zero mosque” fiasco, the Koran-burning pastor in Florida, and (on a more hopeful note) watching Claremont School of Theology take the first steps toward becoming a multi-religious university, interfaith relations are never far from my thoughts.

So maybe that’s why, when I read this article about teens becoming “fake” Christians, my first question wasn’t “How can we renew faith in our youth ministry?” but “Why do we instantly go on the defensive when considering other religions?”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for youth ministry that have more spiritual substance than just weekly pizza parties. But every time this story gets reported, it’s with the lead that a scary new religion is sneaking into our churches. This op-ed by the researcher, Kenda Creasy Dean, goes even farther, with a two-paragraph intro that compares teens’ faith of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” to the symbiotic villain Venom from Spider-Man. Are you quaking in your boots yet? I know I am!

But if we read further, what is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism?

• A god exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth.

• God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

• The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about yourself.

• God is not involved in my life except when I need God to solve a problem.

• Good people go to heaven when they die.

A weak foundation for youth ministry & faith formation? Definitely. But an insidious new religion? Hardly. Last time I checked, Christians do actually believe in a Creator God who wants us to be nice to each other. That’s hardly heresy.

The rest, I’ll admit, is mushy. In creative writing terms, there’s no concrete detail in this list—it’s all tell, no show. And it’s mushy language like this that we sometimes resort to when we’re trying not to tick off people with other religions. You know the sort: “We are all giving honor to the same divine essence,” etc. Nothing about that captivates me as much as the particular details of the Christian story. Or the Buddhist story, or the Muslim story, for that matter.

***

Churches that have resisted the pull of MTD, according to Dean’s research, are more likely to “place a high value on scripture” and “explain their church's mission, practices and relationships as inspired by ‘the life and mission of Jesus Christ.’” Which makes me nervous that people who are afraid of this mutant invasion of Christianity by building even higher walls around faith—by reiterating the reasons why we are right and the “mutants” (and by extension everyone else) are wrong.

If that’s the way churches plan to get teens engaged in Christianity, I feel like it might backfire. At least it would have for the teenage Margaret. At my high school lunch table I sat with Methodists and Mormons, Hindus and Buddhists, evangelicals and atheists. What would Dean have me say to these friends? “I’m glad you’ve got your own faith, but ya know, you’re totally lost without Jesus”? I would have rejected that. If that’s what separates our religions from each other, then no wonder teens resort to bland, all-encompassing faith like that described in the article.

I wouldn’t be a Christian if I didn’t believe in the power of the Gospel story. And I want to be able to articulate that Gospel—to give, as Peter writes, “an accounting of the hope that is in [me]… with gentleness and reverence.” But I also want to keep listening to others’ stories! Whatever the answer to mushy faith, it isn’t simply “Run from everything that isn’t Jesus-y enough.” There has to be a way to claim my faith without watering it down (or clobbering people over the head with it).

***

Yesterday I attended the first CST chapel service of the year. At the top of the bulletin there was an invitation that invited us to replace God-terms with terms we felt comfortable with. Underneath, it said, “This service is in the United Methodist tradition.”

Some mushy words did slip into the service—it’s hard to avoid. But there were also moments of better poetry—like when the preacher brought up Paul’s image of the Body of Christ. Of course, not everyone might use the same metaphor, he said. But we could all learn from the image of one body with many members, all diverse in gifts and all essential.

Maybe that’s a way for us to start talking.

Passion & God-Talk (and I'm published again!)

Check out my latest essay, "She," in the latest issue of Episcorific! (The link leads to a PDF; my piece is on p. 7)

Episcorific is a webzine written by young adults affiliated with the Episcopal Church, and it does cool work. For the Pentecost issue, the theme was "Soapbox:" what are you passionate about, what sets you on fire? For me, the answer (or one of the answers) is the language we use to speak about God. This is especially exciting since I've been reading up on liturgical language for the Worship & the Arts class I'm auditing (more on that later I'm sure). I hope you enjoy the finished product!

Balcony Garden

This week my impatiens started to bloom. Up until now, they’ve just been leaves—but now their blossoms have come out, salmon-pink, just slightly clashing with the hot-pink petunias blooming above. My pot is a riot of color, balanced on the balcony rail.

I’m proud that they’re blooming—my balcony garden has survived its first month successfully. The balcony’s always been here, of course, but for the first six months of my time in Claremont, it pretty much functioned as a storage space/laundry annex for hang-drying clothes. Until my mom finally made a visit. She showed up at my new home with a “housewarming gift” of sorts: a balcony table, two folding chairs, and a flat of flowers ready to be potted.

The plant tags sticking out of the pot have names I vaguely remember from years of gardening with my mother: impatiens, begonia, lobelia, basil. But gardening is trickier on a balcony than it was in my mom’s garden. There are no trowels, for one, and no garden hoses. Just a couple of pots and my own two hands. I have to use the plastic plant container to scoop the dirt into the pot, and tamp it down with my fingers. Then run to the kitchen sink to get a cup of water, pour it on the plant and hope that it blooms.

~~~

There are days when I can’t write.

I do my best. I set my alarm to go off early, so I’ll have time to work—these are my creative hours, I tell myself, where I’m going to tell new stories. And so I pour myself a cup of tea, open to a blank page, and… end up on Facebook. And end up refreshing the page a dozen times an hour. I want to create, but instead I’m stuck.

I head to the balcony to water my plants. After all, I’m responsible to them. I may be able to ignore the blank screen and the blinking cursor—but if I ignore the plants, they’ll go crispy in the California sun. (There are already a few crumbly yellow stalks that attest to that.) So I fill my yellow Nalgene, pull back the petunia stems, watch the water soak into the soil.

Afterwards, my fingers smell of basil; my nails have dirt under them. I am in the world, not just watching it, not avoiding it. This pot might not be a poem, but in its own way, it’s an act of creation. Or co-creation, I suppose: I’m not the one who made the flowers bloom today.

Tonight I’ll pick some basil leaves to sprinkle over the pasta sauce—to give our standby dinner a little more pizzazz. Maybe Drew and I will even eat it at the balcony table. And maybe tomorrow the words will come in the morning. Whether or not they do, I’ll water my plants, and give thanks that creation isn’t limited to so-called “real art,” and wasn’t over on the seventh day.

~~~ How do you plug into the world when you feel disconnected from it?
For all you artists/musicians/writers/theologians out there, do you have another hobby or pursuit that feels “creative” even if it isn’t art/music/writing/theology?

Do You Believe In Marriage?

When my partner and I were starting to get serious, my dad asked me gravely, “Does Drew even believe in marriage?” And I had to bite my tongue. Sure, Drew comes from a less “traditional” family than my dad is used to, but still, the way he worded the question... Can we “believe” in marriage like we “believe” in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy? It’s not like its very existence is up for debate!

Of course, that’s not what my dad meant. He was asking, or trying to ask, whether we considered marriage worth it. Is it a goal for us, a thing we embrace? Seems like these questions are in the air lately. Elizabeth Gilbert, in her recent memoir Committed, doesn’t doubt marriage’s existence. What she doubts is whether it holds any value anymore for our relationships today.

If you were to ask Gilbert whether she believed in marriage at the beginning of the story, her answer would be an emphatic no. Both she and her partner have experienced ugly divorces, and they’ve vowed never to get married again. That is, until Homeland Security detains Gilbert’s non-American partner as he enters the States. Without a ring on his finger, the government insists, he can never enter the country again.

Gilbert is terrified—but figures the best way to cope with the fear is to learn everything she possibly can about marriage, and turn it into a book. (I love her typical writer’s solution to the problem. I’d do the same thing—that is, if I were lucky enough to have the money and brand name to get an instant book advance. But that’s another post entirely…)

Committed is an extended personal essay on marriage, each carefully researched chapter bracketed by anecdotes from her relationship, as she and her partner try to figure out how to build “a careful habitat of [their] own.”

Throughout the book, it becomes clear that she’s sorting through the pieces of “traditional” marriage—in all its complex forms—and carefully choosing the qualities that she wants. Gilbert wants a “Wifeless Marriage,” as she dubs it, where neither partner ends up taking on many domestic responsibilities. And when things are getting strained in the relationship, she wants to be able to take off for, say, Cambodia for a week alone, with a partner who doesn’t at all begrudge being left behind.

That could be threatening from some perspectives—the idea that she’s remaking marriage to suit herself. But I’m not so sure. Is marriage an all-or-nothing endeavor? I don’t know that it is, whether you come from a “traditional” pattern or not.

I went to the weddings of two dear friends this month. The first took place in a friend’s backyard, with a DJ playing a mix of video game music and Celtic airs. The second bride walked down the cathedral aisle to familiar organ tunes. The first bride plans to hang on to her maiden name; the second just changed hers on Facebook. So we know it’s official.

But I know them well enough to know that their marriages are going to look different than ever before. But I know them well enough to know that Tonight my non-“traditional” friend is probably cooking dinner for her husband … and my “traditional” friend may well be dragging her partner along on some spontaneous late-night adventure. Neither is going to be a “typical” wife to a “typical” husband. And that’s the way they like it.

What’s my marriage going to look like, when Drew and I get there? (And yes, for the record, we do “believe in marriage,” or at least it doesn’t terrify us as it did Gilbert.) The liturgy-geek in me is looking forward to designing a wedding, with words and songs and actions that reflect us both.

And the wedding will only be the first step—toward designing a marriage that will last much longer than one day. The “ordering of our common life,” as the Prayer Book puts it, will be just as much an act of creation as any story I will ever write.

It won’t be simple. Creation never is. Gilbert acknowledges the difficulty herself:

Wifeless, childless, husbandless marriages… there haven’t been a whole lot of those unions in history, so we don’t really have a template to work with here. Felipe and I will have to make up the rules and boundaries of our story as we go along…. I don’t know, though. Maybe everyone has to make up the rules and boundaries of their story as they go along.

I don’t know what it will look like, but I’m excited to find out. One way or another, I think, we’ll end up with a marriage that I can believe in.

The Whys & Hows of Writing

Since the last few posts have been writing-related, thanks to the inspiration of the BNO crew, I thought a little more information about my writing life (past, present, and future) might be helpful. So here's my interview from the BNO blog. Hope you enjoy!

1.When and why did you begin writing?
The why is easy: I've been a voracious reader as long as I can remember. And when you read enough stories, you start to dream of writing some of your own. The first story I remember writing (I think I was eight or nine) was about a seagull who made friends with a beach frisbee. Their names may or may not have been Sparkle & Whisby.

My writing life really caught fire in January 2006, when I started keeping a devoted "scribble-book" or notebook for stories and ideas. Since then, I've tried to write every day.

2.What sort of genre do you write?
Creative nonfiction of various sorts. Most of it falls under the category of memoir or personal essay. I like to write about big questions--religion, ethics, love-- and bring a personal voice and an image-rich vocabulary to it. I also do a bit of literary journalism-- same kind of deal, but writing about other people, not just myself.

3.Have you been published? If so, what titles? Where can we find your book?
I've had two poems and one essay published in various issues of my college's literary journal, Saxifrage. I also have an article that I'm shopping around to magazines right now.

4.How do you define being a successful writer? What do you do to get there?
A writer is someone who writes. Let's start there. As long as I have a notebook that is filling up with words, I am a writer. Every day that I write new words, I am a success.

Long term, I want to share my stories with people-- maybe even let them change the world a little, as the stories I've read have changed me. And for that to happen, my stories have to be out in the world, not just in my notebook or saved on my hard drive. That means re-writing, re-writing, re-writing... and finally screwing up my courage to submit a story for publication. Scary stuff. But worth it if I want to be a published writer. :)

6.You come to a fork in the road. Which way do you go? Why?
Either way, I'll get lost within five minutes. No internal compass here.

8.What book are you currently reading?
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for the second time. Garcia Marquez has possibly the most beautiful writing voice EVER. In my personal opinion.

9.What are your current projects?
I'm working on a couple of essays right now-- one that takes a different angle on the life of Jesus, and an autobiographical essay about growing up female.

12.Do you have any advice that you would like to share?
Natalie Goldberg said it best: Keep your hand moving. When you sit down to write a first draft, Do Not Stop Writing. If you're frustrated or stuck, write a sentence about being frustrated or stuck, and then move on. Some of my best scenes/images have come when I thought I was out of inspiration and kept writing anyway.

Also, one of the things that has helped me the most in my writing life is the support of a writers' group. Writing's a lonely pursuit, and sometimes it helps to break out of that isolation once in a while. A group can keep you accountable to your writing goals and remind you why writing is fun. Not to mention that critiques from fellow writers are worth their weight in gold!

13.You're trapped on an island, what five things do you have with you?
Hmm... probably no wi-fi on the island, eh? OK then. A notebook, a deck of cards, a good long novel to read, a box of peach black tea, and a solar flare to call for help!

14.Quick, it's a Zombie Apocalypse! What do you do?
Grab my notebook & voice recorder and go to interview the zombies!

15.Your computer just died, does this ruin your writing day, or can you cope?
Nope-- that's what my trusty notebook is for. I actually find I'm more creative when I write first drafts by hand and then type them up. It's harder to make a "perfect sentence" without a backspace key, and if I'm not worrying about making perfect sentences, I get more done.