A Fresh Look at Writing as a Spiritual Practice
Karen Hering’s new book, Writing to Wake the Soul: Opening the Sacred Conversation Within, hits the bookstores next week, and I want to encourage everyone interested in writing as a spiritual practice to get a copy. In her role as literary minister at a Unitarian Universalist congregation, Hering developed what she calls Contemplative Correspondence, a practice of writing from prompts around theological themes like faith, prayer, sin, grace, and redemption. If this sounds heady or dull or too religious, hold your horses. This book is far more than what you might expect. Karen’s reflections and prompts are meant to exercise our metaphor muscles—our capacity to make connections between disparate images or ideas, and therefore our ability to communicate across differences, resolve paradoxical problems, and relate to mystery. Her choice of tough theological terms is deliberate. We need to reclaim the language of mystery; we need to remember language’s capacity to…
The Story about the Story
I’ve known for a while and repeatedly told my students that writing continues to offer us invitations to spiritual and personal growth even after we’re finished. Publishing and publicity can become opportunities to deepen our integrity, expand our communities, and understand the world more accurately. Of course in the mess of book production and the exhaustion of marketing, it’s easy to lose sight of this. That’s why I keep returning to Seth Godin, who manages to stay steady, full of integrity, and intent on doing good in the world. The idea of his I’ve been chewing on lately is that marketers do best to create a story around their product, and to connect that story with the community that most needs it and is most willing to talk about it. We authors usually flinch when someone refers to our work as a product, but, hey—once a book is in the…
Writing from Deep Gladness to the World’s Deep Hunger
As I move to the close of my second decade of teaching creative writing, I’m experiencing a dramatic shift in my philosophy. Writing has always been for me a means of personal discovery; I came to understand and claim my identity as a bisexual Christian when writing Swinging on the Garden Gate, and then melded my spiritual direction training with writing coaching to support others in profound personal healing and exploration through writing. I’m a firm believer in the power of privacy at the start of a writing project. If a writer’s heart isn’t on the line, what that writer writes hasn’t much chance of mattering. Because I’m well-trained as a feminist, I know the personal is political. So I’ve always trusted that deeply private explorations play a powerful role in public discourse. By reconciling my sexual identity with my faith, in my heart and in Swinging, I believe that,…
Four Excuses Not to Write Spiritual Memoir, and One Invitation
(This blog post is reprinted after appearing in The Loft’s “Writer’s Block.”) “I’m not interested in spiritual stuff. I just want to write stories.” A friend—a thoughtful, church-going friend—said this to me in passing the other day. Since she couldn’t hear my internal temper-tantrum, I’ll give it here: What in tarnation is more spiritual than stories?! Every story, from a child’s imaginative play to an adult’s crafted composition to an elder’s reminiscing, contains both the muddy mundane and the spark of mystery. When we humans want to understand our world, we make stories. It’s how we compose and are composed by meaning—Sharon Daloz Parks’ definition of faith. Dabble in stories, friends, and you work with the most intimate orientation of your heart. All writing’s spiritual. My point exactly. So what are you going to do about it? Sunday morning golfers like to joke that they pray on the putting green. …
Write–Or Be Written.
This past weekend my sister married the man she loves in a sunny meadow. Because this was her second marriage, she had resisted it mightily—“marriage” is a story the culture imposes on couples, and it doesn’t necessarily work. You have to understand—Marcy is a woman who, on her own, adopted two boys from Guatemala; she started a community farm and has midwifed countless babies into the world. Her performance artist sweetie moved in two years ago; the boys already call him Dad. Why bother with marriage? Eventually Marcy conceded that a wedding would give them a communal and sacred blessing. The couple created a “family union” ceremony with their Lakotan spiritual leader that involved the guests hiking across a canyon, drumming, washing in a stream, and making vows to one another and the boys. The guests cried and danced. What made my sister’s wedding powerful? It was faithful to tradition…
You Are What You Write
When I teach, I often ask the question, “What’s at stake for you in this story?” I’m not alone; it’s a common question in the world of writing. Students are puzzled by it, however, and usually ask me to explain. Really I’m looking for the intersection between the writer’s heart and the words on the page. How does this subject terrify you, compel you, wrap its sweaty hands around your longing and jerk you into unexplored territory? When a story nags, it always shares some fundamental passion with the writer. It always taunts the writer with the promise of discoveries that cannot be made in any other way. How does this project set you on edge? What’s the rabbit hole you’ve been skirting? Your writing will take you down. For people who keep journals and new writers, writing is a natural extension of the self. We don’t recognize any separation…
What’s At Stake?
Perhaps the most important question for every creative writer to ask—and definitely the hardest question to answer—is “What’s at stake for me?” For writing to work well, the writer must care deeply. On the surface this question seems simplistic; our care is instinctive, compelling, and unspoken. In practice, the journey through revision is an excavation of the author’s stake, digging below external reasons (“I want to help others; I want to be published”), below the outer story (“I want to explore this memory, character, or idea”), to some subconscious, undercurrent of longing. Our stake is always found in our emotional relationship to the subject matter. Without some connection to our content, we might convey the content to a reader but we’ve no reason to explore it. And passionate exploration is what makes writing great. What’s in question? What are you risking? What of your heart have you invested? A writer’s…
From Rilke, With Love
Whenever I get swept up in the competitive, audience-seeking dimension of the writing life, I turn to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet as an antidote. Rilke returns me to my essential, life-giving reasons for writing. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people. Art-making both awakens and fulfills basic spiritual needs, Rilke says, and that this role is ultimately sufficient. A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. Out of the cacophony of writing advice out there, Rilke stands alone in emphasizing love as the central creative force in our work. We must love our doubt, love our solitude, love the questions, love our subject, and make love our subject. Even suffering in the creative process is worthy of love: Why…
Are you writing?
During a moment of discouragement this morning—others writers have better focus than me, more time to read great literature, no three-year-old pulling love and attention away from the page—I flashed back to college, to what I now realize is a seminal moment in my development as a writer. The world looked bleak (Was it my miserable relationship with my boyfriend? The overwhelming stress of senior year? The overcooked green beans in the cafeteria?); I complained about everying in great detail to my friend Heather, a brilliant mathematician. She finally interrupted me. “Elizabeth, are you writing?” No, I wasn’t. I knew immediately Heather saw an equation I hadn’t: Elizabeth minus writing equals misery. Solitude, a pen and paper were key to my mental health. From that moment forth writing has been an essential activity, saving me thousands in therapy bills. (Thank you, Heather.) Not that writing solves all my problems, but…