The Still Point

Shelly Troup come on down! We promised to send a copy of Novel Tips on Rice to our 300th follower, and Ms. Troup, that would be you. Please send your snail mail address to novelmatters at gmail dot com, would you? We're delighted you're here, and very pleased to give you this gift!
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I think I've learned the cause of all (or most) of my neuroses. In reading Beauty Will Save the World by Gregory Wolfe, I found this:

The believing writer in America has always faced the same dilemma: how to find a way to heal the divisions running throughout the national psyche, including the community of faith itself. 

Gosh. I feel sort of tired just reading that - you? Do you want to spring to your computer and ask Mr. Wolfe, Isn't it enough to just write a nice story, without having to change the world? 

Don't bother. The disturbing truth is, no, it's not enough for me, and if you are a writer and you read this blog, it's probably not enough for you either. The reason we seek, as Sharon said on Monday, to find that sweet spot between the literary fiction we love and the commercial fiction that gets read, is that literary fiction is not just beautiful writing. It is writing that works through beauty to change the way we see. Other authors can write great stories. We want to do that, and so much more.

The trouble is that few within our churches will get the point. We have the Ten Commandments and the Epistles, the sensible books of the Bible tucked between those strange and troubling stories. Give us sermons with four logical points or give us stories to entertain, but don't lets get artsy, please.

So we find ourselves in an awkward position. Wolfe continues the passage:

Nathaniel Hawthorne may have had an anguished relationship with Christianity but that was in part because his imagination hungered for a deeper faith than was available in his time. He confronted many of the same divisions that plague us today. To his right were the descendants of his Puritan ancestors, whose lack of imagination pushed them in the direction of philistinism and fundamentalism; to his left were Ralph Waldo Emerson and his followers, whose religious commitments had evaporated into a pantheistic liberalism. 

This middle position reminds me of stories my step-father used to tell of growing up half Irish and half Cherokee in a racially devided Oklahoma: if you wanted friends, you had to pretend to be one or the other.

But go that route, and you'll end up writing something other than the story you've been given. I hesitate to romanticize your position and sound the call to a noble exile, but I do think that as a writer of faith you must accept a level of friendlessness: many may love you, but few will really get your vibe.

You know?

But vibe you must. Whatever hunger you  have for a deeper faith must be leaned into. What keeps you separate must be cherished for the gift that it is. There is a voice calling through that separateness, and you're meant to follow till you find what T.S. Elliot sought, that "still point of the turning world."

And meantime, those friends you have who share your dilemma must be honored and looked after and, most of all, prayed for.

As we pray for you.

Now it's your turn. Wrap your paisley sash around your hips and tell us (as much as you can on the internet in front of everybody) your tales of artistic exile and wonder.

We love to read what you have to say. And we will pray for your pilgrim souls.

Rejection Schmection

On Monday Bonnie gave us some great advice on handling rejection. Important stuff, because the only way to escape rejection is too sad to consider. Ask nothing of life and it won't tell you no.

I especially liked Bonnie's suggestion number 6: "Have a concrete plan for improving as a writer." There is such hope, such stubborn faith in that: like praying for rain, and taking your umbrella though the sky is sunny blue.

But I'd like to add a seventh tip:

While you wait, write for someone, somewhere. Publication will be nice when it comes, but it won't make you rich or perfect or erudite. It will make you lovely new friends in unexpected places, but you can make friends now. I suggest you make art, and offer it as a gift.

Write a play for your church. Write a story to read to the children. Write anything for anyone, and get your work out into the world. Just be sure to first follow's Bonnie's advice, and make your best work better.

There are important matters at stake.

I recently ordered a new book by Gregory Wolfe, publisher and editor of Image Journal. Its title is, "Beauty Will Save the World." (Just the sort of title to make me don my beads and sandles and cry out for "truth, beauty, freedom and love!"*)

The reason I want to read this book - besides its title - is that its description hits on the sorts of things that keep me up nights:

We live in a politicized time. Culture wars and increasingly partisan conflicts have reduced public discourse to shouting matches between ideologues. But rather than merely bemoaning the vulgarity and sloganeering of this era, says acclaimed author and editor Gregory Wolfe, we should seek to enrich the language of civil discourse. And the best way to do that, Wolfe believes, is to draw nourishment from the deepest sources of culture: art and religious faith.

Impatient for the book to arrive, today I tracked down an interview in ISI Books, in which Wolfe reveals more of his thinking. He refers to a book that sparked his imagination: "Four Cultures of the West," by John W. O'Malley. As he explains it, O'Malley's book lays out four "languages" we speak as westerners. (I had to read the paragraph a few times to understand, so I'm paraphrasing for you here, but please do read the whole interview.):

• The religious
• The academic
• The literary arts
• The visual arts

Wolfe goes on:

The first two—the religious and academic cultures—are extremely powerful but they tend toward abstraction and ideology unless they are balanced by the second two—the literary and visual arts—which clothe ideas with concrete metaphors and lived experience.

Do you see what he's saying here? It is your work as an artist to put flesh and bone to the abstractions with which we struggle, day to day, thus making the struggle more human, more eye to eye than fist to fist.

The interviewer asks:

You’ve been a critic of the “culture wars.” Why?

To which Wolfe replies:

Because in the end they have become more about each side preaching to its own choir than a real political struggle over real issues. Cultural change occurs not because of the arguments we win but because the stories we tell are more compelling, more human than those told by others.

Could you tell a more compelling, more human story? Could you try with all your heart and soul?

If so, then what you do is too important to let a little rejection still your voice.

Make beauty. Give it as a gift.

*Moulin Rouge