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The Unseen

It wouldn’t surprise you, would it, if I told you my two sons were exceptional? Even if you disagreed – if you’d met them and hadn’t found them special at all, you would at least concede that I would of course think they were, because I am their mom.

You wouldn’t disagree, though.

If you met them, you would find them handsome, kind, bright, creative and engaging. Really. That’s what I always hear from people who go out of their way to tell me. They truly are remarkable.

But what if I said that when I see them, I feel the light that emanates from their souls, I honestly see halos around their heads, I practically hear the angels sing? Well, you might believe me the way Scully believed Mulder ( “I’m sure you thought you saw… “), but you wouldn’t see the halos, and you wouldn’t hear the angels.*

Madeleine L’engle held that we are made like onions, with all the ages we have ever been still layered inside. The infant still lives, as does the two year old, the ten-year-old, the teenager. I believe this is true.

So the reason, I think, that I see these young men so clearly is that I have witnessed the formation of all those layers. Few others — their father does, and my eldest’s mother (I’m his step-mom) — understand the things I know because I was there.

I believe that when, as the Bible predicts, the lion will lie down with the lamb, then at that moment we will all see more clearly past our noses into the souls of each other. We will see one another the way I see my boys and be astonished that we ever passed a human on the street without looking up.

Because we will see what was formerly unseen.

Trust me — this all has to do with books.

Over at Novel Matters, we are having a long conversation about why the novel matters, and I believe the answer is connected to all I’ve just said.

The following video is an excellent interview with Eugene Peterson conducted in 2007 at Point Loma Nazarene University. Toward the end of the video (you can drag the slider to 26:11 if you’re in a hurry), he says something I like:

“Imagination is almost, not quite, the same thing as faith. It connects what we see with what we don’t see, and pulls us through what we see to what we don’t see. ”



When an author writes a novel, she must know her characters, layer by layer. She uses her imagination to blend what she knows of her own story with what she knows of the stories of others — some of them people she knows very well.

When you read a book, you use your imagination to flesh out the story the author has given. She has written down the words, but you supply the pictures. You bring to the page what you know of yourself and those you love.

And somehow, when this collaboration works at its best, the result is that you look at the stranger on the street with new eyes. You glimpse the light between the layers. You hear music.









*Their wives might, or if not yet, I think they will. You should meet the man I’ve come to know these past 29+ years. Light and angel songs.

The Circumference of Hard Times

Today's Summer Re-run is from a guest post elsewhere. Written a couple of years ago, but more true now than ever.


I approach today’s post with an assumption about you: that some time in the past month – or week – you've felt a wobble in the wheels of your wagon of life. One more setback, one more bill, a single word more of bad news, and your wagon might collapse altogether.

I feel safe in my assumptions. I know so few people who haven’t commented that surely the present trial couldn’t last much longer. The five ladies I blog with certainly understand the feeling. When we first banded together – most of us strangers to each other, all of us newly published authors with big plans and high hopes – we thought our purpose as co-bloggers would be to encourage our readers and hoist each other to ever higher levels of publishing success.

We found out different. Even as our shared relationship flowered into a rare and special kind of friendship, we discovered that our purpose was in fact to help each other survive the coming wave of hardship. Maybe this is a case of “you had to be there,” but I cherish our lifeboat friendship much more than the hand-up-the-ladder kind. Or – to say it better, I hope: the surviving is more precious to me than success.

There is something lovely about falling into the hole you hoped to stay out of. Once you’re in there, you can walk its circumference, and feel the cool clay of the wall, and realize that you can settle in for as long as you must, and you’ll still be alright. The fear you might once have had of not being able to take it begins to show itself as the lie it was.

Even in the hole, you have friends. You learn, in whatever state you find yourself, to be content.

My prayer for you is that you will find the kinds of friendships that  make surviving a beautiful thing. In that hope, I offer a few suggestions:

Choose people with a capacity for affection and optimism, generosity and humor.

Love them well.

Cheer them on when the news is good, sympathize when it’s not. Be lavish about this.

Stay in close touch, close enough to feel the pulse. We ladies at Novel Matters live far apart, but we email each other every day. We may not know how to pull each other from the hole, but we sing to each other till the wind picks up.

You know the wind, right? Ever hear the Ojibwe saying?

“Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind  is bearing me across the sky.”

Summertime Reruns: The Joy Of a Slow Read

Maybe you have memories like mine, of waking to the delicious sound of voices at the kitchen table.

When I was a child my grandparents would come to visit, often at this time of year, and often arriving at night while I slept. They were retired, and always seemed schedule-less, beyond the basic schedules of grooming, coffee, meals and naps. Their days were all sabbaths, or so it seemed.

My mother would take time off from work when they came, so their gentle rhythms would, for a time, become our rhythms. When I woke, the voices coming from the kitchen were thoughtful and unhurried, filtered through chuckles and quiet pauses. I don't remember exactly what they talked about, but it seems like the topics ran more to the conceptual than the pragmatic. Politics, yes, but in broader terms. My sister and me, naturally, but about the sorts of people we were growing to be.

When we visited them it was the same, but at night, we would join them in the unfenced area between their house and those of two neighbors. We'd all set our lawn chairs under the clothes line, look up at the stars, and talk. My great uncle, who read a lot (I am getting around to talking about books), showed me constellations, and told me which stars were really planets, how unfathomably distant they all were. Curiosity and attention were my childhood luxuries, but in these slow moments, they became the order of the day.

I'm about a third into a book titled The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey. It recounts her observations of a common snail that lived in a terrarium beside her bed during her year-long convalescence following a mysterious illness.

It's not a page turner, not in the sense we usually mean. There are no heart-stopping moments, no smoking guns.

It is wondrously compelling. Reading it feels like listening to voices at the kitchen table, looking at stars with my great uncle who read a lot. Forced by an illness into an abundance of unstructured time, Bailey received a message to pass on to us, that each moment, each detail, the tiniest creature is fascinating if we take the time to look. I treasure books that remind me that time exists, and that there is enough of it to allow for curiosity and attention.

"Every few days I watered the violets from my drinking glass, and the excess water seeped into the dish beneath. This always woke the snail. It would glide to the rim of the pot and look over, slowly waving its tentacles in apparent delight, before making its way down to the dish for a drink. Sometimes it started back up, only to stop at a halfway point and go to sleep. Waking periodically, and without moving from its position, it would stretch its neck all the way down to the water and take a long drink."

Annie Dillard writes books like that. Her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is all the permission you will ever need to lavish time on each microbe of creation.

"It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God “set bars and doors” and said, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?"

There are other books that do the same. I pulled Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift From the Sea from my grandmother's bookshelf when I was twelve. A bit young, perhaps, to begin thinking what sort of adult one wants to become, but I began to think of it then.

"I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact—to borrow from the language of the saints—to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible."

You may have noted that all these books are memoirs, not fiction, and for good reason. Fiction doesn't lend itself to leisurely exploration. Novels need things like conflict, suspense, and tension. Most readers, I'm told, skip over novels that are described as "meditative," or "contemplative." We want our stories to pull us through on a cord of anxiety. Yikes! Oh no! What will the character do now?

The only novel I know of that has managed to finesse the narrative arc in a voice straight out of those lawn chairs under the stars is Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. It's the reason I consider this the most perfect novel I've ever read, because its author understands so well:

"This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it." 

Now please tell us about the books that have inspired you to pay attention. Extra points if that book is a novel.

We love to read what you have to say.

Summertime Reruns: Swatting the Monkey

Once upon a time, Bonnie and I discussed in conversation certain changes she was making to the manuscript of her not-yet published novel, Fish.  I begged, “please, don’t change your protagonist.”

“What do you like about her?” Bonnie asked.

I explained that I like those times when I strongly suspect the character is clinically insane, but also suspect, just as strongly, that she may be God, himself. Something she says or does suggests a kind of wild love, and a profound knowing that gives me shivers.

Bonnie observed, “You like thin places.”

And I thought , “Of course. Don’t we all?”

Don’t you?

You know what thin places are, right? The ancient Celts used the term to describe places that were both one thing and another, and neither. The slope between the plane and the mountain is not mountain or plane,  and it is both. The shore between the land and the sea. The age between childhood and adulthood.  It was thought that these locations and times were holy places, where the veil between the physical and the spiritual was so thin, you could touch hand to hand with God through the cloth.  I’ve always wanted to touch hand to hand.

And after talking to Bonnie, it came to me that yes, this was exactly why I read.  The books I love are full of thin places, and the ones I don’t love… well, they aren’t.

There’s a book on my shelf, Christian Mythmakers by Roland Hein, that puts a name to this kind of writing. The name - you may have guessed – is “Myth,” and the definition Hein gives to myths is “stories which confront us with something transcendent and eternal.” Thin places, those stories that offer, as J.R.R. Tolkien said in On Fairy Stories, “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the Walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

Joy poignant as grief. Couldn’t you spend a week thinking on that one?

One definition my dictionary gives for the word, “poignant” is “Keenly distressing to the mind or feelings.” I’ll admit, it’s the second definition, the first being simply, “arousing affect,” with little or no negative implications. But the kind of stories I like arouse a kind of joy that is heart-breakingly close to grief. I think that’s why I like the faith aspects of novels to stray into the unexpected. We expect God to peek out through the eyes of Father Flanagan. But when he reaches through the hands of the mentally ill, he touches me in the places of my own neuroses. When he descends on a cloud, that’s impressive, but when he calls through the voice of a broken minister (see Leaving Ruin, by Jeff Berryman), my own broken shards  become puzzle pieces, with at least a hope of wholeness.

It’s why crazyness and brokenness are so vital to a story. As GK Chesterton put it, “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

We are all children in the inner layers, and we all have our dragons.

I think of a favorite scene in Pirates of the Caribbean, (the first one). Do you remember? A moonlit night, and Elizabeth (Keira Knightly) climbs a rope ladder to board The Black Pearl, even though the ship is overrun with cursed pirates that look like rotting corpses. Just when things are really tense, Jack the monkey confronts her full on, looking like the picture here. You can see what a terrible moment it is. But then it dawns on Elizabeth that this is just a monkey, after all. She gives the creature a look that says as much, swats at him, and he ducks his head and skulks away.

The new testament tells us of a devil defanged, defeated already, no matter what he tries. Oh Hell, where is your victory? Resist him and he will flee from you.

It’s like the story about Martin Luther – which may or may not have happened:  Luther awakes to find the devil himself seated on the end of his bed. He springs upright, prepared to scramble, till he takes a good look and says, “Oh, it’s only you,” and goes back to sleep.

What a story that is! Even if it isn't factual, it's true.

Just as thin places are true. We touch our hand to the veil, and another touches back.

What books are thin places for you? What about the story places your hand on the veil?

Do tell. We love to read what you have to say.

Holden Caulfield Leads the Way

On Monday, Anne Rice suggested we "go where the pain is," in our writing.

Are you like me? Did you lift your head from your nail-painting/paper-clip-sorting/whatever-it-is-you-do-in-a YouTube-watching-moment and ask:

 "What pain?" I know, for some of you the pain is big and immediate and sits right there on top, and you may or may not be ready to write about it yet.

But others of us may have submerged a few things, so we can get through the day. But what if now, for the sake of writing in a voice that's yours alone, you want to dig them up? Where do you look?

 

I have some thoughts. 

I recently read Catcher In the Rye, because I wanted to watch Salinger, the film Bonnie talked about a few weeks back. It just seemed right to read his book before I watched the film.

It's a good book, and very subtle, and strangely transparent in it's subtleties. Salinger was a master at telling it slant. The plot takes form between the lines. The main character, Holden Caulfield, repeats certain phrases like nervous ticks, and each time he says them, each instance, is like a little signpost. The signs may not be in a language you understand, not at first.

But soon enough you get that they mean something, and you start to pay attention, and they start to tell you what you need to know about Holden Caulfield. 

Phrases like, "I can't stand it," "I hate it," "Boy, do I hate it." 

Phrases like, "If you want to know the truth," "It really does," "I really do." 

Here's how this connects to finding your pain:

Next time you sit down to write, play with those phrases. Start with "I can't stand it when..." and finish the sentence as many times and as many ways as you like.

Play with the others. What is it you hate, boy do you hate? Your reader does want to know the truth. What comes before "I really do," or "It really does," for you? 

Make up a good character, and let your answers shape him.

Then, read the following paragraph: 

"I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

Now ask your character what he sees, what she would really like to be, crazy or not. 

Oh, and one last thing, for no other reason than I want you to notice: Read the last paragraph of Catcher In the Rye, and ask yourself:

What's it means to miss someone?

Creative Reading

This morning I walked with a friend who had recently reminisced with two brothers - one older and one younger - about a small lakeside amusement park they visited when they were young.

The older brother remembered a large barrel of snakes on display.

The younger one remembered the bathroom doors labled "inboard" and "outboard," and the shop-keeper's crass suggestion that he look in his pants to determine which to take.

Two vivid, but different memories, and my friend didn't remember the park at all.

Your mother, your teacher, and Dr. Seuss all told the truth: "There is no one alive who is Youer than You." You have spent your life seeing places no one else saw, and reading books no one else read.

I recently read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. It was a heart-rendingly beautiful story about a broken man in a broken marriage who walked his way back to his past, to himself, and to the woman he loved. The novel got high ratings from most readers - but not from all. One wrote that the story was "tedious," and the word, "insipid" came up in another review. How could a story I found so riveting, be tedious to anyone?

Some of the complaints centered on the subject matter of crushing family loss, and I understood that. A dear friend once told me she could not and would never finish reading my book because the subject matter hit too raw a nerve. Books will do that, and I am inclined to protect some readers even from my own stories.

But where the detractors found The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry "too sad," I found it reassuring and uplifting, because I am interested in what comes after the sadness.

The words on the page form half a conversation, but we each provide the other half, and a different half each time.

What conversations have you had with books you have loved - or hated? And how have they differed from those of other readers?

Stories We Tell Ourselves When We Sleep

Novels matter because...

"Telling stories is how we think." 
(I've said that.)

or

"Stories teach us empathy." 
(I've said that too.)

or

"Stories help us feel again."
(I've heard that.)

or

"To relieve stress."
(Are you kidding? Did you know MRI images have shown that the brain stresses much the same when it watches a story as it would if the events in the story were really happening? So if you want to use fiction to relieve stress, maybe you should pick a really boring story.)

or

Whatever you tell yourself. Fill in the blank.

But why bother? I know I'm not the only one who feels the need to justify the hours I spend reading novels. Or writing them. But why?

Maybe "Just because" is the only answer we have to the question of why fiction matters. Jonathan Gottschall says, "We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories."

All along, you thought your mind was relieving stress by processing subconsciousStories  anxieties, when in reality it was just playing with its toes, weaving characters into situations to see what would happen next.

I'll bet you've got a couple of dreams in mind already, times when you've awakened thinking, what a ride that was!

Care to tell us?

I'll start:

Some years ago, I dreamt that I was in a huge castle court, with tall white marble walls, and white marble pillars holding up a white ceiling somewhere high above. The court was filled with people formally dressed as you would expect in a castle. God was in an office off the hall, fat with a beard, clearly troubled about something, his desk piled with papers. And Satan was a strange little man, running around telling everyone "You'd be perfect" at this thing, and "perfect" at that. 

Then suddenly, God ran out of his office, and squatted down to rifle through a basket of papers on the floor. 

And he said, "Genesis! Where is my Genesis!" 

Here's another:

A couple years ago I dreamt I was walking through a seaside village where everything was painted black and white. (White doesn't figure into all my dreams, but it did in this one, too.) 

A white van roared up the street, and skidded to a stop beside a man walking on the sidewalk. A bunch of men piled out of the van and assaulted the fellow, forcing him into the van. 

The van sped away, only to stop at a white travel trailer down the road. The men forced their victim out of the van and into the trailer. At the last moment, I caught a glimpse of his face and realized: he was Jesus! 

Something clearly had to be done. I ran to the trailer and opened the door. The bad guys were all clustered around the table to my right, too busy hatching evil plans to notice me. Jesus sat on the bed at the other end of the trailer, hands tied, head sagging, face covered by his long hair.  

I sat next to him to untie his hands. "Jesus," I whispered. "We have to get you out of here."  

At which point he lifted his head to reveal a radiant, loving smile, as if to say, "Really? I need to be rescued by you?"

It's strange to realize how many of my dreams are CBA material. Even stranger to know that any reader who makes a study of dream interpretation now knows more about me than I might knowingly disclose.

But I dove in. Now how about you? What stories have your minds woven while you slept?

I'd love to read what you have to say.

I Like Stories With Bad Words

"Two other problems he had: He would crow the morning in the middle of the night. His clock was off, and that sent his animals into a scurvy confusion. The hundred Hens would flock outside, prepared to work, and find that only the moon was there to shine on them. Back inside they would flock again, mumbling, clucking, shoving, and bitching a nasty bitch."

That is just good writing. And that is Walter Wangerin Jr., in his fantastic novel, The Book of the Dun Cow.

Page 25.

Remember, Debbie said "gratuitous." In the last post, she said, "Gratuitous sex, violence and foul language cheapen storytelling and don't have a place in Christian fiction."

Look up "gratuitous," and you will find that it means, "not necessary or appropriate, not called for by the circumstances." So I would add that gratuitous swooning, panicking or ruminating, gratuitous regretting or sorrowing, and gratuitous falling on your knees in remorse and surrender are all out as well. In all fiction, Christian or otherwise, nothing should ever be unnecessary, nothing should ever be gratuitous.

But sometimes it is not gratuitous, in fact it is the most necessary thing of all to say that the hens were not complaining or griping, they were not grouchy or testy, but that they were in fact "bitching a nasty bitch."

A line like that will, however, keep you out of the CBA.

But it didn't keep Wangerin from writing a Christ-saturated story. And I've never seen him use another such word in anything else he has written. I'd guess that it's not his habit, any more than it is mine, to offend others with his language. He might wonder from time to time why it is so offensive to compare a person to a protective mother dog. I do, don't you?

Or why you can say poo, and you can almost say cr*p, but you can never say s***.

I completely understand, however, why a word that technically means to make love almost always sounds more like rape when it is said in anger.

That was part of what made it hard for me to read "Let the Great World Spin," by Colum McCann. The first part, about the main character, Corrigan was luminous, but the rest of the book was angry and hellish and sad, and when you get toward the end, when Tillie Henderson jokes that she is a f***-up, and then admits that she is a f***-up, and then weeps that she is a f***-up, you forget about her words and hear her meaning, and it hits you hard in the middle.

 And you realize that a life like Corrigan's is the only ray of light she has.

And that's not gratuitous at all.

Out Of the Garden, Part 9

Read the story from the beginning here. 

Part 9 by Kathleen Popa

I shoved the shoe box under the bed, and hurried out, grabbing a tissue from the box on the dresser and shutting the bedroom door firmly behind me.

"My new shoes," I said. "The green  pumps. I meant to wear them, but the heel is broken. I'll have to take them back."

"Pumps?" Margaret seemed ready to take my temperature. "Are you going somewhere?"

"Granny? New shoes?” Bree seemed impressed. “Can I see?"

"No! No no no." I said it at least one time too many, because of course I hadn't bought new shoes. "I wanted to run out for a few things, some dessert, some artificial sweetener."

Margaret frowned, so I kept going. "Of course, there's no need to dress up to go to the store. Not at my age."

"When did you ever?" Margaret mumbled, and her eyes met Bree's.

"Why don't we all go?" I asked.

"I'll stay here,” said Bree. “Settle in." For just a moment, her eyes wandered toward my closed bedroom door.

I wished for a lock on the bedroom door. "Come along," I coaxed, "and pick out the ice cream." When I returned, I could find a better place to hide The Her.

But when we walked back through the front door, we found Peta and Klaus sitting so stiffly in the living room, she in the chair and he on the couch, their smiles so tight, that I keenly sensed that they had halted a conversation mid-sentence when they heard the car in the drive. The tension between them was so palpable, I hesitated to enter the room.

Margaret slipped in around me. “’Scuse, Mom. Don’t want the ice cream to…” she began, but then, she stopped.

“What is it?” she asked.

Peta glanced at me, then at Klaus, and then she chuckled. A pair of diaphanous wings popped out from behind Peta. Just like the Her's, only much, much larger.

Tell Me a Story

Whenever I tell people what I'm about to tell you, it feels like I've opened the closet door, and the skeleton has clattered to my feet. I hope you'll think only a little less of me when I confess: I listen to audiobooks.

In my English-major days, I never dreamt of it. That would be like skipping the book and watching the movie. Or like reading the Cliffs Notes for Moby Dick.

Only wait - I did read the Cliffs Notes for Moby Dick. I did it because I was cornered: I had five literature classes, and was assigned to read a novel a week for each one. If you know anything about my reading style, you know I might better have majored in Physics, because I was more likely to discover Cold Fusion than to read five novels in a week. Ever.

It was a similar desperation that drove me to audiobooks.

I was a young mom, with a home-based night job that kept me entering data long into the next morning, and then left me cross-eyed the following day. With a toddler. And no time to read.

A story-deprived life is no life at all.  And besides, something had to keep me awake so I could enter the data. For a while, it was a whacked out radio announcer named Art Bell, who interviewed UFO abductees and werewolves. But even Art Bell went to bed before I did.

Enter Blackstone Audio. In those days, you could go to their website and stream their books - for free, sometimes - over the internet, and they had authors like John Gresham and Maeve Binchy, and those two can keep you awake for hours. Free books, and they helped me stay up and make money. People have gotten hooked on cigarettes for less reason.

I eventually quit the job, but by then, my relationship with audiobooks was established. I found I could exercise and take in a Ray Bradbury story. I could clean house and hear what Malcolm Gladwell had to say.

I could light a candle, lower the lights, lay back in a warm bubblebath, and close my eyes while someone with a wonderful voice read me an absolutely delicious story.

Can you tell? I love that best of all.

Now that my life is busier than it ever has been, I need my audiobooks more than ever. Otherwise I'd starve on only the few minutes in bed I'm awake before I drift off to an exhausted sleep. In effect, I'd practically give up reading altogether. And a story-deprived life is no life at all.

Now Amazon has a nice little thing they call Whispersync, which allows me to read for those few minutes before I fall asleep, picking up right where the audiobook last left off, and then starting the audiobook in the morning right where I stopped reading.

But it's more than mere necessity, this vice of mine.

I'll tell you a secret: Some readers perform the character's voices in ways that make stories even more delicious. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss is like that. So is The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Or The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow by Rita Leganski.

How about you? Do you listen to audiobooks? Got any favorites, any with wonderful voices?

Please do tell. I'd love to find another story for my candlelit bubblebath times.

Delicious

I hadn't yet published a novel when Jan Karon first shared her Mitford character's recipes - in magazines, long before her Cookbook and Kitchen Reader came out - but I knew enough then to to be astonished that she found the time to write both novels and recipes.

And - being a less enthusiastic cook then than I am now - I didn't see the point.

What changed my view was Laura Esquibel's Like Water For Chocolate, in which every chapter begins with a recipe, and each recipe becomes a character in the story. Esquibel made me see that there are many ways to tell a story, that there are strange and marvelous paths being forged all the time, and one of the paths into story is food. She awakened for me a wanderlust for new narrative techniques, and also, I think, an appetite for creative cooking.

And that made me just a little less apprehensive when The Feast of Saint Bertie's publisher suggested I let them print India's recipe for the cinnamon rolls whose aroma wound it's way between the words of my book.

So here's a delicious idea: I'll print here India's recipe, and ask you to share a favorite recipe you found in a novel.

So here it is:

INDIA'S CINNAMON ROLLS
Note from India: It's up to me to keep the author honest. When Kathleen tried this recipe, I shamed her into using free-range eggs-just look up how they treat the chickens that lay the eggs you eat in the morning and ask yourself if any of God's creatures deserve such cruelty. But Kathleen wrote "organic" all over the place just so I'd shut up. Still, it's true, you can even find organic shortening if you look for it, and it's better for you. I make cinnamon rolls with organic white flour to keep my customers happy, but it wouldn't hurt you to make them whole wheat. Kathleen did, and even she admits they were delicious.
Grease enough muffin pans to hold twelve cinnamon rolls.
1/2 cup hormone-free milk
1/2 pkg. yeast
3T organic shortening
1T organic butter
1/3 c organic sugar
1/2 t salt
1 free-range egg yolk, beaten
1 1/2 c sifted whole wheat flour, or, alternately, white flour
melted organic butter
1/4 c organic brown sugar, packed
2 t cinnamon
1/3 c organic raisins
1/3 c organic walnuts
Syrup:
1/2 c organic corn syrup
1/2 c organic brown sugar, firmly packed
1/8 c butter

Heat the milk to boiling, and allow to cool till it's just warm. Sprinkle yeast over top. Cream shortening plus 1 tablespoon of the butter; stir in 1/3 cup sugar and 1/z teaspoon salt. Beat together till light and fluffy. Add the egg yolk, the yeast/milk mixture and enough flour to make a soft dough. Knead on a lightly floured board. Roll the dough into a square about 1/4 inch thick. Brush the square with butter. Mix together the 1/4 cup of brown sugar and the cinnamon. Sprinkle the square of dough with this mixture, plus the raisins and walnuts. Roll the square of dough up like you're rolling a rug. Cut the roll into 12 slices.
Make the syrup by heating in a small pan 1/2 cup of corn syrup, 1/2 cup of brown sugar, and 1/8 cup of butter, till all are melted together. Pour a little of this mixture into each cup of your muffin pans. Place the slices in the muffin pans. Cover and let sit for an hour, or if you used white flour, till the dough rises to twice its size. Bake in a hot oven at 400 degrees for 12-15 minutes. Remove from oven, flip over the pans, and loosen the rolls. Then while the rolls are still upside down, lay the pan back over the tops of them, so the syrup will ooze into the rolls.

Now you go. I can't wait to taste what you have to cook.

Stillness

Oh crap. This morning's topic, the one I woke up with, was stillness: how to incorporate it into my over-committed life. How to stretch my morning prayer,  find the quiet inside it, wrap it up and carry it into my day.  How to hone my focus to the one thing I must do in the moment, and not on the task list which has grown long enough to strangle me. The still point at the center of the maelstrom.

Such a lovely notion it was, and so into it I was, that it crossed my mind to take notes, write down my lovely thoughts about a lovely notion.

Then, just as I was about to write those thoughts, a message from Patti appeared on my screen: "No post today! Katy, are you up?"

Crap. I'd forgotten it was my turn.

So I guess I'll let you in on those lovely notes I was about to take. You know, the ones about being still, calm, in control. Of my overcommitted life.

It's a new situation for me. The work I do, at a resource center where we create events and workshops to support families, where people drop in with their overstressed lives, and we help them find solutions, has taught me so much, and given me connections with so many great people, that I see the way forward to change things. Other things in the community that need changing. Heady stuff. So I say yes. And then, yes. Then again, yes.

That's part of it, anyway. Add to that family commitments and commitments made before life got so busy,  and the task list wraps around and around and starts to squeeze.

So my thoughts of the morning:

The task list must be tamed. I can't do 47 things in one day. I have to decide what things won't get done, before messages start to appear informing me, for instance, of a forgotten blog post.

Some tasks must be dropped or postponed.

No matter how many things are on my task list, I can only do one at a time. So at any given moment, that one thing is all I need concern myself about.

There must be empty space on the schedule. Sometimes the one thing is to clear the mess, stretch the tense muscles, read, drift, stop.

The morning must start with prayer. And not the laundry list kind of prayer so much as the listening kind. I am not always right about what must be done. The universe was created, and is sustained by Love itself. There is a bigger picture that I don't see, that is untouched by my accomplishments, unfazed by my failures. I have this moment, and He is in it.

Better Together

I have never been part of a reading group - not yet. I suspect it would feel like the best moments of a college literature course -  the intense discussions, the never before thought of ideas -  only with couches and coffee, and wonderful friends. Some of you reading this have had the experience. So tell me: Would it be like that?

CS Lewis described something like it in his first acquaintance with his childhood friend, Arthur Greeves:

I found Arthur sitting up in bed. On the table beside him lay a copy of Myths Of the Norsemen.
"Do you like that?" said I.
"Do you like that?" said he.
Next moment the book was in our hands, our heads were bent close together, we were pointing,  quoting,  talking - soon almost shouting - discovering in a torrent of questions that we liked not only the same thing, but parts of it in the same way.

Maybe being in a reading group would feel like that. Or like the moment I discovered that Bonnie too had read Let the Great World Spin. Like me, she had found it to be a remarkably redemptive novel despite the odd thing author Collum McCann had done in showing us one luminous,  unforgettable character for the first small bit of the story, then taking him away and for the rest of the book, dragging us through a world that bore some resemblance to our own, and a striking resemblance to hell. The thing McCann did was to show us the ripples one luminous life made in a hellish world. And Bonnie saw it.

I imagine a good reading group could change the world , don't you?

Lewis seemed to think so. In The Four Loves, he describes a friendship like the one he enjoyed with Arthur Greeves, that begins with "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." He continues:

But as long as each of these percipient persons dies without finding a kindred soul, nothing (I suspect) will come of it; art or sport or spiritual religion will not be born. It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings, or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision...

And the world changes.

It makes me wonder who Martin Luther King Jr spoke to after he read the life story of Gandhi. Did some friend see what he saw in that book? Would life be the same if King had not found that friend?

Have any of you taken part in a reading group or are you in one now? Does it make a difference?

Please do share.

Losing Our Way

I think I'll reel for a long time after what Latayne wrote on Monday: that reading a novel can leave a "shadow" in the brain that is detectable in neural scans. She's right: We did suspect all along, but to learn that the effect has been spotted by researchers! If they'd photographed angels, I'd feel hardly less wonder.

Did you ask yourself, reading this revelation, if that shadow on the brain created any noticeable effect on the reader's daily life? It turns out, there is an effect, and researchers David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano have noticed: People who read a certain kind of book - the kind we tend to like best here at Novel Matters - exhibit heightened powers of empathy, the ability to enter into another person's experience and emotion - not to feel for them, but with them.



But not just any book delivers the potion. You won't find it in non-fiction (surprised?) and you won't find it in every kind of fiction, either. David Comer Kidd observed, "Some writing is what you call 'writerly', you fill in the gaps and participate, and some is 'readerly', and you're entertained. We tend to see 'readerly' more in genre fiction like adventure, romance and thrillers, where the author dictates your experience as a reader. Literary* [writerly] fiction lets you go into a new environment and you have to find your own way."

It makes sense, doesn't it? A relationship with a character that forces you to "find your way" would make good practice for a real human relationship that demands the same. Another researcher, Philip Davies, took it a bit further: "The thing about novels is that they give you a view of an inner world that's not on show. Often what you learn from novels is to be a bit baffled."

None of which will simplify your life. But that may not be the point.

I'll bet you've read some books that have led you into the woods a bit - in a good way. Got any experiences to share? Please do tell. We always love to read what you have to say. 

*See that? He used the "L" word. 

Writing About Emotions... or Why You Have to Go Through Stuff

Blessed is the writer who has lived through some stuff. And the more stuff - the more milk spilt, hopes dashed and hearts broken, the more battles fought and won or lost (no matter), the better.

Everything is material. What else would you write about?

Someone once said (and if you know who it was please do tell) that a writer should not write that it started to rain, but should instead give the reader the sensation of getting wet.

Because of course, you tell stories not to relay facts (not even fictional facts) but to arouse sensation. Your reader picks up your book hoping to feel something. Don't disappoint her.

When it rains, let her feel her hair slick against the back of her neck, chilled to ice by every gust of January wind across the pond she just climbed out from.

Better yet, let her fear that no one will hear her call for help, no one will come to rescue.

Just never say that she is afraid.

Frighten her.

You are a writer. You have ways to do this.

Into the Skin and Into the Water

You realize, of course that every character you have ever written, or ever will, is you. Even the one modeled after someone you know is you, because that someone you know is interpreted by your assumptions and biases, and those are formed by your experience.

This is an advantage. You understand abandonment, and mind-numbing grief, and anger, and fear.

Want to know what your character does with her fear? Close your eyes. Find the experiences that inform your writing of her, and climb through them beneath her skin. What do you feel?

Fall into the pond with her, and climb back out onto the sheet of ice that cracked beneath your feet. Call for help, and listen to the rustling of the cedar branches and the call of a crow strutting along the bank. Try to stop your teeth from chattering so you can call louder. What does your body do now? Does it arch its back to give the call a greater force? Does your voice squeak at the end because your throat has constricted? Does your chest shudder from some sick feeling  beneath your ribs? Try calling once more. A little louder.

Do you hear anything?

No?

Never Say Never Say Never. 

The climb into your character to observe sensation and movement is a powerful tool to help you write about emotions, but it is not the only tool. Sometimes a well-placed reversal can leave your reader questioning why a character would do something he thought she would never do, and the answer he comes up with can be powerful.

Your character swore, all through the novel that (one) she hated Mr. Mandex next door who backed his truck over her dog two years ago, and (two) she would never enter the forest for any reason, not since she was lost there for three days when she was a child.

So on page 214, when your character stands on her front step still holding the note and the silk scarf he handed her just before he got into a car with his children to drive to the home of his daughter where he would live out the rest of his shortened life...

And on page 215, when a gust of January wind lifts the scarf from your character's hands and flicks it end over tassel across the fallow field into the forest... When she hesitates a long moment before charging across the field, pauses a moment more, and then follows the silk scarf into the forest...

You don't have to say much. The reader understands something important, whether she knows what the note says or not.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

I cut my Christian baby teeth on new-believer Bible studies that promised, "Jesus loves you, and has a wonderful plan for your life."

It's more than possible someone mentioned that Jesus' plan was not my plan, and I just didn't hear them. But something about a promise so grand turned a faith that had begun in yearning and wonder into visions of doors opening in all the right places, obstacles overturning, mountains leaping into the sea at my command to make way for my wonderful life. It did great things for my evangelistic fervor, at least for a while. Who wouldn't sign up for a program like that?

It turned out a lot of people wouldn't. And I think now perhaps they were right not to. 

It's been a long journey back to the yearning and wonder, but - with a nod to T. S. Elliot - the end of all my exploring has been to arrive where I started and know the place for the first time.

(Though such talk of ending and arriving is really too serious and too final.)

This despite the fact that - Jesus' promise notwithstanding - mountains don't actually leap at my command. They explode sometimes without my permission, but that's generally a bad thing.

Did they tell me in that Bible study that Jesus speaks figuratively sometimes? I can't remember. 

Sometimes I have knocked, and the doors have opened. Sometimes I have asked and received. In every instance whether I liked his answer or I didn't, God's plan was  better than mine, but it took years, long years to find that out. 

Most of the things I have sought I have found, but sometimes the finding takes long ages of time, and for some things... I'm still seeking. 

All this to explain:

Christian books can scare me sometimes. Even - especially my own. It's too easy to hand out a cheap promise, with Bible verses to match.

No, there is no yellow brick road, not here, in this life. The streets of gold come later, but here, we have the faith of martyrs who say "though He slay me, yet will I trust him." The surprise is what joy there is in a faith like that.  

This is why, If I am to be described as a Christian novelist, I must take care what kind of Christian novel I write. I don't want to lead my readers so far away from the place where they started. And I don't want to leave it again, myself. 

That Awkward Moment

Maybe it's been a long day.

Or maybe it's because it's Halloween, and strange people walk my sidewalks, and I hear a loud, throaty "Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!" from somebody's "haunted house" down the street.

But all I can think of tonight is the little mini-graphic I found on Facebook this morning, and the story it told:

Never mind that these look like my cats, glowing eyes and all. Never mind that the walls are painted glow-in-the-dark green, perhaps to aid the ascent of the very, very old woman with the cane, who climbs them at night to adjust the black valance and draw the shades before retiring to bed in the room next to yours..."

But here we are, it's Friday (or will be when this posts), and I think we should have a bit of fun.

So let's add some "awkward moment" captions to our own pictures, and see if they can't tell a story of their own.

I'll start off with this one, a sequel, of sorts, to "Left Behind":

Now it's your turn. I'll supply the pictures, with numbers. You choose a picture, tell us the number, and supply the "awkward moment" caption. 

I can't wait. We all love to read what you have to say. 

1.

 2.

3. 

4. 

5. 

You Don't Know Nothing

Most Honorable Sir,

We perused your MS.
with boundless delight.  And
we hurry to swear by our ancestors
we have never read any other
that equals its mastery.
Were we to publish your work,
we could never presume again on
our public and name
to print books of a standard
not up to yours.
For we cannot imagine
that the next ten thousand years
will offer its ectype.
We must therefore refuse
your work that shines as it were in the sky
and beg you a thousand times
to pardon our fault
which impairs but our own offices.
-- Publishers
Rejection letter from a Chinese publisher; from
Louis Zukofsky's "A"

On Monday, Debbie listed a relative few out of a long list of writers who were refused by publisher after publisher, agent after agent. Here's another:

Laura Van Warner wrote her first novel while working as an assistant to Doubleday senior editors Loretta Barrett and Betty Prashker. Both editors suggested she stick to her day job and forget the writing, as she clearly had no talent.

If you haven't read Laura Van Warner, look her up on Amazon. She's doing okay.

There's a special brand of discouragement that comes along with being a writer. Literary agent Harriet Wasserman once said of her longtime client, Nobel Prize winning novelist Saul Bellow:

“For Saul, every book is his first book, and he is always the first-time writer welcoming reinforcement.” 

Few people really know themselves. We crane our necks to look inside and to our despair, we see a void. Why kid ourselves? We know nothing about writing.

But you don't know nothing.

To prove it, let me list a few things you do know, once you think about them:

1. You don't have to be a natural. Any lousy writer can get good at writing if they keep on writing long enough. Gustave Flaubert once said, "I have never been so conscious of how little talent is vouchsafed me for expressing ideas in words." Graham Greene said it more plainly: "I have no talent."
2. You do have to have a heart on fire. You have to care enough to keep going long enough to get good. 
3. You may never see a novel of yours on the New York Times Best Seller List. Then again, you might. The fact is (assuming you keep writing) you don't know, either way. 
4. It doesn't matter if you never see a novel of yours on the New York Times Best Seller List. You've had your head turned inside out and right-site round by authors few others have ever heard of. And those authors probably have a lot to do with why you dream of being an author. Like them. Obscurity's not so bad. 
5. You'll never get rich on obscurity. Like many obscure authors, you'll have to work out some mix of struggling, living simply, and finding work. If you find work, try to find something that feeds the muse. Or that leaves your mind free to plot your novel during the day and your evenings free so you can write your novel. If you can't do the above, you must find work that sets your heart on fire. 
6. You have to have a heart on fire. 
7. And above all, you must find a way to write. You know too much not to.