More than Publication: Writing as Gift

JOY ALERT!!! Life has gotten a little sweeter. We just noticed: today (and we don't know how much longer) you can download the eBook of Blue Hole Back Home by Joy Jordan Lake FOR FREE!  Here are the places you can get it: 
Amazon (For Kindle)
Barnes & Noble (For Nook)
Christianbook.com (For just about any e-reader)


We've nearly reached the end of Anne Lamott's writing-book wonder, Bird by Bird. If you haven't been reading along with us, don't be shy about jumping into the conversation. Lamott has a way of jumpstarting a good conversation on the craft of writing. And this is a very good chapter.

The chapter "Writing a Present" is all too timely for me. Lamott tells of writing the story of her father's life and death and about the last days of her friend, Pammy. Lamott is the consumate observer and recorder. In the midst of her family's interactions and a tsunami of emotions, she took copious notes on index cards. And then, she actually presented her father and Pammy with completed manuscripts of their stories before their deaths. She considered her manuscripts love letters, artifacts that would keep memories fresh and in a sense validate the people she loved.

When my mom discovered my modest talent for writing--long, long ago--she suggested I write her story. It's a dramatic story to be sure. At sixteen and the oldest of seven children, her parents took off in opposite directions. Mom dropped out of school to take care of her siblings, but the state stepped in and her siblings younger than 14 were adopted out. My mom made sure they remained a family, even when a lawyer wrote a threatening letter over a birthday card she'd sent to the youngest. You have a admire that kind of tenacity. And a woman with that kind of tenacity, produces lots and lots of material.

As a teenager, I wasn't interested in writing my mother's story. I set my eyes on more exotic tales--which never got written. And then babies were born. Houses were built and remodeled. Careers blossomed and faded and reignited. Directions changed. Life didn't leave much room for reminiscing. If I'm to be honest, I wasn't eager to write my mother's story as an adult either. She's been battling cancer for 23 years, and, well, the thought of reliving all that nearly flattened me. Besides cancer, there are questions nobody wants to ask their mother and answers she most definitely wouldn't want to articulate. So when she would say, "You should write about my life," I would smile and say, "We should do that."

I'm deeply regretting my hesitancy now. We admitted Mom into a hospice program this week, and the disease isn't waiting for a memoir to be written. This writer is steeped in regret. That doesn't mean we've given up on the idea. We're chatting into a digital recorder, and because she is so generous, she's okay with that. Ugh.

People do not have to die for your writing to be a gift. I heard a story on "This American Life," an NPR production, last week. A 13-year-old Columbian girl had been waiting for her kidnapped father to come home for eleven years. When the Columbian military finally formed a rescue mission, they found her father tied to a tree and executed. Among his belongings was a fat journal of letters to the daughter, letters that recounted his youth and his treasured memories of her. He left a piece of his heart for her, but I promised that writing as a gift doesn't have to be about death, didn't I?

Is someone you love having a birthday? Write out a shared memory. Is a friend moving to another city? Write a story set in that city. For your children, keep a journal! Write about your everyday lives but also write about memories from your own childhood.

Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else, " and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not every will be glad that you did.--Lamott

There's nothing so powerful as a good testimony. Think of Moses and the children of Israel. Lots of bondage and injustice. An evil captor. A mighty Deliverer! There's a story! But maybe your story isn't very dramatic. Maybe you asked Jesus into your heart as a child, and you've been living in a state of seamless grace ever since. That's a story! The keeping love of God is a very powerful story indeed. If you haven't written down your story of redemption, this may be the sweetest gift you ever pen, and a great place to start thinking of your writing as a present to be given in love.

How do you use your writing as a present to those you love? Was everyone glad you did? Please offer other ideas for how you use your gift to connect, love, and validate.

Yawpy Endings

In Katie’s wonderful post on Monday, she encouraged us to look for “yawp” in novels—but, more importantly, to have the courage to create yawp.

I’d like to drill down on that concept a bit. It seems to me that courageous and inventive writing has to both sustain yawp through the novel, but must also to pull together elements at the end for a final punch.

Sometimes a good novel whittles away all the rest of the plot to end with a satisfying distillation of themes in the book. I’ve used this quote before, but I love it, from Toni Morrison’s Beloved:

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.

Contrast that to the ending of The Great Gatsby. Instead of using a closeup as in Beloved, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s verbal camera pulls way back and looks at the history of the setting, zooms in on the main character of the book, and then ends with a still shot of a universal truth:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Both these novels are courageous and yawpy. What other novels can you offer which had a strong yawpy ending?

Sharing the Love

What a delightful surprise that so many people contributed to the discussion on Sally Stuart's new book, Christian Writers' Market Guide 2009.

How did we randomly choose the winner? Before writing the column, I "purposed in my heart" to choose the fourth, non-NovelMatters commenter.

And thus, it is Susan Storm Smith who will receive the book! Susan, would you please tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you plan to use the book? And then please use the "contact" function on the site to let us know a mailing address to which to send the book.

We are going into a holiday weekend where "love is in the air." I'm not a fan of romance novels -- give me either blood and guts murder mysteries, or exquisitely-written character studies.

I believe one of the most profound descriptions of love I ever read was Toni Morrison's, in Beloved:

"She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."

In trying to analyze what makes this so moving and effective, some of its qualities are elusive.  For instance, with the quote alone (which appears at the end of the book), one cannot understand the context of the identity of the speaker nor the events that led up to the statement.

On the other hand, it is universally true.  From ancient times people have known the destructive power of personal disorder. In fact, most of ancient Egyptian ritual and much of ordinary daily life for millennia focused on keeping a concept known as chaos at bay, and elevating the principle of ma'at, or order.  In the Old Testament, one of the most overt actions of God against the enemies of His people was to send His terror ahead of them, throwing the foe into confusion.

Morrison's simple, unembellished and even conversational description speaks of the power of a relationship -- indeed, of a person in a relationship -- to be able to take the condition of scatteredness in another and make order of it. While the body may be indeed as the apostle Paul described as wasting away, the mind persists. In such a gathering action of other-centered love, the enduring part of us is at least temporally saved.

What is your favorite description of love from a novel?