Category Archives: Writer and Reader

When Good Art Happens to Bad People


Gregory Wolfe, editor of the award-winning literary journal Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, has a new blog that should be on the regular reading list of anyone interested in the intersection of the arts and religion. In his article In God’s Image: Do Good People Make Good Art?, published in the magazine In Character and linked from his website, Wolfe ponders whether creativity could be considered a Christian virtue, and how this understanding of the creative process differs from the Romantic cult of genius, in which the personality of the artist becomes conflated with the work itself.

As we all know, sublime art is often made by very flawed people, and vice versa. For some religious people, this would seem to undermine art’s claim to be a spiritually significant activity. Unless aesthetics are strictly subordinated to moral concerns, artistic creativity could be a gateway to idolatry, worshipping the powers of the self unconnected to God or community. Wolfe suggests a less egocentric model of creativity, where the artist puts the good of the work above herself and sacrifices her personal agenda (including her religious agenda) to the quest for truth.


So in what sense might we say that creativity is a virtue? Oscar Wilde, a creative individual if there ever was one, and an artist with his own share of problems, framed the question with his usual wit. “The fact of a man’s being a poisoner,” he once said, “is nothing against his prose.”

If Wilde strikes you as suspect in voicing this opinion, given his own notorious troubles, how about those two paragons of reason and rectitude – Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas? They provide a philosophical basis for Wilde’s position by distinguishing between two different types of human action: making and doing. Doing involves human choices, the way we exercise our free will. In the realm of doing – or Prudence, as it has been called – the goal is the perfection of the doer. In other words, in our behavior we are seeking to perfect ourselves as moral agents.

But in making – or Art, if you will – the end is not the good of the artist as a person but the good of the made thing. The moment that art is made subservient to some ethical or political purpose, it ceases to be art and becomes propaganda. Art seems to require an inviolable freedom to seek the good of the artifact, without either overt or covert messages being forced into it. And history demonstrates that it is simply a statement of fact (to paraphrase Aquinas) that rectitude of the appetites is not a prerequisite for the ability to make beautiful objects….

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So where does this leave us? If creativity seems unequally distributed, can bring about destruction, does not intrinsically aid in the moral perfection of the creative individual, and has been tainted by the Romantic cult of genius, it doesn’t seem to warrant consideration as a virtue.

And yet there is something in most of us that accords a high measure of dignity and worth to the creative impulse. Nearly all the world’s religions are grounded in creation stories that also ennoble human beings as agents who perpetuate the divine act of creation by their own actions. In turn, each human action partakes in some measure of the supernatural powers of the creator….

The Christian poet T.S. Eliot put it this way in his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” And the paradox is that in that displacement of personality, the true self is free to make itself known. Eastern religious ideas about creativity may be said to correct a number of unhealthy tendencies in Western ideas. Too often, Western thinkers have seen creativity in terms of concepts like “productivity” or “originality,” veering dangerously close to a kind of hubris, arrogating to themselves the role of God, who is the only one who truly creates out of nothing. But in the East, creativity is intimately bound up with a struggle to discern inner truth and the growth of the self. The stress here is less on production and more on attunement and the connections we sense when we practice a contemplative openness before being.

Later in the essay, Wolfe discusses Dorothy Sayers’ aesthetic theories in her book The Mind of the Maker:


The artist makes things out of love, she says, but this does not imply some sort of jealous possession or domination over the work. Rather, the “artist never desires to subdue her work to herself but always to subdue herself to her work. The more genuinely creative she is, the more she will want her work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of herself.” For a writer this means giving the characters in the story free will, seeking their good rather than her own. It also means that as readers we can come to know, in some measure, the mind of the Maker.

The imagination works through empathy, which requires the artist to place herself in the experience of another – and thus lose herself. While the death of the self may appear to be a loss of control and individuality, the paradox of artistic creativity is that only through this openness to the good of the story and the characters who inhabit it can the maker discover meaning and order.

Read the whole essay here. Another good read from Wolfe’s website is his Religious Humanism: A Manifesto, originally published in Image #16 (Summer 1997). Here’s a man who understands why the Incarnation is so wonderful:


On the face of it, the term “religious humanism” seems to suggest a tension between two opposed terms—between heaven and earth. But it is a creative, rather than a deconstructive, tension. Perhaps the best analogy for understanding religious humanism comes from the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, which holds that Jesus was both human and divine. This paradoxical meeting of these two natures is the pattern by which we can begin to understand the many dualities we experience in life: flesh and spirit, nature and grace, God and Caesar, faith and reason, justice and mercy.

When emphasis is placed on the divine at the expense of the human (the conservative fault), Jesus becomes an ethereal authority figure who is remote from earthly life and experience. When he is thought of as merely human (the liberal error), he becomes nothing more than a superior social worker or popular guru.

The religious humanist refuses to collapse paradox in on itself. This has an important implication for how he or she approaches the world of culture. Those who make a radical opposition between faith and the world hold such a negative view of human nature that the products of culture are seen as inevitably corrupt and worthless. On the other hand, those who are eager to accommodate themselves to the dominant trends of the time baptize nearly everything, even things that may not be compatible with the dictates of the faith. But the distinctive mark of religious humanism is its willingness to adapt and transform culture, following the dictum of an early Church Father, who said that “Wherever there is truth, it is the Lord’s.” Because religious humanists believe that whatever is good, true, and beautiful is part of God’s design, they have the confidence that their faith can assimilate the works of culture. Assimilation, rather than rejection or accommodation, constitutes the heart of the religious humanist’s vision….

With all these references to paradox and ambiguity the objection might be made that I am speaking in quintessentially liberal terms, refusing to state my allegiance to the particularities of the faith. In fact, the majority of religious humanists through the centuries have been deeply orthodox, though that does not mean they don’t struggle with doubt or possess highly skeptical minds. The orthodoxy of the great religious humanists is something that liberals tend to ignore or evade; it doesn’t tally with their notion that dogma are somehow lifeless and repressive. But dogma are nothing more—or less—than restatements of the mysteries of faith. Theological systems can become calcified and unreal—they can, in short, give rise to “dogmatism”—but dogma exist to protect and enshrine mystery….

So we arrive at yet another paradox: that the religious humanist combines an intense (if occasionally anguished) attachment to orthodoxy with a profound spirit of openness to the world. This helps to explain why so many of the towering figures of religious humanism—from Gregory of Nyssa, Maimonides, Dante and Erasmus to Fyodor Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, and Flannery O’Connor—have been writers possessed of powerful imaginations. The intuitive powers of the imagination can leap beyond the sometimes leaden abstractions with which reason must work. Because the imagination is always searching to move from conflict to a higher synthesis, it is the natural ally of religious humanism, which struggles to assimilate the data of the world into a deeper vision of faith.

Meet My Imaginary Friends in Charlotte, NC


“The Albatross”, a chapter from my novel-in-progress, has won the Elizabeth Simpson Smith Award for a Short Story from the Charlotte Writers’ Club. The award ceremony, where I’ll be reading my story and accepting a check for $500 that I’ve already spent, will be held on Sept. 18 at 7 PM at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 4345 Barclay Downs Drive, Southpark Mall, Charlotte, NC 28209. Come one, come all.

Contest judge Meredith Hall, author of the memoir Without a Map, had these comments on “The Albatross”:


“The voice in this story is knockout wonderful. A child’s voice is always very difficult to pull off. Often a child’s voice is very sentimental, rosy, sweet, and we quickly become suspicious. More than that, the reader expects and needs greater wisdom and insight than a child possesses, but the writer must take care not to insert that adult sensibility into the child’s perceptions. Here, Prue is so smart and so direct and so hungry to understand her world, we are led along by her, and feel compelled by her interpretations of the human experience. She is funny, bold, irreverent, and absolutely heartbreaking.

“The writer has a strong sense of pacing, of the architecture of the story, and of the tension of the story. That she is willing to tangle with issues of faith as the child struggles to feel loved is a measure of the writer’s confidence. The handling of Christian dogma and its comforting promises, Ada’s atheism, and the girl’s willingness to try anything that will ease her loneliness and sense of loss is brave and convincing. I loved the writer’s audacity in allowing Jesus to speak, and so colloquially (“I’m the son of God, for Pete’s sake”).

“I noted many lines that surprised and delighted me: — ‘Would Ada die for me? I couldn’t picture it.’ — ‘An ocean stretched between my mother and me, icy and deep, and hell was on both sides.’ — ‘We weren’t a family. We were two mountaineers harnessed together over the abyss.’

“We understand immediately what is and is not the relationship. When Ada reaches across the car and comforts her daughter with more lessons on the patriarchy, we want to undo what she has said, to provide the mother’s talk the girl so longs for.

“Prue is a memorable character. Her coming of age in the absence of parental love is beautifully written. This is a terrific short story, and deserves a wide readership.”

In Memoriam: Madeleine L’Engle


Madeleine L’Engle, the celebrated author of A Wrinkle in Time and many other books of fiction and Christian essays, passed away on Thursday at the age of 88. From the New York Times, Sept. 8:


Madeleine L’Engle, an author whose childhood fables, religious meditations and fanciful science fiction transcended both genre and generation, most memorably in her children’s classic “A Wrinkle in Time,” died on Thursday in Litchfield, Conn. She was 88.

Her death was announced yesterday by her publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A spokeswoman said Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) had died of natural causes at a nursing home, which she entered three years ago. Before then the author had maintained homes in Manhattan and Goshen, Conn.

“A Wrinkle in Time” was rejected by 26 publishers before editors at Farrar, Straus & Giroux read it and enthusiastically accepted it. It proved to be her masterpiece, winning the John Newbery Medal as the best children’s book of 1963 and selling, so far, eight million copies. It is now in its 69th printing.

In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Marygail G. Parker notes “a peculiar splendor” in Ms. L’Engle’s oeuvre, and some of that splendor is owed to sheer literary range. Her works included poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer, and almost all were deeply, quixotically personal.

But it was in her vivid children’s characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for answers to the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious.

“Of course I’m Meg,” Ms. L’Engle said about the beloved protagonist of “A Wrinkle in Time.”

The St. James Guide to Children’s Writers called Ms. L’Engle “one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades.” Such accolades did not come from pulling punches. “Wrinkle” has been one of the most banned books in the United States, accused by religious conservatives of offering an inaccurate portrayal of God and nurturing in the young an unholy belief in myth and fantasy.

Ms. L’Engle, who often wrote about her Christian faith, was taken aback by the attacks. “It seems people are willing to damn the book without reading it,” Ms. L’Engle said in an interview with The New York Times in 2001. “Nonsense about witchcraft and fantasy. First I felt horror, then anger, and finally I said, ‘Ah, the hell with it.’ It’s great publicity, really.”

The book begins, “It was a dark and stormy night,” repeating the line of a 19th-century novelist, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. “Wrinkle” then takes off. Meg Murry, with help from her psychic baby brother, uses time travel and extrasensory perception to rescue her father, a gifted scientist, from a planet controlled by the Dark Thing. She does so through the power of love.

The book uses concepts that Ms. L’Engle said she had plucked from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children’s literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand.

“Wrinkle” is part of Ms. L’Engle’s Time series of children’s books, which includes “A Wind in the Door,” “A Swiftly Tilting Planet,” “Many Waters” and “An Acceptable Time.” The series combines elements of science fiction with insights into love and moral purpose….

Her deeper thoughts on writing were deliciously mysterious. She believed that experience and knowledge were subservient to the subconscious and perhaps larger, spiritual influences.

“I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him,” she said in an interview with Horn Book magazine in 1983. “I know that is true of ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ I cannot possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice.

“It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”…

Much of her later work was autobiographical, although sometimes a bit idealized. Some books, like “A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys With Jacob” (1986) and “The Genesis Trilogy” (2001), combined autobiography and biblical themes. But she often said that her real truths were in her fiction.

“Why does anybody tell a story?” she once asked, even though she knew the answer.

“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

Like many other children of my generation, I read all of L’Engle’s young adult novels multiple times. I reread A Swiftly Tilting Planet last year and found that it stood the test of time even better than the Narnia books (heretical thought!), which seem to have eclipsed her work in popularity among contemporary Christians. Why is that? Are her books unfairly associated with the spaced-out spiritualism of the 1960s? Is it that, like the Harry Potter books, the Christian lessons are more subtly concealed in characters’ moral choices, rather than in an obvious allegorical package (sorry, Aslan) that tames the story’s potentially “pagan” magical elements?

I often think of this passage from A Circle of Quiet, the first of L’Engle’s trilogy of Christian essay collections known as The Crosswicks Journal, as a touchstone for my relationships. L’Engle is musing on what she says to her young students when they seek her advice about their budding love affairs:


I ask the boy or girl how work is going: Are you functioning at a better level than usual? Do you find that you are getting more work done in less time? If you are, then I think that you can trust this love. If you find that you can’t work well, that you’re functioning under par, then I think something may be wrong….

The other question I ask my “children” is: what about your relations with the rest of the world? It’s all right in the very beginning for you to be the only two people in the world, but after that your ability to love should become greater and greater. If you find that you love lots more people than you ever did before, then I think that you can trust this love. If you find that you need to be exclusive, that you don’t like being around other people, then I think that something may be wrong. (pp.109-10)

Robert Bly Interviewed on PBS


Last week the venerable poet Robert Bly was interviewed on Bill Moyers’ Journal on PBS. Some highlights from their witty, uplifting conversation are below. I recommend watching the video online rather than simply reading the transcript, as Bly’s joie de vivre is an essential part of the experience.


BILL MOYERS: You know, when I first met you, you were just barely 50. And you read this little poem. You remember this one?

ROBERT BLY: “I lived my life enjoying orbits. Which move out over the things of the world. I have wandered into space for hours, passing through dark fires. And I have gone to the deserts of the hottest places, to the landscape of zeroes. And I can’t tell if this joy is from the body or the soul or a third place.”

Well, that’s very good you find that because when you say, “What is the divine,” it’s much simpler to say there is the body, then there’s the soul and then there’s a third place.

BILL MOYERS: Have you figured out what that third place is 30 years later?

ROBERT BLY: It’s a place where all of the geniuses and lovely people and the brilliant women in the– they all go there. And they watch over us a little bit. Once in awhile, they’ll say, “Drop that line. It’s no good.”

Sometimes when you do poetry, especially if you do translate people like Hafez and Rumi, you go almost immediately to this third world. But we don’t go there very often.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

ROBERT BLY: Well I suppose it’s because we think too much about our houses and our places. Maybe I should read a Kabir poem here.

BILL MOYERS: And Kabir?

ROBERT BLY: Kabir is a poet from India. Fourteenth century.

“Friend, hope for the guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you’re alive. Think… and think… while you’re alive.
What you call salvation, belongs to the time before death.

If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
you think that ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body’s rotten–
that’s all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
And if you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.”

I was going through Chicago one time with a young poet and we were rewriting this. And he said, “If you find nothing now, you will seemly end up with a suite in the Ramada Inn of death.” That’s very interesting to see how that thing really comes alive when you bring in terms of your own country. You’ll end up with a suite in the Ramada Inn of death. If you make love with the divine now, in the next life, you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the teacher is, believe in the great sound. Kabir says this, when the guest is being searched for – see they don’t use the word “God”. Capital G, “Guest”. When the Guest is being searched for, it’s the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work. Then he says, “Look at me and you’ll see a slave of that intensity.”

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BILL MOYERS: You’ve been talking and writing a lot lately about the greedy soul.

ROBERT BLY: I’m glad you caught that. Read this.

ROBERT BLY: “More and more I’ve learned to respect the power of the phrase, the greedy soul. We all understand what is hinted after that phrase. It’s the purpose of the United Nations is to check the greedy soul in nations. It’s the purpose of police to check the greedy soul in people. We know our soul has enormous abilities in worship, in intuition, coming to us from a very ancient past. But the greedy part of the soul, what the Muslims call the “nafs,” also receives its energy from a very ancient past. The “nafs” is the covetous, desirous, shameless energy that steals food from neighboring tribes, wants what it wants and is willing to destroy to anyone who receives more good things than itself. In the writer, it wants praise.”

I wrote these three lines. “I live very close to my greedy soul. When I see a book published 2000 years ago, I check to see if my name is mentioned.” This is really true. I’ve really done that. Yes, I’ve said that. So, in writers, the “nafs” often enter in the issue of how much– do people love me? How much people are reading my books? Do people write about me? Do you understand that? It probably affects you too in that way.

BILL MOYERS: Us journalists? Never.

ROBERT BLY: Never. Okay. “If the covetous soul feels that its national sphere of influence is being threatened by another country, it will kill recklessly and brutally, impoverish millions, order thousands of young men in its own country to be killed only to find out 30 years later that the whole thing was a mistake. In politics the fog of war could be called the fog of the greedy soul.”

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BILL MOYERS: Are you happy at 80?

ROBERT BLY: Yeah, I’m happy. I’m happy at 80. And– I can’t stand so much happiness as I used to.

BILL MOYERS: You’re Lutheran.

Christian Wiman on the Blessings of Writer’s Block


This spring, Christian Wiman, the editor of the venerable Poetry magazine, published a controversial essay in The American Scholar, where he revealed his diagnosis with incurable blood cancer and how he had found his way back to both faith and writing after a period of darkness. Now, in an interview with Poets & Writers, Wiman shares updates on his condition (much improved, fortunately) and more wisdom about the spiritual side of writing. Highlights:


P&W: How is the essay, which is very personal and intimate, different from confessional poetry, which has a bad reputation in some circles?

CW: Among certain people, yes. With poetry about a very personal experience, for me, it usually gets transformed in some way by the form of the poem, just the demands of the art. I find that the essay is similar, actually—it requires a kind of discipline that removes you from the intensity of the experience, and helps to alleviate the intensity. I think it is possible to be much more personal in prose than in a poem, at least for me. But I was still aiming at making something structured, a formal work, not just my heart bleeding out on the page.

P&W: You’ve also written about prose being less precious than poetry.

CW: I find I can always get prose written, whereas in poetry, there is some element of givenness that you have to depend on. I’ve gone away for a month or two months or six months, and not been able to write. In confessional poetry and prose, what’s bad is when it seems like what you’re getting is just the person’s experience, and it’s important only because it happened to them. What I respond to, and what I aim for, is to try to get something that speaks to experience itself.

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P&W: Another interesting part of the essay has to do with your having stopped writing poetry, and then starting again, and the connection of that to your rediscovery of religion.

CW: I stopped writing poetry for a full three years, starting about a year before I became editor of Poetry. I think I had pushed things in one direction as far as I could. For a long time I was writing poems that circumscribed an absence that I couldn’t define, and I think this was the absence I was feeling. I hope the poems I’m writing now, and am trying to write, are more filled with presence. I don’t just mean the presence of God; I mean just simply being present in the world. The earlier poems, particularly in my book Hard Night, are often about not quite experiencing the world, about that absence. And I consider not being able to write as a manifestation of grace; I think grace sometimes can be anguishing.

P&W: Not being able to write was a manifestation of grace?

CW: Yes, because I was having the thing that I thought was most important in my life taken away from me, and so I was forced to cast around. In some way I had to become destitute to realize what mattered.

Read the whole interview here.

Renee Ashley Interview: Thoughts on the Writing Process


Wild River Review, a progressive e-zine of literature and politics, has an interview in their new issue with award-winning poet and fiction writer Renee Ashley, whose collection Salt won the 1991 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. The excerpts below particularly resonated with my own experience of the writing process, as well as my preferences as a poetry contest judge:


WRR: Do all of your poems surprise you?

RA: If they don’t, they get thrown away. The idea for me is to never settle for what I meant to say. And I seldom start out meaning to say anything. I wrote one poem trying to do something specific-from an idea. I wanted to recreate the rhythms of the gospel church I grew up in. Ma used to drive me there, drop me off, and I’d walk home. But that poem was a booger. The poem is fine. I stand by the poem. But the process was hell. I hope I never have another idea. Shoot me if I have an idea.

I like it much better when I find out what the poem’s trying to say and then start aligning the images within those terms. If I have a premise, it’s time for me to write an essay. And I do love to write essays. But in a poem? I think surprise is essential. Otherwise you’re just taking notes or you’re just talking. Too many poems are just talking. If I want talking, I can call my mother.

WRR: Tell me three cardinal rules you have for yourself. What makes a good poem?

RA: You mean in process or after the fact?

WRR: Well, okay, both…

RA: In process, I would say that there must be an engine driving the poem that is not the writer. A rhythm, an image, an impulse, but not merely the writer’s will.

I would also say the poem is not done until it says more than you meant to say.

And everything has to be set up so that it rolls down the page seamlessly.

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RA:  …I definitely don’t like things that reek of competence. That’s a problem. If competence is so evident that you realize it’s competent before you realize what it’s about or what you might experience, that seems problematic to me. Problematic, anal-retentive, and boring. Of course there are exceptions to everything. But I do hate boring. Anal is easier to live with.

WRR: Like an over polished stone…

RA: Yeah, I mean let’s just polish it down to dust, or kill it and pin it to a board! Beat it to death with decorum! Even if the meter is perfect and it makes perfect sense. Or when it’s infused with prose logic as opposed to a poetic logic, which relies on very different things. It’s easy to tell way too much in a poem.

I think people very often mistake their impulses. In the abstract, romantic notion, they want to be a poet, so they think their impulse to write is a poetic impulse. Very often they’re wrong. If being a poet is the issue, a writer’s in trouble. If making poems is the issue, you’ve got a better chance at doing something of interest.

I think a lot of the pseudo-autobiographical poems are prose impulses because the poem never gets bigger than the poet. It has to… by my definition… get bigger than the poet… to be a poem. Otherwise it’s prose. And prose broken into lines is… a kind of sad happening.

WRR: Although maybe some prose writers feel that the writing has to be bigger than the author as well?

RA: And I think they do and I think it does. But, they’ve got a lot more room to play. I mean, we’re [poets] really working in a bell jar…

For instance, we’re working on some exercises in our MFA’s forthcoming residency on the issue of backstory. And I think that in a lot of poems there’s too much backstory. They’ve had something they wanted to tell. And the problem is if the thing that they wanted to tell is about themselves and they stand in front of the writing, I’m already bored. The poet stands behind the poem. The poem is the center of attention. I just want the poems to take me somewhere I haven’t been before, or at least show me a familiar place in a new light.

********

WRR: I’m going to switch gears a little. Emerson wrote that poetry is a confession of faith. Do you agree or disagree and why?

RA: Well, those are two great big abstractions, confession and faith. I guess it is a confession. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a public confession. I could get off on a real toot about this, but I think too often confession is equated with art. Art is not confession for me. Was it Ad Reinhardt that said, “Art is art. Everything else is everything else?” I think so. I guess my point is that we’re not as interesting as we think we are. Confession is confession. Art is art.

I do have faith, though, that the act of writing will help me articulate what I don’t already know about myself. I think a lot of people misconstrue the meaning of risk in poetry. Risk isn’t telling your story. Risk is finding something new out that happened to you because of the story.

********

WRR: Can writing good poetry be taught?

RA: Talent can’t be taught, but craft can and should be taught. Because the talent can and usually does let you down sooner or later. And when you run into that pothole in your poem where something sucks or is loose or just plain wrong, you’ve got to know how to locate it, identify it, and fix it and that’s where craft comes in. Like a tool box. Quite handy.

Read the whole interview here. Read a review of her first novel, Someplace Like This, here.

“Talent”, Fatalism, and the Artist’s Fears


One of my favorite “books for writers” is Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. Whether you need to sustain your faith in a long-term project or gather the courage to leap into a new one, this little book is an invaluable aid to identifying and overcoming the fear-based myths that prevent you from doing your work. One of those is “talent”:


Talent, in common parlance, is “what comes easily”. So sooner or later, inevitably, you reach a point where the work doesn’t come easily, and — Aha!, it’s just as you feared!

Wrong. By definition, whatever you have is exactly what you need to produce your best work. There is probably no clearer waste of psychic energy than worrying about how much talent you have — and probably no worry more common. This is true even among artists of considerable accomplishment.

Talent, if it is anything, is a gift, and nothing of the artist’s own making….Were talent a prerequisite, then the better the artwork, the easier it would have been to make. But alas, the fates are rarely so generous. For every artist who has developed a mature vision with grace and speed, countless others have laboriously nurtured their art through fertile periods and dry spells, through false starts and breakaway bursts, through successive and significant changes of direction, medium, and subject matter….

Even at best talent remains a constant, and those who rely upon that gift alone, without developing further, peak quickly and soon fade to obscurity. Examples of genius only accentuate that truth. Newspapers love to print stories about five-year-old musical prodigies giving solo recitals, but you rarely read about one going on to become a Mozart. The point here is that whatever his initial gift, Mozart was also an artist who learned to work on his work, and thereby improved. In that respect he shares common ground with the rest of us. (pp.26-28)

Another myth that is deadly to art-making is “magic”:


Imagine you’ve just attended an exhibition and seen work that’s powerful and coherent, work that has range and purpose….[T]hese works materialized exactly as the artist conceived them. The work is inevitable. But wait a minute — your work doesn’t feel inevitable (you think), and so you begin to wonder: maybe making art requires some special or even magic ingredient that you don’t have.

The belief that “real” art possesses some indefinable magic ingredient puts pressure on you to prove your work contains the same. Wrong, very wrong. Asking your work to prove anything only invites doom. Besides, if artists share any common view of magic, it is probably the fatalistic suspicion that when their own art turns out well, it’s a fluke — but when it turns out poorly, it’s an omen. Buying into magic leaves you feeling less capable each time another artist’s qualities are praised….

Admittedly, artmaking probably does require something special, but just what that something might be has remained remarkably elusive — elusive enough to suggest that it may be something particular to each artist, rather than universal to them all….But the important point here is not that you have — or don’t have — what other artists have, but rather that it doesn’t matter. Whatever they have is something needed to do their work — it wouldn’t help you in your work even if you had it. Their magic is theirs. You don’t lack it. You don’t need it. It has nothing to do with you. Period. (pp.33-34)

The Bible, understandably, takes a dim view of magic. Thus I found it particularly helpful to see my reigning writer’s-block myth tagged with this label. Magical thinking, for me, is what happens when I look to the success of my work to shore up my belief in God’s faithfulness, instead of taking that belief as bedrock and letting the work build on it. “I haven’t written a good chapter in two weeks — the mandate of heaven must have passed from me!” 

For no obvious reason, I grew up afraid that God was Tennessee Williams and I was Laura in The Glass Menagerie. I didn’t understand why so many people’s lives just stalled, trapped in meaninglessness and dysfunction, when they had started off like me, believing they could do anything. In literature, there was an author who set such characters up to fail, sacrificing them to the storyline. Perhaps someone already knew that my story would end as another tale of someone whose dreams outstripped their pathetic destiny. Could I spot the clues, and if so, what should I do about it — fight the tide, or reconcile myself to insignificance?

The Psalms and the Hebrew prophets tell a different story. God’s chastisement is always a prelude to restoration. Even the “vessels of wrath” passage in Romans 9 — the closest the Bible comes to supporting my fatalistic neurosis — is only a hypothetical.

In this context, what might it mean for the failure of some aspect of my writing to be “for my own good”? Salvation by grace breaks the chain binding works to self-worth. Therefore, when I’m blocked, my first assumption should not be that God wants to take me down a peg, but that I can learn something useful about what was wrong with my original agenda for the work. This depersonalizes the issue, and also gives me hope, because the failure itself is not the divinely desired outcome but only preparation for starting off again in a new direction.

I figured this out yesterday, and the writing went very well. But what about today? Keep on keepin’ on.

Christian Mood Swings


When I became a novelist last year, I decided to start having emotions. Bad idea. My characters experience higher highs and lower lows than I’ve generally allowed myself in “real life”. I thought that because it wasn’t “really happening to me” I could enjoy the upside without the downside. Wrong again. 

Something that happened around the same time was that God answered my prayer (chuckling in His size-40 sleeve all the while) to remove my fear of being incinerated by contact with Him. Nowadays, when I read “Is not my word like fire, says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?” (Jeremiah 23:29), my response is more “Awesome, dude!” than “Yikes – where do I hide?”

Since I opened the doors of my creativity and my prayer life to let the storms sweep through, amazing things have happened. My writing has taken on new degrees of honesty, depth and mission, and my zeal to know God has increased. BUT…a lot of the time I feel like the Holy Spirit’s chew toy. Shake shake shake, plop. Tossed in a corner. I suppose that changing my temperament from constant low-grade gloom to manic-depressive is an improvement in terms of productivity, but when the post-prophetic emptiness descends, I remember why I resisted our culture’s veneration of impulsive emotion for so long.

In short, I have become addicted to peak experiences. I’m writing because I need the high of creation, or to escape from the flatness of everyday life. I drift from church to church seeking the thrill of spiritual fervor, while knowing that I will never be in a real relationship with the people who are worshipping beside me, because I don’t feel safe with their church’s worldview.

Today’s thumbnail bio at The Daily Office was of Jeremy Taylor, a 17th-century Anglican bishop and chaplain to King Charles I, who wrote this extraordinary prayer for the visitation of the sick, as found in the Book of Common Prayer:


O God, whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered; Make us, we beseech thee, deeply sensible of the shortness and uncertainty of human life; and let thy Holy Spirit lead us in holiness and righteousness all our days: that, when we shall have served thee in our generation, we may be gathered unto our fathers, having the testimony of a good conscience; in the communion of the Catholic Church; in the confidence of a certain faith; in the comfort of a reasonable, religious, and holy hope; in favour with thee our God, and in perfect charity with the world. All which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Wait a moment — we’re supposed to want to be aware of the emptiness of mortal life? This can be a blessing, not just a pathology? As my Buddhist husband has often told me, even negative emotions feel much better when you stop resisting them as a violation of your imaginary entitlement to constant happiness.

And so I ask myself: Do I really long to see and speak the truth because it is God’s truth, or only because it is cool and exciting? Some truths are not fun. They’re not even scary in an exciting way. Feelings of pointlessness and spiritual darkness are also part of the package, because life is indeed short and uncertain, and evil is real.

I have been revived by the emotional freedom of charismatic and evangelical services, and will probably always dip into that world for occasional spiritual rebooting. However, I’m also coming to appreciate the discipline provided by the traditional liturgy, how it makes space for the widest range of experiences through the Scriptures yet holds them in a framework that prevents a single passion from filling the entire field of vision. This striking juxtaposition from the August 10 Morning Prayer service is a perfect example:


1 O LORD, my God, my Savior, *
by day and night I cry to you.
2 Let my prayer enter into your presence; *
incline your ear to my lamentation.
3 For I am full of trouble; *
my life is at the brink of the grave.
4 I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; *
I have become like one who has no strength;
5 Lost among the dead, *
like the slain who lie in the grave,
6 Whom you remember no more, *
for they are cut off from your hand.
7 You have laid me in the depths of the Pit, *
in dark places, and in the abyss.
8 Your anger weighs upon me heavily, *
and all your great waves overwhelm me.
9 You have put my friends far from me;
you have made me to be abhorred by them; *
I am in prison and cannot get free.
10 My sight has failed me because of trouble; *
LORD, I have called upon you daily;
I have stretched out my hands to you.
11 Do you work wonders for the dead? *
will those who have died stand up and give you thanks?
12 Will your loving-kindness be declared in the grave? *
your faithfulness in the land of destruction?
13 Will your wonders be known in the dark? *
or your righteousness in the country where all is forgotten?
14 But as for me, O LORD, I cry to you for help; *
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
15 LORD, why have you rejected me? *
why have you hidden your face from me?
16 Ever since my youth, I have been wretched and at the point of death; *
I have borne your terrors with a troubled mind.
17 Your blazing anger has swept over me; *
your terrors have destroyed me;
18 They surround me all day long like a flood; *
they encompass me on every side.
19 My friend and my neighbor you have put away from me, *
and darkness is my only companion.

Glory to God the Creator,
and to the Christ,
and to the Holy Ghost;
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be
world without end. Amen. Amen.


After all that, we are called to praise. Whether or not we feel like it. There is a sanity to that command that comforts when emotions fail.

Desktop Inspirations


Glimmer Train, a leading magazine of literary fiction, asked in a recent survey for the inspirational quotes that their readers have tacked up on their desk to motivate them to write. The full list is here (PDF file). Some of my favorites:


“If you can’t piss people off, why write at all.” (anonymous)
“I write to discover what I know.” (Flannery O’Connor)
“The hard is what makes it great.” (Tom Hanks in the movie “A League of Their Own”)
“One reason for writing, of course, is that no one’s written what you want to read.” (Philip Larkin)
“Have the courage to follow your talent to the dark place.” (anonymous)
“A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.” (G.K. Chesterton)
“Start writing — the answer will come to you.” (fortune cookie; I have this one taped to my computer too)


Quotes from my desktop:


“Concentrate not on protection, but on reducing your vulnerabilities.” (another fortune cookie)

“He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything.” (Samuel Johnson)

“Live in joy — even with all the facts.” (source unclear; I’ve seen a version of it attributed to Wendell Berry)

What’s on your list, readers?

35 Books for my 35th Birthday


The list below is something of a self-portrait in books. Most of them reflect, and in many cases helped shape, my current worldview. I recommend them for their beauty and wisdom, and the originality of their vision. They’re the books I reread while hundreds of their newer siblings languish on the shelf.

Poetry and Fiction

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Elegance and coherence of Christian ideas revealed in poetry

Katie Ford, Deposition
Contemporary poet chronicles via negativa in thorny yet beautiful language

Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven
Poems shine with hard-won affirmation of life

Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur and Other Poems
Mystical joy explodes normal patterns of meter and syntax

Mark Levine, Enola Gay
20th-century poetic Apocalypse

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength)
Christian science fiction; CSL shares his beatific vision

Walter Wangerin Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow and The Book of Sorrows
Barnyard allegory of the gospel

Walter Wangerin Jr., The Orphean Passages
Master storyteller tells tale of minister who loses his faith and is saved by community’s love


The Arts

David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear
Overcoming perfectionism and self-doubt in order to find one’s artistic vocation

George Steiner, Real Presences
Literary critic argues that positing a transcendent God is the only guarantee of meaning in literature and art


Christian Living

Henry Cloud & John Townsend, Boundaries
Healthy relationships; Christian altruism without codependency; a life-saving book

Garret Keizer, Help: The Original Human Dilemma
Complex meditations on effectively giving and receiving help

Garret Keizer, The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin
Uniquely balanced and compassionate assessment of the righteousness of anger in the Christian life, as well as its obvious dangers

Francine du Plessix Gray, Simone Weil
Biography of quirky saint who transcended weakness and absurdity through radical obedience


Christian Spirituality and Theology

Robert Farrar Capon, The Mystery of Christ…and Why We Don’t Get It
Grace, grace and more grace

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics and Orthodoxy
Early 20th-c. Christian apologist refutes modern heresies in witty prose

Rodney Clapp, Tortured Wonders: Christian Spirituality for People, Not Angels
Best book about the Incarnation, sex, death, the Eucharist, the body of Christ in the church

Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World
Christian love versus Gnostic narcissism and self-annihilation; history of the myth of self-transcendence through Eros

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
How friendship, familial love, eros and agape are distinct yet woven together in a Christian worldview

Richard F. Lovelace, Renewal as a Way of Life: A Guidebook for Spiritual Growth
Basics of Christian belief as a foundation for church unity, spiritual revival and social transformation

N.T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus
Jewish historical and religious context for Jesus’ messianic claims


Pluralism and Religious Truth

Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (and It’s a Good Thing Too)
Bad-boy law professor and Milton expert debunks liberal-secularist epistemology

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
Critique of Enlightenment epistemology argues that we know things by personal commitment; faith should not be on the defensive vis-a-vis “objective” science

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions
Maintaining uniqueness of Christ while humbly declining to speculate on salvation of non-Christians

James K.A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?
How postmodern philosophy is more open to religious faith than the modernist- scientific paradigm that preceded it


Other Religions

Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro, Minyan: Ten Principles for Living a Life of Integrity
Jewish spirituality informed by Eastern mystical practices

Diana Winston, Wide Awake: Buddhism for the New Generation
Clear, lively introduction to meditation practice, mindfulness, compassion, and other Buddhist principles

Sharon Salzberg, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience
Buddhist teacher’s accessible memoir chronicles the stages of conversion and spiritual growth


History of Ideas

Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth
How different cultures have balanced our needs for the three kinds of happiness: euphoria, daily contentment and a worthwhile life

Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
Acerbic history of modern utopianism and its limitations

Robin May Schott, Cognition and Eros
Marxist-feminist philosopher critiques classical and Christian mind-body dualism and projection of negative traits onto female body


And one to grow on…Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead didn’t make the list because I disagree with more of her ideology than I did when I first read it at age 13. However, I’ll always be grateful to Rand for teaching me to think philosophically and systematically about human behavior, and for giving me the courage to trust my own vision as an artist regardless of anyone’s opinion. Those lessons have been the foundation for my entire development as a writer and a Christian…though I doubt she’d recognize me as one of her progeny. A message of humility for us writers: we can’t ever foresee all the ripples of the little pebble we drop in the pond.