Intersections: Natural Worlds, Spiritual Worlds, and Writing

Today is the birthday of Terry Tempest Williams, a woman who has served as a signpost of sorts for me as a writer.  I first became aware of her in the early 90's, but I'm not sure how.  Was she anthologized in one of the many textbooks I used?  Possibly.  I read a lot more magazines then, so maybe it was that route.

When I thought of her then, I thought of her as a feminist writer, which she certainly is, but in a different way than earlier generations of feminist writers.  She seemed either less angry or angry about different things.

I thought of her as a writer chronicling the natural world in a way that hadn't been done much before.  I thought of her in the tradition of Rachel Carson.  Her work made me want to move to the desert Southwest.  Her work shed a different light on the nuclear era, and I suspect that should I ever become a famous writer, some intrepid grad student might see some links between my work and hers.

Today, because of the miracle of the Internet, I was able to reread "The Clan of One-Breasted Women," an essay which neatly demonstrates her writing as feminist and naturalist (you can read it here).  Reading it this morning, I was struck by the spiritual dimension of her writing.  She was the first writer I ever read who discussed her life as a regular Mormon.  I say regular, meaning that all other writing I had read treated Mormons as cult members or as polygamous freaks.

I have spiritual writing on the brain this morning.  Lately, I've been trying to think of alternate jobs.  What else could I do, should my current situation go poof?

Yesterday, over lunch with a friend, I blurted out what I'd really like.  I said, "I want someone to look at my blogs and look at the fact that I've coordinated retreats and someone who reads my poems and the writing I've done for spiritual books and magazines and says, 'Come teach in our MFA program.  We'll create something just for you.'"

My friend said something along the lines of "Yeah, right, keep dreaming."  She said it in that scoffing tone of voice that said, "You'll never get what you want."

You may wonder why I keep a friend like that, someone who would breathe negative energy all over my dream.

Here's why:  my brain has much in common with a punk rocker 18 year old.  My brain says, "Hey, you think I can't do this?  I'll show you.  I'll learn 3 chords by Christmas and then by next Christmas, I'll know three more, and I'll have written 5 songs, and then I'll write 5 more, and I'll put out a CD, and people will wait in long lines to hear my band."

You can tell my brain is of a certain age because it would put out a CD, not a YouTube video.

I woke up this morning thinking, tell me more about that dream, Kris.  What would it look like?

Perhaps I'd teach in an MFA program, teaching Spirituality and Writing.  Why shouldn't MFA students study the intersections of spirituality and writing?  That part of the publishing world is still doing very well, after all.

For those of you who scoff, I'd point back at the early career of Terry Tempest Williams.  Who would have imagined the explosion of writing programs, and other disciplines too, that explored the intersections of the natural world and writing.  Who would have imagined the expansion of so many MFA programs, for that matter?  Why not MFA tracks that explore spirituality and writing?

Those tracks could explore traditional genres (poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, scripts), but could also explore other areas, like writing prayers or writing liturgy.  If we were allowed to do some cross-disciplinary work, it would be cool to explore traditional hymns and modern songwriting.

You may be saying, "Whoa, sounds like you'd really rather be at a seminary or theology school."  Well, yes, that appeals too.  Why not a track in seminary that trains pastors-to-be to use more of the creative arts in their ministry?  I've sat through many a boring sermon through my several decades of going to church.  Clearly, some seminarians could benefit from learning some of the basics that most MFA students learn about how to hook audience attention and keep it.

I'd love a staff position at a church camp, particularly if it came with a place to live in a beautiful setting.

Yesterday, late in the day, I talked to two of my colleagues who are also licensed to do psychological counseling.  Not for the first time did I think I had majored in the wrong field, as I listened to them talk about how they had helped some of their patients.  Could I do art therapy of some sort?  Would I want to?

That gets a little too close to some of the fields that feel dangerous to my soul:  police work, intelligence work, all the fields which would expose me to the uglier side of human nature.

I've thought of pastoral counseling, though, or being a spiritual director.  Hmm.  Could I meld my creative interests with my interests in that direction?

And the underlying question:  how much more schooling would any of these paths require?

It feels good, though, to have some ideas about alternate paths.  Now I've got some possibilities to ponder.  What kind of classes would I create for this MFA program, which may or may not exist yet?  How would I teach students to be marketable?  How might I train pastors who would want an arts program at their churches?  How would I create retreats that would bring people to a church camp?

I have lots of ideas!  Now I'll work on capturing them and molding them into some sort of cohesive unit.

Just think, if my friend hadn't been so negative, my brief yearning might have flitted right in and out of my head without ever finding flesh and form.  And I'm grateful to writers like Terry Tempest Williams, who have allowed their writing to go in a multitude of directions, thus showing the rest of us what we might be able to accomplish.

A Return to Fiber?

I'm not doing much with fiber arts these days.  Once upon a time, I was a quilter.  I made quilts that looked like this:

Here's a detail to show you the quilting:

Not only that, but I did interesting experiments with fabric scraps, threads, and beads.  I created pieces that looked like this:

Or this:

I was also making lots of baby quilts.  My friend and I wanted to go to arts and crafts shows and sell our work, just to see what would happen.  We planned a schedule for late fall.

This all led me to a different phase in my artistic life, and for some reason, I've been thinking about it lately.

Five years ago, I was working on these:

I started making these because I had some green fleece, which reminded me of making Christmas trees out of felt when I was a child.  I made a more modern version, with fleece and beads that I sewed on with metallic thread.

I kept making these because I thought it would be good to have small things to sell at our Autumn craft shows.  I also kept making them because it gave me an excuse to play with beads and to have fun with glittery objects. 

People reacted with curiosity, but also as if I was a bit daft.  I told people that I was getting in touch with my inner kindergartner.

I miss my inner kindergartner.

In the end, I made dozens of these and sold precisely three.  I gave away some for Christmas presents.  Then the dozens sat through the winter, spring and summer. 

In the end, I mailed them all to my mom, for her women's circle's craft sale at their church in Virginia.  She tells me that they all sold and were very popular.  Maybe that thousand miles further north made the difference.  Maybe people are just more willing to spend money to support a church craft sale than the kinds we have down here.

Lately, I've found myself with a hankering to make something with beads and shimmery yarns and interesting scraps of fabric.  A Christmas ornament or something more abstract?  A flat piece or something with dimensions?  Something collagey?  Something that might also support my new chapbook?  Hmmm.

Stay tuned!

Jane Addams and Our Impending Autumn of Ugliness

Today is the birthday of Jane Addams, one of my long-time heroes.  I've written about her in terms of theology here and written here about her in terms of communal living and what we might learn from her successes.  Today as I was reading about her life, I was struck by how much she accomplished.  Where did she find the energy?

I'm just exhausted at the thought of going back to work today, and my work doesn't really take that much out of me physically.  It's not always easy emotionally, but I can't imagine that Addams had no emotional upheavals in her work for social justice.  Why could she do so much?

This morning, I was struck by the fact that it was an inheritance that catapulted her on the path of becoming the first female winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.  Her father's death left each child with roughly $50,000, which allowed Jane Addams to go to college and to buy Hull House and fix it up.  Eventually, other donors helped, and she didn't have to use so much of her own money.  Still, if she hadn't had the inheritance, Hull House would have been but a theory.

I suspect we are headed into an Autumn of Ugliness as our legislators argue about the best ways to spend the money they don't have or about why we can't spend it.  I'm in a bit of despair myself over the state of the economy, over the imploded labor market, over the dwindling job market (no jobs created in August?  None?  Really???).  I suspect we'll hear all sorts of ugly things about the rich and the super-rich.

When you do hear people talking in ugly terms about the rich, remember Jane Addams and the fact that a lot of rich people do a lot of good in the world.

And what a lovely fantasy to indulge in, when you need to tune out the Autumn of Ugliness:  what would you do if you found yourself with a chunk of money?  How could you use it to make the world a better place?

Working Woman's Blues--with Blueberry Recipe

If you came here on this Labor Day hoping for a cogent analysis of the state of U.S. Labor, you'll find far better articles elsewhere than I can write.  The Washington Post has some good ones today.  In this article, E. J. Dionne gives us some quotes out of context which sound quite Communist; can you guess who they are?  It's the kind of article that could lead to some good student assignments in your Composition classes.  In this article, Harold Meyerson reminds us of the promises that were made about the post-Industrial economy we find ourselves in, promises which have been broken; is it time for a new Industrial Revolution?  In this article, Robert J. Samuelson gives us truly depressing statistics about job creation.

Samuelson points out that for every job opening, there are 4.5 unemployed workers who would like that job.  My first thought:   those are pretty good odds.

I have a Ph.D. in British Literature, and my spouse has an M.A. in Philosophy.  He looked at the statistics for jobs available for every Philosophy Ph.D. (at that time, about 80-100 unemployed Philosophy Ph.D.s for every tenure track job) and decided to get an M.P.A.  I've stuck with my original plan and moved into administration, and in some ways, it's worked well for me.  But I can't help but notice the adjunctification of my profession.  Should I want to move back into teaching, full-time jobs (tenure track or not) are increasingly hard to come by.

Like I implied, I'm probably not the best person to write about the plight of the unemployed, especially the unemployed males.  I'm still not sure that bringing manufacturing back to our shores is the way to go.  I'm old enough to have met a generation of mill workers dying because of the lung diseases they developed because of inhaling the fibers that manufacturing generated.  I've studied dispossessed workers through the decades, and the golden age of manufacturing left many behind, particularly as they got close to retirement.  And even though various manufacturing developments made machines in the 20th century safer than they were in the 19th, there were still horrible deaths that post-industrial workers won't face.

I know that we can argue over whether it's better to have some job, any job, even one that might mangle your limbs than no job and no way to pay your bills.

But instead of arguing, let's bake!  Here's a great recipe to celebrate the end of summer.  You can modify it to be lower in fat by having more milk and less cream/half and half.  You can add more or less berries, fresh or frozen--or a different fruit.  You can use up your odds and ends of bread; I used a combination of regular French bread and a multigrain baguette, but I'm willing to bet that any bread would work.

In short, it's a perfect recipe:  easy, cheap, and incredibly tasty.

Blueberry Bread Pudding

1 pound French bread cut into cubes
4 C. cream (a mix of 2 c. half and half, ½ c. cream, and ½ c. milk worked very well)
3 eggs
2 c. sugar
3 T. vanilla extract
2 c. blueberries (1 ½ pints worked very well).

Combine cream/milk mixture, eggs, vanilla, and sugar. Add bread and stir gently. Add blueberries and put into a buttered 9 x 13 inch pan. Bake at 350 for 35 to 40 minutes, when top bread cubes should be golden. For even more of a texture variation, bake the last 5 minutes on broil, but watch carefully to avoid burning.

Our Disillusioned Movie Fathers

For the long holiday week-end, I went to the library and got an armload of movies.  I'm amazed at how behind I am in my movie watching.  I got In the Valley of Elah, thinking it had just been released last year.  Nope, a few years ago.

I got that movie thinking it would be similar to the movie Missing, which I've written about here.  It took me much of the movie to determine the similarities.

Both movies deal with fathers who have some of their most cherished beliefs ripped away from them.  They're even more than disillusioned--one wonders how these men will carry on.  Both movie fathers have their illusions ripped away because their sons have gone missing.  They arrive on the scene thinking that they will save the day and find the missing son, and end up with a corpse and even more questions.

The two actors show the agony of this process differently.  Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah goes for the understated devestation approach with moist eyes, but no tears.  There is one scene where his face transforms into a grim mask as he hears a confession, and it's amazing that he can transform his face into a series of slits.  Jack Lemmon in Missing has a much more visible grief, one that I found excruciating because in the beginning he's so self-assured and confident, and he ends up so crushed and defeated in face, in voice, in posture--he completely inhabits that brokenness. 

Many reviewers have criticized both films as being left wing propaganda or idealist in some way, but I didn't find this to be the case.  When I first saw Missing, I was in high school and considerably less left wing than I would become in college, and these days, again, I'm not on the extreme edge I once inhabited.  I admit that I might be unable to see the bias in these movies because of my tendency to leftist tendencies but I see the conflict differently.

To me, the conflict is more generational, rather than the left-right kind of divide.  The fathers have one set of values, while the sons have a different set.  The fathers' values during the course of the movie are shown to have value, even if the rest of the culture no longer shares them.  In fact, I could argue that the broken societies in which the fathers find themselves point to the value of the abandoned values.

I also rewatched Charlie Wilson's War, another interesting piece of this portrait.  How unlikely that Charlie Wilson would be able to do what he did.  How amazing that the Afghans were able to get the Soviets out of their country.  How sad that the story of Afghanistan follows the trajectory that we're seeing.

I was watching these arms smugglers in that movie and thinking of my idle daydream of becoming a deliverer of  U.N. relief aid.  I think of that ultranutritious nut paste that was created fairly recently that has saved so many lives--but have those lives been saved just to be transformed into cannon fodder?

The movies I've been watching would say yes.  The movies I've been watching have been fairly negative in tone.  I'm ready for a more hopeful message.

Thinking about Manuscript Revisions and Other Friday Linkage

This week at work has been a tough one, in a quarter of tough weeks--but this week may win the prize.  I want next quarter to be one where all the weeks are competing to win the prize for lightheartedness and the granting of deepest wishes.

How I wish I had spent the month of August writing poetry postcards, the way Kathleen did.  Next year!  How I wish I was thinking about readings, like Jeannine is.  This week-end and this month!  I love the view of Kelli's writing shed, and this week-end, I'll go to the writing shed in my mind.  Write now, she commands, and I will.

It's Autumn, and time to think about larger manuscripts again.  Are you working on a manuscript?  Here's a great article on assembling them (thanks to January for this post which got me to the article).

I return to the question which haunts me periodically.  I have a manuscript with poems that have a nuclear theme and explorations of the variety of ways that technology fails us.  Each year, I look back over the new poems that I've written on similar themes, and I wonder about reworking the manuscript.  Add the new poems?  If so, which to take out?

Or is it better to start assembling a second manuscript with similar themes, even though I haven't found a publisher for the first one?

I look at the publishing world, and the fact that I'm 46 years old, and my brutally realistic side says, "You're likely to only have one shot at publishing any given manuscript with that theme--or any other theme.  Take the lesser work out and add the newer."

But once, the lesser poems were the strong poems that I added to the manuscript in past revisions. 

Last year, I wanted to enter the manuscript into some contests that required a shorter manuscript than the one that had approximately 75 poems that was my standard.  I cut rather radically.  So my other question is about optimum length.  I think I like the shorter manuscript.

It occurs to me that I could do a chapbook series on the theme.

Now my head hurts.  I wish I could say that I would be thinking about these things during today's round of meetings, but I will not.  The schedule of winter classes is due at the end of today, and I'm behind.  Insert heavy sigh here.

But after I get that done, I'm ready for my long Labor Day week-end.  Hurrah for 3 day week-ends!
 

Carpe Diem Dates

Last week, my spouse and I found ourselves with a few hours of free time in the middle of the day.  How strange is that?  We debated how to spend that time:  run errands, do housework, rearrange the bookshelves, attack to overgrown yard?

We still weren't sure whether or not we'd be dealing with a hurricane by the end of the week, so we decided to go to the library and get some DVDs, just in case we were stuck inside for awhile (hopefully with electricity!).

We got our books and DVDs and still had time on the meter.  What to do?

We were at the library at the beach, so we decided to wander around a bit.  We ate at a Mexican restaurant with an east wall open to the beach.  We got special prices because it was lunch time.  The restaurant played a mix of traditional Mexican music and techno dance music.  We watched the wind whip the sand and waves, but overall, the weather was beautiful, as it usually is before a hurricane.

As we drove home, my spouse said, "We had a carpe date!" (imagine an accent mark over the carpe, a la carpe diem).

I knew exactly what he meant.  We had seized the day and had a spontaneous date!  Usually we have to plan at least a week ahead to be spontaneous.  Unfortunately, that habit leaves us unprepared when we find ourselves with unexpected free time.  We often waste a good chunk of time trying to figure out what to do, so much time that we spend most of our time trying to figure out how to best use that time.

How many of us do that with our writing lives too?  Or we overlook free chunks of time, because we're committed to the idea that we need to be at a certain desk, with a certain computer, at a certain time of day.

I admire those writers who have carpe dates with their muses, the writers who carry notebooks with them, the writers who spend time thinking about the poems they will write, so that they're ready to seize whatever free moments fall into their days.

I've been trying to do the same thing with my submission process.  Instead of wondering where to send submissions and wasting lots of time looking up journals, I have a list.  If I have 15 minutes, I could get a poetry packet or two in the mail.

I need to do the same thing with typing revised poems into the computer.  I have lots of poems waiting to be sent out into the world, but first I need to type them up.  I've gone through my notebooks and flagged the ones I think would make good additions to book manuscripts I'm assembling and revising.  I'll type those first.

Carpe Diem dates with my muse--I like this idea!  Let the planning for spontaneity begin!