Gene Luen Yang, Writer of Comic Books, is My Spiritual Advisor

Gene Luen Yang is the acclaimed author of American-Born Chinese, a book everyone should read, as well as Boxers & Saints, which you should read for a lot of reasons but most especially if the only thing you know about China's Boxer Rebellion is that Spike killed a Slayer during it. Yang has also done a whole bunch of Avatar comics, and, with co-author Sonny Liew, The Shadow Hero, which tells the story of a Chinese-American teenager growing up in Chinatown in the 1930s. Everything I've read by Yang includes elements of both realism and magic, fantasy and metaphor. He manages to be at once both a quick read and a deep read. He understands that comics have always been about more than just shallow humor or people in costumes having adventures, and he is a master of exploiting this potential to write comics that work on multiple levels and multiple themes.

He is also, although he doesn't know it, my spiritual advisor.

Here is Yang giving the opening keynote at April's Festival of Faith & Writing, in an image I borrowed from the Festival's Facebook page:

And this is, edited for blog-worthiness, what I wrote to some friends after seeing that keynote:

I have been in a very low place about my writing for some time, feeling that I have never done as much with it as I might have, or found the audience I think might be out there.  It's discouraging to feel like I'm still wrestling with the same questions about my writing that have been troubling me for more than 20 years.

But I have never become the writer I thought I was setting out to be in my twenties. This is hard in part because of stories I've been told over and over by important people in my life.

First, there is message I've been hearing since childhood about underachievement and not living up to my potential. My parents and teachers loved to tell me that I was much too smart for the grades I was earning; this persisted all the way up to my First Grad School Foray, when a prof told me that, although I was doing "A" work, I clearly wasn't doing my best work. Recently, during my first meeting with Word Boy's shrink, he asked me about my academic background, and I was more thorough and honest than I should have been. The shrink glommed onto my multiple times in grad school and declared me to be an underachiever who has trouble finishing things.

I have a big button on my chest marked PRESS HERE TO ACTIVATE SELF-DOUBT MECHANISM, and "underachiever" is the magic word that pushes it. So the shrink's snap judgment was hard for me to hear, especially given the struggle I'd already been having.

Another story I took in as a young women is the doctrine many writers and artists subscribe to: that their work is very important, that it may well be the most important thing in the world. Especially when I was a young lesbian writer in the 90s, the narrative among queer writers was that we were doing something really vital and important just by writing about our lives honestly.

I don't think we were wrong. I think telling stories is vital, and I believe it changes the world. I believe telling stories is one of the best ways of changing the world, that people are vulnerable to stories in a way they aren't vulnerable to argument or instruction. I feel that my current leading to write about sex and spirituality honestly and concretely is important. I think it matters that I do this, and I think it matters that I am the one to do it, that I can do it in a way that nobody else I know of is able to right now.

But this doctrine teaches you that your art is not just an important thing, but that it's the important thing. That it matters more than relationships, and jobs with health insurance and having time to relax watching TV. The doctrine says that the primary purpose of your life is to develop your art to its highest level and find the largest audience for it that you can.

I haven't done that. I am very very good at the kind of writing I do, and I have worked hard to develop that skill. But I haven't published much; I've never written a book. I haven't been driven and persistent. I've been distracted by falling in love and having children. I've decided, on the cusp of maybe being able to take my performing career wider, that I didn't want to live my life broke and on the road just to be able to tell stories to a few hundred or thousand more people.

And that is just me underachieving again, and being too weak to pursue my writing the way I ought to.

Over the last few months, I've been feeling very discouraged. I've struggled to find time to blog. I've felt  that, at 48, I can no longer fool myself into thinking that  I am going to change: become a more successful writer, publish a book, start having an income from writing. I've wondered what it was like to just admit you'd failed, that something you had wanted since you were a child, and thought you were suited to, was never going to happen. I've wondered how you get over that, whether you ever do.

I was carrying this as a very heavy weight, and as much as I was looking forward to the Festival, I thought, too, that it was going to be painful for me to be surrounded by writers who have done what I never could manage to do. I was ready to love it and be hurt by it, all at the same time.

And then, the opening plenary at noon on Thursday was Gene Luen Yang. I was familiar with some of his work, and had heard him give a presentation at a previous Festival, so was looking forward to hearing him, in a vaguely curious kind of way. 

As it turned out, Yang is a hilarious speaker. He had slides! His talk was great just on that level: well-organized, engaging, a pleasure to listen to.

But his topic was the trade-off between art and other options in our lives, and he turned the conventional narrative inside-out. Early on, he quoted Emerson saying something about writers needing to be sanctified to their art, but Yang rejected that kind of hyperbole and went on to talk about writers and artists, acquaintances and friends of his, who have made other choices. A friend, say, who was a blogger and podcaster but stopped doing that when he had kids, in order not to divide his attention. Yang has kids, too, and he said, "Fatherhood was calling me out of comics." He talked about the solitary nature of art and how challenging that is to any relationship, but instead of buying into the idea that relationships are an impediment to art, he saw it as a matter of being called into his art and also being called out of his art, so that choosing to do less art in order to be present with family wasn't "giving something up" but embracing a new and different call.

As a side note, I really like that Yang took seriously things like being a blogger or self-published comic author. Like all writing conferences, FFW elevates the widely-published and the award winners above others: Yang was a noon-time plenary, for instance, while the evening plenaries were a National Book Award winner, and Anne Lamott. The award winner and Anne Lamott were both disappointing— neither of them prepared for their talks to the extent of even having notes, but stood on stage and rambled for 90 minutes. I saw a half-dozen talks throughout the weekend that were so much better, by writers I'd never heard of before. I know how the business works, that these big names pull in attenders. But I was very glad that Yang, who had been a self-published comic book artist for a long time, talked very matter-of-factly about the art that is created outside that circle of folks who are most highly rewarded by the system we have. He told a story about seeing some people doing cosplay at a convention, and how it put him in mind of the stations of the cross: people embodying stories that are important to them. He turned to the friend he was with and said, "Something religious is happening there." I just really liked him, and would probably put him high on the list of "writers I'd like to have a cup of coffee with." /end of digression

It was like Yang was speaking right to me, and I am not doing justice to the wit, intelligence, or spiritual depth of his talk. He didn't act like these different calls weren't a challenge, but he didn't see accepting a call away from one's art as a failure. He did talk some about the guilt that you can feel working on solitary art, and how starting to make money from his work after the success of American Born Chinese alleviated some of that. But at the same time, he didn't want money to be the only measure of art or the only way to justify it.

Now we get to the meat: Yang said that, for him, he is relieved of the feeling that he is being selfish when he works by thinking of art in four ways:

First, that art is an icon, that points to something higher than itself while building on what came before. That it is always part of something bigger than just yourself.

Second, that art is a form a prayer for those who practice it. This is my experience as well.

Third, that art is an organ of the body that is vital to the artist's functioning. But the body, he says, is not all art, any more than it's all liver or all intestine. This is also my experience; I get restless and unwell-feeling if I haven't written, and will eventually get to a point where I can hardly do anything else unless I write first. Sort of like reaching the point where sleep is the only option, or eating, or peeing.

And finally, Yang said that art is an act of service. Yang is a practicing Catholic, and he quotes Pope John Paul II's letter to artists, in which the pope says that art is a service that renews a people.

Yang absolutely ministered to me and eased my pain, through his clarity that art is necessary to both the artist and the artist's community, and also through his clarity that art is only one necessary thing; that a call to write or make art doesn't have to be all-encompassing; that it may well not be a person's only meaningful work. As we Quakers say, he spoke to my condition, by lovingly sharing an understanding that counters a hundred voices naming me an underachiever, and another hundred calling me a traitor and a coward and a dilettante for not placing my writing work above all else. I went into Yang's talk burdened and walked out unburdened.

I can update this by saying that, three months later, I've remained very peaceful about the writing I'm doing, and I've been able to do good work; some of my best work ever, in fact, for a talk I gave at the Friends General Conference Gathering last week (the "talk I gave" link goes right to the beginning of my talk). Gene Luen Yang seems to have laid something to rest in me, and it hasn't yet managed to rise up again.

This blog post written and edited while helping the Tornado build a wooden marble maze. Typos and incoherencies should be considered the charming side effect of being a writer and a mom at literally the same time.