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.

Reality Television, Baader-Meinhof, & More About Memoir

Until recently, I had never watched a reality TV show. It's not that I'm above bad TV; there is some bad TV I love. But I never have much time for watching TV, and I didn't think reality TV was likely to be my thing. I find it excruciating to watch people be awkward or embarrassed (this is part of why I also rarely watch sitcoms). I assumed that reality television would have a lot of that kind of thing, and that it would be tacky and stupid and full of people being mean to each other.

Recently, though, it occurred to me that I had let this whole cultural phenomenon pass me by, and so, sometimes, late at night, when there's nothing else on, I have been dipping into reality TV. I've watched 10 minutes of Hoarders, 7 minutes of Dance Moms, and as much as 5 minutes of several other shows. Usually that's all I can handle, because it's pretty much exactly like I imagined.

Last night, though, I watched an entire episode of Toddlers & Tiaras. And I might watch another one sometime. It was exactly like I imagined it, and yet...I kind of liked it.

My thoughts on Toddlers & Tiaras:

1. One of the moms named her daughter after the calamari she craved during her pregnancy.

2. Was that one mom really that nasty, or was she playing it up to get screen time?

3. I thought the mom who worked as a wrestling "ring girl" and raised extra money by putting out a sexy calendar of herself was actually quite awesome.

4. I was amused by the winking-at-the-audience way the show undercut the moms' claims about their daughters. "The thing is, Destiny is just a star! She absolutely sparkles!" Cut to Destiny, slumped against a wall, finger shoved up her nose to the second knuckle. Or: "Camari loves doing pageants. She has a total understanding of what it is, more like a 6 or 7 or 8 year old would, she's so mature, and this is just absolutely where she wants to be." Cut to montage of Camari's assorted tantrums as her mom tries to get her to practice her moves, tries to get her into the makeup chair, tries to get her dress on her.

5. The biggest prize you can win in any given pageant is a thousand-dollar savings bond, yet one mom said she had spent over $30,000 on pageants in the last two years, and another one admitted that she had maxed out the family's "emergency" credit card on pageant stuff.

6. The biggest surprise for me was that I thought these kids would actually be talented. I mean, I thought they'd be precocious little hoofers, a whole generation of Shirley Temples. But they were pretty much like any 2- or 3-year-old you've ever met. Their moms usually went on stage with them and pushed them around like little rhinestone-bespackled sacks of meat during the "beauty" portion, and during the "disco" portion, when they were supposed to dance, they usually stood around blankly until their moms, signaling from behind the judges or standing on-stage prompting with whispers, reminded them to do their "moves." Their "moves" were a handful of gestures their mothers had taught them--blowing a kiss, doing a John Travolta disco point, shaking their chubby little hips, putting their hands under their chins and batting their eyelashes--which they did at more-or-less random intervals and which were universally unnatural-looking and somewhat disturbing.

7. The show followed three girls, but there were quick-cut montages of the other contestants. I really wanted to know more about the boy doing the disco bit.

8. One of the girls had a white ring around her mouth because she wouldn't take her pacifier out when she was getting her spray tan.

9. I really missed an opportunity not getting the Tiny Tornado in on this.

Speaking of the Tiny Tornado, a friend posted this to my Facebook wall:

On the one hand, it's perfect. On the other hand, it makes me feel that I could have been more creative in coming up with a pseudonym for her. Who knew "tiny tornado" was a cliche?

Or it's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

So, two days ago I wrote a little stub about memoir and the tension between Art and Relationships. Hit a dead end in the writing, and I still don't have a place for it to go. But I do want to say a bit about the possibilities.

What got me thinking about this issue is that I attended a panel of memoirists at the Festival of Faith & Writing last month, and this question came up. The panelists were asked about how they handled writing about real people, how they dealt with the possibility that what they wrote would hurt someone's feelings, violate their privacy, make them angry. What made me sit up and take notice was that all of the writers on the panel gave priority to their relationships over their writing. They came at this question with an underlying premise--"relationships should be respected" that was the opposite of the one I was acculturated to, "your art is the most important thing."

So each of them had developed strategies for preserving their relationships. One gave her manuscript to people and asked for feedback about how she had written about them, though she reserved to herself the right to make final decisions. Another actually gave some people veto power, though she was an extreme outlier. Many made specific changes to protect people's identities, creating composite characters or putting one person's words into another's mouth. One woman gave a single character all the thoughtless and hurtful things her friends said to her after her daughter was born with Down Syndrome, for instance.

One writer made such dramatic changes to people and situations that I thought she had crossed a line and was no longer writing memoir. For instance, she took a conversation she'd heard two adults have and, in order to disguise their identities, put it into the mouths of two imaginary children on a playground. To me, inventing characters and settings wholesale is fiction.

I was interested, though, to hear them say that much of this was pointless anyway. One writer, after carefully disguising someone, was surprised that everyone figured out who she was anyway (though she refused to confirm their guesses). Another got her brother-in-law's approval for her book, but after it was published he told her that it was different actually having it out there rather than just reading the manuscript, and there were things he regretted allowing her to include.

The other piece of all this is that I feel quite differently about this issue than I did when I was young. I have, in recent years, even found myself relieved that certain pieces were never published, or at least never published in any place my family might happen upon, because they would have hurt my mother, and right now in my my life, I don't want to hurt my mother.

I know people who remain estranged from their families of origin, and for good reason. But I also know many people whose relationships with their families have evolved. I'm one. My parents, for instance, are never going to match up with the picture of ideal parents I have in my mind. But over the years, I've learned to do a better job of taking them as they are; they may not express love in the ways that I craved as a child, but as an adult I can see the ways that they do express it. Despite their failings, I've become very fond of them--not just loving them in the automatic way that children love their parents, but fond of them. I like seeing them. I enjoy spending time with them. I respect them--my mother in particular was an extraordinary young woman who made her own way in the world at age 16 with purpose and intent and discipline.

I have a friend whose childhood was undeniably bad. But she has a pretty good relationship with her father these days. She says, "The thing is, he's a much better parent of grown children than he was of young children." These things are complicated and they change as we change.

As a middle-aged person, I am glad that I didn't recklessly burn any bridges during that young adult time of feeling that my parents had failed me in every possible way. Because my parents, love them as I do, are not the kind of people to get over that kind of thing.

I still have to wrestle with these issues. I am a writer, and the thing I write about most often is my life. This means that if you are in my life, even briefly, I will almost certainly write about you. Sometimes people like this--if I spend time with your kids, I will probably write something about your kids, probably privately, and sometimes I send a collection of what I've written to the parents and they think it's great. On the other hand, sometimes I mention something that seems innocuous to me and it hurts someone's feelings. Or I think I'm being funny and the humor doesn't come through, and they're offended. No one has stopped being my friend because of this, but I know that some of my friends--I'm thinking of one in particular--have a love/hate relationship with my tendency to write about them.

And there are a few things I absolutely long to write about and can't because David doesn't want me to. He is a very private person and is remarkably patient with my tendency to hang our laundry out to dry--indeed, he loves my writing and is my biggest fan--so I try to respect those few things around which he has drawn a line. I try. And I almost always succeed.

The Child You Don't Want

I have had a cold since Friday afternoon. I spent most of the weekend in my big chair, while David and the kids brought me tea and the like. It hasn't been a bad cold, but because of a persistent cough, I wasn't able to sleep more than about an hour at a time, with hours of late-night TV in between. Last night, desperate to get some rest, I took a vicodin, and slept for about 6 hours.

Today, I felt more energetic, because of the sleep, but also kind of off and flaky because of the drug hangover. Or because of the combination of the drug hangover and the cold. Or something.

Anyway, many things happened today to remind me that I was not at my best. I loaded the dishwasher but discovered hours later I hadn't turned it on. I went to Hobby Lobby with a short list of supplies I needed for my next arigurumi project. In the parking lot, I spontaneously decided it was a good time to clean out some tissues and napkins and random bits of paper that had accummulated in the front seat and floor of my van. Only after I'd shoved the mess into a reeking garbage bin outside the store did I realize that I'd managed to crumple up my shopping list and toss it in there, too. I did OK, though I bought the wrong size crochet hook, and tomorrow I'll have to go back for one more skein of yarn.

And then, I took Word Boy and the Tiny Tornado to the bookstore after preschool, and it was only after we were out of the car and starting to walk toward the store that I realized I'd left the van running. I haven't done that since early in Word Boy's life, when I was seriously sleep-deprived from his round-the-clock nursing schedule. That time, I left it in gear, too, and it slowly drove itself into the garage door with Word Boy inside it.

My brain remains fuzzy and fragmented. And yet! I have resolved to write every day, so I will write something.

At the Festival of Faith & Writing, I heard Amy Julia Becker talk about her recent book, A Good and Perfect Gift. It's a momoir, in this case about Becker's daughter Penny, who was diagnosed with Down Syndrome shortly after birth. Becker was an excellent speaker. One of the things I like about the FFW is the opportunity it gives me to hear from people whose beliefs are very different from my own but who are thoughtful and self-aware. Becker is pro-life, and one of her concerns is the high rate of abortion of babies with Down Syndrome; she said that just over 50% of babies who are diagnosed with Down Syndrome are aborted now. She also talked about some recently-developed blood tests that can allow the detection of chromosomal abnormalities early in pregnancy and without risky and invasive procedures like amniocentesis, which she expects to increase that percentage.

If everyone who was pro-life were like Becker, though, we'd have a very different conversation about abortion taking place in America. During the Q&A, an audience member asked, with great intensity, "What do you do if you encounter a woman who is thinking of aborting her baby with Down Syndrome?" Her tone suggested to me that what she really wanted to know was how to stop her.

Becker said that she thinks many families fear having a baby with Down Syndrome because they don't have a good understanding of what these children are likely to be like, what they might be capable of, what good qualities they are likely to have. She thinks it's too bad that most people probably don't know any families with Down Syndrome kids, that they don't have a model of what is both positive and challenging about raising these kids. So, she said, if the woman is open to it, you might offer her some information, or some opportunities to meet some families raising Down Syndrome kids. She thinks that if more people knew more about Down Syndrome, they'd be more willing to raise these kids.

But, she said, the most important thing is to be compassionate, because this woman is disappointed, and probably frightened, and facing a hard choice. And, she said, ultimately, you have to respect that it is her choice to make, and refrain from judgment or any words or actions that will add to her burden.

Well. Rock on, Amy Julia Becker.

In her response to another question--I don't remember the question--Becker said that someone had told her once thats having a child born with an obvious disability is not that different from having any old ordinary baby. "You just find out that much sooner that you got the child you didn't want."

Every parent in the audience chuckled and nodded knowingly.

I think most parents have to deal, at some point, and to a greater or lesser extent, with figuring out that there is something they were hoping for from parenting that they're not going to get. My friend Farina Endfen is a tough, authority-defying, mess-loving type of person. She looked forward to mucking through swamps with her son, catching frogs and lizards, and looking under logs for crawly things. Her son, it turns out, doesn't so much care to be outside, or to get messy that way. In the realm of parental disappointments, this is a small one. But it requires mindfulness to negotiate nonetheless--the awareness that your child is an autonomous person and not your pet or your doll, the willingness to accept the differences between you, to support your kid in being the kid he is, to manage your own disappointments, large or small, and not expect your child to carry that burden for you.

David and I sometimes joke that parenting the Tiny Tornado is a great blessing because she completely strips away any illusion we might have had that we were in control, that we could "instill" our children with certain virtues or interests. I remember saying to my friend Carolyn, back when the Tornado was maybe 2, that I was having to learn a whole new parenting style with her. Carolyn said, "Detachment?" And she was right.

Today I was reminded--not that I needed to be--that you don't always get what you want. I have this vision of what it is like to take kids to the bookstore; they browse contentedly, they choose a book or two, we pay our bill, they start reading in the car on the way home. Because I love books and I want my kids to love them, too.

Some of this happens. They choose books; we pay for them; they start reading on the way home. Recently the Lego Savant has begun tearing through a series of novels, staying up late to read, spending the whole of a day caught up in a book. I'd have been perfectly happy with him if this had never happened--but I'm glad it did. I hoped I would have at least one kid who was, at least some of the time, a voracious reader.

But bookstore trips never go the way I picture them in my mind. The Lego Savant didn't come to the bookstore with us; he knew exactly what books he wanted (#8 and #9 in the Ranger's Apprentice series, and he was happy to have me pick them up for him). Word Boy wanted a manga, either a Warriors graphic novel or a Legend of Zelda book. The store was sold out of most of the Warriors graphic novels, but he hadn't read the one they had in stock, so he chose that.

The problem started when the Tiny Tornado chose the same book.

Obviously, she can't read it. But she loves to look at the pictures and make up her own story about what's happening, and she loves to have the same kinds of books her older brothers do. It gives her tremendous pleasure. And my philosophy of book selection is that kids should pretty much be able to choose whatever book they want; we will steer them away from books that have content we think might be uncomfortable for them (no suspense novels for the Lego Savant!) and if they ever headed for something I thought was truly inappropriate, I'd steer them elsewhere. But I'm not going to say nay just because she chose a book she can't actually read yet.

Anyway, Word Boy fell to pieces. He had been sitting on a couch in the kids' area, reading his book and waiting for us to make up our minds, and when he saw what the Tiny Tornado had chosen, he had a fit. He went boneless, and fell onto the couch. He began to shudder and "huff"--breathing rapidly and making little noises. It's an anxiety attack.

Why? Several reasons:

1. He did not want the Tiny Tornado to choose the same book he did, because that makes it not special

2. It is #3 in a series and she had not "read" #1 or #2; reading the books in order is very important.

3. She can't even read it!

4. If she just wants to look at the pictures, the Zelda manga have much better illustrations for that.

5. The Lego Savant might try to get her to give him the book, and she might agree, and sthen she might change her mind and then there might be a big fight (this is such a typical scenario that I told her I would buy her that book on the condition that she under no circumstances give it away to her older brother).

How do I handle this kind of thing? I said, "No. You can't do that here. If you can pull yourself together to walk to the checkout, I will buy that book for you. If you can't behave appropriately, I will put that book back on the shelf."

He huffed and shuddered and whined.

I said, "The Tiny Tornado and I are going to the checkout. If you can pull yourself together to come with us, I will buy the book."

And so the Tiny Tornado and I headed to the checkout, and after a moment Word Boy got off the couch and followed along.

As we walked to the car, he said, "I really felt like everything was going to be horrible, but it's not really horrible at all."

I said, "Yes. Your anxiety likes to tell you those kinds of lies. But usually the horrible thing doesn't happen, and if it does, it's not as horrible as you expected, and even if it's pretty bad, you often find out that you can deal with it."

It's very draining, even now that I've learned that not engaging is the fastest route to the end of the fit, and am not letting myself be sucked into it with him. It would only have been worse if the Lego Savant had been there, because he gets embarrassed when Word Boy does this kind of thing in public and jumps into his own anxiety-management mode, which is the effort to control everything around him, starting with Word Boy, and then to use his dissatisfaction with the present moment as a jumping-off point to complain about everything that bothers him about his siblings, me, our home, our yard, his life.

It's extra-hard when their issues feed on each other. You should see them some days, doing seatwork at the dining room table. The Lego Savant has aversions to many sounds and smells, and depending on his general mood and how strained his resources have been, he can be driven mad by Word Boy's breathing or the scratch of his pencil. But, in typical Lego Savant fashion--"flexible" not being a word one would readily apply to him--he will refuse such obvious solutions as taking himself to work in his bedroom. Meanwhile, the Lego Savant likes to talk quietly to himeself as he works, especially when he's solving math problems, and this drives Word Boy crazy because it can be challengings trying to solve your own math problem when someone is sitting across from you muttering, "5 and 8 is 13, carry the one, so that's 60, 63, OK..."

I have been known, on occasion, to point out to them that if they were in school, they'd be in a room of 20-30 kids, all of whom would be breathing, many of whom would have scratchy pencils, some of whom would be congested and making gross sniffling noises, and that they themselves would be discouraged from muttering, from drawing little monsters in the margins of their math workbooks, from getting up for a snack to help them concentrate ("Mom! Why does he have to crunch like that?"). It falls on deaf ears; they both want the problems between them to be solved by the other one changing his behavior. I have made little headway in getting them to see the options that are available to them in terms of modifying their own behavior.

I didn't mean to sound whiny. This is all one of the pieces that's hard, a problem I continue to delude myself that I should be able to solve. If I could just open their brains and pour in what has taken me decades to learn about living with and managing anxiety and inflexibility and sensitivity! I want it to be easier for them than it was for me, and I want it to be easier for them than it is. I always thought that if I were the right kind of parent, it would be.

That is a Fault Indeed, but I Cannot Laugh At It

I don't know why I remember this out of all the hundreds of movies I've seen and books I've read, but 25 years ago, Chevy Chase starred in a movie about a sportswriter from New York City who moves to the country to fulfill his dream of writing a novel. Wacky hijinks ensue. I have no memory at all of the wacky hijinks. What I do remember is the scene where he has finally finished his novel, and he gives the manuscript to his wife. She sits down to start reading it, him watching expectantly, and as she reads her shoulders slump, her head bows low, and in a few minutes she is weeping, the manuscript drooping from her hands as she sobs, "It's teh-eh-eh-eh-errible."

I had a similar experience recently. At the Festival of Faith & Writing, I got chatting with a woman who had a booth in the exhibition area. We had a tremendous amount in common--she was even a Quaker for most of her life, which makes her the first other Quaker I've run into at the Festival who wasn't Parker Palmer or Brent Bill. We chatted away so comfortably that I might have met my new best friend.

She had written a novel, one of a handful of books recently published by a new small press. Of course I bought a copy. I am a sucker for the personal touch. I can't bond with someone like that, and not buy her book.

It's a beautiful book, with a lovely cover that fulfills all four of the principals of good design: Contrast, Alignment, Repetition, and Proximity. The illustration and coloring evoke a mood very appropriate to the book's story and setting.

The paper is high quality, and the typography avoids most (though not quite all) of the errors usually made by small presses and the self-published. The drop-caps are crisp and well done, never impinging on the neighboring text; the printer's ornaments are graceful; the font is well-chosen and laid out with appropriate leading; widows and orphans are rare.

Alas, the book itself--the 450-page book--is terrible. It is terrible from the first line; by the end of the first page my shoulders were slumping. Apparently the press spent all its money on designers and typographers and had nothing left for any kind of editor, either to correct the ubiquitous problems of comma usage or to suggest the many large and small cuts that cry out to be made in the text. The book is a perfect fractal; every part of it, every sentence on every page I have looked at, is just as bad as the whole thing. It reads like the essays my freshman composition students used to turn in, stretched to a thousand times their natural length.

I don't know what allows a bad writer to finish a book this ambitious. It can't be the love of language or the thrill of a well-turned phrase, because there are no well-turned phrases here, there is no language to love. It does not seem that she could motivated by a love of good books, because surely anyone who had read some sufficient number of them would have developed at least enough of a natural ear to avoid perhaps one, or even two, of this writer's many errors of style and usage.

The author of this book is a nice person, warm, personable, caring. This, of course, does not excuse bad writing. She cares very much about the story she has to tell; she is earnestly convinced that it is important that this story be told, and just as important that it be read. She expects that it will bring readers "healing, inspiration, and blessing." This is also not an excuse.

And yet I do not just excuse this writer. I admire her. I admire her book, which is her vision made manifest. Like that vocal ministry that can seem so excruciating, so terribly beside the point in worship but which speaks to someone in the room, I expect this book will find its readers. That is what a writer hopes for, and the terrible ones, perhaps, deserve it just as much as the good ones.

Unchurched: Six Months On

It's been about six months since I laid down my membership in my Quaker meeting. I haven't been to worship on a Sunday since, not in a Quaker meeting or anyplace else. I miss it. I really enjoyed the Vespers service at the Festival of Faith & Writing for giving me a chance to worship, and I'm looking forward to next Saturday's bat mitzvah for the same reason. But I'm not feeling led to go to weekly worship, despite missing it. I thought I would. I left my Quaker meeting with an optimistic sense that I was going to find a new religious community, and imagined myself visiting around on Sunday mornings for awhile until something clicked.

And then I didn't do that.

"I'm just not ready to date yet," I said. And this feels true. It's a big commitment to join a community, and there's a lot of work to be done. Getting to know people, learning the norms, taking the risk that you'll invest your time and energy and it won't work out. Once in a conversation with some friends, I said that if my relationship with Raider ended, I'd probably just choose to be single. I love my relationship with Raider, it's the foundation for everything else in my life, but let's not kid ourselves: it has taken a lot of work. I sometimes doubt I'd be willing to take on that work again.

Maybe I'm not willing to take on the work of joining a religious community, either, even though I know that the payoff can make it worthwhile.

Also, I'm still a Quaker. This felt very clear to me when I was at the FLGBTQC midwinter gathering. So, it's not that I'm completely uncommitted and ready to be snapped up by any attractive faith that comes along. I'm a Quaker without a monthly meeting, and that feels different. It has held me back from visiting congregations that I might like but never feel I could commit fully to.

I've also been lukewarm about the obvious churches I might visit, the Unitarian Universalists and the United Church of Christ. One of my points of friction with my monthly meeting was our tendency to be talky, self-satisfied, affluent liberals, and I can't see the UU or the UCC improving much on that.

At the Festival of Faith & Writing, I had the opportunity to get to know a friend-of-a-friend, and listening to her talk about her church, I got excited for the first time. She is part of a United Methodist congregation in Brighton, Michigan (about 40 minutes from where I live) that decided to be a "missional" church. Their mission statement is "transformed by God to transform the world," and they try to do this by taking concrete action in their community and in the world. They feed the homeless in Detroit and house them in Brighton; they support a local dental clinic for low-income people, and a hospital in Haiti. They do work projects locally, in Appalachia, in North Dakota, and sometimes in the Czech Republic, where they also financially support a sister church. They throw a birthday party every month at a long-term care facility. Look at this list!

Quakers think of ourselves as activists, but in my experience our activism tends toward writing letters, writing "minutes" that we send to legislators and organizations, and demonstrating. It's not that I think a faithful witness like maintaining a weekly vigil for peace for over a decade of war is something to be derided. But I have often longed to be able to do something more concrete. I have always admired the Baby Pantry my friend Julie's church maintains, for instance. I hoped that when my monthly meeting built a meetinghouse, we'd be able to do something like that, something that would let us, on a regular basis, do something concrete and good for a real person standing in front of us.

But the meetinghouse we built doesn't have enough storage space to do that kind of thing (I was, for years, a big booster of the building project. But I remember the moment that changed for me, when I came to feel that we were spending too much money to build a building that would be too small for our needs as soon as we moved in. I know that many people love that meetinghouse, and it is a beautiful little building to worship in. But some of the doors that I hoped would open once we stopped renting space weren't able to open because of space constraints).

Anyway, I found myself seriously attracted to Suzy's church. It felt restful to imagine a church where, perhaps, I wouldn't be asked to do a lot of thinking and talking so much as I would be invited to show up to make sandwiches, to celebrate a birthday, to hammer a nail, to get some diapers or a new crib to a foster family. Perhaps part of what I was attracted to was Suzy's undiluted enthusiasm for the projects her church does. Sure, you'd expect that of her--she's the Director of Missions and Outreach. And she seems like a pretty enthusiastic person in general. I expect that many other people who meet her like her as much as I did. But it also made me aware of one reason I haven't gone church-shopping. After 20 years of practicing the Quakerly endurance test of sitting still, I am strongly drawn to the idea of specific action.

Hmmm. This isn't what I meant to talk about. I was going to talk about the many secular, familial, personal, and professional opportunities that have opened up. Laying down my membership cleared my calendar and settled my mind. But I will save that for another day.

Maybe we need to remember that irritants are the progenitor of pearls

My Monthly Meeting's April business meeting was a big one for me. I came out with so much to think about. There's a whole big thing I'll need to write about how we describe ourselves and why, what unites us as Quakers, belief versus action, and big stuff like that. But today I get to write about something a little smaller.

Anybody who knows me in real life or reads my blog knows I've been struggling with my place in my meeting for awhile, and have been on hiatus since last May, though I have attended business meetings because I have continued as meeting treasurer.

Our meeting begins business meeting with worship sharing, during which we explore a query. Usually they're the queries from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's Faith & Practice, and in April we took on #4: Care for the Meeting Community, which includes questions like, "Do I recognize and face disagreements and other situations that put me in conflict with others?" and "Are avenues for exploring differences kept open? To what extent does our meeting ignore differences in order to avoid possible conflicts?"

One of our members spoke to the query. She started out by describing herself as a "combative" person; I would not have used that word about her, but I recognized in her description my own perception of her as very direct and not afraid of conflict (I know a few people like this, two in particular in my meeting. I admire them, even though they intimidate me a little). But she went on to say that she thinks sometimes we fall into a mistaken belief that every little disagreement is something that has to be addressed and solved, but we might be better off recognizing that these little disconnects and differing perspectives are something we can just accept and live with.

"Hmmm," I said to myself. I have Big Religious Reasons for my hiatus from my Friends meeting; I also have Petty Little Personal Reasons, and, honestly, it is the petty little personal stuff that makes being there hardest, that blindsides me when I've been happily chugging along through the social hour, that leaves me uncertain how to proceed: do I need to bring this up with this person? Or is it best to let it be? If I don't bring it up, am I being accepting and peaceful, or cowardly? If I speak to it, am I bringing Truth or fomenting discord?

So this Friend's words spoke directly to questions I've been wrestling with.

A few days later, I went to the Festival of Faith & Writing. The festival opened with a talk by Scott Cairns, which I found a bit rambly and hard-to-follow, maybe because I was tired. But he said a few things that seemed like they were speaking right to me.

One was that he talked about alienation from church as "an ongoing failure." He sees isolated spirituality as lacking in an essential collective quality, as being unsupported and, in need, unsupportive. "Faith cannot be both solitary and healthy," he said. "Somehow or other, these beloveds must find their way home."

I know he said these things, in these words, because they spoke so directly to me that I wrote them down.

He then went on to talk about God as being an essential witness in conflict. God's witness, he said, has freed him from the need to make every offender aware of their offense. Practicing the awareness of the presence of God, and trusting in God as a loving witness, led, he says, to forgiveness being an almost-automatic process for him. He found that he was no longer an angry person who needed every person to be called to task for every transgression, no matter how small.

I was not challenged by this at all because I could see it had nothing to do with me, and my problems in my Quaker meeting. Thank goodness! Because I really want to cling to the belief that the problem is not with me, but with my meeting, and the other people in it, and that the solution is for me to find a way to speak Truth to them and change them. So many times in the past, the solution to a conflict, whether between me and David, me and one of my kids, me and a friend, me and my mother, or me and people in my Meeting, has turned out to be a change in my own attitudes and behavior. That's not gonna happen this time! No matter how much my Friend's comments in worship-sharing began to move me, or how convicted I felt by Cairns.

Am I convincing you? Because I'm trying really hard to convince myself.

The cherry on top of this sundae: the other day, on the way home from taking the kids to the park, I passed a church that had this message on its letter board (actually, this isn't the exact message. In my memory, it's got this profanity, but I'm sure there was actually a different word outside the church):

Stop bitching about your church. If it were perfect, they wouldn't let you in.

It's so true. I know for a fact that other people in my meeting are made uncomfortable by others' actions and opinions, too--and that I am one of those others. For instance, a year or two ago, one member spoke in worship-sharing about how troubled she is by how many families in our meeting homeschool. She has a concern that families that choose to homeschool are abandoning school systems in which they would be an asset, and improve the quality of the school for other children. She feels this so deeply that she was near tears talking about it.

Now, one reaction I have to this is that I've heard this argument before, many times, and rejected it. I have all kinds of reasons why I think this is a weak anti-homeschooling argument. And it would be kind of fun to run through those again.

But that's not the point. The point is, this woman feels a concern for disadvantaged kids and their educations, and she worries that parents pulling their kids out of public schools leaves behind the most vulnerable children and makes their learning environment worse. She may be right or wrong about whether my family's, or any other homeschooling family's, involvement would be an asset for a public school. But what she feels cannot be denied. And the number of families homeschooling in our meeting reminds her of her concerns, and that is distressing to her.

I've also heard one mom in our meeting say, half-jokingly, that she wishes there weren't so many of us in the meeting homeschooling, because she thinks her kids would be better off homeschooled and it's just not an option for them, and we homeschooling families are a constant reminder.

My point is, if there are choices people in my meeting make that remind me of my own concerns and fears, or are very different from my own carefully-considered choices, and are therefore painful or irritating to me, well, I'm performing that same service for others in the meeting. I am also a source of discomfort. Probably I am a source of discomfort in ways I don't know about, because people have not chosen to make me aware of my every transgression.

I tried for a neat little conclusion here, but I don't have one. So I'm just going to toss this all out there. It's what I've been thinking about. It feels like movement. God only knows where it will lead.