The truth is that once again I have not produced a ton of new material this week – a little bit of interesting stuff in my journal – mostly spurred on by the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz (what a great poet!) For example, look at this beautiful piece, “If There Is No God:”

If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother’s keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,
By saying that there is no God.

Gorgeous, right?

So even though I’m not writing very much, I’m reveling what comes with a life of words. Here’s a list of the good things that have my way this week because I have taken on my vocation as writer.

1. A poetry reading with Delaware Poet Laureate JoAnn Balingit.

2. A conversation about the writing life with writers Josiah Bancroft and Piotr Florczyk.

3. A beautiful blog award from Molly at My Cozy Book Nook. Thanks, Molly.

4. Review books including The Mysterious Life of the Heart: Writing from The Sun about Passion, Longing and Love and Ten Things I Hate about Christianity. I’m going to try to get the Mom of Andilit to review this second one, so stay tuned for her wit and wisdom.

5. My students who have impressed me with their ability to learn, write with such lovely description, and talk about art, and food, and film, and life with such enthusiasm. Thank you for reminding me why I’m a teacher.

6. Most importantly, the chance to use my gifts and desires in the way God intended. I enjoy (and honestly, sometimes loathe) nothing more than writing. It gives me focus and a center, and I’m eternally grateful to be able to live a life filled with passion where every day could potentially be different. Yippee!

I’m off to the parentals for the weekend with Kathy. We’re going to do a little gardening, watch the UVa/Wake Forest basketball game LIVE (I’ll secretly be rooting for Wake with my dad, but don’t tell anyone since I’ll be sitting in the UVa section), and have a great Greek dinner with good friends Hez, Ed, and Henry. I’ll be back on Monday, but until then, enjoy your weekend, relax, do something you love, and revel in the coming spring.

Filed by Andi at 8:05 am under Book Recommendations, Teaching Triumphs and Travails, Written and Wrought
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Lots of things are in transition in my life right now – job, house, mindset, diet – and I love it. I may be one of the few people in the world that really likes change; changes give me the chance to discard old things (like those boxes of school papers still sitting at my parents’ house because I think I might “need” them some day) and take on new ones as I journey down this road of life. I’m not a fan of the stagnant or the static. Perhaps that’s why I teach: new students every term. I prefer streams to lakes; I prefer wind to stillness; I prefer breathing to not (obviously). So in honor of transition and change, here are a few good transitional things. Feel free to share your own.

1. The change of seasons. When I lived in San Francisco, I loved the city – the arts, the food, the transportation, the food, the water, did I mention the food – but I don’t think I could ever live there for long again for the simple reason that there isn’t much of a seasonal change. Now natives will tell you there’s a marked difference between summer (which comes in October) and winter, and to them, there is probably a big difference. But to me, a girl who craves feet of snow come January, the difference between 50 and 70 is not drastic enough for me.

2. Labyrinths. I love these mystical paths that circle back on themselves but always bring about change in the people who walk them. There’s just something about slowing down to walk a set path that calms the spirit and gives space for real introspection. My friend Dorit Brauer does beautiful things with labyrinths; she even took a road trip to visit them around the world.
– Labyrinth by Dorit Brauer

3. Water. At the back of my house here in Maryland, there’s a stream, a creek they call it on the roadsigns, and when it rains or the snow melts, this stream pours through it’s little canyon with force that belies it’s little size. Water never stays the same; even when I drink it, it becomes something else as soon as it enters my body. The ocean changes every second. Rain never falls in the same way. Water is not immutable, and I love it for that.

4. Risk Taking. This morning I was reading from Writers on Writing, and Richard Stern has this to say in his essay “Autumnal Accounting Endangers Happiness”:

Writers, far more commonly than nonwriters, not only organize what happens to them into stories but throughout their writing lives seek out sometimes perilous experience that may make good ones. Like Mailer they enlist in the wartime infantry, or like Hemingway take risks in jungles or bullfight rings, not only to test themselves but to observe their feelings and reactions as they’re being tested. Not a few have serial affairs or marriages.

Even cautious writers like me find ourselves risking not only our own happiness but that of those we love. I will not degrade this risk taking by saying that it serves our ambitions or careers. It is, I believe, the closest things some of us have to vocation, an almost irrational commitment to the accurate, powerful depiction of what we’ve felt, seen, believed, conceived and imagined. That the vocational call is almost surely a domestic rather than a long-distance one doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter that the one called is also the caller.

5. Words. They change depending on who says them, who hears them, what the tone of them is. They morph based on context or in relationship to the words around them. They change over time (See the OED). They twist and spin and elude us when we need them. They are transitions themselves – beautiful glittery things that most of the time slip through our fingers.

In what ways can you celebrate change? Or not celebrate it? Where are your transitional points and the things that make those changes easier?

For me, change is life. Sometimes I wish it wasn’t, but most of the time it is. And most days, I would prefer that to the same thing every day. . . Immutability is overrated.

Filed by Andi at 7:42 am under Teaching Triumphs and Travails, Written and Wrought
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This morning’s Write on Wednesday prompt appeared only hours after I had a really intense and wonderful conversation about writing with two colleagues and friends of mine. Over a beer and burgers (mine was a veggie) on Fat Tuesday evening, the three of us tried to hash out what keeps us writing – publicity, striving toward publication, practice, determination, all of the above? And so Becca’s prompt falls right into line. She asks:
How about you? How do you find positive things to write about in these troubled times? Do you think the written word has the power to effect positive change?

She’s asking a slightly different question than we were. We were trying to parse out how to still value our own work in the face of other (perhaps better?) works by other writers. Becca is asking us why we write in the first place. But for me, these things are absolutely connected. I write – most days – with the hope that what I write makes a difference. I don’t write exclusively to get published, although that’s nice; I don’t write because I think my words will overthrow dictators; I write because, first, writing changes me.

As I told my friends last night, I’m not a good person when I’m not writing (or when I’m not listening to God). Writing is what I was made to do, and when I deny that, my entire humanity suffers. I’m grumpy and edgy and, truly, unpleasant to be around.

But, and this goes more directly to what Becca is asking, I also write because I believe, as she does, that writing changes things. It probably doesn’t end corporate oppression or bring racial equality – at least one piece of writing doesn’t do that on its own. But writing does change the people who read it. I know because the things I’ve read have radically changed me. And if individual people can change, then so can the world.

That’s why I blog, why I write essays (and why I teach) – because I believe if I am living more fully into the person I am made to be, if I am working to do my best with honesty and awareness, if I simply write, sometimes – on those rare days when the sun is so bright you think it’s 72 degrees when it’s only 19 – someone is changed by it. And in that, my friends, I take great hope. More hope than I have in publication or fame. Just the hope that change can happen simply because I do what I’m supposed to do. I can rest in that.

Filed by Andi at 7:32 am under Teaching Triumphs and Travails, Written and Wrought
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Yesterday in the new issue of Writer’s Digest, I read a little article about how to market yourself successfully as a writer. One of the things the author said was that a writer had to avoid being narcissistic when blogging, that readers don’t always enjoy reading about a writer’s life or seeing a writer focus entirely on herself.

On a most fundamental level, I agree; most of us get really annoyed with people – friends, writers, celebrities – who can only talk about themselves. We feel drained when in relationships, real or virtual, with people who are always asking us to send our energy to them without any of their energy returning to us.

But on another level, I’m really hard-pressed to know how to write a blog without being narcissistic. How do I avoid making this blog into Narcissus’ pool, a place where I just stare at my glorious self all day long? Or better yet ask all of you to stare along with me? I certainly don’t want to shun my readers with my self-obsessions, as Narcissus did with Echo in the myth. I don’t want you all to be bored, either, with the mundanity of my every day life. But then, if I don’t write from my own life, explore my own thoughts and feelings about topics, review books with my own opinions, what can I say? I am only me; my experience is the only one I know. (Perhaps this is why I don’t write fiction.)

My conundrum comes because I guess I think that blogging – maybe writing in general – is in some ways self-absorbed. It almost has to be because it requires such solitude and attention to self to be successful. If I go out and give all of my ideas and energy away to other people, I don’t have anything left to put on the page; then, I have not lived into what I was made to do.

Lest you think I’m advocating selfishness, let me qualify and say that I don’t think people should “look out for number one” or that “it’s all about me.” I don’t think that at all. In fact, when I’m doing my job well, the writing should transform from being about me to being about you, the reader. But the only way I know how to make something about you – since I don’t live in your skin or walk through your days – is to write about me and hope that my words live for you in some way.

Of course, I am a nonfiction writer, so perhaps this is different for fiction writers. Do you guys feel you’re putting yourself on the page, or are you creating characters who are “other” than you? I suspect it’s some of both, but I’d love to hear about that.

So I’m back to my initial question – is it possible to blog and not be entirely narcissistic? I certainly hope so. I don’t write this sucker for myself; if I did, I’d just fill up journal pages. But I do wonder if something of Narcissus doesn’t live in every writer, something of us staring back at ourselves in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the world behind our shoulders or seeing a tiny little Mermaid swimming below the surface beneath our reflections.

– “Narcissus” by Caravaggio

Filed by Andi at 6:47 am under Written and Wrought
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So I’m one seventh of the way through the Narnia challenge, and honestly, I’m loving the process of re-reading The Chronicles for several reasons.

1. I love Narnia – not just the books but the place itself. I love the vision of life it gives – lions romping, centaurs (my favorite mythical creature), girls dancing with flowers, all of that glorious harmony. I just adore it.

2. I really enjoy thinking about the way I read these books when I was a kid. They were a huge part of my childhood. We had the little cream-colored box set (with The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe in its “proper” first position), and by the time my brother and I were done with them they were dog-eared and grimy, just as well-loved books should be. My parents still have that set of books in their guest room, and it gives me a little thrill to see it.

3. I like trying to read them as if I were a child full of wonder and delight again. Children’s books encourage me to drop the intellectualization that too much school has taught me. As I read, I can almost drop my analytical mind and just get absorbed in the story. Almost – I’m still thinking how these things are theological, or how the books are or are not like I remember – but I’m closer to that place of childlike wonder that is beautiful.

4. They’re good stories with good plots and good characters. Enough said.

5. And this one is incidental but important, I can read them quickly. I’m not bogged down in there (like I am with Wicked right now – can anyone cheer me through that book, or should I just stop?). I whiz through a chapter or two in fifteen minutes – it’s great.

I am, on principle, a person who does not re-read books (or re-watches movies for that matter). There’s too much in the world to read; in fact, sometimes if I think too hard about all the books in the world, I get really choked up. But somehow Narnia has escape that policy of mine – as Narnia escapes much that is true in this world – and I am really enjoying the process. I wonder if I would feel the same way about other books from when I was a kid.

So do you guys re-read? If so, what? Why? Are you re/reading Narnia? What are you thinking so far?

Filed by Andi at 7:29 am under Uncategorized
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