Sunday, May 28, 2006

I Remember


Thank you to all the men and women who have served, who continue to serve, and who are even thinking of serving this country so that Bethany can walk on free ground and Hannah can reach for the stars.

(Bethany's footprints, Hannah's fingerprints)

Thursday, May 25, 2006

The Round Table

La conference/Laurent Ferrari

There has been a lot of discussion recently among editors and writers trying to pinpoint just what to look for in a solid, print-worthy work. Ryan McDermott, editor of the online journal New Pantagruel, kind of started it last week when he asked the new editors at Relief Journal just what would float their boat to see in print. Trying to get a handle on the kind of Christian journal we were aiming for, he asked how we compared to Image. I responded with the following answer:

I am very familiar with Image, have attended two of their conferences (ten years apart) and will be attending (hopefully) The Glen this summer. I deeply respect Gregory Wolfe’s vision and leadership at its helm. After years of hard work and attention to excellence, Image has the clout and vitality we all aspire to. Absolutely I believe that their fiction and poetry are good. (I love reading Robert Cording and Thomas Lynch and of course Annie Dillard.) But we are not here to emulate Image, other than in quality of journalism.

As editors, we rely on writers to submit their very best work. But we look for more than just good writing. I look for the author’s ability to pull back the veil and reveal the holy. I hope to see the mundane, everyday occurences of life in fresh ways. I hope to walk away from an essay and not be able to forget it because it altered my thinking, opened a window, recast the way I see things. I look for poetic and creative construction. I look for evidence that God has influenced and informed this writer’s creative sensibilties - not through dogma or even intellectualism - but through tutelage of craftmanship.


Kimberly Culbertson, Founding Editor, and Heather von Doehren, Assistant Editor, are doing a fantastic job of steering the first issue to publication. Kimberly clarifies our goals with these words of guidance: Please understand that we are looking for solid literary fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry over didactic, “inspirational” literature. For those of you who are still being timid, stop pulling your punches. Please feel free to send us your edgier work. I am looking for authors who are able to write well rather than make a sloppy attempt at evangelism via the written word.

Now that Mark Bertrand has joined us on the editorial staff, he too, has weighed in here with his preferences.

Brad Fruhauff, Poetry Editor, is our most recent staff addition. He gives a call for "true" poetry that will both "'instruct and delight.'" Welcome, Brad, to Relief. And for a complete profile of all the hardworking editors at Relief, check us out at the Editor's Page.

How do we then define our preferences when some of us like "edgy," some like "reflective," some like "classical," some like "modern?" While we do strive to enlarge the boundaries for an emerging audience, in short, all of us appreciate well-crafted art. I like the fact that we can bring differing sensibilties to the table where we critique your work. You can rest assured, if you say it with excellence, your voice will be heard.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

The Wind Is Passing By


Brad abruptly pulled over to the side of the road, crushing waist-high, purple-headed thistles and a few scraggly Indian Blankets under the wheels of our van.

“Get out and pull it – see for yourself,” he chided.

I’d only asked if the crop we were passing was wheat. A yes or no answer would have satisfied my curiosity until the next time we passed a field growing with mysterious plants in perfect rows. Growing up in the city, I knew my garden plants. Living in Texas, I even knew my roadside wildflowers. But no matter how many car trips I’d taken across the Midwest, I still could only identify corn. Those floppy-eared stalks are hard to confuse. But the grains and low-growing vegetation were still mysteries of nature.

I got out of the car, careful to look for fire-ant mounds, and walked to the edge of the field. Glossy and tan, the stalks stood just past my knees, the long hair surrounding the kernels now visible at close range. They looked like the thin beards of old men, swaying in the wind. I had to yank hard to break one off its stem. Instead, the whole stalk came out of the ground with a clump of earth and my face flushed from the shame of thievery as I hurried to break it from its roots.
Back in the car, the girls squealed with delight. Hannah immediately smelled it, as she does everything, and declared it had no smell. Bethany waved it like a baton. I felt the fatness of the kernels and the rough shells that made my fingers stick and lose their way.

“So this is where bread comes from.”

I squeezed some of the kernels between my fingers and they turned into a pulpy, starchy mash. Brad said he hated harvesting wheat. He would itch like crazy as he walked through the fields in his hometown, the sickle rubbing blisters in his hand. I remembered the threshing floor for his village, just on the outskirts of his hometown. He had pointed it out during a winter visit when the snow dusted the dirt behind the mill.

“So if I dried this and crushed it, it would become flour?”

“It’s not that easy,” he said. He explained that after cutting it, you had to lay it on the dirt and dry it for a day or two, then walk on it to separate the kernels from the stalks. Then the thresher stood in the middle of the pile and threw the mess outward, with a pitchfork. If you did it right, the wind would catch the hulls and hairs and dirt and lay them in a circle around you. The heavier grain, now dried and separated, would travel further, forming an outer circle around the chaff.

The chaff pricked and itched and got in your sweaty clothes, rubbing you as you worked. The dust blew in your hair and eyes. Your shoulders ached from working the tools. Then you gathered up the outer band and pulled out the rocks before storing it in a bag. If you wanted, say, fifty pounds of flour, you removed the grain, picked out the smaller stones and washed off the mud and dirt. The kernels had to dry in the sun before you could take them to the miller. The miller would ask you, do you want it ground fine or coarse? And the miller would grind the kernels between the stones that had been there since the Qing dynasty.

The wind laid down the heads of the bearded ones as Brad steered the van back onto the road. Hannah tickled Bethany with the stalk of wheat as we drove south on the asphalt road in far north Dallas where the field became a suburb and the suburb became a city.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Rock of Gibralter

Great news! J Mark Bertrand will be joining us over at Relief Journal as the new fiction editor. If you haven't seen him in action, check out his weblog or read his weekly posts at Master's Artist every Friday. The consummate "writer's writer," his insights, expertise, wit, and very lucid writing should put him at the top of your "favorites" list - right after me.

Friday, May 19, 2006

When The Trees Bow Down Their Heads

Ni Zan:Trees in Autumn Wind

Hannah is learning to read. Last week, she saw the word MOM on a commercial and read it out loud so I'll just say that was her first word (though she's been sounding things out for several months now.) Hannah is four and she's been able to identify the alphabet since she was two. She taught herself to write the letters and learned the sounds when she was three. Now she's putting it all together. She came to me the other day with paper in hand and asked me to write down a poem for her which began with this provocative line:

I love how the wind whispers.

Could she have started earlier? Yes. But at this stage, I'm more fond of watching things develop organically. I hope she'll approach all learning the same way - with enthusiasm and desire. She'll start Kindergarten in the Fall and face sixteen-plus years of schooling. Hopefully I can teach her good study habits and how to discipline her time so there's space to suck in whatever captures her fancy.

I've struggled some with the issue of home-schooling. I happen to me a strong advocate of it; it's just not for me. If we still lived in our old neighborhood in Houston, I would make the necessary sacrifices. But we don't. We live in a suburb (now a monetary sacrifice) that has the second highest rating in Texas and I am comfortable sending her to school. And glad. I am neither patient nor disciplined enough to tackle such a responsiblity. But I have given it some thought.

I recently read an article sent to me by my friend, Lisa Ohlen Harris. The article is a theological book review by Susan Wise Bauer, a well respected reviewer for "Books and Culture" magazine. She also happens to be writing a history of the world for W. W. Norton. Well. I'm impressed. Susan was home-schooled and co-wrote a book with her mother called The Well Trained Mind. She's a walking billboard for advocates of the movement. So are my friends, Scott and Julie Brister, who live in Austin. They have four daughters and have made home-schooling a priority in their family. They are almost mission-minded about it and it's bearing fruit. Their oldest was studying Latin and comparative philosophy at fifteen - and loving it. Each child plays an instrument, sings, dances, makes their own clothes, ... well, you get the picture.

As I send Hannah off to Kindergarten, I know I'll wonder. Should I have done it differently? Am I being too selfish? Is the world too harsh; are the teachers amoral; are the kids insensitive? Will she be scarred? Held back? Steered in the wrong direction? Maybe yes to all of the above. But if I don't have the passion to teach like Susan's mom or Juie Brister, I imagine worse things for my daughters. For now, we delight in reading stories "together" and picking out words that she can sound out. For now, I can write.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Neither You Nor I


There is an interview with Joan Didion in the current Paris Review. I’ve been reading it during our weekly trip to the bookstore where the girls listen to the sales clerk read stories in a sweet Pooh corner between the stacks. They make a craft at toddler-sized tables and eat miniature cookie wafers. I treat myself to a tall, decaf cafĂ© mocha and grab books from racks and stacks as we pass by. I haven’t read much of the interview, though. I usually have to stop to cut and glue and ooh and ahh at all the right times, and I can’t afford to buy the journal. (Well, it’s the magazine or the coffee, I suppose.)

But I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Joan Didion has been catching my attention lately, anyway. Her latest book, written after the death of her husband, is titled The Year of Magical Thinking, and has recently won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction. (It is also the next book I intend to read, and yes, I have bought it.) The interview begins with her ruminating about a study she read exploring the link between grammatical structure in our writing and Alzheimer’s disease. I also read about the study a few years back, and, as it did with Didion, it has haunted me ever since. I find myself analyzing my sentences and syntax, not for readability, but for signs of senility.

Having children late in life didn’t help. I had/have the classic “mommy brain” syndrome where I forget words, call my children by the wrong names, and put the milk in the pantry. My sister claims that children suck your brains dry while they’re gestating. Childbirth books blame it on fluctuating hormones. Social observers blame it on too much multi-tasking. I can remember my high school friends laughing behind their mother’s back or teasing them to their face for being “dumb” for just such behavior – proof that the syndrome doesn’t go away.


This is a scary thought. As a writer, I can’t afford to lose even one word, yet daily I struggle to remember words that once careened easily off the tongue. Words, and the ability to communicate, are my life. Floyd Skloot, brain damaged by a virus ten years prior, essays about this phenomenon in Gray Area: Thinking with a Damaged Brain, (In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lee Gutkind, 2005.)

“…I have become enamored of the idea that my brain has been insulted by a virus. I use it as motivation. There is a long tradition of avenging insults through duels or counterinsults, through litigation, through the public humiliation of the original insult. So I write….
“…. I have developed certain habits that enable me to work – a team of seconds…. I must be willing to write slowly, to skip or leave blank spaces where I cannot find words that I seek, compose in fragments and without an overall ordering principle or imposed form. I explore and make discoveries in my writing now, never quite sure where I am going, but willing to let things ride and discover later how they all fit together. Every time I finish an essay or poem or piece of fiction, it feels as though I have faced down the insult.”

The entire essay is a testament to his patience and skill. And he makes whining about “mommy brain” seem absurd. He gives me hope. Skloot is of the mind that his suffering and weaknesses have created a new mind, a new person. His triumph is that his disability changed him and his art. In becoming a “jotter of random thoughts . . . a writer of bursts, …” he slowed down, trained new areas of his brain and switched from writing fiction to writing essays. He appreciates his “off balance.” His tangential research into neurology and cognitive science helped him understand and accept what was happening; his art made it beautiful.

[ Dartmoor – de: Wollsack-Verwitterung; cappucino - Deborah Ripley ]

Friday, May 12, 2006

The Heavens Declare

If you haven't already done so, go to my "Friends" list to your right and click The Master's Artist for Friday's post. My friends Allison and J Mark have both written about an experience they had last Friday and writing about it has given us all a peek into infinity.

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Who Has Seen The Wind?


Two nights ago, a tornado blew through my county and left three people dead. I never heard a thing. This is surprising because I wake up at the sound of wind. I monitor the color of the sky, when I can see it. When I can't, running ticker-tape warnings underneath a regularly scheduled program will send chills down my spine. Anyone who knows me well, knows I am terrified of tornadoes.

I grew up in a generation enamored with The Wizard of Oz. The scene with the farmhouse spinning out of control is as vivid now as the first time I watched it and felt Dorothy's horror. I also spent a lot of time in the Midwest while growing up. Springtime brought nightly siren alerts in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas as my family scrambled into the communal basement shared by eight families on Grant Avenue. I've seen the sky turn that sickening green a dozen times and I still head for the nearest closet or culvert when it appears.

But fear of devastation landing on my head was not just in the physical realm. For fifteen years I was plagued with nightmares of tornadoes chasing me down. Sometimes they overtook me, lifted me up, and deposited me in an unknown place. Sometimes I outran them. Several times I confronted them in my dreams and defied them - I rebuked them. Those dreams were so vivid that twenty years later I can still recall them. More importantly, I began to notice a pattern. I would dream about a tornado and then, within months, my life would drastically change. A new direction. A move. The loss of a loved one. A divorce. An up-ending of my life that was as catastrophic as if my house had been leveled. Soon I began to fear the dreams more than I feared tornadoes.

In the eighties the dreams came fast and furious. By the end of 1990, my only child died. Six months later I divorced an already failing marriage. In that time, I ceased being a mother and a wife. I moved and got a job. I dropped out of grad school. I changed churches and made new friends who knew nothing about my tumultuous and painful past. I entered a desert of doubt and disbelief. Like Jacob, I wrestled and wandered before I returned. The last dream I remember, I did not run, I did not rebuke it, I stood still when the tornado approached and I held out my arms.

I crawled out of the culvert of my fears and accepted my past. I quit the sassy single scene and owned up to my brokenness. I'm sure I didn't seem as hip and cute as I wanted, but my life continued to change and evolve. In fact, it got crazier. I quit my job and spent three years teaching in China and then married a Chinese man. When we returned to the states, I gave birth to two babies. Life is as hard as it has ever been except I do not fear it. The winds still erode what I try to build, but I accept it and I remember, I'm building with rock.

(Thanks to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce for the picture titled: Tornado near the end of its life.)

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

A Pebble In My Shoe

It seems that changes to my template do not occur unless I publish a post. Perhaps there is a metaphor to life in there somewhere, as well.

Monday, May 08, 2006

Even the Rocks shall Cry Out


Before things were written in stone, there were pillars of stone: cairns, altars, mani stones, monoliths. One by one, the builder found stones and stacked them into a tower. Often the reason was known only to the builder. A meditative marker of time, of place, or experience of the holy. A mound of rough stones. A memory. A prayer.

Then others passing by found their way to a destination. They located themselves in time and space. They too remembered, and the history became shared. A community was born before things were written in stone.

Asleep on a stone, Jacob had a dream. He saw a stairway to heaven, a gate through time and space, a future and a hope. He took the stone pillow and stood it on end, then poured oil on it. As the oil glided down the crevasses and into the dirt, Jacob named the stone, the dirt and the oil, Bethel - House of God.

These posts are my stone pillars. Though I am tutored by the Master Builder, my cairns are still rather wobbly. Still, I like their effect against the barrenness of the land I live in.
(permission for photo granted by creative commons)