Writing Update: July 2024

Here’s my monthly reading and writing update!

Writing Projects

A Darker Travel
Summary: A bereaved father visits heaven in his dreams, hoping to meet his son there. Update: I’m working my way through more “purgatory” scenes, and I have to say, these are fun to write. I wonder if Dante felt the same way when he was writing his Divine Comedy. Think of a sin or a malformed desire: what would be an appropriate way to be cleansed of it? Where Dante had punishments (Inferno) and purgations (Purgatorio), in the heaven my protagonist visits, the purgatory-ish places are understood to be “trainings.” They are places to unlearn the unhealthy and unjust habits we lived into while on earth. While most of this novel so far is first-person narrative, the purgatory scenes are told in second-person and read like parables (one of my models is Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities). I might share one on here sometime.

The Lesser Light
Summary: After robots invade earth, a boy survives by following a sci-fi novel that mysteriously narrates his experience. After the book is destroyed, he must navigate the rest of his journey on his own. Update: I had a sudden thought the other day which upended some of my ideas for the plot but also solved many problems. Long story short, I am re-outlining the story and reconsidering some of the hero’s relationships. This is a story I really want to write, and one I really want to forget about. I go through phases, pumped up on hype and hope or wallowing in the fear of not knowing how to keep the story going. Right now, there is more hope than mope.

Short Stories
Meanwhile, more story ideas are piling up. I’ve decided to use these ideas as prompts for writing exercises. My goal is write them up as short stories. Even if the story sucks, even if I never return to it, the practice will be good and then the idea will be out of my head. And who knows, maybe some of the crappy writing will end up being recycled into something else I’m proud of. In writing, there’s no such thing as a dead end.

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June 2024 Reads

Here are brief reviews (brieviews?) of some of my favorite books I read in June.

Fiction

Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness
This is probably my favorite fiction book of the year (inching out prior frontrunners). Wow. What a book. The basic plot is this: after his father dies, Benny Oh starts hearing the voices of inanimate objects talking to him. His mother admits him to the juvenile psych ward. Benny makes friends with other teens there, and eventually reunites with them at the local library. They are brought together by an elderly Slovenian poet called “the Bottle Man,” a practical mystic who sleeps on the streets. Meanwhile Benny’s mother, Annabelle, copes with her husband’s death by hoarding objects and fighting to keep her job which is becoming more and more obsolete. The narrator of this novel is a book, who claims that all books are sentient and connected in a mycelial web of ideas. Everything comes to a head when Benny has to decide his own fate, and when Annabelle has to decide whether to cling to the past or step into the future. With intertextual density, philosophical musings, poetics, bookbinding, meta-textual discourse, and more, this would be a great book to use for a literary theory class. Also, there is recurring reference to “The Aleph,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges (which I’ll talk about later in this post).

Etaf Rum, Evil Eye
This novel follows a Palestinian-American woman, Yara, who wants to be an artist but finds herself limited by motherhood, racism, sexism, and her own unexamined past. The emotional landscape of this novel is just as full as the physical landscape. As a reader, I felt emotional whiplash sometimes as Yara explodes in anger, then cowers in guilt and shame. She second-guesses her decisions, apologizes for things that are not her fault, and chastises herself for what she perceives are her own failures. As the book progresses, and more stories come to light, we learn that many of the causes for her current troubles are not in her control. Nothing is straightforward or simple. Everything is complex, interconnected, and mysterious.

While I sometimes felt the emotional descriptions and ruminations were over-the-top, at the same time I connected with the protagonist’s anger. The anger simmers and explodes, and its roots are much deeper, much longer, than the surface events that trigger it. My anger emerges as an aspect of my grief at losing a child, but it connects with so much more from my past. As Yara explored her psyche and her past, I began to feel more empathy for this character. More and more I could find facets of myself in her story. I like the ending, when Yara finally finds a sense of peace after making a decision that frees her to be herself.

Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
A neuroscientist studying addiction in rats reckons with her own family history. The writing in this book is superb. There are several things I loved about this book. In some places, it is very clinical and scientific. But then this academic jargon becomes a metaphor for the family relationships of the protagonist. She cites scientific articles to infuse the story with facts (making me think of Jorge Luis Borges or Herman Melville in Moby Dick). Beautifully written, wonderfully surprising, interesting throughout.

Non-Fiction

Sarah L. Sanderson, The Place We Make: Breaking the Legacy of Legalized Hate
Sarah Sanderson graduated from the SPU MFA program during my first residency as a student. What she read from her graduate thesis blew me away. This book is no different. Sanderson examines the history of Oregon, specifically its racial exclusion laws, which prohibited people of color from living in the entire state. More specifically, she examines the case of Jacob Vanderpool, a Black hotel owner in Oregon City, who was arrested, tried, and convicted of breaking that law. He was expelled from Oregon for the crime of being Black. She explores the legacy of this exclusion law, including the fact that Portland, Oregon is one of the whitest cities in the U.S., and that there are still very few Black people in Oregon to this day. What makes this book most poignant is that Sanderson, a white woman, examines her own family’s history in the state. She discovers that many of the key players in Vanderpool’s case, and in Oregon’s founding as a “white state,” were her ancestors. This is a critical book at a crucial time. White people don’t want to lift up the rocks of their history to see how their ancestors may have perpetrated injustice. We need more white authors who demonstrate how white people can reflect on their own culpability in racism. Sanderson’s book is an example of how whites can examine their past and present participation in racial injustice, not just at a national-political level, but at the personal level, too. My favorite non-fiction book this year!

Poetry & Drama

Danusha Laméris, The Moons of August
A wonderful collection of poems on grief and hope, family and culture, memory and the future. In one of my favorite poems from the collection, “To Bless,” Laméris compares blessing to wounding. Here is how it begins:

To bless once meant to draw blood,
as with the tip of a blade,
blessing, the act of wounding.
And now it has come to mean a cutting through what cannot be seen the way a saint might pass her hand, over the bent head of a supplicant. Or how a mother begins to weep as her newborn is handed to her for the first time.

Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother
This collection centers around the death of the author’s mother, though it explores other themes as well: family, identity, love, hope, fear, resilience. I love Vuong’s ability to offer surprise after surprise both with turns of phrase and with the themes of his poems. In “The Last Dinosaur,” the speaker of the poem begins and ends as the last dinosaur, but takes a moment in the middle to become Eve at the moment of exile from the garden of Eden. Another poem, “Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker,” is in the format of a monthly Amazon shopping history, and tells a tragic story. Here is the ending of “Rise & Shine,” a culinary poem of grief, with all its wonderful surprises:

The crickets
unhinge their jaws
in first light, last

syllables crackling
like a pipe steady
over a blue flame

as footsteps dim
down a dawn-gold road
& your face

at the window
a thumbprint left over
from whose god?

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
I read this classic in high school. It is probably Shakespeare’s best-known play. I’ve seen a couple different versions of it, and of course, various retellings: West Side Story, Gnomeo and Juliet. I know the story. Or I thought I did. Rereading any text is always a lesson in surprise. How much richer is the actual text than my memory of it! (I recommend reading the Bible like this, too, always ready to let yourself be surprised by what is actually there.) The wordplay and banter between friends and enemies is hilarious. The characters are vibrant, even those with minor dialogue. And of course, the tragedy is baked in with the love. All in this story seems to rely on chance encounters—the serendipitous meeting of Romeo and Juliet; and all the unfortunate circumstances which cause the deaths of so many youths in fair Verona.

Theology / Spirituality

Randy Woodley, Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Connecting with Sacred Earth
Randy Woodley is an Indigenous theologian and farmer. This book is a wonderful introduction to Indigenous-wisdom-informed creation care. It reads like a devotional, but it invites the reader to various practices, reflection questions, and actions that promote a connection with the earth and all its creatures (including other humans).

Lauren Winner, The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin
In the last few decades, Protestant theologians and writers have called for Christians to re-engage with spiritual practices. Often, the message is: “do this practice, because it has important benefits and can be a cure for ______.” Lauren Winner’s book is a response to this trend, and, according to her, “can be read as an attempt … to suggest that many current discussions of Christian practice are too rosy … and fail to acknowledge, let alone account for or respond to, the sin entailed by those practices” (168). Winner argues that the “gifts” of Christian practices are “damaged.” The damage could come from sources external to the practice, such as cultural hegemony, various injustices, or personal sins like greed or hatred. We can always misuse spiritual practices for our own sinful purposes. But Winner claims that damage is also inherent in the practice itself. Every spiritual practice has potential for good and potential for harm. These two potentials are baked into the practice itself, and when we, for example, pray or baptize, we are susceptible to both the good and the harm of the practice. Winner examines Eucharist, prayer, and baptism, exploring their twin potentials through a particular historical event. She argues that a harmful event was not simply a “misuse'“ of the spiritual practice, but demonstrates the inherent tension and damage within the practice itself. Below are my summaries of her argument for each practice—these are my words, and are nowhere near to the full depth and nuance Winner presents in the book:

Eucharist: Predominantly Gentile Christians take into themselves the Jewish body of Christ; there is a tension between Jew and Gentile, between the Jewish heritage of Christianity and the tendency for supercessionism. Winner looks at “host desecration” accusations against Jews in the Middle Ages. A Jew would be accused of “desecrating” the communion bread (the host), and this accusation would be used to justify Christian massacres of Jews.

Prayer: Prayer is intimacy with God. The more intimate we become with God, the more willing we are to share our desires. However, these desires may be malformed and myopic, so we pray for the “wrong thing.” Winner examines Southern plantation mistresses who prayed for their slaves to be obedient, and prayed for their own patience toward their slaves. These kinds of prayers demonstrated “intimacy with God” while upholding the unjust slavery system.

Baptism: Baptism both affirms and transcends our earthly culture and lineage. At baptism, we are baptized in all our particularity—our cultures, our locations, our bodies, our histories. At the same time, we are baptized into a new family of God, in which social identifiers are transcended. This is a tension inherent in baptism. The problem comes when we emphasize one side over the other. Winner explores late-nineteenth-century christening parties, which happened in the home rather than in the church (leaning in the direction of affirming cultural/family lineage without “extracting” them into the family of God [the church]).

The book is a bit academic (particularly the introductory and concluding chapters), though clear enough to understand. I recommend it if you’d like a different take on spiritual practices and are interested to explore some of their theological and practical tensions. Ultimately, Winner argues about these practices, “we carry on with them, always hoping that, despite the damage, they will return us to one another, and to the Lord” (165).

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Currently Reading

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night. This is another Shakespeare play I read in high school. It’s fun to read new plays, but it’s also fun to go back and reread what I vaguely remember.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories. Borges is one of my favorite authors, definitely in my top 3 if not number 1. I love how weird, how eloquent, how academic, how mystical, how poetic, and how dense Borges can be. He wrote extensively in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. I’m reading the Penguin edition (Andrew Hurley translation). The title story, “The Aleph,” is typical Borges: a standard story (this one about a writer) interrupted—or perhaps: infused, transcended, transformed) by a phenomenon unable to be explained by science or religion or art. In “The Aleph,” a writer is grieved that a woman he was in love with has died. He still frequents the family’s house, and becomes more acquainted with one cousin in particular. This cousin is trying to “versify the earth,” and seems overly enamored with his own effort. But then, the cousin calls to tell the writer-narrator about “the Aleph,” a glowing orb that is a “point … that contains all points,” “the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist.” The narrator gets a view of this Aleph (“In that unbounded moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts; … all occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency. What my eyes saw was simultaneous”), and is able to see his beloved as well. What is the beloved’s name? Beatriz, which of course brings to mind Beatrice, the beloved whom Dante meets when he visits heaven in The Divine Comedy. “The Aleph” is a major feature in Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness, and some of the references are so fascinating (for example, one of Benny’s psych ward friends calls herself The Aleph; the Slovenian poet is trying to “versify the earth”). I’m looking forward to reading more stories from this book. Here’s a quote from the story “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz”:

Once fully understood, that night encompasses his entire story—or rather, one incident, one action on that night does, for actions are the symbol of our selves. Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment—the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.

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One Final Thought: On Worship Music

Since our firstborn son Emerson died in 2017, Allison and I have had a hard time appreciating any evangelical worship music. Most songs profess assurance in God’s plan, God’s providence, God’s healing, God’s power. Many songs treat grief and sadness as a problem that God solves. We were in between churches when Emerson died, and it took us a long time to find a church where we felt like our story of child loss could belong (you can read more about that journey here). Part of the problem of finding a new church was the music and its rosy-positive proclamations (some biblical, many not).

This week, at the church we’ve been attending for almost a year, they sang two songs I’d never heard before. I found them both to be very resonant with my story of grief. They acknowledged the challenges of life and its many sorrow-filled circumstances. They affirmed God’s comfort and justice without glossing over present and past pain. I’ve listed them below with some of the lyrics.

“All of Who I Am” (not sure the artist, couldn’t find it online, but you can catch some of the song in the service recording here; the song is right at the beginning of the video—I’d also recommend watching the sermon!)

Some of my kindness comes from my pain
Sorrow and tenderness join once again …

I’ve come to believe that whatever I need
I will find every single time
Love will be my guide
All of who I am is beautiful and strong
As I come to know that all of me belongs—my best and my worst,
The ways that I’ve grown, the struggles I’ve faced, the joy that I’ve known
There is a blessing I’m trying to understand
It’s been there since my life began
I will find it in all of who I am

“Leaning In: A Prayer of Intention” (Christopher Grundy) - listen on YouTube

We pray for the lonely ones knowing that some of us are lonely
and we pray for the heartbroken ones knowing that some of us are heartbroken …

We pray for the starving ones knowing that some of us are starving
and we pray for the imprisoned ones knowing that some of us are imprisoned

All our hearts and minds are leaning in with clear intention
joining in your way of justice in the world

We pray for the dying ones knowing that some of us are dying
and we pray for the newly born ones knowing that some of us are arriving

All our hearts and minds are leaning in with clear intention
joining in your way of love in the world

I wasn’t ready to cry in church today, but I was on the edge. This was the first time in a long time that I’ve connected with a worship song, one that spoke to me in my fullness in that moment. And to have two songs like that in one service was a blessing.

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