Writing Update: June 2024
Here’s an update of what I’ve been up to writing-wise and reading-wise in the last month.
Writing Projects
A Darker Travel
I’ve been hand-writing “purgatory” chapters for this novel. When I write by hand, I feel less rushed getting words to the page. It’s also easier for me to set a journal aside for a minute or hour or day and come back to it. With my laptop, there’s logging in, checking email, battery life, wondering how much time I’ll get until I’m interrupted or get bored. With the notebook, I just sit and write when I can for as long as I can, filling little nooks and crannies of my time with the next thought, the next narrative beat, the next sentence.
Poetry
I have surprised myself this month. I really enjoy revising my poems. I think the trick is—as I’ve discussed in previous Writing Updates—I have to print them out. I can read through one and make some notes, then move on. Then when I go back to it, I don’t have to revise from scratch (like I would if I stared at it on a computer screen). I have my handwritten notes and squiggles. Revision becomes a multi-stage process over time. Several of my past selves give input. I also found that when my poem revisions are bouncing around my head, I can make more connections with the texts I’m reading. For example, I read King Lear in May, and discovered quite a few passages that interact with poems I’ve written. Now I can make my poems more robust by alluding or responding to the texts of others.
May Reading
I read 20 books in May, the most I’ve ever read in a single month. Lest you think I merely skim and forget (which does sometimes happen), I also annotate my books furiously. I underline, bracket, star, question, and make notes in the margins. If I’m reading a library book, I put sticky flags in, then scan the relevant pages / chapters. I listen to audiobooks on 1.75x speed, and try to write down any quotes I find particularly compelling.
Because I read so many books, and I had so many favorites, I’ve put my reviews into a separate post. You can read them at this link. Below, I’ve put a snippet from each review.
William Shakespeare, King Lear. The most powerful line for me comes near the end of the play. I read right over it the first time through. But when Anthony Hopkins said it in the film, my heart leapt in recognition. …
Juan Manuel Arias, Where There Was Fire. Toward the end of April, I had a dream in which my boss, a poet, told me that I needed to read Arias. When I woke up, all I had was the name. I googled “Arias poet” and found a few, but Juan Manuel Arias seemed most interesting to me. However, I saw that he’d just come out with a debut novel. So I audiobooked it right away. …
Cathy O’Neill. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. The biggest danger, O’Neill points out, is when we “trust the algorithm” without providing a way to check if the algorithm is even working. …
R. F. Kuang, Yellowface. A well-done novel that made me feel uncomfortable for all the right reasons. …
Amy Kenny, My Body is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church. Part memoir, part how-to, part theology, this book is insightful and practical. …
Jhumpa Lahiri. Translating Myself and Others. This is a collection of essays on the art of translation, including translating one’s own work. …
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or The Whale. I enjoyed the story and even all the digressive, expository chapters on cetology and the implements of whalers. Of course, none of these chapters is truly a digression. …
Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez, Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in Indigenous teachings, environmental justice, psychology, and community-building.
Poetry Collections (Top Recommendations in Order) …
Peter Rollins, The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales. This is a book of parables. They are designed to challenge your faith and theology. Most of them were fascinating and surprising. They catch you off-guard. …
Michael A. Stackpole, I, Jedi. What I like about this novel is that it shows Jedi actually being trained from beginner to intermediate. …
Merlin Sheldrake. How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. The main argument of the book is that we live in symbiotic communities of life. There is no such thing as an independent life form. …
If you want to read the book reviews in full, click here.
Currently Reading
Lauren Winner, The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin. This book considers the damage that can be done through the Christian practices of Eucharist, prayer, and baptism. Winner argues that some of this “damage” is not just coincidental; in a fallen world, the gifts of God—even the sacraments—have intrinsic qualities that cause damage. Here is a quote from the first chapter that lays out the premise of the book:
I aim to consider not primarily a practice’s propensity for fostering holiness (there are plenty such accounts) but rather a practice’s propensity for violence, for curvature, for being exploited for the perpetuation of damage rather than received for its redress (14).
Jessica Hernandez, Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science. I haven’t read very far in this book yet, but I’m eager to learn what Hernandez has to say about Indigenous ecology. I am teaching an academic writing course this fall, and the primary text will be Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. I want to bring in some other texts and perspectives as well, and Fresh Banana Leaves (as well as the two that follow this) seems like a good fit so far.
Despite climate impacts being highlighted and amplified during the pandemic of 2020, Indigenous narratives continue to be dismissed and ignored in mainstream environmentalism. The environmental discourse has failed and continues to fail in uplifting and centering Indigenous peoples’ voices, perspectives, and lived experiences. … Without [these], we are continuing to separate humans from nature, and that is why our environments are at the current state they are today. It is important to note that Indigenous peoples have been the stewards and caretakers of our environments since time immemorial. Yet we are often left out from the environmental discourse and any decision-making pertaining to our environment. In order to heal our environments, which are all Indigenous lands, we must incorporate Indigenous voices, perspectives, and lived experiences (13).
Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Yunkaporta is an Indigenous writer and academic from Australia. He argues that the English language and Western forms of academia are inadequate to express Indigenous knowledge, so he employs methods that may work better. His table of contents is a visual image one might carve into a bark shield.
So the ideas of this written introduction are in the shields. I simply hold those objects and translate into print parts of the knowledge I see there. This is my method, and I call it umpan because that is our word for cutting, carving, and making—it is also the word now used for writing. My method for writing incorporates images and story attached to place and relationships, expressed first through cultural and social activity. … Each chapter will include some “sand talk,” invoking an Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge (14–15).
Randy Woodley, Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth. Woodley is an Indigenous Christian theologian and activist. This book is a daily devotional of sorts. It is broken into ten themed sections, each with ten reflections. Each reflection has an epigraph to consider, a short 2-3 page essay written by Woodley, and a question / practice to engage with.
Although we were farming, we always made room for the non-farm creatures. Even on the smallest farm, we set aside a half acre that was theirs, not ours. … Sure we could have used that half acre for something else. We could have planted corn and other crops, or cut down the trees for firewood, or simply used it for wild-tending indigenous plants. But we had to ask ourselves, How much is enough? How much land do we really need to make it, and is it ever worth driving all the wildlife away? They need space too. If we would have used that space for our own needs, our community would be the poorer for it (50–51; Day 19).
My Seminary Thesis
In 2015, I finished my seminary degree, a Master of Arts in Christian Scripture from SPU. To complete the program, I wrote an exegetical thesis on a passage from Genesis. My thesis is called “‘Who Are You?’: Reading and Judging Character in Genesis 26:34–28:10.” This is the story of Jacob receiving the blessing intended for Esau. You can read it in full on Digital Commons.
My main argument is that one cannot make any definitive moral judgments about the actions of the four characters (Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Esau). The narrator does not declare anyone to be in the right or wrong throughout this narrative. However, details in the text could be pieced together so that each character has a “positive / exemplary” portrait and a “negative / cautionary” portrait, depending on which details you emphasize. (Maybe I’ll do a post about it at some point.)
Wes Howard-Brook, a biblical scholar recently retired from Seattle University, included some of my thesis observations in his ongoing YouTube series “The Radical Bible.” Right now he’s working his way through Genesis, in small sections at a time. I recommend the channel if you’re interested in exploring the biblical texts more thoroughly. Watching his videos are like getting to read a commentary—the good kind, that points you back to the text rather than telling you what to think. He does close readings of the Hebrew text and brings in word studies and intertextual references that shed light on the passage at hand. Here is the introduction to the Jacob-Esau cycle (S1E126). And here is the first video in which my thesis makes an appearance (S1E128)!
Thank you for reading! Blessings on your weekend!