Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew's Blog, page 14

Goodness Gracious

I can’t tell you how many times writers hand me a stack of pages and ask, “Is it any good?”

I’ve stopped answering this question. Sure, some writing is better than others. Sure, I have strong opinions about what makes a good story. But I’ve become increasingly wary of writers’ need to ask this question and my ability to answer it.

When a work-in-progress is deemed “good” by a reader, what purpose does this serve? All artists—all humans—want and need external affirmation; to continue hard work, we need our efforts affirmed and the essence of our endeavors recognized. Over my years of teaching writing, however, I’ve found that engaging a piece of writing (by sharing what happened to me as I journeyed through the manuscript, by asking questions, by trying to articulate what the piece is about at its core) gives a writer the external affirmation he or she needs to continue—without my having to sit in judgment on it. All creative work is becoming; it is more alive or less alive, and our job as artists is to nurture life.

The question “Is it any good?” comes from the ego. The small, grasping self wants bolstering with goodness. We want the strokes, but more than that we want deep down to know we are good and that the work we do is worthy.

For much of my life I’ve been told that my writing is good, and, frankly, it’s done me great damage. For years I strived to write well rather than write honestly. It’s exceedingly difficult to write a “shitty first draft” when you’re such a “good” writer. When my work isn’t good, I feel like a failure instead of an ordinary human. Judgment infests my creative process.

I’m reminded of that peculiar exchange Jesus had with the rich man who asked, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus retorts, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” Here’s a moment when Jesus is just himself, a flawed human being. By attributing the source of goodness elsewhere, Jesus stays on the path of openness and emptiness. He goes on to give the rich man a thorough answer, so it’s not like he’s feeling miserable about himself or in denial about his agency in the world. He just refuses to get caught up in ego-gratification.

These days I’m applying this same spiritual practice to my writing and to teaching writing. The quality of goodness and the authority to decree goodness reside elsewhere, beyond me or any other human. What we do own is our agency. We can engage the work. We can do the practice. We can participate in creation, and this alone is enough.  –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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Upcoming events:

Second Fridays; 1:30-3:30 p.m.: Spiritual Memoir drop-in sessions, Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality.

November 11: Place

December 9: Symbols & Metaphors

Participants in the Book Binders’ Salon will read from works-in-progress on Tuesday, December 6th at 7 p.m. in the front lobby at 2615 Park Avenue, Minneapolis.  Hope to see you there!

SAVE THE DATE:  October 2-6, 2017: Alone Together: Living Revision at Madeline Island School of the Arts.

              Related StoriesSeeking Justice Through StoriesEnduring the Discomfort of WritingWriting as Deep Listening 

Liberating Stories

First thing in the morning I make my tea, sit in the red chair, and read the early Christian mystics. Then Gwyn wakes, curls in my lap, and we read Greek myths. I bustle off to work where I write stories, read emerging writers’ stories, review published stories, and teach others how to create effective stories. I return home to Gwyn listening to an audio book. I read magazines on the toilet. I listen to Gwyn read her homework. I tell her a bedtime story. Finally, exhausted, I curl up with a good novel.

I’m steeped in stories.

When I take the stuff of my life and make it into a story, I feel myself and my world transformed. I come alive. I participate in ongoing creation. One of my greatest delights is that I get to support others in this work. When I teach writing, I help others know the “aliveness” that, as Ann Belford Ulanov says, “springs from our making something of what we experience and receiving what experience makes of us.”

Is it any wonder, then, that my most intimate name for God is Story?

Recently I came across this comment from John Makransky, a professor of Buddhism and Comparative Theology, which at first blush might seem antithetical to my sensibilities but actually got me excited: We need to be liberated from our own stories.

We Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Humanists, etc., need each other to liberate us from our own stories. … The stories of our own tradition are foundational for us, orienting us to our religious identities and ways of being and understanding. But we all tend to get caught in the stories of our own tradition; imprisoned in them in ways not fully conscious to us. We get caught in a kind of idolatry that clings too exclusively, in too limited a way, to our own culturally conditioned current understandings of our own stories.

Makransky goes on to say that we’re dependent on people of different faiths to “interrupt our own narratives and point beyond them to more of the richness of human perspectives and experiences, thereby opening us to further possible meanings in our own stories.” He sees interreligious dialogue as a way to remove ourselves from the limitations of our stories and invite ourselves into ever-more expansive understandings.

Amen to that! But this is also the work of revision, which asks us to see our stories in this new light, and then that, and that. We jam our experiences into a box and come to love that box, but the work of writing—the work of evolving—requires unpacking the box and building a new one, perhaps a bit more fitting, and then discovering a cloth bag works better, and finally realizing that all these containers are marvelous but incapable of holding the true glory which is our story.

Then we honor that mystery by making a story about it. And so on. Hooray!   –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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Please join me in the delightful work of making stories:

Second Fridays; 1:30-3:30 p.m.: Spiritual Memoir drop-in sessions, Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality.

November 11: Place

December 9: Symbols & Metaphors

Want to hear some great stories? Participants in the Book Binders’ Salon will read from works-in-progress on Tuesday, December 6th at 7 p.m. in the front lobby at 2615 Park Avenue, Minneapolis.  Hope to see you there!

SAVE THE DATE:  October 2-6, 2017: Alone Together: Living Revision at Madeline Island School of the Arts.

 

              Related StoriesSeeking Justice Through StoriesIntercourse with the WorldWriting as Deep Listening 

Play with Me!

Maybe because my dining room table is plastered with paper dolls, cat toys are scattered across the living room, and Gwyn is almost constantly pulling at my sleeve begging me to play with her, but play has been much on my mind lately. Or maybe I’m thinking about it because I’m wrapping up my book about revision and realizing that the gist of 200 pages and six years of work is don’t forget to play.

Play is anything done spontaneously for its own sake—according to Stuart Brown, psychiatrist and founder of the National Institute for Play. Kids are pros. Artists are those who preserve this basic childhood capacity into adulthood. Artists are also ambassadors for play; by actually doing it, we witness to our communities and audiences that this basic human inclination is valuable.

Is it? So much around us says otherwise. By kindergarten we’re putting kids in desks and teaching them to read; we pack kids’ summers with organized activities; and by high school we hope their work ethic is sufficient to launch them into productive, economically viable jobs. By adulthood play is relegated to vacation. We can’t wait to escape the grueling routine, the mandated activities and proscribed productivity, for anything—anything!—“done spontaneously for its own sake.”

This productive whip-cracking is one of the biggest threats to making art. In the adult world, writing for writing’s sake is unconscionable. We need an audience or money or recognition or accomplishment or sales records or do-gooding or any number of recognizably productive reasons to validate our work—to make writing work and not play. New writers and even experienced writers are terrified that their creative lives are “just play,” as though play is the antithesis of worthiness.

“What can we do with our days,” Garnet Rogers sings, “but work and hope that our dreams bind our work to our play?” It seems to me that the preservation of play into adulthood—along with the maturation of our understanding of play—is the marker of a creatively engaged person. Picture mathematicians going to town on a large blackboard or a tree-trimmer swinging from the topmost branches of an elm or a city planner brainstorming with her team. Within the structure of socially acceptable productivity, we grown-ups can preserve pockets of spontaneity, absorption, and love. Painter Robert Henri called this the “play of maturity.” The poet Michael Dennis Browne says, “In writing, as in prayer, we often need to become as little children.”

The freedom of play isn’t superfluous; it’s not to be saved for vacation or retirement. Without carving space between and within our necessary activities to engage the world spontaneously, for its own sake, there’s no life-spark. Play is how we come spiritually alive. Play makes art. Play is the essential ingredient.  –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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Come play with me!  We’ll share in two hours of the holy play of writing spiritual memoir on October 14, 1:30-3:30, at Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality.  Liz Olds will host the next seed writing session–a time to write and share in community–on the topic of play on October 21.

For those wanting a general introduction to the art and practice of writing spiritual memoir, join me THIS SATURDAY, October 8, from 9-12 at Wisdom Ways.

Save the date:  Give yourself and your writing project a week-long immersion on Madeline Island!  Alone Together: Living Revision will next take place October 2-6, 2017.

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Nurture the Wow

Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder, and Radical Amazement of Parenting by Danya Ruttenberg

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Just when I'd given up on books about spirituality and parenting, I found Danya Ruttenberg's NURTURE THE WOW--a book with an unfortunately kitchy title and excellent content. Ruttenberg is a rabbi steeped in the mystical branches of Judaism. When two boys arrive, interrupting her prayer practice with their bodily needs and rosy-cheeked smiles, she suddenly sees her religious tradition as formed and developed by those not caring for dependents--in other words, by men.

"The idea that caring for children could be a core, crucial, even cornerstone aspect of one’s spiritual and religious life, that loving and caring for them should be integrated, somehow, into one’s spiritual and religious expression—well, it’s totally absent from [traditional Jewish law]. And this absence isn’t specific to Judaism. Rather, it’s the norm in a lot of corners of the religious world.
"I wonder how various religions traditions might have formulated their approaches to prayer (and everything else) if they had been thinking about the realities of parenting small children from the beginning. And I wonder what these traditions could look like if the questions, challenges, and types of thinking that parenting opens up were taken seriously and brought into the conversation, even at this late date."

Exactly what I wonder, daily. Ruttenberg leans on her rich, Kabbalistic tradition and draws from the wisdom of daily experience to begin this conversation. A few of her angles in? The practice of listening to and responding to a baby's needs as preparation for heeding God. The covanental relationship we have with our children, in which we have dominion over their world and we agree to be radically changed by their presence. Acts of love for our children NOT as practice for God but AS the experience of loving God. The desperate longing we feel for our children as an expression of our longing for the divine. This isn't dimestore spirituality; Ruttenberg is grappling with the heavyweight questions of embodiment, the formation and loss of self, and on-the-ground spiritual practice.

My only criticism of this book is that it's based entirely on the early years of parenting. I want Ruttenberg to write part two in 15 years, when her boys are on their own (perhaps) and her spirit has endured the trials and formations of the teen years. We need both books; we need many more books like these, that bring the messy, demanding, embodied experiences of loving young humans to bear on our religious and spiritual wisdom traditions. Look for mine in another decade.




View all my reviews
Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder, and Radical Amazement of Parenting

Just the Pond

When I was in my early twenties, flying back and forth between home in New York and college in Minnesota, the moment on the plane that terrified me most had nothing to do with take-off or rising to forty-thousand feet or landing. No, what gave me anxiety was that broad view of New York City, eight million people packed into three hundred square miles, that proved to me just how small I was. In the vast world I was a speck. An “insignificant number,” my chemistry teacher taught us, was like the weight of ashes in an airplane ash tray (back in the days when there was such a thing) compared to the weight of an airplane. I was an insignificant number, and it shook my foundation.

At the time I was transitioning from Sleepy Hollow High School, where I was the editor of the literary journal and valedictorian and generally a big fish in a little pond to Carleton College, where my fellow students had done calculus in seventh grade, started businesses, and performed at Carnegie Hall. I remained as good a student as I’d always been—I studied hard, I got good grades—but in hindsight I failed miserably at Carleton, meaning I was so busy trying to maintain my big fish status that I neglected to experience the full breadth and joy of a fine liberal arts education. That large pond threatened my hard-earned identity.

When graduation dumped me into the really big pond (not New York City but a world that includes it), I finally found some peace with my smallness. Everybody is small—no need to fight it. Ironically, the less I’ve needed to prove my worth, the wider the ripples. Do you remember Swimmy from Leo Lionni’s picture book? The little fish was a master community organizer who arranged his school into such a big presence, they scared away the shark. I’ve enjoyed swimming with the small guys.

These days, however, I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that being a fish, big or small, is an illusion. What if we’re all really the pond? The fish-form I inhabit now is temporary—at death I’ll return to water and silt—so perhaps it’s not essentially who I am.

This is the possibility I dip into when I pray. In silence, in release, we can practice being just the pond. At times I find this even more terrifying than seeing New York City from above—Who am I in this vastness?! But at others times I taste a selfless self, one awash with love, and am deeply grateful.

–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew


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Upcoming offerings:

October 8, 2016: Saturday Introductory Workshop at Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality.

Second Fridays; 1:30-3:30 p.m.: Spiritual Memoir drop-in sessions, Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality.

October 14: Holy Play

November 11: Place

December 9: Symbols & Metaphors

              Related StoriesWhat Others Think–What I Think–No ThoughtCorrective LensesBeyond Hope 

Seeking Justice Through Stories

As a privileged white woman I sometimes wonder what to do with my strong commitment to racial justice. Much as I want to join the Black Lives Matter movement on the streets or participate in my church’s educational programming around white privilege, as committed as I am to supporting my native brothers and sisters in their fight to protect their land from pipeline invasions, I know that’s not where my energy belongs. My money, yes, and my whole-hearted support, but not my energy. My clear calling is to write, teach, mother my child, tend my home, and tend my partnership.

Despite this clarity, I sometimes regret that I’m not doing enough. Recently, however, I got some insight into how teaching writing and writing well myself might further the work of racial justice—in ways however hidden, however small.

When I first heard Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” I knew her wisdom regarding stereotypes applied to writing. Adichie explores how “single stories,” or simple, limited versions of a people or country, become damaging stereotypes. “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” In an earlier blog, “Undoing the Single Story,” I wrote about how revision insists that we reject the single story in favor of layered, complex, and contradictory stories. Just as intimacy and awareness break down our stereotypes, intimacy with and awareness of our material break apart our over-simplifications and half-truths.

A single—that is, unnuanced, unstudied, unrevised—story is inevitably a bad story. I use the word “bad” sparingly for fear of the wrecking ball of judgment, but in this case I believe it’s warranted: Single stories have no layers of meaning, no subtext, no complexity, and therefore function as stereotypes. They are incomplete. Consider how easy it is in an early draft to write with clichés. The discipline of eliminating those “single stories” from our prose forces us to research the reality they hide and then articulate it accurately. Or consider the work of developing a viable character, how the fullness of human strength and weakness are both necessary for a character to come alive on the page. The journey from rough to final draft takes us from a single story into a story rich with diversity and contradiction. The journey from beginning to advanced writer follows this same trajectory.

I’m starting to understand that as writers break apart single stories on the page, they also exercise this muscle of multiplicity, strengthening their capacity to withhold judgment and embrace paradox and remain open to new layers of understanding. Just because a writer exercises this muscle doesn’t mean he or she applies it to other arenas of life. Nor does a nuanced text mean that every reader will apply complex thinking to the real world. But in both cases it’s more likely. If we come to love a character for all her rich and contradictory facets, we’re more apt to love our neighbors for theirs’. We’re more apt to see the falsehood of single stories. We’re more apt to be compassionate. This is no longer the wishful thinking of English majors—it’s scientifically proven.

The inner life of stories is intricately connected to our public lives. Work for justice can happen in every dimension—if we choose. I invite you into the fullness of this effort.  –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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NEWS

The Orison Anthology is now out!  I’m grateful to Luke Hankins for placing my essay, “Dark Night of the Nursery,” alongside writers I greatly respect, such as Christian Wiman, Li-Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, and Alison Gopnik. Please check it out!

Are you hungry for time to dive deeply into your project? There’s still room in the Alone Together writing retreat at the Madeline Island School of the Arts September 12-16.

Memory is a rich place of interior listening and a source for creative inspiration! Support your exploration of memory, writing, and spirit at Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality this fall:

October 8, 2016: Saturday Spiritual Memoir Introductory Workshop.

Second Fridays; 1:30-3:30 p.m.: Spiritual Memoir drop-in sessions.

September 9: Journeys


October 14: Holy Play


November 11: Place


December 9: Symbols & Metaphors

Third Fridays, 1:30-3:30 p.m.: Seed Writing group–an opportunity to write and share writing in a supportive community. The Seed Writing circle is led by Liz Olds and Vanessa Ramos.

Autumn blessings!


Elizabeth

 

 

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Corrective Lenses

Recently I plunged into Minneapolis Park & Rec’s latest phenomenon and started swimming across Lake Nokomis. The lifeguards tow enormous orange buoys out for the course, then hover alongside in their kayaks. The first time I was ecstatic—such freedom! such a great workout!—except that, without my glasses, I couldn’t see the buoys and kept veering off course.

So I bought prescription goggles.

Now you have to understand that I’ve been both terrifically near-sighted and an avid swimmer since I was nine. When I got my first pair of glasses, I was amazed that trees actually had leaves. My world came into focus, and I’ve been grateful ever since. But swimming, in the Hudson River, in Adirondack lakes, in Minnesota’s many glacial lakes and at my beloved Y, has always been a blur. To me even clear water is fuzzy. Add my propensity to get ear infections and thus wear ear plugs, and swimming becomes an experience of sensory deprivation, or rather is entirely and intensely felt. I enter a watery cocoon. I sense the depths, the pressure, the air in my body. I disappear.

Sunday morning, however, I strapped on the new goggles and I was nine all over again. The buoy was brilliant orange, right there, bobbing on the surface. The murk of Lake Nokomis was suddenly clear murk, with a sandy bottom. From my back the clouds had form, the seagulls personality, and swimming, this movement I’ve loved all my life, became brand new. This, I thought to myself, is what it’s like to be born again, to see the world afresh, in all its glory.

I’ve known many miracles, a few even supernatural and profoundly transformative. As ordinary and as human as they seem, today I want to proclaim the holy miracle of corrective lenses. I was blind but now I see.  –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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NEWS

One way to ease the discomfort of writing is to do it with others!  There are still openings in my Alone Together retreat at the Madeline Island School of the Arts this coming September 12-16.  Treat yourself to a week of writing.

Things are gearing up at Wisdom Ways this fall.  Join me for an introduction to spiritual memoir writing on Saturday, October 8th. If you’d like support and inspiration for sustaining your spiritual memoir writing, drop in on the second Fridays to explore a theme or aspect of the craft:

September 9: Journeys


October 14: Holy Play


November 11: Place


December 9: Symbols and Metaphors

Here’s more information on the monthly Writing the Sacred Journey sessions.

Wisdom Ways will also launch new writing groups (contact Wisdom Ways if interested) and a drop-in seed writing sessions–a place to write together and begin sharing writing in a supportive community.

 

              Related StoriesWhat Others Think–What I Think–No ThoughtWriting as Deep ListeningUndoing the Single Story 

Enduring the Discomfort of Writing

After allowing my novel to rest for half a year, I launched back in to make some major changes. I restructured the first hundred pages, shifted the personality of the main character, and changed her reasons for making a pivotal decision. As I revised, I experienced the complicated joy of being fully immersed in a project. The sensation is one of absolute concentration—I move into the cosmos of the book and see nothing beyond its boundaries—coexisting with absolute rebellion. I squirm, I want to get a glass of water, and then ice, then a coaster. I need to clip my toenails. When these powerful, contrary forces rise up, I know I’m in the heat of writing.

This discomfort reminds me of meditation, how part of me is drawn into the vast oblivion of silence and another part fights mightily to maintain the dignity of selfhood. The same contemplative muscles are at work. When we write, the true Self longs to surrender into a story where it thrives and knows itself integral to our larger human story. Meanwhile the false but righteous self fights to maintain its identity. In such moments we reside at the fulcrum between our temporal, physical plane and eternity. It’s thrilling and unpleasant, ecstatic and unbearable.

“I think that writers must try not to avoid knowing what is happening,” Anne Sexton wrote. “Everyone has somewhere the ability to mask the events of pain and sorrow… But the creative person must not use this mechanism any more than they have to in order to keep breathing.” Why? Our stories can be true only when we look directly, simply, and clearly into the nature of reality. “We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here,” Annie Dillard writes. “Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.” Revising is the contemplative practice of seeing and re-seeing “what’s going on here” and representing that on the page.

A writer’s capacity to tolerate discomfort, along with violent busts of elation and anguish, determines how deeply and for how long he or she can reside in the generative state. “Discomfort is the nerve ending of growth,” says Jonathan Rowe. Consider the endurance Junot Diaz needed to write The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:

The novel had me lost the entire process. The beginning only revealed itself at the end. Very frustrating to find yourself having to start at the beginning again, but that’s how this writing game is. Rarely anything linear about it. In the end I handed the book to my editor convinced that what I had written was a colossal failure. I spent the next eight months demoralized about the eleven years I had wasted on the book. Even after the awards, etc., it took a long time before I let myself look on the novel with any kindness.

The emotional rollercoaster ride tells us nothing about the worth of the process or our product. “Write a little every day,” advised Isak Dineson, “without hope and without despair. ” Hope is hope for the wrong thing, as T.S. Eliot so wisely reminds us, as is despair. We must walk the middle path.

Fortunately this is a skill we can develop. I can acknowledge my body’s restlessness without leaving my writing chair; I can recognize my ego’s rebellion and still immerse myself. I can tolerate my own dissatisfaction with the quality of my work and continue regardless. While writing, we choose again and again to be uncomfortable, going against both instinct and social norms and possibly good sense. From discomfort rises our best work. If we can hold paradox in our bodies, we can illuminate paradox within our stories. If we can practice walking the middle path on the page, we’re more likely to walk it with our lives.    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

*******************************

NEWS

One way to ease the discomfort of writing is to do it with others!  There are still openings in my Alone Together retreat at the Madeline Island School of the Arts this coming September 12-16.  I’d love to see you there.

Things are gearing up at Wisdom Ways this fall.  Join me for an introduction to spiritual memoir writing on Saturday, October 8th. If you’d like support and inspiration for sustaining your spiritual memoir writing, drop in on the second Fridays to explore a theme or aspect of the craft:

September 9: Journeys


October 14: Holy Play


November 11: Place


December 9: Symbols and Metaphors

Here’s more information on the monthly Writing the Sacred Journey sessions.

Wisdom Ways will also launch new writing groups (contact Wisdom Ways if interested) and a drop-in seed writing sessions–a place to write together and begin sharing writing in a supportive community.

 

              Related StoriesWhat Others Think–What I Think–No ThoughtMessage from the Page: “Would you please pay attention?!”Writing as Deep Listening 

Riding the See-Saw

Here’s a law of physics that every preschooler knows: To have fun on the seesaw (or I should say teeter-totter now that I’m a Minnesotan), you need two people. Movement, balance, and those joyous bumps all depend on having weight at both ends.

This is true for so much else as well! A good conversation needs two people with different opinions and a willingness to listen. A healthy relationship needs tension as well as commonality. A productive solution to any problem addresses multiple aspects of that problem. The truth itself is never singular but always sitting right in the center of paradox.

As you’ve probably guessed, I’m pondering our public rhetoric, especially around the upcoming election and in response to ongoing, systemic racism in our country. Our propensity for one-sided thinking is rampant. Police are pigs. Protestors are disruptive. Trump’s insane, Clinton’s a crook. None of these lopsided beliefs comes close to depicting our complicated reality. Most (although not all) police are good people working hard to protect our neighborhoods, who are nonetheless influenced by deep-rooted, personal fears and questionable training and a culture that distrusts difference. Most (although not all) protesters are ordinary people outraged by injustice and frustrated by their leaders’ inability to rectify it and desperate to do something. Most (although not all) politicians are flawed individuals trying their best.

The truth of a situation always requires us to embrace complexity. I am a well-intentioned, privileged white woman, educated in racial politics, profoundly influenced by my African American teachers and friends, who nonetheless has racist tendencies. I’m good and bad, as is everyone else. I project badness onto other people all the time (my poor partner, for example, or leaders of my rival political party or the United Methodist Church), and generally find that this projection doesn’t serve anyone, including myself. It’s like pushing my playmate off the seesaw. I might feel righteous and my worldview might seem clear, but I know from experience that I’m deceived.

The trouble with the dualistic thinking that’s so rampant in each of us as well as in public discourse is that it fosters evil. An extreme tilt of the seesaw brings out the sniper and the fascist and the terrorist—the exceptions within humanity. Which is why in these tenuous times I urge everyone, myself included, to practice opening our hearts to life’s wide and wondrous complexity.

–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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NEWS

In the messy middle of a project, writers need three things: tools for getting perspective, support from peers, and time to write. I’ll be hosting a retreat from September 12-16 that offers all three, plus a gorgeous place to write. Join me for the Alone Together retreat on Madeline Island.

Isn’t summer the best?!

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What Others Think–What I Think–No Thought

If my underwear ever had holes in it or the elastic stretched out or the fabric was stained, my mother would say, “What if you had some accident and wound up in the hospital? What would people think?”

So absurd! Who in any emergency would really care?

But because of this conditioning or my natural proclivity (I remember dancing ballet on a low tiled coffee table within sight of our open front door as a kid, hoping someone would drive by, be awed, and whisk me off to join the New York City Ballet) or because this is an ordinary human tendency, I arrived in adulthood with my attention well-honed toward others’ attention. It especially has haunted my writing, where awareness of an audience can invade even the most private journal pages. I’m as good as the next writer at leaping from rough draft to imagined New York Times review fame, or for that matter obscure distain. Dealing with my thoughts about what others will think is an ongoing, daily artistic struggle.

Over the years, though, I’ve noticed that my capacity for originality, vulnerability, and connectivity in writing largely depends on my ability to put audience aside, at least early on in a project. All sorts of literary skills can move a reader, but I’m increasingly convinced that one of the most basic and needful is the writer’s capacity to create a deeply private psychic space, what I like to describe as a “cloud of privacy, permission, and unknowing.” I’ve written about this in an earlier blog as “dismissing the audience.” Robert Frost wrote, “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” And Strunk and White say, “Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.” Over the years I’ve honed this skill, carrying my “cloud” through a project much like Winnie the Pooh, entering it periodically to assess why and how the project moves my heart. I’ve learned to turn off thoughts of what others would think, and that’s brought me many gifts.

Recently, however, as I’ve been diving into contemplative prayer, I’m aware that even an audience of one may be one too many. The self that is vigilant in me is also my monkey mind, and my spiritual practice involves releasing this self again and again. What if the self of my most intimate writing isn’t my real self? What if the true audience is no audience? What if there’s a means of communication that involves no self and no other but rather the ultimate Self and the ultimate Other?

At this point the questions are hypothetical. But I sense a trajectory in my journey as a woman and writer, away from ridiculous self-consciousness toward chosen consciousness toward release from the tiresome workings of my mind. I’m immensely grateful for the freedom this journey has afforded me thus far.


–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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NEWS

If you missed my latest newsletter with news of my forthcoming book, Living Revision, here’s the link.

Do you have a working draft and the desire to go deeper into a project? There’s still room for more participants in my week-long Alone Together retreat on Madeline Island from September 12-16.

Happy summer!

 

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