Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew's Blog, page 2
January 2, 2025
The Year in Books 2024
I wish I could be again the reader I was at age twelve, when each novel Mrs. Fermin the librarian handed me dependably launched me into a thrilling, expansive realm, after which I’d reenter the junior high halls bearing secrets—more than this grind is possible! Until encountering Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in eighth grade, I had […]
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December 11, 2024
Creative Bypassing: Grist for the Mill
I’d like to make a confession. On Sunday mornings, I sit in church internally spinning out a reactive, biting critique of the service, how hollow and performative it is, how the sermons charge us to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly without ever addressing how, feeling mightily superior about the vibrancy of my prayer …
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November 12, 2024
A Moment that Matters
I’ve heard sculptors say that, when a piece isn’t working, the best way forward isn’t to chip away at the details but rather smash it to the ground. Only devastation will make possible a new vision. Writers do the equivalent. In The Release I relate how, when Benjamin Percy spent two years writing a novel …
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October 14, 2024
When the Creative Beaver Dam Bursts
Unsurprisingly, these days I’ve been pondering the word “release”. Prisoners are released from jail, butterflies are released from cocoons, classified documents are released to the public, singers release their latest albums, and when we weep or rage we release emotions. My favorite definition of release is “to allow something to move, act, or flow freely”; …
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September 11, 2024
The Courage to Ask for Help
As I begin the bizarrely self-referential work of releasing The Release, I’m test-driving the teachings I put forward there. Can I really find increasing freedom as I send this book into the world? Can marketing and publicity really be life-giving? Can I sustain writing’s energizing, personally enriching exchange with mystery—the gift economy of the creative process—as …
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August 14, 2024
Here’s a peek into THE RELEASE, which comes out this October!
Your writing projects are your babies. Sometimes you dream about them before conception; sometimes they emerge in a passionate rush. You raise them with care, patience, frustration, labor, and abiding joy. Like child-rearing, revision is long, arduous, and meaningful. Often it seems the kid will never grow up. Then your baby is grown. The project is complete—more or less. It is …
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July 10, 2024
What can dancing teach us about writing?
Do you ever feel self-conscious on the page? A shout-out to the Brevity blog for publishing these reflections on stumbling our way to consciousness through writing. When my partner Emily teaches traditional circle dance to a group of newbies, they go through a predictable progression. First, they stride easily into the class, unaware of their …
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June 13, 2024
This Queer Divine Dissatisfaction
In preparing to launch The Release this October, I’m dizzied by the ironies of releasing a book about releasing creative work. If ever there were an opportunity to heed my own advice! So between now and then I thought I’d share some excerpts, in part to give you a foretaste but mostly to remind myself. The Release shares spiritual …
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May 14, 2024
Last Regrets
On a weekly basis, one client or another will tell me, “If I wind up on my deathbed without finishing this project, I’m seriously going to regret it.” This population of writers is, admittedly, peculiar; they share an intense enough degree of passion, compulsion, or vocation about writing to pay me good money. Or perhaps they seek …
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April 16, 2024
Celebration on the Altar of the World
Well, friends, my decades-long obsession with revision has reached a new extreme. I’ve shamelessly messed with another author’s work. Is this even allowed? When my mother died, her study group was preparing to read Teilhard’s Divine Milieu. I picked up her beat-up paperback copy just as I began a two-year formation program in contemplative Christianity. One day my teachers …
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