Category Archives: Writing

Articles concerning the craft of writing, or particular writers.

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There Are Still Words

For the last week, I have dug deep and inflicted some horrific discomfort upon myself, setting my alarm for the wee small hours of the morning (well, before 6 A.M. anyway). In light of some of the thoughts I was having earlier last week, I decided the only way to really get some solid, non-blogging writing time was to knock off the sleep bank. The afternoon wasn’t working (that’s cherished time with my daughter), early evening wasn’t working (that’s cherished time with my wife), and with my class load the way it is this semester, I really don’t have the ability to use a planning period for my own personal fun.

Yep, that's pretty much what I look like at pre-dawn.

To be honest, I didn’t know if I would be able to hang in there with the new early bird schedule. But I’m seven weekdays in, and other than having to tiptoe from bedroom to bathroom to office so I don’t wake Katy Jo or Leigh, things are not as hard – the well is not as dry – as I thought they would be. There are still words.

Approximately 8000 so far, which isn’t all that extraordinary an amount, but a lot more than I was producing a few weeks ago. So I suppose there’s something to be said for discipline. Who would have thought the encouragement I give to my students is actually true?

May we never stop trying new ways to better ourselves. Changes come in miniscule amounts, but they do come, and at 5:30 in the morning, that’s really all one can ask for.

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Wednesday Wordsmiths: Thomas Merton

Today’s Wordsmith:

Thomas Merton

He’s a writer many people can claim they have heard of but only a small percentage of those have actually read something he wrote. This is not because Merton was an obscure writer, but rather because, as a Trappist monk who studied comparative religion, wrote about pacifism and social justice issues, and cooperated in interfaith dialogue with the Dalai Lama (among other influential spiritual leaders), many Christians shy away from Merton’s books, settling instead for the cute little aphorisms and poetic sayings cut out of them. However, Merton possessed an astonishingly insightful mind, especially when it came to embracing a faith that is genuine, raw and unique to the individual even in the midst of church community. I believe Merton could write with such understanding on this because of his own journey, which included a lot of anxiety and agonizing doubt preceding his decision to enter the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky as a young man, not to mention years of confusion regarding exactly what kind of faith, if any, he should practice. Nowhere in Merton’s writings is this struggle described more compellingly than in his own autobiography, The Seven-Storey Mountain. Above all others, I have found this book to be a remarkable account of one man’s search for spiritual meaning in a time when religious ambiguity and the rejection of absolute truth was becoming part of modern society.

Merton’s interest in the deep, mystical traditions of the Christian faith, which he believed were withering as more and more Christians turned to an interpretation and practice of the faith that forced conceptualization, rationalization and formulaic answers, drove him to the study of Eastern religions. He saw systems such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism not as something to combine with Christian doctrine, but rather as a way to better understand the mystic experience, which he believed was at the core of the lives of the early Church fathers and Desert Mystics. This led him to recurring dialogue with the leaders of many Eastern religions, and allowed him to model a Christian faith that is more interested in forging a deeper understanding of the human experience and need for salvation than it is with erecting doctrinal boundary lines.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Thomas Merton, the writer, is his own journals, which he kept faithfully throughout his life, before he entered the Trappist community, during his years at Gethsemani, and even in his travels across the United States, Asia and Europe, as he engaged in interfaith dialogues and talks on social justice issues (including the struggle for Civil Rights in America). For any first-time reader of Merton, in addition to The Seven-Storey Mountain, Seeds of Contemplation and No Man is an Island,  I would certainly suggest looking into his journals – one of the best is The Intimate Merton. Here’s a sample:

What (besides making lists of the vices of our age) are some of the greatest vices of our age? To begin with, people began to get self-conscious about the fact that their misconducted lives were going to pieces, so instead of ceasing to do the things that made them ashamed and unhappy, they made it a new rule that they must never be ashamed of the things they did. There was to be only one capital sin: to be ashamed. That was how they thought they could solve the problem of sin, by abolishing the term.

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Wednesday Wordsmiths: Michael Chabon

Today’s Wordsmith:

Michael Chabon

There are some writers that dazzle you with the memorable characters they create, some who bewilder you with their mastery of diction and vocabulary, some who baffle you with how adept they are at constructing realistic dialogue on the page, and still others who astonish you with descriptive passages so vivid that substituting an actual picture of the person, place or thing would only serve to diminish the idea. Michael Chabon is a combination of all of these writers. There are few who can match his talent for storytelling or his grasp of the weight of mystery and heritage in life. Chabon’s books include the novels The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (the last one winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001), the short story collection, Werewolves in Their Youth, and the alternative history genre novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. While I have not gotten my hands on all of these, I can tell you that the ones I have read have confirmed my suspicions that the man is incapable of writing anything bland or tedious.

Chabon has drawn upon many personal interests and experiences to give his characters and stories their oddly unsettling realism, such as baseball, comic books, Fine Arts graduate students, his younger days in Pittsburgh, and his Jewish background. He has also attempted to forge a new connection between literary fiction and genre fiction, denying that one is inherently more cultured than the other. To that end, some of Chabon’s most recent works are heavily inspired by genres such as science fiction, fantasy, horror and even romance. And rumor has it that The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is being adapted for the screen by the Coen brothers.

If you are interested in Chabon, I suggest picking up The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, his most praised work. However, if the size intimidates you, you may find Wonder Boys enjoyable, or one of his later, genre-influenced works, like Summerland or Gentlemen of the Road.

Here’s an excerpt from Wonder Boys that I particularly enjoy:

I say that Albert Vetch is the first real writer I knew not because he was, for a while, able to sell his work to magazines, but because he was the first one to have the midnight disease; to have the rocking chair and the faithful bottle of bourbon and the staring eye, lucid with insomnia even in the daytime. In any case he was, now that I consider it, the first writer of any sort to cross my path, real or otherwise, in a life that has on the whole been a little too crowded with representatives of that sour and squirrelly race. He set a kind of example that, as a writer, I’ve been living up to ever since. I only hope that I haven’t invented him.

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Wednesday Wordsmiths: Frederick Buechner

Today’s Wordsmith:

Frederick Buechner

 

He’s an ordained Presbyterian minister who rarely preaches, but who for six decades has maintained a congregation of loyal readers. While never winning the awards (a true example of oversight if ever one existed), he has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In his later years, he has published little, claiming to no longer have the same zeal for producing books, but in earlier times was quite prolific, crafting works of various form and genres, including novels, lexicons, literary criticism, sermons and autobiography. John Irving, one of his students from Phillips Exeter Academy, credits him as a mentor of profound impact. His most well-known works include Godric (a novel chronicling the life of the medieval, monastic hermit, Godric of Finchale, creatively narrated in Godric’s own “mediaeval” tone and language), A Long Day’s Dying (his critically acclaimed first novel), and his four memoirs, The Sacred Journey, Now and Then, Telling Secrets and The Eyes of the Heart.

Buechner’s themes are drawn from his own life and the similarities between his experiences and everyone else’s: themes of loneliness, rebellion, doubt, redemption, grace and contemplation. Despite the wide variation in his forms, these themes remain central but never wear thin or become repetitive. Anyone wishing to look into Buechner’s works would do well to start with his lexicons; these three works take overused-to-the-point-of-being-archaic religious terms (Wishful Thinking), well-known and obscure Bible characters (Peculiar Treasures), and common societal buzz words (Whistling in the Dark) and infuses them all with fresh, poetic theological significance. They were recently republished in a single volume called Beyond Words. And, for those interested in Buechner’s fiction and memoir, Godric and The Sacred Journey, respectively, will captivate in ways you never knew books could.

It is almost impossible to provide a short sample of Buechner’s talent, because it seems he is endlessly quotable. However, here are two wonder-filled lines:

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. - Now and Then

If you look at a window, you see dust, flyspecks, the crack where Junior’s frisbee hit it. If you look through a window, you see the world beyond. Something like this is the difference between people who see the Bible as a Holy Bore, and those who see it as the Word of God, which speaks out of an almost unimaginable past into the depths of ourselves. - Wishful Thinking (“Bible”)

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Extracurricular

For my Sono Libero kids…

On Tuesdays, thirteen students saunter into my classroom a few minutes after the final school bell chimes. They gather here to commit themselves to something none of them can do alone, something greater, requiring their collective talents and a communal vision. Granted, some days the vision is dulled by the fog of pressing schoolwork and college applications and rival clubs, but I know that they participate in our creative endeavor because somewhere inside of them burns a flame of innovation and imagination. And, when they choose to fan that flame, mountains move.

We’re putting together a literary magazine, a compilation of artwork, prose works and poetry from the student body. The students who come to my room are the ones who not only believe in the power of art in general, but are convinced that power burns confidently within the hearts and minds of their fellow students. Essentially, they adhere to a notion that people are so much more than what is found on their surface. They have faith in the existence of depth, of mystery, to life, and they want to celebrate this fact rather than disregard or deny it.

Maybe there’s hope for the world after all.