CHAPTER FOUR: YOUR STORIES TOGETHER: Gathering
I take seriously Flaubert’s statement that we must love one another in our art as the mystics love one another in God. By honoring one another’s creation we honor something that deeply connects us all, and goes beyond us.
JOYCE CAROL OATES, PARIS REVIEW
ALL SUMMER LONG, with Kate’s words in my ears, I wrote scenes. I sat in my studio, which was a tiny shed on a dock over the ocean. When we first came to the island nine years before, this shed had been stacked to the rafters with junk that had rusted and roosted for decades: crumbling cans, old tools, jars of nails. No one had lived on this mile-long island since the 1950s. My husband and I cleaned out the shed, dragged in two sawhorses, dropped a four-by-eight sheet of plywood on top —and there it was, my desk, my office. The shed wasn’t insulated or heated, so even in the summer, with the temperature in the forties, I sat in a winter coat, hunched over my legal pad or old computer, writing, remembering, with the wind whining reminders through the cracks. With six children spinning and dizzying the house up on the hill, this was my haven, silent of all but the wind, the ocean licking the pilings beneath me, the fishing boats rumbling as they passed, the crows and bald eagles screeching overhead.
I was living my own version of the starving artist, that muse-haunted writer alone in a spartan cell beside a lone sputtering candle. But I was happily aware of all I was missing: for those hours, no sink of encrusted dishes to attend to, no wailing babies, no kids’ chores to manage, no tussles to referee. My studio, in all its rusty tools and starkness, was beautiful to me. For a few days, anyway.
But I was too alone, and I knew it. Who was I writing for? Yes, I was writing for myself, to make sense of my life. I was writing to find God. But who were my readers? I could not imagine an audience for this book. The only audience I had was Kate. Was I writing for Kate? Kate was my agent, but she wasn’t a real reader. She was getting paid to be my reader. I knew I needed others to offer feedback and support as I wrote, but who? I felt profoundly alone as I wrote all through that summer.
I learned a lot from writing alone. But now that I’ve led writing groups for decades, I know what I’ve missed. When a community, however small, is gathered around our stories and scenes, our words come to life in surprising new ways. I’m reminded of it every time I lead a writing workshop, especially out on our island in Alaska.
It’s twenty years after that first summer of wrestling words and scenes for Kate. We’re in a house on the hill over my first lonely studio, on our second full day of class. I’m sitting against the wall, glancing out the window as I speak. The ocean is just a few hundred feet away. I’ve just asked everyone to write a scene from their time line.
“Okay everyone, we’ll write for just one more minute. See if you can finish your thought.” I look around the room. About half are still working their pens and keyboards. The others are glancing at me or reading what they’ve written, some with smiles, others with frowns. Shari is already sharing her piece with Rick, who is sitting next to her. They both stare at her page with the gaze of an archaeologist.
“Okay, good! That’s our last minute.”
Jim lays down his pen with a flourish. Lisa snickers at something she’s written. Everyone now looks at me.
“Wow, I saw some serious smoke coming out of your pens! How did it go?”
“It was hard for me to remember details at first. I wrote about a bike accident when I was ten. But the more I thought about it, the more I remembered,” Shari offers. “I just want to keep writing.”
“Yeah, me too. I can’t believe how writing took me back so many years. I was there with my father fixing his car,” Jim says.
“Fantastic! Now, this is the fun part. Let’s break up into our LifeStory Circles and share our stories. Let’s do groups of four,” I tell them. No one is surprised by this. The weeklong class is called a “workshop,” and I’ve let them know beforehand that we’ll be sharing our work. But the first time can be scary.
“Mine’s terrible!” Suzanne groans.
“Mine’s worse. I started out in one scene, then remembered a better story, so I’ve got two parts that don’t go together,” David says, sliding his chair toward the others.
“Hey, everyone, you wrote it in fifteen minutes. Are you expecting Pulitzer material here?” I say, smiling. “Of course it’s rough! That’s all we’re doing right now —a first draft.”
Chairs scrape. Pages rustle. Computers shift onto laps, and it begins. In each group of four, one person reads at a time. There’s always jockeying for who reads first. And there’s always the brave one, the impatient one whose story is so on fire they must read it, sharing the heat and light from the sentences that emerged from their fingers. There’s always one hesitant reader, and sometimes she’ll pass. But mostly, she’ll read too. The others always lean in close to listen.
Today I’m not going to join a group. I just stroll around the room, looking out the windows as if I’m watching for whales, which I am doing, but I’m mostly listening.
I see Heather reading. Her hands are shaking slightly, her voice wavers. I know this is her first writing group ever. I know she’s only recently begun to write. I hear some of her words. She’s reading about her children, her adopted children from Russia. I hear Vina reading about her mother. In another circle, David is reading something about his father. The group by the window suddenly erupts into laughter. I look back at Heather’s circle. She’s wiping her eyes and others are nodding sympathetically.
I know what’s happening. This is the best part of the class, when buried memories emerge. When the writer brings her own breath and voice to tiny moments and grand moments, and those moments are now heard and shared, often for the first time.
I’ve seen it five hundred times. How rapt the listening faces are at hearing another’s words. How surprised writers are when they hear their own words aloud: David reading about his mother’s diagnosis of lung cancer. Joan telling about her daughter’s first day back at school after the accident. When Molly tried to sign the divorce papers and couldn’t.
Last month I sat in a circle of writers from remote villages in Alaska. Darlene had never written a story from her life before, and neither had she read her words aloud to anyone. She wrote about her adult alcoholic children, how she kept trying to help them, take care of them. Her strength wore out day by day. One day, she fainted. The doctor told her she was dangerously anemic and malnourished. She could have died, he told her. She must rest and take care of herself. Darlene read her story to us slowly, her face calm but hands trembling. She ended simply with the sentence, “I, too, am important.” She read this sentence with pressed lips, then looked up at the four of us with resolve. She needed to proclaim those words to us, and we needed to witness them. That truth she was finally able to speak and to share may save her life.
Yes, we write to save our own lives, to speak words into the wordless places in our lives. And many times, that is enough. But there is more. We write for ourselves, and maybe we even write for God. If so, no matter what happens to our work from there, we already have an impressive audience! But there’s more: readers. The stories we write are not complete without readers. Stories, however raw and unfinished, need voice and an audience. And listening to others’ stories often sparks and vivifies our own stories in response.
Heather, who continues to attend workshops, later wrote this about her first time sharing her words:
The first time I sat in a writing circle, I felt nervous. My group had writers of all levels —a managing editor of a major magazine; several already published authors; and me, the most inexperienced. I had confidence in my academic writing ability as a Doctor of Clinical Psychology, but I had never ventured into the scary whirlpool of writing my own story.
Would they rip my manuscript (and my heart) to shreds with criticism? Would they view my story as not worthy compared to their own or others’?
But it turned out so differently than I expected. When I told my story, I felt seen and heard —two things I had not felt before with regards to my parenting experience. I could see tears well in one woman’s eyes, a woman with her own special-needs daughter who could relate to what I wrote. More than all this, I could see that these women could relate to the universal theme of my story. We all had experienced the pain of not being seen, of not being heard, of having our stories minimized, marginalized, not wanted.
All the writers encouraged me to keep writing, telling me my story was necessary because it could help many others. More than all the positive writing growth, I grew in my ability to share vulnerably and to receive others’ stories gratefully.
Gary, a pharmacist and a new writer, was also anxious about sharing his work with others. Later, he wrote this about his experience:
Throughout the week, I found we all had insecurities in our writing skills. Rejection letters, a harsh remark from a friend, or being chided by a family member about “doing something with your life” all take their toll. I learned I was not alone. In fact, I was in pretty good company!
In my small group, we read one another’s work. We listened intently as the writer would read aloud what they had written. We spoke the truth in love about how the words had an impact on us. We were writers taking a risk to bare our souls. In the end, we were rewarded for doing so because we wanted the best for one another. Our personal insecurities were held in the hands of other writers with care and acceptance.
Yes, it’s a risk to open your freshly scrawled memories and even your polished stories to others. Once you do it, you’ll be strengthened and encouraged; most of your anxieties will fade. But there are deeper reasons to share your work. Why are your stories so important, so powerful? Because the Book of This World is unfinished without your story. In the Bible, Creation begins with a Creator who generates the entire spinning, exploding cosmos with nothing but words: let there be, let there be, and there was. And God pronounced it good, very good. Why wasn’t it perfect? It was not perfect because the world was not finished. Our work since we were given the breath of life is the same work given to Adam as the animals paraded before him: to speak back, to name all that is, to finish what was started, to offer it back to God and to one another.
Could it be that God intended creation to be a conversation instead of a monologue? God speaks, utters forth, and the word-birthed cosmos responds often better than we do: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. . . . Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.”[21] In Jesus’ triumphal entry into the city of Jerusalem, the spectators greeted him with such great gladness that the Pharisees appealed to Jesus to shut them up. But he can’t and he won’t because “if they’re silent, the very rocks would cry out.”[22] Yes, this is hyperbole, this is mystery too deep for me, but of this I am sure: God speaks and all of creation answers back —in joy, in praise, in truth. That’s what we’re doing in this book. We’re still naming the word-spoken world; we’re writing the story of our life. We’re answering back. Not just to ourselves and to God, but also to one another.
John, one of the men who followed Jesus, knew about this. He tells us in this opening to his letter exactly why he’s writing:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched —this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.
1 JOHN 1:1-4, EMPHASIS ADDED
John wrote, we’re writing these things to you —what we’ve seen, heard, touched, handled —to make our joy complete! Incredibly, it wasn’t enough to witness the life of Jesus among them. Their joy wasn’t complete without passing it on! And when they did this, a new community was formed: Through the reading of these words, we are drawn together, and together, we’re drawn into fellowship with the Father and Son.
Our own stories do no less. When we pass on our stories to one another, we form a very real triangular community: We’re drawn into the presence and the hearts of one another, and together, we’re drawn closer to God. This is holy, holy work. Even for those who are uncertain of God, shared words can profoundly move hearts and join lives.
When Zandree wrote a scene in class about the doctor drilling through her bone, she wrote surrounded by others who were also writing deeply into their lives. Zandree noticed a shift as she wrote her “showing” scene:
Leslie taught about scene and invited us to transform our drafts into something our readers could see, hear, touch, taste, and feel. When I did this, my relationship to that moment of diagnosis shifted entirely. As I drafted the experience for a second time, I no longer wrote for me; I wrote for someone else out there who is living or has lived her own moments of deep pain. I wrote to connect to her heart, to walk with her through visceral pain with the goal of building healing community through mutual understanding of ourselves and God with us. Moving from writing for me alone to writing to invite others into shared experience gave that particular moment in my life, in all its horror, purpose in the world. The rendering of the horrific traumas in our lives for the purpose of birthing encouragement, fellowship, love, belonging, and a deeper communion with God brings a violent defeat of the enemy.
But the question arises: Who is our audience? Are we writing only for those who share our beliefs or disbeliefs, who wear the same shade of choir robes as we do, or who dress in the same tint of doubt? We cannot cloister or limit ourselves this way. We want to hear from others along their own winding paths, don’t we, no matter how different from our own? And don’t we hope that others will want to hear from us? I hope we’ll make room, then, and write in such a way that all can enter into our words, our disappointments, the day the doctor said, “I’m sorry, but it’s cancer.” The day your daughter won the marathon, the week your son got divorced. We have so much common human ground, let’s come together to form the best kind of gathering I know: a gathering of differents, a community of strangers who become, soon, a trusted circle of friends.
At the end of this chapter, I’ll introduce you to LifeStory Circles and give you guidelines about forming them. I hope you can do this. I hope you can find others who will journey through this book with you.
Even as I say this, I know that some of you are not able to write and share your stories in community. Many of you reading this book are writing alone. Bless you, and keep writing. If you can find an audience, even just one other, as you write, you will be glad for it. If you cannot —and there have been long periods of my life when I could not —just keep writing. So much good is coming from your pen, your keyboard. And your words will find an audience at just the right time.
What if you join a LifeStory Circle, and then the worst thing happens? What if everyone in your class or circle is better than you? Of course they are! Every time I’m in a writing group I fall in love with everyone else’s words and I feel my own wither in comparison. Don’t you know others will fall in love with your words, too, and think their own are paltry and poor next to yours?
Let’s stop doing this, comparing voices. Let’s remember the real world we live in, which is a world abounding in gifts, voices, and experiences. Let’s dump our culture’s competitive mind-set where we rank and measure everything. It begins the moment we’re born with our Apgar score, and soon, we’re ranked and marked from kindergarten all the way through graduate school. Now we’ve gadgeted up our lives so we can measure and rank our steps, and even the few hours of our lives when we try to sleep! Can we put all that away? It’s not real. The real world runs not on scarcity, not on competition, but on abundance.
On a January night in Kodiak, I was working on a book. It was 10:30 p.m. Tired, under a deadline, and riddled with doubt, I knew I needed to go to bed, but I wanted to finish the chapter. While working, I glanced at my Facebook feed and discovered that the northern lights were ablaze. I was missing too much life. I shut my computer, proclaimed a “Northern Lights Search Party,” and yanked my sons out of bed. (They were both still awake, reading sneakily by flashlight.)
We jumped into the car in various states of dishabille and drove to the top of a mountain, up a switchback road, passing —count them! —thirty cars on the narrow gravel passage coming down. The whole town was out!
At the top of the mountain, beneath massive windmills, we scoured the black horizon for the shimmering waves of light —but saw only blackness, and then, something else. As our eyes shifted to night mode, they appeared, faint at first, then growing in intensity until we all gasped —a swimming sea of stars, like the night ocean alive with phosphorescence. We bathed in their glory together for a long moment while three windmills strong-armed the sky overhead.
I was under a book deadline. I am so aware of my limitations, how others’ words and stories are often so much better than mine. How can I compete? How can my words ever make it among so many brighter lights? But standing there, I realized something. There is no single star that knocks us down. It is the panoply of stars that take our breath. It is the uncountable collectivity of galaxies and star clusters that light the black sky and plow us down into worship and humility. It is their sheer density and magnitude that teach us our size and then make us glad to be small.
Yes, I am small. Dear friends, aren’t we all small? Each of us is one among millions of talented, smart, creative others and their stories. Lucky us —we get to hear and listen and learn from them all. Write your stories for all of us. Keep going. You’re already a star. Now you get to join a constellation.
Your Turn!
This chapter ends with your stories rather than others’. We’re practicing a skill crucial for every writer —and every human being: the art of listening well to one another.
- 1. What has been your experience with out-loud storytelling or reading? (In Kodiak, we have “Galley Tables,” where seven people tell a story in seven minutes on a particular theme.[26] Half the town shows up for these.) Why do you think hearing stories aloud is so moving and powerful?
- 2. What are some reasons we might hesitate to share our stories with one another? Talk together about some of these fears and hesitations. How does this chapter help alleviate some of those concerns?
- 3. It’s your turn now to enjoy what I believe will soon be your favorite part of this book. Those of you going solo, hold on. I have something for you as well!
- If you’re working through this book with friends or in a class, form a LifeStory Circle (or circles, depending on how many are in your class). Pull out the scenes you wrote in the last chapter or your encounter-with-God story. Choose the piece you’d most like to share. Take turns reading and responding around the circle, following the guidelines given above. Be sure to let everyone read who desires to.
- You may be working through this book in an online book club, or with friends who live in other cities. Consider other ways of reading your work aloud to one another: through Facebook Live, Zoom, or Skype, for example. Reading your words aloud and hearing others’ words, even through a screen, can still be powerful.
- If you’re reading and writing solo —first, kudos to you for knowing the importance of this work and doing it on your own! But I’d also love for you to cultivate a reader or two, if possible. Is there someone in your life, perhaps a trusted friend, who might enjoy some of your work and who would encourage more than critique? Ask them and see. Maybe it’s your son or daughter. Or your next-door neighbor. Or perhaps you have a childhood friend that you keep track of through Facebook. Sending one or two short pieces a week to them could be an encouragement to you and a blessing to them.
- This last category is for me, for all the years I wrote completely alone, and for those of you here without a group or reader to share with. You’re not alone! You’re here in these pages with a whole host of us sharing our stories. Here’s something valuable that you can do: As you write your stories after each chapter, try reading them aloud, giving them your full voice. You’ll experience your words differently out loud than on the page. Consider recording it as well. You’ll get a whole new sense of the value and meaning of your story when you hear it aloud. (And you’ll be creating a valuable audio record of your life, faith, and thoughts.)