CHAPTER NINE: YOUR SHARED STORY: Launching
Each of us is like a desert, and a literary work is like a cry from the desert, or like a pigeon let loose with a message in its claws, or like a bottle thrown into the sea. The point is: to be heard —even if by one single person.
FRANÇOIS MAURIAC, GOD AND MAMMON
IT’S THE LAST NIGHT of the writing workshop. We’ve just cleared dinner from the tables. We’re circling our chairs, nabbing slices of chocolate cheesecake and sipping wine, settling in for the evening. I’m sitting between Amy and Zandree. I’m off the hook tonight. My teaching is over. This is their night, their reading.
“Okay, everyone, it’s time!” I call out from my chair, still savoring the last bite of the chocolate crust. Everyone begins to settle in the living room, which has been our classroom this week. We’ve collapsed the tables and are now moving chairs to the perimeter of the pine-paneled room. While I’m waiting, my eyes follow the lines of the wood from the walls up to the cathedral ceiling. It was the wrong wood. We ordered eight-inch fir, but someone in Seattle sent us two bundles of four-inch pine, the kind of lumber used for trimming windows. It was winter, and we had to build this entire house in nine months. It would take two months to get the right wood shipped up. So we took it anyway. We loaded it in our two twenty-three-foot open boats and drove it back the seven ocean miles from the tiny remote village to our island. We wore five layers of clothing to keep warm in the winter ocean air, driving those skiffs heavy in the water with pieces of our new house. Then every board was loaded from the beach, up the long hill on our backs. I was eight months pregnant with my first child as I knelt to sand every board. Then I climbed the ten-foot scaffolding, hands over head, nailing up one piece after another, my belly heavy, until the whole room, days later, was done. I could not have imagined that this room, this house, would host so many more stories beyond my own.
Finally, the noise calms. Everyone is in a chair and looking at me.
“All right, everyone,” I begin, my heart giving a skip. These are my favorite two hours of the whole week. “I’ve asked you to read something new, something you’ve written this week. Anyone want to start us off?” I meant it as a rhetorical question, ready to volunteer someone, but Stan’s hand shoots up. It begins.
Stan starts with a miraculous story from his childhood in Guatemala. Then Sara reads about a difficult meeting with her brother, just back from treatment. Terri reads a terrifying scene when her husband threatened her and her children with a gun. Joan tells the story of her first encounter with God as a child in the Catholic church. Harry reads a story about a camping trip. Zandree wrestles with God as she struggles to serve malnourished children in West Africa. Amy is enrolled, reluctantly, in a charm school for girls in her remote Alaskan village. Vina shares a tender moment with her mother, who is battling Alzheimer’s.
In that pine-paneled room on an island in Alaska, we traveled everywhere that night, into empathy, wonder, grief, fear, sadness, hilarity. I thought of Annie Dillard’s famous words: “Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?”[46]
The next day, as each one climbed into the floatplane, clutching a backpack full of one another’s stories as well as their own, I knew that much more was ahead for them. Some would keep writing and compile a book. Some would start a story circle themselves. Some would take more classes. The end of the workshop was not the end; it was the beginning.
These are the best kind of endings, aren’t they, that open into something more? My story with Kate ends like that too.
The reviews of Surviving the Island of Grace were mostly positive, but Kate and I were doomed. She didn’t like my next book idea. In fact, she hated it.
After the memoir went out into the world, and then the collection of fishing stories, I took a break from writing to focus on my teaching and my family. But at forty-two, I was suddenly pregnant. At forty-four, it happened (impossibly) again. Over those two years, I found myself with not only two books in the oven but two babies as well. (Surprise! Surprise! And please refrain from clever quips like “Don’t you know how that happens?”)
I hadn’t planned on being pregnant again, nor had I ever planned on writing a book about pregnancy. But I needed to. The years of writing the memoir had taught me the power of words to blaze a road through the wilderness into the past, and even to the future. I needed this now more than ever, for myself and for others.
I was writing this new story from my life with a fresh intensity, writing now to literally save lives: Many women in unplanned pregnancies end their pregnancies, I discovered. But one thing would be different in this book. I knew I had to write honestly from my faith, from my belief in God as the maker of every life and the loving designer of our days. What other hope did I have to offer?
I sent the first three chapters to Kate. Our conversation on the phone a month later went like this.
“Did you get my new book proposal?”
“Yes.” Long silence. “It’s not for us.”
“I see.” I knew she wouldn’t like it. I take a breath. “Is it because it’s faith based?”
“Of course. I can’t sell any God stuff. You have to go to those religious houses. If that’s what you want to write, you’ll have to find another agent.” Her voice was cold and dismissive.
And that was it.
Kate and I never spoke again. She was my agent for eight years, but we never became friends. I didn’t mind. I never expected to have an agent. I never thought I’d actually write books. I couldn’t dream that big. And I trusted that the end of that relationship would be the beginning of something more. (It was.) I believed I would find another agent. (I did.) That I would keep writing. (I did.) And I hoped that now I was free to write as explicitly from my faith as I wanted. (I was.) The ending with Kate was abrupt, but it led me exactly where I needed to go.
This chapter, too, must bring closure, and it’s also a launch toward all that’s next. Some of you are arriving here with bundles of stories, ready to go. Some of you may have read through the entire book first before going back and writing your stories. And a few of you have skimmed the first chapter and skipped to the last to see if you want to do this. (Just say yes!) However you’ve done it, here you are!
And now what should you do with these fresh stories, brimming with memory, heart, and wit, with fresh wisdom, these bones that have been joined joint to tendon, muscles strung, and skin, a “vast army” of stories now ready to go where you ask? Many of you are thinking of sending them out into the world. How should you do that? I’ll sketch out some ideas about how to do this and then send you to a list of books that will tell you everything you need to know. But I’m here to share with you about the writing, mostly. I don’t want this book to go the way of a conversation I had a few years ago.
Three of us sat together in a big-box bookstore. We were there to sign our newly released books. Between signing our books, we bent our heads together and talked with animation and complaint about all the tasks assigned to us as published writers, building our online “platform,” starting a blog, Instagram, Facebook. We talked about marketing strategies, online promotions, the stress of following sales figures. We didn’t speak for a minute about what bound us together, what we loved and cared for most: words and stories. I left the table that day empty and disappointed.
I don’t want to end this book like that. But I’ve been urging you all along to write for more than yourself. So let me try to finish what I’ve started.
Here are five ideas for sending your words out into the world.
- 1. Submit individual stories to magazines, journals, and blogs. Some of the stories you’ve written and shared may have struck a deep chord with listeners. Consider shaping that story or stories into an article or piece for outlets that publish work on this topic or from this perspective. Read and research each outlet carefully, however, to see the length, style, and tone that best fits their audience. Most outlets have websites with writer’s guidelines that outline their requirements. Send only your best work. But know going in that some publications receive a thousand times more submissions than they accept. (Less for blogs.) Rejection slips are the coin of the realm. No matter how experienced the writer, we all have an impressive collection of rejections. Don’t take it personally. If you believe in your work and others do, as well, keep sending off your work, but don’t sit around waiting for a response. (It can take months.) Keep writing, keep honing, keep getting better.
- 2. Gather your life stories into a single collection. As you’ve written stories from your time line or your Artwalk, following the process from memory to final editing and shaping, you may now have a bundle of stories about significant moments in your life (or someone else’s). They can remain separate stories, each one shining on its own, without a single narrative arc or “through line.” This is the easiest, most efficient type of memoir to write. If you prefer a tighter book, gather the stories around a theme that will connect and unite the stories in some way. They can be arranged any way that makes intuitive sense, given the content and your audience. Even with family histories, however, beware of the pitfalls of the straight chronological approach, unless you write with wit, humor, and a compelling voice. An introduction will be especially important to set the stage, provide an overview, and create a framework for the stories that follow. Many of you will choose this option, and it’s a good one. If you’re writing to preserve your story or the history of someone close to you, know that your work is already a treasure —you have rescued the past from oblivion —and it will become increasingly precious as it’s passed around the family and down the generations. Dakota: A Spiritual Geography is a good example of this kind of memoir.
- 3. Create a traditional book-length memoir. Many traditional memoirs contain a single narrative arc. This option is more time-consuming but is still the most common form of published memoir. Think of your stories as different beads strung on a string. The string that organizes the stories is the inner story, the theme. Every story and chapter will enlarge, deepen, and advance the inner story/narrative arc. Surviving the Island of Grace follows this model. As you know from chapter 6, however, the story may move back and forth through time. Still, in comparison to a collection of stories, there is a clear sense of unity, cohesion, and momentum. In this form of memoir, story is king. While reflection is still a crucial element, let your story illuminate your “message.”
- 4. Christian Living Memoir. I’m coining this phrase for a hybrid that blends key features of the memoir: the primacy of story together with the “felt needs” approach of Christian Living books. I used this approach in several books, including Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers. Memoir —the story of reconnecting and reconciling with my father —anchors the book and provides the outer and inner story and narrative arc, but out of that experience, explicit guidance and instruction are given to the reader as well for their own forgiveness journeys. My friend Heather, a clinical psychologist, is currently writing about raising her adopted special-needs children, blending her story as a mother and providing her guidance as a mental-health professional. This option can truly combine the best of story and instruction.
- 5. Start a targeted blog, website, or Facebook page. Creating a book of any kind is a significant undertaking. Finding a traditional publisher for your work can be a lengthy, frustrating process. But with the Internet and social media, you have other options to use your material. If your life story centers around a particular issue that you’ve become especially knowledgeable about (dealing with grief, the loss of a child or spouse, beating addiction, coping with illness, managing menopause, etc.) and you’d like to use your story and expertise to reach out to others, consider beginning a blog, a website, a Facebook page, or all three. They could serve as a ministry, as a support group, as an online story circle. Chronic Joy, a ministry for those dealing with chronic illness and lingering pain, sprang up from women who met at one of my writing workshops. They have a powerful, effective ministry that emerged from writing and sharing their own stories. They publish their own books, and manage a website and Facebook page. Be aware, however, of the personal cost and commitment this requires (as well as the possible liability).
But this list is far too short. My students and others have shown me how much more is possible as you write into your life. Here, I’ll let them speak to you directly.
Writing and revising my autobiographical novel placed me into a deep peace that I haven’t shaken. I also got an MFA, which opened the door to teach developmental composition at Northern Illinois University. I wondered how being called to write would allow me to help the poor. Well, the two came together, and I was privileged to work with students from some of the most notorious neighborhoods in Chicago for twenty years.
KATIE ANDRASKI
Writing my story not only gave me fresh eyes to see God in the difficult parts of my past, but continues to help me minister to others from hard places. My online ministry started through simply articulating those “treasures in darkness” kind of lessons on the blog. It has since grown into something I never could have imagined, teaching me God gives us our story for sacred reasons.
ARABAH JOY
I was almost forty when my life turned upside down. That began a wild, thirty-five-year journey of everything from learning how I’d been affected by childhood sexual abuse to earning a bachelor’s degree at age fifty and a master’s degree at age sixty. Even though I will be seventy-four next month, I still see clients for counseling. At the beginning of that journey, a speaker said, “Give God the pen and let him write your story.” I believe the day will come when I finish my book for mothers whose children have been sexually abused.
MARILYN HEIN
After three years, I finally decided to write and share my story about my struggle with Crohn’s disease. I got so low and felt so hopeless, I even tried to take my life. But I’m telling all that now, writing it and sharing it with my family. It’s helped all of us heal.
“TIM”
When I write, it feels like a nine-hour prayer that leaves me with the peace I desperately need to keep PTSD at bay.
DONNA JAYNE SAMMONS-DEMOSS
Writing my life story, finding God throughout it, has been fascinating. It all started when I wrote about my first encounter with God. My goal now is to not just write my story but to help others write theirs so they can find the touch of God in their lives, as well.
JOAN MCPHERON
C. S. Lewis has a quote about friendship springing from the moment when one person says to another, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”[47] Writing my stories has birthed many such friendships, as my willingness to tell my experience connected me with others who had previously felt alone in theirs.
MEGAN EVANS HILL
The biggest lie is that I am the only one who has experienced a particular thing. I’ve learned, in appropriate sharing of the hard and awful stuff I’ve experienced, that I am never the only one. Telling my story rebukes the shame that wants to cripple me and often brings freedom and sanctuary to a reader or listener —thanks be to God!
MICHELLE VAN LOON
Writing helped me to understand, to grieve, and finally, to celebrate the six years I lived in a remote, small village in Zambia. Writing gave me words to fill in the blanks and gaps of those hard years. To integrate them into my life story. Writing literally stopped my nightmares. Writing made me into an author, and I am profoundly, deeply grateful.
JILL KANDEL
Since the workshop, I’ll have one essay published in a theology journal. What I learned about writing life stories has helped me write better sermons.
RANDY
I wrote Under a Desert Sky to discover for myself the faithfulness of God in the hard place of both parents having cancer. When I lived those years, I was so busy dealing with the Overwhelming Now that I wasn’t always cognizant of God in the story. Only in writing did I relive the truth of his faithfulness. I now teach classes to other people touched by cancer and am a Voice of Hope with the American Cancer Society.
LYNNE HARTKE
But maybe you’re not ready for any of this. Maybe your heart stopped at those words: send your work into the world. What? Send your private words, your most sacred moments out into the noisy, indifferent world, subject to critique and rejection? It was hard enough to share with your LifeStory Circle! And maybe you’ve worked your way through this book on your own, so you’ve not shared a word yet with anyone.
I understand the magnitude of this step. This is where I get hit hard too. Yes, I’ve been moved through writing. I’ve grown, stretched, learned empathy, listened to God. But now, let someone else read this? Share this with my family and friends? Publish a book? Even now, as I write this final chapter, though it is my twelfth book, I hear the same niggling at my very foundations: Does the world really need another story, another book?
It’s a genuine question. More than a million new books are released every year in the US alone. Every time I walk into a Barnes and Noble, which carries literally a million titles on each store’s shelves, I’m hit by a wave of inadequacy. Who needs to hear from me again? Surely countless writers over many generations have already said what I’m struggling to say, and they’ve said it more lyrically, more descriptively, more profoundly, more of every kind of adjective I can find for “better-than-mine.” Does the world really need my story, this story?
I do have an answer. I’ve stilled my beating, doubting heart again and again by listening to Madeleine L’Engle’s wise words:
My husband is my most ruthless critic. . . . Sometimes he will say, “It’s been said better before.” Of course. It’s all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anyone else, I’d never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it in our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn’t what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.[48]
Yes, we must write it, or we die, or some part of our memory or our family’s memory dies. But this does not answer the question entirely. We need to write our stories, but does the world need our stories?
I experienced a deeper answer a few years ago. I was standing on a stage, a mic at my throat, facing a sober audience. Just a few days before, a man had pulled out twenty-three guns and shot into a crowd of twenty-two thousand. Fifty-nine were killed, hundreds more wounded. Most of us remember that day, though it blurs with so many other hostilities and attacks around the world that visit us on our screens each day.
This was a writing conference. Each person had come to learn and to be inspired. I had planned to say some of what I’ve written in this book: Write your story for you, for your family. Write your story to name the world and give it back. Write your story to wrestle God. Write your stories to pass on the comfort you have received in all of your distress. Write your stories to attend to what God attends to. Write your story to pass on all you’ve seen and heard of the sacred in this world.
All of this was still true. I believed every word. But that day, I wanted more. I wanted to hand out bulletproof vests instead of pens. I wanted to hand out shields and swords instead of speaking words into the air about writing words on the page. Never had I felt so shaken, so helpless. What good were all these words? Can words stop bullets and end violence?
But then I remembered that in his own violent world and time, Jesus didn’t call out the military or teach self-defense classes or hand out swords, though all of this was warranted. Instead, he told a story. “A man was on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho . . . ,” the same narrative the woman in the prison retold. About a man who was violently attacked, robbed, and left for dead. Who was then ignored, despite his need, by the very ones —a lawyer, a priest —who should have rescued him. The one man who stopped to bind his wounds and to nurse him to strength and health was a man Jesus’ listeners despised. A man of the wrong lineage, the wrong ethnicity and religion.
Jesus just gave them that story. Maybe he used his hands and acted it out a little as he spoke, but he just gave them a story. Words that show us what it looks like to be blind, what it looks like to see beyond political and religious labels, what it looks like to be a neighbor, what it looks like to love.
So I did that too. I stood there and told that story, with a few changes: a Democrat passed by, a pastor passed by, a Republican passed by, but a liberal stopped and bound his wounds. Or a libertarian stopped and bound his wounds. I moved the labels around. I remembered that stories can do what guns and shields cannot: They can move us beyond affiliations, under the skin of our neighbors, even into the hearts of those we think are our enemies whom we are to love because they, too, are made in the image of God.[49] Every one of us —carrying the image of God.
But I couldn’t stop with that parable. And I can’t stop there now in these pages either. Because after that story we might think, Okay, we need uplifting, hopeful stories that show love and mercy, where all turns out happy and well. But do we know how hard that story was to hear? It rattled and shook up the entire social order. (Wait. The social outcast is the good guy? The super religious are the bad guys? We have to take care of strangers?)
Don’t we know Jesus did this a lot? Every story he told was riveting, challenging, new. He valued people no one else valued: the lepers, the blind, the insane. He had deep friendships with women. He was scary in the breadth of his love and forgiveness. Sometimes in our comfort and security, we forget: The Good News he came to speak is not safe, not for anyone. The gospel’s revolutionary message is not safe, but it is true. And it is beautiful, but it’s a beauty that must cut to heal.
If we really want to offer healing to this cracked-up world, our stories must do as Jesus’ stories did: tell the whole truth about this human existence. Yes, about its goodness and hope as well as its tragedy, absurdity, and folly. And like Jesus, we need to tell these stories with original words so our readers’ ears and eyes will stay open and awake.
That means we need to be on Christian-ese alert. I catch myself all the time repeating truisms, using the same sanctified metaphors, the same theological terms that only a lifetime pew-sitter can follow. Even when my readers are kind enough to tag along, they’re likely either yawning or too comfortably affirmed. Yes, I’m writing from a stance of faith, but I desire to write about this life with such honesty and insight that all people are invited in and find common ground.
To do this, we’ll need to take our time. As we compose and revise and finish our stories, may we do it with joy and patience. We don’t have to be literary masters. I am not a literary master, but I labor like one. Resist our culture’s twittering, constant instant messaging. Learn, practice, write and rewrite, study, pray, listen. Value your words and the story God is writing through your life. Take as long as you need. Do you know how long I spent on that first memoir? Eight years. I spend an average of two to three years on every book. I know I’m slow. But those words must wrestle me first. They must slay me, shape me, then raise me again. It has happened twelve times over now in every book I write, and I never want it to stop. If you want the truth of your words to live on the page, let them live in you first. If you want the truth of your stories to change hearts in the world, let them change your heart first.
What will happen then, when your words go out, near or far, to many or a few? Who can know what will happen? One summer, I roamed the hills and grass of our island in Alaska with a clutch of papers in my hands —a first draft of a book from a young woman in Canada. We wrote back and forth about her poetic words, about narrative arc, about story. Her words were piercingly beautiful, and I hoped she would garner a large readership, but who can guarantee such a thing? I had written seven books by then and knew the ropes. Solemnly, I prepared her for the reality of a first release, which often doesn’t sell well. A year later, Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts launched into the world, selling a million copies within the first two years.[50]
But fame and fortune are uncommon visitors for most of us. I know hundreds of writers, and only a few can claim even a passing visit with these handsome suitors whom we imagine are hovering around our doorbell, waiting for the moment our brilliant words take flight. I am not immune. I confess to occasional pangs of jealousy toward the twelve authors in the world selling a bazillion books. I think, in a temporary swoon, How easy their writing lives must be! But then I remember from my own modest shots of fame that every burst of attention brings greater responsibilities, not fewer. Another friend landed a spot on the New York Times bestseller list. His agent, readers, and global fan base now hold their collective breath for his next book. How can he write with so many others now to heed and please?
So enjoy the quiet. Your obscurity as a writer right now is a gift. Keep freely pursuing the truth of your life. Keep using “that one talent which is death to hide,” as John Milton writes.[51] If you’re doing any of this now, you’re already famous.
Don’t lose track of what this is all about. You may not have a lot of time to write. You may not publish. You may not end up on the New York Times bestseller list. None of this is needful. Because writing into our lives is bigger than this. If we pursue our stories, honestly and truly, they will send us on a pilgrimage that takes us, like Abraham, from one land to another, from a country of unknowing, through wastelands where the promise of a promised land appears invisible and impossible —but day by day, this journey moves us closer to clarity, to truth, to the very City of God, if we allow it. I don’t want to lose out on any of that. I don’t want you to either. And if in the whole course of your life you write one beautiful book, or five compelling life stories —thank you for sending out into the world the brightest, truest words you could find.
As you wrestle and write your story, joining joint to tendon to bone, I wish you leaps of joy, but also I wish you that crooked little sideways limp when a piece of writing is done and has done its work on you.
Let’s go into the world limping together.