Rebuking the wind

A new venue

2010-09-17T07:30:00.000-07:00

my new blog is at timwasem.wordpress.com

Vonnegut Advice: Short Stories

2010-05-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

2010-04-01T11:44:00.000-07:00

I've restarted Josip Novakovich's book Fiction Writer's Workshop. I bought it a while back, hoping that it would act as a writing course over the summer. After his first section on the "sources of fiction" I got excited and began writing. Therefore, I never made it to chapter two--Setting. He makes the statement that the "exterior and the interior go together," which in everyday life is pretty obvious but in writing it is easily overlooked. In my case I go to either extreme, trapping myself in the mind of a character or keeping so much distance that you can see where he is but know little about what makes him tick--why he is part of the story at all. Both of those types of stories die suddenly after a while. They're difficult to finish because after a while my pen feels more like a tattoo gun, and each word feels unchangeable and stubborn.

However, Novakovich does write about "Setting as the Groundwork for Fiction." He says that "out of place, a character is formed; out of a character's motives, plot may follow." And today I am finding this very valuable insight as I work on the second story for my 490. I'm am using a setting that is familiar to me, yet a fictitious character.

One challenge of writing about a familiar place is that it if describe it as too familiar, it won't interest the reader. Novakovich's advice is that, "as a writer you should attain the skill for defamiliarizing your immediate surroundings." This is great advice that allows a writer to be purely original, expressing what could seem normal to people as something fascinatingly present in perhaps our everyday lives. A writer also needs to defamiliarize situations and reveal the real desire and pain and joy that motivate every moment. I would say Jesus managed to defamiliarize quite a bit to us. If a writer truly does this, she should leave the reader upside down--feeling the truth and wanting more.

an old story done

2010-03-23T18:56:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned in my first post, there is a story I've been working on for the past two years about a little town in North Carolina. It began as a short story, then a series of short stories, then a play, then a novella, then a short story again, and now is being put to rest as a paragraph. About a month ago I submitted a six sentence version of this to the 6S site (mentioned before) in hopes of having it occupy a small amount of lumber in the next 6S Review to be published this coming April. Today I got an e-mail confirmation that the story was accepted. There are probably a couple hundred people in this little publication so its acceptance isn't a big deal. What is most important to me is that this story that I've obsessed over is, like Benjamin Button, ending its development after a long life of growing pains and melodrama as the smallest of stories. I loved this story. In some ways I'm upset it never grew up, never developed the broad shoulders and facial hair of a novel. I feel a sense of loss and grieve that there was a lot that would have been discovered about these characters in the fleshing out of the plot. However, "Spruce Pine" was destined for smaller things.

"Spruce Pine"

Jackson Skua has a grandma named Willie, a sweet, pious woman who remarried a unipod ex-cop named Bill Penix. Their home is known for a pair of Shakespearian suicides that took place in the living room 30 years earlier when Bill was a fledgling on this small town's force. He didn't respond to the call. Bagworms are cocooning in the town's Christmas tree crops and killing them as well as Bill's own horticultural meddlings. Jackson has an insatiable love for concrete things, and the mere existence of Bill challenged that. But, now, as a drunk sets the city aflame, Jackson cries next to Willie as Bill lay dead on the porch, poisoned by his own bitterness and pesticides.

2010-03-22T08:13:00.000-07:00

So i know that I have done a poor, poor job of keeping up with this blogging business. But I am back. For those of you who have actually checked this little page, I thank you. There is more to come.

For now I'll offer you a poem by Wendell Berry from A Timbered Choir:

Whatever is foreseen in joy

Must be lived out from day to day.

Vision held open in the dark

By our ten thousand days of work.

Harvest will fill the barn; for that

The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

And yet no leaf or grain is filled

By work of ours; the field is tilled

And left to grace. That we may reap,

Great work is done while we're asleep.

When we work well, a Sabbath mood

Rests on our day, and finds it good.

Six Sentences

2010-03-14T17:32:00.000-07:00

I want to put a plug in for a great blog I found. I've been reading it for the past month or so. It is called "Six Sentences." The site's goal is to publish short stories made up of no more than six sentences. Writers who submit stories cannot be previously published in a major way. Occasionally the editor of the site compiles stories into book form, almost like a literary magazine.

Well, last week I submitted a story called "One-up" and it was accepted to be on the site. I loved crafting a small story and I'm going to write more of them. It is great practice in using concise language. Check it out and rate it if you'd like. I would recommend reading this blog regularly because there are some great stories getting published here.

Six Sentences

My Story

Untitled Note

2010-03-05T04:48:00.001-08:00

"It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather, it is the story that owns us."

-Chinua Achebe

What a great thought, eh? A writer is an artist- yes. But a writer more importantly has responsibilities. These duties are to our "progeny" as Achebe says, but doesn't the language of "our" just unfold continuously until all of mankind is included? It is a liberating thought. It is a challenging thought. This does not mean that a writer has to keep in mind every poor student, wall street banker, starving little boy in India, and our parents. They may have a place in one's heart, but are defined as a love for man. Keeping our mind on truth our words can clear the fog for at least one soul. And we can be confident that if this happens, it can do nothing but unfold through the generations.

2010-02-25T19:39:00.000-08:00

I just finished a fit of writing. I was in the middle of Starbucks, which was full of abrasive laughs and painfully hip music. It has been a while since I've been enraptured in a story for a long amount of time and felt I couldn't stop. Most of my time writing is too nit-picky, too obsessed with detail. Therefore, today I decided that I would just put it all out there and let the story form itself. This form of writing doesn't come too easily, but when I allow it the story seems to be filled with truths rather than blatant fictions. I can't wait to finish it tomorrow.

I'm off to unwind and finish Wendell Berry's book A Place on Earth. It is fantastic.

work

2010-02-20T06:20:00.001-08:00

Thomas Merton on the nature of work, and how every task and job at hand can be a form of praise. I read this today in New Seeds of Contemplation, which I'm rereading for Lent. This was an empowering notion for me to encounter. I am the instrument of God's will in my life.

"The requirements of a work to be done can be understood as the will of God. If I am supposed to hoe a garden or make a table, then I will be obeying God if I am true to the task I am performing. To do the work carefully and well, with love and respect for the nature of my task and with due attention to its purpose, is to unite myself to God's will in my work. In this way I become His instrument. He works through me. When I act as His instrument my labor cannot become an obstacle to contemplation, even though it may temporarily so occupy my mind that I cannot engage in it while I am actually doing my job. Yet my work itself will purify and pacify my mind and dispose me for contemplation."

-Thomas Merton from New Seeds of Contemplation

Balancing Time and Eternity

2010-02-19T20:21:00.000-08:00

Last week I said I was going to talk about the question “How does this piece I'm writing embody (or not embody) the kingdom of God?” again. However, as I’ve thought about it this week and as I read this quote, I felt more and more satisfaction in even having this question to hold myself accountable. I would like to leave it there. It’s funny. Over the years of writing I’ve built up a collection of list, created by famous authors, that consist of their 5…6…7…8 “essential” tips for writing. Surprisingly many artists have been compelled or prompted to make such a list. Hemingway, Vonnegut, Chekhov, Stegner, Orwell, and even Edgar Allen Poe have them. Poe wins the prize for best tip: “#5. When in doubt, bury someone alive.” Thanks Edgar.

These lists are fascinating little windows into the mind of writers whose style is proficient and recognizable. All of the lists were made late in life after decades of trial and error. One of my favorite Hemingway quotes when he claimed to write “one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of s***.” Pardon the language. But, still, I feel that I’ve have even written my 99 pages. I have so long to go. But as I work harder and harder on this project and on just being a better writer, it feels good to be formulating questions of my own, that maybe in the future I could pass on to others in some way. And if I make a list and publish it I’ll make sure to make the last one, “when in doubt, burn a house down,” or “when in doubt, reveal that the main characters are siblings,” or “when in doubt, write a different story,” or something of the sort. I haven’t written enough to be at a point where I was “in doubt” and had to use a road-tested trick of my own.

I’ve got another quote I want to share and talk about. It’s from a poet named Christian Wimar, who is also the editor of Poetry Magazine. My brother-in-law told me about him a few weeks back and about one of his books entitled Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. Christian grew up in a religious household (creative naming by the Wiman, eh?) but didn’t embrace Christianity until late in life, 20 years after stepping into a church for the final time as a young adult. Here’s the quote, from the essay “Notes on Poetry and Religion”:

“Art is like Christianity in this way: at its greatest, it can give you access to the deepest suffering you imagine – not necessarily dramatic suffering, not necessarily physical suffering, but the suffering that is in your nature, the suffering of which you much be conscious to fulfill your nature – and at the same time provide a peace that is equal to that suffering. The peace is not in place of the sorrow; the sorrow does not go away. But there is a moment of counterbalance between them that is both absolute tension and absolute stillness. The tension is time. The stillness is eternity. With art, this peace is passing and always inadequate. But there are times when the very splendid insufficiency of art – its ‘sumptuous Destitution - / Without a Name,’ in Dickinson’s phrase – can point a person toward the peace that passeth understanding…”

I really love this: “The tension is time. The stillness is eternity.” Many of the writers whom I’ve been very interested in this semester, like Stegner, Wendell Berry, John Updike, Thomas Merton and Flannery O’Connor all could be described as dwelling in this counterbalance. I would single Wendell Berry out as the one who I think is firmly grounded in this middle ground. In the Port William stories he is able to create a real, tangible people, flawed and beautiful, while describing their worlds as a place where something is “going on here that counts,” as O’Connor says.

I will never forget reading Jayber Crow for the first time. I read it over Thanksgiving weekend of my sophomore year at Milligan. It seemed to be more than an novel as I read it. Berry wrote a character that if I were to describe it as “so lifelike” would seem elementary and far from the point. It felt like artistic understatement. A seemingly simple man leading a seemingly simple life, yet the profundity and intricacy of his being was communicated in such an intimate way that I couldn’t imagine that the book would end. He had to live on past the ink. Maybe he did. Maybe Berry gift of balancing time and eternity was manifest in Jayber, because that character was more than a character, but an amalgamation of authentic human characteristics that in my mind he could be nothing other than real. This may sound like jibberish, and I hope it doesn’t, but that is why I’m writing it. I want to be able to understand why fiction has this effect on me and why I never can get enough.

Bananafish revisited

2010-02-12T04:41:00.000-08:00

This week I reread "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" for obvious reasons. I hadn't read the story since high school, since that epic sick day when the fruits of a brief Borders-run were three books by J.D. Salinger: Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and The Catcher in the Rye. At that point, like most high school kids, my attraction to his words came from a fascination with Holden Caulfield. Personally, my attraction at that time wasn't of identification with Holden's way of thinking or of wishing that I could emulate the attitude of this punk. For me, there was something deeply out of sync in Holden, something dark, and the fact of its existence was enough to pull me in.

One of the most refreshing things I remember, is that after finishing Catcher in the Rye, I didn't feel the need to analyze it, figure it out, beat it with a sack of metaphorical doorknobs until it squealed the theme, the point. In my mind it was above criticism, above nitpicking and it was refreshingly plainspoken. It was like sitting for a week of standardized questions listening to analogies, listening comprehension exercises and word problems and then going home to hear your brother say, "the john's clogged again." Ah, yes, I know exactly what you mean.

I was flipping through New Seeds of Contemplation this week, as anyone who has read it is apt to do...often, and came across this:

If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy.

If you write for men—you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while.

If you write only for yourself you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will e so disgusted you will wish that you were dead. (NSC 111)

How does one write for God? I set out on this project to find some foundation to set my feet upon. A place that stands true because at the base was the perfect mixture, the ideal ratios of virtuous things that contribute to the Good. But, as I'm sure most of my understandings of God's role in my life are, that may be too simple (or too complicated depending on how you think of it). As I study and reflect I find that the things that are most edifying are the questions I'm formulating. I'm constructing questions that I can always, for the rest of my writing career, ask myself because if I sit at this laptop and try to "figure out" what exactly it means to be a Christian writer, then every time I spit out a word I'll just be riding the callow wave of ignorance that I've stirred up by thinking that I could ever come to an understanding of something so much greater than myself. For me, God comes out in the questions, more often than the answers.

The New York Times published an article about Salinger on the day of his death. It's a dime-a-dozen article about his crescendo to literary fame where at the top, like a pissed off magician with a poof of smoke, disappeared to the woods of Vermont where he avoided interacting with most of the world for the next 50 years. In the article there is a quote, which I thought of after reading the Merton excerpt above:

"He seldom spoke to the press again, except in 1974 when, trying to fend off the unauthorized publication of his uncollected stories, he told a reporter from The Times: 'There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.'"

I can't help but make the observation and I can't help but being conflicted by it. I wholeheartedly agree with Merton that all we do in life has to be done for God, or it is just self-service. So which one of Merton's three distinctions does Salinger fall into? "But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." Seemingly the third. So what is it that he created with words? Salinger's dialogue is some of the best I have ever read. It's fluid and he is a master at leaving out what needs not said. Lately, I've been trying on his style, omitting adjectives and descriptors after dialogue and not letting anyone say more than they have to. He leaves the quotes by themselves and let's them reveal things about the people in the story rather than the narrators. So I'm left with a question: what is Salinger to me? Is he simply a gifted wordsmith with no focus on the Good? A phony?

It's an odd coincidence that within ours of finding these two illuminating quotes from two writers whom I admire.

So how does one write for God?

I have formed another question. A test, for myself and what I'm writing. It's based on these verses:

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.

Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

A writer should create from a place of compassion. As I've written before in some other way, a writer should create with the hopes of illuminating something about this world for someone else. The writer should be creating something that counts, something that makes sense out of the mundane and the crazy, organizing it in a way that hopefully could make tomorrow's haze just a touch thinner for the one who receives the story. In all my stories, as in every moment of my life, these types are around me. Whether I embrace them and whether I take up my duties as a Child of God, they are there.

So, the question: How does this piece I'm writing embody (or not embody) the kingdom of God?

And the dreaded follow up: Why?

I plan to write more about this in my next post.

Thanks again, everyone.

P.S. I'm still going to read Salinger. He helped me make sense out of it all by example.

Our own tiny, skull-sized kingdoms

2010-02-05T13:00:00.000-08:00

This week I discovered David Foster Wallace. And apparently he's been a pretty big deal for a while. I found out that his novel Infinite Jest was on Time's list of the best novels in the past 90ish years. Many of the stories that come up on Google are stories of his tragic suicide in 2009. I haven’t read any of his work, so I searched the internet to see what I could find. The first thing I found was his commencement speech from Kenyon College's graduation in 2005, entitled "This is Water." It is one of the most indelible speeches I've ever read. He is addressing a liberal arts college and from the first paragraph seems to be throwing to the students thoughts and ideas that don't get tossed nearly enough. Eventually we catch them, but probably not until we're bludgeoned on the back of the head by it over and over.

He first addresses the liberal arts mantra of "learning how to think." I'll offer this quote to you:

"...learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

I hoped, with this blog, that I could begin a process of pulling together all of what I've learned about being a servant leader. My goal was to graduate in May and be just a little more aware of what my place in this world is, what my place in the body of Christ is as a writer, teacher, whatever. Most importantly, I want to be more aware of my fellow man and God. I feel that there is a reason that a few days ago I was told about this man, and the next day I found this speech, and now I am writing about it. I've been told and have read that David Foster Wallace was in fact a man of faith. He was a church-goer, and in one essay from his most recent collection, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, he describes his church in Bloomington, Illinois as a serious place, with a tightly knit community. It sounds like a place where he could be himself, not need to apologize for it, and always strive to be a more compassionate and aware person.

"Choosing how to construct meaning from experience," is a phrase in which I felt his faith percolating through the page. It spoke to me as a Christian, because that is what we all long for deep down -- to be able to experience and digest fully the world around us, making sense of it in the process. We'll never be able to achieve this fully, only God can. I read a quote from short story writer John Cheever in which he said that he wrote about the subjects he did because he was trying to make sense out of his own life. I feel that this search for truth needs to be at the center of a writer's arsenal, especially a Christian's. You can have a great vocabulary, be widely read, have our grammar by the throat, and have every connection in the world, but if what you write does not come from the conviction that what you have to say counts because you want to see the “capital T-truth” in the world, then your words will float along, slowly sinking in tepid, ankle deep water. And if those words are self-centered and not concerned with trying to give people a reason to take another step and another toward awareness, then in my opinion, they cannot make a complete sentence.

I hate to pull too much of the speech out in pieces, because its context is no doubt lost in the use of small quotes and phrases, but I want to talk about his phrase, “our tiny, skull-sized kingdoms.” He uses it to describe our individualistic world where we are “privileged” to each find ourselves at the center of the universe, where the only thing that matters is our own situation. This made me think that artists and writers don’t exist on the fringes of society, just as Christians aren’t in some weird limbo, waiting for the world to turn around toward “our” way. A writer should see his subjects and embrace his or her stories, without ever forgetting that the point of writing is to share what it is that we have found or have known that can make it all a just a little better for the everyone else. Likewise, a Christian’s call is always to love his or her enemies, give sight to the blind, and to try and imbue compassion within every leprous heart we encounter. This DOESN’T mean that positivity is the only acceptable artform. However, what is true is that that the everyday mundane is what we all find ourselves in the midst of, so what is the point in isolating ourselves. It isn’t about positivity; it is about exposing ourselves and the world as a place of interconnectedness. This would be a woebegone, anemic place if mankind was what we thought of it as: a vortex of 6.6 billion people who all dwell in their very own egomaniacal vacuum. Everyday, in our work and in our play we have hundreds of chances to help one another toward “the good.” As I keep saying, I hope that through words I can creating something that counts, something that helps me and others to see the world a little more clearly and to see God a just little more omnipresent.

In closing, I’ll say to all of you who have come from a liberal arts college that you have to read this speech. In my opinion, it’s a 4000-word capstone for the finest type of education available.

I’m sure that as I read more of David Foster Wallace’s fiction, I’ll be writing about this man again.

Thanks.

Link to the full speech, "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace:

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words

2010-02-01T10:26:00.000-08:00

I work in Milligan's library. For the last two years we've had a book sale around homecoming. It is an opportunity to purge all the duplicates and superfluous volumes in our stacks, as well as provide hours of bliss to the bookish folk of the Tri-Cities area, who salivate at the appearance of a gargantuan dictionary, a rare collection of commentaries on Habakkuk, or the coveted first edition that has slipped through the cracks. I am one of these.

While organizing these books into boxes to sell I found this little collection - "The Bestselling Collection of Our Time" according to the cover. I laughed a little as if I as an English major in college may be above reading such a paltry collection. Then I put it on my stack of books to take upstairs and buy before the rush.

Until a few hours ago this book was occupying one of the many sad, displaced boxes of books in our house that have no shelf to call home. But, this morning, while looking for reading material I found it again. I had been thinking about this project and coming up with strategies for how I can get myself reading widely in the short story medium and there lay this simple little book. After a closer look, I realized that the collection was edited by Robert Penn Warren, author of All the King's Men and recipient of two Pulitzer prizes, one for fiction and one for poetry. In his words he put these "masterpieces" together in order to give a broad view of the short story, emphasizing it obviously isn't definitive. Warren and the co-editor, Albert Erskine, chose the stories because they "think that each one, in its own particular way, in its own scale, tonality, and self-imposed limitation, will give pleasure and satisfaction."

I'm not going to pretend like I know what all that means. But! I plan to find out this semester as I work through the book. If any of the stories help me to process my thesis about the expression of truth in fiction then I may write a reflection here. Or if I just find a good story that is worth hearing, I'll let you know. Like any encounter with the masters, I'm seeking an education from men and women who have already trudged through the muck of mediocrity.

I'll end this post with another quote from the introduction by Warren:

"Behind the good story, no matter how light its tone, how trivial its subject matter, or how cranky its end, we feel that an interesting mind and temperament has made contact with life. Even though the point of the story, stated or implied, may be contrary to our personal conclusions about things, it enlarges our own sense of human possibility, for good or bad."

2010-01-31T10:25:00.000-08:00

I know that I have stories to tell. I know also that you have just as many or more. Stories are how we communicate with one another, how we entertain one another, how we relate with one another, and most importantly how we make sense out of this world.

The catalyst for this blog is my Humanities 490 project. Basically, my senior project that completes my Humanities major. I've always known that this project would involve the crafting and telling of stories, but as I started the process I continually returned to the fact that I'm not just telling a story and I'm not just a writer.

I remember when I was in elementary school and as any naive American boy would do I made a list of what I'd be doing when I grew up. I canonized my dreams. I called the list the "4 A's." Astronaut (I watched Apollo 13 on a biweekly basis), Architect (I probably spent thousands of hours elbow deep in a bucket of Legos), Archaeologist (Indiana Jones), and Author. The last one I could never explain. I enjoyed to read, I guess. But more than that, at age 10 or 11 had an inkling of sorts that through writing books I could make something that counts. I wouldn’t have said it that way, but the feeling that writing gave me has led me to this very concrete conclusion. Words matter.

I produced my own books, telling stories of the Chicago Bulls, my expedition to Antarctica with my friend Jacob (that one is fictional), Goosebumps inspired stories of haunted summer camps, my autobiography, and a Breakfast Club-like story of a group of friends who experience a power outage while working in a health food store. Yeah, I know. Oh the things we’ll do to improve.

The story I’ve been attempting to write for the past few years is about a town called Spruce Pine. It is inspired by a true story. Two years ago there was a night of arsons in the town. A few buildings burned to the ground. Imagine half of your downtown catching fire, no matter if it is Spruce Pine, Johnson City, or New York City. I had been reading In Cold Blood at the time, so the idea of gathering all the facts and writing a story about the people of this tiny town and the devastating effect these fires had on them was fascinating. I tried. I took notes, made charts and tried to give the truest depiction of these events as I could, but it never felt right. It wasn’t mine. So I shelved it. Actually, I scrapped most of the story. But, bits and pieces of it remained in my head, probably fictional emotions and themes that had developed in my imagination, but they were the seed for a fictional story of my own that I wanted to tell. A story and a family has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the town’s burning and of the figurative torching of my first draft. That is what I will be attempting this semester. The topics that I’ll reflect on this blog will be enlivend in a story, a story that while being just that…a story…will also (I hope) be a truthful representation of the people, emotions, and things of this world that all show glory to our creator through their complexity, simplicity, love, hate, and existence. Apparently when people told Flannery O’Connor that because she is a Catholic, she couldn't be an artist, she replied curtly that "because I am a Catholic, I cannot afford to be less than an artist."

Those of you who go to or have gone to Milligan, you know that the hyphenated buzz word is “servant-leader.” I subscribe to this ideal wholeheartedly and it led me to the question…why do I want to be writer? There are a few answers. I love stories. I love stories that represent truth. I believe that all truth exists through Christ. Therefore, I want to tell stories that represent that same truth.

As a writer and a Christian, there is a wind that is all around. A wind that challenges our perception of truth. Jesus knew this wind. He preceded it. So he rebuked it. That is the writer’s purpose, to search for the words to represent the truth we find in the midst of this wind. And most importantly, we must never, ever hide what we find.

In the Gospels, Jesus tells stories. In chapter 4 of the Gospel according to St. Mark, Jesus finishes telling parables for the day and tells his apostles that the should cross the waters to another land. They got him on the boat and ran into a storm. It must have been a big one, and a sudden one, because I don’t think they would be on the boat if a storm was brewing. But, they did, and Jesus was calm, asleep on a cushion. However, the apostles were freaking out. Some of them were even fishermen, they were used to swells and squalid seas. I can imagine Thomas and Judas at the back of the boat vomitting into the ocean, Peter fileting the waves with his short sword. But they find Jesus and wake him, thinking he has no concern for their survival. Jesus knows this world. He preceded it. I imagine him saying “They are waves. These things happen. They are a truth of this world, but I am even more true than the waves. And you are still scared of them? Have faith.” So he rebukes the wind, "Peace! Be still."

As a Christian and a writer, the wind is all around. It is a wind that represents the things of this world that may seem contradictory to a live of peace and love. Through words I strive to calm this wind in my life, by seeing how they exist in relation to the truth which is my foundation. I want to make sense of what this world means to me, a lowly pilgrim. O’Connor says that Christian writers are priveleged because they are free to see sin as sin. We are therefore free to see the world as the world, in all its glory and consequence. Writers are, in Wallace Stegner’s words, "perceivers and handlers of things," and we name these things, we see them for what they are. Most of all, we must never, ever hide what we find.

We are handlers of truth – rebukers of wind.