Here’s your creativity vitamin for today from the Fetzer Institute Writer’s Retreat collection:  Alison Leuterman, Jenifer Louden, Michael Jones, and Dianne Suess discuss making art. I agree with Alison that making things and joy are intimately connected. Take a few minutes to visit the links above if you enjoy hearing these great voices.

www.youtube.com
CWS% x}U[SÛFþ,ËX&$´Á!ábrL;mÙZÉrdIÖñ’Þêý%ôìÊ;¤ÕÃ^Î9ß¹|gwu7ÀÌÀR;÷AßÉ?Àp°ût8÷_ v)q»gåÛ^¯0°»¥òþ^pr¾^þ¥Ðùh0Sï;§FHÖk1Ã`I &;óÍâæJ±ør³¸ºV*Ba»BëÛÜaÀãç,ȽlÎa®ÎxÀtþ:÷Ör«í¹¢õÕhïZ@1/¼f

I love reviewing books for Christian Century magazine. If editor Richard Kauffman had not asked me to review this book, I may never have found it, and that would have been a great loss. You can find the review below in the August 24, 2010 issue. When it is posted online, I will link to it.

Marty, Gayla. Memory of Trees: A Daughter’s Story of a Family Farm. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.

Along America’s highways, wooden barns used to reign, their blue or white silos standing like sentries. Today those wooden barns with their high hay mows and accompanying silos are slowly being replaced by low steel buildings or allowed to decay, their wooden ribcages emerging like skeletons after years of neglect. Under this seemingly innocuous change in architecture lies a great American drama.  You will want to read this book if you are interested in the story of transformation of the family farm in America. Gayla Marty has told this larger story inside the particular story of her own family.

In this memoir of a Minnesota girlhood, Gayla Marty turns the Marty and Anderson farms into characters in their own right. To give these characters weight, she surrounds them with four generations’ histories and introduces chapters about them with passages from the King James Bible like those she memorized as a child. To give them breadth, she relates them to the little-told agrarian tale of how the Roman republic fell as the empire grew, history she learned first-hand as an international student in Tunisia. To give them life, she intersperses chapters on the various kinds of trees she first came to love on the farm, in the Bible, and in her travels: nine trees paired with nine chapters.

Marty’s gifts as a writer include: a fabulous memory for detail, sensitivity to the lyric sound of language, excellent documentation and historical research skills, and honest descriptions of her own spirit, creating a very credible, authentic voice.  The structure and pacing of the book may discourage some readers, but those who persist will be rewarded.

Two churches—East Rock Creek and Rush City Baptist–play an important role both as an anchor for family and community life and as a place where Marty’s inner life was formed, as in this passage:

On the last Sunday of the year, we walk into our old church, the furnace burning for the last time. Facing the painting of Jesus the shepherd in the field with his sheep, we sing.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day, their old familiar carols play. Mama and Daddy’s voices harmonize, different notes but close together. And wild and sweet the words repeat, of peace on earth, good will to men.

Inside my head, I hold the words: wild and sweet the words repeat (58).

With this book Marty joins the ranks of many wonderful storytellers and memoirists of rural America. Readers may be reminded of Wendell Berry’s poetry, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Kathleen Norris’ Dakota, and Mildred Armstrong Kalish’s Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. Marty has Norris and Berry’s spiritual attunement along with some of the zestful documentary voice of Kalish.

But Marty also speaks with the voice of a prophet, wailing a lamentation even as she finds solace in trees and the abiding divine spirit they represent. When she leaves the farm for college and then again for an international education experience in Tunisia, she learns the history of the Roman republic, rooted in agrarian yeoman farming, which gave way to forced large-scale agriculture that fed the Roman Empire. She skillfully connects memory, culture, and characters in a Muslim land: “At every call to prayer, I thought I heard Uncle’s and Daddy’s clear voices” (164). When she hears a street vendor cry out in Arabic, she thinks it sounds like “C’m baaaaaaaaas!”—the calling of the cows in Minnesota.

The connections to home continue, in a sharper vein, as she describes how the inexorable movements toward growth haunt both places: “I felt the movement of ghosts, wandering peoples and languages scavenging for places to plant, graze animals, satisfy hunger, build a shelter and hearth—sending legions ahead in clanking metal, enslaving each other to dig and build, . . .” (176).

The antagonist of Marty’s father is her Uncle Gaylon, her father’s business partner whose family lives in an adjacent house. Uncle makes Gayla feel special when she is a small girl through his attention and storytelling about the history of the Marty farm. Later, he becomes angry and unpredictable, like his father before him. Moving full circle, he becomes an ally in a failing cause. Marty and her Uncle want to keep the farm as a spiritual inheritance. The rest of the family wants to sell it and view it as an investment like any other.

So years of labor, love, harmony and community end up on the auction block. The needs of one generation do not align smoothly align with the next. And a daughter who loves the land can seldom own the land. Since trees serve as her primary metaphor, she voices her protest this way: “Daughters have been like apple trees, transient, adaptable, wandering the earth with their sweetness and tartness and promise, bending to the will of men in exchange for roots.”

In the epilogue, the daughter has given up the struggle for the land itself. Uncle gives her one final gift before he dies, reciting long passages memorized from the King James Bible all leading to this conclusion: “Then shall I fulfill my promise and bring you back to this place.”

Like many of you, I am surrounded by books and paper everywhere I go.  Here in the red chair, which serves as my favorite office, magazines spill over each other on the both sides of me. In front of me is the pile of paper I scooped off my work desk on the way out the door for the holiday weekend. Embedded in the debris are about four books I have promised to review.

In the next room, which doubles as guest bedroom and my official home office , sit stacks of books that have reproduced like rabbits since the last time I cleaned off the desk. Next week we will have guests to welcome in that room, so I have vowed to find places to store the books. Soon I can procrastinate no longer!

All of which is to say that Lee Kravitz had his work cut out for him when his publicist sent me a copy of the book that had to compete with all the rest.

But he won the battle.

I read his memoir, Unfinished Business, in a matter of days. As I said in a previous post, his thesis matches one of my most profound motivations for doing this blog.  He knew that he would be a better person, a better father, and a better writer if he took care of the unfinished business in his life. Where I work, we call that desire the power of love and forgiveness. I believe that memoir writing at its best resolves unanswered questions and teaches both the writer and the reader profoundly spiritual lessons.

Lee Kravitz is a name you might recognize. Until a few years ago, he was the editor of the largest circulation magazine in America–Parade. If he had not been fired from that job, we would not have his memoir, his father and his brother would still be estranged from each other, his high school teacher and mentor would not have gotten a thank-you visit, his friend would never have heard from him after his daughter was killed in Iraq, an old debt would still exist in the debit column, a Muslim friend and an Eastern Orthodox bishop would not be in his life, and an old enemy would continue to haunt him. The benefits of these redeemed relationships, will cause every reader to do an inventory of his or her own unfinished business. You may even find yourself hoping to get fired yourself!

The book falls neatly into a preface, ten chapters, and an epilogue. The deceptively simple structure, each the story of a memory or relationship that the author attempted to salvage, makes a satisfying package. But it could have been otherwise. If the author had not found ways to maintain the complexity and individuality of each relationship or had allowed a sentimental stew of good feeling to overflow without a real struggle to understand himself, he would have destroyed the value of the book to anyone outside his immediate family.

So how does the author keep us reading? He begins with aimless depression following the firing and the arrival of ten cardboard boxes of personal momentos that he, as a good workoholic, had stored in his place of work rather than integrate into his home.

As Kravitz goes through the boxes, he finds evidence of parts of himself long repressed–the world travelling adventurer who had been to Israel, Pakistan, and Afghanistan in the 70′s, the puzzled and dutiful son who saved over 1,000 letters from his father full of capital letters, red type, and strange punctuation, a highschool yearbook brought back the fear he felt in the presence of his childhood bully, but also the love he felt for his history teacher and for the boy who had opened his eyes to the possibility of experiencing God. In the box was a recording of an interview he did with his grandmother Shirley. He listened to her voice again with awful guilt–he had skipped her funeral because he had had too much work to do when she died.

In Kravitz’ own words:  “There were signs in these boxes that there had been a better me: a more curious, adventurous, and compassionate individual who had taken risks to do the right thing.” He decides to wait to search for a new job and instead to devote an entire year to “tying up my loose emotional ends.”

The great spiritual traditions offered great support on this journey. Kravitz, a Jew by birth, rediscovers his own tradition as well as explores what Buddhism, Christianity, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Islam have to say about making amends. The book has an ecumenical, inclusive, joyful spirituality running like a current under a stream.

The author does not try to hold us in suspense. We know from the beginning what he is trying to do and that he will succeed in doing it. Yet we keep moving, page after page. Why? My own reason was to discover the nuances of the journey, the how and why of it. The what hardly mattered. Adventure in this book happens in the mind and in the heart not so much in plot devices. His narrative arc is readymade, but his real story has to be chiseled from his unique displays of courage and ingenuity. We follow him, still curious, as he checks one mistake after another off his list, because his approach varies adroitly every time.

Martin Buber, Jewish mystic and spiritual guide to many, provides Kravitz with the language he needs to describe his transformation. Throughout his ten journeys he learns to take time to listen, to recognize the holiness of other human beings, and to treat them as “thou” rather than “it.” Though this new ability to hold the other’s gaze with love and attention may seem like a small thing, it is in fact the beating heart of every spiritual tradition. Discovering how to love in daily life is the spiritual equivalent of scaling the Alps. Kravitz shows us how the smallest act can either slip into our metaphorical boxes of unfinished business or can elevate us to the place Buber talked about in another of his famous books–ecstatic confessions.

Identifying unfinished business may in fact be the route to your own memoir. What aspects of yourself and your story lie buried in boxes, literally or figuratively? I’d love to hear questions and comments about Kravitz’s approach. What thoughts does his story evoke in you?

 My fellow memoir reader Clif let me know that the review I wrote of the following book has now been published in the Mennonite Quarterly Review. It has not been posted online yet, so here it is for those of you who are Canadian, Mennonite, or just interested in good family stories.

The Steppes are the Colour of Sepia: A Mennonite Memoir. By Connie T. Braun. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2008. Pp. 245. $24.95

More than any other book I have read recently, Connie T. Braun’s The Steppes are the Color of Sepia left me asking questions about the nature of memoir (note the subtitle) and its relation to two other genres it traverses—history and fiction. Braun’s book makes a major contribution to the reconstruction of repressed memory of suffering and survival among the Russian Mennonites, and, coincidentally, but less clearly so, to the burgeoning field of Mennonite memoir.

Braun tells the story of three generations of Mennonites in Russia who struggled for survival on the vast prairies of the Ukraine and Siberia: her grandparents, Jakob and Maria Letkemann; her parents, Peter and Erna Letkemann; and herself. She divides the book into three parts: an introduction called “Promised Land” and Parts I and II titled “Russia: A Pastor’s Record of Repression” and “World War II: A Boy’s Recollection of Survival.” These parts correspond roughly to reconstruction of her grandfather’s memories of Russia and her father’s memories of WWII. Interspersed throughout the book are very helpful maps and evocative photos, both of which the author uses effectively to help establish another of the book’s subjects: place. A trip with her parents and family to Russia and Ukraine in 2005 allowed her to suffuse the book with a poet’s appreciation for landscape, fecundity, and a “promised land” mythology, even as the same setting evoked her father’s memories of cruelties endured under two of the twentieth century’s harshest dictators—Hitler and Stalin.

Braun brings three extraordinary gifts to this tale. The first is passion and love of language. Her preface begins with a description of rivers where her father’s memories flow:  “ along the river bank now and then are stretches of sugar-white beaches, various hollows where willow trees cast deep blue shade over fishing holes, and, further along, near the old quarry, high rocky ledges from where boys whoop as they slice, like blades of pocket-knives, through air and water” (ix). The second is a thorough comprehension of the relevant works of Russian and Canadian Mennonite history combined with literary and philosophical texts on the nature of memory itself (see her fine essay “Silence, Memory and Imagination as Story: Canadian Mennonite Life Writing” at http://www.mennonitewriting.org/journal/1/3/silence-memory-and-imagination-story/ for evidence of the scholarship that underlies her book.) The third strength lies in conscientious detective work—uncovering deeply repressed and thus scantly recorded memories. She wants the truth, she deeply respects the documents and recorded history she uses, and when she imagines, as she often does, she “shows the work,” to use Julia Kasdorf’s apt phrase.[i]  We trust this author’s voice, both for the narrative she constructs and the silences that remain within it.

As a descendent of Swiss-German Mennonites, I eagerly read this story for both its similarity and difference to my own. One thing that struck me is how inadequate our labels are for various kinds of Mennonites living in Canada and the United States today. Braun says in her preface that although her progenitors lived in Russia for a century, “we are not Russian and not Ukrainian. We are descendents of a migratory people, the Mennonites. We are survivors of dictatorship and war, and are now a Canadian family” (x).

The fields of Mennonite history and literature, at their best, illustrate the power of what Braun calls “peoplehood” to transcend the boundaries of time and space.  They accomplish this feat well when they are the most particular. Braun never conflates the story of her family with that of the Amish or Mennonites in Pennsylvania or Indiana, for example,[ii] but she tells it in such a way that any descendent of the Anabaptists can recognize age-old issues—separation from the world, pacifism, family, community.

The kind of suffering detailed in this book is alien to many Mennonites who, after escaping persecution in Europe, found land and freedom and have never lived under dictatorship. One of the questions history asks of us is, “Do I have the courage of my ancestors not to take up the sword, or not to recant my faith under the threat of death or imprisonment?” The complicated answers to these questions from those who lived with them under communism and national socialism in Russia and survived to tell the story are important contributions to twenty-first century Mennonite identity—not just in Canada and the U.S. but also in places where Mennonites have suffered more recently—Indonesia and Ethiopia, for example.

The book might have benefited from stronger editing. Even though the author’s lyric prose captivates many times, occasional lapses occur. Sometimes the meaning is unclear [“At times, these distinctions of tense become blurred, but essential truths are sharpened” (xiii)]. Sometimes purple prose combined with conjecture seems jarring: “Was this pregnancy a whisper of hope to Jakob and Maria in the depths of winter’s hush?” (56). An occasional cliché — “new life emerges from brokenness and ashes” —in a dramatic place—the end of the preface (xiii) —blunts the effect of a poetic description in the previous sentence.

These are small matters. But I am left with one larger regret. Ironically, it is the same regret the author has in relation to her grandfather’s telling of his tale in writing:  “Unfortunately, Jakob did not reveal much of his interior life” (xi). I wanted more of the interior life of the author.  We catch glimpses of her riding her bicycle in the suburbs. We can tell that she has scholarly training. But how have these stories affected her life? Her presence is strongly felt, but more in her imagination concerning the silences of others than in the impact of their stories on her.  I expected more of Connie Braun’s story. Her mother Erna and grandmother Maria’s voices were effaced by circumstance. Connie’s should ring out. Readers don’t even know if she is writing from the perspective of someone who claims the name Mennonite for herself. The author description uses the phrase “of Mennonite heritage,” which suggests, but does not confirm, that her location now is not inside a Mennonite community. She has a right to this story whether or not she claims the faith as her own, but she should claim her location now. Memoir promises insight and intimacy. It stirs curiosity in the reader that cannot be satisfied by biography of ancestry alone.

Finally, we know from a few details in the story (her father’s Italian leather shoes, allusions to business success in Canada) that his life and his family’s life changed drastically after immigration. The story of a “Mennonite memoir” should not end, like an old high school text history text, with WWII, but should, at least in epilogue form, “show the work” that takes the present into the past as well as bringing the past into the present.

[i] “I love the essays that “show their work,” in the words of my eighth-grade algebra teacher, the process more interesting than a flawless scholarly product” (xii), Julia Spicher Kasdorf, “Preface to the 2009 edition,” the body and the book: Writing from a Mennonite Life: Essays and Poems,UniversityPark: Penn State University Press, 2009.

[ii] Keeping the categories of different narratives and nationalities clear while also showing what all Mennonites have in common is a complicated task. Braun’s diligent treatment of this subject stands in contrast to the recent humorous memoir of  Rhoda Janzen. See my review of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2009/11/mennonite-in-a-little-black-dress-an-old-mennonite-review/

When Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe met for the first time, the President allegedly said, “So you’re the little lady who started this great war!”

When it comes to 21′st century memoir, one can make the case that Mary Karr started the publishing phenom we now refer to as “the age of memoir.” Her The Liars’ Club, 1998, became not only a bestseller but also set the standard for literary excellence in memoir. Karr is a also one of my personal heroes, as many previous posts, including this review of her most recent book Lit,  have attested. So I am still basking in the pleasure of having just met the svelte, fiercely intelligent, vivacious, intense woman whose three memoir volumes have shaped a whole contemporary genre.

This picture makes me chuckle.  I look a little like the dog that caught the Karr, and Mary looks for all the world like the Mona Lisa.

Having listened to two public presentations Mary gave at the Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing, and having talked in person with her, I come away with a desire to read more, read more intelligently, and pray more, and pray more deeply.  That’s what I learned from the woman who has her father’s love of salty, earthy expletives and her mother’s determination to go her own way. When she met God, a special priest named Father Kane, and the Ignatian spiritual practices, she had a new story to tell, and nobody tells a better story than Mary Karr. Also, no one pursues her object more intensely than Mary–unless it is the Hound of Heaven who pursued her. When she says grace before a meal, she cups her hands upward, as though to both receive more blessing and return more thanks. Then, when carefully plated food is set before her, she makes a joyful noise and forks with gusto. 

Dinner with Mary Karr was the grand finale for me of much feasting on words at the Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing. To whom much is given, much is expected, so I want to share more than just tweets, as I did in the previous post. Richard Rodriguez, one of the keynoters, said that he never read a blog post that holds the passion and clarity of typical a 19th-century letter. That’s a challenge, and you know I love a challenge. So, here’s a letter to Mary (and to you, gentle reader) that may not stir Richard Rodriguez’ admiration, but perhaps it contains a fraction of all the gifts I have been given while eating and walking and dreaming among writers these last four days.

April 19, 2010

Dear Mary,

You taught me to search for the grace in the tiny moments and not give perfunctory thanks for the big things I am duty-bound to appreciate. So I’ll leave out the part about moving from a Writer’s Festival to a Writer’s Retreat–eight days in heaven. And I’ll overlook the fact that I am seating in a large, stuffed, green wool chair with a view of a lake and of  a woods bursting into leaf. I won’t tell you about the succulent crunchy tacos at lunch today or the pork in red pepper sauce we’ll scoop onto our plates tonight. I won’t mention the amazing, intimate, soul-revealing conversation last night among 14 writers, images of which still float in my mind. I won’t tell you about the luxury of taking a yoga class in the middle of the morning. For sure, I won’t tell you that I won the lottery of birth and happened to be born in America and that I work in one of the most amazing places on the planet.

No. What I want you to know is this: I saw your face. You love your student’s faces, you said, and I knew immediately what you meant, for I have loved many student faces. I also have loved my teacher’s faces. When Mrs. Lochner, my sixth-grade teacher, walked through the aisles at Fairland Elementary, I once let my eyes gaze with uncensored devotion on her grey hair pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck, on the straightness of her back and grace of her stride when she walked, and on that excellent face, a map of kindness and authority. She was not only teacher but principal and bestrode my little world like a colossus. She saw my adoration that afternoon and gently guided my eyes back to the paper I was writing. You would do that too, I think. But I can tell you that your name, Mary, is the perfect name for who you are, and that your face, with dimpled chin, blazing eyes, translucent skin, and shivering cheekbones, says it all.

You said you are just now just about able to go back to find the young girl you were in Texas. Having laid open the pain in that same childhood to yourself and your readers, you can now go back and re-unite with the girl in you. I felt the exultation of my own girl-self when you said that. When you stepped out from behind the podium on Saturday night, I saw that girl in you. 

No longer did I envy you the body that can still fill up a pair of skinny jeans just the way they were meant to be filled and the flair that brings together a cross at the neck, boots on the feet, and big brassy belt to hold it all together. Nope. I left that thought in Texas and went back to a Pennsylvania dairy farm where I grew up. I just wanted to go run in the clover.

These two moments of glad epiphany arose in me from just a few hours of being in your presence and were illuminated by the memory of joyful discoveries while reading your books. So it is only appropriate that I end this letter as

Your grateful and obedient student,

Shirley

Do you remember the scene in the movie As Good as It Gets when Jack Nicholson tells Helen Hunt, “You make me want to be a better person?” This book made me feel like that. Lee Snyder, whose life of academic and church leadership, culminating in the presidency of Bluffton University, 1996-2006, far exceeded what she ever asked or imagined in her youth, has written an inspiring spiritual memoir.

One of the things I like most about this book is that it owes its origins, in part, at least, to a course taught by Jeff Gundy at Bluffton University when Lee Snyder was president. You can find the syllabus for Jeff’s class here and imagine deeply engaged class conversations as Jeff and the students, including Lee, read books by Anne Lamott, Thomas Merton, Dinty Moore, Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, and Cynthia Yoder. The topics included the finding of vocation, since all these texts have a spiritual dimension, and the course was developed as part of a larger, Lilly Endowment-funded, emphasis on vocation in liberal arts colleges and universities.

 Spiritual memoirs have their own tradition, and, according to some, it is a gendered tradition.  Those who have studied the history of the form usually begin with Augustine’s Confessions  and also recognize the important contributions of cloistered, powerful, medieval women, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, and Marjorie Kempe.  Jill Ker Conway, herself both a former college president and a scholar of memoir, has observed, “There are archetypal life scripts for man and for women which show remarkable persistence over time. For men, the overarching pattern for life comes from adaptations of the story of the epic hero in classical antiquity. Life is an odyssey, a journey through many trials and tests, which the hero must surmount alone through courage, endurance, cunning and moral strength.” Conway notes that St. Augustine, in the prototypical memoir, Confessions,  assumes strong authorial agency through hundreds of pages and then, even when he surrenders to God, “he makes us believe that his inner struggle is of vast and world-shaping significance”    (When Memory Speaks, 7, see first chapter here).

The first women memoirists were, like Augustine, religious figures. But unlike him, they told their stories not as heroes but as meditators on the nature of God and as ones who experienced direct revelation of divine illumination. They did not focus on the will or the intellect, and thus were not heroic action figures but receivers of revelation. Conway traces this archetypal pattern of female surrender and service, which may include ecstatic visions but does not include what she calls “agency.” Women, even spiritual leaders, frequently do not think of themselves as actors on the world stage but as players called by God to partake in the divine and to give witness to it. Conway goes on to trace the evolution of this archetype from spiritual to secular in the 18th and 19th centuries, when finding the ideal mate and acquiring domestic security replace the surrender to God in women’s narratives.

Why this historical analysis as background for reviewing the memoir of a Mennonite woman college president? It’s a bit of a side question, but I wonder whether Mennonites, with their emphasis on community, peace, and servant-leadership follow this gender division in their autobiographical writing or whether both men and women adopt more of Julian’s position toward God rather than Augustine’s. I’ll take up this question when I review Rudy Wiebe’s of this earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, a Canadian bestseller, and winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award.

But now to Snyder’s memoir itself. First, a few minor criticisms. The title At Powerline and Diamond Hill: Unexpected Intersections of Life and Work and the hard-to-decipher cover art do not serve the author or publisher  (Cascadia Publishing House) as well as they might. Also, I could not uncover the logic in the organization of the book with its six parts, an introduction, and three epilogues. If I did not know and admire the author, I might have gotten confused by the loose thematic structure which sometimes jumps decades between paragraphs. Non-linear structures can be excellent 21st-century forms, but they work best with strong thematic focus. This book celebrates both calling and challenge and the ordinariness of everyday life–life and work flowing together and apart over almost 70 years. It works well as a series of pearls strung on one thread, or stacks of laundry neatly folded. It does not have the tightness of construction of Karen Armstrong’s  The Spiral Staircase, reviewed here.

I’m looking right now at the cover of Kathleen Norris’ Dakota, one of the books Snyder read in Jeff Gundy’s class. I own the hardcover edition, which is evidently no longer in print, and love the cover of this edition.  The image starts with blue sky, cumulus clouds, and ends with flat stretches of red land and black hills running along the bottom of the cover. The simplicity of the word Dakota with the subtitle A Spiritual Geography floating in the sky and clouds draws the reader into the work in a way that one might covet for this book, which is so much like Kathleen Norris’ (down to the way weather is discussed in both books). I can picture Oregon: A Mennonite Woman’s Journey with Mt. Hood on the cover and strong themes of what Oregon means as the place of birth and childhood but also the place, physically, spiritually, intellectually, and psychologically, to which Snyder keeps returning throughout her life.

In any case, Oregon does figure prominently in this book, and Snyder opens with an introduction that lays out her purpose beautifully, placing herself squarely in the women’s spiritual autobiography tradition of accidental leader following a spiritual path. “Growing up in a Mennonite family,” she says, “I did not know women who had career goals. I never had any.” Sometimes statements like that sound disengenuous coming from leaders who have a need to deny their power, and Jeff Gundy, who writes the foreword, challenges a similar one where Snyder says, “While I never actually rebelled against the community’s strict expectations, rituals, and beliefs, I gradually began to see that the sharp lines of separation and supposedly clear boundaries were much murkier than anyone wanted to admit.”  He is right to question her, even with tongue in cheek, because Lee Snyder’s career trajectory is amazing–from farm girl with only a year of college to young wife and mother, years of voluntary service during the Biafran war in Nigeria, administrative assistant at Eastern Mennonite University, assistant dean, academic dean, president of Bluffton University, and denominational head for several years during a decade of presidential leadership. Along the way, while working and mothering, she somehow finished three degrees, concluding with a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Oregon with a dissertation centered on Joan Didion.

“Why do you want to go to college?” asked her father before she set off across the country with her high school sweetheart for one year of college before they married. “Will you have a good man to work for?” came from her mother when she took the position of academic dean at Eastern Mennonite University, and “Why would you want to do this?” asked a board member’s wife when she interviewed at Bluffton. All three questions indicate how radical her path was when judged by traditional Mennonite standards for women. How did she resolve them? By her thorough knowledge of the Bible and its narratives of unusual people called by God to do particular work in the world, by her careful reading of great writers, by her loving relationship with Del, her supportive husband, and by her daily practices of contemplation, some of which included traditional tasks like folding laundry. When she gets a particularly nasty letter in her work as academic dean, she goes home and scrubs the toilets!

What I find most amazing about this book is exactly what I find most wonderful about Lee Snyder in real life. Just barely five feet tall, soft-spoken, and self-effacing, she never commands with her presence. I think about a poetic line describing Emily Dickinson– “demure as dynamite”– when I look at her. Like the frangipani blooms that perfumed her days in Africa, she permeates a place with a spirit of love and power combined. This memoir,written out of gratitude to those who have loved and taught her, comes out of a place of genuine humility. Desiring to serve, she was called to lead.

Let me conclude with just one final observation. Snyder’s story could be told as a tale of rebellion, will, heroic struggle against the odds, and even sexual abuse (she briefly and somewhat enigmatically describes an incident with a construction worker when she was seven years old). In our feminist age we might want to see more criticism of all the people and structures that held her back. That would be the tale of “agency” that Conway seems to desire for women.

But this story is not about the individual hero. It celebrates God’s surprising mercies, forgiveness (even to the man who molested her), learning, and above all, the community of faith that formed her in the beginning in that special place in the Willamette Valley of Oregon and has continued to draw out her many gifts over a lifetime.

“Is life’s purpose something you create or discover?” asks an unnamed professor in this book, probably Snyder herself. Lee Snyder would never claim to have created her life, but she has not been the passive recipient of it, either. Somewhere between the Oregon sawdust trail of her youth and the president’s corner office, she discovered harmony, a peace that passes understanding, something larger than the mere resolution of the contradictions and conflicts in her life. Her story is not a testimony to striving, or “agency;” instead, it testifies to the possibility that the still small voice inside, when rooted in faith, love, and a physical home in the world, can lead both to great adventures and to a larger spiritual home that we carry with us always.

Melanie Springer Mock contributed our first course syllabus, and now, I am happy to say, we have two more from Professor Jeff Gundy of Bluffton University. Jeff has published numerous books and poems. His latest collecton on Amazon is Spoken among the Trees, which you can check out by clicking on the book cover.

Jeff’s class inspired one of his students to write her own book. I will be reviewing that book in my next post. The syllabi here lose some of their formatting in this software, but I think you can get all the content!

The two syllabi are from the same course, but since they include different book lists, I will do one syllabus but two lists.

Syllabus: ENG 305                                                                                                    Spring 2009

Advanced Writing: Nonfiction (Memoir: Spiritual and Otherwise)                     Jeff Gundy

Tuesday 6:30-9:15 Cent 207                                                 ext. 3283 or gundyj@bluffton.edu

“What can any [one] say when he speaks of thee? But woe to them that keep silence–since even those who say most are dumb.”

            -St. Augustine, Confessions Book One, Chapter IV

Because inside human beings

Is where God learns.

            -Rainer Maria Rilke, “Just as the Winged Energy of Delight”

    Say this is enough, right here, right now.

   That you will learn to want

    only what you have.

   Go ahead. Try.

       -Julia Levine, “On the 12:50 Out of Fairfield”

Reading List:

 Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. 8^th Mountain, 2002.

Annie Dillard, The Annie Dillard Reader. HarperPerennial, 1994. 

Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, Eds., Modern American Memoir. HarperPerennial, 1995 

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies. Anchor, 1999 

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation. New Directions, 1961.

Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe. North Point, 2006.

 At least since St. Augustine, writers have been reflecting memorably on their lives and journeys, spiritual and physical, in the form of memoir. This course will involve writing and reading personal essays that reflect on and refract our lives, using the mirrors and lenses of memory, observation, narrative, and reflection. We will read, discuss, and try to emulate writers such as Thomas Merton, Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, Scott Russell Sanders, Kathleen Norris, and Dave Eggers. These authors cover a broad spectrum from the devoted to the doubting, the earnest to the hilarious, the orthodox to the offbeat—but they share a genuine quest to grasp the deepest truths of their lives and find the best means to express those truths in prose. I hope this class will share that quest, and that range of styles, attitudes, and approaches.

 Some Premises and Postulates

 This course will ask you to do a lot of reading and writing, and to put your absolute best efforts into everything you do for it. But it is also a chance to read–with curiosity and patience—some of the best classic and contemporary writing on spiritual topics, and for us to explore together what it means to be human beings in search of meaning and truth.

 I cannot imagine such an exploration taking place without considerable expenditures of energy, fair amounts of struggle, unavoidable tensions and anxieties, and copious laughter. As Yeats said, “There’s no fine thing / Since Adam’s fall but needs much laboring.” But we can be serious about the work without being solemn.

People possess four things

that are no good at sea:

anchor, rudder, oars

and the fear of going down.

 -Antonio Machado, tr. Robert Bly

I want to suggest, even plead, that you write the most reckless things that come into your head. We may ask questions about how well they work as writing, but we are all free to think any thought, to express any opinion, to question (or affirm) any belief.

 If the writing seems true, authentic, and/or necessary at the moment you put it down, you’re off to a good start. Much of the rest is just tactics and details. It’s crucial not to agonize about how “good” your writing is, especially in the early drafts.

 However, Flaubert famously claimed that God is in the details. We will work hard at polishing and refining our writing, and at developing our sense of how to do so.

 Two large potential impediments to work of this nature are lack of seriousness about the effort on one hand and taking oneself too durn seriously on the other.

Two other debilitating pathologies we will seek to do without: fear of the unorthodox and scorn for the traditional.

Course activities:

 Reading, including quite large chunks for some of the weekly sessions. Some of our texts can be profitably read by dipping into and out of them, but careful concentration, deep response to  selected passages, and broad reading for a sense of larger patterns and effects will be required. We will often look closely at specific passages and aspects of the texts, but your own reading for passages, strategies, and approaches that speak especially to you, and that you can make use of in your own writing, is equally important. Mark the books up as you go!

Regular responses/journals. These will be posted on the Jenzabar Forum and form an important channel for conversation about the readings and preparation for further discussion in class.

One entry each week will be in response to some element of the week’s reading. I hope and expect that from these will come seeds and starting points for your larger writing projects. These entries are due by 2 p.m. each Tuesday that we have class and a reading assignment.

 Another regular element will be “Discovery” entries. These should include brief quoted passages from sources outside our regular reading, with some commentary on why you find them worth bringing to our attention. To receive full credit for this element, make at least one Discovery entry during each month of the course (four in all).

A series of essays in the first half or so of the course. Some will be brief (a page or two), several others more extended (3-5 pages).

 A longer writing project, its form and subject matter to be worked out between us later in the term.

 A review of a book of memoir/spiritual writing.

 A portfolio of revised work at the end of the course (in lieu of a final exam).

 Reading and responding to your classmates’ work, which will be available in the box outside my office (Centennial 318). Plan to spend at least an hour after each essay set comes in browsing through the essays and leaving signed comments on three or four each time. 

Regular attendance and active participation in class activities. Because we meet only weekly, missing even one class session will put you out of synch with the course. Please make every effort to attend all the classes. Grades may suffer from absence.

 Grade Calculations:

 Weekly journals                                  15%

“Discovery” journals                             5%

Book review                                        10%

Final portfolio                                     60%

Attendance, participation,                  10%    

comments on “Box” material              ____

                                                            100%

Tentative Course Outline

Jan. 6 Course introduction. St. Augustine et al. What is memoir? What is spiritual writing? Beginning possibilities.

Jan. 13 Barrington, ch. 1 and 2. Some classics and starting points. Augustine, excerpts;

Modern American Memoirs: Buechner, Gornick. 

Jan. 20 Barrington, ch. 3 and 4. MAM: Ozick, Baldwin. Due: Joining the Conversation essay (brief).

Jan. 27 Barrington, ch. 5. Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation. Due: Narrative/reflective essay (brief).

Feb. 3  Barrington, ch. 6. New Seeds, 2.

Feb. 10 Barrington, ch. 7. Lamott, Traveling Mercies.

Feb. 17 Barrington, ch. 8. Traveling Mercies, 2. Due: Contemplative essay (brief).

Feb. 24 Barrington, ch. 9. Dillard, An American Childhood.

Spring Break

Mar. 10 Barrington, ch. 10. Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Due: Place/nature essay.

Mar. 17 Barrington, ch. 11. Dillard, Holy the Firm Work on longer projects begins. Due: Book review.

Mar. 24 Sanders, Private History of Awe.  

Mar. 31 Sanders, part 2.

Apr. 7 Readings from MAM, TBA.

Apr. 14 TBA. Due: Project Drafts.

Apr. 21 TBA

Final Exam/Celebration

 The 2005 version of this course included this reading list:

Reading List:

Annie Dillard, The Annie Dillard Reader. HarperPerennial, 1994. 

Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, Eds., Modern American Memoir. HarperPerennial, 1995 

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies. Anchor, 1999 

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation. New Directions, 1961.

Dinty Moore, The Accidental Buddhist. Broadway, 1997.

Kathleen Norris, Dakota. Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

Cynthia Yoder, Crazy Quilt. Dreamseeker/Cascadia, 2003.

 This course, with special support from the Pathways Project, will explore spiritual writing and memoir. As models and inspiration for our own writing we will read classic and contemporary writers as diverse as St. Augustine, Henry David Thoreau, Kathleen Norris, Anne Lamott and Dinty Moore. These authors cover a broad spectrum from the devoted to the doubting, the earnest to the hilarious, the orthodox to the offbeat—but they share a genuine quest to grasp the deepest truths of their lives and find the best means to express those truths in prose. I hope this class will share that quest, and that range of styles, attitudes, and approaches.

E. Ethelbert Miller spoke to Krista Tippett recently on her American Public Media program “Speaking of Faith.”  Tippett described the conversation as a “jazz riff,” and I think you will agree that Miller, who is poet, spiritual seeker, memoirist, and director of the Afro-American Resource Center at Howard University, weaves together a beautiful cloth melody in this set of reflections describing his awakening into the idea of blackness as idea, not just color.  Well worth the 55 minutes it takes to listen here.

He sums up what he sees as a universal response, coming from all people, when they hear jazz or listen to a story or poem–”I see the hurt and the pain, but I also see the joy and celebration.”

Black writers have given us some of the first and best American memoirs–from slave narratives to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Richard Wrights’s Black Boy.  Mary Karr’s included all three of these in her list of Top Ten Memoirs previously described here.

Blackness as an idea includes many spiritual traditions. Christianity has been a major influence in black community in this country, but today Islam and Buddhism have become important spiritual influences also as the American idea of blackness expands to include the whole world.

Miller’s voice reminds me of Langston Hughes’ smile, which he celebrates as being Buddha-like. One of Miller’s more interesting ideas is that “there should be people that you know are poets by their behavior.” Below you can see a living example of the idea of universal blackness as you watch the short video of Lucille Clifton reading her poem, “won’t you celebrate with me.” This reading is bittersweet because Clifton died last Saturday, Feb. 13, 2010. You can read more about her here.

Wonderful resources–John Coltrane, Langston Hughes, Charles Johnson, music playlist, video, etc.– on the Speakingoffaith.org website can be found here.

I have not read Miller’s own memoir, pictured above, so I would love to hear from those who have. And I will be reviewing a number of African-American memoirs in the weeks and months ahead. Black memoirists, like black poets, musicians, dancers, and visual artists have evolved a combination of truth and beauty that appeals to all people and will last forever. We need to celebrate the beauty of blackness not just this month but every month!

Edward Short’s review of Mary Karr’s Lit (which I also reviewed here), contains a few paragraphs very relevant to all memoir writers. I invite you to read the complete review here. Short’s insights are brilliant.

Here are the four most relevant paragraphs to our concerns as we seek to understand the power of memoir to go beyond the telling of the events of a single life:

If you want to spring out of bed tomorrow morning, saying, “Good!” I suggest you read this book the night before. And if you want a role model for how to age with zest and enthusiasm, even to the extent of looking forward to death as the last great adventure, Huston Smith is your man.

I loved this book. Because it covers the entire life of 90-year-old Smith, the label on the cover is autobiography rather than memoir. But that distinction is one that I am more than willing to overlook as I add it to the collection of 100 memoirs we are building here. As I see it, most autobiographies are memoirs even though not all memoirs are autobiographies. (If you want more precise definitions, you might appreciate this previous post.)

The Huston Smith story focuses on love. First, Smith is a beloved child of missionary parents in China whose memories of China and of life as a missionary kid are overwhelmingly positive. They also set the pattern for his lifelong curiousity about new cultures and new lands as well as the desire to practice whatever he studied.  As a child, he began the day with prayer and Bible reading–in Chinese. At age 86, he followed this morning ritual:

“And it is as a body, a mind, and a spirit that I begin each day. First upon waking I do physical exercise for my body. I favor India’s hatha yoga, a sequence of asanas, or postures, that culiminate in the headstand. . . .For my mind I slowly read a few pages from the Bible or a bible (the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Qur’an, the Sufi poems of Rumi, and so on). Now more mentally alert, I come to the spirit. For the spirit, I pray. I pray for those I know who are in trouble of one sort or another. Having prayed for others, I now pray for myself, which involves introspection–am I happy, sad, or anxious?–so I know what to pray for. Then I empty my mind of all thoughts and dwell in the luminous consciousness that underlies thinking. I conclude by repeating three times the Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodoxy for mercy: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

The love of travel, religion, and culture began in childhood and sustained him all his life. He memorized Rudyard Kipling’s “The Explorer” at age 14 and then made that poem the theme of his life. Here are words he selected from the poem in the prologue of his memoir:

Something hidden, go and find it;

Go and look behind the ranges.

Something lost behind the ranges;

Lost and waiting for you–go!

He also fell in love with Kendra Weiman, daughter of his major professor at the University of Chicago. She is the muse, the partner, the major actor in his life, and one feels her presence on every page of the book. In fact, she gives him the title for his book and a poem on which to base it, a gift she may have given to more than one book in his long list of publications. Here’s the Robert Penn Warren poem from which the memoir’s title comes:

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,

Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,

But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

No matter what other subject Smith takes up in this story almost a century long, the subtext is delight. Does that mean that he denies or represses the shadows in his life?  No. In fact, this book may contain the best short marriage memoir ever written. In a chapter called “Family: The Operetta,” Smith describes four phases of his marriage. The third stage was the hardest. Here’s his honesty and pain in the raw: “only one time have I been both scared and afraid. It was the night that Kendra said, ‘You know, I am thinking of leaving you.’ I did know, but in order to keep going, I had had to suppress it. I sobbed myself to sleep that night.  It is painful, even now, to admit Kenra had reasons for leaving. I am a workaholic. I can hardly wait for breakfast to be over–eating, what a waste of time–that can be better spent getting down to work. And then, too, when I was unhappy at MIT, I traveled extensively, lecturing at other colleges. There are worse kinds of infidelities than the sexual. . . Fortunately, she did not leave; I attempted to make amends and began of all difficult challenges perhaps the most difficult–to actually change.”

The straightforward, humble, grateful voice of Huston Smith rings out from every page of this memoir. Go with him to every world religion–not through the mind only, but also with heart and body. He guides you like a docent through a gallery of pictures, not only of himself and his family at every stage of life but also of his mentors and guides.

What a hero. What a journey. Even in a nursing home, he reaches out–to share his tales of wonder.

Do you think it matters what age you are when you write a memoir? Do you have a bias for joy or for sorrow in writing?