Two Good Books about Nuns

In my search for contemporary novels about American nuns, I've found only two. Both of them are fantastic books I'd recommend to anyone. They both share a strong message about religious life, as well as some other key similarities. The two novels are Mariette in Ecstacy by Ron Hansen and Lying Awake by Mark Salzman. (Hansen also wrote Exiles, a novel based on the story of the Wreck of the Deutschland and drowning of eight nuns and the poem Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about the incident, but it's a different, much more historical and in many ways less accomplished, book.)

Both books have a mystic at their center, and both of these women live in cloistered communities. Mariette, though published in the 1990s, is set in the first decade of the 20th century, when all Sisters who were not on active missions were cloistered. Lying Awake, published in 2000 and covering the years 1969 to 1997, deals with a Carmelite Sister living in an enclosure in Southern California.

By building in these restraints on the Sisters' lives (habited, cloistered), the authors are able to deal with the central issues of a nun's life: community living with other Sisters and the quality of the spiritual life. What is clear immediately is that mystics, who seem both closer to God and richer in spiritual experience, are disruptive to religious communities. In Mariette, set in 1904, the mystic has the experience of stigmata and her experience, though doubted as self-inflicted, is treated seriously as a phenomenon recorded throughout history. Her wounds come and go and don't act as normal wounds or cause the permanent damage one would expect. The priest and Sisters experience other inexplicable signs of S. Mariette's special status. The experiences of Sister John in Lying Awake result in visions and writings which find popularity in the world outside the cloister walls. Both Sister Mariette and Sister John gain noteriety for their spirituality outside the convent.

But by the time Sister John is having her mystic experiences, there is a diagnosis and a cure for her particular troubles. She is recommended to receive surgery for epilepsy and has to decide whether or not to have it, knowing it will mean and end to her visions and possibly a return to a spiritual dryness that plagued her earlier in life. What makes up her mind is an experience with her community. It is not good to stand out in a convent. The idea is not to be special but to seek God together in daily life and prayer and work. That is the life, and the life, both books seem to decide, doesn't work without the Sisters subverting their own desires to the life and needs of the community. It is ultimately a much more "big picture" view than most of us can take. It's a big-picture view of time (aren't all spirtiual experiences by nature fleeting, if we continue to grow?) as well as one's place in a community.

As in Mariette, Lying Awake handles this action without diminishing the veracity of Sister John's spiritual experience. In the end, a holy, older Sister, helps S. John to understand the meaning of the experience. "God showed you what heaven could be like, and you shared it with others. ... God must think you did enough with that gift. Now he wants you to do something else."

Sister John is also helped by the glimpse she gets of her surgeon's vocation and its challenges. He also faced a period of disillusionment, realizing he went into medicine "for the wrong reasons." But he remained a doctor when he realized "everybody gets into medicine for the wrong reasons. It seems to come with the territory."

Quite a bit comes with the territory of being a nun. Struggling with the large questions all the time, and with the limitations of the church. For the Sisters who entered in the 1940s and have lived this life in its changing forms until today, there are myriads of questions, challenges, and also, I believe, joys. And each one is special and "stands out," even as they do what it takes to live together.

Big Projects

Last year, it was the kitchen rehab. But this year, Steve could barely contain himself in finishing the last of the landscape projects before he got to his Big Project-- renovating one of the hog barns into a furniture-making shop. The day after his last job (Saturday) he began by putting a big hole in the roof. Sunday he rented a masonry saw and took out a large chunk of the wall. All this was in preparation for today, when his "consultant," Dwayne, who built our house, and his brother Tim joined him in raising the roof enough to make room for the glass garage door that will go in the opening.

He's been thinking and talking about that glass garage door for about a year. I remember when we saw one at the restaurant Joe's Garage in Minneapolis. It will be a lovely thing, sort of like a greenhouse wall, and will bring good light into the working space. Good light is the opposite of what this place currently has.

The custom wood stove is ordered, as is the garage door. The insulation guy has been out to look at the place and is working up some bids. What started out as buying a few tools on Craig's List has become a truly awesome endeavor.

I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't rather use the money for a trip to Italy or Paris... but it is inspiring to see someone dig into something so ambitious. A place to spend the Minnesota winters making mid-century modern style furniture. The plywood will be bent. The metal will be soldered. Other local furniture makers and woodworkers will be consulted. A sectional couch the likes of which have not been seen before will be installed in our living room.

And me? I'm working on small pieces, daily, writing out bits of what I know, imagining myself into worlds I want to explore, in the hopes of making a whole book out of it, at least a draft, over the winter.

Police Blotter June 2011

It's been a while since I've posted any of the always amusing entries from our local police blotter. I still don't know who writes these, but that person really should be submitting his/her work to "instant fiction" contests.


May 26
1:34 p.m. Property damage accident. CR 121 and Jade Road. A 43-year-old St. Joseph male was heading north on CR 121 when a deer came fromt he west side of the road, running into his vehicle. There was some damage to the vehicle including the driver's side mirror breaking off and being thrown into the vehicle. The mirror hit the driver's face and made a small cut. Male wanted deer so officer issued a permit. Officer assisted with loading the deer and cleared the accident.

June 2
7:37 p.m. Neighbor dispute. Iverson Street W. A 34-year-old St. Cloud male and a 44-year-old St. Joseph female both called police stating the other party was yelling at them and threatening each other about getting kicked out and taking care of the kids. Officer received two different stories about how it started and what was said. Officer adviced they should stay away from each other and each other's kids or citations might be in order so a judge could take care of it.

My Winter Project

I'm getting ready to embark on a writing project, the third volume of Art of The Saint John's Bible. I finished writing the second volume almost three years ago, so it was with some trepidation that I picked up the massive Historical Books, the sixth of seven volumes of The Saint John's Bible to be published and one of two volumes that will be covered in this book. [It's confusing, I know. The Saint John's Bible is being published in seven volumes. My book is in three volumes, covering a set of them as they are are released.]

The final volume of The Saint John's Bible, Revelation and Letters, will be available to me in summer 2011, with a reproduction volume scheduled for Spring 2012. The hope is for my book to be released at the same time.

This morning I sat down with Historical Books and a pad of Post-its to start marking the artwork throughout the book. My book will basically go illumination to illumination, laying out the Biblical context and describing and annotating the artwork.

I started writing these books basically a week after I took a full-time job as an editor at Liturgical Press four years ago. Alongside writing the volumes, I was also copy editing other projects, and one of the best of these was being able to edit all of the revised Old Testament commentaries for the Little Rock Scripture Study. I love the Bible but had never spent so much time, book by book, with the Old Testament. It was a great crash course, and I learned a lot. I also just really enjoyed the stories and the richness of the books.

One of the most reassuring and pleasing aspects of this morning's exercise with the Post-its was realizing how much fun it will be to spend time once again with the books of the Old Testament. As I paged through, not reading, I felt renewed excitement about these stories of good and bad kings, and warmed by the thought of spending time with those Israelites in exile as they wrote and read their own history. That is the lens through which I see Historical Books: not as accurate history so much as the story a people told themselves when trying to explain how they could have lost the land God gave to them.

As a Christian, there's also the genealogy of Jesus unfolding, the continuing story of God choosing the least likely of his servants and the great promises of God for restoration of the kingdom.

The leaves are off the trees, a cold wind is blowing, and I'm looking forward to a lovely winter project.

Web 2.0 for the Sisters

This past week I was at a conference in Denver, one very specific to what I do. It was the National Communicators Network for Women Religious (NCNWR). It was attended by 114 communication directors and others from Roman Catholic women's religious orders. It was a great conference, in part because they always get very good speakers to talk about technology and social media and in part because it is very interesting to be with that many people who do exactly what I do.

I get to hear about what others are doing and always learn about some online program I can use in my job. And I usually hear in depth about something that I had only barely heard about before. This year, it was mobile phone media. What you need now, it seems, is a Web site that people can read on their phone. The mobile Web site, it seems, is actually a blog that consists of short bursts of information (your Facebook updates and Twitter feed) and a few links to longer things that are on your regular Web site or blog for those who are really interested. Once they click, of course, they'll have to read the piece they're interested in on their little phone.

I'm not happy about this development. It takes away the photos and design and any substantial length from the Web. Nor am I happy about the advice to not really communicate anything in an e-newsletter anymore, but just make it into a set of links to your Web site or other places where information is stored, for those who are really interested. "Click-throughs" are the measure of success.

I run a very successful e-newsletter for the Sisters. To see a sample, click here. I write all the articles except the brief, introductory piece by Sister Gen. There are links to videos I've posted on Youtube or registrations or our blog or the secure online donation form. People do indeed click through. They also open it at a rate of about 40%. Our open rate was even higher six months ago, when we had 2,000 subscribers. As we get more subscribers (now at 3,000) we get a lower percentage of opens, but still a very large number of (950-1,100) opens. What we get very few of is "unsubscribes." Maybe 2-3 a month.

Maybe it's because our audience is composed of readers. Or because they're interested in the Sisters. I like to think the newsletter is interesting and is changing some people's ideas about what nuns are like. I like to think it's because I don't waste anyone's time and have interesting content and good photos.

I know about the other kind of e-newsletter. I get one of these from my college's alumni office and the alumnae office at the college near the monastery. Sometimes I click through, mostly on links to articles in the New York Times or other big publications where my college was mentioned. If not a set of links, the Web 3.0 newsletter is what this expert recommended instead: one message, repeated over and over in each paragraph with a different wording that is also a link to what they want you to do-- click through to the donate page or information-gathering page on their Web site. I get several a day these days, now that political season is upon us. I give to one candidate regularly, and am happy to have a Web link to do it more easily. The rest I summarily delete. I barely glance at the subject lines.

The world has changed, even for the Sisters and their communicators. I am watching it-- both at a distance and up close. Learning to communicate in the new world in a new, and yet, I hope, meaningful way.

The Future

I spend and have always spent a considerable amount of time picuring the future. This may be why I was able to move around the country so easily for so many years. I love the art of imagining a life yet realized. I wouldn't say it interferes with my current life or keeps me from being contented in the present, although maybe it does.

In any event, it's not a behavior I plan on changing. It means that I spend my bike rides thinking about the future, what I will do when I no longer need to work full time. I spend time while canning tomatoes thinking about the garden I will plant next year, and what I need to do to improve the soil in my garden, and what might work better in the raised beds next year, what out in the plain old bed.

These days, what I think about all has to do with life in this place, because for the first time in forever, I plan on staying in the place I'm in.

I think a lot about my writer's cabin: how it will look, what it will be like to go out there and write, what of my furnishings I've managed to hold onto so I can put them in there. I still long for a space that feels fully my own and which I can decorate the way I like to decorate.

Much of what I think about is completely mundane. I want to have one of those 5-gallon water jugs out there, because I drink a lot of water when I'm writing. I want a wood stove, and I wonder if I'm the kind of person who will go out there and light the stove in the cold, face the cold until the cabin warms up.

In this, the heart of harvest season, I also think about the next steps for living off the grid. I'm about to start reading Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal Vegetable, Miracle: a Year of Food Life, about her year eating only local and seasonal food. I'd like to do that, but realize mostly the limitations of my growing season and my interest in hard work! After all, I only managed to can nine quarts of tomatoes, and really don't see how I could do another five (not that I have enough tomatoes for that!)

At the same time, I live in a place of real abundance in terms of good food. On our farm, Annie and Tim provide us with eggs. We have amazing local bakers, the Nelsons, and Steve also loves to bake bread. On the same road as the Nelsons live the Doyles, who are mushroom farmers. There is the St. Joseph meat market where you can buy large bundles of local beef and pork to keep in your freezer. If you want to really go crazy, there is a local producer of fine, grass-fed beef. The Willenbrings of Cold Spring keep us in asparagus, strawberries and corn (I do plan on growing my own raspberries, which they also provide at the farmers' market). Then there's the yak farmer, Mr. Hooper, who we sat next to at a wedding a few weeks ago. People swear by his yak steaks. I'd really like to find a source for ground venison for winter chili.

There is plenty to think about, as I let myself get deeper and deeper into the yearly cycle of this place. Just learning to balance eating the fresh harvest with the canning and pickling and freezing is an art all it's own. New garden vegetables are calling out to me: beets and radishes and arugula and the raspberries and blueberries. Someone said they have had good luck growing tomatillos, too.

As life continues to unfold, I will hopefully have the life I'm imagining now: writing and gardening and with good project work now and then, time to think and make things and eat and exercise and read all the Library of America volumes I'm laying in store for those days-- especially the cold days with the wood stove burning and a lamp on.

Joshua Tree poem

Of my previous visits to Joshua Tree National Park, it is clear that I have one singular story that will forever dominate in my memory.

It is of the Thanksgiving Day I spent there with my ex-husband, as our marriage was ending but about a month before I really knew it, lost for four hours. We went there to camp, but of course, arriving on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, all the spots were taken. I'd wanted to come down on Tuesday night to try to get a space, but there had been arguments. In fact, he wanted to go to Death Valley, but I was so tired from commuting I just didn't want to spend six hours in the car each way for a long weekend trip. He would only go at all because I'd said he could go to Death Valley on his own the following weekend. It was odd that he seemed to think he needed my permission for this, or that it was a negotiation.

We decided on a longish hike we found in a book of hikes that was decidedly unhelpful. The book was about 5" x 8", so the maps, such as they were, were small and lacked detail. It had a rough line drawing of the elevations and the terrain, and directions that read something like this: "follow the trail among the rocks about 700 yards, then veer left beside the wash. After about half a mile, the trail turns right between two rocks and climbs for about another quarter mile." Well, if you've ever hiked in the desert, you'll know that it is nothing but rocks and washes and what look like trails but might turn out to be ancient goat tracks. Also, it's impossible, ever, to figure out how far you've walked. George was moving fast, distracted, wanting to climb up things and see the views, always ahead of me and my book. I struggled to make sense of the directions, but probably quite soon we were lost. Not admitting it and back-tracking, however, we got deeper and deeper into the park. At some point we probably left the park boundary. Up and down massive rock and scrub landscapes we went.

We'd chosen this hike thinking it would take more or less exactly until dusk. Suddenly it was dark (late November), though the air was really pleasant and the overcast sky kept the temperature from getting too cold. I was suprirsingly comfortable. And once we got to a point where I could actually see a little ribbon of road with its beads of headlights in the distance, I was surprisingly peaceful, too. Now it was just a matter of walking until we hit the road. And when we did, we got to a Medical Center, and called from there for a taxi back to the park and our car-- a $15 cab ride if I remember correctly.

George and I hardly talked the whole time, but I just can't explain how peaceful I felt. I hadn't felt that calm for months. I still think of it as a really good memory. Even later, when he said he was wishing he was with his girlfriend instead of me the whole time, that didn't diminish my feelings about that day. I just felt really safe and confident and good. Sure, my feet hurt and there was one panicky time when we were really, really lost, down in a canyon with no clear ascent out, but overall, it was so, I don't know, more manageable than I would have expected. So not scary. We had water and food in our backpacks, and if we needed to we could have just lay down and gone to sleep.

I wanted to write a poem about Joshua Tree for a long time. I thought I would try to write a sestina. I think "outdoor" stuff like this makes for good sestinas, because in a sestina the last word of each line repeats so you have to keep reusing the same six words. And in the desert, as I mentioned in my last post, there are about six things. There's something elemental about it. I also like sestinas because, since they have long lines and are such long poems, they tend to have a narrative push to them, a narrative appeal. They have to go somewhere and keep moving through the structure. In this way they are the opposite of villanelle's, which keep circling back to the same spot.  For those of you new to sestinas, notice the end words (in some form-- the variations are most of the fun for me) are the same in each stanza: desert, empty, lost, carry, water and trail.

It was two years later that I wrote this sestina about the desert, and it took a turn to this story, as did my talks with Steve in Joshua Tree last week. It's still one of my favorite poems, though I never did find a magazine to publish it. I sent it to the "sestina editor" at McSweeney's who wrote back a really nice e-mail saying he LOVED it, but that the editors thought it wasn't witty enough. Witty, it is not.

Desert Sestina

I feel at home in Joshua Tree’s desert.

There’s peace in the vast emptiness,
the illusion that you could never get lost
because you can see so far, and sounds carry
over desert like they carry over water,
alerting others to your presence on or off the trail.

Have you ever noticed how two women on a trail
will talk and talk, never running empty,
but couples are more quiet? In the desert
they stop briefly to share a bottle of water
as if time together allows them to be at a loss
for words, or many ways to show they care.

I pay attention to these things now; I care
what brought these people to the desert,
and wonder if it makes them feel full or empty,
the barren rock beneath a sky the color of water.
I know it’s hard for anyone to stay on the trail
and in the world, as in the desert, easy to get lost.

Two years ago my husband and I got lost
following a wash we mistook for the trail.
Four hours we walked in the dark in the desert,
each ridge we climbed showing us more emptiness.
My husband was worried. He tried to take care
of me. I told him it was warm and we had water.

Finally we saw the lights of the highway, like water,
an oasis of cars, and we walked toward it, far from any trail.
I felt oddly peaceful in sight of town. I didn’t care
how far we had to walk through the emptiness.
I didn’t know that my husband was already lost.
Finally, we reached a medical center, nearly deserted.

It would be less than three months before he would desert
me and our good marriage, leave me like a fish out of water,
flopping. I was left to find my way, build a new trail
out of my grief over so large a loss.
Watching him go down so fast, that he didn’t care
enough to try, left a deep, vast emptiness.

I revisit that loss, working it out in the desert.
I stay on the trail and carry plenty of water.
I know in the big emptiness there’s also clarity, bedrock.

October Snow Makes One Think About the Future

Woke to snow

Green leaves blown

From ash trees

October Snow

Dry coneflower stalks bending in wind,

one squash left in the garden bed.

Last night I was reading a blog by someone I knew in college. In the last year she's left the place she lived her whole adult life and moved to San Francisco, where she bikes the hills (we're talking 300 miles in 3 days in one instance, competitive biking), wakes up with coffee and a view of the ocean, has a new lover, spends her mornings writing and her afternoons doing project work and is clearly quite happy. She's living the life she imagined, and her blog is full of great, brief entries encouraging transformation. If you can be clear about what you want, the line of thinking goes, you can make it happen.

One of her techniques is to write out "An Ideal Day." From morning to night, what would an ideal day consist of? After reading hers, I had trouble thinking of my own. Eventually I started imagining two. One is wintery and involves snowshoeing on the farm and writing and a good meal. Another involves giving a reading in a city, waking up in a nice hotel, meeting with friends in that city, giving a reading at a sweet-smelling bookstore, a good meal, the hotel room with a view of the city.

I was surprised that the day would include fulfillment of writing ambitions, though maybe I shouldn't have been. I am not doing the kinds of things that would make that dream come true, like serious and disciplined writing or more serious submissions to magazines. I did send an idea for a non-fiction book past my agent last week, and she was actually kind of excited about its possibilities, but it is a book that is a project, not really the book I want to represent me as a writer in the world. It is a book I probably could write, but not my passion.

Still, what does it take to get that ideal day/ideal days? I had those days very regularly when I had a year off in 2005 and was at the Ecumenical Institute finishing the memoir and a book of poems. It was not sustainable, but maybe it could be in a few years, when Steve's daughter is out of college and his businesses are established enough to provide some breathing room for me in terms of work.

I am actually quite clear about the way I'd like to be living my days. I do realize that I'm losing faith in myself slowly but surely in terms of writing, but I know what it takes for me-- time and attention. And I know that I am still "reading the signs" all around me, as avidly as ever. I also realize the courage it would take at this particular moment in my life to make a change and live my days that way. Lucky for me, making a change, especially in service of my writing life, has always felt more like necessity than a choice.

The Great Emergence

I've been reading Phyllis Tickle's book The Great Emergence, with my skeptic heart engaged and as open as I can pry it, and the book has definitely resonated with me. Resonated is a word I would like to not allow myself, but there it is. I'm involved in all sorts of new ways of thinking and being because of the monastery-- right now I've been grappling with what they mean by "discernment." There is even a "discernment process" used by the monastery for making large decisions, that involves going in and out of group discussion/feedback and individual contemplation. And I think it works for the community, if it works, because these women pray the Liturgy of the Hours and are engaged in daily lectio divina, contemplative reading of Scripture. This practice builds in them a present-consciousness and awareness the likes of which I've never seen-- and which I've seen and remarked on quite regularly in the Benedictine monastics I know. It makes for an incredibly tuned-in community of fierce, smart women.

Today I read chapter 4, and at the end of the chapter she names the "essential questions" of our time, a time of upheaval in the underlying systems of meaning that have guided Western humanity for the past 500 years, questions that we ask because of Darwin, Faraday, Freud, Jung, Einstein and more recently Joseph Campbell. The three essential questions are:
"1: Where, now, is the authority?...
2:What is human consciousness and/or the humanness of the human?
3: What is the relation of all religions to one another-- or, put another way, how can we live responsibly as devout and faithful adherents of one religion in a world of many religions?" (Tickle, pp. 72-73).

Well, I thought to myself, those are the three central questions addressed in my second book of poetry. Those are exactly the questions that I've been thinking about and asking myself about for most of my life-- certainly since I was twelve years old and we converted overnight from Catholicism to the Assemblies of God. And, in fact, the authority question is the one question hanging over all the women's religious orders of the United States at the moment, because Rome is attempting through an Apostolic Visitation what seems to be a "slap down" of their individual authority for what seems like no good reason at all. And personally, not speaking here in any way for the monastery or any of its members, I suspect Rome has overstepped and will find out that the "people in the pews" don't care what Rome thinks. I think it will be, if not the end, a blow to that particular authority. And don't take my word for it-- read the 420 comments posted to the New York Times front page coverage of the Apostolic Visitation and two other investigations and criticisms of women religious by American bishops and Rome.

In the discernment process, the community is asking: "What do you believe the Holy Spirit is calling us to given what we know?" It is a question that can only lead to boldness, I think, in facing the future and in walking into whatever new world we find ourselves in.

Lindbergh and Lewis

The two local historical/literary figures in this area are Charles Lindbergh and Sinclair Lewis. Obviously, Charles Lindbergh is the better and bigger historical figure. His childhood home is in Little Falls, Minn., and has a really nice museum next door. The house itself is where he lived with his mother and grandmother, and on the tour they don't volunteer information about his father. Still, I can't imagine there's a tour where people are so "Minnesota nice" they don't ask, "If this was his mother's room, where did his father sleep?" His father, who was a congressman and mostly lived in Washington, lived a few blocks away, presumably with his mistress, when he visited or returned to Minnesota. Although Wikipedia says they divorced when Lindbergh was seven, the tour guide doesn't hint at divorce but just a highly irregular marriage.

Sinclair Lewis grew up in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and made that town into Gopher Prairie, Minn., the town in Main Street that exposed small town America as small-minded, narrow, provincial and a bit mean. After hating the book at first, the town eventually came around-- might have been the Nobel Prize Lewis won in 1951-- and embraced their identity. There are still two blocks of "Original Main Street," with a vintage hotel that still had the room keys in little cubbies behind the desk. My parents and I stopped in to see it and thought about absconding a key and checking out a room. Two blocks off Main Street is Lewis's childhood home, a very modest affair, where his father the town doctor and his stepmother raised him and his two brothers. His mother died when he was six, and his father remarried within a year. He was a bookish and taciturn kid, a loner, and didn't fit in. His parents also didn't really fit in, and it seems his stepmother did a good job encouraging him in his educational and literary pursuits. In the end, he died alone in Italy but had requested to be buried in Sauk Centre, Minn.

I tried reading Babbit in high school but didn't really get it, and so gave up. I am going to get around to reading Main Street, maybe soon.

When I left New York for Silicon Valley in California after graduate school, my friend Hermine Meinhard gave me a framed black-and-white print of Sinclair Lewis and his second wife, Dorothy Thompson, sitting on the steps of a trailer in Hollywood. Lewis is typing, presumably a script, and Thompson is smiling. The print was from a calendar of literary folks, and Hermine took it off her wall and gave it to me as the only one of a writer in California. I had no affinity for Sinclair Lewis, but I loved Hermine and hung the print on my wall. I took it with me to Chicago and then, more aptly, hung it in my apartment in Long Beach, California, when I moved there in 2002. Finally, I brought it with me to Stearns County, Minnesota, 25 miles from Sinclair Lewis's boyhood home. I hung it in the hallway by my bedroom, and now it is next to my desk. Tucked into the frame is a snapshot of Hermine and me at graduation from Sarah Lawrence.

I'm not sure what that means, if anything. I just like the journey the print has taken, and that I've landed here. I hope to fit in better than young Sinclair did, and I hope to make something of my literary dreams, which it feels like I've held onto for a long time, and carried from coast to coast and back to the Midwest again.

Catholic Literature

I'm always interested in how people define "Catholic Literature." I tried making a serious study of this question when I was a resident scholar for a year at the Collegeville Institute. Although I was raised a Catholic until 12, I spent the next ten years in an evangelical, fundamentalist, Pentecostal environment, and it is the stories I heard in those churches, the behavior I observed, and that world view that I think has primarily shaped my aesthetic vision. However, I know Catholicism was also formative for me. In the end, I like the idea that there is such a thing as a Catholic writer, and so I've looked for ways to cultivate and understand what that might mean.

I never did get a good definition of Catholic Literature from my self-guided study. For the most part, perhaps like all these classifications of literature, people seem to define it as 1) work written by Catholics, or 2) work about Catholics. As a poet, I was looking for something a little more philosophical, a Catholic imagination. The biggest contribution on this issue is offered by the theologian and philosopher David Tracy, whose work on "the analogical imagination" claims basically that the Catholic imagination is shaped by analogy, in images rather than abstract ideas. That's a gross oversimplification, of course, but it basically works. Catholics are liturgical, whereas Protestants are steeped in sermons. Catholics are drawn to the icon, the symbol, visual images that guide them in their faith, whereas Protestants are sola Scriptura, "proof-texters," focused on the Word of the Bible and its meanings.

It was with great interest I spotted a volume on a bookshelf in our basement a month ago called: Great Modern Catholic Short Stories. It was edited by Sister Mariella Gable, OSB, a Sister at Saint Benedict's Monastery who died in 1985. (I have to note that they misspelled her name on the spine of the book, "Marilla Gable.") It was published in 1942 by Sheed and Ward.

I opened it this morning and found the table of contents organized this way: Ten Stories about Nuns, Seven Stories about Monks, Nine Stories about Priests. As straightforward a definition of Modern Cathlic Fiction as you might find.

In the introduction, she talks about the way these short stories mark a watershed in writing about religious. For the first time, she says, there are stories telling it straight and plain, giving a real view into the lives of priests, monks and nuns. She gives some examples of the earlier type of fiction, including a story that tells of "a young Trappist ... seduced immediately upon hearing the voice of a woman." Of this, she says, "After [James Lane Allen's] portrayal of a monk, the yarns of the Arabian Nights read like stark realism." The collection is a celebration of the ordinary life of monasteries and rectories, and so had my attention. After the introduction, I read two of the stories that were written by monks, although most of the stories in the collection were written by laypeople. One was called "Reading in the Refectory," by Peter Whiffin. It is more a reflective essay than a short story as I think of them. It is a first-person stream of consciousness, a monk who seems to be speaking to us directly about the experience of listening to "holy reading" during mealtime and thinking about his own experience with the kind of piety portrayed in the reading. It's a wonderful story about the disconnect between the reading, that leads the monks into a sort of competition "counting" how many holy acclamations they can make during a period of time, and the simple holiness he observes in another monk who has spent the night with a fellw monk who is dying in his cell.

The second hit closer to home for me. It is called "Monks Die Good" by Jack English, a pen name for Brother Caetan, a Brother of St. Francis Xavier. It tells the story of a burial for a monk, "Brother Raphael," who dies on New Year's Day. It is focused on the physical discomfort of the process-- the hard work of digging the grave, the awkwardness and banging of his knee as they carry the casket down the narrow aisle, the cold when he forgets his gloves, the annoyance of having all the other brothers tell him he should have worn a hat. It's steeped in physicality and in the awkwardness of community life. The monks discuss the imperfect job done by the mortician (too much powder, unevenness of tone), the way the monks move back to the tasks at hand after the burial. Near the end he offers up a simple prayer.

It is a brilliant story, really. I'm going to make a copy to give to the prioress at Saint Benedict's Monastery, Nancy Bauer, who wrote an account for the upcoming issue of our magazine of how our monastery marks death, following the directive by St. Benedict in the Rule to "keep death ever before your eyes."

It is also a Catholic story-- steeped in the physical reality while seeking simple transcendence. That is more and more becoming my working definition.

The copy of the book we have on our shelf doesn't show up on an Amazon search, but another does, published by Sheed & Ward in 1943 and reissued in 1944. I suspect it's the same book, hopefully with her name correctly imprinted on the spine. The title had also changed, more reflective of the contents: They Are People: Modern Stories of Nuns, Monks and Priests. It is long out of print, but there are still a couple of used copies available.

Rocco

I have been trying to keep death out of the blog, more or less. Sister Jeremy's death slipped in, but hers was the sixth death at the monastery since August. That's been on my mind because I write the obituaries for the Sisters' magazine, Benedictine Sisters and Friends, that I'm preparing now. Also because two of the deaths happened on Saturdays, which meant I got called in to work to post the obituary and photo to the St. Cloud Times. The first time was Sister Glenore, who was 105 years old. Then it was Sister Jeremy, which felt like actual news, and I carried it around the whole weekend looking for someone to tell.

Also, Brother Dietrich Reinhardt, an incredibly gentle and kind monk who has been president of Saint John's University for 17 years, was diagnosed this fall with metastatic melanoma, stage 4, in his lungs and brain. His decline has been very rapid, and although people speak with vague hope sometimes, it is clear he won't live much longer. I found myself crying at Mass at the Abbey one morning over this. I also went to an anointing service held for him at hte Abbey church a few weeks ago. I saw it on the campus bulletin board, and had no idea what a large event it was. I thought it would be the monastic community humbly doing their little prayer service after noon prayer. But when I arrived there were choruses and many instruments, a packed house, several news reporters and cameramen. In other words, it was a university event. It was highly choreographed, with lots of actual fanfare. Select constituencies were represented up in the choir stalls-- not the brothers who sat down in the main area with the rest of us. They wore red ribbons and when the time came they paraded past Dietrich and held a hand up over him. You couldn't actually touch him because his white blood cell count was too low at that point and he risked infection. I stayed to pray, to sing, and visited with a couple monks I hadn't seen in awhile, but I didn't stay for the whole parade. I went back to work.

Then yesterday I got news that an old friend, Rocco DiSipio, died. He committed suicide, and this was not a surprise. I don't know the details, just that he died at home, and somehow that was comforting to me. He could have easily died in an institution or on the street. He'd threatened in manic times to stage a battle with Satan at the mouth of a mountain in New York State. I was glad to hear he was in Eastern Pennsylvania, in a place he loved. His physical health had become bad, I hear, and I would imagine that was also a factor. Maybe he didn't want to lose his independence. Or maybe he was just finished fighting his demons.

I knew Rocco when we both lived in Chicago in the mid-90s. He was the brother of a friend of a friend. At a party, he zeroed in on me quite intensely. We spent the next few months talking about writing mostly. Rocco had written seven unpublished novels, stuff along the lines of Confederacy of Dunces. He had elaborate correspondences with Margaret Atwood, who advocated for his writing to her publisher and agent, and with Anne Tyler. Eventually he wrote a novel that was published in serial form online, a satire. It was a good format for him--keep it moving, keep it archly comic. I heard him on WBEZ one day in the late '90s talking about the death of the conventional novel and predicting that soon all publishing would be online. My first husband heard the interview and said, "Wow, Rocco is real." I had a lot of Rocco stories by then, but not many of my friends ever met him.

Rocco had been a police officer and then a parole officer, and married, before he had his first manic depressive episode in his late twenties. In the intervening years he'd been homeless, attempted suicide twice, and been in and out of hospitals. He was brilliant, and knew how to work over psychiatrists to get the medication he decided he needed. When I met him he was living in a spare room in someone's apartment, and instead of rent he was painting furniture for the guy. He'd coat it in black paint and then use paint pens to cover the piece in images from his wild imagination. One of this favorites was a straight-backed chair with three nuns on the back looking longingly down at a hotdog on the seat. That was Rocco's sense of humor, completely. He talked me through the writing of a novel, multiple drafts, which he believed in utterly-- much more than I did. I sent it out to agents, got interest from two, but was relieved when they decided in the end they couldn't sell it. I never would have finished it, however, if it weren't for Rocco. Because of him I wrote something that was completely invented, real fiction, and felt as real as the world I inhabited every day. I even got a chance one summer to take him to a place in Michigan where some of the novel was set, and he took the place in exactly as I'd hoped, saying, "What a site. This place. What a world." Like he could see my made-up people and their lives playing out there just like I'd written them. I can't really express how valuable that is still.

One Superbowl Sunday he took me out shooting. He thought it would be a kind of therapy for me--empowering. He didn't want me to be a victim. He picked me up and we drove out to the western suburbs of Chicago where there was a shooting range. On the way out he gave me the gun safety lecture. "The gun is always loaded. Repeat what I just said."
"Always act like the gun is loaded."
"NO! That's not what I said! The Gun IS ALWAYS Loaded. Repeat it."

When we were nearly there we left the highway and stopped at a K-Mart to buy bullets. The gun was a .22 shotgun made mostly of plastic. At the sporting goods counter a meek suburban man who seemed more comfortable selling basketballs than bullets came and asked us what we wanted. "What do you have in the way of .22 shells?" Rocco asked. The man showed him the selection, two kinds. Rocco picked up the boxes and his hand shook from the Lithium, rattling the shells. The meek man looked at Rocco, looked at me, looked back at Rocco.

"These will work," said Rocco, sliding out his permit. I didn't really understand how he managed to keep a weapons permit with his diagnosis. Also, he really did look like a serial killer in the picture-- large dark eyes, sullen face, ragged beard. Rocco chain smoked and never looked healthy. Ravaged is a word you could use.

That's when the clerk opened up. "Where are you going?"
"Just to the range up the street," Rocco said.
"Well, you know, if you want some real action, you should get a .44 and go shoot skeet out at the Drive."
"Oh, uh huh."
"A .22 isn't going to be any fun. A .44 is what you need to have some real fun." I'm not sure if he actually said "real fun" or if I got that from the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's "A Real Man is Hard to Find." But the clerk was quickly becoming that kind of character. Sylvio took his change, and we turned to walk down the aisle.
"That guy was crazy," Rocco said, laughing. I couldn't help but agree and join him.

At the shooting range, we lined up to buy our target sheets. Rocco pointed and told the guy to give us "one wife," "one husband," and "one of those married couples." The guys behind us in line laughed. The targets were of a man assailant with a gun, a woman assailant with a gun, and a man holding a woman hostage. "You can shoot the husbands and I'll shoot the wives," he said on the way back to our booth.

In the end I couldn't shoot any of the people. I found a bullseye target on the floor and used that. It had a few big holes in it already, probably from a .44. Or one of the much larger guns the men in the adjacent booths were firing. They had fire coming out of the end of their guns. We had a plastic .22 that seemed more like a shooting gallery toy. But I learned how to site the thing and managed to completely punch out the center of the bullseye. For years I used it to "decorate" the peep holes on apartment doors, kind of like a wreath.

When I got married the first time in 1998, I told Sylvio over the phone. He said, "Congratulations! It's really good you're getting one under your belt." I said, "Rocco, I think this is going to work out." He laughed, quite genuinely, and said, "Oh, Sink, it never works out."

Rocco was not all darkness, but he was very dark. It was exciting, and felt very real. I took the late night calls and we talked. He could talk for hours, and so could I. He could draw worlds with his words, and he had lived several lives, all of them fascinating. I had permission to be and say whatever I wanted to with him. I think that was the real attraction. But I met my first husband, and then we moved, then he moved, and I stopped hearing from him. At some point he asked me to be his literary executor. I said sure, and carefully put the manuscripts he sent me in files in a drawer of my file cabinet. Then I started to receive daily pages and instructions in the mail. "Please replace page 143 in book 3 with this new page 143. Confirm." Or more briefly, to change the wording of a particular sentence on a page in one of the short stories. I was supposed to write him a postcard back saying I'd done what he asked. This went on awhile. I always made the changes he asked, but I didn't always write and confirm. And this was not acceptable. After a few threatening cards about how I was torturing him, he asked for all the materials back. He'd found a new executor. That was ok with me.

I didn't hear from him after that. I knew he'd moved to New York state for awhile, and then back to Western Pennsylvania. Among the papers I'd been entrusted with when I was his literary executor was a copy of his will. In it he had instructions about women he'd been involved with and who he felt had disappointed him. They were each supposed to get a particular page, or a few pages, from one of his novels in the event of his death. I wondered if I was on that list. I still do, actually, wonder if someday I'll get a page in the mail. I've thought of that on and off over the years and hoped that the fact I didn't get one meant he was still alive.

I got an e-mail from the friend of a friend of his brother about his death. It was a notice of a death in a line of deaths this fall. It was both expected and unexpected. I thought briefly that I should add his name to the Book of Remembrance the Sisters keep for the month of November and pray from-- but it was December 1. That seemed like an irony Rocco would appreciate. I prayed for him anyway.

Jan Richardson, artist and writer

I'm adding a blog called The Painted Prayerbook to my blog list. It's written and illustrated by Jan Richardson. This is one of her collages at left, called "All Souls." She lives in Florida and is an ordained Methodist minister, but mostly she's an amazing artist and a wonderful writer. She's a member of a Methodist Benedictine monastery called St. Brigid of Kildare Monastery that has its home here in St. Joseph at the residence of Mary Stamps. Mary also works at Saint John's School of Theology, and is kind enough to always forward me the Savage Chickens cartoons when they're about poetry. Last winter Mary forwarded me a few of Jan's books to see, and I immediately bought two-- one on Lent and one called The Intimate Apocalypse about the book of Revelation. The images are amazing, and the text is rich and well-written. This is a woman who does not need an editor-- every word counts. She also must be living right because I know she has a busy schedule, and keeps herself fed and clothed and traveling as a freelancer, and yet she also lives a life that allows for regular, meaningful meditation on spiritual things, and time and inspiration to make consistently gorgeous and complex art. Last year she had a blog during Advent, and it looks like she will do it again this year. I plan on reading every entry.

I met Jan this past summer. She was in town and we met at Bo Diddley's sandwich shop-- halfway between our two monasteries (which are about 6 blocks apart). I'd been an advocate of a book she'd written that was out of print and that I thought Liturgical Press should publish. But I was no longer in a position to help (I probably never was, actually) and so we were meeting as two artists. Well, it was either a week before my wedding or a week after it. I had started my new job less than a month before. "Overwhelm" does not begin to describe my state of mind. And I was not able to talk at all about plans for my own writing in the future-- I had none.

Jan was quite generous about listening to what was going on in my life. And I was of course very interested to hear about her projects. At the same time, that meeting was a sign to me of how quickly things had turned on their head. I was not in the same place I'd been when we'd exchanged e-mails less than six months before. She also had experienced major life changes in that time. Yet I couldn't help feel that whereas mine had thrown me into chaos and unsettled me, she was calm and steady.

It might be why I am looking forward to reading Jan's blog this Advent. There is a calm, a centeredness, and a thoughtfulness. And the art is always astonishing and beautiful. If for nothing else, visit her web page, http://www.janrichardson.com/ and look around at the collages and charcoal.

Jon Hassler, Last Catholic Novelist?

Jon Hassler was a novelist who lived and worked in this area for his whole career, and whose novels are more or less set in this area (fictionalized) and the other places he lived-- Brainerd and Bemidji. He died in March of this year after a long illness. I never met him, but my father-in-law was his classmate at St. John's University (MN), and he taught for a long time at the college. One of the things I've been doing these past two years as I've contemplated what it means to be a writer in Central Minnesota, to cast my lot with this place and this people, has been reading his major novels, considering what they have to say about this place, about Catholicism, and about the Catholic imagination and Catholic writers.

A wonderful appreciation considering this question by Andrew Greeley appears in the current issue of America. In it is the following paragraph:

"It may occur to the reader how many of the authors I have mentioned are products of the (German) Catholicism of Minnesota centered in St. John’s Abbey (which includes such Celts as Coleman Barry and Eugene McCarthy). The Jesuit sociologist Joseph Fichter once remarked that the centers of creativity in American Catholicism seemed to be concentrated in a triangle that reached from St. John’s to Chicago to Notre Dame. St. John’s pervasive and unique influence on the church in this country, in particular, demands more intense study. The environs and culture of Staggerford, Rookery College, the Abbey Press, Bad Battle River, Pluto, Ostrogothinburg (St. Cloud?) the Clementine Fathers, Godfrey Diekmann and Lake Wobegon seem to demand more coordinated and more intense investigation. Perhaps they are also a challenge to Minnesota Catholicism to understand itself while there is still time. I have suggested on occasion to the monks of St. John’s that they are far more important and indeed far better than they think they are."

Many of the names referenced will mean nothing to people outside this culture and place, but like my crash course in S. Thomas Carey, I've had crash courses in Godfrey Diekmann (by his biographer, Kathleen Hughes, RSJ, who was a scholar at the Collegeville Institute with me) and many of the other topics. I live more or less in Staggerford, work at Rookery College, and for the past two years worked at the Abbey Press. This is the heart of Garrison Keillor country, and Keillor often references nearby high schools like Avon and Albany in his monologues. My favorite restaurant is Fisher's Club, an old set-up club of which he is part-owner. You can get very good Beebop a Reebop Rhubarb Pie there, and Powdermilk Biscuits with ice cream. Not to mention the best ribs and walleye in the county.

Eugene McCarthy was a novice at St. John's Abbey for 9 months, and graduated from the prep school and the University. His legacy here is large. I heard Mondale eulogize him at St. John's abbey at a memorial service after his death last year. He was remembered at that service not just as a statesman but as a poet. I believe it was his son who read several of his poems.

In this place, it is sometimes difficult to think about what is yet to be. Especially in the context of the monastery. Three Sisters died this past week, including S. Glenore Riedner who was 106 years old. We are expecting two more deaths by Christmas. Also, Brother Dietrich Reinhardt, until recently the president of Saint John's University, was in the past few weeks diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma-- in his lungs but also in his brain. On Sunday I went to Mass at the Abbey, after a discussion about being an oblate the night before with friends. I found myself in tears, seeing Brother Dietrich up in the choir stalls, gray and fading, but also for the other amazing people I know, Brothers and Sisters, and who I will face losing in the coming years. I don't have much experience with old people-- all my grandparents lived far away. To have bonded with this many people over 70 this quickly and significantly-- adds a certain complexity.

It is hard to think about what is yet to be, but it is also hard even to think about what IS NOW. I know that there are artists in the area, and I know that I myself am reaching toward something. I know that this place feeds artists and writers, still. I am a writer who for the past few years has been transitioning to a place that is much larger than myself. In some ways it is larger than the other places I've lived-- including Chicago, Southern California, New York. In those places, one could get caught up with a "scene," or strive to belong to a group that was "making it" in the arts. There was a lot in the way of social interaction and development based on shared ideas. It was certainly easier to build a community of artist and intellectual friends. But this place shapes people. This place rushes up to meet you, and then takes a very long time to absorb and get to know. There is something more going on here. I'm afraid sometimes that I've come too late to live deeply into it, to find the stories I want to tell in my writing and become the person who can tell them.

I can't tell you the number of astonishing things that happen to me around here. One I have yet to write about is an encounter I had last week at the St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce luncheon at the new school. That is what I had planned for my next essay, but then this essay in America appeared. Jon Hassler.

My own impression of Hassler's novels is that they are really enjoyable, very readable, but ultimately they don't rise to the level of greatness. They're episodic, character-driven, solid regional literature. They don't have the depth or brilliance of a Flannery O'Connor or James Joyce, or even the significance of Graham Greene's work. It surprises me that people who are not Catholics, or not Minnesotans, would take much interest in them. I admire greatly his ability to find and develop characters like Agatha McGee and Father Frank Healey. There are things about the books that have stayed with me. I think I most admire that he was able to write novels rooted in place and his Catholic identity, assemble a body of work that is consistent. I think it was that he was able to accomplish his life-- get published, have confidence in these characters and his own writing, keep doing it-- that I'm interested in most. The fact that Loyola University Press has brought out two of his large novels in their Loyola Classics series, claiming they rise to the level of "masterpieces of Catholic fiction from some of the greatest authors of the twentieth century" strikes me as hyperbolic, especially in the case of Hassler (yes, I know it's marketing text, but still). I'm even surprised that Greeley would put him in the company he does or make such great claims for him.

I spent a large part of my year at the Collegeville Institute trying to get people to explain the "Catholic imagination" to me. Reading Catholic authors, poets, essays, criticism, the famous work by David Tracey that Greeley mentions on "the analogical imagination." Catholicism, he claims, is special because it is embodied, and it is image-based. It shapes the imagination by action of ritual, by association with all the religious imagery. Well yes, ok.

Hassler is dead. And McCarthy. And B. Godfrey Diekmann. S. Thomas Carey. And Sister Mariella Gable, a poet I never heard about until Greeley's article but now have to go find. And in a way an entire way of life is coming to an end before my eyes. I have a strong symbol of it in the new public elementary school behind our house. (About which, more later.) The challenge, though, is to be part of what is now, even if it is an autumn of sorts. And to be a part of what is to come. Because there are still a lot of us artists left out here. Some of us Catholics. I'm paying attention.

You can read the whole article about Jon Hassler by Andrew Greeley in America online here.

How I Got Here

I came to Minnesota to spend an academic year at the Collegeville Institue for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, because I had to get out of Southern California, and because I was working on a memoir, and it was the story of my religious upbringing and my move from life out of Catholicism and into a fundamentalist, pentecostal church and back to Catholicism through a group of Benedictines. I knew that Kathleen Norris had written the book Cloisterwalk, a popular book about Benedictine spirituality, while in residence at some monastery, and so I Googled the place named in the acknowledgements of her book and found out the residency was still going on. And I applied and was accepted.

I came here with an agent for my book, and thus some urgency to complete it, and even some faith that the story I was telling was being told well enough for others to want to read it and was interesting enough for others to want to read it. I mostly wanted a sabbatical, which is what the Ecumenical Institute offered, and I also really wanted to be in the Midwest. (Though if truth be told, the fellowship I applied for and wanted most was a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe. I mean, who wouldn't!?)

I loved it here, but I didn't go all rapturous about it the way others did. The beauty of the place is obvious. I didn't feel like "Oh, this is the home I've always been destined for." The culture of Central Minnesota is quite distinct, and not the one I was brought up in. In some ways the place is exotic to me. And I knew part of my happiness was that I didn't have to work. I lived on a gorgeous college campus in an apartment designed by Marcel Breuer with a wall of windows looking out on a lake and a fireplace. The other scholars, and the monks, and the faculty and students at Saint John's School of Theology, all treated me like I was interesting and smart, like I was a "scholar," which is what they called us. I was part of a whole series of high-level conversations about Catholicism and faith and monasticism and the life of this place. I was totally filled up to the top of my head engaged intellectually and emotionally and creatively.

I finished the memoir in November. The agent agreed it was much improved over the two previous drafts, and complete, and ready to be sent out to publishers. Then I moved on to some serious study, and also to writing my second book of poems. I read. I talked.

I worked on what it meant that I wanted the hell out of The Poetry World (though I made casual gestures toward the English department here, all soundly rebuffed). Some, it felt to me, even cruelly rebuffed. That was ok, though, because I'd kind of given up on people in English departments being interested in what I had to say. But that left me with a much larger question-- if I didn't care about publishing or the poetry world anymore, if I let go of that ambition, why write a second book? Who was I writing for?

In many ways I felt I was getting a chance to go back and take the road not taken. After graduating from Grinnell College in 1986, I'd taken two years to decide whether to go to graduate school in poetry or seminary/social work. I had no idea really how to get into a seminary, or which one to get into, and back then I found it easier to get mentoring and direction from a few poets I came in contact with. For which, let me be clear, I'm grateful. And I didn't have to take the GRE to apply for poetry graduate school. So I entered an MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College and decided to just see how far I could go as a poet.

And I went pretty darn far. I got accepted to Yaddo while still in graduate school. I won a Stegner Fellowship immediately after graduate school and so got to write for two more years at Stanford. I was able to translate that MFA and my English BA into the credentials necessary to teach (tenure track) English at the community college level-- which was a great level for me. For one thing, the creative writing students there were for the most part way more interesting and talented than the average undergraduate I encountered at 4-year colleges. My Stegner Fellowship meant editors would usually read my poems and reject them personally. My first book manuscript was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Brittingham Prize, and a few other places as well.

But mostly my poetry life after graduate school (and to some extent in graduate school) was about being condescended to, made constantly aware of my shortcomings and inability to do the things that real or great poets do in their writing, and kept out of the club. I hope I don't sound bitter. I thought I wanted something there and could get something there that in the end I don't think was worth getting or fighting for, and that ultimately, despite all my connections and hard work, I couldn't get. The book didn't get published, and I didn't get a university job. In the end, I couldn't get legitimacy in the Poetry World, and I had to let that go.

I also had a first marriage. I married a scholar of 20th Century American Poetry from Stanford, and was with him for years as he also struggled to break into a tenure-track position. I saw the dark side of English departments through his struggles, too. And when he left me for a woman we'd known at the graduate program in English in Reno, shortly after we'd moved to Southern California for his first tenure-track job, that was a serious break between me and poetry. (The first serious break had been that Stegner Fellowship, and the petty exclusiveness of that world and the demoralizing experience of studying with Denise Levertov. After that, i'd taken a three-year hiatus from writing poetry seriously and had written a novel instead.)

After the divorce, I reassessed a lot of things, including the fact that I'd spent probably almost $1,000 on entry fees for contests for my poetry manuscript, waiting for it to, as my former teacher Mark Doty had promised it would, "rise to the top" and find its way into publication. And I could go on like that indefinitely. Or I could publish it myself and move on to the next book. And have something to hand out and exchange with other poets and sell at readings I gave. That year I gave a reading at my junior college to which 300 people came (the power of extra credit, not my own fame believe me), and where I could have gotten my book into many hands if I'd had one. I made sure I had one the next year when I was a visiting poet at local fundraiser for the Spirituality Center of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange (my first real experience with a women's monastery, oddly enough!).

At the Collegeville Institute I worked in an office across the hall from a monk who started writing poetry at age 80. He was 85 when I arrived. He was a very important Catholic scholar, particularly in the fields of the Holy Spirit and ecumenism. The guy is a first rate theologian. But for some reason he's decided that immortality is in poetry. Well, no, he does believe that immortality is in faith and Christianity. But he's decided the way to "live" on earth, the only real legacy worth having, is to be a Great Poet-- and he'd like to be recognized as such. I wasn't the right person to help him out on that path. He wanted to be a famous poet, validation and immortality through the written word and the truth that could be told only by wrestling deep human truths and sacred truths into lines of poetry.

I'd pretty much decided by then that poems couldn't do such a thing. That there aren't many really great poems at all, just stuff that people like and stuff that people don't like.
Language that's startling, or fresh, or amusing.
A story worth knowing.

But not immortality. Not by winning a poetry prize. Not with the judges I know in the game. It's a profession (a rather nasty one), or an avocation, a hobby, a predilection, something fun and worth being good at. But it's not to be valued above other professions or avocations, other forms of expression or creativity. It's nothing to build a life on, really.

It's hard for me to explain how big of a thing that was for me to realize, accept, and start to live by. I'd put a lot of hope into being a poet. I'd put a lot of identity into it, too. And reinventing myself in a way that let go of those ambitions I'd cultivated based on my early successes, well, let's just say it was an engaging year. I was glad to be embraced by the other religion scholars, and the monks, and an editor at Liturgical Press who gave me some freelance work. And, I was still writing and crafting my poems. And finished the second book of poems at the end of that year, though for the next two years it just sat in its folder. I sent out a few poems from it occasionally, but I didn't have the interest or energy to send it out to contests. I've just started that route again this fall.

And when in the spring the editor at Liturgical Press offered me a job, I suspect wrote a job description with my strengths in mind, and I didn't have to go back to Southern California and my teaching job and living down the street from my ex-husband and his new wife, well, I took my chance to move into a different life.

Time to Start Posting

Where to begin... is that the reason people have trouble beginning blogs? I've had an account here for weeks, maybe months, but it sits empty. Which is not to say I haven't been communicating virtually. I've been listserving. I've been writing essays and sending them off to the good folks of Commonweal and America. I've been sending poems off to magazines.

Two weeks ago I wrote an email to the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict, for whom I work, and told them why they need to write some editorials to show how relevant their message is in these trying times. For which I was hugged and had many more e-mails in reply thanking me for reminding them of their mission and for "getting us," and one Sister even came to my office and read back to me what I'd written aloud.

Then on Friday Commonweal Magazine, a Catholic magazine of politics and culture, actually accepted something I'd written. Something I'd submitted a long time ago. Back when the story of the day was Barack Obama and his pastor Jeremiah Wright. Remember that? People wanted him to disavow and disown his pastor. He wouldn't do it. And I thought that was right-- that was very, uh, Catholic of him. To recognize that the church is imperfect and that pastors are imperfect and that doesn't mean we just go off and leave the church we're in, or the denomination, or whatever. But also I thought, how American tha we would expect him to disown is pastor and move on to another church. How like, uh, the evangelical church in America. I had some really good thoughts on the matter, so I wrote them down and sent them off to Commonweal.

A lot of time has past since then, and in fact Jeremiah Wright got a little more out of control, started mucking around like the fact that Obama didn't disown him gave him the right to bring his politics onto the national stage. The media, through the controversy, gave Jeremiah Wright a political platform. Things got all distracty. Obama did in the end make a statement about the pastor. He in effect distanced himself. Disavowed. Disowned.

At that moment, or even before, I figured my little article was dead. And in effect it was, in that what I wanted to say was no longer relevant in the context that I'd said it. But the article sat on the desk of a very high up editor at Commonweal. This week, out of the blue, I got an acceptance letter in my e-mail inbox.

Was I still interested in publishing it?

Absolutely!

Then a few hours later I got the "edited" version ready for publication. It was clear what they'd seen in it. Why they'd held onto it. They'd stripped out the stuff about Obama and Wright. OK. The occasion was gone. But then they also stripped out some other things I'd said, the real conclusions I'd drawn about what it meant to be Catholic and not disown one's imperfect church or imperfect ministers. What was left was a rather sketchy account of my experience-- as a sex-abuse victim (though not of priest abuse) working and worshiping in a community that included priests credibly accused of sexual abuse (and on "restriction" because of it).

It had been an article thoughtful enough-- and important enough-- to publish despite the fact that it would have caused problems for me because it identified people in the Benedictine monastery where I worked and worshiped at the time (and basically live) in ways they do not want to be publicly discussed. Now it struck me as sort of a gratuitous mention of these brothers, this community, in a very public forum. Without provocation it might be said... And basically, cut down to where I didn't feel my meaning was coming across.

So I wrote back and sadly, literally crying, told them no, they couldn't publish it. Not like that.

And I thought-- oh, I should have just put this on a blog a long time ago!!!

And then today, I was on "the listserv," about which much more later, and engaging in a discussion of Sarah Palin and her "aw shucks" droppin' of the final gs on her words and I expressed EXACTLY what bugs me about that. And man, that needs to go on my blog! So after this intro post, I'll let you know what I think about that!