March 27, 2023
Discover more from Post Script
The tide of Puget Sound was going out when I arrived on Whidbey Island a week ago. After I dropped my bags, I walked the shore north, hunting for treasures. I found three rocks and put them in my pocket. Having arrived with an overweight suitcase, I should have considered the rocks would not help my case on the way home.
This is the first time since our move to Cincinnati that I’ve disappeared from life for a residency. (There are five residencies in this program, residency simply meaning the 10-day stretches students gather for seminars and workshops, mentor meetings and readings.) I know my new friends and acquaintances have so many questions, as people often do about this graduate program. There are reasons for people’s bewilderment. Wasn’t I already publishing? Didn’t I already have a master’s degree?
There are so many ways to tell this story, all of them likely incomplete or mistaken. My reasons for being in this program now may not be the exact reasons for which I entered. But maybe that’s the nature of decisions, that we understood ourselves and our motivations only dimly at first.
I will say that my consideration of an MFA program began in July 2020, when I participated in a virtual Glen workshop with Lauren Winner. That workshop experience, despite obliging me to sit long days on Zoom in the middle of summer, was life-giving. I consumed readings, wrote sonnets, pondered big questions about writing as witness. On one of the final days of the workshop, Lauren asked some of the workshop participants to talk about their MFA experiences, then shared her experience as a faculty member at Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program. I began to wonder if I might consider it for myself. My publishing life was launched, yes. But my writerly life seemed something separate, something demanding its own efforts of cultivation.
My education has been, in large part, painfully ad hoc. Made up, stumbled into, pieced together, happened upon. I had ministry interests when I went to college, but I saw no real reason to train for the ministry. I was a woman. Instead, I studied French and took the necessary courses to get a teaching degree as well as a secondary certificate for teaching English. My English coursework, however, did not fulfill the more systematic requirements of an English minor, which is to say I was left with gaping holes, with important works left unread. The one creative writing class I took, I lagged noticeably behind the other students in imagination and craft.
In my twenties, I got a master’s degree in literature. It was my department chair who advised me to start a graduate program earlier than I might have liked, and I am glad for that advice now. I was teaching high school French and English on Chicago’s North Shore, and I applied to Northwestern University for one of their programs designed for adult students. It was a program in which I learned to read and write. Those are wonderful skills I’ve put to good use, but I still managed to evade the work of reading the Homer and Ovid. (Do you hear me saying that my education leaves me feeling like a fraud? You’re getting the picture.)
The feeling continues, quite honestly. Feeling like I inhabit a kind of lonesome, liminal space. Feeling that I’m making this up as I go along. As a spiritual writer, I am neither credentialed theologian nor recognizable literary writer. As a spiritual writer, I am neither an academic, nor a pastor or practioner.
It is not always obvious how to be a writer with theological and literary interests. There is so much written today under the banner of spiritual writing whose primary goal is information transfer. Readers have their demands: Tell me what to know. Give me a prooftext. And please, either alliterate or enumerate your points because I’m scanning the page.
Informational writing is not the kind of work I’m interested to do, at least not primarily. Don’t get me wrong. I want to know the reality of the world, the self, God—but I tend to believe we can apprehend far more by means of the poetic, by story and image. When I knew that it was time for me to deepen my work and my life as a writer, I turned toward craft—because I felt it would provide more encounter with the concrete experience of the world, rather than the abstract formulation of it.
And that’s what happened in this last week, as I read and listened to poems and short prose. This experience, this education, continues to give me language for the lucid moments of living, of loving.
“Don’t allow the lucid moment to dissolve
Let the radiant thought last in stillness
though the page is almost filled and the flame flickers
We haven’t risen yet to the level of ourselves . . .”
“Don’t Allow the Lucid Moment to Dissolve” — Adam Zagajewski, Trans. by Renata Gorczynski
I don’t think you have to get an MFA to cultivate a writerly vocation. In fact, it’s a rather expensive way to go about it. But what I’m grateful for, with regard to this program, are two things in particular (never mind that it’s giving me a teaching credential, which I hope to put to good use). First, the way the program shores up my confidence in the goodness of the creative life. It reminds me that I am doing necessary work, even if the economics make no obvious sense. Second, the way the program underscores the importance of creative community. Writing feels like lonely work, but we can’t and shouldn’t be doing it alone.
I am certainly happy to take questions in the comments, for those of you who have more specific questions about writing and the MFA! I do know that someone on Instagram asked for the favorite texts I’ve read so far in the program, so here are my top 10. You’ll probably guess it’s an impossible list to even attempt.
These books aren’t necessarily the ones I enjoyed the most but rather the books that have contributed most to my ongoing development as a writer.
Anything by Frederich Buechner (and I know that’s cheating): In particular, Telling Secrets, The Sacred Journey, and Telling the Truth
The Divine Comedy by Dante
Mysticism for Beginners by Adam Zagajewski
I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell
The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick
Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
Revelation of Love, Julian of Norwich
A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Ordinary Time, by Nancy Mairs
That’s it for now! Happy reading!
Jen
Speaking of vocational cultivation, if you’re interested in registering for an upcoming Rule of Life (virtual) intensive, you can learn more here.
