Will I leave a story or lead a life?

Field Notes from the Festival of Faith and Writing

Award-winning author Mitali Perkins opened the recent Festival of Faith and Writing held at Calvin University. A couple of years ago, I interviewed Perkins, along with Erin Wasinger, in an early episode of the Englewood Review of Books Podcast, and as we talked about children’s literature, I found Perkins warm and witty and humble. This is exactly as she appeared onstage before more than a thousand festival attendees, mocking, with more than a little self-deprecation, the title by which she’d been introduced: “distinguished writer-in-residence” at Calvin.

“The only thing that is distinguished about me is that I’ve kept going.” This throwaway line was the first in a series of many creative encouragements for me at the Festival—messages in bottles sent downstream from public writers.

I came to the Festival with a heavy heart regarding the writing life. I suppose it’s even fair to say I feel as if I’ve been fighting for a writing life in the last many months. I’ve been meeting deadlines, yes, but I haven’t made headway on a book project or on many of the creative essays I’ve been wanting to write since finishing my MFA. Part of this has everything to do with the constant demands of my life, including the care of my mother who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. Part of this is also internal resistance, as I have tended to wonder more loudly whether the work is valuable (when the results aren’t measurable). There have been more than a handful of times when I have said to Ryan, “Maybe I should get a real job.”

I came to the Festival with creative weariness, and I came asking two things of God. First, I wanted encouragement. I wanted reasons to keep going. I wanted renewed vision and purpose. Second, I wanted to receive God’s providence. I’d attended three previous festivals, and I knew there would be too many people to see, too many wonderful sessions to attend. I made a plan—then held it openly and expectantly.

Both prayers were answered. On the encouragement side, it was speakers like Perkins who reminded me that we must persevere in persevering.¹ Every writer faces rejection and discouragement. Every writer has moments of “mortification” she must meet with “acts of penitential courage.”

Perkins described one of these moments when a line formed outside of a book signing for her and another author, much younger than her. All those eager fans? She imagined they were hers, but when the doors opened, they rushed to crowd the table of her colleague. It was hot inside the event venue, and Perkins’s “act of penitential courage” was to fan the other author as she sweated and signed. Perkins has continued writing, and she even has a forthcoming book for writers on the habits and practices that will sustain their work. It’s called Just Making: A Guide for Compassionate Creatives.)

One session I hadn’t planned to attend but “happened into,” by a series of providences, was Bryon Borger’s session, “Raising up Sons and Daughters of Issachar in Complicated Times: One Small-Town Bookstores Owner’s Journey Through 40 Years of Bookselling.” The story of Borger’s Hearts and Minds bookstore (from which you can order books and have them shipped to your home) seemed an epic tale of perseverance.

When he and his wife first opened their store in central Pennsylvania, they were boycotted by town residents for not being “Christian” enough, given that they sold more than explicitly Christian titles. Then, when the Borgers vocally supported the institution of a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., they were threatened. (They responded by filling their display window with any book by MLK or about him.) Today, there are constant obstacles to sustaining the work of the bookstore: the rise of Amazon, ebooks, audiobooks, and the general decline in reading. But Borger seems to sustain the work with memories of customers like the late Eugene Peterson, who would call him and ask him to send copies of Jayber Crow to the pastors he was mentoring. “Put a little note inside,” Peterson instructed. “Tell them that every time Berry writes of the field or the farm, they must think of their congregation; that every time Berry mentions the barber chair, they must think of their pulpit.” Borger closed his session with a line that has been ringing in my mind ever since: “Books are holy projects, and writing is holy work.”

There is much more encouragement, many more providences to record. I could write about the session I attended with Dr. Christina Edmondson and Ekemini Uwan, hosts of “Truth’s Table” podcast and co-authors of Truth’s Table: Black Women’s Musings on Life, Love, and Liberation. “Book writing was agency in the pandemic moment,” Edmondson said. “The beauty of a book is that the words live on and on and on.” I could write about the poet Tracy K. Smith, speaking from the stage on Thursday night about the “authority, patience, and courage” that writing has helped her to expand. I could write about the session with James K.A. Smith and Bryan Bliss, Smith describing the moment in his career he stopped writing “just to explain things.” I could write about Yaa Gyasi’s Friday night interview when she spoke of writing stories as a way to “still the mind” and “make order from chaos.”

But maybe I could simply say that the final session with Hilary Yancey (we left before Anthony Doerr’s mainstage, needing to be home for Sunday morning responsibilities) was a fitting ending to the Festival. Yancey’s talk, “It All Counts: Writing in the Margins of Life,” was a lovely meditation on the good of our God-given boundaries, even as they seem interruptive to our creative ambitions.

Yancey is the author of Forgiving God, which she describes on her website as “the story of my pregnancy with our firstborn, Jackson, and our journey through his diagnosis with craniofacial microsomia at our 20-week ultrasound. It’s a story of working to believe in miraculous healing, and confronting God when the miracles didn’t look the way I expected. It’s a story of learning to leave behind old expectations to make room for something wider, and wilder.” Yancey is a woman whose life is firmly bounded, and she confessed she’d written the talk she was giving in the margins of the weeks leading up to the Festival, even the margins of the Festival itself.

Early, she quoted a line from a Robert Frost poem about “being easy in my harness” and used an extended metaphor from her experience with horseback riding to argue for a gentler version of the writing life, one that perhaps suggested more loving “devotion” than arduous “discipline.” The simple idea was this: we must soften into the boundaries of our lives, not buck up against them. There’s too much energy to be wasted in wishing away the boundaries and their interruptions and enforced limitations. Boundaries are an “unwieldy gift,” but they are a gift nonetheless. They remind us that the control we imagine exerting in the world is, for the most part, illusory.²

“Most of what happens to us is not choice but annunciation.”

This was a word about providence, and Hilary’s talk was a creative encouragement. Yes, I’m fighting for my creative work, determining to get these Monday letters out as well as to write longer-form work. And yes, I’m looking to soften into my boundaries, to accept the limitations of a season and the invitations to be present to my life here and now.

On the top of one of the pages where I’ve scribbled my Festival notes, I see I’ve written a musing, maybe even imagined it as the seed of an essay. “Will I leave a story, or will I lead a life?” I’ve asked.

Yes. The answer is yes.

1. “Persevere in persevering” was advice from Uche Anizor, author of Overcoming Apathy. I’ve unlocked the interview recording for all subscribers, and I hope you’ll watch! It’s been a tremendous encouragement to many.

2. Have you read my last book, In Good Time? This was a major theme.