Writing in Community: writing practice, writing rewards

I am a writer who chose to dive into life rather than attend college. I left my home on the East Coast to live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My story after that decision is filled with an alternative lifestyle, travel, kids, multiple losses, moving again and again, surviving a partner's suicide, re-claiming my voice, becoming a performance poet, my youngest son's suicide, moving to Mexico and co-founding an art gallery, providing child-care for grandsons. And finally creating a writer's life. My work appears in over 40 literary journals, anthologies, and magazines, many of which you never heard of, and I have published a novel, a full length poetry collection and two chapbooks.

I always wanted to facilitate writing groups but it was after the loss of my son that I realized I had hard-earned wisdom as well as a desire to be of service. I created Writing Circles for Healing as a way to deepen my own healing. 

By receiving McKnight Community Art Program grants in 2008 and 2009, I was able to bring a performance-writing workshop to one high school and a writing-art installation project to another. One high school hired me as the after-school writing instructor.  I volunteered to facilitate writing workshops at non-profits: victims of domestic violence and clients who were HIV+. In 2012 a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board gave me the opportunity to teach in twelve non-profit human service and arts organizations, from a heart patient support group to Saint Paul Almanac. I connected with Mn Prison Writing Workshop. I continued to teach in community education programs and was an artist in residence through Patrick's Cabaret for The Aliveness Project, a resource center for those who are HIV positive.

This lengthy explanation is to provide a bit of background to what I do now: facilitate writing workshops in cafes, churches, women’s retreats, libraries, prisons, healing centers, yoga studios, bookstores, and community centers. I teach mostly memoir, personal essay or creative non-fiction, and poetry.

I love what I do. Sometimes tears indicate that someone has found her/his voice. Always there is laughter. Someone may have a break-through or transformation during class. A young woman who had never written before started writing daily. Participants type up poems for the first time since school days. People give feedback that they have started writing again or re-discovered writing. I was gratified to hear the resiliency expressed by participants at The Aliveness Project. The participants who attended my workshop continued on to performance workshops. Later, these participants got up to share their work in front of over a hundred people.

At Pathways Healing Center, a man’s brain tumor had returned after three years of remission; he attended my class before he passed away. At that point the tumor was impacting his ability to be coherent and so he copied the last lines of a poem I used as a jumpstart. That day it just happened to be a poem I wrote and I will never forget the chills I got as he read my words back to me. One participant wrote in columns—first his words marched down the right side, then his words marched down the left. To tell you the truth, I didn’t always understand what he was writing about but others in the circle complimented his “poetic style”. A woman whose husband was dying from ASL came for a break from care-giving. One woman had to sit on the floor because it was too painful to sit in a chair. Several people grieved spouses or parents. Cancer survivors wrote about feeling they are a burden on others. 

We used prompts such as: what I am praying for, my beloved body, the knot of the self that won’t untangle, and what brings me joy. Here’s a quote from someone who went through a nasty divorce, then breast cancer: “Be what you need and want to receive, even though you don't have it yet.” Often I am in awe of their resiliency as it finds expression on the page.

The thing is, I believe we all have stories to tell and some of us have important stories. Some of us are the story-bearers for those who can't quite yet tell their stories. I have heard stories of abuse, grief, fear, regret, addiction, depression, and shame. I have heard stories of the will to survive. I have heard stories of unremitting guilt and stories of enduring love. My goal, I tell my students, is to get you writing so that when this class ends, you are motivated to continue. 

"Writing is a practice. The more you practice, the more you will find your voice and the story you are compelled to tell."

I have dreams and visions for me, the writer. But there is a satisfaction in teaching that keeps me on the look-out for poems to use as jumpstarts, articles about craft, and ways to encourage those determined to share the story they have inside.

Giving Thanks and Birthing a Book

I am in the throes of preparing my book for publication after attending the Independent Author's conference sponsored by Book Baby in Philadelphia. They convinced me that Indie publishing is the wave of the future. I like the idea of pod books for the ecology: books sent back are often damaged or destroyed whereas you only buy a pod because you want it. I like having the ability to purchase boxes of books to sell at readings, workshops and events. And I like the fact that I can download a manuscript and have a book out in three months or less, whereas I have been waiting years to find the right and perfect fit in traditional publishing, one I am starting to believe doesn't exist. Not because there aren't potential readers but because my book doesn't fit in the right categories. It is a love story with the land of Israel and her people and two lovers, one an irresistible but dangerous charmer and one a comforting friend who can't commit, but it's not a romance. It tells the story of a country embroiled in civil conflict but it's not a political or historical commentary and it doesn't balance reporting about the Palestinian people's struggles with the Israelis I encountered. It is about the steps a woman takes in her own healing process but it's only the first beginning steps and not the completed journey.

It will be considered women's fiction, I suppose, but it is about contradictions, the ideal of peace and how hard it is to achieve, the light and the dark, the yearning for freedom and the yearning to belong, the desire to stay and the impossibility of doing what it takes to make it happen. The entire undercurrent of dreams: the dream for peace, belonging, love, and humanity against a backdrop of strikes, demonstrations, mandatory army duty, tear gas, suicide bombings, and imminent war.

It is also about life and death.

What I didn't know is that the revisions would bring up all the emotions I felt at the time they happened and the time of the initial writing.

What I didn't know is that I have extraordinary beta-readers who give me insight into what I thought I said and what I really wrote down, what makes the book work and what makes it less than fluid, and why I wrote the darn thing in the first place.

Catch a Dream: a woman's healing journey in a country embroiled in civil conflict.

It takes a village to birth a child: the steady voice saying, "You can do it! Push! Stop! Breathe! Push!" The nurse who offers you a cool washcloth or ice chips or checks your blood pressure, the delivery doctor who knows what to do when things escalate or go wrong or you need medical intervention. The mid-wife who has taught you to pay attention to your own body signals. The pre-natal friends who cheer you through the nausea and doubt and exhaustion of pregnancy, the friends who come to cheer the newborn and bring chocolate cake and clean up your kitchen. The family who gathers around in welcome of the new being, the community who acknowledge here is hope and a new beginning.

So it is with the birth of a book. The many friends who are cheering you on, offering their feed-back, encouragement, and critiques. The friends who will love your story, love the disturbing questions, love the fact that not everything has a tidy happy ending but only a prelude to provoking ponderings. I love happy endings. Catch a Dream is not happy in the way you might expect but it ends with a sense of hope. I learned from my own journey of falling in love with the irresistible dangerous lover and wanting to stay in a place where I didn't really belong is that not all dreams are meant to come true. But this one, the one of a book in my hands, written with my own tears and questions and contemplation and insight and love, is about to.

Writing Through the Storm

Writing is a way to connect to your deepest self, your intuition, and your own inner guidance. It can also clear the decks when you feel troubled or dismayed, it can be a way to express outrage and release worry, it can be a way to express sorrow and not hold onto it. For many of us who write on a regular basis, writing has saved us. It not only gives us an outlet, it fosters self-awareness and self-empowerment, through truth-telling. It can open the doors to what we are afraid to confront and it can do so in ways that are gentle, such as poetry, changing our voice to third person, or writing a letter to ourselves with our non-dominant hand. Sometimes when we are in the midst of a crisis, trauma, or upheaval, we want to write but our words seem inadequate. How do we find eloquence when feeling overwhelmed, shocked, or outraged? How can we be emotionally vulnerable rather than adding static to the airwaves? 

Take a look at this essay called Punch:  https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/447/punch  and ask yourself why does it work so well?

      This brief essay is 618 words. It goes from the personal to the universal quickly. First we understand a history of family violence -- this may be something we recall from our own families. Or we may simply remember a slap, a scream, a spanking, a threatening environment. Then Robertson write with raw honesty about the urge to hit his own child. A teen-ager. Who with teen-aged kids hasn't experienced this moment when it takes all you have not to use force...either from a reaction to their disrepsect or from the desire to make it stop or from the frustration that you aren't getting through? I am someone who vowed never to use violence, who dedicated her life to making peace, and yet there was that moment when I slapped my teen-aged son, unable to restrain myself because I was so angry. Robertson writes about it with grace and ends with the big question? If we don't stop it, who will? 

      Brief creative non-fiction gets straight to the lesson learned and does so within a wider context. Not only does Robertson have a realization about himself, but the dynamics of living together that extend far beyond his own family.

    Just as I have begun a post about writing as a way to anchor ourselves through the storm or perhaps beam out light from the lighthouse through the storm and want to remind you that we are in a very treacherous storm. We are in the midst of cultural change that will upend our sails. We are in a powerful storm of racism, sexism, and homophobia. We are in a storm of intolerance for immigrants who seek a better life and intolerance on the public roads and sidewalks for those who we share them with. A storm of bad manners and bad habits, of addictions to the screen and instant news, whether it be true or just gossip. And a storm of health issues: from autism of our children to dementia of our elders, and lacking the support we need to improve their daily lives. A storm of loss and a storm of lack. And a storm of fear.

      How will you weild your pen in these days of change? Will you share your story, will you find a way to be articulate, vivid, engaging, and insightful without being irrational, self-centered, or myopic? Outrage turned to something that uplifts us to try harder, sorrow that lights up our compassion, trauma leading to understanding, crisis that is an opportunity to have dialogue. I dare you to give it a try!

Resiliency: accepting what is: what cannot be changed

I believe with all my heart in the power of affirmations.

I use them every morning to start my day with something uplifting. They raise my vibration and give me focus and vision.

Positive affirmations can change the way you feel and the way you respond. They create new neural pathways in the brain. And they are powerful senders of energy that is reflected back by the response of the Universe. When we say “yes”, the Universe says “Yes.”

There are plenty of articles and books about the power of positive affirmation. You can watch Abraham and Ester Hicks discuss it on youtube. Unity became a movement due to the power of Myrtle Fillmore healing herself through prayer and meditation. Writers from Wayne Dwyer to Eckert Tolle discuss the unlimited power of thought.

I believe gratitude is one of the most powerful affirmations of all.

However, I also need to practice acceptance: the things that cannot be changed.

While I was in Puerto Vallarta, I created a bilingual poetry event during Día de los Muertos. I appreciate how the Mexicans honor their ancestors during this celebration. They build ofrendas in their homes filled with the favorite foods for when the dead come by. They clean and decorate the graves of their loved ones in the cemeteries and spend time together at the gravesite, telling family stories. They also have ways to poke fun at death to remove the sting. Everywhere you see calacas and calaveras, miniature sugar skulls and skeleton figurines from every walk of life: the mariachi band to the soap opera star, the barber to the teacher, the bus driver to the bride. They remind us that death comes for all of us, none of us are getting out alive.  The Mexicans call death La Muerte, and La Catrina and La Sebastiana.  I found a poem by E. R. Mares which listed Spanish names with meanings such as The Stinky One, The Bony One, the Hag, the Bitch, etc. The poem is essentially about near-misses, how the poet had close calls but survived. My co-performer and I were calling these names in Spanish to each other across the stage, almost as if taunting Death or enticing Her near. 

Suddenly I had a revelation that Death is part of the natural cycle of life, death and rebirth.

I had placed a candle on each table and at a certain point, asked audience members to light their candles and hold them aloft in honor of someone they had lost. As I looked out over the sea of flames, I realized that we have all lost someone…or will lose someone…or we will die. I was not alone in my grief. 

My son was not coming back. This was the beginning of acceptance. This was a turning point.

There are things in life that will never change, no matter how many affirmations we say. The only thing that can change is our attitude. I will never have the same flexibility I had before hip replacements. . I will never be a professional dancer, for example (but I still can dance.)  Some of us have lost people or relationships or ways of living. Some of us have lost homes, cities, or freedom. Some of us have lost dreams that won’t come true.

Acceptance is letting go and moving on. I will never stop loving Sam but I had to accept his death. This is part of my healing.

What things do you need to accept? 

Cultivating Resiliency part 2

How can we cultivate resiliency? What is resiliency and is it a muscle we can strengthen? How does being resilient change our lives and the ways we cope with crisis?

Resilience is defined by the ability to bounce back after trauma, to cope with or to heal after a crisis. Resilience is not only coping or bouncing back or healing but change, growth, and transformation. 

The love of my life, Michael, was wild—gregarious, funny, warm-hearted, affectionate, honest—and he lived his life in a creative fury. But when his mood changed to unrelenting depression, he was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. The next eight years were a roller-coaster of manic highs where he stayed up all night, disappeared out of state, and spent recklessly, and lows that sucked the air out of the room, when he spent all day in bed, unable to change clothes. I lived in constant fear after he told me he wanted to die. During this time I joined two writing groups, one a women’s poetry group and the other Write Action, a writing support group led by poet Joan Logghe. These would cushion my grief when he took his life.
     Michael’s death released me from the weight of care-giving and my own depression. A burst of creative inspiration uplifted me. My poetry group held our first public reading during Day of the Dead to honor those we had lost. I wanted to share a poem about Michael but felt too emotional to read it off the page. I needed the audience to support me, so I memorized it. The connection was gratifying as I shared my grief honestly in public. I opened hearts, and mine was comforted.
         I decided to memorize all of my poems. I self-produced a poetry CD, had a launch party, traveled to promote it, and honed my performance style, creating a career as a performance poet.

But tragedy struck, one I was not anticipating. When my younger son died, also by suicide, my life shattered. I was filled with anger--at myself, at him, at God, and a burden of guilt—that I hadn’t seen it coming, that I hadn’t tried to stop it. My voice was strangled. I was unable to pray or write. The spiritual practices that had guided me through mourning Michael were now silenced. At the memorial services, one in Minneapolis where he lived, and one in Santa Fe where friends gathered, I fell into dark despair.

As Thanksgiving approached, I wanted quiet—I didn’t think I could put on a façade for friends. However, I didn’t want to be alone and I decided to go to Christ in the Desert Monastery. The monastery is thirteen miles up a dirt road by the Chama River. I didn’t have a car, I don’t drive, and I didn’t have money for a retreat, but I contacted the guest master and asked for prayer. He replied that the monks would pray for me.

            Then, a small miracle happened. A friend had gone back to Mexico but slipped over the border and drove me out to the monastery. (Little did I know that here Thanksgiving was celebrated with a turkey feast with wine and the vows of silence lifted for the evening meal!)

            The next day the Abbot read the preface from the book The Thorn Birds: “There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life …it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale…For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain. …Or so says the legend.”

                As a poet without words, this seemed hand-picked for me.

                 I walked to the river where we scattered Sam’s ashes. I had chosen this spot because we camped here when I was pregnant with him and when he was a teen.  I hiked back through autumn leaves to the beach. At Earthwalks for Health retreats, we learned from the indigenous people how to listen to the river, the rocks, and the drum. I thought, The river wants to give me a gift, and walked to the water’s edge. Was it a special rock, a feather? Then I heard a voice saying, “You have all the pieces of the puzzle. Take all the pieces of your life and put them together. You must sing again.”

This visit to the monastery was a turning point. I came home to write on my own for the first time, recording my experiences of the week-end.

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT RESILIENCY: ASK FOR HELP

We live in a culture that demands we be strong and self-sufficient. Asking for help is a seen as a sign of weakness; asking for charity makes us dependent on others. But what I learned is that to ask for help is being resilient. After I learned of Sam’s death, I asked friends to make phone calls so I wouldn’t have to. I remembered from Michael’s transition how draining that had been. My friends threw fund-raisers. I asked for rides to the grief counselor, to pick up groceries, to the writing group. I asked the monks to pray for me. I had support from professional counseling, a grief support group, and a women’s group. People helped move possessions to second hand stores or storage. A friend took me camping. Another friend cooked meals. Alejandro escorted me on the plane from Minneapolis back to Santa Fe, I felt incapable of doing it alone. People gave me places to land, kept me connected.

Question to ask yourself: Where can you go for help? Is it professional: a therapist, counselor, or coach? Physical therapist, yoga class,  hot tub? Is it a support group or workshop or spiritual community? Is it family and friends: a listening ear or just company; an invitation to dinner; transportation: errands, to the doctor, to support group; a walk in nature together; help with de-cluttering or getting rid of things; or prayers, healing energy, and positive affirmation?  

     Sam's altar at the Santa Fe memorial gathering.

Cultivating Resiliency part 1

How can we cultivate resiliency? What is resiliency and is there a way to strengthen it? How does being resilient change our lives and the ways we cope?

Resilience is defined by the ability to bounce back after trauma, to cope with or to heal after a crisis. We think of bouncing back after health challenges such as cancer, heart surgery, joint replacements, serious infection, root cannals, as recuperating, but actually we never recuperate to be exactly as we were. We may have scars, we may have new body parts, we may have a new diet or restrictions on activities or we may be advised to increase physical activity. With an on-going illness such as diabetes, MS, CP, Lupus, Parkinson’s, we may think of resilience more in terms of attitude and determination. We practice gratitude for what we have, we choose to be disciplined about therapy and we ask for help and guidance in order to enhance our lives. We continue those activities we love as best we can. Resilience after pregnancy doesn’t mean we bounce back to the person we were, even if we get our figure back. Our hearts, emotions, minds, time, stamina, are all stretched, sometimes to the limit. We give up sleep, autonomy, our own comfort; even our friendships may change. But we live more fully, deeply, richly. So resilience is not only coping or bouncing back or healing but change, growth, and transformation.

Resilience after an emotional crisis is a sign of healthy moving forward. Whether it is a loss of a loved one or our relationship with someone, a way of life or a job, a home or homeland, a dream or our abilities, we mourn and let go. Sometimes this happens in cycles, a wave of rising and falling, as we are reminded of what has been altered, perhaps by an anniversary, a special place, children and grandchildren, a certain fragrance or song. When we are resilient, we are able to feel whatever it is we are feeling, then we move on to another feeling which may be relief, gratitude, love, or acceptance. We may find ways to express our feelings through art, journaling, a support group or a friend's listening ear; we may choose to weep, scream, pound our fists; or we may draw, pray, dance, walk by a lake. But we don’t stay stuck in the past. We remember we have other relationships, ideas, projects, homes, dreams and a life to fill. We may be more compassionate; we have gained insight, wisdom and new perspectives.  

  

Michael was the love of my life. He made me laugh and he listened to me, he took me seriously. He was the first person I ever told, “I am an artist.” He healed past physical and psychological abuse with his affection. He was fun to travel with, always ready to explore, gregarious and enthusiastic. He also had wide mood swings. Some days he couldn’t get out of bed, some days he couldn’t sleep. He would call me from another state or even disappear across the border and not call at all. He would bring home people he had met at the bar at 3 am. He was also suicidal, telling me that he didn’t want to live daily, that life was too abrasive. With a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, we began to understand his suffering was not going to be cured by will alone.

We lived in Santa Fe, a Mecca for alternative healing, and I began to search for alternatives to prescription drugs. Earthwalks for Health was part of my search. Earthwalks connected us to indigenous artists and local sages for a week-end of learning about their healing practices. This is how I met Joan Logghe, beloved Santa Fe poet.

           

 Joan was the founder of Write Action, a writing support group. I was writing poetry with another group at the time and encouraged Michael to attend Joan’s group. He found it satisfying to pour out his brutally honest thoughts on paper and not be judged. One week, he couldn’t attend because he was going out of town so I suggested that I could go and “keep his seat warm.” I loved it and we continued attending together weekly. We felt supported and accepted. It was energizing to hear common themes go around the circle and to be reassured that coping with Michael’s moods was not isolating us.

            

Joan had worked with Natalie Goldberg and used the same basic writing instruction that so many writing instructors and writing groups would come to rely on: spontaneous timed writing. However, Joan used poems as prompts. 

Eventually Michael became more and more mentally unstable and one night he gathered up the courage to kill himself. I wept until my eyes were swollen shut but I was released from care-giving and uplifted by a burst of creative energy. To be able to pour out my grieving heart onto the page in the writing groups was cathartic. To feel that others cared was life-saving. From that point on, writing became not only a way of self-expression but a life raft that saved me from drowning. When emotions feel overwhelming, writing helps me to stay focused. Writing helps me to analyze and understand what I am feeling and to make a shift from emotion to clarity.

There is no sharp dividing line between self-repair and self-realization. All creative activity is a kind of do-it-yourself therapy, an attempt to come to terms with traumatizing challenges –Arthur Koestler

What I learned about resiliency is that it is important to name and claim your emotions. When we feel something, the amygdala part of the brain lights up. This is called our flight or fight center. Studies confirm changes take place in the brain when we feel or name our feelings. “When you put feelings into words,” wrote UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman in an article in UCLA Today ”you’re activating this prefrontal region and seeing a reduced response in the amygdala. In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses.”

In one MRI study, appropriately titled "Putting Feelings into Words" participants viewed pictures of people with emotional facial expressions. Predictably, each participant's amygdala activated to the emotions in the picture. But when they were asked to name the emotion, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activated and reduced the emotional amygdala reactivity. In other words, consciously recognizing the emotions reduced their impact.

Suppressing emotions doesn't work and can backfire on you. Gross found that people who tried to suppress a negative emotional experience failed to do so. While they thought they looked fine outwardly, inwardly their limbic system was just as aroused as without suppression, and in some cases, even more aroused.

To reduce arousal, you need to use just a few words to describe an emotion, and ideally use symbolic language, which means using indirect metaphors, metrics, and simplifications of your experience. This requires you to activate your prefrontal cortex, which reduces the arousal in the limbic system. Here's the bottom line: describe an emotion in just a word or two, and it helps reduce the emotion.

http://www.brainfacts.org/sensing-thinking-behaving/mood/articles/2015/fear-and-the-brain-an-introduction/

Therefore, the emotions move from the amagdala to the prefrontal cortex, which decides how to respond. Here is where writing about our experiences not only sends helpful chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin to the brain, but the emotions move from flight or fight to determine how best to respond.

• How do you feel when you wake up? At the end of the day? After work? After your evening activities? Is there a way to express what you are feeling?
• Are you sad/frustrated/angry/lonely/upset/frightened?
• Are you relaxed/filled/content/happy/satisfied/joyful/curious?
• Keep a feeling journal and note the ups and down through-out a day.
• Chose an emotion and write to it, telling it you let it go. Use Joy Harjo’s poem I Give You Back as a prompt:

I Give You Back 

                                            

I release you, my beautiful and terrible

fear. I release you. You were my beloved

and hated twin, but now, I don't know you

as myself. I release you with all the

pain I would know at the death of

my children.

You are not my blood anymore.

Christmas Reflection 2016

As I reflect back on 2016, I see beautiful uplifting experiences and then the shock of awakening to the

underbelly of American politics and the festering illness of racism, homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia. It’s hard to talk about these topics in a Christmas newsletter but they won’t let me go. I truly believe we are in a time of transformation from the old paradigm to the new, entering the 5^th Dimension and the Age of Aquarius and the time of the Feminine, leading with the heart. And yet, we are also in need of profound healing. You don’t realize how much until you hear that a colleague who is articulate, successful, who turns every reading into a community gathering, has been followed often by the police due to the color of his skin. Until you see the photo of someone in the next neighborhood over cleaning the swastika from her garage. Until you see the rows of brown paper bags getting packed with Saturday’s lunch for KidPack and find out that ¾ of the children at the neighboring school are receiving food support because their families are struggling economically. Until you hear the statistics of suicides by GBLT kids and murders of transgender folks.

What can we do?

Be our best, ask questions, follow what calls to us, pray, meditate, gather in community, stand up for what we believe in, donate food, serve meals, have conversations, make art, appreciate the good, pay attention.….work on ourselves. Our own assumptions and ignorance. Our own intolerance and judgment.

You may feel called to protest, write letters to congress, and boycott certain businesses. You may feel called to a rejection of consumerism, purchasing only what you need, recycling, giving away, living more simply. You may feel called to deeper stillness, embodying peace, listening to the inner voice, speaking from the heart. You may feel called to write poems or songs or plant a garden. But whatever you do, do it with love, do it from a place of peace, so that the world we build from the shards of the old is based on peace and love. Read The Most Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein.

Read poetry: the famous and the local. Attend readings. Buy books. Support literary organizations.

These are some of the things I did last year and will continue to do:

Taught a memoir class at the men’s correctional facility, followed by a  reading of their stories to about 100 audience members and “Writing About Your Ancestors” at the women’s facility, with laughter and tears as we shared stories about grandmothers and mothers. Mn Prison Writing Workshop raised $29,000 in order to continue to fund our programs and to meet the matching funds requirement of our current state grant. Our annual reading was attended by over 250 community members. It is such joy for me to hear the improvements in my students’ writing and to know that some are now publishing. My colleagues are my heroes and my literary community. They are dedicated above and beyond, they are smart and wise, they are open-hearted and compassionate. And they are receiving their own grants, accolades and awards.

Presented a panel on teaching incarcerated writers at Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, DC. It was a renaissance of hope, three days of dynamic, powerful, moving, thought-provoking poetry, panels and workshops. Poetry as activism, as resistance, as subversion. Novice poets mingled with experienced poets, spoken word poets with published poets, all ages, genders, and ethnicities.

Encouraged the children at Unity Minneapolis to meditate, to be in silence and stillness, to know the Divine is within us all. Every Sunday I am in the classroom with a story, art project, game, and/or  discussion.  I am tested by challenging behaviors, tardy families, not enough volunteers, and my own expectations. And every Sunday there is fun, there is a child saying something profoundly wise, there is silence, there is grace, there is wonder.

The Writing Life: 

Going into my fourth year of leading Writing for Healing group at Pathways.

 I am back teaching creative writing at Face to Face Charter High School in St. Paul. 

I was invited to be the key note speaker for Jacob’s Well Women’s Retreat on the topic of resiliency and how to access one’s inner guidance with writing, to be repeated at Unity Minneapolis on Jan 22.

I will teach Writing Through Crisis at The Loft Literary Center in March.

I am looking towards teaching on-line classes in the spring.

The novels and poetry manuscripts, stories and essays and poems are getting sent out but the plethora of writers submitting makes it harder than ever to be published. Nevertheless, I won the National Women Book Association’s contest for Pilgrimage and my essay called Words to Light Our Way will be live on line in Talking Writing the week of Dec 18: www.talkingwriting.com

I can’t promise that we don’t have a rocky road ahead. It takes much more determination to stay positive, to use the tools I have learned to use so well: patience, affirmation, trust, gratitude, surrender, staying open, being flexible, blessing those I meet. But I do promise that this is the beginning of something that will change us as human beings, a painful awakening that is inevitable and necessary. Hold to the Light!

You are the Light!  Namasté!

Writing a Complicated Memoir

My memoir is a story of communal living and personal transformation. I joined the commune to live with my best friends, I was a single mom and wanted help to raise my child, and I was very idealistic. We took in the homeless and visited incarcerated adults and juveniles; we lived all over the Southwest and Northwest and in Mexico, Spain and Israel. Over time one person dominated the group with his interpretation of how we should live. The break up was a bitter mix of betrayal and disappointment and grief, but my journey continued to self-awareness, healing and empowerment.

After the group broke up, I dreamed of sorting, packing and running away for years, and sometimes still do. This describes what it has been like to write and edit my memoirs. For the ten years I lived in the commune, I did almost no writing at all, held to a standard of perfection impossible to achieve and a lack of privacy that prevented true self-expression. When I returned to the states, one of the first things I did was to enroll in a continuing ed writing class. Memories poured out of me onto paper, insistent and unstoppable. I wanted to capture everything while it was fresh in my mind. I made phone calls to friends to confirm details, I returned to Mexico and re-visited places I lived, I wrote furiously every chance I could but it still took me years to finish. In the meantime, I had to earn a living and raise my kids. I found true love and lost both the lover and a son to suicide and had to survive yet another painful turn on the wheel of life.

The memoir, started twenty-five years ago, grew into 650 pages. Five years ago I revised it down to 350 pages but it wasn’t until this past year that I was able to work with an editor and revise it to a publishable manuscript.

While writing down everything I could remember, realizations about myself, the person I was at the time, startled me. In high school, I was a rebel hippie; in love I was a free spirit; in heart and soul I was a poet. In the group, under the “guidance” of our leader, I was scolded and my personality flaws raked over the coals. At one point, I defiantly removed myself and my children from the group; longing to belong brought us back. But as I remembered the past, I saw how naïve and inexperienced I was, emotionally high-strung and desperate for approval. In this mirror of myself as a character, I was revealed in a not very flattering light: my introverted yet overly-dramatic personality, my need for acknowledgement and acceptance, my awareness of how attractive I was to the opposite sex, my opinionated ideas and resistance to advice, overlaid with undiagnosed PDST from a previous trauma. These personality traits made me seem out-of-touch, arrogant, vain, insecure, stand-offish, and “too sweet, not enough salt” as I was chided. Seen from this angle, I could understand how someone might be impatient with me and want to toughen me up. I could understand someone wanting to mentor me so I could be of service to others: to become strong, compassionate, visionary. 

I also had to be vigilant about blaming others or dramatizing the role of being the victim. In this way, my skills with writing fiction were helpful. Through the lens of trying to objectively describe interactions between myself and others, I didn’t pity the person I had been. And from there, I couldn’t excuse the way I surrendered my power to another. A lifetime of experiences would eventually teach me how to survive loss and disillusionment and bereavement, how to connect with understanding and openness, and how to be of service with deep empathy. But these were not mine when I first joined the commune and I cringed to see my faults laid bare under the scrutiny of my pen.

After I started the memoir, I shared the beginning chapters with members of a women’s writing class. They were curious and encouraging but when I started to publish poetry, my focus shifted. I might mention that I had written a memoir but I only showed it to a couple of friends. Lately I feel an urgency to get it out to the world. Perhaps it is because a dozen of the former commune members have died and I am painfully aware that time is running out.

I pitched my memoir to a well-established agent at the 2014 writer’s conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He scanned a few pages and said he was interested. He advised me to hire a professional editor to go through it before submitting a proposal to him. Filled with new ideas from a workshop on how to write a dynamic first page, I revised the beginning until I ended up strangling myself. Even with the help of an editor, the agent rejected the proposal I sent. When it came back, I realized that I had been trying to fit into someone else’s notion of “a hook” instead of trusting my own voice.  But I persisted in rewriting the introductory pages over and over. And over.

           

One of the weaknesses of my memoir was that I was more comfortable as a fiction writer. I wrote it like a novel, without reflection from my present, wiser self giving insights on my past self, hoping the reader would connect to me as a character and want to know what happened next. Now I can see that reflecting deeply on the meaning of my experiences was so painful and fraught with emotional landmines that I was unable to tackle it head-on. Writing about those times when I was abused, not only by the leader of our group but others who were still my friends, and those times when I allowed choices to be made for me and my children that were unhealthy or dangerous, brought up unresolved anger and guilt. How hard it was to write from the perspective of hard-earned wisdom and even harder, to justify why I had stayed! I felt, for the first time, ashamed of my endurance, my duplicity, my willingness to go along with the abuse. I felt ashamed that I had been so stupid and naïve. My doubts began to crescendo as my editor asked questions about things that seemed obvious to me. I grappled with explaining the spiritual basis of our lifestyle, founded on interpreting the New Testament literally. I didn’t want to explain every scriptural reference because I thought it would bog down the story. It was a challenge to explain that as remnants of the ’60s with Flower-Power attitudes about parenting and property, we didn’t believe in nuclear families or owning possessions. For example, my editor would always bring up my children: where were they, was I worried about them? She would suggest that I add sentences such as, “As soon as I came home, I went to check on my son,” but that sentiment was simply not true. We raised our children kibbutz-style; I trusted others to take care of my boys and even left them to go across state lines. We were living a new paradigm as brothers and sisters in spirit, sharing everything in common and working for “God not Mammon.” Why didn’t she get that? Her red marks all over the page made me feel discouraged. I had to slow down and explain more than I wanted to explain. I wanted to take the readers on a ride with me, an exhilarating roller coaster of highs when we were doing God’s work and receiving what we needed and lows when we were begging on the streets, highs when we got invited to the inner circle and lows of being chastised, highs of feeding the hungry and lows of living with sexual predators. I had to remember that she was reading as an outsider and as a representative of my possible readership. There were moments when I almost gave up, thinking I could never untangle the complicated mess enough to keep a reader turning the pages. Revising was exhausting but I started to see how the manuscript was taking shape. My story made more sense and had more clarity.

My memoir is a multi-faceted, complicated story. If I think about everyone on that journey with me, there are more than one hundred points of view, not including some who left and never came back. Others had similar but vastly different experiences, including my children. I wondered if I should refer to some of these. As my editor pointed out, episodes piled up one after the other and she thought the reader might get tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop. The reader wanted the crescendo towards revelation and group break up, followed by my awakening or rebirth, she advised me. But I felt it was important to keep the integrity of the story as it unfolded, the reality that I lived this lifestyle for ten years and that group-think, disempowerment and blind obedience occurred gradually. It was later, after the editing process was finished, that I was able to go back and cut out parts that felt unnecessary or dragged the momentum. (I am glad that I have kept a hard copy of the original manuscript for myself, though.)

Because the leader was alive until recently, I chose to rename everyone, including myself. It wasn’t so much fear of lawsuits as fear of being harassed by him. I imagined him showing up at a public reading or contacting me through social media. Any possibility of attention from him made me anxious. I knew I just couldn’t handle it; rage and resentment surfaced during the writing and editing as well as a more compassionate understanding of my own journey.

I knew that the people I was writing about would be upset. I knew friends would be taken aback by some of my perceptions. I deliberately left out the more scandalous sexual behavior because I didn’t want that to be the flavor of the memoir or the reason people read it. At the same time there is more about my relationship with the leader than people who know me now might be aware of. I have to be willing to be vulnerable and take a risk that they won’t judge me. I wanted to show how miracles were possible when we lived by faith and served the outcasts and the disenfranchised of society, how easy it was. But as I meditated carefully on the past, my perspective shifted.

Perhaps the hardest thing to do in revising my memoir was to keep a consistency of vision and purpose. I wrote my story chronologically as that is how the memories were stored but in revising, I also recognized that my writing skills have improved since I started twenty-five years ago. I originally wanted the story to be told in the innocent young woman’s voice, then have that voice mature over time. My story is about giving up self-volition and reclaiming self-empowerment, naiveté and sagacity, losing a sense of individual identity and re-identifying myself, a transformative healing story. But while trying to summarize it for a proposal, I realized that what my story is really about was never feeling that I was good enough and the ways in which that belief allowed me to be victimized. This belief did not begin when I joined the group. My sense of self-worth had already destabilized during encounters with others who disregarded me or rejected me because I was different. This is something many of us deal with in our contemporary culture, especially women and especially artists. Because I believe in the power of story to teach and to reach out to others, it overrides the fear that others who lived with me might feel discomfort at reading my version of what they also lived through. I changed my name back to my real name in order to connect it to my previous work but kept the pseudonyms I gave everyone else. It provides some disguise for those who don’t want to be associated with this story. I also have my son to consider: he doesn’t want the story of his upbringing to be blatantly in the public eye if at all possible. In my preface I apologized to all that I was limited to the events and experiences of my own life told through the subjective lens of my own interpretation. I wrote that I regret that there isn’t a way to archive our shared experiences.

Now that the manuscript is edited and revised, it is possible to self-publish if I don’t find a home with a publisher, so I foresee it being in print some day. I want the take-away to be the story of survival and healing and being silenced no longer because, after all, that is the reason I felt inspired to share it. I rescued my own voice, both in telling the story and in living my life. I access my inner guidance daily. I claim my authentic way of being in the world and I am still learning how to live up to the person I want to become. I am powerful and I am still evolving.

I wrote the memoir to heal myself. Some of this healing happened naturally as I wrote down my memories and continues as I share this story through open mics or excerpts posted on my fb page. I revised it in order to offer it as a healing story to others, to remind ourselves that we are all more than enough. 

flash fiction prompts 4 & 5

#5 Prompt based on visual:

The pocket watch in her hand. The last thing he handed to her, the one he has inherited from his father. Every time she opened it, it was off a minute but that didn’t matter. Every time she opened it she remembered that he was so sick at the end, it was a relief when he let go. Every time she opened it she remembered that once upon a time she had been his princess, his Buttons, his Sugarpops, and at the end, his Angel. "My Angel," as she swabbed his mouth since he could no longer take in anything orally. Whispered. Did she actually hear his voice or was it only her imagination, her wanting to hear one last word? If the pocket watch lost a minute a day, how long before it lost a whole day, a year? Would it be like peeling back time? How long before she could put it away and remember the corny jokes and laughter, the car rides with her arm hanging out the window, the breeze blowing back her hair, the spontaneous picnics: stopping at a gas station for soda, at a roadside stand for apples, a hunk of cheese and bread already in a basket? How long before she remembered the way he cheered at her basketball games and frowned as he scrutinized her dates? His sad eyes when she packed up to move to the big city? The dollars slipped into every envelope, her purse when she came home to visit? How long before the good memories overcame the horror of his last choking breath?

#4 Prompt based on conversation:

“Anna, are you going out again?” No, Mother, I just spent an hour putting my make up on and styling my hair because I am staying home, with you. Because I want to hear your complaints. Let’s see, we’ve covered my brother’s stupidity and lack of good TV shows, the neighbors’ tree shedding leaves on your side of the fence, the latest too-revealing fashions and the way the Puerto Ricans take over the sidewalks. I have heard about your aches and pains of arthritis and the latest argument with your doctor and the way the nurse was so rude. I just struggled to get on these pantyhose that I actually hate wearing because they roll over and make me feel fat and the heels that make my feet ache, so I can sit and listen to you groan about the inferior garbage service that Dad hired before he died. I love to eat fattening snacks with you before bedtime. Of course, I have my cell phone so you can track me down. In case you have those heart palpations again. In case the panic comes back and you feel isolated and alone, out here in the middle of nowhere. No, Mother, I just want a breath of air, a drink, a reason to sway to the music even if it’s from a jukebox. “I don’t feel so good, Anna. Can you make me a cup of that tea you brought me? The one that soothed me down?” “Yes, Mother.” Yes, I am taking off the heels and the pantyhose. What was I thinking? That I could leave you alone again, that I could escape? “Let’s find a movie to watch on pay-on-demand. Don’t worry, I’ll pay for it.” 

flash fiction challenge day 1: It's Our Family

I began my flash fiction challenge on February 1st. hosted by Marjorie Altman Tesser from Mom Egg Review. ‪#‎febflash=Feb. Flash Fiction Challenge--Write one piece of flash each day in Feb.We will be featuring daily tips, optional writing prompts, advice, and encouragement from established fiction authors and editors. Scroll down to see them, or visit this link for all tips and prompts posted so far:http://bit.ly/205wjd4

My challenge is to write short fiction. I write long narrative poems, memoir pieces of up to 3000 words and novels. Short stories have never been my forte. I took on the challenge to see if I caould do it and to see what might inspire me. My first piece is below: The challenge was from RICK MOODY "Write a story with no modifiers (i.e., no adjectives, no adverbs)." My first attempt ended at 1400 words. Flash fiction by definition is less than 1000 words and the suggestion is to get 250 words down each day. So I went back and edited. It is still 870 words. I think I will develop it into a longer story.

It's Our Family

The fighting in the back seat escalated from annoying to maddening. The 12 year old’s pummels left bruises. The 9 year old boy cried but he had started it, singing out of tune to his ipod and flinging out his arms. Her son, driving, ignored it; her daughter-in-law, exacerbated it with threats that meant nothing. The three year old contentedly watched a movie on his laptop with earphones so large, he looked like a pilot. Grandma’s pleas to stop fighting didn’t make a dent. Gritting her teeth was not only making her joints ache but her heart. It was not the trip she imagined to spread her younger son’s ashes.

As the miles passed, her hopes that this family gathering could mend the past faded. Now she only hoped they could get through it, salvage at least the fun of camping. She imagined waking up to birdsong, sitting peacefully by the campfire. “Look out the window,” her son told the little guy. “We’re in nature!” They passed towering rocks on one side and the shimmer of the lake on the other. “Where, where?” the boy said, turning his head to the window and back, puzzled.

Yoan had decided the tenth anniversary was the time to spread his portion of his brother's ashes. He chose the river where they had camped together before children and nights without sleep and alcoholic down-swings and complicated mortgages. Josiah had left behind a son who would meet them at the campsite with Grandpa Don. Grandma had spread Josiah’s ashes at the Chama River where they had camped when she was pregnant; Don had spread his at the mountain where they used to ski. The fiancée was in rehab. Grandma worried about scars left behind.

She remembered the day she had spooned the ashes into several containers, one for her, one for Yoan, one for Don, one for the fiancée. How it fell to her to do because even though her life had shattered, she was more capable of organizing memorials and candle light vigils and altars, digging through piles of photographs, choosing cremation, purchasing urns. She went back to work for a year, then disappeared to Puerto Vallarta and margarita sunsets until one day she said to herself, What the hell am I doing? and moved lock, stock and barrel to Minnesota, to help out with Yoan’s kids.

Dividing the ashes was one of her most vivid memories, scorched on her eyelids and her heart. Releasing her share of his ashes was part of a series of rituals to shake loose the despair that settled into her soul. But only time would dull the pain, she would learn, despite everything she tried: counseling, support groups, art classes, workshops, travel, margaritas, yoga, grandsons.

They pulled into the campground where Don waited for them and claimed two sites next to the river. Nate fell in, soaking his shoes. Linda scolded. Then they began the hike, stopping by the tourist station to consult maps. Yoan remembered that it took an hour, but they were younger then. The trail was rugged, root-tangled, pine needle slick. Nate offered to take the dog, which kept both of them under control. The pre-teen boys discussed football. The little guy walked by himself.  Her feet ached but she kept going, determined.

The beach was covered in sharp rocks, no where to sit and catch her breath. They stood in an awkward circle. A few words were said, but the waterfall was loud, impossible to hear anything unless they shouted. While they waited for hikers to pass, the dog took off up the hillside and had to be retrieved. The urns were opened and upturned and powdery gray ashes swirled to join the water. The kids skipped stones. Photos were taken.

He was gone, even the last bits of bone. They each had to reconcile with the loss in their own way. His death divided them, too painful to talk about, once the last photos had been packed away, the urn that Yoan inherited parked on a shelf. What do you say when someone is in so much pain, they see no other way out? How can you reconcile it with the kind young man who was always optimistic? The tree they planted was barely surviving, no one had the heart to take care of it. The house he couldn’t really afford now someone’s else’s burden. She had cried until she felt drowned, submerged.

The kids were eager to get back to hotdogs and s’mores. The dog led the way, his tail wagging. The little one had to be carried. She couldn’t believe her feet could still move.

The adults sat by the campfire talking of everyday this and that: jobs, school, past and upcoming vacations. The boys tossed around a football until the fire was hot enough for hot dogs. Yoan stripped a stick for her to toast marshmallows for the little guy, who crawled into her lap. This was her moment of grace: whatever was left of her child was collected here, by the fire. Broken in places, grieved beyond measure, sibling rivalry for the cousin’s attention, the little one nestled against her, they were still family, all the family she needed.

Writing Memoir: Reflection and Take Away

When I wrote my memoir Flowers in the Wind, I wanted to document the things that had happened, the memories, before they faded but I wrote the way a writer of fiction would write. I wanted the reader to be invested enough to want to find out what happened to me and I hoped the reader would see himself or herself in the choices I made. As I approached publishers with the first chapters, it became evident that not including my reflections made the story read as a novel instead of a memoir.

The reason people read memoir is to connect deeply with someone they either admire or identify with, to gain insight into their own lives. But the memoirs that really touch people’s hearts are the ones in which readers not only imagine themselves in that person’s shoes, but can be uplifted, inspired, provoked, and connected to a universal truth. In which their hearts are pierced by the honesty and courage of the story-teller.

I wanted readers to come to their own conclusions but my writer friends told me that if I wanted the book to be read that way, I should write it as a novel. Now, I have nothing against writing novels, I have written four, but for this particular project, it would mean removing huge sections of the book. It would need tighter pacing. There was a natural and accurate rhythm of feeling lost and lonely, allowing decisions that I didn’t agree with to be made for me, then rebelling and leaving, followed by returning to where I felt accepted and loved. This might make it in a novel from the 19^th century but not the 21^st, sad to say.

I had taken out all of my moments of self-reflection and now I had to put them back in. When I worked with an editor, I also learned that I had to explain things more specifically. That someone who had never lived with our philosophy wouldn’t understand why certain choices were made. I could not assume my readers would "get" it simply by describing events as they happened.

The difference between reflection and take away is that reflection is a moment of inner musing to make sense of the experience but the take-away is a moment of connection with the reader, where you offer something that speaks heart to heart. Brooke Warner writes, “If you’re a reader of memoir and you’ve experienced a really good takeaway, you’ll recognize these moments as the ones where you experienced a chill, a deep level of connection, or when you needed to put the book down for a second to sink into the powerful truth the author has just revealed.”

Both reflection and take away must be interwoven through-out, little jewels of insight embedded in the text.  My editor suggested that I consider the theme of each chapter as well as the overarching theme of the entire book, a thread that runs consistently throughout, while each chapter may have slightly varied undertones. My memoir is the story of how I lived communally for ten years. We took in the homeless and traveled worldwide by hitch-hiking. But as we succumbed to the manipulations of one powerful and charismatic man, things began to unravel. My major theme is how I lost my identity in order to fit in and how I gained it back. The minor themes include the challenges of single mothering, desire for love, manipulation and abuse by a powerful man, traveling by faith and hoping to become a worthy disciple of Jesus, the desire to serve the less fortunate. The universal truth is that we all want to belong, to feel welcomed, to come home. This journey is harder if we are artistic, social rebels, pioneers, peace-niks, visionaries, and have a strong desire for social justice and true equality. We often give up parts of ourselves, sometimes our whole selves, our freedom, our money, our voice, our conscience, our beliefs, to fit in, to be part of, rather than demanding that the group change to meet our ideals or to leave the shelter of the group to go it alone. Reclaiming ourselves is essential to move forward after a severe and devastating loss when we no longer fit or are expelled or can’t put up with the inconsistencies any longer. For me, the life I choose was meant to be my life for the rest of my life.

This section of my memoir takes place when one of the “sisters” and I and our children have been sent off after being told that we were not disciplined enough to live with the group. I was seven months pregnant at the time and had a eighteen month-old son. I was determined to improve in order to return to the fold but was mostly consumed with finding places to stay. We ended up at my sister/friend’s family home while I gave birth, then I was invited to return to the group in Santa Fe.

 Snow started to fall as we pulled in to the Santa Fe Greyhound Bus station. Diane answered the phone and said someone would come to fetch me. I burst into tears when I saw Brett coming through the door. My entire body trembled with relief as we greeted each other with a warm embrace. I shoved the box into a locker. He swung Yoan up onto his shoulders, I tucked Ezekiel into my arms and we set off for the hostel.

 The familiar atmosphere of homeless men sitting around the TV while soup bubbled on the stove. A hot cup of coffee served by Tiffany with a gracious smile. Hugs and exclamations over the newborn—being welcomed the way a guest is welcomed. The insecurity flared up immediately. As sharp as that IV needle driven into my arm. How could I have ever thought I could fit in here?

The next day Russell escorted me to the other house, the private house where Ben and Marian stayed with its atmosphere of study and contemplation. I was an outsider. My room was in the basement, dark and hidden away. Yoan was expected to sit still through the morning readings rather than go off to play. All the children sat with us, including the youngest. I had never forced Yoan to do anything in his life. He wailed and squirmed. I took him outside and scolded him, disrupting the somber atmosphere.

My first conversation with Ben included being chastised for how many things I had acquired, how we were dressed (Yoan in corduroy overalls rather than jeans) and my utter lack of discipline.…I was scoured by Ben Oren from top to bottom. The clothes I wore (pastels), my relationship with Cristopher (all sweet, no substance), and my attitudes (spoiled princess), my lack of understanding and respect for my elders, my lack of obedience and devotion. Ben repeated his litany of my personality. “You are a beautiful girl but you have cotton candy in your head. It’s probably not your fault but you have to change...you have to change. You are vain and presumptuous and that has to change.”

“But what can I do?” I wailed.

His face folded into a severe frown but Marian stepped in.

“Stephanie and Anna have just sent us a postcard from Missoula where they have been helping out at a place that feeds people. They just rented an apartment and want someone to come up there. You can leave tomorrow if you want.”

I slowly stood up, relieved that I had somewhere to go. Ben turned away. “Thank you,” he said sarcastically. I had no gratitude for what they were doing for me, pointing out the changes I needed to make. I was too hurt and humiliated.

I stayed at the hostel for the next two days while an attempt was made to raise bus fare. I trudged through slushy piles of snow, but I had used all my options in the fall. Finally Diane informed me that Salvadore would hitch-hike with me. It was the dead of winter and ...Ezekiel was three weeks old. My faith was being tested and I did not falter. By placing myself and my children in God’s Hands, I would be escorted every step of the way to safety. The only way to go was forward. Toward Montana.

  Looking back, I can’t believe I didn’t protest or take my kids and get out of there. The heart truly makes no sense. Was I holding on to those moments when I felt connected, bonded, or was it the promise held out to us that we would become pure of heart and able to make miracles? Was it strength or exhaustion? No one ever shared their doubts or worries with me, but people would leave, usually quietly. The immediacy of finding rent and cooking and cleaning and caring for children, or those moments of euphoric companionship took away our ability to discern whether or not the Scriptures being poured over us every morning were truly transforming us into Christ-like disciples capable of healing or saving souls. We wanted to be “good servants worthy of our reward” and “inherit the Kingdom prepared for us.” Of course we did. I did.

I don’t know if this take away, that strong desire to be good while never being quite good enough, is one that will pierce the hearts of my readers. But every woman who has suffered demeaning abuse, every man who has put up with humiliation at the hand of a boss, will recognize that sometimes we ignore our inner knowing for the hope of acceptance, love, and redemption. It would take more than a scolding about the pastels I was wearing to wake me up to the dangerous power of control and condescension.

As writers, we must remember that we are telling a story as a way to build a bridge between us and the reader, one that is both tender and sturdy, fragile and invincible: the thread between our hearts.