Writing goals (and why I'm not writing a novel in November)

I've wanted to do NaNoWriMo for ages, but instead I've always ended up writing things like my dissertation (or, like last year, defending it). And this year---

I'm still not writing a novel.

But I will be working on this book that's been rolling around in my head since May (since the ICMS conference in Kalamazoo, more specifically). I keep poking at it and thinking, "Meh, maybe later. I've got to write Other Little Thing right now and a book seems big and scary." But the things I'm wanting to write about for this book keep popping up in blog posts and poems, and I guess I should actually face this beast.

The advantage of hitching my project to something like NaNoWriMo is that it requires me to actually write every day, even if I don't feel inspired, and it precludes me from spending B's valuable naptime revising instead of generating material. Because I can sit and fiddle with the wording of a single sentence for hours, just to avoid facing a case of writer's block.

For now I'm calling it Kitchen Mystic, because reasons. And having a name for it makes it seem more like a real thing, even though it will almost certainly evolve away from that name as it grows. But I'm letting you all know about it now, because it will make it harder for me to bail on this project in a week if it turns out to be hard ;-)

Anyone else doing NaNoWriMo in some form?

The kingdom of God is like....

On Sunday afternoon, I had the delightful opportunity to have lunch with part of our church’s Confirmation class, along with some other adults (it still surprises me to be on the adult side of these conversations, incidentally). We talked about our faith and told stories about how God had moved in our lives, and there was such a range of stories. I represented the “willing to admit to getting really mad at/about God a lot” contingent, but others had stories of getting distracted from God and being led back, or hearing clear words from God in crisis, or simply feeling God’s presence throughout a long life of quiet, perhaps boring, faithfulness.  

Then Monday, my pastor and I took an adventure to the north side of Chicago to deliver a minivan full of winter coats and other wintery accessories to RefugeeOne, an organization that assists refugees who have been resettled in the Chicago area.

So back in September, shortly after pictures of little Aylan Kurdi started circulating online, I knew I needed to do something. And RefugeeOne came up through a link someone shared on Facebook. They were holding a coat drive for refugees who had been resettled in the Chicago area but had previously come from warm climates and had no winter gear. I figured I had some things I could bring, but their office was about an hour away and I didn’t have enough stuff to make the drive worth my while. So I asked on Facebook if anyone had anything else I could bring, and my pastor suggested I get the church involved.

At that point, basically all I did was say the same thing I did on Facebook—I asked people, “Hey, do you have any coats? Because these people could really use some coats,” and coats poured in for weeks. They filled the Sunday School director’s office and overflowed the big cardboard boxes that the Sunday School students had decorated to collect donations. Sunday morning at the end of Sunday School the kids hauled them down from the office where they were stored and piled them over the altar rail up front, and during the service we blessed them and the people who would be wearing them.

So the next day, it was wonderful to visit RefugeeOne’s offices and hear about the many ways that they work with refugees, from the moment they get off the plane until they become citizens. They find and furnish apartments for them, stock the pantry, then help them get jobs and learn English—for those who have lived in refugee camps for many years, sometimes even showing them how to use the door key for that new apartment! RefugeeOne’s hallways were lined with gorgeous artwork done by refugee artists and photographs of their clients at different stages in their journey here.[1]

My pastor asked the woman who gave us the tour, whose job is to escort their clients through the permanent residency/citizenship paperwork maze, how she felt about her job—was she hopeful? Discouraged?

She responded that she loved it—she was never discouraged. Her work held so much beauty and significance for her, as the child of refugees herself, and she loved helping people come here and thrive.

Afterwards we—my pastor and I—had a long talk over fabulous Ethiopian food about what we had seen and what had inspired us about this visit.

Honestly, I was both inspired and a little jealous of the meaningful work RefugeeOne does, showing God’s love to others and blessing their lives in such concrete, tangible ways! And fearlessly crossing those boundaries of culture, religion, and language that typically segregate us from each other—it was a beautiful image of God’s kingdom.

My place in my church and community are so safe and easy by comparison—I know that God doesn’t call the citizens of the kingdom to stay safe and comfortable. That’s not how the kingdom grows. What if I’m not fulfilling that call because I’m Here where it’s safe and boring and I write long blog posts agonizing over whether my work means anything instead of being There where it’s risky and gorgeous and I could actually help people?

But those coats.

Then he said, “How can I picture God’s kingdom for you? What kind of story can I use? It’s like a pine nut that a man plants in his front yard. It grows into a huge pine tree with thick branches, and eagles build nests in it.”

He tried again. “How can I picture God’s kingdom? It’s like yeast that a woman works into enough dough for three loaves of bread—and waits while the dough rises.”[2]

I only contributed about a pine nut’s worth to that coat drive. And then there were over fifty coats, plus boots and hats and gloves and scarves and snowpants. God’s kingdom was sprouting leaves and tendrils in closets and garages and under-the-bed totes in homes all over Lemont.

And the kingdom of God was there in the holy conversation[3] at lunch on Sunday where people who had walked with God much longer than me reminded me that sometimes a life of faith is slow and quiet, and again at lunch over Ethiopian food on Monday, where we digested the new-to-us work of God we had just seen. It’s like my sourdough starter, which takes way longer than the instant yeast in the jar in my fridge. To make bread I have to dip out some starter, feed it flour and water and let it set overnight until it’s bubbling and oozing and the happy little yeasties and sour lactobacillus have worked their way into the whole mess, and then I knead in even more flour, and salt and sugar, and let it set even longer while it swells again before I can bake it. It’s messy and slow and domestic, but that’s the image Jesus gives for the kingdom.

The starter's name is the Burblicious Burbletron.

This doesn’t change the sense that perhaps things are too safe here, though. Gardening and sourdough may be slow and boring but they’re still messy—you get dirt under your fingernails and dough crusted on the countertops, and sometimes things don’t grow and you have to clean up and start over. If that’s the case, how do I make my work here more dangerous?

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep 

your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

We walked out the door of the church carrying armloads of coats—maybe we’re already on the road to something dangerous and beautiful and holy, if we can let ourselves be swept off.

---

[1] If you’re in the Chicago area, you should really check them out! http://www.refugeeone.org/

[2] Luke 13:18-21 (The Message)

[3] I found the lovely phrase “holy conversation” in The Holy Twins, a beautiful life of Benedict and Scholastica written for children by Kathleen Norris and illustrated by Tomie DePaola. I highly recommend it. Incidentally, it also shows how two siblings can live lives of equal holiness and faithfulness even in very different settings—Scholastica quietly gardening and praying and teaching in her nunnery and Benedict wandering around living in caves and being nearly assassinated all the time because he kept telling people what to do.

Valuing my work

I had a meltdown several weeks ago at my husband, because I felt like I was making time for him to do all kinds of fun things like play his video games on his big new gaming computer or purchase and attempt to restore an old anvil so he can try to make knives on it, but there was no time for me to do those kinds of things. He pointed out that he *does* do work—most of his adventures in his workshop result in things like coffee tables or the very lovely sewing table/desk I’m currently writing this on. I countered that if he quit doing that work, we would still be fine. If *I* quit doing *my* work (which, unlike furniture-building is the sort of goalless repetition that unmakes itself as soon as it’s completed—the laundry is washed, dried, and put away only to be worn again, and the food is prepared only to be eaten and vanish, leaving a huge mess to clear up so that I have space to make a new mess in a few hours making more food), we would starve to death in a filthy house.

I felt had no time to do anything towards a larger goal because I spent all my time doing all these smaller tasks. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy cooking—I have a darling little sourdough starter named the Burblicious Burbletron who lives in a green glass quart jar in my fridge—but I wanted to keep taking steps towards something bigger, something involving writing and research. Not necessarily a full-time job, or even a book, but establishing a voice that people will read because I have something to say, not just because they know me and want to know what I’m up to. It would be great if it involved money.  

But I felt like this wasn’t getting anywhere because I didn’t have the time to focus on it—I was too busy dealing with putting out fires at home because David’s work seemed more valuable than mine and not worth interrupting to deal with all those little piddly things.

I said as much, loudly and furiously and perhaps a bit tearfully.

“Then what do you want me to do?” he demanded.

I opened my mouth, and then closed it again.

Here’s the thing: the problem isn’t that he doesn’t consider his work more important than mine. It’s that I don’t consider my work as important as his. And if *I* don’t ask for what I need because I don’t think I merit it, he can’t give it to me because he doesn’t even know what it is!

About a week later, I opened up my mailbox to discover a check for me, for a little essay I had written for the October issue of Chicago Parent (it’s only in the print version, but it touches indirectly on some other things I’ve been pondering so a different form of the story will probably end up here at some point). It was a very nice little check, and even more so, it reminded me that my words still have value outside my journal and this blog.

Part of why it’s taken me so long to finally put this on the blog, though, is that there are actually two aspects of my devaluing of my own work.

First, I’m assuming that those day-to-day chores are worth less because they are stereotypically feminine. You’ve heard the double-speak, I’m sure, how women are such magnificently self-sacrificial angels for staying home with their kids, but if a man stays home with his children, he’s a loser. Kathleen Norris in The Quotidian Mysteries has pointed out that the word menial

“derives from a Latin word meaning ‘to remain,’ or ‘to dwell in a household.’ It is thus a word about connections, about family and household ties. That it has come to convey something servile, the work of servants, or even slaves, is significant. It may help to explain one of the strangest things about our culture: that in America we willingly pay the garbage collector much more in salary than we pay those who care for our infants in daycare centers. Both might be considered ‘menial’ jobs, but the woman’s work, the care of small children, is that which was once done for free—often by slaves—within the confines of the household. Precisely because it is so important, so close to us, so basic, so bound up with home and nurture, it is considered to be of less importance than that which is done in public, such as garbage collecting.” [emphasis mine]

Basically, I’ve just fallen into our patriarchal culture’s trap, leading me to treat feminine things as less-than masculine things (like how I hated wearing pink until Mab started convincing me to wear it, and I discovered that I actually did like it, or the rest of the whole “ugh, girls” thing I had going on through most of high school and college).

Second, I’m treating my own writing as a hobby and not as work on the same level as the homemaking things. This seems paradoxical—my writing is public (in aspiration, at least) and therefore theoretically of greater importance than the things I do in private! But until I got that check, I was unable to put any kind of dollar sign on my writing. I can do a cost comparison of day care for B versus staying home with him, or the amount of money I save by making dinner every night instead of eating out, or making homemade crackers or granola bars instead of buying an equivalent version at the grocery, but not with writing. In fact, writing takes me away from doing those very things—in some sense, it costs me money to write. It’s hard for me—as someone who has always been notoriously bad at spending money on myself, even back in high school—to justify that cost.

And really, it wasn’t the check itself that did it. It was my friend Heather who found it in the magazine, on her own, and posted it on Facebook with a comment about how much she enjoyed it. I realized that more people have read that little essay than have read anything I published in grad school, and that the editor (someone who doesn’t know me and has never met me) thought it was worth the cost to her publication to have my essay there instead of any number of other wonderful submissions. Something about my words connected with other people in a way that they haven’t in the past.

It seems like I shouldn’t be able to value both of these kinds of work at the same time—one of them is going to have to be sacrificed in favor of the other.

But right before her discussion of the word “menial,” Kathleen Norris also said that

“We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing, and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were. We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places—out of Galilee, as it were—and not in spectacular events, such as the coming of a comet (…) Even if we do not make such glorious poems [as the one by Margaret Gibson quoted above] out of our ordinary experiences, arranging Easter lilies or making salad, we are free to contemplate both emptiness and fullness, absence and presence in the everyday circumstances of our lives (…) We can become aware of and limit our participation in activities that do not foster the freedom of thought that poetry and religious devotion require; I cannot watch television, for example, and write a poem. I might be inspired by something I hear or see on television, particularly in news interviews, but this is rare. The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.” [emphasis mine]

I think the baking and the writing and the laundry and the revising can support each other, and the more I value the things I create, whether they are eaten or read or worn, the more they will add value to each other.