Wisdom Tree

Words and Funerals

I went to a workshop this morning sponsored by Christian Century magazine. It was at Fourth Presbyterian Church, up on north Michigan Ave., so already I was happy--all I had to do was get off my usual train a few stops earlier. Add to this a ginger-peach tea from Argo on the way, and I was ready to learn about funerals.

Yes, funerals. A roomful of us (the majority I would guess were pastors) listened to Thomas G. Long, author of Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral, and then to Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. I attended for two reasons: I'm always ready to hear Lynch speak, and, given that I seem headed for ministry myself, lectures on Christian funerals could come in handy down the way.

I've always liked that Lynch is both a poet/essayist and an undertaker--how appropriate that one who must deal with people when they are most wounded is also one who practices the very careful and lovely use of language. Those of us who dare to enter peoples' lives in a spiritual capacity become the namers of things. And like poets, we must ceaselessly work with the vocabulary--sometimes we must first of all supply the vocabulary so that people will have something to work with.

A good friend of mine, Emily Blaire Stribling, is a poet who became a priest a couple of years ago. Ever since then, the term "poet-priest" has worked on my soul with vigor and persistence. Of course these vocations belong together. Of course the profound events--birth, marriage, death--require the utmost wrestling with our syllables and our silences. A poet knows that the silences between the words are as important as the words themselves. In the same way, a spiritual helper knows when to speak and when to refrain from speaking. Also, both poets and priests know that words have frightening power and must be released with care and humility.

Maybe the thing to do, as a writer, is to imagine that always my words are landing upon desperate people, upon those who have no choice but to listen and take to heart the words they are given. I won't be able to protest later, "Oh, I was only kidding" or "I sort of tossed that in as an afterthought." However I regarded my words, whatever measure of seriousness I gave them, they became substance. They made meaning. They left marks.

Perhaps Thomas Lynch is a good poet precisely because he's in the business of burying bodies. His sense of humor is sharp and spontaneous, and his presence is uplifting, even pastoral. But one who faces grieving families day after day has developed an ear for the unspoken fears and unexpressed needs. Not only must he read between the lines but often he's helping write the lines. He must supply the missing words, the ones we can't get to on our own because loss is ringing in our ears and weariness has dimmed our capacities.

I highly recommend both authors. Thomas Long is professor of preaching at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. I'm well into Accompany Them with Singing and can tell it will stay in my library for years to come. When it comes to Thomas Lynch, you must read his poetry as well as his essays--go to his Amazon page to find Still Life in Milford and other volumes.  

Follow Your Passion

 

A writer has to connect with what she's passionate about. Yes, we can do assignment writing; we can shape our words to make them more marketable and popular. But at the heart of any truly creative work must be desire and honest caring.

Your heart needs to race sometimes, and your mind needs to be overrun with beautiful chaos. Passion releases all sorts of dreams, struggles, and even chemicals within you. While under the influence of passion, you're willing to do battle over what is flat-out important. When passion thrums your nervous system, reality can open up suddenly and with great clarity.

Passion makes you impatient with the petty. Passion quells your hesitation to pose questions. Passion leads you down deep and complicated passages of the soul, on journeys you must take if you are to learn anything at all.

So, please, in the midst of all the work you're doing, make time to write from your hungry and excitable center. Make yourself stop and get quiet until you can hear that interior song that breaks you in two at the very moment you are spontaneously uttering breathless praises to God, heaven, the angels, a plum tree . . .

Write what stimulates your hopes. Write what haunts your late afternoons. Write what inspires the tears that choke and sting.

Write what blasts through in gasps of laughter, and in the soft ache of relief.

Blessings on your loves and your right-now living.

Copyright 2009 Vinita Wright

Understand the Difference between Personal and Public Writing

I’ve been in book publishing for about twenty years, and I’ve lost track of all the manuscripts that have come in from people who survived tragedy, processed the experience through writing, and now feel strongly that their written accounts would help others dealing with a similar tragedy. We editors dread the arrival of such manuscripts because we know that 1) 99.999 percent of these are not publishable, and 2) regardless of their quality, they needed to be written. That is, people often need to process their lives by writing about their experiences, but needing to write is not the same as writing something that should be published.

That sounds cold, but honesty will take people further than polite denial will, and my desire is for people to move forward, whatever their situation. So, for anyone out there who wants to understand the difference between personal and public writing, here’s a distillation of what I’ve tried to communicate through workshops as well as carefully written reject letters.

Personal writing is for the person doing the writing. It doesn’t always have to be in journal format. I’ve written stories that were not publishable but that did my own soul some good. A LOT of poetry falls into this category—Lord knows, I’ve written enough of it. I have a couple of friends who enjoy reading my amateur poetry, and that’s audience enough.

Personal writing is too specific to one situation to translate well to anyone else’s situation. For instance, all the details of Molly’s battle with cancer are Molly’s details alone. Although many other cancer patients will share some of that experience, they don’t benefit from reading about Molly’s journey exactly as she recalls it.

Personal writing helps those close to the event make some sense of it. Most of the time, readers outside that circle don’t have the same need to make sense of that particular event. The audience for most tragedies is a limited one; even if a million other women watch their children die of a certain disease, not all of them will want to read about someone else’s experience with that. Each of them is already grappling with her distinct search for meaning in the context of tragedy.

Personal writing often works out an issue specific to the writer. In grieving for my deceased father, I’ve written some eloquent words. But those writings moved in a direction I needed them to move, and I don’t expect many other people to have exactly that same need.

Personal writing is usually emotional, passionate, and tunnel-visioned. This is as it should be, because the writer is working through emotions, living out of her deepest passions, and doesn’t need to see anything but what she must focus on. This kind of writing might work for religious or political tracts, but otherwise it’s not very useful for the larger public.

Public writing takes a long time to distill from the original personal writing that generates it. Years ago I lost my only pregnancy to miscarriage. I was journaling about it all along, and I wrote several versions of an article that I thought would help other women who experienced miscarriage. As an editor, though, I knew that this article was not ready for the public. It needed more time. I needed more time. It took me five years to produce a publishable version of this material. It takes time to gain enough objectivity from your own experience to shape the material for the benefit of others.

Public writing is shaped for the readers, not for the person writing it. This means that lot of the details and nuances meaningful to the writer get edited out. The structure gets reworked. I have to imagine what would motivate a person to read this piece—and I have to imagine what that person would expect to get out of it. Once I answer those two questions, my task as a writer is to shape the work accordingly—which often means that I am ruthless toward my own needs and preferences. Whole paragraphs will disappear. The tone will change as well, to be welcoming and respectful to the readers rather than merely expressive of my own passions.

Public writing takes the concrete details of a single, personal experience to generate a discussion of the more universal experience readers will relate to. This is tricky, because I’m using personal details, but they are carefully selected ones. The end result is that they don’t point so much toward my experience as they evoke in the readers’ minds their own experiences that fall into the same category. To write more universally is not to write in more general terms. Here is where, in the world of essays, the truly skilled writers shine above the rest of us. They manage to choose just the right details. They unfold very personal experience in such a way that to the reader it feels like her own life.

Please write what and when you need to write. Write for yourself. Write for those people close to you. Write until you accomplish within yourself what needs to happen.

Then put it away for awhile—maybe even a year or two. Take it out and read it and look for clues that the world out there might benefit from this story or reflection. Then do the work that must be done. I wish you well, because, in my opinion, this is the hardest writing of all. When we manage to do it well, the result is powerful and rich with beauty.

Copyright © 2009 Vinita Hampton Wright