Kathleen Norris Archives - Letters from the Parsonage

On Wednesdays, we blog? On Writing Habits and Doing the Work

One side effect of this new at-home working, (very) freelance writing lifestyle is that I forget far too often what day it is. I seem to have lost my sense of routine. The daily routine is coming together, but the weekly rhythms are still a bit wobbly. For instance, this morning I opened my laptop and typed “On Tuesdays, we blog.” …But it’s not Tuesday, I quickly discovered. I’d fully intended to put a ramble of some sort or another up yesterday, but either or both the muse and the time got away. One of my objectives for the month is to get this little corner of the internet rolling on a regular basis again, if for no other reason, to get some words out into the world again.

A favorite quote of mine is from John Darnielle, from back in the days when we had writing conferences. At the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing back in 2016, he said, “Writer’s block is a bourgeois luxury,” to an audience of understanding writers. I think at the time, the line was delivered with a bit of frustrated derision, and received with knowing laughter and awkward applause. His point was that if we claim to write for an occupation, we need to develop the discipline of showing up. The habit of AIC: “ass in chair” –or more delicately, “butt in seat,” as Anne Lamott and others have written. If we show up, the words will follow, because the words are material, not an ethereal substance that floats in through the window given the perfect circumstances. A carpenter doesn’t get to claim “builder’s block.” No, she grabs the tools and the lumber and gets to work. Simple enough, right?

Until it’s not.

Until this year, I had a backlog of ideas. College and grad school broke the dam that had been holding back twenty years of writing material. I could drop everything and write three pages on dryer lint. Seriously. So, going from that to …silence? This is deeply disturbing to me. I have plenty of life going on, don’t get me wrong. A complete life shift, completely unexpected. Parenting teenagers who are turning out profoundly different than I’d expected. Re-examining long-held beliefs. Gaining new perspectives on things I took for granted as fact. And yet, the words aren’t following the life experiences this time. Nor are they guiding my way through all of this. Some of this is due to the fact that I know now that some stories must age. Some stories aren’t mine to tell. Some stories shouldn’t be out in the world at all, but settle in the pages of my journal. Maybe some of this chapter of my life will wind up in words, but for now, the time isn’t right.

So, now what? All this time at my disposal, and I’m struggling to find things to write about. First world problems, I’m sure some of my writer friends who’d kill for just a weekend free of other responsibilities to do some dedicated writing would say. Well, for now, I’m reading again, surrounding myself with gorgeous writing. Debra Marquart’s The Night We Landed on the Moon is on my reading table, along with Kathleen Norris’s Dakota. I’m becoming inspired from Marquart’s work to take things in pieces. Just focus on an individual scene, an single scrap of memory, and go deep with it. Maybe that’s enough for this season of writing. Sculpt the beads and wait for the thread that connects them all to appear. Dakota reminds me that yes, other people really write this kind of stuff –books that connect place and meaning. Reading Dakota for the first time gave me permission to write the things that go through my head, and encouraged me that an audience for that kind of writing is out there, even if there might not be enough of them to routinely put that kind of beauty and depth onto the New York Times bestseller list. In a world where shock, fear, and outrage gets everyone’s attention, it’s good to remember that getting attention is only part of the problem of finding your readers.

Well, that’s where I am on this Wednesday morning. Doing the work, even if it’s just “writing about writing,” something that I remember so bugged a fellow student in my MFA cohort. I think I get why, but …well, it’s not going to stop me. At least not this morning.

Re-Settling: an update

I thought of titling this entry “settling,” making use of the double meaning there –settling being the process of making oneself at peace in a place, and settling also being the state of making do with less than what one originally wanted. Both might apply here, to be brutally honest. This is not a move I originally desired, but one of those cases where God was clearly on the move and my job was to follow. However, the more we’re here, the less that second meaning applies.

Since last October, my family’s been transitioning from our little house in southwest Minnesota where we’ve lived for nearly ten years to a much-larger parsonage in a little town of 700 in rural South Dakota. It’s an unexpected transition for me. After having written a whole book on what home means and moving and settling (my MFA thesis, as yet unpublished), I wasn’t figuring on having to do yet another chapter of re-settling. But once things built momentum last summer toward our move here, I quickly realized resistance was futile. Jonah tried running once from God’s clear direction. Learning from his example, I think I’d rather avoid the parallel of a three-day-detour in the belly of a whale (or worse). …So, if you see some posts tagged “Notes from Nineveh,” there’s the connection. Nineveh may not have been Jonah’s first choice of address, but once he surrendered to God’s calling, he had a front-row seat to God at work in the unlikeliest of places. And that’s a place I wouldn’t mind being, really. In clarification, the Nineveh connection only really applies as far as my initial resistance. I think Jonah had some anger and resentment toward Nineveh, and that doesn’t apply in my case. Neither is my little corner of the world any worse than average in terms of being a den of iniquity as Nineveh was (that is to say, it’s a typical rural small town with all its quirks and blessings and difficulties).

I may be intentionally vague at spots in the stories I share here, as I’ve learned from observation (and maybe the wisdom of years?) that one role of a pastor’s wife is knowing which stories to tell and which ones to keep. Even admitting my hesitance in selling our house and moving here feels like an indiscretion. My years of working among Christians has taught me two things in brutal clarity: one, Christians are absolutely terrible at conflict management. Two, no one speaks fluent Passive-Aggressive like we do here in the wounded Body of Christ known as the Church. And so, I take on this role with a heavy dose of caution and perhaps more than a dash of paranoia. People are messy, and pastoring is about as people-y as you can get. But I’ve also learned over the past few pandemic years that people are necessary, even for me. I may not be the one preaching, but in many ways, this new chapter is a Moses move for me. Hospitality and mercy and flexibility are things I’ve desired, but not things that come naturally for me. I’m learning how to support my husband and family (and church) as I go. All of this is new.

We’ve been here for a little over a month now. I’m finding it easier to remember names and find familiar faces each Sunday. For the first time in years, I am part of a moms’ group that I feel a genuine part of, even having been there only twice. The list of missing items (somewhere in a yet-to-be-unpacked box in the basement, most likely) remains, but for the most part, we’re at home here. I’ve charged the battery to my good camera and am hoping to add some more of my own photographs here as I find my way around. I’m finding my way into a new routine also, since I’ve taken an indefinitely long hiatus from teaching. Now that the dust has settled, I’m hoping to spend more dedicated time writing and getting more of my words out into the world (a gift and a privilege I plan to accept wholeheartedly).

Meanwhile, my copy of Kathleen Norris’s Dakota is sitting here on my desk, waiting for its yearly re-read. I look forward to finding some new understanding in it this time around, even if technically I can still see Minnesota from here.

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