Living the Comma #31

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

Enter your email here to receive Weekly Wide-Awake

back

Offerings. Pentecost. Kate Bowler.

For every book, both as a historian and as a person trying to find their way in the world, I mostly think about my writing in terms of trying to dismantle a cultural myth. Everything Happens for a Reason was about why bad things happen to good people. No Cure for Being Human was about why wellness will feel so attractive and so incomplete. And [Joyful, Anyway] is about what we should be wanting when people talk about their best life now. I know the prosperity gospel version: God wants you to be happy, healthy, wealthy, and that you should be able to achieve that with your positive words and actions. But I felt, given how lightly apocalyptic this moment is, that it requires that we dig out something not just hard, but something beautiful for ourselves. What actually is the loveliest thing that we can offer each other? — Kate Bowler

Dear Writer Friends,

I have read Kate Bowler’s work for years. Bowler always asks thought provoking questions, while being seriously funny. I absolutely love Bowler’s question at the end of this quote. “What actually is the loveliest thing that we can offer each other?” As writer’s, we laugh, investigate, create, cry, remember, forgive, make sense, jostle, construct, deconstruct, imagine, reimagine, grieve, heal, peel, tear, repair, console, confront, lift, hold, and a hundred other things with words.

We offer all that to each other when we write.

Let’s tie the idea of an offering to Pentecost. Let me explain. Sunday was Pentecost — the day in which the Christian Church celebrates the Holy Spirit descending and the Christian Church beginning. Consider the idea that our words are the continued gift of the Holy Spirit. Our offerings are Holy. Our words are Holy, and Holy is big enough to hold us all. Like Love itself. They allow us to feel beauty. They allow us to connect with one another and our world. They allow us to pay attention to what matters.

It is about building a permission structure to thrive in lightly apocalyptic times. It is about knowing we often find what we seek. It is about, as Ross Gay encourages, discovering what we love in common. It is about, as Katie Ferris suggests, learning to write love letters in a burning world. It is about seeing how the puzzle pieces of a writing life fit — borders and edges, ones with 100 colors, before we see the picture on the box emerge.

Conversations with Authors — Kate Bowler

About Kate

I am a Duke professor, podcaster, and author with a single mission: giving you permission to feel human. (And letting you have whatever weird or boring hobbies you can’t explain to strangers. Do I love roadside attractions and exotic potato chip flavors? Yes. More than I should say.)

I believe that the world would be a gentler place if we took apart the well-meaning clichés we use when life is hard. (What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? Maybe what doesn’t kill you might try again tomorrow. )

I am determined to create a gentler world for everyone who wants to admit that they are not always “living their best life.” After years of being told I was incurable, I was declared cancer-free. But there’s no going back. I am forever changed by what I discovered: life is so beautiful and life is so hard. For everyone. And while we can’t always be happy, we can be joyful, anyway. — Kate Bowler

Why Your Creativity Matters

“You have this beautiful line from the poet Jack Gilbert that I just I think about about once a week. And it is. “Do you have the courage? Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.” — Kate Bowler

Read entire post here.

“Everything happens for a reason — and other lies I’ve loved.”

I‘m sure I would have ignored it if it hadn’t reminded me of something I had experienced, something I felt uncomfortable telling anyone: that when I was sure that I was going to die, I didn’t feel angry. I felt loved. It was one of the most surreal things I have experienced. In a time in which I should have felt abandoned by God, I was not reduced to ashes. I felt like I was floating, floating on the love and prayers of all those who hummed around me like worker bees, bringing me notes and socks and flowers and quilts embroidered with words of encouragement. But when they sat beside me, my hand in their hands, my own suffering began to feel like it had revealed to me the suffering of others. I was entering a world of people just like me, people stumbling around in the debris of dreams they thought they were entitled to and plans they didn’t realize they had made. It was a feeling of being more connected, somehow, with other people, experiencing the same situation. — Kate Bowler

Read entire post here.

The Future of Hope

I think about being an incurable optimist as being a really, fundamentally, a story about hope. And it’s hope for me, it’s hope for you, that hope is a story about all of us that God puts in the future, ever before us and always with us and always behind us. But it moves in kind of that beautiful way that we will someday be wrapped up in a story about love that is beyond time and beyond our dumb bodies and beyond finitude and beyond tears. And that will be really beautiful. — Kate Bowler

Read entire post here.

Kate Bowler’s Book of Alchemy Writing Prompt

Think of a time when you felt especially unlucky. The opposite of #blessed—the “anti-blessing,” if you will —but then you noticed something beautiful, funny, anything that sparked. Write about holding the tension of both the deep terrible and the fairy dust feeling.

Read the explanation and prompt here.

Think about what is the loveliest thing that we can offer each other this week? Think about how words are offerings? Think about how our writing group might be a powerful conduit for our offerings? Let’s work to make it so.

From the heart of the comma,

Katie

Thank you for Living the Comma with me. This community is truly love and light. Subscribe to the Wide-Awakeness Project and share your light. It has never been more important.