"Letters from the Mountain" by Ben Palpant

Are you organized, precise, a neat-nik, with a place for everything and everything in its place? Or are you a slob, with a desk and writing habits that look like the junkyard set from Sanford and Son? Or, like most of us, are something in between? 

How we write reflects how we live. If there is any lesson from Letters from the Mountain by Ben Palpant, and there are many, that is the overriding one, at least for writers. How we write reflects how we live.

 

Palpant, a poet and writer and son of former missionaries to Kenya, wrote the book in the form of letters to his daughter Kialynn. Using that form imparts a tenderness and affection to the subject that many books about writing lack. So that while the subject is ostensibly about writing, this is a father writing to a beloved daughter, and soon the subject of writing becomes indistinguishable from the subject of life and living. It never descends into how-to advice; it’s more “this is what I’ve learned from what I do and what I am.”

 

“The principles essential to his own writing journey,” he writes, “have proven mysterious, paradoxical, and bewildering even after all these years. He would prefer a less difficult trail. He would prefer a white chalk line making the easiest ascent up the mountain. But this path is not like that. This mountain is not conducive to ease. Day hikers never last long here.”

Ben Palpant

Whether he’s discussing the imagination, beauty, rest, listening, contentment, ambition, self-doubt, criticism, or several other subjects about writing, Palpant’s words apply equally to writing and living. Writing well, like living well, requires discipline and self-knowledge. It also requires a love for others.

 

Perhaps the most important idea Palpant imparts is that writing needs sustenance and cultivation. It’s not a skill or talent that independently arises out of one’s mind or soul. It’s more like a seed that, once planted, needs protection and nurture to spout and flourish. 

 

Palpant has published several books, including the poetry collections Sojourner Songs and The Stranger; The Essential Journal for Writers; Honey from the Lion’s Mouth: On Remembering and Reclaiming Our Past; Pepin and the Magician; A Small Cup of Light; and a worldview guide for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest.

 

Letters from the Mountain is a tender, loving, and occasionally hard look at writing. This is not a dispensation of wisdom from on high, but more “what I’ve learned so far” on my journey. And it is a book in which writers will recognize and find themselves.

 

Related:

 

Spiritual Poetry: Three Collections.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The summer issue of An Unexpected Journal is out, and it’s all things King Arthur. It includes articles, poems, and scholarly articles under the general title of King Arthur Legendarium.

 

A Reader’s Guide to Thornton Wilder’s Neglected “The Eighth Day” – Daniel Sundahl at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

Mike Mulligan and Beyond: the Work of Virginia Lee Burton – Kelly Keller at Story Warren.

 

The Wanting of What May Be Lost – Jim Wood at Current Magazine.

 

Newly discovered ‘Stonehenge of the Netherlands’ is 4,000 years old – Laura Baisas at Popular Science.

 

A fresh face for an old friend: London’s National Portrait Gallery – Helen Barrett at The Critic Magazine.

The Gift of the Monarch Butterfly -- Dheepa Maturi at Tweetspeak Poetry.