Songwriting and Writing: “Adorning the Dark” by Andrew Peterson

"Songs require patience,” writes Andrew Peterson in Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making. “Books require endurance. Songs are 100-meter dashes. Books are marathons. You have a lot more opportunity to question your sanity when you're battling your way through the jungle of a novel for a year." Peterson writes both songs and books, and he knows the challenges of both.

I’ve read a multitude of books about writing, fiction writing, publishing, book marketing, writing style, writing challenges, writer’s block, and several other categories. Never have I read a book about writing that spoke directly into my soul. Until Adorning the Dark. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

The Abounding Creativity of Middle-earth: An Appreciation of J.R.R. Tolkien

I considerJ.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) and Middle-earth (timeless), and I find myself eventually arriving at Homer.

Tolkien in World War I

I’ve been reading about Homer and his Iliad and Odyssey, and the work that’s been underway for several years on what’s believed to be the tomb of Odysseus, or someone like him. We’re still learning that stories we believe to be myths, in the contemporary sense of that word, may actually be grounded in historical fact. It doesn’t mean they’re completely and historically accurate, but it does mean that the oral tradition they come from may be more historical than we realized.

Homer’s works were considered more fiction than anything else, until 1870, when the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered the site that is now considered the battleground of the Trojan War. Troy turned out to be a real place.

When he was young, Tolkien found himself fascinated with the Edda, the collections of prose and poetry written in Iceland in the 13^thcentury. These writings were themselves collections of stories from much earlier times that continued until the Viking Age. The Edda is our main source of knowledge of Norse mythology, and it would exercise a significant influence on The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and indeed all of Tolkien’s writings.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Saturday Good Reads

It seems you can’t read a report on the reading habits of Americans without the inclusion of moans and groans announcing the imminent death of poetry (with fiction a close second). And then I read poems like the ones noted below and think, “If this is a funeral, it’s one wild party.”

I’m glad to announce that none of the links below are about Bruce / Caitlyn Jenner.

And we Boomers may be aging, but 60-year-old dance teacher Shirley Clement knows what’s in our feet.

Poetry

Open Field – Jerry Barnett at Gerald the Writer.

Poetry Kept My Patient Alive – Ruth Livingston at The New York Times (Hat Tip: J of India).

Cyprian Kamil Norwid –D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

So Let Us Run – John Blase at the Beautiful Due.

Revelation at Eleusis – Brendan MacOdrum at Oran’s Well.

Accidental Discovery – Richard King Perkins II at Curator Magazine.

Faith

The Distance Between Head and Heart – John Piper at Desiring God.

Is it possible that persecution will actually save the church? – David Rupert at Red-Letter Believers.

Are Christians Really the Arrogant Ones? – Michael Kruger at Canon Fodder.

How prayer works...through the eyes of a child – Doug Spurling at Spurling Silver

Life and Culture

Valorizing Deadbeats – Rod Dreher at American Conservative Magazine.

Aging into Art – Chris Yokel at The Rabbit Room.

Errant Negotiations – Billy Coffey at What I Learned Today.

All the Happy Workers – William Davies at The Atlantic.

Why Indie Bookstores Are on the Rise Again – Zachary Karabell at Slate.

A Historian's Reckoning with the Past - Grant Wacker at Christianity Today.

Work

When the Employee May Have to Go – The Hardest Decision a Leader Makes – Ron Edmondson.

Photography and Art

Simple Gifts – Tim Good at Photography by Tiwago.

Found Theology and Found-Footage Film – Brett Davis Potter at Curator Magazine.

Creativity

Cultivating Creativity – Joe Sutphin at The Rabbit Room.

Boomers Rock

Top photograph: Queen Victoria memorial in front of Buckingham Palace by Steve Bryant via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Monk by the Sea

Wandering among the winter dunes

flattening into an expanse of sand

and sea and sky embracing one

another, a solitary figure, a monk

perhaps an artist or a writer

or both, for they are the same, stands

facing outward, away.

Wandering among the winter runes

of his mind, a monk, or perhaps

a writer or an artist (they are the same),

reaches to escape the reality

of the everyday to touch that ocean, dark

and deep, forbidding, that ocean calling

to him in the everyday.

Painting: The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich (oil on canvas; 1808-1810); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

“Making Manifest” Review Featured by Sandra Heska King

Last year, I reviewed Making Manifest: On Faith, Creativity and the Kingdom at Hand by Dave Harrity (it’s also available on Amazon). I enjoyed reading and using the book; it’s not your typical set of writing exercises and it has broad application to all kinds of writing.

Starting May 1, Sandra Heska King is hosting a devotional series on Making Manifest at her blog. She graciously asked if she could reprint my review, and posted it this morning. If you interested in the subject of faith, writing and creativity, head on over to Sandra’s place.

Struck Dumb Coming Out of Work

It’s the end of the work day like the end of any other work day. Turn off the computer, pack up the briefcase, put on the jacket, turn out the light, and walk quickly down the hall to the entrance door in the building lobby.

I glance at my watch. I have, perhaps, just enough time to get ahead of the swath of traffic that will soon clog the southbound streets. A normal commute home is 15 minutes. Many days, however, it’s 30 and 40 and 45. If you hit the traffic just right, it will be the normal 15.

I come out of the entrance of the building and turn toward the parking lot. I work in a campus-like setting – buildings no more than three stories tall. The time is approaching dusk.

That’s when I glance up. And I am struck so dumb that I literally stop in my tracks, all thoughts of beating the traffic gone.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling. 

My One Day

It is my one day, my one day

is today to be lifted from the stack

where I’m carefully kept, paper

napkins between us so we don’t

scrape or chip or abrade. I am

lifted and separated, carefully

washed, hands in yellow gloves

feeling my heaviness, for I am not

ordinary glass but crystal imagined

and blown and shaped and cut. I sit

on the table, next to a cutting board,

and I listen to the peeling and paring

and cutting and dicing and halving as

into my interior is emptied apple

oranges tangerines grapes (red and

green) pecans maraschino cherries

and whatever else is deemed worthy

and appropriate. I am covered

in clear plastic and placed in a box

that is cold, not icy but sufficiently,

until I am removed and carefully

carried to the table, where my contents

are spooned out and whipped cream

topped to murmurs of “ambrosia.”

It is my one day.

Over at Tweetspeak Poetry, we’ve been discussing Spin: Taking Your Creativity to the Nth Degree by Claire Burge. One of the suggestions Burge makes in this book is to take an everyday object and personify it in an art form of your choice. To see the discussion and what suggestions and questions others tackled, please visit Tweetspeak Poetry.

And may you enjoy your own ambrosia this Thanksgiving Day.

Photograph by Maliz Ong via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

From the Dark Times – Creativity

Twice in my professional working life I experienced two dark times, and the results were as unexpected as they were confounding.

The year 1987 was a trifecta of convulsions. My father died suddenly in March, leaving behind a business that was a colossal mess. My church figuratively blew up in June. Then my job blew up in October, and I walked away from what many considered the best part of the company to work for.

A little over twenty years later, my job blew up – and for all the wrong reasons. Success in doing new things had outstripped the organization’s ability to deal with it, and so the team was broken apart.

Both situations led to self-doubt, loss of sleep, emotional turmoil, and ruptured relationships. For a time, it all looked dark.

In the first situation, within two short months in a different job in the company, a job that several people had turned down because it was largely about dealing with negative stuff, I realized I had walked into the equivalent of a professional gold mine. I had really good people working for me, and huge opportunities in front of us. I simply had not expected anything like this. A lot of work, yes, and dealing with negative stuff, yes, but the opportunity to change an industry? How did that happen?

I did some of the best work of my career. What we accomplished won national recognition and awards.

In the second situation, the critical thing was to keep as much of the team intact and functional as possible. Which we did, but it would never function like the old team had. Some people left, others were dispersed, but enough of the understanding and philosophy of work survived to allow people to continue to flourish.

But also born during this time was my decision to publish this crazy manuscript I had been playing with for three or four years. Eventually, that decision led to the publication of Dancing Priest and its sequel, A Light Shining; becoming involved with poetry (and a new book – due out this December – Poetry at Work); and writing for The High Calling and Tweetspeak Poetry. None of that could have been foreseen at the time.

I’m doing some of the best writing of my life.

My purpose here isn’t to celebrate the dark times. They are awful to experience. But what came from them was something better, something I never would have believed possible, something I never would have imagined.

What came was creativity and accomplishment.

Over at Tweetspeak Poetry, we’ve been discussing Spin: Taking Your Creativity to the Nth Degree by Claire Burge. One of the questions Burge asks is, what dark places have developed your creativity? To see the discussion and the questions others answered, please visit the site.

Photograph by Emma Ivanova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The little wooden bridge

A power ride, it was

165 miles, graveled and

pounded flat, with rutted

stretches appearing

unexpectedly, like

the occasional snake

and critter darting

across my path, uneventful

until the little bridge,

the little wooden bridge

across the little creek,

the bridge with its construction

sign, narrowing the way,

slowing the ride, dutifully

I slowed the ride, the handlebar

hooked the board, hooked it

hard, the bike slammed down,

slammed down hard, I’m

thinking I’m seriously hurt,

I see the blood on my leg,

broken mirror, I stand up

on the little wooden bridge

and walk for a time, then

climb back on the bike

to finish the final 15 miles,

not much else I could do,

not bad for someone (as

it turned out) with four

broken ribs and a partially

collapsed lung. It did

hurt, though, once I got

off the bike.

Over at Tweetspeak Poetry, we’re discussing Spin: Taking Your Creativity to the Nth Degree by Claire Burge. One of the exercises asks the question, when have brake figuratively failed you with surprising consequences? In the true story recorded above, the brakes didn’t literally fail, but the resulting bike crash (2009) led eventually to an overnight stay in the hospital and reading Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places by L.L. Barkat straight through to 4 a.m. the next morning. And that led to being part of something called Tweetspeak Poetry, and that led to a book called Poetry at Work being published next month.

Who would have thought a bike crash on a little wooden bridge would lead to that result?

So check out the discussion on Claire’s book at Tweetspeak Poetry. However, I don’t advise bike crashes as the easiest way to creativity.

Photograph via Pryor Area Cycling Enthusiasts.

Snapshots and Fragments

My earliest memories come from when I was in the vicinity to two-and-a-half- to three-years-old. My family lived in a duplex in suburban New Orleans, a neighborhood called Azalea Gardens. It was solidly middle-class modest, the kind of neighborhood you began on your way to the next economic step up. Most of it is still there.

My father worked for a company that published trade magazines, like “Shrimp Boat” and “Work Boat.” My mother was a housewife; my half-brother (older than I was by almost eight years) was a pain, like all older brothers.

The memories are like snapshots, disconnected photographs, fragments imprinted ona child’s mind.

The elderly couple next door, giving me a square of Kraft’s fudge, sometimes vanilla and some days chocolate.

The washing machine in the garage, with its roller apparatus.

A stash of black licorice on a shelf in the garage; one taste was enough to convince me I didn’t like it.

Wearing my Davy Crockett coonskin hat.

Our dog, a Boston terrier, the one I snuck into the house and then hid when my mother came looking for him. “He’s not in the oven,” I said.

Playing with the boy next door through the fence – he had measles.

My father coming through the front door, home from a business trip, carrying a jack-in-the-box. I learned later that he had searched toy stores all over New York City until he found one.

My mother making root beer floats with vanilla ice cream, in tall glasses with a red-and-green floral design.

I don’t remember the story my mother often told – that I had poured black shoe polish on the fabric soda.

The first family vacation dates from this time – going to Biloxi on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The only thing I can remember about it was the sulfur-tasting water that came from the tap.

Why do I remember jumping from the back of a pickup truck, yelling “Bombs away, Tokyo”? My father was a World War II veteran, serving in the Navy in the Pacific. Perhaps that was the reason, or the desired connection.

While the memories are simple snapshots without a connecting narrative to sustain them, all during this time my attitudes and personality and thought processes were being shaped, molded and directed.  I still don’t like the noise of vacuum cleaners; my mother says the only way she could keep me still was to turn on the vacuum, forcing me to take refuge on the sofa, perhaps the one with the black shoe polish.

These were the early years of my parents’ marriage; I arrived just over a year after they had married. Certain themes were established in these years, family themes, that I would come to understand only much later, when I was older. From the fragments is a mosaic fashioned, and a mosaic discerned.

Over at Tweetspeak Poetry, there’s a discussion going on about Claire Burge’s new book, Spin: Taking Your Creativity to the Nth Degree. In one of the sections for this week’s discussion, she challenges the reader to descrive a childhood experience that especially surreal or dreamlike in its unfolding. I can say what I’ve written here is either surreal or dreamlike, but this is what the challenge brought to mind. Check Tweetspeak Poetry for more discussion. At the time of these memories, I would have been about the age that my oldest grandson is now.

Photograph by Amateur Pic via Public Domain Pictures. Used with Permission.

Born to create

You read a book like Matt Appling’s Life After Art, and you remember things long buried and forgotten in memory.

What I remembered was that I wrote poetry in high school.

It wasn’t love poetry. If I remember correctly, it had more of an apocalyptic, alienated bent to it. And I actually held on to the poems for years, stuck in a box or old filing cabinet in the basement. I went looking for it recently, but it wasn’t where I thought it would be.

What I can’t recall is what prompted me to write poetry in the first place. I would have been 16 or 17. This was at least a few years before I knew that writing forever would be a part of my life.

Forty years would pass before I started writing poetry again. And I can’t really explain why I did this time, either.

But I think it has something to do with the idea of beauty.

I was trained as a journalist, and have spent most of my career in public relations.

You have to look hard to find beauty in journalism or public relations. It’s there, of course, as it is in all of life, but journalism is a lot about ugliness, and public relations is, too, for that matter.

“The world is full of ugliness,” Appling writes. “It is desperately searching for beauty. And even the beauty the world thinks it finds is usually ugliness in disguise.”

I was in a boringly routine meeting at work when I first began to hear the beauty of work, a kind of poetry pouring forth from the repetition of the same thoughts, ideas, words, and sentences. At first I thought I was hearing things, but as I continued to listen, I discovered there was beauty in some the most mundane aspects of my workplace (a meeting, no less!).

The novelist Athol Dickson has written a lot about beauty, and it what he strives for in his stories. “Maybe we’re embarrassed by the idea of discussing beauty in our work,” he says. “Maybe we feel it is immodest to admit pursuit of such a goal. Or maybe we’re intimidated by the subject. Maybe we fear open talk of beauty makes us more accountable for its absence from our words.” (The whole article is here.)

It’s one thing to say something is beautifully written. It’s quite another to say the writing is beauty, that beauty is what we strive for because it is beauty that so distinguishes the work of God from the work of humanity.

Beauty points to God. We are creators, and the beauty we create points to God.

At The High Calling, we’ve been discussing Life After Art this month. Today concludes the discussion. To see what others are saying, please The High Calling.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Failure is an Option

One of the most intense movies I’ve ever watched is Apollo 13, the story of the space mission that was to land on the moon but went awry. Based on the true story of the ill-fated mission, it was a gripping tale starring Tom Hanks, Ed Harris, Kevin Bacon, and Gary Sinise.

At one point, Ed Harris, playing Gene Kranz at Mission Control in Houston, tells his colleagues that they have no choice but to figure out how to save the astronauts’ lives. “Failure is not an option,” he says – in the movie.

The real Gene Kranz said something like that during the actual crisis, but it took Hollywood to turn what he said into a line both memorable and enshrined in the American cultural lexicon.

In the case of Apollo 13, failure was indeed an option – and three lives hung in the balance. In fact, in anything worth doing, be it space missions, writing a novel, implementing a new program at work, or anything else, failure is always a possibility, and it is always an option. We can experience failure through unforeseen circumstances, and we can choose to fail by the actions we take and the decisions we make.

The question is, is the possibility of failure sufficient to stop us from trying in the first place?

Over the years, I’ve worked for several large organizations, mostly in the corporate and educational fields. Organizations become large for many reasons – marketplace success and natural monopolies (like school districts or county governments) are two of them. One thing all large organizations have in common is the desire to minimize risk.

It’s a natural phenomenon. You become successful, and the desire to remain successful leads you to minimize risk and seek control over things that can upset your success, or challenge your natural monopoly. The problem is that that the desire to control or reduce risk comes with a cost – the stifling of creativity and innovation. Over a long period of time, creativity and innovation can become anti-cultural, which may explain what happens to so many Fortune 500 companies that have disappeared forever.

This desire to avoid risk isn’t limited to large organizations. It also applies to individuals. “It’s our survival instincts that help us judge when to take a risk of failure and when to retreat,” writes Matt Appling in Life After Art. “But we’ve reprogrammed our instincts with the assumption that failure is not an option. So we stay home and protect ourselves from failure and deprive the world of our gifts.”

If we believe in what we’re doing, or what we want to do, we have to accept the reality that failure is an option. Creativity is dangerous. It upends the status quo. It challenges vested interests. It challenges the whole notion of “this is how we do things here.” If we are being creative, we should expect opposition, or worse, indifference.

Failure is always an option. The fear of failure is always present.

We can play it safe. Or we can choose to create, knowing we may fall flat on our faces.

We’re discussing Life After Art over at The High Calling. To see the discussion, please visit the site.

Photograph: The damaged Apollo 13 Service Module, seen after separation from the Command and Lunar module; via Wikipedia.

Creativity and the Woods

My childhood home was a relatively typical post-World War II American suburb of tract houses, the only difference being that it was suburban New Orleans, and the surnames occupying the tract houses were a dizzying array of English, Irish, Italian, French, Spanish, American South and American Yankee.

The neighborhood was living proof that there was an American Baby Boom. If you weren’t part of the Boom, or didn’t have a hand in creating it, you can’t imagine what Halloween was like – hundreds and hundreds of children pouring over the streets like an animated, costumed tidal wave. Or how crowded public and parochial schools could be.

Suffice it to say there was never a problem finding a friend to play with, or assembling more than enough players for two full sandlot baseball teams or street football teams.

Behind the houses across the street from ours was a remnant of what the entire area had once been – a low-lying forest on land just high enough to avoid the name “swamp forest.” For a few years, we called it simply “The woods” – until rumors came along of an even large tract several more blocks away. Then our tract became “The Little Woods,” differentiated from “The Big Woods.” Surrounding subdivisions, some older than World War II, provided something of a civilized buffer, but both wooded areas were places of magic and mystery.

Our parents didn’t seem to mind us playing there. All of the critters had departed, with the exception of squirrels, birds, lizards and occasional snakes. Nothing terrible had ever happened there; there were no stories of ghosts or someone’s body being found. So all we had to say to our mothers was “going to the woods with the kids” and they’d nod in understanding and acquiescence.

The woods, without old stories or rumors attached them, became a blank slate for scores of imaginations. They were the setting for countless games of hide and seek, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, war, and reenacting favorite movies and television shows (“What now, Kimosabe?”). We found mysteries to solve – who left that old jacket and baseball cap? Who built that campfire? Could someone be living in our woods? If we couldn’t solve the mystery, we’d invent a story and make up our own solution.

The woods, little and big, were a place for kids to be kids, to exercise imagination and creativity, to come up with nonsense, to climb trees and pretend they were lookout posts to watch for the enemy. We’d make camouflage blinds to hide in, and set traps for enemy soldiers.

Those woods, and the creativity they afforded, were a gift.

“Creativity is a gift from God to be submitted to Him,” says Ann Kroeker in Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families. “He can use it as a powerful tool for learning, growth, and understanding. Bright, inquisitive, childlike minds are so open to God’s revelation. He gives our children the ability to think, wonder, and question.”

Both tracts of woods are long gone, converted to yet more subdivisions. It’s inevitable, I suppose.

But what a blessing it was to have had them.

Over at The High Calling, we’ve been discussing Not So Fast. Today concludes the discussion, and you can see what people have to say about the book by visiting the site.

Photograph by David Wagner via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Tell ‘em Phyllis sent you

Over at Tweetspeak Poetry today, we’re embarking on a weekly discussion of poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge. It’s about poetry, and creativity, and words (of course). The book is divided into five sections – convenient for five Wednesday discussions in April. And it’s chock full of practical exercises.

Well, mostly practical exercises.

I read each chapter (they’re short) and looked through each of the exercises, trying to select one I could write about.

Like write words on slips of paper, and make tickets out them, hanging them from lamps, shelves, paintings, kitchen utensils and other convenient spaces around the house. Or put the slips of paper into boxes, and place the boxes around the house, pulling out a word now and then and having a discussion.

Obviously, Susan Wooldridge doesn’t know my wife.

“What is THAT?” she would ask, pointing.

“THAT,” I would proudly say, “is one of my word tickets.”

“It’s hanging from the dining room chandelier,” she would say.

“Yes,” I’d nod. “It’s about creativity. Think of the fun discussions we’ll have about words as we dine.”

Later, after being discharged from the hospital, I would dutifully remove all the word tickets hanging around the house.

Another possibility: Go outside, and name everything. And I thought, why not? It’s been three years since the last time I communed with my garden (as urged by L.L. Barkat in God in the Yard).

“Hey, Young,” the neighbor would say, “whatcha doing?”

“I’m naming everything in the garden.”

“Doesn’t everything already have a name?” he’d say.

“Yes,” I’d reply, “but not a personal name. Like this hydrangea here. Doesn’t it look like a Betty?”

“Betty?”

“Definitely a Betty. And this river birch looks every inch like a Phyllis, don’t you think? Oh, and this dandelion, it has to be an Irma. Irma, what do you think? Is Irma a good name?”

“You’re talking to a weed, Young,” my neighbor would say.

You can see where this might end up. Don’t scare or otherwise shock the neighbors.

Then I found one that wouldn’t alarm my wife or the neighbors: find a painting, choose a feeling, and let your words paint the feeling. 

So I did. I turned to the artist Gerhard Richter.

The cold slides into my bones,

the cold that drives old Ebenezer

to his stove fire, what there is

of it, until he falls asleep, and

dreams of chains, until only

ashes remain, and charred wood.

Maybe I should go back to Irma and Betty in the backyard. Phyllis is still sulking in her corner.

To see the discussion and links to other posts, please visit Tweetspeak Poetry. Tell them Phyllis sent you.

Painting: December by Gerhard Richter (1989), St. Louis Art Museum.