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.

Waiting and Losing Heart

The time is intense. The arrest of Jesus is imminent; his earthly ministry is quickly drawing to a close. The sense of the passage from Matthew 23 to Matthew 25 is that Jesus is trying to teach his disciples as much as he can before it all comes to an end.

He warns against religious leaders and condemns them (“You snakes! You brood of vipers!”). He grieves over Jerusalem. And then, on the Mount of Olives, he teaches his disciples, using stories and parables. Be watchful. Be ready and waiting. Be expectant. The last days are coming. Learn from the stories of the 10 bridesmaids and the loaned money. And let me tell you about the final judgment.

This is his last extended time to teach them, and Jesus is packing it in.

Tucked among the various teachings is a warning about being ready. Jesus uses the analogy of the wise and evil servants. The wise and faithful servant, put in charge of the servants of the household, cares for them and feeds them at the proper time. “It will be good for that servant whose master finds him doing so when he returns. I tell you the truth, he will be put in charge of all his possessions.”

The evil or wicked servant, however, waiting and waiting for the master’s return, gets tired of waiting and “then begins to beat his fellow servants and eat and drink with drunkards.” In his case, the master arrives unexpectedly. “He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (I’ve always like that phrase – “gnashing of teeth” – even though it makes my mouth hurt to think of it.)

Bob Sorge, in The Fire of Delayed Answers, notes that two things happen to the evil servant: “He loses his heart for the household, and he surrenders his self-control.” The two are inevitably linked; one follows almost naturally from the other. The delay in the master’s return creates both a crisis of the spirit and a crisis of behavior.

The causal problem in facing delay is the loss of heart. At work, we’ve been experiencing major organizational and management changes. What the new organization and leadership will be won’t be known for some weeks. There are good reasons for the delay, but the waiting is wearing on people. Anxiety is not uncommon. Speculation abounds. Things overheard in casual conversations become amplified into statements of fact.

The reality is that, regardless of anxiety and speculation, we still have to get work done. Work hasn’t gone away. It didn’t decide to take a holiday while we worried and fretted.

That’s what the wise servant understands and practices. He keeps focused on what he’s been entrusted with, as difficult as that can be at times.

He is faithful. He doesn’t lose heart.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see more posts on this chapter, “Jesus’ Teaching on Delay,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Nuzrath Nuzree via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Andrew Motion’s “The Customs House”

Next year will mark the 100^th anniversary of World War I, the “war to end all wars,” except it didn’t. The “Great War” has held a great fascination for writers and poets, not to mention historians, not the least for which is because it so neatly, and jaggedly, divided the old word order from the new. The war also produced several poets who became famous in death, such as Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, and several who survived the war but became part of the Lost Generation, such as Seigfried Sassoon and Robert Graves.

Their poetic styles varied widely, but they shared a view of war that was both realistic and resistant. Poetry served as the means to illustrate both.

The first half of Andrew Motion’s The Customs House: Poems shares that same realistic and resistant view of war. A series of poems about war stretches from World War I through the wars of today, including Iraq and Afghanistan. But the poems not include the battlefield and theaters of war, but also the home front, and the aftermath of war. These poems often tell stories, but they all examine war with a cold penetrating eye.

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

Photograph by Tim Emerich via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

What Resonates? (It Matters)

Most of my working career has been spent in speechwriting. It’s tempting (the temptation being smugness) to think that the 30 years I spent immersed in speechwriting (roughly 1976 to 1980) were the last hurrah of formal discourse. Television, PowerPoint, and now social media have all had an impact, and not necessarily positive.

Instead of civil discourse, we utilize videos and talking points.

Instead of speeches, we have PowerPoint.

Instead of intelligent conversation, we tweet.

For someone like me, whose day-to-day work occurs online and largely within social media, I understand what we have and what we have lost.

The change was already obvious by the mid-1980s, largely due to television. “Sound bite” had entered the communications lexicon. So had “talking points.” Up to that time, most large companies had speechwriting departments (we didn’t call them teams then). But change was underway. The great corporate restructurings of the 1980s did not spare the speechwriting departments. In 1980, I was one of four full-time speechwriters for the company I worked for. In 1990, I was the sole corporate speechwriter left, and I had supervisory responsibility for other functions.

The conventional wisdom about speeches had become (1) shorter is better, (2) use illustrations like photographs and videos, and (3) be entertaining.

And then I attended an event that turned the conventional wisdom on its head.

In 1992, I attended a speechwriter’s conference in Chicago. One of the speakers was Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a former aide to U.S. Rep. Claude Pepper and now with the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. A few years before, she had published Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechwriting. The book spoke to political and corporate speechwriters alike, and it articulated the unease that many of us speechwriters felt. It wasn’t only speeches and speechwriting that were changing; it was all discourse – corporate, political, academic, and social. And it wasn’t change for the better.

Jamieson spoke with interruption or a break for an hour. A solid hour. The audience was spellbound. No one got up to leave. She finished to thunderous applause. She was asked one question, and spoke for 45 minutes. Forty-five minutes to answer one question, and the audience remained spellbound.

What she said resonated with me and the other 200 people in the room. I still consider it to be one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. Two years later, I arranged for her to speak at a company conference. She had the same effect. By 1994, many of us could see what was coming with electronic communications technology, and how it was already transforming how we communicated with each other.

Today, I hear and read very few “speeches” as I understood and wrote them. Speakers string together message points and call it a speech. Virtually no one utilizes the tools of rhetoric. Few marshal evidence. Instead we make assertions as emotionally as we can, and it passes for thought leadership.

In Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day, Todd Henry talks about the importance of resonance,  which he calls a “valuable clue on the path to performing your best, most unique work.” We each have, he says, “resonant frequencies that we respond to naturally, and when we encounter them in others, their words or actions are amplified in us and we begin to resonate with the other person…Typically, these points of resonance are thematic, not specific in nature. It’s more about the deeper theme their words or actions point to and not just what was said.”

Her words resonated. In the years that followed, I wrote some of the best speeches I had ever written. What she said also had an impact on how I approached social media, and I generally use it in atypical ways.

I still remember that speech. I still remember the room, and being there. The impact was lasting.

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading us in a discussion of Die Empty. To see what people are saying about this section of the book, please visit the site.

Photograph by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Seasons

We sit, we listen, we know

the afternoon sun is fading

irreversibly into night, the warmth

of the day is fading inevitably

into coldness of night, the walls

of stone and stained glass offering

some light, some warmth. We move

closer, huddling, feeling the chill,

remembering spring's explosion

into color and summer’s hot sands

and brilliant glare and even

the beautiful decay of fall 

with its slanted, withdrawing light.

Outside, a bird is singing.

Photograph by Larisa Koshkina via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Wendell Berry’s “Jayber Crow”

A barbershop in a small town is less about the cutting of hair and more about community, one of those places where people (usually men) congregate to talk, observe, and plan hunting trips. Or that’s what barbershops used to be.

And “used to be” is what is at the heart of Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow, originally published in 2000. Jayber Crow is a barber in the town of Port William, Kentucky, the place around which so many of Berry’s stories and novels center. Port William is a “used to be” place, a town in decline as economics and what we consider progress passes it by, its life gradually siphoned away.

Jayber is telling his story, and the town’s story, from the perspective of old age. He was left orphaned at a very young age by his parents succumbing to influenza; he’s taken in by an elderly couple, and it is there that he begins to fall in love with the place he lives in. Orphaned again after their deaths, he’s sent to an orphanage and a bible college. And while he should have ended up in ministry or working in a city, he doesn’t. The pull toward the place of his youth is too strong. Along the way he’s picked up barbering skills, and so he returns to Port William. And people remember him, remember the orphaned boy.

When he’s telling his story, he’s an old man, retired from barbering, officially at least. The state regulatory authorities have cited his shop for numerous violations, even if it’s in the same place and Jayber doing the same things he’s done for almost half a century. But he tells his story, his story of community and place and people – and the woman he falls in love with, the woman he cannot have because to do so would violate all of what place and community are about. He never speaks of his love, but, in a small town, some things people just know.

The novel encompasses most if not all of Berry’s beliefs and philosophy about land, agriculture, progress (including interstate highways), faith, and community. In the hands of a lesser writer, the story would have degenerated into ideological diatribe. In Berry’s hands, it doesn’t. He maintains a tight control, even over what he most wants to say.

Jayber Crow is a novel about many things, and about one thing, the idea that place, history, and memory are what bind people to each other, and to loosen those binds is to unravel something much larger that a small town. It is also a novel of love and redemption, and how redemption is inseparable from place and community. 

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.