Author: lauren

I just returned from my grandfather’s funeral in California.  This trip was far less painful than I anticipated, and I am grateful for my family and glad that I got to at least speak to both of my sisters while I was out there.

Being at a big family funeral inevitably results in a lot of awkward moments, not only because I see people I haven’t seen in decades (and may or may not recognize), but because a family funeral connects me with people I love who are grieving.  After this experience, I have made the following observation.

When someone I love is grieving, I shouldn’t try to make it better.  This is a strong, nearly irresistible impulse.  Like sorrow is a vacuum at which happy feelings must be thrown to stop the sucking power.  Still, I should try.  Nothing I say is actually going to make them happier right at that moment, that comes later.  And it doesn’t come from me, it comes from a process, a relationship with the supernatural forces of time and God, which I should avoid stepping on.  There are certain phrases that I regard as red flags when they come out of my mouth.

“God works in mysterious ways.”  Duh.  How does that help?

“God is good, all the time.”  Ever notice that no one EVER says that when you might actually think God is good?  The resulting feeling is a not very well disguised guilt trip.  It sounds something like, God’s good no matter how crappy your life is, so don’t complain.

“God has a different/better plan.”  For this one I will quote my good friend Morgan, who said very aptly “Satan comes to kill, steal, and destroy.  God doesn’t do that.”  So if someone or something is dead, lost, or ruined, quit saying God did it, okay?  Even if I think that’s what really happened, that is not the time to enter into a theodicy debate.

“Oh, were they Christians?” Even though it’s tempting, and I want to be able to speak accurately about the situation, asking this question always feels like a choice between calling grief unnecessary (if they’re in heaven now, what’s to be sad about?) and the infliction of hideous sorrow.

“They’re in a better place now.”  People know this.  If that was going to make them feel better, they would feel better already.  And what’s weird is, it might already be making them feel better, but my saying it like that should unravel all the complex feelings they have about someone dying is insulting to soul and intelligence.

In general, I feel that pat answers to grief are harmful.  Even when they are said with a true intent to help and comfort, they are avoiding the true nature of the thing.  Using a generic phrase to respond to what is challenging and confusing obscures the human relationship I’m involved in.  When I say things like, “They’re with Jesus now,” I’m avoiding contact with my friend’s grief and pushing that horrible feeling back on them.  In essence, I’m asking them to keep their wounds away from me, to come back when they’re happy and easy to deal with.  Not only am I hurting them out of my fear and self-preservation, I am losing a chance at a friendship that is deep and true.

This is my experience and opinion only.  I would love to hear about something that was said to you when you were grieving that really helped.

Grandpa scared me as a child.  I grew up in a houseful of women, and men in general were questionable to my young mind.  Not only was Grandpa a man, he was a tall, tough man.  He had leathery brown skin and was certainly the first person I’d ever met who had a real tattoo, old and green on his forearm.  He made jokes about eating my thumb if I kept sucking it, and would pin me down and tickle me until I was really a little afraid.  He smelled always of forbidden cigarette smoke, and would lie on the couch and watch news while we had to troop off to Grandma’s church.

I remember the day I stopped being afraid of Grandpa.  We were staying at my grandparents house during a move, and one of the new little girls on the block had hurt my feelings.  I curled up in a ball to cry on the porch, free at five years old to collapse over a child’s snub.  Grandpa came home and asked me what was wrong, but I was sure the world was coming to an end and refused to answer him.  After making sure I wasn’t physically hurt, Grandpa picked me up and pushed me into the room I was sharing with my sisters.  He shouted, “I love you to death, but you can’t scare me like that!”

Although I could have been more scared of Grandpa then, what I heard was that he loved me.  I saw him differently then.  I saw his joy when he heard me laugh.  I heard his concern when he cajoled me to stop sucking my thumb.  The smell of cigarettes took on an affectionate meaning, and to this day I can’t be offended by their scent.  I cried with him when he was finally baptized in Grandma’s church.  I felt differently about Grandpa, but it wasn’t because he stopped being intimidating.  This isn’t a story about how I realized he had a softer side.  I stopped being afraid of Grandpa because I realized that tall, tough man was on my side.

I am writing, and I am writing with my head on my knees, eyes squeezed shut, fingers trembling over the keyboard.  But the words are leaking out, one after the other.  I can look away, and I can pretend that someone else is making this happen, but it’s not true.  This story, these characters, these events, they are all things I have made with my own typing and my own hands.  My words.  These tears squeeze into the folds of my skirt, and although my eyes are still shut tight my mind cannot turn away from the picture I’m creating of this girl following someone she trusts to a room with a knot of evil in it, waiting to break her into pieces and make her into a thing they can sell.

I did not create the situation, because that is based on fact, and this makes it all the worse to push forward and make the next thing happen that I know has to happen and that I pray will somehow not happen.  Somehow the plot will twist some other way, somehow my precious character will be spared, somehow this issue will go away and so I won’t to break hearts about it anymore.  And it is because I write it this way, clenching my stomach, weeping into my knees, shaking with rage and sorrow, it is because I write this way that God gave me this vocation and this cause and this heart.  The issue is there, the girls are real, and the hearts are still hard and unknowing.  So I keep writing.

I must confess that I have an inexhaustible penchant for really good young adult fiction.  I have no desire to write young adult fiction, and I know for a fact that a great deal of the genre is complete crap.  Yet I find really good young adult fiction literarily delicious.  At the present time, I am reading about a chapter of The Phantom Tollbooth before bed, and I have to say that every time I read that book I am shocked to discover that I’ve once again forgotten its genius since the last reading.  Just last night I stumbled over this little gem: a witch (oh, excuse me, a “which”), named Faintly Macabre.  As in, “Hello, my name is Faintly Macabre.”  You just don’t find stuff like that in adult fiction, no matter how magical it’s pretending to be.

I think there is something about writing for kids that allows authors to break free of convention in ways they would never consider for adult fiction.  Magic becomes ordinary instead of something that needs explaining or has to have some deeply serious consequence.  There is a release from the idea of having to take oneself too seriously, which I enjoy vicariously by reading these delightful creations.

Young adult fiction that I’ve found enchanting recently includes Peter Pan and A Series of Unfortunate Events (of which I’ve read only the first two books, will be looking for the rest of the series at thrift stores).

Just to cover my bases, I did not read Harry Potter or the Twilight series.  Harry Potter I gave a good honest try by reading the first two books of the series, to which HP fans cry out “Oh but the third book is where it gets really good!”  My response is that I usually give authors 50 pages to convince me keep reading.  I gave Rawlings 500.  Twilight I have not even tried, because what I hear from Twilight fans (of my own age or thereabouts) is the following.  “I LOVE Twilight, it is SO good!  I’m totally addicted to it, I skipped work for a week to finish it.  You would hate it.”

The cute husband and I are organizing a social justice/art fusion event at River Heights Vineyard on June 4^th (yes, that was a plug), and we’d like to the theme of the evening to be children.  We’ll talk about the child sponsorship through World Vision and Source Ministries’ B448 campaign, which serves homeless youth in the cities.  In planning this event, the issue of whether kids would be welcome at the event has come up, which has brought up some thoughts on what happens with kids at church.

Our church and the Vineyard in general has been focusing on children ever since Wes Stafford made everybody cry at the national conference last year.  To blatantly steal some stats from Mr. Stafford’s talk, something like 85% of Christians accept Jesus before they turn 18, and something like 11% of church resources are targeted at children.  I’ve worked in church nurseries since I was roughly 11 years old, and I have noticed the following.  1) children’s programs at church are constantly short of volunteers.  2) working in the children’s program is commonly misconstrued (by leaders and volunteers) as baby-sitting.  3) it is considered absolutely essential that all the children be rounded up in a separate room with a sound barrier before “church” can happen.

As you might have picked up by my tone at this point, I do not like this attitude towards kids.  In my oh-so-humble opinion kids are people, and when people come to our church we should at least try to include them in what we’re doing.  No one needs to say (although I’m about to anyway) that the rate at which people leave the church as soon as they’re old enough to have the option is shocking.  This alone should tell us that we’re doing something wrong with our kids.  As we become increasingly aware that including people unlike ourselves in church activities is very difficult, can be uncomfortable for the regulars, and requires a certain amount of flexibility and creativity, I would like these same concepts to be opened up to how we treat our children in church.

Including kids in “real” or “big” church faces the following obstacles.  1) Kids can be noisy, and therefore distracting to grown-ups.  2) Kids have limited vocabularies and attention spans 3) Adults can be very judgmental of parents with children who exhibit factors 1 and 2.  These are real issues, and would require no small amount of patience and creativity to overcome.  There would need to be buy-in from the congregation at large, because there will some extra noise and discomfort while we figure out how to do this so it works.  Which is exactly what is going to happen if we try to include anyone who isn’t just like us in what we do.

I would love to come up with something creative and awesome to do for our arts event that would include kids in some way that would be more edifying for everyone involved.  I probably will not be able to do that before June 4^th, but I’m glad that I’m at least thinking through how that might look.  Because I think in the future, at least for stuff I plan, I might not want to consider not including a whole segment of our church an option anymore.

*Disclaimer: These thoughts are not directed at any one person or even any one organization.  It is a problem I consider somewhat universal in the churches of the USA

Last night I went to the last Voices Merging Open Mic of the semester.  If you live in the Twin Cities and you haven’t been to one of these, you really should.  They’re free to attend and in my opinion, one of the most fun hip-hop shows around.  And if you’re poetically, theatrically, or musically inclined, you can get some experience performing in front of a very large audience.  I go whenever I can, and I frequently perform.

I’m not sure if it’s because the University of Minnesota is a fairly liberal place to be, because Voices Merging and their open mics are predominately African American, or just because college students like to rebel against something, but a lot of the performances tend towards the political.  I like it.  There are aspects of issues that I haven’t thought about that get presented in an interesting and artistic manner.  There are issues I don’t even know about that I get introduced to that way.  Plus, there is stuff that I’m really passionate about, and hearing poetry about it makes me feel less weird in the world.  Always a good thing.

My poems tend to be…not political.  In fact, it’s somewhat rare that my poems address “issues” at all.  A lot of my stuff on youtube can be that way, because they are mostly poems I’ve written for other people or organizations.  I like doing that, it’s a challenge, and I like to find an angle on something that I can relate to.  But on my own, my poetry is a deeply personal reflection of emotions and thoughts that can’t be expressed any other way.  And occasionally, I will perform those pieces in front of the 300 faces of Voices Merging.

So last night, after the Poetic Assassins raised the roof with their challenging and aggressive piece on walking the talk of revolution, I took up the mic to talk about losing a pregnancy.  My hopes that the audience would think I was acting out a character crumbled away from me as I teared up in the last few stanzas.  I wondered why I couldn’t write a nice rousing piece about mercury contamination or immigration law.

Partly, it feels safer, a lot safer, to write about larger issues and political angst.  But there’s also a part of me that wonders if writing so close to the chest is self-centered and narrow-minded.  I’m sure there are beautifully poetic thoughts on the universality of suffering or the ability of art to make something small and personal into a larger issue.  Sometimes I can swim in that stream, and sometimes I sit on the shore and wonder where all that water’s going, anyway

I have decided that moving that comma a couple more times has become a fruitless exercise, and I will now begin actually querying my latest book.  I spent last week and some of this week writing a synopsis and a query letter, and I now have assembled all the tools necessary for trying to convince literary agents that I freakin’ rock.  Except stamps, I still need stamps.

That won’t hold me back though, because most agencies will accept queries over e-mail.  This is really convenient, expedites the process of querying, saves trees, and requires fewer stamps.  It also has the unfortunate side effect of cutting out the comfortable little waiting period between sending queries and getting the rejection letters.  While I have always suspected that agents frequently don’t even glance at, much less read, random query letters, I never wished for hard proof.  When a time stamp tells me that the rejection was sent a mere 20 minutes after the query was sent, it destroys my happy delusions.

At the beginning of a query day, I am filled with hope and possibility.  Each letter that’s sent out, each agency website I visit, feels like a new opportunity to become a represented author with mainstream literary potential.  Slowly over the course of the day, that mood degrades.  By the end I hear myself saying things like, “I don’t care if it’s a good fit or not, they’re just going to reject me anyway.”  And I hate to have a ‘tude like that, but that’s really how it feels.

Here the debate ensues.  Is it better to set a goal for number of queries sent, like say 10, per day and then retreat into my writing cave and create new work?  This mitigates the soul-killing effect of querying, but it also elongates the process.  It might be less painful to rock through as many queries I can in as few days as possible and then just live in my writing cave while the rejection letters roll in.  I never really settle on one option or the other, but tend to oscillate between them depending on the time of day.  So there are a lot of days when 13 queries get sent, including two at the very end of my writing time when I now feel frivolous and lazy for spending three whole hours actually working on my work instead of slowly draining away my hopes for life.  On days like that, it feels like one of the best perks of becoming an established author would be never needing to do this again.