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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.

Working at Breaking Free has taught me the hideous and yet all too common story of a young girl (12 or 13 years old) who meets a boy and starts dating him.  He gives her all the attention and love she’s been missing, and then one day, he turns on her.  This can happen in a horrible sudden switch where he takes her somewhere and she’s gang raped by all of his friends.  Or it can be a slower and more insidious transformation, not unlike other kinds of abusive relationships, where his behavior slowly becomes less forgiving and more demanding until he’s beating the crap out of her, pimping her out to his “friends,” and she just feels grateful that he puts up with her.

Didn’t want to hear that?  Me either.

But I did hear about it, and now when I hear people talk about “willing prostitutes,” organizations clarify that they don’t want to help “common prostitutes,” or see “happy prostitutes” in media, I want to throw things.  Instead of destroying random property, I thought I’d write a story to explain how this happens and hopefully raise the level of compassion and understanding towards American prostitutes.

Unfortunately, in order to write that story and accomplish that fantastic feat, I have to write that pimp character.  And because I don’t want to write pedantic, stupid, dichotomous drivel, I have to find some way to understand and possibly even empathize with that character.  Which is how I find myself staring the first line of dialog I’ve given the guy for three days in a row.  I’ve worked out a little bit of what the guy’s motivation is, but I just can’t bring myself to write his physical description, can’t move my protagonist in his direction.

So here is creative compassion at its apex, trying to feel for the worst kind of villain, trying to imitate a life I wish had never existed.  Writers that I admire create villains that are so dynamic, so powerful, and so true to life.  They write villains that are fully evil and fully human.  God have mercy on me, and enable me to do the same.

On Tuesday I spent about six hours writing 1,800 words that filled three single-spaced pages without any breaks or indentations.  This was a document that I start for every major project I write, entitled “Talking it out.”  This is the embryo of a book.

Today, I will attempt to construct a preliminary bone structure for this new creation, which might look something like an outline.  My outlines are nothing like the complexity of a human skeleton, but look more like a stick figure.  Here there is a leg, so probably there should be another one of roughly the same size next to it.  More will be added to it later, after it has some room to grow and develop on its own.  My last book started with a simple ten-point outline.  At the midway point, I had forty-six plot points that I printed out on slips of paper and arranged and re-arranged in a tree on my kitchen table.

My last book, entitled “The Other Side of Silence” and in my notes as “Spiritual,” has been cast out onto the waters of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.  It is just a touch insane for me to submit my treasured work to that particular contest.  A contest that chewed me up and spit me out along with my grand efforts at transcending gender roles a mere year ago.  But the rationale of last year still works now; it’s motivation to really finish the book and stop picking at it, and it delays the necessity of querying that book so I can start working on my next project.  So off it goes, to try its legs in the real world.  Mary Shelley referred to her writing as her “hideous progeny.”  I’m a little less dramatic, and might choose something more like my “awkward toddlers.”

It may (or may not) surprise you that more than once in my life, I’ve been asked why I continue to pursue a career that involves so much rejection and critique.  This is not only because the publishing industry is known for chewing people up.  Oh no, it’s mostly because I’m known for being particularly sensitive.  Why would that be a problem?

I wind up in a lot of odd activities because my kind of courage is a conviction that I’ll be able to deal with problems when I get to them.  This often results in blind or downright boneheaded decision making.  This is how my soft, reclusive, easily wearied teenage self wound up on a three week backpacking trip in the Alps.  It’s how my husband and I joined a church plant after leading one small group together.  And more recently, it’s how I found myself raising my hand and saying “I’ll lead worship for Celebrate Recovery.”  That is not to say that I regret any of these decisions.  These have been some of the most profound experiences of my life and if I had skipped them, I simply would not be me.

However, half-way into the execution of these choices, I have to actually deal with the problems.  More athletic hikers berate me for my slowness, and that soft reclusive person gets a little peeved that she wound up in this position.

So there’s an internal thumb war that takes place between the stubborn, boneheaded part of me and the sensitive, malleable bit.  I need both pieces to make my life work.  So much of what is creative and beautiful in my work comes from that soft place.  That’s the part that feels deeply for causes, can empathize with totally unsympathetic characters, and will hear and respond to the voice of God.  But the harder, stubborn part can use strategy and discipline to overcome obstacles, will continue to work in the face of adversity, and actually takes a gritty pleasure in doing so.

My question is not only who’s going to win, although that’ll be interesting.  More deeply, is it possible to continue on without severely bruising or restraining an aspect of my personhood that I love?