Who knew?

When I started this blog, I knew I would have times when I would avoid writing because I didn't have Something to Say.  I just didn't realize that one of those times would come so soon.  I guess that's part of becoming a writer - overcoming the need to say something important instead of just seeing the significance of saying something at all.  At least I have that good old list of my 15 most influential writers to keep the words flowing!

Number Two on the list is Elizabeth Johnson, someone who I'm sure is less familiar to the general public than Barbara Kingsolver.  Johnson is a Catholic feminist theologian, and her book She Who Is has been one of the most important books I've read and re-read over the last six or seven years.  She has a way of talking about the Christian tradition that makes things I've heard before seem new and invigorating.  Her feminism is bold and powerful without being alienating.  Maybe most importantly for me, her use of the feminine concept of wisdom, or sophia, as a way of understanding the Trinity is brilliant and life-giving for my own understanding of what it means to believe in a God whose people have a complicated and often unsavory history. 

When I started my education in biblical studies, philosophy and theology, I never expected that I would end up a more passionate and committed feminist than anything else - scholar, philosopher,  or theologian.  I was not kind to the first feminist theologians I encountered, maybe because they confronted what I thought I knew about being a Christian, maybe because they hit home a bit too closely.  But Elizabeth Johnson was different.  Her love for the Christian tradition is evident, and her feminist systematic theology grows out of that love, much like the way a gardener often prunes certain plants in a way that seems harsh but is motivated by knowledge and experience and hope that such pruning will be good for the plant, the garden, and the gardener.  Johnson showed me that being a loving voice of dissent is possible, and even beautiful.

Letting Go (or, finding just how "not alone" I am)

I've started a blog to improve on my writing before... and it lasted just a little while before it fell by the wayside in favor of my master's program.  I was worried about being able to write at the caliber required of me for my graduate studies - I had taken a year off from school, and felt like I was out of practice.  As is the case for me (far more often than I would like to admit), my worries were exaggerated and things ended up working out just fine.

This blog seems to be less about improving my writing, and more about becoming a writer.  Words are the place in which I find myself most at home.  I've always seen myself as a reader, and my husband can attest to the fact that I'm definitely a talker.  But being a writer - that's more intimidating to me.  Writing is about output, about actually producing something that can be engaged by others, can be criticized, can be interpreted, maybe in ways I don't mean or didn't intend... I love words, but I love being in control of my words, and writing requires letting go.

I think it's time for me to start letting go a little bit.

My friend Jacquie recently posted a note on facebook that listed the fifteen writers who have been most influential to her.  I not only took her cue and wrote my own list, but I'm also following her lead by blogging about them.  It seems like a good way to start being a writer - writing about writers...  So without further ado, number one on my list is...

Barbara Kingsolver

Her place at the top of my list is shocking to no one who has spent any time with me in the last two years.  My senior project at Vanderbilt Divinity School involved a literary analysis of The Poisonwood Bible in conversation with my own autobiography and the work of process theologian Marjorie Suchocki, so I spent a lot of time immersed in Kingsolver's work.  Something about her writing sticks with me, speaks to me in a way that is different from anyone else I've read.  I feel like I've become friends with her characters, and I'm invested in what happens to them far beyond just needing to know what happens at the end of the story.  Her commitment to the environment, to the interconnectedness of all beings, to the power that love and relationality have over destruction and violence - these make her work sacred to me.

She has also been the first example I point to when I describe what I imagine my writing to look like one day.  She is able to intertwine complex ideas - theological, historical, sociological, scientific - with very real characters in a way that is accessible to folks who have not been inducted into the Society of Those who Know Big Words.  And her everyday-ness does not in any way detract from the beauty and depth of her ideas; rather, I think it enhances them.  Truth is not the property of those who can describe it to the most elite audience.  By expanding her audience, by writing fiction that is popular, and by tapping into some of the most visceral human experiences, Kingsolver confronts me - my arrogance, my love of big words, my desire to know more than someone and to tell people things they don't know.

And as much as she confronts me, she comforts me as well.  In the face of uncertainty, of transition, of change or doubt or fear, I find in Kingsolver's work characters who are responding to things not far off from my own experience.  Beyond familiarity, these characters show me that I am not alone.  Perhaps that might be the greatest gift of Kingsolver's writing - through her work, I am learning more and more to live like I am not alone.

...Which somewhat brings me back to where I started. Becoming a writer seems to be the best way I know how to live like I am not alone.  By opening myself to the vulnerability that comes with writing, I am starting the process of letting go.