ideas
What I'm thinking about right now.
I refuse to submit to the spirit of fear
As a child, I was taught to fight dark forces. Only now am I starting to understand what that really means.
I have been thinking about demons again.
During my evangelical Christian childhood, the little dudes were everywhere, somehow managing to be both agents of supreme evil and mangy little jumpers. Get too close to a demon-host without a protective prayer and—schroop!—it’d be in you, just like that! Like a virus or a hopping, predatory leech. A friend told me that once he walked into a house and saw demons in a child’s stuffed octopus. They were watching him, waiting to pounce. Terrifying! Those little critters were always looking.
Having reached adulthood, I thought I’d successfully banished such entities from my consciousness. Now, I am less certain. Perhaps it is the off-smell in the air, the tumbling news cycle, the weird, greedy men posturing and ripping the flesh off the poor. The world feels charged, crackling at its uttermost edges. Meanwhile we stare at each other through digital lenses, unspoken questions lodged in the throat: Where do we go? Who is evil? Who is well? Where is safety? I don’t know if there is Something among us, but it’s hard not to feel that, if there were, this is very much what it would feel like. Some nights, I wonder if we are all possessed by something with a million eyes and heavy breath.
I don’t know if there is Something among us, but it’s hard not to feel that, if there were, this is very much what it would feel like.
But I have felt something like this feeling before. In my twenties, I took two ill-advised trips around the country. On the first I was 26, with a brand new Honda I’d decided to drive away from Florida, just to see what happened. What happened was that I hit the I-10 intersection, turned toward California, and didn’t return home for a month.
On that trip, I learned to love the west and to trust my gut. I spent very little money, mostly on gasoline and Trader Joe’s runs. I ate room temperature brie and baby carrots straight from the bag. I slept in my car, then on stranger’s couches, then in a dusty tent I bought on Craigslist for $8 and began pitching anywhere that looked uninhabited, sleeping wherever I liked and feeling utterly safe, upheld by mountains or the great swaths of rock beneath me. A neuroscientist might say that my prefrontal cortex hadn’t fully developed, and so my security was an illusion, a fluke of an immature brain. And, yes, it may be true that I did not believe that anything could happen to me. It’s also true that nothing happened to me, and I was utterly happy, eager to return.
And so, two summers later, I started another roadtrip, which I began by visiting my brother in Wyoming, where he was working on a dude ranch. He was 18, a brand-new grown up, and our philosophical paths were already diverging, but we shared a sense of humor and a love of the west and were happy together, careening around red cliffs on a four wheeler and spinning up plumes of dust in the path of the sun.
On one of our final nights, I told him of my plan to repeat my adventure and return to the wilderness, that I had brought my tent and would once again go it alone. I was eager to tell him my plans, thinking he would understand. But he did not share my enthusiasm. Instead, he was visibly concerned. He began telling me everything that could happen to me. Animals. Accidents. People. Strangers who could rape me, hurt me, steal from me. I did not have means to defend myself. I should really have a gun! He wanted to get me one, and would teach me how to shoot it. It might be necessary soon, anyway, given where the country was going. He even offered to sponsor my admission to a program where I would learn how to win a gunfight—some kind of survival camp taught by ex-Marines.
Yeah, no, I thought, I’m not going to shootout camp—over my literal dead body. The thought alone was absurd. Those who know me well know that, while I’m enthusiastic about urban berry foraging and have been known to raise the occasional pea plant, I’m not well-suited for a dystopian apocalypse. I don’t want to learn knife-throwing or how to heal a wound with saliva and maple leaves. I have zero desire to bury pinto beans in the backyard. If the situation ever comes to gunfighting in the streets, I’m dead! I accept that.
I told him as much, or at least demurred in some way, thanked him for his concern, told him I would definitely not be needing a weapon. Then I changed the subject, tried to shake it off, got ready for bed. I thought I was okay. Then I fell asleep.
All night I dreamed of annihilation. Fires howled in my ears. Strangers surrounded my car, screaming, beating the windows with obscene pink fists—someone horrible walked toward the tent—tall and with hovering, long shadows— My dream-brain fragmented into a thousand questions: Who would protect me? Where could I go? The shards attacked and attacked until everything turned into a recoiling, until I became the recoil, retreating until I could not retreat any more. I knew I should defend myself, that I had to kill!—but I could only lash out, could only flail with my wavery, watery dream-fingers, while I choked in the smell of my own terror—
A sudden blur of light. A cough in another room. Something looped me under my rib, yanked, and—the fever broke. I was heaved up and out of the hot, fetid sea in which I was drowning and into my own bed, where I was reassembled as a real and breathing body.
That body sat up, blinked, and there I was: myself, and safe again. Then I thought: Well! I think I just met the spirit of fear.
As a child, I’d learned that Bible verse— “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and of a sound mind.” I’d taken it absolutely literally. The spirit of fear was a demon sent from the devil, that could capture you and…do what exactly? I wasn’t sure, but it was best to steer clear.
So I tried not to be afraid, or, at least, not to appear afraid. I was mostly uninterested in childish activities undertaken with other children, so I picked the scariest, most solitary activities and applied a sheen of bravado to them. Climbing things, going up ladders, picking up snakes. I have a distinct memory of overhearing a childhood friend, who, while watching me climb the backyard apple tree, said to her father, “Nellie will go to the very top! She’s not scared of anything!” Which statement puffed me up, because I knew she was wrong but extremely pleased she’d not seen the truth. Of course I had no fear of the apple tree, which had always been my friend and would not allow me to fall. But I was afraid of many things. I am afraid of many more now.
Still, after that unsettling Wyoming night, I began to suspect that my friend had been more right than either of us knew. Sure, I have my anxieties and worries; like my brother, I am also unsettled by the world, scared by what we have created and what may be coming for us. But through some admixture of nature or nurture—certainly not through my own merit—I have never been someone who dwelt in the hallways of fear, who felt others were out to get me, or that it was imperative I protect myself at any cost.
That night I’d wrestled something new, a different and darker angel: The feeling of desperation and contraction, of something coming after you—a murderer at your heels, a death knife at your throat. Of retreat, abandonment, isolation. Of I’m in this by myself. Of I’m going to keep what’s mine even if I have to shoot you to do it. It felt real. It was real. It was the spirit of fear, and it was serious business. Driving away from Wyoming, I thought: There are folks who live with this thing. People live that way all the time. And I thought: If that thing was with me all the time, ratcheting a knife in my gullet, yanking me about by my molars…well, I would do anything to be rid of it. I would vote for anyone, betray anything, tear the skin off of any living being.
That night I’d wrestled something new, a different and darker angel: The feeling of desperation and contraction, of something coming after you—a murderer at your heels, a death knife at your throat...
I smell it now, the stench that pervaded that dream. It’s not a demon, exactly—at least, it’s not the kind of grimy, little, voyeuristic being I used to think of as a demonic. Instead, it’s a mindworm, a meme, a virus we catch from each other. It can masquerade as a thousand things, and in a thousand things—common sense, patriotism, resistance—but it degrades the core of our humanity, the vital substrate of who we are and what binds us to each other. It’s being spread, on purpose, by our most powerful digital networks and our most powerful men, and it’s gnawing through the brains of the people I love, gnawing at the foundations of the country I love. I feel the spirit of fear every time someone—a friend, a bot, or a greedy and craven man—tries to tell me that my enemy is my neighbor, or the people across the border, or a stranger on social media. I feel it every time someone tells me I need to hunker down, pick a side, protect what’s mine. I see it. It’s with all of us. It pounds its dream-fists on the tent.
And wherever it walks, it walks with paranoia, retreat and retraction. Social disintegration, broken relationships, rumors of violence and war. Sarah Wilson, who writes about the future we’re all headed into, addressed this recently on a podcast. Sure, she said, if you really want to, you can respond to the events of the world by saving yourself—moving to the middle of nowhere, stockpiling supplies, bunkering against the apocalypse.
But do you realize—she ended, gently—That if you go this route, you will need to defend yourself? Probably with guns?
I burst out laughing! I did realize that! I have been told that so many times, in so many ways, and by so many well-meaning people. That the devil or the libs or the Republicans or the hikers and wildlife of Idaho were after me, or that America wasn’t going to be safe and that the government was out to get me and I should really take pertinent steps, should really find a weapon, trench in, get ready to punch someone who disagrees. Didn’t I want to defend myself? Didn’t I want to prepare?
No. I’m not going to live that way. Do you hear me? I refuse to live that way.
I refuse to live in a defensive posture. If the human community gets out of the precarious position we’ve put ourselves in, it will not be by succumbing to the same mind-patterns that got us here; by defending our little bean patches with our little bean sticks, stealing and hoarding territory, and worshipping those who horde the most resources, but by recognizing and accepting reality—and by building networks on the recognition that we are all in this together and that we all share the same fate. I won’t bow to politicians or influencers or anyone who tries to spread this demon to me or to other people, that screech at me about everything I have to fear, no matter what color they wear. I won’t do it. I get to choose. And with power, love, and a sound mind, I will.
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How to host a story dinner (and why it might be important)
Creating connections with other humans feels more vital than ever. Here's a DIY guide to a process I found surprisingly successful.
IMPORTANT: This piece started out as a simple explanation—intended for a friend—of an unusual approach to human dialogue and peacemaking. It then grew to encompass much more: Origins, personal anecdotes, and a sort of rubric for holding a story dinner event yourself.
Because of all that, this article is nearly 3,000 words long. But you don't have to read all of it! I’ve divided this thing up into sections and recommend the following strategies:
Keep in mind, too—this piece was written in the summer of 2016, before Donald Trump was elected to his first term of office. When posting this article (February of 2025), I nearly edited out any mentions to that zeitgeist. They seemed almost quaint in retrospect.
But I ultimately decided to leave all the references in—unchanged. If anything, I find them a reminder of how important this work is, how much we have left still to do, and how much I need to recommit myself to it.
Okay, let's get into it?
1 | The Beginning
The premise of a story dinner is simple: it’s a time for a group of diverse humans to gather around a common table to eat food, drink something delicious, and tell their stories — not the job interview versions, but the real ones: the ones that involve failure and doubt and uncertainty and, maybe, a few moments of glory.
Weirdly simple, right? Despite that, it’s proven to be monumental in my life, and, in a time when we all desperately need practice listening to our neighbor, it’s an idea whose time has come.
I stumbled on the whole thing accidentally.
One afternoon, deep in the heart of a midwestern winter and exiled to a place I’d never wanted to return to, I realized I’d been lying to just about everyone, including myself, about some very vital things. For years, I’d been maintaining a facade of a belief system that I no longer really held, had people-pleased to the point that I no longer even knew myself. It was making me miserable. I decided to stop, take off the mask, and be myself, whatever that might cost and whichever relationships I might lose.
And, as soon as I realized I’d been lying, I also realized the problem: there was almost nowhere I’d felt comfortable being honest. There was no community, no place to express doubt or uncertainty — at least, nowhere I wasn’t also scared I’d be preached to, where people would shame me or try to change me into something I wasn’t.
So, impulsively, I started a Meetup group for doubters, religious refugees, and ex-fundamentalists and created an event I called “Beer and the Truth.”
I described it like this:
“Let's meet at a common table, have a drink or two, be human beings, and tell our 5-minute ‘misfit stories,’” I wrote. “Come to tell your story. Or come just to listen, laugh, and hang out with friendly people. No pressure or judgment.”
Come to tell your story. Or come just to listen, laugh, and hang out with friendly people. No pressure or judgment.
I clicked the post button, scared to death.
But then the event filled to capacity within forty-eight hours, all strangers. It was our first story dinner, and it was one of the most holy and profound and human experiences of my life.
3 | Why tell stories?
I’ll state the obvious: we’re not exactly living in a time of reasoned and respectful discussion. Everyone is yelling, all the time. In the echo chambers of our internet feeds, on the radio waves, the blue and red boxes on television sets, we’re all yelling at each other, as if across a chasm, voices raised, ears closed.
You are right, and they are wrong, and if you can just say it loud enough, long enough, and cleverly enough, those idiots over there will stop their foolish ways and start behaving.
It’s obvious something’s wrong, but there seems no good way to change it. Small voices are lost in the cacophony. If you want to accomplish anything, you need to make noise, establish a brand, tweet out a zinger. We’re connected in every possible way and profoundly disconnected on a human level.
Clear-eyed prophets have been warning of this for years, but the danger they spoke of is becoming increasingly less abstract. The dystopian hypothesis of Neil Postman’s Entertaining Ourselves To Death has found human and ideological embodiment in the person of Trump, the celebrity candidate of 2016, a TV exaggeration come to life, who yells at everyone, who listens to no one, who deals in shame and ridicule, in stereotypes and cartoon characters, who traffics in Jerry Springer-esque one-liners.
We are stunned. But we also eat it up, because it’s kind of entertaining. We’re too wise, too mature, too smart to yell with Trump, of course, but it’s cathartic and pretty fun to yell at and about him...and at and about his followers. Why don’t they get it? Let’s yell louder and maybe the morons will hear us!
It’s a big, complex problem, and it’s not obvious how we fix it, but it is clear how we don’t.
“You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviors,” says Brene Brown. Why? In her book, I Thought It Was Just Me, she goes on to say that “[s]hame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”
In other words, you will never convince your irritating neighbor to change his mind — or even to see your point of view — by belittling him. You will only succeed in making impossible for him to do so. But pouring him a glass of wine and asking about his life? Well, that’s something to try.
You will never convince your irritating neighbor to change his mind—or even to see your point of view—by belittling him. You will only succeed in making impossible for him to do so.
“Even if my neighbor doesn’t understand my religion or understand my politics, he can understand my story. If he can understand my story, then he’s never too far from me,” says Paolo Coelho, in his introduction to The Alchemist, “ . . . There is always a chance for reconciliation, a chance that one day he and I will sit around a table together and put an end to our history of clashes.”
Or, as Brown puts it, “Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story.”
If we ever hope to fix the rifts between ourselves and other people, to heal the disconnects we humans are constantly creating and aggravating, we have to be able to talk to each other, to resist shaming. We have to re-humanize each other, to dismantle our caricatures and assumptions about others and begin to view them as complex beings with histories and loves and hurts.
One of the most efficient ways to do that is to sit with your “other,” look them in the eye, and hear their story.
3 | The Story Dinner
Here’s what happens at a story dinner:
We gather around a table, order food, introduce ourselves, fill up the beer glasses. Someone makes a joke about awkward social behavior. It’s a big table, but not too big; we keep it to maybe 10 or 11 people. Many are nervous, and it’s understandable: this is distinctly out of the ordinary and no one knows what to do with it.
When everyone is ready, whoever is leading the festivities welcomes everyone, and then gives what we’ve affectionately named The Spiel:
#1: “This is a place to tell your story.”
“This group was formed because we wanted a place to talk, honestly, in safety. We wanted a place to express doubt, belief, frustration, happiness, joy, to say the words, ‘I don’t know.’ We wanted a place where it was okay to be human, to talk about your thoughts, your decisions, and your inconsistencies without having to justify them.
“This is that place. You can take off your mask here.”
#2: “What is said here, stays here.”
“To ensure that this remains a safe place, don’t discuss anything you hear tonight with anyone else in any other place.”
#3: “Please honor every storyteller.”
“Some may say things that surprise you or make you a little bit uncomfortable or, you feel, are just plain wrong. Please respect them by not reacting in a way that would make them uncomfortable.
“Remember that you are hear to listen, not to judge.. Give each person the same respect you want them to give you.”
#4: “Say as much or as little as you like. There’s no test.”
“There’s no pressure, and no checklist you have to check off.”
#5: “Keep it to around five to eight* minutes or so.”
“Remember that there are many people around you who also deserve time to speak.”
“Be aware that I’ll keep an eye on the clock and that I may have to cut you a little bit short in order to ensure time for everyone.”
*Time allotted can change, of course, with the number of participants.
#6: “Please give each storyteller your full attention.”
“Feeling truly seen, truly heard, is rare. We so often divide our attention. We half-listen to whatever is going on.
“At this dinner, we want to intentionally give each person our undivided attention.”
#7: “Don’t interrupt during the story or attempt to analyze it afterwards.”
“Sometimes it’s tempting to ask a question or make a comment in the middle of a story, or to break an uncomfortable silence. We try not to give into that temptation here.
“After everyone has told their story, you’ll have a chance to discuss things, if you like. But until that time, we’ll be going straight from story to story, without discussion.”
#8: “Please ignore your cell phones.”
“Turn ‘em off, silence ‘em...whatever you have to do to ensure they don’t
distract you or the group. Tonight is about the people in front of you.”
#9: “We toast each storyteller when they’ve finished.”
“Yeah, it’s corny. But it takes courage to tell the truth, and that’s worth honoring.”
It takes courage to tell the truth, and that's worth honoring.
The leader asks if there are any questions.
Then we settle down in our seats, order another round, take a deep breath, and begin.
4 | "Wait, does this story dinner thing actually work?"
The whole rubric was cobbled together from my longtime crush on L’Abri, a passing familiarity with the rules of The Ungame, and a love for Alcoholics Anonymous theology that was pretty irrational, given that I’d never attended a meeting in my life.
It was also absolutely untested. I took my little handwritten list of guidelines, marched into the pizza place, and confronted a room full of strangers.
Three hours later, after laughter and tears and about ten small pizzas, they were my dear friends. The night, far from being awkward, was intimate and moving and powerful in a way I could never have expected.
The bonds we formed that night held, too; we formed a community, went on picnics, texted inside jokes, hosted more story dinners with new people. We continue to meet in various configurations. And, for the most part, we are pretty good to each other.
As one of us put it, “It’s kind of hard to be mean to someone once you’ve heard their story.”
It’s kind of hard to be mean to someone once you’ve heard their story.
5 | Guidance & Practical Tips
So, if you want to host one of these yourself, how do you keep it running smoothly? What should you keep an eye out for? We’ve picked up a few tips.
A good theme can go a long way.
Consider providing a focus for the night to give people a direction for their stories.
Our story dinners focus on people’s spiritual and religious journeys, with the central questions something like “Where am I spiritually and how did I get there? What’s my church refugee story?”
Other themes might be, “How did I land where I am politically?” or “How has the race conversation played out in my life?” or “How was I parented and how I do struggle as a parent now?” or “What things have I left behind to get to where I am today?”
Hold the dinner in a quiet, private place.
Find a place where you won’t be interrupted. A neutral location (a restaurant with a private room, say) works great for us. But so could someone’s home, if that level of comfort is there.
If you decide to hold it in a restaurant, do give the waitstaff a clue of what you’re up to so that you won’t be interrupted by countless check-ins and offers of refills. Ask the server to put refill pitchers on the table, and tell them you’ll give them a sign when you need service again. Tell people to have their orders and requests ready so that you don’t waste the server’s time when they do show up.
Treat the restaurant and the waitstaff really well.
Inform others to do the same. Generosity and goodwill set a great tone for the evening. (Plus, if it’s a great venue, you want them to like you.)
Don’t let your group get much above ten participants.
Eight is great. Ten is workable. Twelve is really pushing it. Anything over that, and, considering time for breaks, ordering food, etc., you’re in for a long, long evening.
Keep in mind that, aside from the time factor, it takes considerable mental resources to listen attentively to other people, especially when they’re telling you real and sometimes uncomfortable truths.
After about nine or ten stories, I find I’ve reached the limit of what I can process, and just want to sit back and enjoy chatting with everyone.
The leader starts the storytelling.
It’s tempting to assign it elsewhere, or demure and ask if anyone wants to start, but the truth is that the leader sets the tone and model for the evening.
I’ve said some difficult things about myself during story dinners—things I’ve never actually said anywhere else. Bad things that have happened to me, things I’ve done that I’m not proud of. My first story ended with with something like, “So...uh, I just don’t know.”
If you are vulnerable and open, others will feel that freedom, too.
Don’t forget breaks.
On such a vulnerable evening with no established etiquette, it can be awkward for participants to know how and when to excuse themselves. Make it easy on everyone and call breaks at appropriate intervals.
The leader initiates the toast — and uses it, too.
Toasting each person at the end of their story is a lovely gesture of affirmation and support.
And it’s also a gentle and efficient way to step in if someone is overstepping their allotted time by a significant margin. I’m not religious about time-keeping, but sometimes, out of respect for others, I occasionally do need to help someone wind their story down.
Stepping in with a toast is a winsome and respectful way to do that.
Alert your guests in advance regarding the nature of the event.
It’s a bit jarring to go to what you think is a normal dinner party and, halfway through, find yourself next to a person sobbing convulsively over their crippling struggle with substance abuse.
Be intentional about who is at the table.
Disclaimer: Every story dinner I’ve held has been populated primarily by people of diverse backgrounds and opinions who don’t know each other. In a way, that adds to the safety of the evening.
So, if a significant portion of your group is coming from your friend/family set, be especially wise about who you invite (and the theme of the evening). That’s not to say that you shouldn’t give people a chance to surprise you, but I would be wary of inviting, say, both halves of a recently ex-ed couple.
You might also consider a few extra directives to ensure that personal storytelling doesn’t become an exercise in gossip or underhanded digs at anyone else. A simple “I know we all have some history together, so do your best to be kind and to focus on your story,” might suffice.
6 | In Closing
Look, take none of this as gospel. It’s just one set of ideas. There’s no perfect way to fix our cultural communication problem, to calm down all the yelling. But I’m firmly convinced that we must try. Even if we don’t know what the outcome will be, we still, as Chinua Achebe put it, have the “obligation to struggle.”
Recently, I attended a political discussion with the same group of wonderful rascals who attend the story dinners. We circled the big questions, round and round, but then the conversation settled a little and came to rest on something vital: that politics are made by people, that real change happens in small, local ways when ordinary people commit to see each other as human and to work together to clean up their corner of the world.
Real change happens in small, local ways when ordinary people commit to see each other as human and to work together to clean up their corner of the world.
You may not be able to calm down partisan mayhem. But, by God, you may be able to get a two very different people to sit down at the same table and listen to each other. And this is a worthy work, the seed where change can start.
It’s easy to get caught up in sweeping, complex problems and forget that we, too, have a corner of the world which desperately needs our attention. We have to fight apathy and find the courage to build bridges to each together, whatever that looks like, and however small the effort seems.
We must tend to our corner. Because we cannot give up on each other now.
Where do we go from here?
Carl Jung addresses the moment, in a way.
“The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things.”
Carl Jung
I accidentally wrote a dead book. What do I do now?
I finally finished my book and all I got was this uncomfortable truth.
I'm going to start by doing something absolutely insufferable, which is to start off a blog by quoting myself. (It's short. There's a point.)
Here you go:
A realization that hit me hard early in my graduate degree was that craft was not vision, and, while even a tiny amount of vision could make up for a multitude of technical sins, no amount of technical prowess could make up for a lack of vision.
If a piece of work was fundamentally lifeless, it could and would not be revived—not by might or willpower or impeccable sentence-wrangling. The work had energy to channel, or it did not, and it was prudent to figure out which statement applied to the situation at hand and cut my losses immediately if the outlook looked bleak.
That paragraph is quoted verbatim from my MFA thesis, where it languished in the middle of a section about creativity and the philosophy of AI. In the section, I wondered where writerly “vision” came from and whether such vision could be replicated by a machine. Interesting stuff! Certainly zeitgeisty enough for any self-respecting thesis.
But now all that high-falutin' talk of craft vs. vision has come back to haunt me, because I've finished my book and large swaths of it are, yes, fundamentally lifeless—they feel patched in, or too heady, or simply aren't breathing in the way every bit of a book needs to breathe. This book has no energy! It's kaput! It is an ex-parrot! (Confused? See [a] below.)
What's worse: The book has taken a long time and many drafts to complete. So much for “cutting my losses immediately.”
You shouldn’t feel sorry for me, though. This realization, while discouraging, has put me firmly on the path to figure out exactly what it is that makes a work lifeless or energetic.
One promising hypothesis has come from Nuar Alsadir’s book, Animal Joy, in which she discusses the mechanics of communication—namely, the unique vitality that only emerges when one speaks authentically, which is to say—from one’s own body. Drawing on her experience as a psychotherapist, Alsadir talks of Wilfred Bion’s theory about elements of thinking:
Alpha elements are the brain-to-brain elements, ego-ridden, thoughts which are digested and can be articulated in concrete forms. Beta elements, meanwhile, are the raw experiences—the sub-language textures that can be communicated body to body without the higher linguistic brain being any the wiser. Alpha elements can be deceitful; beta elements never can be.
It occurs to me that the kind of writing I instinctively recoil from — from others or myself — is the alpha-lead stuff, in which it’s clear that the writing is ultimately an elaborate performance—a theatrical mask. Brightly painted, yes, and very possibly beautiful, but an obfuscation.
My hypothesis here: The lifeless sections of my book are the ones that my body and instinct had nothing to do with. They're the bits of my book that came from my ego, the part of my brain that wants to make itself feel better by being A Really Excellent Writer.
The lifeless sections of my book are the ones that my body and instinct had nothing to do with. They're the bits of my book that came from my ego, the part of my brain that wants to make itself feel better by being A Really Excellent Writer.
There's no easy craft fix here. There's no way to replicate beta-lead work through technical means. Amateur writers try to induce a similar effect via explicit body words (all those elbows and bones!), but this shortcut works only sometimes and only on a surface level. If the work itself is lifeless, such sensory writing isn't so much evocation as affectation. The brain, speaking of and as the body, is wholly unconvincing, rife with ulterior motive.
In short: The long way ‘round is also the only way ‘round and that is: To get work that speaks, body to body, you have to tell the truth from the body. Feel your way forward a little. Be willing to slow down, stop for a while, wait until the body knows what it wants to say.
In my situation, there’s no rectifying the bad bits through revision (that part, at least, I got right in my thesis!). Poking at dead things won't make them any less dead. The only way forward is to throw out any corpses and go back on the hunt for what lives.
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Postscripts and references.
[a] If you didn't catch that reference, that means you're lucky enough to be seeing this for the first time. (I envy you! Sincerely!)
[b] Mats Eilertsen, who I listened to on repeat while writing the above.
(2/2024)
Hope is an unsexy word, but it might be what we need.
The movement for change is getting mired in Internet Despair. Rebecca Solnit has a recipe for getting out of it.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: The last several years have been, arguably, the most depressing years in recent record for those unsettled by extremist currents in American public and religious life, and, yes, it was especially painful for those of us with ties, however frayed, to the Evangelical church. We’d been betrayed, yet again, by those who claimed to speak for God. It’s an old story, but no less painful for being old.
Still, something about the way we’ve handled all of this has bothered me deeply. It’s a discomfort that I haven’t quite been able to name, a resistance to the the way our collective discourse has gone: the biting sarcasm, the streams of comments and retweeted toxicity, the doom and gloom and casting of blame. About halfway through 2020, I turned off Twitter, unable to deal with the collective indignation. It all seemed profoundly unhealthy in a way that I wasn’t quite able to parse out. We’ve been mishandling something.
Last week, I picked up Hope in the Dark and Rebecca Solnit helped me out. In her chapter about the American election of 2004, “When We Lost,” she writes:
Sometime before the election was over, I vowed to keep away from what I thought of as “the Conversation,” the tailspin of mutual wailing about how bad everything was, a recitation of the evidence against us—one exciting opportunity the left offers is of being your own prosecutor—that just buried any hope and imagination down into a dank little foxhole of curled-up despair. Now I watch people having it, wondering what it is we get from it. The certainty of despair—is that kind of certainty so worth pursuing?
There it is! This has been the era of the Conversation, of accusation and self-flagellation, of wallowing in the 24 news cycle of unceasingly dire news, of endless social reposts and mounting anger, of mourning things we knew and things we did not know, of the endless projection and refraction of anger until we stood in a house of mirrors, our anger infinitely morphing and reflecting and thwarting itself into new forms until finally settling into despair—unfocused, ruthless, self-destructive despair.
This has been the era of the Conversation, of accusation and self-flagellation, of wallowing in the 24 news cycle of unceasingly dire news, of endless social reposts and mounting anger.
Throughout all of this, we—yes, yes…I—forgot one thing which Solnit points out with laser-like specificity: None of us actually know what is going to happen next. That story has not been told. But by wallowing in the Conversation, I was robbing myself of the opportunity (and, frankly, energy) to help tell it.
Solnit is ardently anti-wallowing. She writes,
“[H]earing people have the Conversation is hearing them tell themselves a story they believe is being told to them. What other stories can be told? How do people recognize that they have the power to be storytellers, not just listeners?”
How, indeed?
The tricky part for those like me (that is, who grew up in fundamentalist-leaning faiths) is acknowledging that we’ve yet again succumbed to the temptation of certainty. For—as Solnit points out—however well ensconced in correct language and well-intentioned outrage, that’s what our collective fatalism ultimately is: A certainty that things will turn out badly.
And, as former Evangelicals know all too well, certainty how the world’s story ends leads directly to inaction, a paralysis so well-rationalized that it feels like righteousness.
Certainty how the world’s story ends leads directly to inaction, a paralysis so well-rationalized that it feels like righteousness.
So maybe we could take a page from Solnit and reframe all of this. Maybe this isn’t American culture’s long and inevitable slide into decay, but an upheaval which enables the rebuilding, the wrecking ball that makes way for something new. Maybe what we’re looking at is not a culture on the edge of the abyss, but a bunch of humans confronting a profound disruption of narrative, a sea-change of thought in American culture and a mass exodus from the old ways of perceiving and talking. Maybe. It could be.
The point: I don’t know and neither do you. But I don’t think it’s beyond us to leave the Conversation and, instead, tell a new story about faith and its place in the world.
To do that, though, we have to have a story, to be for something. We can’t simply reject the old narrative, be the “ex,” the against, the ones who say no. We can’t just rage against the inevitable on social media. We’d have to decide what we’re for, declare what kind of world we want to live in and live in that world as boldly as we can. We’d have to eke out the courage to, as Heaney puts it, “Believe that further shore / Is reachable from here.”
We have to have a story, to be for something.
And there’s the rub: those of us who grew up righteous had a story and it let us down. For many of us, the dissolution of our old narrative was deeply traumatic. Our communities, self-worth, families, and identities hemorrhaged. And for those of us who walked away wounded, committing to a new story—with the fervor necessary to join in the telling—is a step of such bravery and vulnerability that it feels, frankly, impossible. Believing in something again would be an act of self-donation, profoundly religious. It is exposing our neck, once again, to the axe.
And, when we come right down to it, is it even possible to tell a story, collectively, without certainty? What do narratives about the future, faith, belief, and religion look like when you remove the platitudes, the systems of control, the neat sorting algorithms used to sort one another into cleanly edged groups marked In and Out? In the vacuum left by old orthodoxies, can we build a new orthopraxy strong enough to hold us together?
Again, I don’t know and neither do you. But since the Conversation no longer seems an option, I’m game for trying hope instead.
Orthodoxy won't save the world. But orthopraxy might.
To channel Bruce Wayne, it's what we do that defines us.
As with many other young evangelicals, I grew up under the auspices of orthodoxy, which is to say that what one believed is what mattered. To save people, you got them to "believe in Jesus" and declare as such. Believe with thy heart and confess with thy mouth. Any admonitions to read the Bible and do God's work were decidedly after the fact. What one did was important, too, but only in a hazy, ill-defined way I never understood. What was clear was that if you screwed up you could be forgiven as long as you believed in the appropriate doctrines. In other words, you can raise hell your entire life, be converted on your deathbed, and skid into heaven on a technicality.
This culture of right belief over right action—of orthodoxy over orthopraxy— was a large part of my early and ongoing grievance against my evangelical upbringings. The more I became disillusioned with evangelical leadership and action, the more the pontificating on belief and public skirmishes over belief-centered artifacts began to grate.
Before my final exit from the Christian fold—although "final exit" is perhaps a bit too strong for my slow drift away from the altar and out the church door—I was drawn to more ancient practices of Christianity, mostly because they were practices. Physical objects appeared and were handled. On high holy days one fasted, or prayed, or threw confetti at a church altar, or something. People did things. Sometimes the Lutherans opened hospitals and cared for the poor. It was nice.
By the time I got as far as Roman Catholicism, though, it was too late. The well was poisoned. The drift bore me relentlessly out the door.
The combination of the DJT presidency and the utter lunacy of my former spiritual leaders has turned me a bit religious, though, in the sense that I feel devoted to things; I want to save the whole damn world.
But not by thinking the right things, saying the magic words, or joining another Good Guy Club. In truth, I find the intellectual posturing and political correctness of the left nearly as exhausting as the rabid ideological insanity happening on the right. There are so many rituals and code phrases—things one must think, things one must absolutely never say, and questions one really shouldn't ask in public or out loud. It's as as steep a purity spiral and as rigid an orthodoxy as any I ever saw.
In the aftermath of Charlottesville car attack—remember that?—there was a push on social media to stand up and declare which side you were on. It all felt very religious: Think the right thing—and then be sure everyone knows you're one of the cowboys in white hats. But how much declaration is enough? How many words will it take to sort out this mess? How many rallies do I need to attend before everyone sees I'm on the right side? How loudly and how long do I have to declare the doctrine before I'm one of the so-called good guys?
How many rallies do I need to attend before everyone sees I'm on the right side? How loudly and how long do I have to declare the doctrine before I'm one of the so-called "good guys"?
In the midst of the mêlée, the quote I've turned to the most is from Wendell Berry, who humbly suggests that "[m]aybe we could give up saving the world and start to live savingly in it."
Those who grew up with the same kind of evangelicalism I did will recognize this concept as pretty much fundamentally opposed to evangelical orthodoxy. Because everything in evangelicalism is about saving the world. Not the actual world you and I live in, mind you, but the theoretical, futurey-wuturey world that will be labeled as Saved when all the people in it (who are future people—not us) believe and say the right thing about God. It's an unreachable utopian ideal, as is so much of evangelical theology.
What I like about Berry's idea is that it's rooted in the real, the concrete. The word "living" is in the present perfect progressive tense. It must be done here—in the muddy and half-baked Now—and it will continue into the future with no specific expectation of an end. Living savingly has no finite goal and no real measure of success. It's a concept grounded in messy and unending reality—in the humans, relationships, and physical objects which surround us and which we have the power to affect.
What does living savingly look like? I've been trying to figure that out. I have an ache to figure that out. My own attempt at living savingly has looked largely like a series of adjustments: staying in conversations from which I'd otherwise excuse myself, a sputtering project to gather people in my home every week, carrying around a coffee carafe, changing where I shop, changing my writing goals.
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The adjustments don't feel like much in the grand scheme of things. They are slight reorientations. Sometimes they are too slight.
So, in the end, I have no great revelation, but I have come to two conclusions. The first: No other human can tell you how to live savingly—or give you the conviction necessary to do it. Likewise, no one has the right to extract a confession of belief or demand that you flash a "good guy card." There are no lawful initiations to this game we're all born into, squalling. You must do the best you can by your neighbor. You must—to risk quoting an old nemesis—"work out your own salvation."
No other human can tell you how to live savingly—or give you the conviction necessary to do it.
The second: releasing oneself from the obligation to save the entire world—to "think of the small as large" as the Tao Te Ching puts it—is one sure step away from despair. The dismissal of Everything is what allows us to start on the road to our Something—whatever that might be. Of course, our Something will never be enough. But I don't think it's supposed to be. The cosmos of good appears to operate by a math I don't understand.
In his 2014 article Burn Your Indecision to the Ground, David Sessions outlined a plan of resistance:
"[S]tart living different ways, a little at a time. Start committing to people, places, things. Say yes to your friend’s party Saturday night, and go anyway even when something better comes up. Join an organization that fights for an issue you care about, and keep going even when the meetings are long, boring, and seem pointless. Fight for someone . . . . immigrants, minorities, the homeless, the incarcerated, whoever; you’ll realize you had more in common with them than you thought. Commit to a person or people; stay in the same city with them, live with them, marry them. Join a union, especially if you’re the only member under 50; if there isn’t one where you work, start one. If you can find one that hasn’t retreated into spiritual apoliticism or reactionary traditionalism, I don’t even care if you take up a religion. The point is to build human ties, add little by little to your network of solidarity, make it thicker and stronger. It won’t be enough, but it’ll be a start."
Sessions wrote this well before Trumpist hell broke loose, so the resistance he described was not against Trump or his cronies but against the very ideological current that later was to bear them up. His advice was even more sound for its prescience. After all, the year really makes no difference: be it in 2014 or 2017 or 2025, we deal not so much with the power of people as with the power of ideas, of too-simple narratives, of ego-stroking propaganda. We wrestle now not with fellow citizens, but with an old American demon—an ideology we have fought with since the beginning.
We wrestle now not with fellow citizens, but with an old American demon—an ideology we have fought with since the beginning. If it is to be defeated, it will not be by repeated declarations of horror on Twitter or by heroic acts in flames of glory.
If this ideology is to be defeated, it will not be by repeated declarations of horror on Twitter or by heroic acts in flames of glory, but by the stalwart obedience of a multitude of ordinary people able "to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways," as David Foster Wallace put it. In other words, a communal system of action, an orthopraxy of everyday justice, of bull-headed devotion to good work, and of deliberate attention to those things and people termed inconsequential by a for-profit culture.
Again, it's not enough. But for those of us orphaned from our faith communities and haunted by old gods, it is something: A rubric of sanity and a way to approach our days.
(This article was written in 2017 and updated slightly.)