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On Waking Up, a New Year, and Why She Can’t Read My Novel Yet

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Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope…who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art…

Ursula K. Le Guin

Seven months after my book released, I am coming to terms with my status as an ordinary author. My writing life is simple, and good. There is a book on my shelf with my name on it. There are the lovely reminders from readers that my book meant something to them. And I am learning to receive this as a gift: I’m not as big a deal as I always hoped I’d be.

– Micha Boyett

I stood in the lobby of our hotel in New York City at noon on the day after Christmas, packed in a line of thirty mostly unhappy people. I still had my coat on, and I was warm, getting warmer. The bar stools were all taken, the sofas were full, and piles of luggage lounged on carts waited to be delivered to new rooms. Me and my tribe? We were just trying to check out. We had been in the city for 24 hours, had our fun, and were ready to return to small-city life.

The wait was long. I pulled out my phone and continued reading one of the best books I’d read in a long time, All the Light We Cannot See. It was the climax, the peak of the story, and in that moment I was no longer in a city of 8.4 million people. I was no longer waiting in a lobby surrounded by baggage, holding my phone. I was in France, in 1944, surrounded by the detritus of war. Smoke rose from the rubble and restless refugees wandered through a broken land. A young, blind, French girl asked a young, starving, German soldier a question.

She says, “When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”

He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.”

I looked up at the television screens showing images of Times Square. I watched the bellmen and the receptionists and the bartenders scurry from here to there. I watched the people around me, complaining or reuniting or checking their phones, consumed by stimuli, seemingly oblivious to the startling, beautiful world around them.

Am I awake? Am I living my life?

* * * * *

I find myself feeling a little untethered at the end of another year. And what a year. We moved from forty acres of woods to a small sliver of city. My sister got married on a beach in Florida. My wife had a baby, number five, Leo Henri, our gentle giant. Soon after he was born, I was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night, my colon blocked, my world shaking. A kind young father, a guy I knew from high school, passed away, leaving a wife and three children behind on this side of that dark passage. My parents sold their place, the basement of which has housed my family and I for two small chunks of very transformational time. I published a novel.

These years, they come and go, and some of them seem to pass like one breath leading seamless to the next. Other years are long sighs, or rattling coughs. Or gasps. Or the breath that comes through a smile. I’m still not sure exactly what kind of breath this year was, but it refuses to pass unnoticed, unrecognized.

As I stood in line in that hotel in New York City and read that passage from that heart-breaking, beautiful novel, I considered 2014 and I thought to myself, “Wake up and live your life.” Because if I’m honest I have to say that I slept through much of it, numbing myself with Netflix binges and an ever more encompassing cell phone addiction. I recognize in myself an inability to stop consuming the very things that are breaking me down.

I think we all feel that message at different times in our lives, to varying degrees: Wake Up. Live your life. I felt it strongly in 2001 when Maile and I moved to England and then again in 2009 when it was time to leave Virginia and come home. It came in 2011 when Maile and I started talking about traveling across the country. I felt it this summer when I realized, no, when I knew, that I needed to publish The Day the Angels Fell.

We all feel this message from time to time, this calling from comfort into discomfort, from predictable to not, when this hand reaches down and offers to draw us out of the rut we’re spinning in. For each of us, that call seeks to bring us closer to the center of ourselves, but it almost always arrives in the form of a question beginning with the words, “Are you willing…?”

For me? This year? I can sum it up for you in two questions that came to me through the mist of two powerful things I recently read, one shared by my friend Emily Freeman, and the other written by my friend Micha Boyett.

“Are you willing to see through our…obsessive technologies to other ways of being?”

“Are you willing to believe you are not as big a deal as you always hoped you’d be?”

* * * * *

I am beginning to remember the freedom that comes when I answer that call to Wake Up, no matter how nonsensical or counter-intuitive the ensuing steps may seem at the time. I’m beating around the bush, I know. The long and the short of it is this: the answers to these questions, in 2015, wait for me on the other side of something difficult, namely spending much less time on social media, less time blogging, less time building a platform for myself. It’s time, once again, to step back. Breathe.

I’ve come to enjoy Facebook and Twitter and the kind responses you offer to my blog posts. I’ve made real friends online, people I will stay in touch with through other means. But I also realize that my addiction to the short spurts of approval that come through Likes or Retweets nearly kept me from the long, concentrated time I required to write a novel that I’m very glad I wrote. I don’t want to watch the next five years pass and suddenly realize I have little more to show for it than a few hundred forgotten blog posts, a few thousand Facebook fans, or 1500 pithy Facebook updates.

I know you might ask, “Why are the two mutually exclusive? Why can’t you write and do social media?” I’m not sure. I can’t explain it. But for me, that’s just how it is. I have not been able to dive deeply into writing the novels I want to write…except during the year I took a break from blogging. Also, I must emphasize that this is not a value judgment on social media and it’s impact on society. Or on you. It’s a value judgment of myself, a realistic assessment of my capabilities, of how much I can handle, of what’s important to me, right now, and what it will take for me to Wake Up.

* * * * *

When I released The Day the Angels Fell just over a week ago, I was mostly nervous about one thing, and that one thing came up in a comment left by a reader of this blog. She wrote:

Looking forward to reading this once my head is clear. Finding ‘death as a gift’ a difficult concept at the moment.

How can death be a gift? How can the thing that separates us from those we love be a gift? How can other, less literal deaths (the loss of jobs, the giving up of things, the turning away from things we want) be considered something worth having? The last thing I’m trying to do with this book is diminish the pain we feel when we experience some kind of death.

I had a long talk with Caleb Wilde about this last week, and I’m still not sure exactly how it plays out, this idea of death being a gift. Yet I know this: stepping back from social media and blogging feels like a kind of death to me. But it also feels like an amazing gift. That, I think, is where the tension lies: the loss we feel when we encounter death does not always coalesce with the knowledge that death can be a passageway to somewhere or something better.

So what lies on the other side of this passage?

I will focus on the projects I’m being paid to write. I will begin writing a sequel to The Day the Angels Fell. Maile and I will take a trip to New Orleans, because that seems to be where the sequel will take place, and I want to look around, feel the place, walk the streets. In April and May we’ll tour the country, talk about the book and meet new friends and hear what you have to say about death being a gift, or not. Once the trip dates and locations are set in stone, I’ll post them here and send out an email to those subscribed to the list.

If you’re currently asleep, I hope you’ll consider what it might take for you to Wake Up.

If you’re currently experiencing some kind of death, I hope you’ll hold out hope for something better on the other side.

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Stop Listening To Those Voices. Create.

A friend of mine posted this on her FB page last night. She received her book! They're making their way into the world, and I'm in two minds about that.
A friend of mine posted this on her FB page last night. She received her book! They’re making their way into the world, and I’m in two minds about that.

I spent over two hours in the post office on Friday mailing nearly 200 copies of The Day the Angels Fell to six different countries. At first the lady at the post office wasn’t too sure what to think of me, but by the end of it we were chatting amicably and when I found out she liked to read, I gave her a copy. You can always tell a reader by the way they receive the gift of a book.

Two hours is a long time to stand there watching someone scan and rescan and rescan barcodes and stamp stamp stamp and type type type. It was one of those times when the voices started up again in my head. Those good old voices.

Kickstarter was a great idea, wasn’t it? the first voice asked. I mean, now instead of making a fool of yourself in front of your family and friends, you’re doing it in front of a few hundred people!

I grimaced.

Also, another voice chimes in, now that you’ve already started scheduling a book tour, that will work out perfectly once all those 1-star reviews start coming in. How fun will that be, touring with a book that everyone hates!

I squirmed.

These guys don’t pull any punches. They know how to hit you where it hurts.

* * * * *

After listening to Anne Lamott the other week, I realized that one of the things I love most about her is that she’s reached a stage in life where she seems not to care what other people think about her, and she doesn’t try to control others. Wow. Those are two things I would love to be able to say.

I don’t care what other people think about me.

I refuse to try to control other people through judgment or manipulation.

I feel lighter, just thinking about living that way.

* * * * *

So as those yellow envelopes got barcoded and stamped and sent to Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, England, and the US, I decided that I was going to celebrate the moment. I sent out 200 books to people who wanted to read them! That’s pretty cool. On the way home I stopped at the Fractured Prune for a dozen Mocha Buzz donuts, and when I got home they were still warm and Maile, my kids and I had a little celebratory snack, both because I had escaped the purgatory that is the USPS on a Friday just before Christmas and also because The Day the Angels Fell is making its way into the world. I don’t think we celebrate our creative endeavors enough. I know I don’t.

We can’t let our fear of failure keep us from creating. We can’t let an overdeveloped need-for-acceptance stunt our development as creative people, because this thing has to be created in order for that next thing to be created in order for that finally-beautiful thing to be created. Start now and don’t look around. Put on the blinders. Move forward.

Create.

* * * * *

For any of you who receive your copy this week, post a photo of you with the book on Instagram or Facebook and tag me (@shawnsmucker on Instagram or Shawn Smucker, Writer on Facebook), and you’ll be entered to win a free copy of the book. On Friday I’ll draw five winners and mail a copy to one person of your choosing (which could be you if you want a second copy).

Four days until the launch!

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Finding Peace in the Dark (And It Really Is A Wonderful Life)

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Some days you just feel pulled in seven different directions in a world that won’t let go, don’t you? A great breakfast with a friend and then walk six blocks home and some of the kids are sick so I had to take the girls to the dentist and before I knew it, it was four o’clock and things are still piling up. Work for an hour. Clean the house. Eat dinner. Do the dishes. Bed time snack for the kids.

Then I hear Leo crying so I leave Maile with the oldest four and go up to the dark bedroom and pick him up and rock him back and forth. His eyelids get heavy and he sucks on his index finger these days and you know what? There’s nothing like singing hymns to a sick baby in a dark room if you’re looking for peace.

What a friend we have in Jesus
All our sins and griefs to bear
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer

Later we watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” and I finish off the ice cream because there’s not really enough left for the older four to split (“Nice of you to take one for the team,” Maile says). Maile cries in the beginning of the movie, when Mr. Gower accidentally puts poison in the capsules and then young George Bailey confronts him about it. We both cry at the end when George’s brother gives the toast: “To my big brother George…the richest man in town.”

* * * * *

I think back to what Bryan and I talked about at breakfast, how we have no idea what 2015 might hold. That’s both encouraging and terrifying. I think back to the beginning of 2009, back to when we had no idea the ride we were about to embark on: $50,000 in debt, my parents’ basement, trying to scratch and claw my way into a writing life. I think back to the fall of 2012, when I had no idea how good the next two years would be – Sri Lanka, Istanbul, and so many great writing projects. A move to a cabin on 40 acres of woods. Then a move into the city.

Who knows what’s next.

And that song comes to mind again, that old hymn I sang to sick little Leo, the one my Grandma Smucker used to sing:

Blessed Savior, Thou hast promised
Thou wilt all our burdens bear;
May we ever, Lord, be bringing
All to Thee in earnest prayer.
Soon in glory bright, unclouded,
There will be no need for prayer—
Rapture, praise, and endless worship
Will be our sweet portion there.

 

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Taking Communion With Over the Rhine Beneath the Streets of Philadelphia

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Maile and I stood on the Philadelphia sidewalk in the rain, waiting for the doors to open. We crept a little closer to the couple in front of us, the couple holding the massive, multicolored umbrella. It was December, and a cold, city wind swept down the boulevards, peeked into the alleys, raced the drizzle around corners.

At 8pm the doors opened and we followed the slow trail of people up a steep set of steps flanked by two burly, neckless men checking photo IDs. Then the line of people went inside and down steps that led into an industrial basement. Bare pipes and cement walls were covered in old concert posters and artistic graffiti. The tickets had said no smoking, but decades of cigarette smoke escaped the walls and wandered the dark stairwell.

The crowd, all these slowly walking people, descended together, and they felt like family to me because we all loved Over the Rhine, and most of us had been following them, their story, their music, for many years. Decades even. We were in this adventure together, even if it led into the bowels of Philadelphia. Some people, like Over the Rhine, create things of such beauty that you would follow them anywhere, and if you’ve never seen a movie or read a book or heard music that made you feel that way, then you need to open your eyes, my friend, and look around.

Maile and I waited at the bottom of the steps as people showed their tickets, had their wrists stamped, and vanished into the next room. That’s when “our people” arrived.

* * * * *

Another Christmas is drifting in softly
like the ghost of my innocence lost
and the tree in the corner burns brightly
I turned all the other lights off

I look back on my life in its stillness
I consider the days of my youth
and the moments I find myself willing
to surrender and just tell the truth

Cause I’ve committed every sin
and each one leaves a different scar
it’s just the world I’m living in
I could use a guiding star

I hope that I can still believe
the Christ child holds a gift for me
Am I able to receive
peace on Earth this Christmas?

– Over the Rhine, “Another Christmas”

* * * * *

For the last five years we’ve had dinner with this group just about every month. I barely knew most of them before we started sharing food together. There are five of us couples (six including the couple who moved to Florida a year ago and can’t join us very often anymore). When you spend five years with people, you break through the surfacey shit. When you walk with people through miscarriages and stillbirths and children born healthy (we have over 20 children between the six couples), business failures and successes, family stuff, and moving from state to state, well, it’s like a small grove of trees planted so close that their trunks literally start to grow together, their rings shared, their roots and branches entangled.

We haven’t officially taken communion together, but there’s something Eucharistic about those dinners, something holy. Which sounds funny because we’ve had plenty of conversations that push the boundaries of “holy,” but I think that when you start to give your life to other people, it’s the bread and the cup, the Body and the Blood.

* * * * *

Seeing their eight faces come through that dark door brightened that entire venue, and we laughed and hugged and went inside, found our seats.

I’ve been listening to Over the Rhine ever since 1996, when one of my roommates had an unhealthy obsession with them. But from the moment I heard their song “Poughkeepsie,” I got it. I fell in love with the way Karen Bergquist and Linford Detweiler’s voices swirled together and took me away.

And that’s what happened in that industrial basement on Saturday evening, way later than this 37 year old is used to staying up. I felt transported to another dimension, a place where nothing existed except that moment, that chord, that harmony. That mandolin solo. That aching lyric. That moment of silence in between notes.

Cause rain and leaves and snow and stars
and that’s not all my friend
they all fall with confidence and grace
so let it fall
let it fall

– Over the Rhine, “Let it Fall”

* * * * *

The next morning, my friend Janelle wrote a letter to Over the Rhine, and they featured it on their Tour Diary. Here’s a small part of what she wrote:

We drove down there together, just a bunch of regular salt-of-the-earth folks. The ten of us, (“The Dinner Club”) have been meeting once a month for several years. We’re all in our mid 30’s, early 40’s and some of us have been listening to you for 20 years. What a DIVINE time we had. Thank you for being so inclusive in your performing. We could feel the trials and pain, the joys raining down from that stage last night, balm to our weary souls. We truly felt that in that dark, dingy basement in the middle of that bustling city, we met with God. I loved the imperfections, (and perhaps tacky) nature of the venue, it was an outward display of our inner workings….kinda hidden, a little messy, but lovely nonetheless.

* * * * *

A little messy, but lovely nonetheless.

And so after all of that, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I hope you have a good Christmas season, even amidst the dreariness of so many things lost, the seemingly impossible waiting, the sense that this world will never quite be enough. I hope you find a star to follow, and I hope it leads you to what you’re looking for.

* * * * *

Over the Rhine recently released a beautiful Christmas album, “Blood Oranges in the Snow.” Check it out HERE.

If you’d like to hear the story of how Over the Rhine gave me permission to use the lyrics from “Poughkeepsie” as front matter for my upcoming novel, check that out HERE.

The venue where we saw Over the Rhine was Underground Arts.

 

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If You Constantly Think There Must Be Something More to Life…Maybe There Is

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It’s the great tension. Comfort versus adventure. We crave both. Comfort usually wins, but it doesn’t like to share, so we let it lull us to sleep. Before we know it we’ve organized our entire life around that small god, making every decision based on the perception of stability. We lay our dreams on the altar, pretending that someday we can retrieve them, or that Comfort will give them back to us when we are old and gray.

In the last fifteen months, two of my friends died, both in their mid-30s. The future will wait for some of us, but not all.

I know it might sound irresponsible, or breathtaking, or maddeningly idealistic, but just consider it for one moment. Forget what you should do, what you feel pressured to do, what you’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on a degree to do. What if you were designed for more than entering data into a spreadsheet? Or constantly trying to crest the waves of email that threaten to drown you every day? What if your mind-numbing commute is actually that…numbing your brain to the things you would love to do?

Dream big. And I don’t mean big financially. Dream bigger than that. What if your personality, your skill set, your strengths and passions and loves, make you the perfect fit to serve refugee communities spilling into Lebanon from Syria? Or to adopt multiple children? What if your ability to think on your feet would make you one of the most successful fighters against human trafficking the world has ever seen? What if your ability to form relationships in hostile environments lines you up perfectly to serve in the more difficult places of the earth, places where others are currently trying and failing?

Maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe you have close friends who desperately need you once a week, and you simply need to make time for them. Maybe you’re an organizer and can help the local food pantry go to the next level. Maybe you have one or two or three or more littles in your house who need forming. Imagine a world where children are protected and not exploited, nurtured and not abused. You can be part of that. You can participate in that.

Maybe you have a book you need to write.

Maybe you need to paint a picture.

I’m not saying that what you’re doing now isn’t important. I’m not saying a paycheck isn’t worth anything. But if you live your life with that constant nagging in the back of your mind that there must be something more, well, maybe there is.

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“That’s Usually When We Experience God, When We Run Out of Good Ideas.”

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We followed the winding line of brake lights to the far side of the college campus, swinging into the first empty parking space we could find. We got out and walked quickly past dorms and large halls, and all around us there were people walking in the same direction, as if some irresistible force drew anyone within a one-mile radius. Most of the people were in groups of three or four, and they chattered in that excited way people do when they’re on their way to something they’ve looked forward to for a long time.

How did I feel? I felt like I was on the way to meet a long-lost friend, someone who knew me and had spoken life into me for the last twenty years.

* * * * *

I love to read, and I love beautiful books, but I’m not someone who becomes emotionally attached to particular versions of books. At least not very often. I have an 1864 version of Pilgrim’s Progress that I found in hole-in-the-wall bookstore in Windsor, England. My Prayer For Owen Meany is dog-eared and underlined and definitely the worse for wear. I have many books signed  by the friends who have written them, and I’d hate to lose those.

But of all of the books I own, there is only one that makes me feel panicky when I can’t find it right away. It’s my copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. On the inside cover is a short note from the friend who bought it for me

To: Shawn
From: Jason
On your 21st birthday

It was a rather inauspicious gift at the time. Thoughtful, but not something that made me stop and say, “This moment will change my life.” But it did, actually. That book, throughout the years, has given me more joy, solace, and encouragement than any other book I’ve ever read. Anne’s (and yes, I refer to her as Anne because we’d obviously be great friends if we met in person) irreverent and sometimes crass humor took me by surprise. A Christian who drops the f-bomb? A Christian who is a Democrat? A Christian who has Buddhist friends? I had never met a Christian like that; I didn’t know Christians like that even existed.

The first reading of Bird By Bird blew me away. By the second reading, I knew it would be a book I would read many times in my life. By the 20th reading, I’m still taking away new things.

* * * * *

We got closer to the auditorium. Someone handed me a program as we walked through the glass doors: “A Night With Anne Lamott.” We found excellent seats in the balcony and settled in. Anne’s talk was beautiful and hilarious, encouraging and witty. She is everything in person that she projects through her writing. This is a rare quality, a writing voice that carries over into real life.

But of all the things she said, one sticks out in my mind:

“That’s usually when we experience God, when we run out of good ideas.”

And that’s where I’m at, in some ways. I’ve been a relatively successful freelance writer for the last five years, and I will finally get around to releasing my first novel later this month. I feel it in my spirit, that there’s change a-comin’, though I can’t put my finger on exactly what it will be. In some ways I feel like I’m all out of good ideas, but I’ve been here before, and I know it’s  the right place to be.

* * * * *

At the end of night they invited people to get in line and have Anne sign her new book. Maybe chat with her for a few seconds. I thought about it, but then Maile and I walked back into the night. We had a four-month-old at home. Besides, there was nothing more that Anne could give me, not even if I shook her hand, not even if we talked for a few minutes. I have my worn copy of Bird By Bird at home. That’s enough for me.