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Postmarked – The End

Today, Jen wraps up our Postmarked series with a kind and hopeful conclusion:

“These letters, arriving weekly, have reminded me that we’re never meant to go it alone. To be needy and vulnerable is to be human. To be discouraged, tired, and anxious is pretty normal. It just helps to have someone in your corner when you sit down, feeling a little bruised, someone who believes that you’ve got more in you for than the fight than you can even see yourself.”

To read this final letter in its entirety, head HERE.

What an encouraging almost-year of letters it’s been. Thank you so much, Jen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Conditions for Creating

Today marks the 39th letter in the correspondence between Jen Michel and me. Here’s a little sample:

“I find myself mired in thinking about writing, in planning for writing. I keep waiting for the best conditions to write rather than writing as time allows. I wait for the best words rather than catching ordinary words, which certainly seem better than no words at all. These are faults I’m able to name, although they’re not faults I feel confident about overcoming, especially when the act of writing, in these pandemic days, feels a little more laborious that it previously did.”

To read the rest of the letter, click HERE.

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What began as a Twitter conversation between two writers on creative work and family life has become an exchange of letters. Here is where Postmarked began:

Postmarked: Dear Shawn (1)

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Postmarked: Dear Jen (38)

Dear Jen,

Winter is hanging on for dear life this year, isn’t it? This past weekend, practically the middle of May, we had to cover our garden plants because of a freeze, and some people in the county reported snow flurries! But this morning, Spring peeks down the alley behind our house—I can see a narrow strip of blue sky, the trees that overhang the lot are a darker green, and the rising sun glances off the top of the brick apartment building.

You are right to address the privilege inherent in a slower, simpler life. If the pandemic has done anything, it has revealed the financial and racial fault lines that remain in our society, and in even starker relief. When infection and death rates are so much higher in poor communities of color; when those who are required to go to work are overwhelmingly people living in poverty; when the benefits that go out seem to prop up the biggest businesses in the world…it can seem so overwhelming.

The phrase you shared from Jill Briscoe’s sermon seems more applicable now than ever before: “Go where you’re sent. Stay where you’re at. Give all you got.” It helps to clarify what I’ve always meant by my own motto, “Tend to your own garden.” We’ve all been given a tiny little corner of the planet to steward, with its people and its sense of community and its resources. I wonder what this means during a pandemic. I wonder what I’m being called to steward—trapped in one’s house, it can require quite a bit of imagination to find anything besides the daily dullness to take care of and tend.

Speaking of “my own garden,” I finished the second draft of a novel I’m working on, one that is scheduled to come out next summer and is the last book I currently have under contract…and I was immediately struck with another idea and began furiously writing. It seems a foolish time to start another novel—These Nameless Things releases in about six weeks, I’ll need to work on revisions for the novel I have to hand in to my editor in July, I’m supposed to be writing a screenplay this summer, and then there are the projects I’m collaborating on with others. And the podcast. And these letters. But sometimes a story won’t wait for a convenient time to reveal itself, so I’m pounding the keys in the off hours, taking notes, writing up character sketches, and getting down the words in the margins of time I can find. My dream is that one day I would be able to support my family on writing fiction alone, but I know that’s unlikely, so I keep everything else going, too.

How is your writing coming along? The work on your next book? How is your family continuing to cope with life during a pandemic? For the first four or five weeks of the stay-at-home order, everything felt strange and new, and we craved for life to return to normal, but after nearly two months, this is beginning to feel normal. Which is strange and a bit scary in itself. How quickly life can change. What seemed to run-of-the-mill eight weeks ago now feels completely foreign.

Wishing you all the best from Lancaster! May you find grace and peace in all the seasons of your life.

Kind Regards
Shawn

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What began as a Twitter conversation between two writers on creative work and family life has become an exchange of letters. Here is where Postmarked began:

Postmarked: Dear Shawn (1)

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The Privilege of Slowing Down

“In many ways, I want a quieter life after “this” is over. I want to take the days more slowly. Still, I can’t help but recognize that privilege, at least in part, allows me this kind of dreaming. I want to resist hurry—and I also want to make that same slowing possible for others in my city.”

Another wonderful letter from my friend Jen Pollack Michel. You can read the whole thing HERE.

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Postmarked: Dear Jen (36)

Dear Jen

I am currently over at my parents’ empty house doing laundry—our washer’s spin cycle sounds like a helicopter taking off, so until the repair person comes or we buy another one, we’re relying on my mom and dad’s machine. We have not spent time with my parents for over six weeks now, and it’s strange to be in their house when they’re not here. Spending our Sunday afternoons here seems like something we did in another life, or perhaps dreamed about.

You are so right about the monotony of days, the repetitions we find ourselves in, the new ways we mark the passing of time. Our days are relatively peaceful: mornings together over breakfast and The Purpose Driven Life; days spent working and writing; early afternoons involve something outside; dinner together; put the “littles’ to bed and watch Downton Abbey with our middles and our bigs.

Our kids have been finding some small measure of freedom by exploring the city, with its empty sidewalks and less busy streets. Our 10- and 12-year old went for a bike ride yesterday, winding their way a few miles to check out the middle school. Our son goes for long walks. Now that the sun has arrived, we spend more time on the front porch or racing around the back alley.

The topic of trust continues to settle in my mind–I think if I were to write a nonfiction book anytime soon, it would have to be on the topic of trust. If you don’t mind, I’ll put this Brennan Manning quote here again, for anyone who missed it when I included it two letters ago:

“The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.”

And now as I write, I remember a story that Henri Nouwen once told, of his obsession with the work of trapeze artists. In a talk he gave (around the 24:30 mark), he reminisced about meeting the leader of a group of trapeze artists, and he was star struck. There were two catchers who never left the swings, simply hung upside-down and caught the other three, the flyers as they made their way through the air. Nouwen had such admiration for their courage and creativity. He asked the leader, one of the flyers, how he did it.

The man paused and then told him that what was most important, as you were coming out of a triple and preparing to connect with the catcher, was making sure you didn’t try to reach for the catcher. If you did, you would almost certainly miss them, or even break your wrists. No, he said the most important part of making that connection was simply putting your arms straight out and trusting the catcher would be there to grab onto you.

Trust the catcher.

That is a phrase Maile and I often say to each other when we find ourselves moving into obscurity, into ambiguity, into a place where there is no “clearly delineated plan for the future.”

Wondering where the next project will come from? Wondering how we’ll pay the bills? Wondering what to do with the decisions our children are making? Wondering what our future will look like?

Trust the catcher.

While I am so ready for these restrictions to be lifted, I do have to say that when I think of the future and going back to our old life, I feel a small twinge of anxiety. I have found gifts in this strange time that I am afraid we will lose when normal returns, whenever that is. This, I think, might be the great challenge of our time–to emerge from this unprecedented uncertainty able to resist the current that would pull us back into any of the destructive practices we used to engage in during “normal” times.

Well, I suppose I’ll have to simply put out my arms, when the time comes, and trust the catcher.

Kind Regards

Shawn

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What began as a Twitter conversation between two writers on creative work and family life has become an exchange of letters. Here is where Postmarked began:

Postmarked: Dear Shawn (1)

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To Where Am I Hurrying?

Another wonderful letter from Jen Pollack Michel:

“I remember thinking, when I first heard this prayer, how often my life feels like “slow progress” and “seemingly endless delays.” For so many of us now, those phrases perfectly characterize this moment. We’re getting nowhere, running endlessly in place. It’s had me wondering recently: why am I in such a hurry, and where do I hope to arrive? Maybe those are some of life’s biggest questions.”

To read it in its entirety, you can head HERE.

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What began as a Twitter conversation between two writers on creative work and family life has become an exchange of letters. Here is where Postmarked began:

Postmarked: Dear Shawn (1)