Category: Postmarked

Jen

It’s wonderful hearing from you, and I’m so glad you guys made it home safely.

Thanks for asking about my novel—I think I’m finding a bit of groove. This one is a wriggling thing, and hard to grab on to, but I’m about 50,000 words in, so the path to the end is in sight.

Today marks two weeks since we were told to stay home as much as possible here in Pennsylvania, two week since schools were canceled. It’s so strange to think about how much has changed since I wrote my letter to you fifteen days ago. Then, life was still relatively normal. We had no idea, or at least I didn’t have any idea, what was coming.

We’re approaching the end of the honeymoon phase of staying home all the time. I know the jokes and memes about being trapped in your house with your children abound, but to be honest, Maile and I have so enjoyed our time with our kids. After all, it’s only been two years since Maile was homeschooling them all, so in some ways this feels like a flashback to a simpler time in our lives, when everyone was under our roof most of the time, and our schedule was in our control. Add to that the fact that Maile and I both prefer not to have busy schedules, prefer to be at home, and these two weeks, in many ways, have felt like a blessing.

And yet.

This morning marked the first time a friend of ours was admitted to the ER with Covid-19. We have close friends who work in the healthcare system, as well as friends in New York City where the disease is exploding. And the fog of uncertainty hangs over everything, no matter how much we enjoy being at home—will our aging parents and friends make it through this? Will the economy recover? Will I still have writing projects through this time, or on the other side of it? How will the publishing industry be changed?

During our dinner club last week, when we met on Zoom instead of in real life, one of our friends laughed and said, “Well, now we all get to live like Maile and Shawn have lived for the last ten years.” I think she was referring to the uncertainty everyone is feeling, and in some ways what she said is true: Maile and I have grown accustomed to uncertainty. Rarely in the last ten years, since I started writing full time, have we had more than three or four months’ income lined up. Often, less than that. A few times, we have had nothing lined up. We have operated, these ten years, with a certain level of trust (more or less, depending on the season) that God would provide what we needed. Strangely enough, and in sudden fashion, it would seem that everyone has been ushered into this kind of uncertain existence.

Trust is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity.

Something that has meant a lot to me during this decade of trust has been Brennan Manning’s book, Ruthless Trust. My favorite quote from that book goes like this:

“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.”

I think we are, all of us, entering into a season that will require more trust than we have ever managed to muster before. As Manning later writes, “The most urgent need in your life is to trust what you have received.” While none of us have chosen to walk into this new life defined by a virus, I think we can still take heart in what Manning has to say, because even here God offers us his presence and his promise.

So, here we are. You and me and our families and nearly everyone on the planet, walking into darkness, waving our hands around in front of us, trying to get a feel for what lies ahead.

May we all sense a presence and a promise during these strange, uncertain times.

Our love to you and yours

Shawn

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Maile and I are going to run the same free writing class for kids again next week that we did this week. These 20-minute classes will be held each day next week, from 3/30 – 4/3, at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time, and we’ll explore creating characters, settings, conflict, plot, and ways to move forward in the writing life. Please share this link with all your friends!

https://eepurl.com/gXC2AH

Dear Jen

Just when I thought the mornings were getting lighter, the time changed, and now all of us here in the Smucker household are meandering around through dark breakfasts again. But despite the darkness, I can tell the seasons are changing. The buds are forming on the trees, the grass is recapturing a kind of hopeful, almost-green hue, and the sunlight lingers in the early evening. My quarterly reminder is here: things will always change, good and bad will come and go, and even the darkest seasons eventually give way to light, even if its soft and can barely be seen above the city skyline.

I’m glad to hear you are on track to finish your next book as planned, although I do have to admit, I felt both a small cringe as well as a sense of awe when you described the process you’ve been through: “I studied 41 chapters in the Bible, read 3,055 pages of commentary, wrote 190 handwritten pages of notes, composed 27000 words in outline, drafted 64,000 for the manuscript.” The cringe comes from my resistance to research. The awe comes from how thorough you are, how dedicated to your craft and the message of your book. Well done, and keep going.

For some reason, thinking of you doing this work reminded me again of the phrase I was handed over a year ago: “Tend to your own garden.” When I envision all of that work you’ve done—the research, the reading, the study, the writing—it brings to mind the image of someone casting seed out over a patch of tilled earth, working diligently in that space, caring for each square foot of the soil. Never mind the expansive farms that border this garden, the ones that stretch on for miles with their complex machinery and ever-droning harvesters. Never mind the ones that seem to be growing more exotic things than the gardens we have been given to look after.

Tend to my own garden. Again and again I come back to this.

Isn’t tending our own gardens the very thing that leads to stories like the one you told in your last letter, where someone gave you a card to let you know how your writing has mattered to her? When we tend our own gardens, when we stop jealously eyeing the fields of others, it gives us the freedom to do the work we have been called to do. And what good work it can be. What good work it is.

And when we tend our own garden, as you mentioned, this “making” does its good work in us. Maybe that is what lies at the end of this writing journey we’re on—not necessarily best-sellers (though it would be nice), or critical acclaim, or awards, but a thorough and complete remaking of ourselves. Can anything till up the inner self like writing? Can anything better use the compost of life than these small literary gardens we’re looking after?

This novel is still a heavy slog, but as one writer said, “Hard writing makes easy reading.” How I hope that will be the case with this one.

Warm 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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In the most recent episode of The Stories Between Us, I make a confession, Maile talks about depression and creativity, and we dig into the weighty topic of revision. You can listen HERE.

Dear Jen

I write this to you sitting in a hotel room in downtown Nashville, getting ready to go hand out ARCs of my upcoming novel, These Nameless Things, to librarians at the PLA conference. Hawking my book to strangers isn’t my favorite thing in the world, but I do love the story—it’s been in my head since 2011ish—so I’m pumping myself up.

As of Wednesday last week, I was completely prepared to write this letter to you. Maile and I left on Wednesday for our annual pilgrimage to Kentucky to spend time with a small group of writers we love. I use the word love in the deepest sense, not in a passing kind of “Oh! I love that book!” but in a way meant to communicate a deep sense of caring and belonging and hoping for. These are writers who not only write beautifully but who also live beautifully. They inspire me to care even more about the craft, the words, the people to whom I’m writing. It is a good, good group.

So, for about three days we ate together, shared our writing with one another, had conversations about downward mobility, publishing, and the desire to be read. We also laughed a lot.

I’ve come away from that meeting, our third time together, thinking quite a bit about the role of community in the writer’s life. And when I say community, I’m talking about writers who gather more or less as equals to encourage, critique, and share about their lives. I don’t think I could keep going without my writing community—not only those writers we met with last week, but my online writer friends, the people who listen to Maile and I on our podcast, and friends like you.

Writing is hard, hard work. Yes, it is fun. Yes, there are few places I’d rather be than perched in front of my laptop with a few blank hours to work on my next novel. Yes, the encouragement, the contracts, the very occasional awards, the positive feedback…these are all nice parts of the writing life. But without the people, without the other writers, I would soon lose myself in an endless feedback loop of self-criticism or self-aggrandizement.

So, thank you. Thanks for being part of my writing community, for coming alongside me for this season, for taking the time to write every other week (or a little less often than that, when I forget to keep the chain going!).

Well, I guess I’d better start polishing my one sentence description of my book for these librarians. They really are some of my favorite people in the world, librarians. They seem to me to be like the sacred keepers of lost worlds. I would never have read Tolkien or Susan Cooper or Madeleine L’Engle at such a young age if it weren’t for my middle school librarian. They really do change our communities for the good.

I hope February is coming to a satisfactory end for you and your family, and that you are charging into the home stretch with your upcoming book due date.

All the best, my friend. Thanks again for your companionship on this writing journey

Shawn