Category: Postmarked

This week’s letter from Jen is another good one. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s the only way any of us keeps going: this naming of why the work matters, what blessings we gain as we write. Because when February turns colder and grayer, it’s the burdens of the work that will feel truest of all. The slow inefficiencies of the words, their lukewarm reception, their failure to pay the mortgage. What does it matter that you, that I, do this little noticed work?

You can read her letter to me in its entirety 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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In our most recent podcast episode, Maile and I talk about why we stopped homeschooling our kids. Except the episode is about a lot more than homeschooling–it’s about make hard decisions on how to create space for writing, not making decisions out of fear, and giving ourselves permission to baby-step our way into a new life. You can listen to that episode HERE.

Dear Jen

These February days have been gray and wet. This morning the rain has eased off, but the clouds are low and drifting, and the extended forecast is showing ten more overcast days in our future. I’m sitting at the dining room table, which is partially covered by eight folded piles of laundry (one for each of us). Our five-year-old son Leo is coloring in a notebook and eating Cheerios, right here beside me.

I’m trying to figure out exactly how I’m feeling during this gray season—and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I know the days feel fast and short and full. I know our teens have somehow rather suddenly entered a new phase of their lives, and our relationship with them is shifting like ground along a fault line. I know I’m writing a lot of words. In the midst of all this activity, I feel slightly disoriented.

You wrote in your last letter, “Risk is always going to be a part of whatever we do, especially whatever we do as Christians by faith. There is always a risk, in our creative lives, that the work will be misunderstood, ignored, neglected, criticized.”

Risk. I could write about that for a long time, from so many different angles.

I feel like I’m in that phase of my writing life where I’m being asked to double-down, to take everything I might have gained or learned or absorbed, and risk it all again. It’s like I’m seated at a poker table and some cosmic force is saying, You see where writing has gotten you so far. Are you willing to keep going? Are you willing to go all in, again, on writing?

In other words, is the work enough? If I never see substantial returns on my efforts, is the writing enough? I guess it all keeps coming back to those two little words:

Why write?

It is in this space where your words speak so clearly into my current disorientation:

“Are people reading? No matter: serve the work. Are people noticing, admiring? Keep your head down: serve the work. Will there be another contract? Another award? Keep writing. Keep serving the work.”

And it’s interesting to me, that use of the word “serve.” I tend to say “Do the work,” but isn’t what’s required of us in writing much more like serving than doing? With each book, I feel a tangible giving of something to the book itself, something essential, some deep part of me—the hours spent writing? The mental space set aside to consider plot, character, setting? The other income turned down in lieu of hours spent writing fiction?

Serve the work. This is a phrase I will carry around with me for a bit, like a coin in my pocket, turning it over and over until my fingers smell metallic. Serve the work.

Your letters keep grounding me in a very good way. My mind is prone to wander, prone to seek out the trail of fame or fortune. Here, I come back again to what is essential. Thank you.

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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In our most recent podcast episode, When Creativity Surprises You, Maile and I chat with author Christie Purifoy about why she got her PhD and then left teaching, what it’s like when writing keeps surprising you, and how to balance (or not) the writing life with other minor things like family, a spouse, and real life. You can check out that podcast episode HERE.

Today, the letter exchange continues! This, from Jen Pollock Michel:

“Risk is always going to be a part of whatever we do, especially whatever we do as Christians by faith. There is always a risk, in our creative lives, that the work will be misunderstood, ignored, neglected, criticized. But those public reactions to the work are, what I call, “above the ground” reactions. Surely our work is doing more private, hidden good than we could ever know. Our words are likely encouraging someone to keep moving, keep believing, keep hoping.”

You can read the rest of the letter over at Jen’s blog.

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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)

Dear Jen

How we ended up here so quickly, I’m not sure—through the holidays, through the new year, and finding our way again on a fresh path of hours and days and weeks. That’s how it always feels to me, anyway, these new days of January, as if they’ve appeared out of nowhere, boundless. When I wake up with the kids in the morning, the house is cold, and the darkness presses in against the panes, and there’s something comforting about hot radiators and omelets frying. Even winter can hold us close, I guess. And while I know that by February I’ll be yearning for warmth and brighter mornings, I’ll take these short January days for now.

Speaking of warmth, we did skip town for Christmas, heading south to spend the holiday with my sister and brother-in-law and their seven kids in North Port, Florida. My mom’s entire family was in the area—my uncles and aunts, my parents, my three sisters and our fifteen collective kids, my six cousins and their various and sundry spouses and children of their own and even a few pets. It was quite a gathering, especially later on Christmas day, when we all went to my uncle and aunt’s house and they roasted a couple of pigs (yes, pigs–I think they turned some of the younger kids into vegetarians) and we sat out on their deck long into the night listening to the aunts and uncles tell old stories from when they were growing up Amish. Someday I’ll have to write those down.

We had planned this family gathering at least a year before, mostly because we hadn’t all been together in one place for quite a few years, but also because we knew my grandmother’s days might be numbered. As you might remember me mentioning, she died over Thanksgiving break, about four weeks before we gathered. As all of us, nearly fifty in total, stood to pray together before the meal, it was amazing to look around and see what she had left behind—though she had never done anything the world would find worthy of fame or wealth, she was responsible for nearly 50 good people, loving each other (imperfectly), trying to find our way, trying to make the world a better place.

My uncle tried to say a short tribute to her, but his voice faltered. We all had tears in our eyes. This is the way of things.

At one point on that Christmas afternoon, I climbed the stairs to the rooftop deck of that beautiful home and looked out over the Gulf of Mexico. The sky was slate gray, the water a subdued blue, and a stiff breeze blew in off the water. The trees rustled madly, as if some invisible army was making its way up the beach through the undergrowth. It makes you feel mighty small when you’re up above the tree line like that, taking in an entire sea boiling under the approach of a storm. It makes you feel like maybe a bad review isn’t so important, like under-performing sales on a particular book actually mean nothing compared to the love you might have for someone, or the passion you feel while doing the thing you’ve been called to do in the great, wide world.

I love that sentence from the quote you mentioned in your last letter, the one from Robert Farrar Capon’s Supper of the Lamb, and especially where he says, “No artist can work simply for results; he must also like the work of getting them.” Now that I look back on that moment where I was standing on the rooftop deck, looking out over the Gulf of Mexico, I realize that what I felt in that moment was a peace with my life, including the work that I do, a peace that is not dependent on accolades or endorsements or riches.

“Unless you become like a little child…”

I think in this aging, dare I say maturing, as a writer, I’m beginning to notice there’s a kind of growing backwards, like Benjamin Button. It is like when Galadriel considers taking the ring from Frodo in the movie and then goes in an instant from being a great and terrible sorceress back to her normal self. “I passed the test,” she says, almost in disbelief. “I will diminish now, and go into the West.” Maybe that is a better word—diminishing. Every day, it seems to me at least, the artist is asked whether or not they are willing to keep creating and diminishing, always less of themselves and more of the work.

It is good to be back. I am eager to hear more about your book when you are free to share it. I am also wondering, as I’ve just considered this diminishing as an artist (literally as I’m sitting here writing the letter), if it’s even possible to diminish and maintain a writing career? Can we say no to the creative Ring of Power and still manage to make a living? Or is the diminishing less to do with results, good or bad, and more to do with what we are seeking?

So many questions.

Happy New Year,

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)

Today, Jen writes to me of new years, of hope, and the beauty that can be found even in what feels like ordinary work:

“It’s the art of hope as you called it: believing that the unfinished things have all the possibility for becoming something lovely. I’ll just need to stand stirring a little while longer: waiting for the custard to firm, the roux to brown, the book to conclude, the marriage to deepen, the child to grow tall and wise. Of course it’s not a passive waiting but a very active one, a process that draws me into prayer and participation.”

You can read the rest HERE.

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