Category: Postmarked

Dear Jen

It’s rather hard to believe this our 20^th letter, which means I guess we’ve been doing this now for what? Four months? Five months? That’s one thing about life that always surprises me, no matter how many times I experience it—faithful, consistent work always adds up to something. It’s been that way for me in writing, marriage, raising children, and all sorts of other areas.

But it’s so unglamorous, isn’t it? The everyday work, done behind closed doors, not drawing attention to itself? It’s the handwritten note, the gentle, passing kiss of a spouse, the reading of a book to a child, the 1,000 daily words. These are the things that make up a beautiful life—not the awards or the prestige or the starred reviews. It’s the simple things. Would that I always remembered that.

I love the image you described of the woman who was moved to tears at the orchestra. The older I get, the more I love tears—to me, they signify that something important is happening. I have been known to cry when I laugh hard and long, and those moments are always sweet. We wept hard over my friend’s son and my grandmother, but there were moments when I would lock eyes with someone else who was crying, and it was like I saw that person for the first time. Shared grief is actually an intimate, wholesome thing. We avoid tears in our culture at our peril.

I turn 43 today, which means I am in the liminal space you were talking about, that middle ground, that waiting. I wait to see how my children’s lives will turn out, wait to see if anything will come of these books I’m writing, wait to see what will become of this physical body I inhabit. And I am increasingly content with this reality. I am glad to be in my 40s—my 20s were passionate and tempestuous, my 30s just plain hard. I feel I am finally settling into life, settling into myself.

On the other hand, dwelling in the liminal space of fiction has been my greatest challenge and most difficult discipline to learn. It is perhaps the most crucial skill of a storyteller—allow the tension to exist, tease it out, let it linger, and then, just as everything seems twisted into knots, pull the right string, and the story slips into place. I have always been one to resolve the conflict and tension in my real life as quickly as possible. It makes me uncomfortable to create a character and then make their story difficult. But I think it’s in that difficulty, it’s in that unpredictability and tension, where we learn the most wonderful things about life. And, as you have written, “In this life, there is pain, so much of it unresolved, and we find ourselves waiting, nurturing the faintest hope that surely we haven’t gotten to the end.”

Maybe that’s what writing fiction is teaching me. The art of hope.

And yes, the new year is right around the corner. I do tend to become rather reflective during these last few weeks of the year. While I don’t often do official “resolutions” anymore—I do like your desire to root hurry from your life—I am finding this year that I need to reevaluate my commitments. My co-writing work is busier than ever, the fiction I write is becoming more and more mentally and emotionally demanding (which I love), and our responsibility as parents spans from the new driver to the toddler. Some things must go, and so I’m sifting through my life, picking out the excess, the expendable, laying it aside.

Do you have any resolutions for 2020? How are you feeling about the book you’re working on and the ever-approaching due date? And what are some practical examples of what rooting hurry from your life looks like?

I guess the next time it’s my turn to write, we’ll be in this new year. I hope it is a wonderful one for you and your lovely family.

Merry Christmas, Jen.

Shawn

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What began as a Twitter conversation between two writers has become an exchange of letters. Here’s where Postmarked began.

Dear Shawn (1)

This week, Jen Michel and I continue our correspondence. Here is an excerpt of her letter to me:

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You’re right to say that patience is required to live this life and bear its losses. To live well is to learn the art of waiting. As Christians, we wait for the day when death wrecks no more, when everything wrecked is repaired, when Glory itself returns to reign. It’s what the dark season of Advent is all about, the paradox of all that’s bound up with the expectation that this world will finally be set to rights: the loss and the longing, the grief and the great hope.

I remember learning how the Christian writers known as the Inklings emerged from the Great War with hope beating in their breast. Just when the world was reckoning with the fact that progress was dead and that humanity was capable of far great sins than thought possible, Christians were writing fairytales. A great irony, isn’t it?

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You can read the entire letter over at Jen’s site.

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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,

Bright sunlight shines through the cold glass. The house is quiet and empty, but outside I hear the traffic on James Street and the out-of-place, intermittent buzzing of a chainsaw as someone works to prune one of the large trees that line our sidewalk. The sky is a cotton candy blue, and a few remaining leaves twist in the cold December breeze, somehow still hanging on.

It has been a long two weeks since we last corresponded. The day after your last letter, somewhere in the middle of a normal Saturday morning, I learned that a close friend of mine went into his only son’s room to wake him up, discovering that his 16-year-old had died in the night. He was a happy, loving teenager with doting parents and a kind sister. He was excited about his future and loved by his classmates. His death has left Maile and I reeling, shaking our heads, and crying quiet tears at unexpected times. What is this fragile life?

Six days later, I got the call that my grandma died at her home in Florida. She lived with my parents for half of the year here in Pennsylvania and spent her winters down south. Her passing was not unexpected, but she had such a gentle presence and a steadiness that will be greatly missed in our family. It’s interesting to me how someone who was so quiet, such a good listener, can leave such an intense void.

Last night, we went to my parents’ house and I walked through my grandma’s adjoining apartment, taking in the strange stillness. There are pictures of her on the wall, some with my aunt who died of cancer only a few years ago. There are pictures of my cousins when they were little. There is the chair where she spent so many afternoons, watching baseball of all things.

These losses have felt like axe blows against a tree—shuddering, and personal, and biting. Most of the time now, I feel only empty.

In your last letter you talked about patience and faithfulness and how “we want our work, whether in marriage or parenting or friendship or ministry or professional vocation, to be as effortless as instant coffee. We don’t want to be patient.” I feel that so much now, especially in regards to grief. I’d like to cry hard for an afternoon, or an evening, or maybe a week, but then I’d like to set this ache to the side and move on with life.

I’m realizing now that grief, like writing or marriage or parenting, requires a kind of determined patience, a commitment to relinquishing anything that looks like a time frame, a giving up of ourselves to this day and nothing beyond it. My good friend who lost his son told me that he cannot imagine how he can ever live an entire life without his beautiful boy, so instead, when he wakes up, he determines that he will get through the day in front of him and trust that somehow time will do its work. A tenacious, almost ruthless, patience.

What wisdom. Maybe this is how I should view all of these important things we have been writing to each other about. Marriage. Parenting. Writing. I cannot imagine how I will do all of those things well for an entire lifetime. But today I can do my best. Today I can write the words that come to me. Today I can love Maile well. Today I can try to accompany my children on their journey and hold them up, keep bringing them back onto good paths.

Matthew, quoting Isaiah, writes, “the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.” I have been clinging to that verse. Perhaps this is what our patience in every area of life is teaching us, or growing within us: the patience that will see us through these great periods of darkness, the kind of patience that gives us the strength we need to keep our eyes open, waiting for that great light.

In darkness and in light,

Shawn

Today, Jen Pollock Michel and I continue our ongoing correspondence about creativity and writing. In her latest letter to me, she writes,

“I fear that most of us, me included, want a glossy, sparkly faithfulness. We want to stage it for Instagram. We want our work, whether in marriage or parenting or friendship or ministry or professional vocation, to be as effortless as instant coffee. We don’t want to be patient. But if it’s true that most of faithfulness is found in the gritty in-between, we’re going to have to accommodate ourselves to the idea that a life in the making takes a lifetime to make. Faithfulness requires a slow and steady hand.”

To read the rest of her letter to me, head over to Jen’s website.

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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

Winter decided to arrive in Lancaster since the last time we spoke. Most of the time our kids walk about a mile to school through our small city, but it’s been pretty cold the last few days, so I’ve been driving them. Sure does make a person thankful for hot radiators to lean up against, and warm blankets, and stoves that work. I don’t mind the cold so much when I have a warm place to come home to.

Friends from all over the country are posting pictures of snow-coated outdoor furniture and fall leaves frozen in the ice. It reminds me that even though we tend to think of life in well-defined seasons, there’s a large part of life that will always fall in between. Snow drops and tulips pushing up through frozen ground. Shedding spring layers when the first hot day of summer arrives unexpectedly. Or walking out onto James Street at the end of summer, only to realize I need to go back in for a light jacket.

I’ve never been a fan of waiting; I’ve never been much for these in-between times. I like to know exactly where I’m at, what to expect, where I’m going, and what needs to be done to move forward. Dwelling in the undefined, setting up camp in the space between here and there, is not something I’m a fan of.

This reminds me of something you wrote in your last letter:

If we want to write for readers, then we’re going to need them to know about our books. We’re going to need them to buy them. This doesn’t mean, of course, that you and I have to hawk copies from the trunk of our cars in the church parking lot, but it does mean we can’t keep this work a secret.

I have often, in the past, found myself creating this false duality, this artificial here-or-there, well-defined seasons if you will, between the thoughtful writer and the writer who is business-savvy. And I’ve often thought that, since I had to choose between the two, I would choose to be the thoughtful writer.

But your words in that last letter lead me down a different path—what if there’s a way to be both? What if there’s a way to write thoughtful, well-written books while spreading the word aggressively about this hard, good thing I’ve done? Too often in the past I’ve felt tempted to, in your words, “pretend as if (I’m) not writing.” This is the messy and complicated both/and you wrote about, and your letter has encouraged me to stop pretending.

I can tell this letter is already going long, but there was one other phrase from your last letter that jumped off the page and I have to at least ask you about it: “The modesty of faithfulness.” Wow! What a wonderful grouping of words. In the context in which you wrote it, you seemed to be describing the person who goes about doing their good work even when it’s unacknowledged. I’m not sure that I can think of a more important phrase for a writer to embrace and would love to hear more of your thoughts on that.

You asked about books I’m currently reading—the current list is, as is usual for me, rather discordant: Stephen King’s It, George MacDonald’s The Light Princess and The Golden Key, and Dallas Willard’s Life Without Lack. I read Stephen King because I enjoy his books, but mainly because he has so much to teach me about how to tell a good story. I have become dedicated to dissecting the works of talented writers. The novel I’m currently writing requires a fairy tale side, so I turned to MacDonald to learn more about that. And Dallas Willard, well, who needs a reason to read Dallas Willard? But these words of his have been resonating in my mind for weeks now:

Human life is a process of transition and transformation. We go through life in a belt of time and space with one another, and we have the opportunity to be everything God intended us to be in relationship to him and to those around us. We have the potential to create something incredibly precious and good, and God is going to bring it to pass.

What an incredible promise, that “we have the opportunity to be everything God intended us to be in relationship to him and to those around us.”

May it be so for you, friend.

All the best

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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Have you had a chance to listen to the podcast my wife Maile and I have started, The Stories Between Us? We talk about creativity, family, and the writing life. You can find our first four episodes HERE.

Dear Jen

I’m writing this at around 4 a.m. in the Baltimore-Washington International Airport. For some reason, I had it in my mind that this week was your week to write, and so even as recently as last night I asked myself, I wonder when Jen is going to send me her letter? Then, this morning as I peeled myself out of bed at 2:30 a.m., I realized it was my week! So, here I am.

It wasn’t that your letter last week wasn’t memorable! In fact, I have been thinking quite often about the quote you pulled from Flannery O’Connor’s prayer journal: “I want very much to succeed in the world with what I want to do. I have prayed to You about this with my mind and my nerves on it and strung my nerves into a tension over it and said, ‘oh God please,’ and ‘I must,’ and ‘please, please.’” Reading that has challenged me in a few different ways.

First, it’s encouraged me to be much more honest with God. It’s not that I’ve been blatantly dishonest, but I think I subconsciously keep from mentioning some of my true desires to him, often because I question the integrity or value of those desires. It occurred to me that I have never mentioned to God that I want to be a successful writer, never asked God for such a thing.

Second, reading her words has helped me to own that desire. Like you, I find her request rather audacious! But what’s wrong with that?

I currently find myself at a kind of crossroads. I’ve just begun writing the last book in my current contract, and so naturally I find myself looking forward, wondering where this writing life might take me, wondering what books I want to write in the coming years. My publisher asked me to think about my broader writing goals and the direction I see myself going, and get back to them. Maybe there are writers who could quickly answer such questions, but I found myself rendered speechless.

Who am I?

What kind of stories do I want to write?

What direction do I see my writing going?

I’m not really sure. I guess on my good days I’m writing stories that help me explore life’s deepest and most unanswerable questions, the things I’m always wondering about. On good writing days, I’m reading more often. On those good days, I go deep into the story, sit quietly in it, and there’s something about the writing that makes me feel more like a conduit than a source.

On bad writing days (which, to be honest, have seemed to dominate as of late), I find myself distracted by social media, my mind flitting here and there. I grow weary of the noise. I lose my fascination with the incredible freshness of life.

I think a lot about the Mr. Rogers’ quote, that “Deep and simple is more essential than shallow and complex.” I wonder how my writing could be deeper and simpler? Maybe this is the direction I would like to go. Maybe this is the answer.

The airport is starting to wake up around me. There is my reflection in the glass, and through it I can see planes meandering to their gates. In a distant terminal, people scurry like ants. So much movement. So much hurry. For what? I wonder.

November has arrived! I hope it is a good month for you and your family. I am looking forward to Advent more than I have in the past. I think I need to sit in a nice patch of darkness and wait for a while.

Kind Regards

Shawn