On being drenched

Writing as life taking.

"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy." -- Dorothy Parker

Writing as life giving. 

"Writing is not only a reflection of what one thinks and feels but a rope one weaves with words that can lower you below or hoist you above the surface of your life, enabling you to go deeper or higher than you would otherwise go. What excites me about this metaphor is that it makes writing more of a lifesaving venture." -- Phyllis Theroux

Which is it?


If you asked my husband it would probably be the former quote by Dorothy Parker, as he bears the load of listening to my endless frustrations regarding the lack of the second choice. It's not that my writing sucks or doesn't suck, that's totally beside the point. It's just that there is no writing. There is working, there is driving, there is living. Working, driving, and living are not all bad. It's just when you get a glimpse at the glorious panorama of all you could do, all the possibilities, and you see what others do, the teaching, the workshops, the publications, the conferences, the travel, the ideas, the performances, the growing, the lifesaving, the incredibly relevant essays on the here and now, the storytelling that makes people care -- it just makes you want something you wouldn't otherwise want had you never learned about it.

I think that's why I cling to David Foster Wallace, even though I've barely scratched the surface of his brilliance. Sure, his vocabulary is stratospheric, his voice complicated, yet only he could go on a cruise and write paragraphs about the sound of the toilet in his cabin. He seemed to long to understand the absolute ordinariness of everyday. And why it makes us all so sad, even though we mostly don't acknowledge it. He did. We're all just quietly frustrated by the working, the driving, and the living. His writing says, basically, screw the big stuff. Embrace the small stuff. Because the small stuff -- aka the working, the driving, the living -- is usually, in actuality, what's most important. (Easy for him to say, I'm tempted to think to myself, because he could write, write, write his hearts desire. Yet, he took his own life. RIP. His torment about the banality of everyday life was real, and tragically unresolved. I'm still sad about his loss, even though I'd never even heard of him when he was alive. He was born the same year as I.)

Tomorrow, though, Saturday morning, the small sanctuary of my time, I will gather up notes from three short interviews that took me a month to conduct, and write an assigned piece for The Lutheran Magazine, thanks to a generous editor. A piece that I hope will maybe, just maybe be relevant, clever, and surprising. It's about LGBTQ Lutherans. No, it's about faith. Really, it's about labels. Hopefully, it's about appreciation.

For now, I invite you to watch this three minute excerpt of David Foster Wallace's most famous writing, his Kenyon College commencement speech in 2005, now referred to as  "This is Water." (Here's the full transcript. Trust me, you won't regret reading it.)

Which of course begs the question, what is my water? Yours?