“A Week Can Change a Life” (it did mine)

“A week can change a life” is the motto of the Glen Workshop, an arts and faith workshop/retreat/seminar put on by the dedicated, passionate, and good-looking folks at Image Journal. That it can change lives is a fairly bold statement. As the Glen Workshop opens registration for 2011, and, for the first time offers two locations (east and west) and a YA fiction class, I want to testify a bit about how it changed mine and invite you to join us.

When I lived in San Francisco, a guy who attended the same church I did put together a weekend seminar on arts and faith. I never knew such a topic as “arts and faith” existed. I was raised in a church that, intentionally or not, fostered a kind of dualistic thinking: art and culture was either sacred or it was profane. There were “Christian books” and “Christian movies” and “Christian music” and then there were the other kind. There was Us and there was Them. And all I knew was I liked the stuff produced for and by Them a whole lot better than what was produced for Us, which largely seemed didactic, silly, condescending, or just plain…not good. But if I liked the stuff for Them, was I still a member of Us? More specifically: If I liked the stuff for Them, did God still love me? If I liked the stuff for Them, was I on a slippery slope to You Know Where?

Around the time of this weekend seminar, I’d been seriously pursuing writing for a couple of years, and I knew I wasn’t going to write for the Christian market. But I wasn’t succeeding, and part of me still wondered: Is it because God doesn’t approve of what I’m doing? So I went looking for answers. In efforts to shorten this story, I’ll just say that Greg Wolfe, the publisher of Image, was on a panel and I rose a shaking hand to ask a question (I don’t remember what it was), and his answer (uh, I forget that, too) was a first step in making me feel like I wasn’t a heretic for doing what I was doing. I left with a subscription for Image and a lot to think about.

A few years later, after we moved to Salt Lake, I got a mailing about this Glen Workshop thing. A fiction class was among the offerings. I’d never taken any kind of fiction class before or done anything like this or even gone away for a whole week on my own, I don’t think. I signed up. The workshop was in summer 2002 and by the time I left for it, I’d just been laid off from my job, parted ways with my first agent, and had been writing for 7 years with nothing to show for it. I was seriously questioning what I was doing and had somehow come back to nagging doubt: maybe my lack of any kind of success was God telling me to stop writing. (This was before therapy, okay? I had a lot of issues.) I went to the Glen thinking, “I will either leave this workshop knowing I should keep writing, or I’ll leave it knowing I should quit.”

(Oh – did I mention the theme for that year’s conference was Art as Vocation: The Voice of This Calling? Yeah.)

Well, obviously I didn’t quit. I went to my workshop with the first few chapters of the book that became Story of a Girl. The fiction faculty was Robert Clark. Ulp. A real writer. Of grownup literary fiction. That I actually liked. Whose books my husband had been reading for years. Would he and the class merely humor me and my little “children’s book”? Would I be taken seriously? Did I deserve to be? Would everyone else be writing stories about biblical characters and saints?

Robert and my classmates wholeheartedly embraced me and my work, as we all embraced each other. By the end of the week, we’d shared tears in the class as we revealed our deepest reasons for writing what we write, and our hopes and disappointments and hurts as we’d been pursuing this craft. We learned how to be better writers, yes, but also something had been added to our humanity in ways I never expected.

From what I gather, though this is not an uncommon experience at the Glen (I had a similar experience this past summer in the screenwriting class I took there), it’s not typical outside of it at other conferences with a similar format and similarly high-caliber faculty. I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out. I’ve been back to the Glen 7 times since then. Honestly? It is where I feel most me, most at home. I’ve made lifelong friends. I’ve never once felt that I was not religious enough, not good enough, not moral enough, not sure enough, not right enough. (Though the intellectual horsepower among the faculty is such that once in awhile I do feel sort of dumb.) I’ve never been made to feel like less than an equal for writing YA fiction instead “grownup” fiction. The Glen community has been proud and supportive of my success, and I’m proud that they’ve been a part of it.

Most importantly, I have forever and for good been cured of my thinking that God might care whether my books are sold at Lifeway or at B&N. Or if my characters swear. Or have sex.  He does care that I do good work, and that whatever I write about I write about honestly and deeply, from a worldview that says people—all people—matter, simply because they are created in the image of God. And that their stories matter because they are part of the Big Human Story of which we are all a part. In that way, we are all Us.

I’m so, so pleased and proud that the Glen Workshop is now offering a class specifically for young adult fiction, and that I am teaching it in MA next summer. Here’s the description:

Willa Cather said that writers acquire most of the fodder for their writing lives before the age of fifteen. Frederick Buechner wrote, “Adolescents are Adam and Eve in the process of tasting the forbidden fruit and discovering that in addition to good, there is also evil, that in addition to the joy of being alive, there is also the sadness and hurt of being alive and being themselves.” Vampires, zombies, and time travel may additionally complicate matters. Beyond (and including) traditional coming of age stories, young adult fiction today explores rich and varied literary territory covering every imaginable genre and sub-genre. Through workshopping manuscripts, writing exercises, and discussion, we’ll address fundamental fiction matters—voice, character, plot—in ways that are specific to writing for and about teenagers.*

(*edited to add that if your work skews more toward middle grade, that is also fine and welcome)

If YA fiction is not your thing, there are numerous other offerings, at both Glen East and Glen West, including various permutations of prose, poetry, visual art, songwriting, dance and topical seminars. I think if you read this post and poke around the Glen web site, you’ll know whether or not this is for you. But if you have any specific questions or concerns that are not addressed by the site, feel free to leave me a comment and I’ll contact you.

The Glen Workshop information and registration, for both East and West (refer to left sidebar)

My YA Fiction Class

I know it is a chunk of money. But if you figure out what a weeklong trip anywhere would cost, including 6 nights accommodations and all meals, let alone the fact that you are also getting the workshop, the lectures, the rest, and the community experience, it’s pretty much a bargain. Personally, I know that as long as my credit is good, so help me God, I’ll keep going back.