Posts for category ‘faith’

I’ve been wanting to attend this conference ever since I first heard about it years ago, and now I get to go as a speaker. Yeehaw! It’s not too late to sign up. But it will be tomorrow.

Allow me to drop but a few names of other speakers to tempt you: Avi, Scott Cairns, Debbie Blue (oh my golly, fangirling right now, didn’t notice she was coming before and I LOVE HER), Sharon Flake, Joshilyn Jackson, Mary Karr, Rhoda Janzen, Wally Lamb (!!), Gene Yang…oh I could go on and on and on. And of course! My panelmates Jenny Han and Donna Freitas.

The conference web site has everything you need to know

I will, at various times, be doing the following:

Reading (Thursday, 10: 30 a.m.)

Lunchtime forum with other Jesus Girls authors (Friday, 12:45 p.m.)

Solo talk: “Young Adult Fiction and the Stewardship of Pain” (Friday, 2 p.m.)

Signing (Friday, 3 p.m.)

Panel with Jenny Han and Donna Freitas: “Are You There, God? It’s Me, the American Teenager: Faith, Doubt, and Redemption in Young Adult Fiction” (Friday, 3:30 p.m.)

Full Festival Schedule

And now – I’m away from my blog for a few weeks. Spring breaking, finishing up a book, and then off to the Fest. Please do let me know if you’re planning to go and maybe we can find a way to say hello. Until then!

(P.S. – I have a new post at Teen Fiction Cafe for Food Week, celebrating recognizing one year with diabetes.)

There have been a number of times during my hiatus that I’ve wanted to pop back in and comment on something or another going on in the world, but I decided those things will keep, and stuck to my guns.

But this Uganda thing is bothering me so much, I’m poking my head out here because whenever this kind of bullshit goes down in the name of “Christianity” I feel like I gotta say something.

In case you haven’t heard about it, here’s a summary. And here.

Throughout Advent I’ve been doing the Book of Common Prayer readings every day. That has made me spend a lot more time in the Old Testament than I’m used to, and as you may know a lot of us modern Christians have an uneasy relationship with the O.T.  There are a lot of harsh, weird rules about things. People who think the Uganda laws are a good idea may use some of those rules to justify their position. But in my readings, I have really been struck that the overwhelming message of the O.T. isn’t this harsh weird thing that is the opposite of what Jesus talks about. The overwhelming message is that God is pissed, yes, but the reason he’s pissed is his people have not loved justice, shown mercy, been humble. They’ve been corrupt. They’ve been too comfortable. They’ve sat in their palaces while people starve in the street, they’ve oppressed the poor, they’ve taken self-serving advantage of  their power instead of using it to take care of widows and orphans, and after being freed from slavery themselves, they’ve re-entered a culture of slavery by enslaving and oppressing others. They have failed to trust God, and have failed at what Jesus later tells us are the two most important commands: love God, love others. This is the overwhelming message from the prophets.

If Ugandan Christians want to love justice—yes, prosecute those who engage in sex tourism and sex trade that exploits children and the poor, sex crimes against children, rape, abuse. A sex crime is a sex crime, no matter what body parts are involved. According to wikipedia, over 75% of Ugandans live below the international poverty level. How about some justice and mercy there. There is a history of government corruption, civil war, mass murder, and genocide. Good reasons to show humility.

And while U.S. Christians are speaking out against the Uganda policy, it is a good opportunity to look at how well we’re doing at speaking for human rights here in our own land of the free.

Okay, retreating back into hiatus. Peace on earth.

I’m finally getting a chance to delve into Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female & Evangelical. Though I’ve been part of this project forever, I hadn’t really had or made time to read the other essays. On Sunday, I had the chance to meet contributor Nicole Sheets for coffee and read her wonderful piece, “Keep the Feast,” in which she writes, in part, about church:

“The readings are lengthy and somehow distant, these same stories that have been with me from the faintest pinprick of memory. They’re sort of God’s greatest hits, a litany of his most shining moments of beauty and deliverance.”

I love the wording of that, and project onto it my desire for more than the greatest hits, or at least a new way of hearing them. In regard to the latter, I’m enjoying Debbie Blue’s From Stone to Living Word. Blue has got some great, unorthodox, funny, surprising takes on some of the stories that can feel so worn out. My inner fundie theologian freaks out at some of the things she dares to write, but that’s part of what I need right now in terms of owning my faith as an adult.

This morning I read Paula Carter’s JG contribution, “Open the Doors and See All the People.” Oh, man. She writes about church splits, clergy affairs, congregational meetings that turn into fights, and how around adolescence (when she was trying to be the good kind of person Sunday school was teaching her to be) she

“…began to recognize the gap between what people were asking of me and what they were able to do themselves. The adults around me were only human…trying to make it through, searching for the right path, wanting to be good people, wanting me to have a happy life, scared of pain and sin, scared of themselves and me and our shared humanity.” Later: “I worry that people who grow up in the church learn to deny their own humanity.”

Scared of themselves and me and our shared humanity. I mean, that’s human behavior at, let’s say, not its best, in a nutshell, right there. She goes on to write more about how she thinks as an adult, and says: “It is hard for me even now to reconcile the expectations of church and the reality of being alive.” Me, too. While part of me knows that most of those expectations—or at least the interpretations of them—are add-ons, burdens God never meant for us to carry, it is hard to find the peaceful place (as Nicole put it over coffee) where you can just let those expectations skim over you. I love how Paula puts what she does now: “I try just to be me, to be real, to experience my humanity with God as a witness.”

Shop Indie Bookstores

Shop Indie Bookstores

Follow me down my current mental wormhole…

My daydreaming about moving back to the Bay Area crossed moments with an email from a writer friend who works at a writers’ co-op in NYC. That led me to google shared writing spaces in SF because, let’s face it, unless I write a hit best-seller the amount of space we can afford to occupy there will be smaller than what we afford here, and our now separate home office spaces would converge and shrink. I’m also guessing I would never be able to find an office to rent at even quadruple what I pay now.

I found Po Bronson’s web site, where he has a page about the Writers’ Grotto. More poking around there led me to his answer to the question, “Do writers need community?” I know my answer to that question: yes. I have several little communities of other writers, both virtual and real-live-physical-people-in-bodies. Some I see nearly every week, others I only see at conferences, a few I’ve never met at all. All I know is that without them, I’m pretty sure I would be crazy and depressed. (More crazy and depressed.)

Laurel Snyder wrote a great essay for Salon on her addiction to Twitter. Funnily enough, just before I found her piece I’d been thinking about Laurel, who is my Twitter friend. I wondered where she’d gone off to. I missed her presence. (Not that I want to enable, no!) Sherman Alexie wrote a response to Laurel’s article on his site, and his take is that the weakness of technology is the lack of intimacy. The part that got me thinking was his imagined conversation with his detractors: “But Sherman, I have made so many friends on the Internet. I am close to so many more people that I would otherwise be. Because of the Internet, I have hundreds of friends.”  Hundreds of friends? Hundreds? I guess that’s my problem. I have a small number of friends.

There is community and then there is friendship. My community is big, and technology has been vital in creating and maintaining it. But friends? Some members of my writing community are also my close friends, but they make up a very small slice of the Venn diagram. Many more I would call “friend” but wouldn’t loan money to or become the godmother of their children or go on vacation with or let stay at my house or spend more than four hours in a car with. “Friend” is a difficult word when it comes to social networking. If you’ve ever seen an update in your Facebook feed along the lines of, “Beverly Cleary has accepted your friendship” or “friend request pending,” you know how wrong that feels. I mean, God knows I love Beverly Cleary’s books almost more than any books in the world, but we are not friends. On Twitter the word is “followers.” That’s weird, too. I’m not Jesus or Jim Jones.”Network” is cold. We need a new word.

Speaking of Jesus, as I thought about friends vs. community, it occurred to me that one of my bigger problems with the contemporary church is the extreme emphasis on community, to the point it’s an idol that replaces faithful obedience and service. We confuse “community” and “friends,” and it’s a problem. There’s an expectation we will all want to spend time together doing all sorts of social stuff. Then when there are relationship challenges or some kind of life milestone, and we discover how few friends there are among the community, or you just don’t fit in or click with people, we’re disenchanted and think the church—or God—has failed us. I don’t need to be friends with everyone in my church community, do I? There are people I love and will pray for but I wouldn’t want to have coffee with.

I feel the same way about the writing community. I need it, and I enjoy being a part of it, and technology helps us find each other and stay in touch and get specific support or advice when needed, but when shit comes down there are maybe five people in my life I would tell and turn to.  And that feels fine, and right, and as long as I understand the difference between my friends and my community and recognize the limitations of technology in creating and maintaining the former, I’m down with it. I’m not going to go to Twitter for love, or to be known.

Where was I? Oh yes, shared writing space. Salt Lake needs a place like The Grotto or Paragraph. I’m doing my part—I talked Ann Cannon into renting the office next to mine and we’re going to have our own little writers’ colony in the corner of the basement. I’d love to hear about writer communities you’ve created and why they’re important to you.

Despite the relative seriousness of my novels, everyone who knows me knows I love to laugh. Yesss-ah-do! (As Mary Murphy might say.) There’s a lot going on in the world to cry about, that’s for sure. But for me, losing my sense of humor equals death. Laughing has saved my marriage over and over (or at least made it a whole lot more fun), keeps me from going absolutely crazy when it comes to my religion and my health and life in the world, is the key to overcoming childhood/family dysfunction, and makes friendships possible (I simply cannot be friends with people who cannot laugh at themselves, at least occasionally). So, in honor of all that, here’s some stuff that has lately made me LOL:

- Flash Burnout by LK Madigan (October 09)

Shop Indie Bookstores

Okay, it isn’t a comedy, but the voice of this debut YA is so good, and so funny (without being silly or goofball, not that there’s anything wrong with that), I envy Madigan having written it.

- Stuff Christian Cultures Like: A blog I just discovered, skewering Evangelical Christian culture. Probably most funny to people who have been there, like me. Here is a taste from the “Focusing on ‘that one scene’ that ruined the movie” post:

“Watching a movie rated anything other than G with them has the potential to evoke in you a feature-length anxiety episode over what their reaction could be. When a love scene comes on or a bad word is said, the parental figure will begin to stir malcontentedly before saying “I think we should turn this off” or something to that effect. If the parental figure is in another room and hears something questionable from the TV they’ll either say “What are you kids watching in there?” or make some disgruntled harumphs before coming in and evaluating for themselves. If you feel that old sensation of fear shooting through your chest and into your legs as you imagine this, then you may have been raised in Christian culture.”

And imagine this in the days before there was a TV remote with a “back” button that you could handily set to the nature channel.

- Emily Wing Smith. She is a friend, and an extraordinary writer, and also she cracks. me. up. Whether she’s talking about making herself over to be an extra on “Greek” or detailing her summer camp accidents, or accidentally posting the wrong pictures because she doesn’t know how to make thumbnails big enough to see what the pictures are actually of, her blog always makes me laugh. Even though her wonderful book made me cry.

Shop Indie Bookstores

- Smart and Important communication that also employs humor. Among the things the Daily Show has done for culture, it’s reminded us that humor is politically and socially powerful, and it’s communicatively powerful. It’s the spoonful of sugar that not only helps the medicine goes down, but helps us acknowledge and understand the disease.  This article from Alice Sebold in The Atlantic about literary awards and the publishing business, for example, made me laugh, and then go, oh yeah, totally. Given my aforementioned ADD affliction, I probably wouldn’t have read it if it didn’t make me laugh within the first paragraph. (Yes, I am that lazy.) Sarah Haskins’ “Target Women” pieces crack me up and make me get mad about the way my insecurities are used against me in efforts to get me to buy stuff. George Saunders makes me laugh and also recognize the absurdities of life and politics that could perhaps be changed. David Sedaris makes me laugh while thinking how we are all just trying to love each other and be known. Et cetera.

What makes you laugh?