THE PERILS OF WRITER’S CONFERENCES
Gordon Mortensen color reduction woodcut
I cannot quite make up my mind about Christian writer’s conferences. Without question the most recent Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing offered an opportunity to spend time with friends and fellow kindred spirits, charitably discussing some tough subjects, sensitive subjects concerning faith and writing not amenable to the easy or glib answer. It was also an opportunity to hear and read some exciting and imaginative writing.
However, the incessant interrogation of process, the awkward mating rituals between art and commerce, and the amebic streaming of so many introverts into and out of claustrophobic classrooms and auditoriums seemed antithetical to the art, or at least how I practice writing.
Writing, for me, remains a painful and solitary affair; the slow bleeding of words onto paper becomes like engraving a text into a copper plate, a process more aligned with the life of a desert aesthetic than the witty repartee found at the typical author’s panel discussing say, place description as a form of character development or the effective use of humor in tragedy.
Bret Lott in an article about Flannery O’Connor wrote that she was, for him, one of the “Host of Witnesses that went before.” I believe Lott intentionally used this Biblical quotation to engender both the sense that no writer writes in a vacuum, that we all stand on the shoulders of those who wrote before us, and it is within this community of “witnesses” that we are provided a measuring stick against which work should and will be judged. But Lott notes the Host keeps getting larger as we enlarge our own communities, our host becoming both the dead who went ahead and the living who travel alongside. All writer’s function, it seems, within a community context—however limited or dysfunctional—of past influences and present contexts consisting in our family, friends, students, teachers, mentors, and colleagues as well as our intellectual heritage. But what I think Lott also suggests is he, and by implication all writers, are in some way accountable to this “Host of Witnesses.”
This idea of a “Host of Witnesses” to which a writer or artist is beholden or accountable is is foreign to the mainstream notion of the modern artist. That is, a totally free individual creating art without ties to ideology or institutions or individuals.
In my living room is an astounding color reduction woodcut of an Iris created by Gordon Mortensen. This little known artist, now in his seventies, has lived for many years as a near recluse on the Monterey peninsula. I was fortunate to meet him some years ago and although painfully shy, Mr Mortensen did not feel his isolation from an artist community had been a bad thing. In fact, just the opposite. “I put all my energy into creating what I imagined and none into what other people imagined I should imagine.”
Fiction writer Cormac McCarthy famously isolated himself for years in motels as a type of literary monasticism. Further, once famous, he avoided the literary world, eschewing other authors, interviewers, and critiques. When queried about this behavior, the quarrelsome Mr. McCarthy thought that you could not become a “worthwhile writer” without such isolation.
My personality is balanced at the Meyers-Briggs midpoint: neither a full-fledged extrovert nor a card-carrying introvert. Yet, I am also a writer who spends significant chunks of each day alone performing exegesis upon imaginary characters or long forgotten memories. I compound this insanity—or perhaps clinically verify the fact— by actually committing to paper these internal conversations. Long solitary sojourns into stories at times resemble looking out of a space capsule towards a beautiful but distanced earth. After a long day documenting the messiness of my past or an imaginary character’s life, I often find myself grateful to be a voyeur, experiencing considerable pride when none of the character’s splatter got on me, that I did not have to justify my words or defend my judgments.
I was dwelling in just such a pleasant self-righteous place late on the first day of the Festival conference. I had left a talk by an author whose particular journey I was quite grateful and it must be admitted proud that I had not experienced. The last session of the day was to be a conversation between two very successful poets, Jeanne Murray Walker and Luci Shaw.
But rather than share their poetry, these two old friends spoke about their own ambition—both the good and bad. While these wise women gave a plethora of good advice, I was struck how each had created poetry—an intensely solitary undertaking—while embedded and dependent upon an accountability inherent in the day-to-day messiness of family and friends and colleagues.
In addition to my being both an introvert and extrovert, I am also a modern and therefore averse to the entire concept of accountability, especially to any “host of witnesses” and particularly to the living kind who just might disagree with me and worse, ask me to justify my words. After forty years of marriage I am convinced that being accountable is a great and necessary idea in principle but is a dicey reality to implement, a reality accomplished only by multiple gifts of grace. However, I am being dragged to the understanding that despite my reluctance and inability to explicate how, as an artist and especially an artist who professes faith I am not exempt from accountability. This accountability will not, if my previous experience is any measure, be natural or easy or without pain. No doubt, this will be a process requiring equal amounts of humility and grace.
I don’t much like to admit this idea but it may be possible, in addition to extricating ideas and stimulation, I need to go to the Festival of Faith and Writing for a measure of accountability. I know that if in two years I do not go to the Calvin conference my absence will be noticed by friends. I also know that I will be asked, “what are you writing” and will have to give an accounting. This is not much, I admit, in the total schema of “faithfulness“ accounting. However, as Jeanne Walker gracefully points out in her poem, The Failing Student, “. . .mercy can start as little more than a direction you can move in.” So I suppose, can faithful accountability.
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