And Who Am I If I Don't?

On writing as work, identity, and a way of becoming.

A view from St. John’s Abbey Guesthouse at the Wellspring Retreat for Mother-Artists, October 2023

Practice any art […] no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.” —Kurt Vonnegut

I had it, and then I lost it. An unbroken chain of 28 weekdays, waking before my 5:30 alarm, padding into the basement with coffee in hand for the secret enlivening: to bring this novel to life a page at a time, before anyone had the chance to call me Mama. 

And then: All three kids sick at the same time. 

And then: A new reckoning with a pervasive problem in the story.

And then: Teaching eight workshops in six weeks’ time. 

…

In a podcast interview¹ for her book on being God’s image, Dr. Carmen Imes contends with the importance of understanding vocation in proper relationship to our identity as image bearers. 

Our work matters—but it doesn’t make us matter.

Hearing this, I pause from wiping down the counters and walk to the chalkboard next to our kitchen table, the one I’ve emblazoned with the words to a hymn that comforts me beyond measure. With a broken piece of chalk, I scrawl the quote from Dr. Imes, listening as she goes on to say that our relationship toward creation is meant to be one of gentle stewardship, not one of exploitation. I think of the chain of successful writing days that I broke nearly one month ago. I think of the story I am trying to render from the fluid contents of my own imagination and faith, and I wonder what it would be like to stop believing my creative practice is something to harness and tame into submission. 

…

I’ve assigned my young students the task of completing the first draft of their historical fiction short story by tomorrow, and already their documents are beginning to arrive in my inbox. Yesterday, at church, I found a quiet moment to catch up with two dear friends, and we talked about the delicate work we are called to as parents to know when to push our children to follow through on their commitments, and when the pressure we apply might crush something fresh and budding in them. 

Cupping my hands around my coffee, I said, “I just know that I don’t want for them what I felt so keenly in school—that my sense of belonging and self-worth was hanging in the balance each and every day, based on how I performed and how others responded to me.”

These patterns are hard to unlearn. Writing chose me long before I recognized it as a vocation, long before I walked into the familiar, yet unknown landscape of this novel. But my writing practice was cultivated in those same classrooms of uncertainty, where I waited for the nod of approval. Now, as writer apart from the setting of the classroom, I’ve become my own professor, impossible to please. I’ve splinched myself, trying to draw the best out of myself as I also try to create an environment that supports the best in everyone else. Womanhood is always this: Being a person, being a place. 

So how do I answer this call, which comes and goes, while tending to the moment-by-moment beckonings of my children, and the effervescent desire to nurture and teach other writers, and the unavoidable duties of everyday life? In the rocky re-entry of this week after a few days at the Wellspring Mother-Artist retreat, my friend Mia Eckes² dropped this quote into my inbox. 

I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted; then I realized that the interruptions were my work. ― Henri J.M. Nouwen

Just a few days prior, as we sat in a chapel in St. John’s Abbey, overlooking a leaf-strewn lake, she prompted us with the following question: What word or value do you need to take with you into your creative life from our time together?

For me, the word—the fruit cultivated in me, which is ripening and falling to the ground to be consumed by my children, by the voracious white pages, by the beautiful souls weaving in and out of my days—was Patience. Patience was what my soul invited me into regarding all things, most especially my novel. Faith in what is yet to come. Belief that the story He is writing in me is more essential, even, than the story I am writing myself. 

…

I was intrigued by a conversation George Saunders was having on The Active Voice³, about the ambition his students display, and how it can serve a purpose, how it can drive them. 

“It happens pretty naturally—that desire for attention will become a desire for excellence.” 

I agreed, pausing the episode to scrawl the words into my notebook. I recognized the transition in myself, the desire to please my professor morphing into the desire to please my own inner professor, only this one is impossible to please. My own desire for excellence is more demanding, less appreciative of the context of my life than any real human would ever be. Professor Excellence, though, was recently invited on sabbatical. He is out of the office. He is roomed in the least expensive hotel in Santorini, and he’s making peace with sub-par service over there, because the views are excellent. I’m not certain when he’ll be invited back into the halls of my consciousness as he’s rather severe. I may never become a George Saunders without him, but perhaps I will learn to rest in the process of my own becoming. Perhaps I will be patient enough to learn to live well, trusting that the writing may then follow after. 

…

The printed calendars on which I recorded my word count are filed away for now. I still wake early, most weekdays, and pad down to the basement with hot coffee, but now I type up old journals as a way to indicate to myself that my words matter. I’m feeling drawn to consider ways to winter well. On the other side of that same coin is a primal fear, the same one stoked in the belly of every chipmunk and squirrel scurrying across my lawn: Will I make it through the cold darkness approaching? Winter is always hard, and I am entering this one more depleted than ever before, the result of such wild and voracious blooming as teaching nearly 30 writing workshops, writing thousands and thousands of words, stewarding more than a dozen podcast interviews, fostering new friendships and work connections, traveling internationally, welcoming therapeutic breakthroughs, tending a thriving marriage, and mothering three precious rascal-children.

In October, I archived my blog of seven years without a word to anyone at all, turning the posts into a coffee-table book, the second of its kind, and whispering thanks to the version of me that poured out those words. I’m cutting ties to my pretty newsletter service. I’m tabling teaching workshops for the foreseeable future. I can feel the strings of other creative work, strings of kites I’ve tied to other fingers, beginning to lose height, beginning to come down but still drifting gently in the wind for a few more months. I’m holding new ideas at a distance, squinting at them, hardly trusting.

This is a season of believing my work does not define my worth—not the work of tending to others, and not the work of tending to words. This season I will endeavor to rest in the kindness of limitations, to laugh gently at my own fallibility, to savor twinkling lights and dark evenings, warm drinks and stories written by someone other than me. 

1. Context Matters podcast, “Being God’s Image”

2. Mia is a creativity coach and co-founder of Wellspring: A Mother-Artist Project

3. The Active Voice conversation with George Saunders