Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew | Spiritual Memoir Author and Teacher

Author: Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Housefly, Go Home

    Arnold Lobol writes a cautionary tale about a housefly who one day wakes up to see all the dirt in his house.  He diligently begins sweeping.  When he pushes the pile over the threshold, he notices the dirt on his front path, and then on the road.  He’s a good way down the road when Grasshopper comes along and inquires what he’s doing.  Poor Housefly; he’s taken on cleaning up the world.

    I am that housefly.  Not that I’m a compulsive cleaner—far from it.  But I can’t look around me without seeing what needs to be done.  A moment spent admiring the (glorious) flower garden with Gwyn turns into a to-do list:  weeding, transplanting, pruning, seeding.  Cleaning the kitchen after dinner, I’m acutely aware of all I’m not cleaning:  the grease on the kettle, the spills in the refrigerator.  Clearing out my email, I berate myself for not writing to my senator to stop the Keystone pipeline or to the Security and Exchange Commission to make public the disparity between CEO- and worker-income.  I have trouble living in an incomplete world.

    Oddly enough, the one arena where I feel peaceful and even passionate about incompletion is in writing.  I advocate revision; I’m the spokesperson for the slow evolution of creative work.  As Mark Doty writes, “the longer we can stay in the state of uncertainty, of unfolding possibility, the better.”  In other words, to be a fully engaged creator, we have to cultivate an enormous tolerance for incompletion.  We must see what we’ve done as well as what can be done—with equanimity, with a peaceful heart.

    Most of the time, I’m halfway down the street with a broom before I realize this isn’t how I want to live.  Each day is a new creation, as is a home and work and this society we all participate in making.  My prayer is that we might learn to thrive in the midst of a messy, beautiful becoming.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • From Rilke, With Love

    Whenever I get swept up in the competitive, audience-seeking dimension of the writing life, I turn to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet as an antidote.  Rilke returns me to my essential, life-giving reasons for writing.

    What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.

    Art-making both awakens and fulfills basic spiritual needs, Rilke says, and that this role is ultimately sufficient.

    A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity.

    Out of the cacophony of writing advice out there, Rilke stands alone in emphasizing love as the central creative force in our work.  We must love our doubt, love our solitude, love the questions, love our subject, and make love our subject.  Even suffering in the creative process is worthy of love:

    Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?

    To Rilke the soul of a creative project is tender, solitary, and full of potential.  Only those readers who treat it with love are worth listening to.

    Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.  Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.

    At the heart of Rilke’s letters is unabashed faith in the writer’s inner world.  Who else treats that silent life with such respect?

    I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.

    Who among us doesn’t benefit from this reminder?  We each have within us a potent, generative life-force that feeds our creative work, and attending this is the foundation of all art-making.  That said, I’ll sign off to enter that lovely private sphere.

    Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Bath-Time Resurrection

    If you’ve happened to walk past our house on a Saturday around seven p.m., chances are good you considered calling child protection.  Judging from Gwyn’s screams, that’s our weekly time for torture.  In fact we’re just washing her hair—once a week is frequent enough, thank you.  There have been times when Gwyn’s anxiety about hair-washing was so extreme, she began worrying about the next shampoo while her hair was still wet.  We tried washing around swimming goggles.  We asked Gwyn’s birth mom to share how much she hated hair-washing as a child.  Once we called an older neighbor kid to come hold her hand, hoping peer support might help.  We talked with a therapist about toddler anxiety.

    Shortly before Easter, when Gwyn was playing with a watering can in the bathtub and began pouring water over her head, I raised my eyebrows but kept my mouth wisely shut.  “Mama, I’m a flower,” she said.  “Will you water me?”  Why, of course!  I tipped the spout.  A stream of blessed water hit her hair and she began to rise, her beautiful porcelain skin emerging from the tub, her arms stretching toward a pretend sun, her fingers unfurling until my daughter was gloriously, nakedly in bloom.  I “fertilized” her hair and she wanted to grow all over again, the suds pouring over her body, her face beatific.  With her arm-petals open, Gwyn was a picture of prayer.

    Easter’s a grand rebirth, life conquering death and all, but most days for most people are simpler and smaller, most sin that needs saving is minor, and sometimes I find the translation tough.  Gwyn’s bath-time resurrection released her from fear.  Torment turned into grace.  While I might point to contributing factors—her vivid imagination, her age, her increasing love of water—at the core of this transformation is a tiny Easter.  Moments like this, full of divine rebirth, surround us like the flowers of spring, and for these I praise God.

  • Are you writing?

    During a moment of discouragement this morning—others writers have better focus than me, more time to read great literature, no three-year-old pulling love and attention away from the page—I flashed back to college, to what I now realize is a seminal moment in my development as a writer.  The world looked bleak (Was it my miserable relationship with my boyfriend?  The overwhelming stress of senior year?  The overcooked green beans in the cafeteria?); I complained about everying in great detail to my friend Heather, a brilliant mathematician.  She finally interrupted me.  “Elizabeth, are you writing?”

    No, I wasn’t.

    I knew immediately Heather saw an equation I hadn’t:  Elizabeth minus writing equals misery.  Solitude, a pen and paper were key to my mental health.  From that moment forth writing has been an essential activity, saving me thousands in therapy bills.  (Thank you, Heather.)  Not that writing solves all my problems, but it does return me to a place where I can hear what I’m thinking and feeling and thus address my problems sanely.  It takes the scattered pieces inside me and binds them up.

    Twenty-two years and three published books later, I sometimes forget this basic function of writing:  To return me to myself.  The distractions are different today; parenthood, sure, but also competition in the literary world, the terrible demands of social media, a career built on creative work that nonetheless seems feeble and unsteady.  Were Heather to ask me her question now I would answer, blithely, yes, and my answer would be a tiny bit dishonest.  I’m not always faithful to that fundamental function of writing.  I sometimes forget to write to become more myself.  And when that happens, I lose my moorings.

    I believe—in fact, I know—that writing to become more me is the groundwork of every successful piece I’ve put into the world.  When I write to put my internal pieces together, I’m also rearranging external pieces and creating a whole beyond myself.  This isn’t a distraction from my literary ambitions but rather the essential first step.  It’s also the second and fifth and final steps, only it gets harder and harder to remember.

    But now I can conjure up Heather.  She’ll squint her eyes at me and demand daily, “Are you writing?”

  • Sufficiency

    When you nurture and nourish what you do have and begin to make a difference with it, it expands before your very eyes. In other words, what you appreciate appreciates. This is true prosperity.            –Lynne Twist

    In an attempt to bring my financial life in line with my beliefs and values, I’ve been reading The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist.  Twist posits that the mentality of scarcity is a modern scourge affecting rich and poor around the world; when we believe we don’t have enough and act from that place, we damage our souls, but when we recognize the wealth of our resources, be they internal, relational, or financial, and act from a place of sufficiency, our generosity and health ripples out into the broader world.

    Early in her book Twist tossed out a side comment:  Our scarcity-mentality around time is just as damaging as that around money.  Her words jolted me awake.  I know my perpetual feelings about not having enough money have no basis in reality.  They’re the result of being steeped in a culture striving for more.  I’m confident that with hard work and some financial planning I can move into an attitude of sufficiency around money.  But time?  I never have enough time.  For every activity I find time for in a day there are ten that go ignored.  For every project I accomplish I’ve ten ideas that never get developed.  For every friend I visit ten get neglected.  No, I don’t lust after my neighbor’s Camero.  I lust after time.

    So what began as a plan to straighten out financial priorities has become a major personal challenge.  How do I—how does anyone—live from a place of sufficiency?  How do I trust I have enough time to create the changes I envision for myself and the world?  How do I rechannel the energy I currently spend on longing into appreciation for what I have?  “Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day,” Jesus teaches.  Really he’s saying, “Have faith!”

    Jesus and Twist both invite me to inhabit the time I have, the money I have, fully, right now, without allowing myself to be distracted by longing.  What I appreciate appreciates.  Perhaps one day my sense of sufficiency will become one of abundance.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Triage

    I’m a great proponent of the triage method of revising:  Take care of the big problems first and gradually work your way down to the details of language.  This is a great policy—in the abstract.  If there’s such a thing as a time-saver, prioritizing is it.  And generally writers DO pay more attention to word choice, sentence structure, rhythm and sound the closer they get to publication.

    But in reality writers, to varying degrees, can’t help but pay attention to language from the start.  On one extreme are writers who must perfect each sentence before continuing to the next.  While this method works for some, I wouldn’t recommend it as it poses far too many opportunities for a new writer to get stuck.  Most of us grow attached to sentences we’ve polished and this attachment interferes with our ability to remain flexible and open-minded.  It’s hard to fundamentally restructure an entire book or to lop off a chapter that took you six months to write when all the sentences are beautiful.

    On the other extreme are blessedly sloppy drafters who spew out text, trusting that revision will tighten their prose.  I know writers who, when unable to conjure up the right word, insert asterisks instead.  Preserving the flow of ideas is too important; the right word can arrive later.  When we’re not attached to particular words, it’s easier to play with the large elements that form a work—structure, character, themes, plot, voice…

    Most writers fall between these two extremes.  We try to stay loose but can’t help but consider our word choices.  Luckily, language is quirky; just as a strong working title can give direction to a draft, the right word can also unlock material.  An accurate description can reveal to the writer a character’s nature or the truth about a memory.  Precision in word choice can expose new ideas worth exploring. There are benefits to occasionally slowing or even stopping one’s “flow” to deliberate over language.

    We don’t always know which words or sentences are worthy of careful construction early on and which are distractions from the hard work of composing.  Only much later will we discover which passages are germane—which is why it’s always wise to keep a repository for cut passages.  Generally, though, staying alert to our motives keeps us on track.  Is a particular quest for accurate language motivated by genuine questions about the content?  If so, our work with language reveals the heartbeat and is worth pursuing early on.  Is our struggle with language about presenting material to the reader?  If so, consider tackling this work later.  Better find the core of your story first and then polish the surface.

  • Resurrection Socks

    A month ago on a long drive to Madison Emily taught me to darn socks.  Basically you sew along the circumference of the hole, warp it like a loom and then weave.  Darning thread is comprised of four strands so you don’t have to be precise about moving in and out.  It’s surprisingly, ridiculously, easy.

    Ever since, I’ve been (dare I admit it?) ecstatic.  Emily and I are reluctant to throw away quality goods (anyone want ten Styrofoam medical coolers?), so my darning abilities now mean that the pile of Smart Wool socks with holes accumulating in our mending basket will finally vanish. I’m suddenly rich in socks.  I’ve achieved a new and satisfying level of self-sufficiency.  By recovering a small skill that’s been forgotten for a few generations, every time I get dressed I can thumb my nose at disposable consumerism.  What could be better?

    As I revel in my resurrected socks, my warm feet have been walking me through their theological implications.  With a little skill and a little effort, I can participate in giving the dead new life.  Okay, perhaps this is dramatic, but there’s a stitch of truth here:  We all have within us the holy capacity to find what was once lost, to mend that which was torn, to bring life, in however humble a way, to that which was lifeless.  Something about our willingness makes God’s work possible through us.  When we experience resurrection on a small scale, with socks or a garden plot or a friendship, we know its truth on a big scale, with the planet’s health or the well-being of our own souls.  There’s continuity between the details and universal truths.

    When stores are stocked with socks and swiping a piece of plastic can make them yours, it’s easy to forget our resurrection capacities.  But new life isn’t something that simply happens, deus ex machina.  It’s something we participate in.  Next time you see me, I’d be happy to show off the evidence.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • When to Stop Revising

    My mother’s greatest fear for me as a writer is that I’ll never stop revising.  When beginning writers learn about revision they always ask, “How do you know when to stop?”  My mother, and possibly these students, view revision as a path to perfection—which we know is endless and packed with illusions.  I prefer thinking about revision as child-rearing.  Even if your twenty-something isn’t fully mature, he’s able to interact in the world on his own.  Let him go.

    That said, most writers (myself included) have a tendency to think their work is done prematurely.  My agent worked with me for two years to get my novel in shape.  My first publisher asked that I rewrite my memoir with two timeframes rather than three; this took me a full year.  So how do we know when to revise and when we’re done?  Here are the questions I recommend asking in response to a revision suggestion or idea:

    • Does it offer you the chance to learn something about your subject?  Will you grow by continuing to revise?
    • Does it offer you the chance to learn about craft?
    • Will the change help bring about wholeness in the manuscript?
    • Will the change help your story land more solidly on the truth?
    • If you’re resisting the suggestion, is it because the change feels wrong for the project?  Or because it would require too much effort?

    When a work is complete, it feels balanced.  It has great integrity.  Responses from readers you respect (writing coaches, writing groups, agents, editors) no longer resonate with your inner tuning fork; suggestions tend to contradict one another or be petty.  Or you receive unanimous affirmation that your work is done.  Usually at the end of a project, an author longs to cut the umbilical cord and move his or her creative energy elsewhere.  It’s time for the piece to live its own life separate from the author.  But remember that finding a publisher may or may not be a sign of completion; books that desperately need development get published daily, and remarkable books are rejected all the time.  Once again we must trust the story, and the whisperings of our own heart.

  • Faith in the Face of Global Warming

    Snowless?  45 degree days in January?  Sure, like everyone else I’m reveling in the sun’s warmth and I appreciate being able to bike through this winter, but every time fellow Minnesotans wax poetic about this lovely weather I feel an awful sense of doom.  The elm trees need long periods of icy temperatures to ward off Dutch Elm disease.  Cold wards off the tent caterpillars; it permits native fish to survive in our lakes.  I’m afraid the immediate pleasure of warm afternoon walks could blind us to the long-term gifts of our normally cold climate.

    Emily has begun a weekly Qi Gong practice of praying for the earth’s healing.  Usually in such matters I’m infinitely practical:  If I want to end global warming, I need to radically change my lifestyle and support those working for systemic change.  This is prayer in action.  To some small degree I am culpable in the harm done to the earth; asking God to do something about it seems hypocritical and irresponsible.  God has no hands but ours, Theresa of Avila taught, so we must pray with our hands.  Thus Emily and I rarely purchase new items, we share a car, we grow vegetables, we write letters and donate money.

    But these choices seem paltry in the face of, say, the ongoing drought in the southwest that threatens my sister’s home with fire or the torrential rains in Guatemala that have caused a ten-foot rise in Lake Atitlan, forcing people from their homes.  The problem is huge.  I feel hopeless, powerless.  And yet it is precisely circumstances like these that invite us beyond ourselves, out of a practical mindset and into faith, the realm of possibility and mystery.  Praying for the earth’s healing isn’t a cop-out; it is a way to invite a loving, generative, just energy more fully into ourselves and the world.  Prayer helps us acknowledge our limitations.  Prayer also breaks apart those limitations by foisting us into a place of interconnection.  What is possible in the invisible, soulful realm can be birthed onto our fleshy earth.

    So let us pray.

    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Language that Shows

    When tweaking language during the final stages of revision, strive for clarity first. Language is meant to communicate. Sound, rhythm, pacing, word choice, sentence structure, punctuation, paragraphing—all stylistic choices—should convey the content rather than call attention to themselves. Take Strunk and White’s advice: “The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is an expression of self, and should turn resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style—all mannerisms, tricks, adornments. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.”

    But within the scope of clear language are many choices, and fine writers opt for words that show as well as tell. Let’s look at a passage from Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell You Stories:

    When I am the reader, not the writer, I too fall into the lovely illusion that the words before me which read so inevitably, must also have been written exactly as they appear, rhythm and cadence, language and syntax, the powerful waves of the sentences laying themselves on the smooth beach of the page one after another faultlessly.

    But here I sit before a yellow legal pad, and the long page of the preceding two paragraphs is a jumble of crossed-out lines, false starts, confused order. A mess. The mess of my mind trying to find out what it wants to say. This is a writer’s frantic, grabby mind, not the poised mind of a reader waiting to be edified or entertained.

    These paragraphs feel effortless, unpretentious, and perfectly clear. But look carefully at Hampl’s choices. In the long, undulating sentence about reading, she pairs “rhythm and cadence” and “language and syntax,” simulating “powerful waves” of sentences. In the paragraph about writing, she omits the “and” in her list: “crossed-out lines, false starts, confused order.” She follows this with two incomplete sentences, giving her readers a visceral experience of stopping and starting. The word “grabby” is colloquial, tactile, and low-brow. Her language shows as well as tells.

    Whether readers are conscious of these choices is irrelevant. Readers feel language; we have bodily responses with or without consciousness. Writers succeed when every aspect of their work serves the work’s heartbeat.
    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew