Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew | Spiritual Memoir Author and Teacher

Tag: revision

  • Broken & Beautiful: How the Light Gets In

    Image 5Ring the bells that still can ring.
    Forget your perfect offering.
    There is a crack, a crack in everything.
    That’s how the light gets in.

    Inspired by the 2015 Key West Literary Seminar, I’ve been thinking about these Leonard Cohen lyrics for months now.  So few literary attempts ever achieve perfection! The Shakespeares among us are rare. Most of us are embarked on foolish, impossible, and yet strangely and ultimately worthwhile projects. “What matters most in our lives is unsayable,” Mark Doty said. “We’ve got to attempt to make meaning… Of course it’s impossible, but if we don’t, we despair.” (more…)

  • Undoing the Single Story

    512px-Brooklyn_Museum_-_Hands_Female_Nude_Baby_-_Kahlil_GibranThe novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gives a wonderful TED talk about the human inclination to tell a “single story” about others, especially those we barely know. When she left Nigeria for college in the United States, her roommate was surprised that she spoke English so well and knew how to use a stove. “Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity.”  The roommate’s single story of Africa was one of tragedy and poverty.

    Single stories are the stuff of stereotypes, “and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” (more…)