Hashtag FFWgr

Ninety-nine percent of you won't know what that title means--which is sort of the epitome of bad communication. Nonetheless, I'm starting there, because I ended there--at #FFWgr. 

#FFWgr, the Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a biannual conference of writers and readers of faith: about finding faith, leaving faith, and returning to faith; about the connection between faith and writing. I make my pilgrimage there to find inspiration and motivation. I'm completely positive (in the ironic sense of those words) that I will eventually be one of the speakers there, talking to the little people about getting up at four a.m. and sitting down in front of the computer and waiting for God to show up.

Actually--that was James McBride's line. My perspective will be more of a p.m. perspective, because mornings give me hives; and my topic will be Why I Keep Writing Even Though I've Never Been Published; And As A Matter of Fact, Why Would You Even Listen To Me?

I'm going to give you two kinds of #FFWgr candy: motivational and/or interesting quotes from some of the talks I went to; and a reading list. I kept notes as I listened, and wrote down the names of books and authors that the speakers mentioned. I may have missed a few, but I've still got a pretty good list.

So first, the quotes, in order of their appearance:

Daniel Taylor:

"Everyone should write their own apologetics--how do you tell this story of faith to yourself?" This is a riff, he said, on Milton's idea that everyone should write his own theology. I tried to confirm that Milton actually said or wrote something like this, but could not. Internet, could you do me a solid and let me know a) did Milton ever say/write anything like that and b) what's the source?

The topic of Taylor's talk was The Use of Story in Apologetics. He said, "stories defend faith by making it desirable, powerful, winsome. Stories don't just tell truth. Truth can be a sledgehammer. Stories can make faith not just reasonable and believable, but also attractive."

"Stories are convincing; they require us to change, and tell us how to do it."

"Stories don't prove anything, but stories prove everything that's important."

"Don't just tell anecdotes, tell stories. Anecdotes are reduced; they lack personal experience and emotion." I'd like to learn more about this distinction.

"Look for evidence of the divine in the mundane and even in the profane." 

John Suk talked about something called "perspective by incongruity," an idea of Kenneth Burke's which I didn't quite get but will add to my growing list of Things I Want to Know More About.

(Sigh. #FFWgr always leaves me with the existential exhaustion of realizing ever more clearly how much I don't know.)

From James McBride: 

"Most of what I do fails. Learn to fail. Fail--then forget it." I'm not sure I believe this. Maybe it's hyperbole? I would like to know, operationally, what that looks like.

"I wake up at 4 a.m. and just sit there waiting for God to come into the room." Many speakers at the conference mentioned the productivity of the early morning hours, which discourages me a tiny bit.

"Skepticism is good, but cynicism is a killer of dreams." Ooooh, this was good. (And by the way, how do you spell "ooo" that rhymes with "mood" rather than ooooh that rhymes with "road"? Because I was aiming for the oo in mood sound there, but it just didn't look right without the h.)

Shannon Huffman Polson: 

"Grief and loss are lonely, but they connect you to humanity." I think this is why suffering is such a useful tool for an artist, writer, musician. Dammit.

"I wanted to suffer, wanted the pain of grief--because it would keep me closer to those I had lost." This certainly resonated with me, even though I remember when I said it to a friend, she looked at me strangely. I saw other heads nodding--and I was glad to see that this counter-intuitive feeling of wanting to hold on to the pain of grief was not merely a glitch in my otherwise well-adjusted persona, but that it had universal resonance.

"If the grief ebbed, did it mean that the love and connection were not that great? There is a lot of guilt in grief." This, too; both the question and the statement.

Andrew Krivak:

"Take small acts--actions outside of the interior life of grief and loss--and write them into your story." This is actually a paraphrase, but I like the notion that small acts have great value. I think he was making a reference to the book Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity and Ingenuity Can Change the World. 

Peter Marty

Peter Marty (whose appearance reminded me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer):

"If you want to be a better writer, become a deeper person." I wish he had offered Seven Steps to Becoming a Deeper Person.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"We keep on outsourcing our brains--we know and remember less. We externalize our knowledge, our taste, our experience, and our faith. We reference and rely on the faith and experience of others. In Genesis, by chapter three they stop talking with God and start talking about God."

"Is it possible for some people to miss their lives in the way that they miss a plane?"

"Tell me what you love, and I can tell you what you believe." Oof.

"We identify our center through suffering." More on this, please.

Anne Lamott:

"Life and writing are very, very hard. I don't think we're here to figure things out."

"There is perfect healing, but people die anyway. Frankly, if I were God, I would have a completely different system."

"I think if there is a God, he probably looks a lot like Isaac Stern. Or Bette Midler."

"We were taught to stay one step ahead of the abyss. If the abyss opens up at your feet, go to Ikea. Get an area rug."

"It's OK to admit that you're crazy and damaged. All the better people are."

Hugh Cook offered practical advice about writing fiction:

"Your character must desperately want something; but something thwarts her. She must make specific, decisive actions."

"Use dialogue not for narration or description, but to show your characters."

"Reveal your character's age early on."

Brett Lott:

Start a story with what you know, and head into "what if"--what if this happened, or that?"

Suzanne Woods Fisher:

"Answer the call to write; keep the calling at the forefront of your vision all the time."

"Living for the opinions of others is seductive; don't do it. Remember who you are."

I have no quotes from James Vanden Bosch, but his presentation on corpus linguistics was one of my top three sessions. Who knew. I might even sign up for the eight-week MOOC in September.

Miroslav Volf:

"Atheists point to ways that religion and Christians have failed and malfunctioned."

"We must listen to the voices of our brothers and sisters from around the world to penetrate our own self-deception. We must listen to the wisdom of saints and critics."

"We are restless for God; we reach for the transcendent. The orientation of our selves to the Divine is the primary function of faith."

This next quote is from an audience member who might have been quoting someone else, but it struck me as worthy of inclusion: "Christianity has become so sentimental and shallow that we can't even produce good atheists anymore!" This was connected to the part of the interview in which Volf said something to the effect that he'd take Nietzsche over Dawkins any day.

"I don't bemoan the marginalization of the Christian faith. There are strengths in the margins. When Christians were in the center of power we were used, and the faith was abused. Like the band of twelve followers on the outskirts of Jerusalem, we can testify to the beauty of Jesus Christ from the margins."

Rachel Held Evans:

"Every challenge--the challenge of writer's block, distraction, discouragement, fear, lack of ideas--is solved by getting back to work. In writing, that work is paying attention, naming things, telling stories." 

"Remember that God is generous, and grace is scandalous. God has called us to this work. There is no scarcity principle at work in writing--there's plenty of work to do, plenty of stories to tell."

Now, I bet you can't wait until #FFWgr2016! I know I can't.

Stay tuned for Hashtag FFWgr, Part Two: Reading List.

Why You Should Stop Saying "Happy Mothers' Day"

I don't actually hate Mothers' Day any more (it was not high on my list of holidays after losing a child), but I totally understand why some of my friends do.

My unscientific poll last year found that more people feel sad on Mothers' Day (MD) than happy. Many people feel ambivalence or even dread as MD approaches, for many reasons: having lost a child, desiring a baby, having a sick child, having a strained relationship with your child or your mother, wanting to be married, having a mother who hurt or disappointed you (aka, being human), experiencing the death of your mother, dealing with your mother's serious illness, and on and on.

So for all of you out there who don't feel particularly thrilled about the prospect of yet another crummy mother's day approaching--I'm sorry for your pain. I get it.

Why does there need to be an official mother's day on the calendar, anyway? I've decided that I want to be the kind of mother that has zero expectations around the day. What I really want is to have a great relationship with my kids, such that every day we have loving interactions, and That Sunday in May is just another typical day.

When they've grown up and established their own households, if they want to send me a card or a potted geranium or take me out for a meal, great. (Although I'm not particularly fond of geraniums. But whatever.) I will never decline kindness or attention. But if they forget, or they're not good at getting a card in the mail, or they've had a busy week--so what? If we continue to have fun together, and good conversations, and reciprocal expressions of love and appreciation, then one Day on the calendar means very little.

(BTW, this logic does NOT apply to my birthday.)

If, however, by the time my kids are out on their own I've screwed them up enough that they don't feel any tenderness or appreciation toward me, then our problems are larger than an M-Day card can fix. (God protect them, please, from my mistakes and selfishness.)

And what about dads? Should they be off the hook? Mr. Peevie's job, I believe, is to help the kids, while they're still young, to say "I love you mom" and "Thanks, mom"--but not just on M-Day. If he does it on M-Day, great; but as long as he's setting this example the rest of the year, then I'm totally cool with minimal fanfare on That Day.

I don't dread the Day; and I don't want my family to dread it either. Do you want to join me in my Quest to Take the Expectations Out of Mother's Day?

And I really want to address the issue of the ubiquitous, relentless, and somewhat mindless Mothers' Day greetings. The only person you really need to acknowledge the Day to is your own mother. You don't need to say it to me or to any other woman, whether she's a mother or not. It's not like Christmas/Hanukkah, or Independence Day, or Halloween, where the celebration and acknowledgement includes everyone.

I'm not trying to be mean here, and if you say HMD to me, I won't bite your head off. But be aware: saying "Happy Mothers' Day!" does not make it happy. Before popping out the cliched holiday salutation to someone who is not your mother, look into her eyes, and try to discern whether it is, in fact, a happy day for her. Maybe a better thing to say is, "How are you today?"--and really mean it.

And I will leave you with this Anne Lamott essay in Salon about her not-June-Cleaver-mother. It's not pertinent to Mothers' Day, per se; but it's Anne Lamott, so it's entertaining, touching, and truth-telling, and I think you will enjoy it.

NOTE: I really wanted to include a picture of June Cleaver with this post, but for some reason Blogger won't let me. Stupid Blogger.

Bad Clients

I love being a freelance writer, and if God and Mr. Peevie allow it, I will never go back to a regular full-time job, ever.

That said, there are some things that suck about being a freelancer. One of them, as I have noted, is that there is no guarantee of a regular paycheck.

Another is that sometimes clients are slow-to-pay, or don't pay at all. Why is that? I currently have two clients that I produced work for who are not paying my bill. One is a former colleague; we used to have lunch together periodically; we are friends. She signed off on my quote in February, and I delivered the first draft of a resume to her about a week later, along with an invoice.

We went back and forth with emails for a few weeks: first she wanted to do a conference call, then she didn't, then she asked for a different resume format. By this time it was late March, and she still had not paid my invoice, nor did she pay the up-front half that my contract required; but I still delivered the second draft on April 3. Five days later she asked me for another re-write, and this time I insisted that I talk to her mom--the actual subject of the resume--to make sure that I understand from her exactly what she wants.

Now it's a month later--three months after we made the contract--and my former colleague has not put me in touch with her mom, nor has she paid my invoice. I had asked her after the second draft was rejected if I could just call her mom directly, but she wanted to set it up herself. She is now ignoring my emails.

Grrr. Bad client.

The second non-paying client is a huge IT consulting company in Florida. They probably do millions of dollars of business every year--but they are stalling, or reneging, on paying my lousy $150 invoice for consulting on and re-writing a marketing brochure. WTF?

This client I got through E-Lance, a website that allows people or companies to post freelance projects online, and subscribers pay a monthly fee to have access to the job listings and bid on the projects. Since it's a virtual international marketplace, I'm bidding against writers in countries where the dollar is worth a lot more than it is here; and without exception, all of the jobs I've bid on have had minimum bids of $50. In other words, someone in India or Bulgaria is willing to write 50 articles for a grand total of $5, which, bully for them. I'm not.

So this IT company, which will remain un-named unless it turns out that I really am not going to collect any money from them, asked me to turn around a first draft of this brochure copy in 24-36 hours, which I did. I did some research on the company, researched their competition, made some recommendations for how to improve the piece they were producing, and wrote a concise, peppy first draft.

They hated it.

It's fine for them to hate it, though, because that's what a first draft is for. Anne Lamott calls them "shitty first drafts." This company is apparently unclear on the concept of a first draft, because, as it turns out, when they didn't like what I produced, they gave the project to another writer to finish up for them. They were planning on just dropping the project and not paying me, because, as the client said to me the other day on the phone, "I didn't get what I wanted."

But let me backtrack. At first, I didn't get any feedback from the client himself, but his representative told me the client was unhappy with what I had done for him and that there were grammatical errors in what I had written. Now, I might not be Noam Chomsky, but I do know my way around a p-ante, if you know what I mean. Which you probably don't, but stay with me here.

(Oh, and just as an aside, I did wear Noam Chomsky's name on my back during one of those meet and greet games in college where you have to go around the room asking people questions to figure out what name has been scotch-taped to your shirt. Every time I asked a question--am I a male? Am I alive? Am I in sports?--people would look at me with a blank expression and say, "I have no idea." This was Mr. Peevie's hilarious idea, and yet I still married him.)

So back to my point. When I pressed my client to point out the alleged grammatical errors in my writing, he admitted that they weren't so much "grammatical" problems as they were concerns about word choice. Effing word choice. That's like telling an engineer she made structural mistakes in designing a bridge, when in fact she painted it a color that you're not quite comfortable with.

He also said that what I wrote wasn't long enough. So for word choice and length, he figured it was just fine and dandy for him to breach his contract with me. In fact, I believe he considered that by not delivering a perfectly acceptable first draft, I was the one who had breached.

I told him, look, Mr. IT Guy, you're a billion dollar company. I'm a sole proprietor operating out of my home office. Are you really going to cheat me out of $150 dollars? He replied, without any irony, "We're not a billion dollar company," which missed the point by approximately 26.2 miles.

At one point he said, well maybe we can still pay you to produce another piece for us. Of course I'd love to get more business from you, Mr. IT Guy, but I'd like to get paid for the first job FIRST, I told him. (I can be very direct when I need to. Some people call it combative.)

In the end, we agreed that he would send me his comments on my original first draft, and I would revise it so that they could use the material for another purpose. This is what should have happened in the first place. That conversation occurred two days ago. I'm still waiting for his edits.

Bad client.

My Husband Made Me Cry

Last night I was sitting in The Green Room, wasting time on the computer, as I am wont to do (I know you're suprised) and Mr. Peevie came in. He said, with a serious expression on his face, "I have something to say to you." He looked around. "Here, let me sit down," he said ominously.

My stomach flapjacked, and my heart Titanicked. "Is it bad?" I worried. "Did something bad happen? Did I do something bad?" (My vocabulary shrinks in the face of fear.) Nobody follows "I have something to tell you" with "I better sit down" unless it's difficult to say, right? And bad news is tough to deliver. It was only a brief moment, but I can still feel the dread on my neck.

"No, not at all," Mr. Peevie quickly reassured me. "It's good."

Whew. Then why all the seriousness? I wondered. Why the sitting down? Why the formality?

And then came one of the sweetest, tenderest moments of my 23.75 years of married life.

"I thought about sending you an email today to tell you this," Mr. P said, "but it just didn't happen, and it didn't seem like the best way to say it."

Now I'm thinking, oooh, he bought me a present! He bought me a really great present that I'm going to love, and it's being shipped, and he's going to tell me about it! Because that's how my mind works. But it wasn't a present. Actually, it was better than a present--which, coming from me, the queen of loving to get presents, is shocking.

Mr. Peevie leaned forward and looked into my eyes. "I just want to tell you," he said, "that you are always building up my self-esteem, always telling your friends how wonderful I am, and telling stories that put me in a good light. I want you to know that I wouldn't be half the man I am without you."

By this time, the tears are totally rolling right down my cheeks. But there was more.

"I never had very good self-esteem until I met you. I wasn't a very good communicator, and I especially wasn't very good at expressing my feelings. But you have taught me those things, and you appreciate the things I'm good at."

I kept on leaking salty tears, and he kept on talking. "I'm glad I didn't try to put this into an email," Mr. Peevie continued. "It's better in person. I want to look right at you and tell you how much I love you, and how much I appreciate you, and what you mean to me. You make me a better person."

I don't even have words to tell you what a gift that was to me. I hugged Mr. Peevie and left tear-marks his sleeve. "Too much credit," I said, but he just hugged me harder.

Anne Lamott said in Grace, Eventually, "A good marriage is supposed to be one where each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal"--and the only point I'd contest is that it's no secret.