The other place in the mind: learning to draw at 36

When I was a kid I always wished I could draw.

"Before": a self-portrait I drew a month ago

I remember, in one of the couple years here and there that I homeschooled because we were traveling/moving too much that year, how one of my textbooks--a math textbook, I think!--randomly had little pen-and-ink drawings of deer and other animals in it, to fill up the empty spaces. They were my favorite part of math class*, and I remember trying to learn to draw that year. I wasn't very good at it.

* My mom and I have a story about me and math. I came home from elementary school and said "I hate math." How my mom later told the story: she was surprised when she got my grades and it turned out I was performing just fine in math. What I said when I heard the story: "Mom, I said I hated it, not that I couldn't do it!"**

** (You're absolutely right, that is not where a footnote goes. Onward!)

Actually that makes an excellent segue back to drawing: I'm not very good at math now. I could fill out our tax returns but I am extremely happy to let my bookkeeping husband do it, and as for trigonometry, forget it. I'm not very good at math because I hated it from day one--I haven't learned, and I haven't practiced, beyond the necessary. (And I don't regret that!) Innate ability counts for something, but experience and practice count for a lot more. (Something we've taught our son maybe a little too hard--you should hear the way he says "EXPERIENCED.")

But with drawing, people--including me--tend to figure that innate ability is the only thing. That either you can or you can't. Imagine if we had that approach to reading! I ended up figuring I couldn't.

But I can.

Sometime in the fall, the Boy and I were at a thrift store with a little time to kill in the book section, and I found a book I remembered from my art classroom in high school: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. (BTW please don't jump up and debunk left/right brain just yet. I'm getting there.) I bought it, partly because "thrift store, why not," and partly because that little secret wish leapt up in me again. I decided to give it a go this winter, and try to learn.

The message of the book is essentially this: most people try to draw with the wrong side of their brain. The left side of our brain, the side that does both language and math, is obsessed with symbols. It gravitates toward drawing symbols--stick figures, trees with green balls on top, the idea of a house without finicking over every crack in the façade. You can play Pictionary with it, no problem--communication is its gig. But it doesn't draw what it sees. Or if it does, it doesn't see what's really there.

I copied this Van Gogh sketch upside down

The right brain, on the other hand, takes in what it sees without naming it, simply. It sees line and shape and color and lets them be themselves. So that when it draws them, what it draws looks like what is there. So that's what we have to do, to learn to draw things that look real: immerse ourselves in right-brain mode when we draw.

Now I know, because Ye Olde Internet Debunkers have been on about it for quite awhile, that the popular conception of right vs. left brain has been proven wrong. The book's pretty old. But what's interesting to me is that on a practical level it doesn't matter: the book is right. It describes a set of symptoms--a sense of wordlessness, of timelessness, of deep focus on a thing in itself without impatience or the need to name or define it--that point to a distinct mental state, which is the state needed to draw well. And in order to draw, I don't need to know exactly what my brain-scan would look like in that state--I need to be able to get there. (There's a super interesting analogy to spiritual things here--maybe I'll explore it eventually. There's a connection also with learning the wilderness--you need that same state.) That's what the book offers--exercises for getting there--and they work. I felt those symptoms, and I felt them when I was finally drawing something decent for the second time in my life. (By drawing upside-down, to cut down on my brain's instinct to name things.)

That's the funny thing--it was the second time. Once in high school, at my missionary-kid boarding school--just once--I was alone in the dorm all one Sunday morning. (It was allowed. Long story.) It was glorious. Remember high school? Well imagine you lived with those kids as well, and unless you were a jock you can probably imagine why it was glorious to be alone. It was spring, and I went out and lay on the green grass under the lilac-trees for a little while; then I went in and got a postcard I loved, of a kitten in light and shadow, and I copied it in pencil and then in watercolors. Time flowed sweet and silent as I painted. I was a third of the way done with the watercolors when the dorm vans pulled in carrying the crowds home from church, and that's how the picture--ten times better than anything else I ever drew--remains to this day. It felt like a magic moment, one I never could recapture. I never tried.

That's the thing about the right brain--or whatever it really is, that timeless mode. I remember the taste of it in that moment, the freedom. Freedom was a prerequisite for me then--I couldn't have drawn like that with all those people pressing on me, with their adult expectations or their hair-trigger teenage scorn--but also a result. And as I did the beginner exercises in the book, the ones intended to get you into that mode as you begin, I could taste it again. The book has you visualize images of it, and for me they were green, all green, rock and lichen and leaf and pine, and me climbing. That's the other place the timelessness came for me, always when I was a child--out in the woods, in the mountains, in caves even, in all wild and rocky places where I could use my body and trust it and let my mind be one with it, knowing my foot was firm in the foothold and my balance was clear and strong.

I drew this over this weekend. Me!

It was good, remembering that. I did feel like I was opening doors in myself to long-missed rooms.

The book claims that our education with its focus on symbols and definitions closes those doors, that we're moved more and more away from that experience and the particular skills it brings. But that they can be opened again, with time and practice. The book seems to envision a kind of equality of right and left--I wonder if that's affected by the idea of two paired sides, and whether it would be changed by whatever the real science is on these two (or more?) different ways of thinking. I wonder what would be the full list of skills that the "right-brain" mode enables--hunting? working with animals? my mind always goes to outdoor stuff--and whether more crossover between the two would help the problem I've so often seen in farm interns here, where they're so taken up with the image behind their eyes that they don't see the plants in front of them, don't learn from observation.

(I remember being that person. I remember push-cultivating a row of the garden and not seeing that the weeds hadn't died, because push-cultivating kills weeds by definition, right? Except nothing kills weeds by definition. And if any of the Logic Guys I knew in college are here, don't start in at me about weed-killer. You spray that weed-killer on some weeds and see if they die, and then we'll talk.)

I don't know the answers to all those questions. But to the last one I'd lay money on a resounding YES. I think this other place in the mind, whatever we call it, is indeed something we've tossed aside too lightly, neglected to our cost. The ability to look at the world and see what is there rather than the definitions we rightly or wrongly impose on it--how many mistakes might that have prevented, at the very least?

But it's not lost. It's right there, a path we can walk down if we choose. Who know what we'll find?

For example--as it turns out--I can draw.
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On writing Christian Holocaust novels aka Thank God for my worst reviews, Part II

So I was saying last week why I wanted to continue with the series and write Flame in the Night, despite coming to understand (and sympathize with) why some Jewish people feel so queasy about Christian Holocaust fiction. Because the story of Le Chambon is a story of Christians getting it right for once, and it's a story all of us (very much including me) desperately need to hear in our time. So I wanted to keep telling it—but to get it right, to get every part of it right this time, to draw my Jewish characters with as much depth and texture and vitality and respect as I could possibly muster. And I knew I had a lot to learn before I could.

I started online. I wish I could have walked into a big-city library and started there, but I live in rural Illinois. I went to a writers' forum I frequent, got up my courage and put out a query asking if anyone could tell me about Judaism in the mid-20th century. I confessed to my past half-baked approach, I admitted that I barely knew what questions to ask, and then I asked a long list of questions anyway. Some very kind people answered me almost right away. They went above and beyond for me, writing long posts again and again, coming back and back to answer my gradually less stupid questions; they told me they were glad I was taking the time to try and represent Judaism right.

You know, I've seen a lot of arguments online about representation of minorities or the “Other” in fiction, about cultural appropriation, exploitation, all the rest. The conversation goes like a sort of pendulum, back and forth: complex discussions of the subtle, uncomfortable shadings that push a work over the line from representation to exploitation, then suddenly writers throwing up their hands in despair, feeling judged, their best efforts judged, wondering if it's even possible to get it right or if they should give up—either by abandoning their manuscript or by deciding this whole cultural sensitivity thing is a crock. Because you do feel judged, in a discussion like that. As a writer representing the majority culture, all the pressure is on you to walk that tightrope, neither to exclude nor misrepresent people whose experience you do not share. But—it's amazing, it's amazing how different it feels to have this other discussion: tell me about your experience. Tell me about your culture. I don't know much about your religion. I want to learn.

It's walking in as a learner, I guess. We're so scared of being judged for being ignorant. But learners are supposed to be ignorant. If you confess your ignorance, it turns out people are kind.

And eager to teach you. It surprised me, and yet I should have known it. It's been when someone on the forum has asked a question like “So what is a Baptist church service like anyway?” that I've thrown out the rest of my afternoon plans and written them 1000 words on the subject. Of course it feels good to teach.

(I mean, it doesn't always. I know some people get asked the same questions a million times about their background and that can drive you nuts. You have to be polite and roll with where people are. But I was grateful to find people who were there in the forum ready to teach.)

We had a long, fascinating discussion—mostly me and two Jewish writers. I read the resources they pointed me to, I summarized scenes for them and asked them if a detail made sense; they were incredibly kind and generous with their time, and—simply kind. Not once did I feel judged. They shared family history, stories they had heard or read, links, basic knowledge about prayers and services, nitty-gritty details of keeping kosher. (And oh my word it is hard, if you don't have your own kitchen—as Elisa, my Jewish character in Flame, does not. Very hard. But she's a determined young woman. I can't wait to introduce you to her.) And I learned.

It turns out that I find Judaism fascinating. And, frankly, impressive. Naturally, growing up Christian, I received the impression that Judaism was legalistic; that notion didn't survive the first few days of research. A far more appropriate word than legalism, it seemed, would be loyalty. A loyalty that they've held onto for millennia. I got absolutely no sense of (as Christians generally define legalism) anyone trying to earn their way into Heaven (which by the way is explicitly de-emphasized in Judaism--Heaven I mean, and the afterlife in general.) Rather, that the commandments are obeyed because they are commanded. By God. That's impressive. I'm not saying I want to convert. But—basing your whole daily life, big and small, around loyalty to God. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength. And love your neighbor as yourself. How can I, or any theist, not respect that?

Frankly, it's been a privilege to write about this. It's been a privilege to write Elisa Schulmann, her courage and her loyalty. She doesn't make every choice as I would make it—because she's a person in her own right. And she's a person I respect.

The other week I finally got my first response from a Jewish fellow writer who's read the book. He pointed out a small inaccurate detail, suggested I put in a little more about holidays, and then told me this: that many non-Jewish authors get the details right but miss the “feel,” but that I had grasped it, that Elisa's Judaism felt real. I can't tell you how my heart expanded in happiness and relief.

Of course, it's only one person's response, and an incredibly nice guy at that. I am seeking more opinions, as I said last week. But I'm seeking them much more happily now.

Still it's for each person who reads the book to judge how I have done. As it always is. As the song says, it's not me, it's not my family—other people have far more right over this story than I do. But I'm deeply grateful to the people who were kind to my ignorance.

And I want to say this to my fellow writers. I know what it's like to feel judged. When I enter a new writers' forum I hint so carefully, so nervously, that I write Christian fiction. I ask myself what will be the consequences if I choose to claim the label evangelical—because I remember what happened last time I failed to ask myself that. I know what it is to have people assume I'm coming in ready to trample everybody—because others with the same labels on them really did do that. But still, here in my white evangelical Christian-fiction-writing skin—people were kind to me. I came in as a learner, and they thanked me. I learned that it's all right to be ignorant, as long as you listen rather than speak. I want to tell my fellow writers—it's all right, or at least it may be all right, I haven't read your book, but it really just might be all right if you step into the skin of a learner, if you take that leap and confess what you don't know. If you sit down at someone's feet and listen hard.

It really might.

On writing Christian Holocaust novels, a.k.a. Thank God for my worst reviews

I dialed the number, then hesitated before pushing “call.” I was calling a friend of a friend—in other words, a total stranger. I've always hated calling strangers since I was a child more mortally scared of embarrassment than of any actual danger. But this might help my work. My friend had referred me to this lady, saying she was Jewish and had very worthwhile constructive criticism for me about my first book, How Huge the Night. I pushed the button. I stammered my way through my inquiry about her feedback. Lay it on me, I didn't quite smoothly say.

“The French boy's story was a very fresh look at World War II for me,” the lady told me. “And I appreciated that your book wasn't trying to convert me. But it's your Jewish characters. They're a little… generic.”

Let me make this clear right now: she was 100% right--and being nice about it.

Honestly? Seven or eight years later, I kind of squirm thinking about it. Gustav and Nina, the Jewish brother and sister, in their very first scene have packed to flee Austria and are about to go out the door, and I have them pause to say the Shema together. Why?

Um. It's what Jews say, right?

I'm actually not positive it wasn't something they would do. It probably is in the realm of the possible; my kind critic didn't mention it as a ridiculous moment. What embarrasses me is that I didn't check. I didn't make even the slightest attempt to find out whether this was considered an appropriate prayer for the circumstance. Nope. I just blithely sailed on.

“I couldn't tell what kind of Jews any of them were, what their backgrounds would be.” Well of course you couldn't, lady. Judaism has only three major denominations, to my own religion's approximately one gazillion, and at the time I couldn't have told them to you. I'm just lucky she didn't ask me where I got off—I couldn't have told her!

Now some people may be nodding along to this and some people may be asking why I'm beating myself up for being a little vague in a novel. For the latter, I'll give the answer in three words.

Christian Holocaust fiction.

I didn't realize at the time that this was even an issue. It took me awhile to figure it out, even after my phone conversation. It snuck up on me slowly. Then a Christian romance between a Jewish woman and a concentration camp commandant made finalist for a major romance award, and it started sneaking up on me very fast.

There were rants all over the internet about it for awhile. (Why a concentration camp commandant? Well, it was supposed to be a retelling of Esther—he was King Xerxes, her love changed him, he liberated everybody. There were issues on all kinds of levels, all the way down—click on the links if you're interested.) People were furious. I was down that rabbit-hole for days, following link after link. Yes, there was some morbid fascination there, but I could tell there were things here I needed to know.

I hadn't made most of the mistakes that author made—casting a Nazi as the romantic lead, trying to spin a concentration camp commandant as “not a real Nazi,” etc. But I saw that I had made her first mistake, the one all the others came from. I had failed to realize I was rushing in where angels feared to tread.

My narrow escape took my breath away.

Allow me to link you to my two worst reviews.

My first reaction to both of these was just what you'd think. What the heck? The Tablet magazine one in particular confused me. The man's brief remarks about my book (one of many in a themed multi-book review) boiled down to “It's a Christian Holocaust novel for Christian teens and also it's Christian,” to which he affixed the verdict: creepy. Creepy?

The other review, when I finally stopped focusing on its couple of errors (nobody forces any Jews to go to church in the book, but I do understand how she might have gotten that impression,) actually put the heart of the issue really well. There was the “generic” quality—my Jewish characters sounded, she said, like “Christians who spoke a different language”—there was the lack of any genuinely researched Jewish worship or practice (there were reasons, but they weren't good reasons)—and finally there was the worst part. The reviewer accused me of “using the background setting of a people being persecuted, tortured, and killed for their religion to glorify another religion”—i.e. Christianity.

I certainly didn't intend to do that. I didn't set out to use my Jewish characters only to glorify the faith of my Christian ones. But it's true that I understood my Christian characters' backgrounds far more than those of my Jewish characters, and that I was not uncomfortable enough with that to fix it. Intentions are not the only thing.

How much I did or didn't exploit my Jewish characters, I will leave it to each person who reads How Huge the Night to decide. I know I didn't do it nearly as much as others have, I know I didn't do it enough to spark a viral series of internet rants. But let me put it this way: I'm no longer saying What the heck? I hear what these people are saying now. I don't think that writing a Christian Holocaust novel is inherently, automatically wrong or creepy (or I would have stopped) but I don't think the Tablet reviewer was a lunatic, either. I understand now why he could make that judgment without taking the time (or the wordcount) to back it up, and expect his reader to agree.

I understand two things I should never have gone into this series without understanding. My two worst reviews started to teach them to me. Someone else's thirty worst reviews hammered them home.

The first was simply what the Holocaust still means to some people alive today. If you click one link in this post, click this one. Fair warning, it's a rant. There's no language, though. Just raw, intensely personal emotion and truth. The part I have never forgotten is the writer's description of visiting the nursing home week after week as an eleven-year-old, hearing people's stories, seeing the faded numbers on their arms, running her shaking arm up and down an old lady's back as she sobbed and relived the terror of thinking she was going to die in a camp. Reading that, and other posts—but mostly that—I heard the voice of reality whispering in my ear what I'll repeat to any author who's treading where I'm still treading today: this is not a story, okay? World War II is not your fiction background—or playground—it's not “instant drama, just add water.” Write with respect for the real people it happened to, or go somewhere else and make your own drama.

For some of us, it's a terrible historical event; for others, it's the reason why their parents don't have any older relatives. Once I started interacting with Jews online about this, one of them made the simple statement, in a discussion of the culture of Jewish communities in the mid-20th century, that she didn't know much about her mother's side of the family because “none of them made it out.”

None of them made it out.

I knew the Holocaust was terrible, right? But there's knowing and there's knowing.

Here's another story one of the same people told me. We were discussing the experience of Jewish children hidden during the Holocaust, and what they remembered. The (true) story is this: there was a rabbi who was tasked, after WWII ended, with finding Jewish children who had been hidden in monasteries during the Holocaust. Why finding? Well, sometimes the monasteries didn't want to give them back—in fact, some denied having any Jewish children there. To verify, he would call out the Shema—and any Jewish children who were there would run to him, their deepest memories stirred by the words.

Why didn't the monasteries want to give them back? They wanted to raise them as Christians.

I was shocked by this story. But I also felt something else, something—shall we say creepy? I felt recognition.

I'm a Christian. So I understood why they wanted that.

But hearing it from a Jewish person, I also understood how she would feel about it. How the children's relatives would feel about it. How anyone Jewish would feel about it.

That was the second thing I learned.

Anti-Semitic medieval art

We American Protestants, we don't feel that the Middle Ages has anything to do with us. There's the early church, the Reformation, the Great Awakening, and then there's all that Catholic stuff, which is not our stuff. But Catholics were simply Christians, the only Christians there were, when the Spanish Inquisition coerced tens of thousands of Jews into converting. Make no mistake: they remember. The old, cold history of medieval Christian Europe making it clear to the Jews they were really not very welcome—but they could be! If they converted! (or maybe not depending on the country…)—is one the Jews have not forgotten, even if we have. The slanders about poisoned wells, the murders, the pogroms, they haven't forgotten those either. They don't consider the Holocaust to be an inexplicable exception. Simply the climax of a terrible story. I haven't heard many of them online blaming Christians for the Holocaust. It's generous of them, or perhaps polite. But we should be the first to admit, at the very least, that it happened on our watch. On our turf. That if every Christian had risen up, it would not remotely have been possible.

And then we have the good Christians. The ones who hid and rescued Jews. Some of whom also went ahead and used the power they'd been given over Jewish children—given, remember, indirectly but most surely by the Nazis—to obtain conversions that stank of coercion. The good ones.

So yeah. Christian Holocaust fiction.

I had no idea what I was getting into.

Now at least I've got the first clue. Thank God.

Now, none of this made me want to stop writing the “Night” series. No way.

Because if there's anything that the story of Le Chambon has to say to all of what I've written above, it's that it is not inevitable. Le Chambon, and what happened there during the war, stands as a proof that it doesn't have to be this way, that all the bone-bleak history between Christians and Jews, the awful dynamics, the excellent reasons for people's suspicion about what I do, were not inevitable then and they are not inevitable now—that we can obey our God much better than that, and we must.

Children arriving in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon

The people of Le Chambon did not use the people they rescued to prove their own virtue—they considered their own virtue little more than common decency, what “anybody would do.” They did not use their position of power, with desperate, hunted refugees and children utterly dependent on them for survival, to put pressure on them to listen to the message of Christianity. They respected them too much for that. They quite simply acted toward them according to both the Torah and the Gospels: Do to others what you would have them do to you. Love your neighbor as yourself. They lived the kingdom of God in their here and now—not the supremacy of Christianity, but the kingdom of God.

I knew in my bones that was still the story I wanted to tell—more than ever. But I wanted to do it right this time.

But this is far too long already… so, Part II next week.

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But—I have a query for you all. Part of the end of the process by which I hope to be doing it right: consulting Jewish sensitivity readers. I still need one or two more. If you are Jewish, willing to read my book, and able to advise on whether I've rendered the experience of a devout young Jewish woman, and the Jewish experience in my book in general, accurately and respectfully, I would be very grateful and glad to reciprocate with any writing feedback or editing work you might need. You can contact me at heatheremunn@gmail.com.