Grieving, weakness, God, and my friend Rich

I am re-running this, because I know that my publisher put my blog URL on the back of Flame in the Night, and if anyone new here shows up because of that, I want them to know about the person I dedicated the book to.

I wrote this in March 2017.

____________________________________

I've been realizing, as I recover from finishing my manuscript, just how many things I put on hold as I raced toward the finish line. (And then limped over it, having gotten a nasty chest cold in the last week of the work; between the book and my 3-year-old I managed to ration out just enough energy to finish.) One of those things, naturally, was cleaning the house. (You should've seen it.)

But I think another may have been grieving.

My dear friend Rich Foss died in January. I think it was January. It's been so surreal. It was expected, in a way; his health was bad at the best of times, and was getting worse. Then the blow came suddenly: he was newly diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder, when his immune system's continual fight against his chronic lung condition was all that was keeping him alive.

Rich was always a brave and honest man. He could barely walk; he'd had rheumatoid arthritis since he was seventeen, and by the time I met him his feet literally pointed in opposite directions. He spent the bulk of his time in a mechanized recliner, hooking himself up, with his wife Sarah's help, to three or four medical machines daily to stay alive. And I'd venture to say he spent the bulk of that time facing things head-on. (Not just his own things. All the things. But that's too long a story for today.) He had been talking openly about his own death for over a year, even when the rest of us felt that social impulse to tiptoe round it. He had known a long time that he wasn't going to live to a ripe old age. When the last diagnosis came, he accepted that it was the end. He went on hospice care.

But we did think he was going to live longer than two weeks.

When it happened, one level of my soul accepted it, in a stunned sort of way: this is happening, this is real. But for weeks afterward when I woke up, at the moment of coming back to consciousness, it would hit me with shock: Rich is dead. There was a part of me, down inside sleep, that still had no idea.

I used to visit Rich every Thursday evening, for years. We'd talk about this or that. But in the past two years we'd started to talk almost exclusively about the book I was writing. After the first few weeks of mostly talking about myself and my work I started to get uncomfortable: clearly I was monopolizing these conversations. I loved being able to talk about my writing--it's not easy to do so in a way people can even understand, when you're still in process, and Rich did--and Rich was always generous with his listening, but I needed to rein it in; even the most patient person would get tired of this week after week. I kept checking in with him about it, first in subtle ways, then asking him outright. Finally he managed to convince me: he was genuinely enjoying himself.

It felt like a miracle to me. That I could get what I so badly needed without having another person generously sacrifice their time for me; that I could get it while actually adding something good to someone else's day. Rich was a writer himself--if you can find a copy of his beautiful novel Jonas and Sally, I recommend it very heartily--and interested in Story, in the travails and dilemmas and emotions of human beings and how we resolve them, how we make the big choices, which is what fiction is about. As I went deeper into the book, themes developed in it that were very dear to his heart. He would tell me stories from his own life that re-echoed the themes, we would talk about what those things meant to us. Sometimes I would come to him with my latest thorny problem and he would give advice. Sometimes I would simply tell him the scene I wrote that day, and watch him react, and see that it was right. Sometimes what I was writing would lead into profound stories from memories he was sifting through and processing, knowing he was at the end of life. Sometimes he would cry.

(I think he would be all right with my telling you this. He was a very open person.)

Then came the time it became a miracle for him.

He used to be a leader, a writer, a mentor, a counselor. He was profoundly respected, it was clear at his funeral. But in his last few years he had no energy for the contributions he used to make; all his energy was spent in the sheer work of staying alive, managing his medical conditions--and that took work all right, a day-long routine of medical machines. One hour of conversation a day was pretty much what he had the energy for after that. And he needed more and more help--someone to come over & warm up his supper, for instance, which he could do but getting up and walking would wear him out. I did that often, I loved doing it, it meant a chance to talk with him, even if briefly. As things went more in that direction, I was stunned by how much that meant to him--that I wanted to.

It was getting harder and harder for him, being helped. He'd been helped all his life, of course, but he'd also been a leader. Now he talked about being an "outsider." Now most of the interactions in his day were someone coming over and doing him a favor. One that he wasn't able to return.

But with me he was. With me he had the energy (on a good day) to have at least a little bit of deeply meaningful conversation, because Story energized him; with me he was a mentor giving deeply valued advice and understanding, giving me something I needed very much. With me he was not just a receiver but also a giver, and he needed that. His soul needed that. We came to understand this end-of-life friendship as a deep gift of God to us both.

There was something about it that was very hard to understand, for me. It's this: God's power is made perfect in weakness. To receive, to be helped, isn't this a connection that has God in it? Simone Weil says "Compassion and gratitude come down from God, and when they are exchanged in a glance, God is present at the point where the eyes of those who give and the eyes of those who receive meet." I think that's beautiful. And true. I knew Rich agreed with me on this. And I knew Rich was deeply connected to God. But to see just how much it hurt him, this profoundly respected man, just wondering if he was a burden to the friends who stopped by to hook up his oxygen or microwave his pizza--I don't want to go into detail, honestly, I don't want to make you picture this, that might be a bridge too far in terms of openness--well, I couldn't parse it. What about the power of God?

What I learned from his feelings at the end of his life was this: oh Lord, Heather, it is so much harder than you think.

I have not been tested on this. But I will be. Except for those of us who die very, very suddenly, every single one of us will be. And that is the other thing I have learned: in the face of someone who is in that place of vulnerability, when you have to help and yet helping is painful, that is the one response that brings connection and relief: I will be in your place someday.

(It's ironic. It's one of the themes in my book. The Jewish characters and the pain of their vulnerability, the way the non-Jewish characters have a profound "I had no idea" shock when they finally come to understand--due to the threat their rescue efforts end up placing them under--what their friends have really been experiencing this whole time.)

Why? Why does weakness, plain material weakness, hurt us so much? Why does dependence on other people hurt us so much? Why are we ashamed of it? It's one of those places where all I've been taught about God seems so right and so good, and yet it is so hard for it to come to birth in our daily world. (What Simone Weil said is beautiful, and I still believe it, but I love her all the more because, though the quote doesn't show it, if you read the whole essay you will see that she fully understands the pain involved, and the difficulty; what she is describing in the quote is literally a miracle.)

Why? I don't know. I don't know. There are only two things I know: It is much harder than I think. And I will face it someday.

Oh, and one more thing: I still believe. And Rich knows. Rich knows all of it now.

So here is the thing I can say at the end of this story, that I would not have dared to say at the beginning, because I fear so much to sound selfish about my friend's death. Ever since I finished the book I have been mourning what I used to think this time would hold. I was recording the book for Rich to listen to. I had just recorded Chapter 15 when he died. I went ahead and recorded Chapter 16, because I had other reasons for wanting a recording. It broke me up hard, to read it into the microphone, to feel no-one on the other end. I always believed he was going to read this book. I want him to read it, I want to put it in his hands. But they're gone.

And yes, I mourn the help he could have given me. There are very specific questions I want to ask him: should I change this? Is this over the top? And I don't dare tell people that part, out of context. But the help he gave me was the connection, the friendship, the gift, it was the help I gave him too. It was the help God gave us. It was the miracle.

In my head, he was going to live till spring came. We would talk. He would listen to the book and we would talk about it, talk about it. I would bring him the first spring flowers. And then I would be ready to let go. That was how it was going to be, in my head.

Oh Lord, Heather. It is so much harder than you think.

Flame in the Night is at my house!

When I was a kid, my mental image of being an author was this: you get a big package in the mail, you open it, and there it is! Your book--dozens of it! Your author copies have arrived! You're an author!

So yeah, that's one day in an author's life (the most filmable, of course, which is why it was my mental picture!), out of approximately one thousand and thirty-six. But it is one day--and it has come!

Here's a little video of my son playing with them, facilitated by my husband (and the Boy's rather interesting notions of how libraries work!)

There's strength in the root: pruning and editing and the sharpness of choices

Pruning is fascinating. Would you believe that—and that editing is fascinating too? This time last year I wrote a post called “Pruning and editing”--in haste, because the editing I was doing was heavy and under deadline. This year I'm digging deeper. It's sinking into me. I know this may sound strange, but as I learn better and better how to prune—I find it helps very much to love the tree or vine. But love doesn't look quite like what you'd expect.

I'M NOT DEAD!

Have you ever seen a tree that's been pruned very hard? Or a grapevine? Commercial orchards and vineyards are unsparing in their pruning, eye on the bottom line and the highest possible fruit production—those trees and vines seem cut down to nubs. Our instinct when we see that is that the tree's been killed—like the instincts of a farm intern I had once, who became very worried when I picked all but the smallest leaves off the kale. Our instinct is that most of the plant is gone, so how can it survive? We forget how much, and how vital a part, we can't see.

The life in a plant is in its root. If we ever did to the roots what we do to the tops, the plant would expire in a hurry. But if the root is sound, you can cut the whole tree down at the base of the trunk and it'll send up a dozen shoots the next spring around the stump—so never worry about those nubs, come spring they will branch out in every direction in leaf and flower. There's strength in the root. I sing that to myself sometimes, while I prune or garden, to the tune of the hymn There's power in the blood: “There's strength in the root, there's strength in the root...”

I recently learned to prune grapevines properly. (I know apples and cherries now, and blueberries too, but grapevines were still an “OK, hope I'm doing this right” mystery last year.) First you have to know what good fruitwood looks like on a grapevine, then you make a goal to keep a certain number of fruiting buds per vine and take off, well, everything else. It's that per vine part that tripped me up—no one had taught me to look at each vine before. Our vineyard looked to me like a tangled mass of leafy streamers twining along the cables, sending down a root here and there. No wonder it was a mystery to me! I was starting at the wrong end.

Writers do this too, until we learn.

We start at the wrong end, at the surface, at the leaves. We start at the words. We don't see the words' source; that is underground. Beneath the surface of the page, beneath the dark sweet earth drawing life into our words, is the Story.

When I start at the source, at the root, I prune differently. I don't go branch by branch, bit by bit, asking “Should I cut this?” I look at the plant entire, I draw into my mind a vision of what it can and must be. The good fruitwood stands out to me, and I choose it. In choosing the good, it becomes easier to cut off what I don't need. The question is not “What should I cut?” but “what should I keep?” Ruthlessness is—strange as it may seem—a positive course, a joyous one. It's driven by the lovely vision of the thing as it should be.

Of course I'm talking about editing—though it's true about pruning too.

The rough draft is like the first wild growth of the vine. Sprouting in every direction, opening leaves to the sunlight, photosynthesizing, gathering strength into the new young root. You do need that part. You need to write till your story has substance, till your characters become real in your mind, even if many of the words you write at that point serve no other purpose. (I remember the moment Elisa became real. She was climbing the steps to the Fourvière basilica that towers over Lyon, looking apprehensively at the massive gold statue of Mary over it. None of that's in the novel. Cut. It was the right choice—writing it and cutting it both.) You write and write, till the root gains strength and shape—you write till under the words you see the Story. That is what you are making.

You keep going then, till the Story is made, till the end. Even if you see where you branched out wrongly, you don't start pruning yet. Pruning out of season is a dire mistake—the sap drips out of the cut (I've seen it drip and drip), microbes and insects get in, whole limbs can sicken. Editing out of season drains the energy from your story, leaves you open to attacks of discouragement and loathing. You prune in February, when the sap is not flowing, when the vine has already been dormant a long time. It's hard to wait—it used to make my brain itch, going on and leaving passages I knew weren't right. One chapter I left behind was mostly scene fragments with half-a-dozen empty lines between them. But I could see the shape of the story going forward, so I followed it. I knew it was the important part.

There's strength in the root

Then the break. I was beyond exhausted after I wrote the last word. The book and I rested. The sap ceased to flow. I came back to it after awhile, and that, that's the moment when you do it. The choosing. You look at the story entire, you carry a vision into your mind of what it can and must be. The good writing stands out to you, the passages that shine because they're not only good prose but are filled with reality, because they are moments where someone makes a choice she knows she can't turn back from, feeling both the weight and the freedom of choosing—they are Story. And then you cut around them, cut and shape and rearrange. In choosing the good, it becomes easier to cut what you don't need.

I keep talking about Story with a capital S—I know, it sounds a little funny. But that's what I've learned these past two years, is that it's a real thing, like the root, invisible and really there—and it's the source. What is Story? Short version, it's made of two things: forces and choices. Forces that oppose each other, the desires and aims of the characters, the forces of nature and of need, things that press together to a point and a dilemma: will this character choose the gun, and can he survive if he doesn't? And choices: once and for all, he either takes up the gun or throws it away. All the words of the scene, maybe all the words of the story, come to a point just at that moment—they serve that moment, they have no other purpose. They may be individually beautiful, they may make a beautiful pattern together, but if you cut them off from human dilemma and choice and action they will wither into sad, lightweight things, maybe keeping a melancholy beauty—but dead.

If you understand your characters' dilemmas, the forces they're up against, their choices, the consequences of those choices, you understand your Story. And the role of pruning is to bring it to light.

That's the last thing I learned about pruning grapevines this year—you want your fruitwood as high as possible. You want the fruit to grow on the top, in the light. This keeps the grapes dry and safe from bacteria and mold—and it helps the picker to see them. When your story is finished, those moments of choice will be the fruit—those moments when a character stands at a crossroads for a long moment, then turns and plunges down the path they've chosen, and we see where that path leads.

So I guess, if we're going to make the analogy precise: the forces, the dilemmas, are the root. The turning points, the moments of choice, are the fruit. The rest is a path between the two. If one of your scenes doesn't lead from the root to the fruit—you know what to do. Or if your moment of choice is buried in your scene, de-emphasized, you rearrange it, bring it up to the light.

To bring the strength from the root to the fruit; to bring the fruit to the eater. To sink the root deep into the soil of human experience, and draw up vitality. Those are the great things. And that's what happens when you love the vine—or the book—you see its true nature. You see where its true strength and glory lie, and you want to bring it out. I've become far more ruthless in pruning than I ever expected to be, and I'm glad, because I can see the thing as it can and must be. I don't mourn things I cut anymore—whether branches or pages.

I know what trees know now. You can always make more leaves.

Book cover!

YOU GUYS I GOT MY BOOK COVER. AND I LOVE IT.

Is it weird that I love it even though Elisa would never in a million years wear that scarf? Will probably not even wear that scarf when, God willing, she is 30? But definitely never in Tanieux in 1942, because a) she is poor, everyone is poor, people made their kids' new sweaters out of the unraveled wool of old sweaters for Pete's sake, and b) the last thing she wants (or would enjoy doing) is to draw attention to herself. (Also while I'm at it I really doubt she carries a purse, however mature she is at 16 years old. Whatever. You can barely see the purse.)

But it doesn't matter, because I have learned a thing or two about book covers since my first one, and I've learned the reasons beginning authors always get frustrated at theirs--book covers are symbolic. They're not intended as a factual representation of a scene from the book. That scarf isn't even around that young woman's neck, if you really look--it simply swirls behind her, an embodiment of something, a symbol. A symbol of her indomitable spirit, the flame.

It's interesting about book covers, about illustrations too. When I read a book--or maybe this isn't so anymore, but it was very much so when I was younger--the image that's presented to me with it colors it vividly for me. I still have the vividest memories of some of the art that was used to illustrate the poetry in my senior Lit textbook--especially a very strange (well it had to be!) painting on the page opposite T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. Sometimes a piece of writing without an illustration--sometimes something I wrote myself--produces a strong impression in my mind of a certain type of art. I see the images as line-drawings, or oil-paintings. The reading I wrote about Jesus' birth always makes me think of a certain painting, in which a very ordinary, humble Mary bends over the very rough and ordinary manger and a light pours upward from it, lighting her face. (I can't find it. Wish I could!) I

This isn't it but this also reminds me of Jonas & Sally

don't remember if I saw the painting before writing it or after--I like to think it was after, and I said Yes that's it! Or my friend Rich's novel Jonas and Sally--I told him this once, and I hope I expressed it well enough that it was clear this was praise--makes me see a sort of graphic-novel illustration in my mind, done with strong lines and clear watercolors, wide spaces, very fresh greens and blues.

So I kind of wonder what images Flame in the Night will raise in readers' minds, and I wonder if they'll be affected by the cover. Sometimes I imagine other covers it could have had, other images--a farm with a ancient stone barns, people walking in streets piled deep with snow, a young man on a path with the green and golden light of oak-woods around him, a group of people walking along a ridge high in the Alps. Or maybe the back of a watching Gestapo officer... (Though that might have garnered me a bunch of two-star reviews that boiled down to "I thought this was a thriller and it wasn't.") I mean some of those could have been gorgeous, yeah, but I don't care. I swear--for most of this week I've had a PDF of my cover open on my computer just so I could look at it again and again.

It's the spirit of it that's right. A book cover isn't representational--it's meant to make you feel something. (Specifically "desire to read this book," of course...) It's meant to give you a powerful instinctive sense, in a split second, of what it would be like to read this book and whether you would like it. It's meant to put a finger right on that pivot point between "meh" and "hmm..." and push down till your hand goes out toward the book and you flip it over to read the back. And to achieve this there's a whole silent language of form and color, which I don't fully understand, but a little better than I used to--I understand now why putting a bright color into a black-and-white image is so different from putting a pastel color in. That's what (after looking at a whole bunch of WWII book covers) I ended up  suggesting to the cover designer, and that's what they ran with, with a ton of style. I think what this cover communicates is that this book will be striking. And I think (well, it's just my personal opinion!) that that's true.

A lightly color-washed example

Incidentally there are some really, well, interesting ramifications to that split-second factor in cover design. One of them is racism. I ran across this concept (there's a fair amount of blogging about it, because to anyone who sees a large sampling of book covers in the course of their work it's pretty obvious) a few years back; here's a good sample post about it. To boil it down: most publishers are afraid that if we white people people see a black person or other person of color on a book cover, we'll pivot toward "meh, not for me." That though none of us would admit to not wanting to read about people who look different from us, we have instincts which, in that split second of "do I want to give this book a chance?", will lose them money if they put too much melanin on the cover. So they have all kinds of dodges, from actually changing the character's race on the cover (NOT COOL, publishers!) down to little techniques to make the character's race less obvious: weird lighting, weird angles, silhouettes, even fading everything out into sepia or some other color-wash so that if you look closely you'll see a person of color but at least it won't jump out at you in that crucial split second. A bunch of those individual decisions could be very well defended (come on, that's a gorgeous, artful silhouette, come on, portraying the fight from above looks amazing) but it is awfully... interesting the sheer overwhelming proportion of times this happens to these types of books--whereas no U.S. publisher ever turned a hair at putting an attractive white girl on the cover.

Well. I'm doing WWII Europe, so I didn't really have to face that particular question. Though I'll note that as far as attractive white (Jewish) girls go, Elisa is actually not pretty. She has bad acne and also much more urgent things to think about. But then the cover doesn't tell you if she's pretty or not. It tells you that her back is straight and her spirit is strong and bright, that the darkness around cannot quench the life within her.


So yeah. I'll take it. And say THANK YOU!

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.

__________________________


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.

A different kind of hard

So I was talking on the phone with a dear friend the other day, and I found myself saying this: "When you're doing the work you're called to do, it is hard--very hard sometimes--but it's a different kind of hard."

It made sense in the context of what we were discussing--work that's driven by guilt, or the guilt of not doing it, work that crushes rather than fulfills. But afterward I kept thinking about it. What did I really mean? How could I explain it better?

See... I'm lucky. I get to do the work I choose to do. Due to some choices I'll discuss sometime, I live an extremely quiet life where I stay on the same land basically all the time because I can't afford a car. In the same bargain (so to speak, and leaving out a lot) I also received three or four quiet hours a day in which to write. I think I got the good end of the deal. But I didn't realize just how true that was till halfway through writing this book.

It's a long story. Maybe I'll tell it to you sometime. But in writing this book I found my calling. Found that I'd been writing, not because it was my skill, but because I was supposed to. It came out of nowhere. It was... really hard to explain.

But here's the thing. It was hard. Very hard. When I entered the phase of the book where I was truly doing my real work, here was my routine: Sit at computer playing digital Mahjongg, trying to force myself to get up and go to my writing room. (A small bare room in the empty apartment next door. While our friends still lived in the upstairs part, I got my husband to sabotage my computer's connection with their wireless. No internet.) Go over to my writing room, berating myself for not going sooner. Sit down at the desk, open my laptop.

Stare at the screen for twenty minutes, scared to death.

Start writing.

The writing wrung me out, mentally and physically, exhausted me. I felt the story in my body, my characters' tension and fear, the hard spiritual work of making choices that they could never step back from, choices in the dark. It was like wrestling. In my mind I stopped calling the little bare cave my writing room. I called it my battle room.

If I was saying it now, after thinking about it, I would add this: it's a different kind of hard. Like battle, or surviving in the wilderness. Not hard like being abused. It's completely different. Work you're not called to, done out of guilt, can crush you. Beat you down with your inadequacy, your failure to ever measure up. Because how can you measure up, when it's not your work?

(I mean, when we're failing to do our true work, when we're procrastinating past the point of shame, when we've let that beat us, we can feel like that sometimes. But when we're doing it--never.)

I think of the descriptions of wilderness survival in Hatchet and its sequels. You're very rarely comfortable. (Mosquitoes. Everywhere.) You have to put your whole strength, your whole mind, into what you're doing. There's hard work and discomfort and pain and fear and sudden danger. There are continual small joys, the deep, ever-fresh pleasure of food for real hunger. There are also breathtaking, transcendent moments of beauty and awe that you wouldn't trade for anything. And you can't decide when those moments will come--you have absolutely no control. They are given you--by a hushed lake under the stars, by a sunrise, even by a wild animal leading you on your path. They come from outside--from God.

And the whole time, in the good moments and the bad, you are alive.

It's like that.

There's something else it's not like, too. I've been listening to the Story Grid podcast recently, and Tim Grahl, who's starting a nonfiction book on how not to let procrastination and shame overcome you in creative work, describes a terrible moment in his life. It was the moment when he had gained everything he'd been working toward. He'd struck out on his own as a writer and book marketer, he'd built his business, he'd marketed a book into bestsellerdom, he had made it.

And it turned out he was completely miserable.

Now I've already made this pretty long, so I'll cut to the chase here. Doing the work you're called to do is also not like being on drugs.

"Success" is a drug. And what I mean by that is fame is a drug. I mean, I wouldn't know, but I can darned well guess. Because I know that even attention is a drug, at least in the form of "likes" and upvotes--anonymous attention, not flowing back and forth face-to-face, just a little signal in a vacuum that says you are now a little bit more worthy.

You get a "hit." It feels incredible. It fades.

You want another.

I read an article on Cracked.com (just so you know there's language & stuff) about stupid things we believe about rich people. The writer says money doesn't make rich people happy, which we all know and few of us believe. To make her point, she gives us a sentence about "Rich people never have to worry about money, they have so much money they don't have any real problems," etc, and suggests we replace the word "money" with "cocaine."

Because money, in that kind of quantity, is also a drug.

And what do drugs do? Weaken you. Destroy you.

I know it in myself. The mood in which I go to the internet looking for a hit is a terrible thing. I can well imagine why Tim Grahl wasn't happy. You work and you work towards success, and you think that you will make it and then you can bask. But you can't bask. The hit fades. And you feel miserable.

Human beings weren't made to bask.

I don't know everything about how, not having read the book he's just starting, but I gather Tim fought his way through from that bad place. One of the things he says he wants to tell everyone is that meaning and joy are found in the work itself. In the doing, in the struggle. And that's what I find too.

You're rarely comfortable. There's hard work and fear and failure and having to start all over again. And there are transcendent moments, unforgettable, unexplainable moments.

And in the good and the bad times, you are alive.

(But at least there aren't any mosquitoes.)

Makes me think of G.K. Chesterton's poem The Hunting of the Dragon, about how beautiful the world is in the midst of the struggle, and how it fades in our eyes when we've been too long at rest:

Beauty on beauty called us back
When we could rise and ride,
And a woman looked out of every window
As wonderful as a bride...

...For the hunting of the Dragon,
That is the life of a man.


There is no heaven on earth, no nirvana-like state of resting, unchanging bliss. There is only the struggle. But if we are blessed to be given the good struggle, in which the work itself is its reward, let's not flee it. It is the good. It's a gift to us, a gift of meaning. It is the kindness of God.

All is held in trust

In the spring of 2010, a house burned down in the Christian intentional community I live in. Nobody was hurt, but the house was wholly lost. It was the most beautiful house on the place, beautifully crafted with old-fashioned beams, and a living space for quite a few people. There were people still in the community whose sweat and skill and hope had gone into that house, and I knew they felt it. I wrote a poem from those thoughts.

Yesterday a meeting was held here about the final closing of the intentional community, with decisions made about the disposal of the land. It's the end of an era, and an outcome many people did not imagine as they put their sweat and skill and hope into the place.

So I thought I'd share that poem today.
_____________________

Us:

Dawn opens silent as a bloom

Above the gutted house, its dark

Bones crisscrossed in the lucent air;

The phoebe sings. Which of our hearts

Could drink this young wind sweet as wine

And not taste bitter ashes? See:

All that our hands have built is tinder

For the flame. So it must be.

You:

The phoebe sings, and flicks her tail.

Her eggs will hatch this year. Seeds wake

Beneath the blackened ground; the grass

Will rise, the fireweed and the creeper take

The ruin, wrap it close with life.

Know this: though all may burn, each day

Beneath the faithful sun ten thousand

Trees are born. The earth returns.

Us:

No. What is lost, is lost. The black

Beams wrapped in their green vines will fall,

And will not rise, though spring should wake

The dead. Some only sleep; not all.

The green heart will not beat again

In brittle branches winter-cracked;

Dead limbs that hang like bones from broken

Trees. Don't tell us it comes back.

You: 

You do not know what lies behind

My door. Where sings the fallen bird,

Where stand the shattered, crafted beams,

No eye has seen, no ear has heard.

The world's tale runs through the years:

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

But all your tears are kept within

My bottle; all is held in trust.

Life Again

For Easter I'd like to share my favorite Easter reading that I've written. We read it aloud in my church the year I wrote it. It's a monologue by an unnamed, humble male disciple, the husband of Salome. He doesn't even have a name, and yet I think he might be my favorite person I ever wrote. I remember what it was like to write this. It was as if he spoke to me.

__________________

The garden was wet that morning, the rich man's garden around his tomb cut into the rock. I remember that. You could still hear the earth drinking the rain.

It had been a dry spring that year. Very dry. Everyone was afraid. The young crops in the fields were beginning to shrink and wither, to hang their heads like weary slaves. Everyone spoke of it, guessing at how soon a rainfall would need to come, to save enough of the crop. Everyone spoke of it, when they weren't speaking of the things that were happening in Jerusalem.

You know, I am sure, what happened in Jerusalem that year. Maybe you have heard that a great prophet came to Jerusalem, and was acclaimed with hosannas and palm branches, and that the Sanhedrin and the Romans conspired against him and killed him. Maybe you have heard that a rabble-rouser came, and all the poor and landless flocked to him and hailed him as king, and something had to be done. Though perhaps it should have been done more quietly. I have heard that some of them thought that, afterwards.

We had followed him there, from Galilee. We were the poor and landless. I had farmed another man's land ever since I was old enough to put my hand to my plow; it was my father who got into debt and had to sell our farm. No fault of his. Three bad harvests, in a row. Three years just like this one was promising to be: thirsty, dusty, empty of the new life we were hoping for so hard.

 And so we lost our land, although we lived on it and farmed it still. I married; my father died; I farmed. Every year struggling hard to meet the rent; every year hoping, trying, working from dawn to sundown with hardly a pause, hoping to keep enough back so that in three years, five years, ten years we could buy it back. Every year the hopes withering a little more, even as our hopes for a child withered also. After the last harvest was all gathered in and the storms began, I would calculate how much we could keep back. And then I would calculate whether we could make the rent at all. And then I would walk out into the field, in the rain, so that my wife would not have to see me crying. I didn't go there to cry; I went to pray; but I couldn't. I could only hear in my mind a line from the prophet Isaiah, over and over again till I wept: “The harvest is over, the summer is gone, and we are not saved.”

So when I heard of this man Jesus, I had very little to lose. Very little. That year my wife fell ill, terribly ill, till it seemed certain she would die. When Jesus came to our town I came out to him and pushed through the crowds that were around him, the people begging him to heal their sick, and when I finally reached him I begged too. He came into my house. I couldn't carry her―she was hot with fever and gasping for breath―and so he walked with me and actually came into my little house, and he put his hand on her head, and for a moment he closed his eyes, and in his face I saw such weariness. It was as if all our hopeless, grinding struggle, all the years we had worked and worked and not been saved, were on his shoulders and in his face, and I felt a stab of fear, and thought: he cannot save her.

He seemed so much like us. Who could save nothing.

And then his eyes opened and his face lit up, like the sun for joy and power. And I heard my wife's breathing slow down, and deepen.

I was so grateful to him I could not speak.

And so we followed him. She stood up from her bed and offered him bread and milk, and he ate with us, till a man came to the door begging him to come heal his son, and he went. And I spoke with my wife, and we were of one mind. So that when he came back to our door, staff in hand, on his way down the road again, and looked at us and said Follow me, we were packed and ready. He walked away from the fields I had worked all my life and we walked away with him. We were done with the struggle. With working till we were stumbling with weariness, and not being saved. God knew what would happen to us, how we would live. But God had sent this man. This Messiah. And he had come into our house, and he had said follow. So let the land go, let the withered hopes go, let God decide what would come. We were done.

We followed him, from town to town, walking in the train of disciples. We lacked nothing. Among the disciples, everyone shared what they had. We listened to his words, wherever he stopped to teach. We loved him. We followed him to Jerusalem, and cried hosanna with all the people, and I threw my threadbare cloak in the road for his donkey to walk on. And yes, I hoped he would be king. I could imagine nothing better.

And less than a week later, he was killed.

I remember that night, the night after he died, as if it were yesterday. We were staying at Lazarus of Bethany's house, a finer house than I had ever slept in, a dozen of us on the floor in each big room. My wife was in the next room with the women; I couldn't bear to be with her. She had seen him die. She tried to tell me what it was like, and I walked away. I couldn't. I was already broken, just from hearing he was dead. I was barely breathing now.

I sat on the floor in silence, with the other men, and the thoughts in my head were like jackals, tearing. He was dead. Hope was dead. My wife had trusted me and I had led her into a trap. Followed after a false messiah. Or a doomed prophet. What difference, in the end? We had nothing, no money; no home. We could not ask Lazarus and his sisters to continue helping us forever, for the sake of a dead man we all had loved. We would have to set out on the road, and somehow make our way back to our village, not knowing if we would be allowed to begin our hopeless farm again. I thought, we will starve, and it's my fault. I thought, this is how people become slaves. And their children after them. I thought of the wheat in the fields, the dusty shoots hanging limp, and I thought of the weary eyes of slaves, which held the truth: work without hope is, in the end, all we have.

And then I heard a sound, from outside; a sweet, soft sound spread wide across the sky and the land, that began very quietly, and grew. It was raining.

I sat on the floor in the dark―we had lit no lamps―and I listened. Put my head back, and listened to the rain. Falling soft on the thirsty earth, laying to rest the dust; I pictured the crops, in the fields, the dust washed off them now, small and green against the dark earth. And I could not help it. Hope came up. Small and green against the darkness in my heart.

A farmer cannot listen without hope to the rain.

Because a farmer knows, though he forget it again and again. He knows where hope comes from, and salvation. He can plant. He can even water, to the best of his strength, and for a time. But it will all come to nothing, unless God sends the rain.

I lay down on my mat, and remembered that day he had healed my wife. I remembered the freedom, the surrender, of walking away behind him. I lay there, and I listened to the rain.

It rained for two days.

On the third day, the women woke early. They had bought spices, they wanted to embalm him. No one thought the rich man would lend his tomb forever; and so he must be fit to be moved. My wife went with them. She was not with them, when they came back.

They came back wild-eyed, shouting that the tomb was empty, that he was alive. We stared at them. Peter and John began to try to talk them out of their fit. I said nothing, and counted them. All of them were there except her. I slipped out the door.

She was in the street outside, waiting. Too shy to come in with the others. She was waiting for us all to come out, to go back to the tomb. Her eyes were shining like a sunrise in spring. The joy in her face almost made me look away, it was so bright.

“It's true?” I whispered.

She nodded. “I saw angels.” She was whispering too. “Two of them. So bright.” There were tears in her eyes. “They say he's alive. That God―God gave him life again.”

“Where is he, Salome?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't know.”

I do not remember all that happened. I remember Peter and John rushing past us, and me without the strength to run; still barely breathing, still weak with joy. Alive. I had not led her into a trap. The true Messiah―only the true Messiah could do such a thing. And he had stepped inside my door; he had looked into my eyes, and said Follow. He had not abandoned me. The freedom, the day I walked away from all I had known―that was his gift to me, and his gifts he does not take back. He gives them again and again. This I thought, as I walked. This I knew. God does not take back the rain.

It was true. Since the day we walked away and followed him we have lacked nothing. We are not slaves; nor are our children.

We walked to the tomb. The sun was still rising; the doves were calling, they were flying down and drinking from the puddles in the road. When we got there the place was empty; no one walked in the wet garden, and the cave of the tomb was dark and silent. We stepped into it, my wife and I, and our steps echoed; in the darkness my eyes began to see the head-cloth, neatly folded, and laid aside; the graveclothes, empty, still holding the shape of a man who had no need of them now. It was so quiet. Even from inside the tomb, you could hear the earth drinking the rain.

That is what I remember.