The Notebook Years

Six Years Away from Public Writing

Preface - January 2018: The charges our pastor lobs against us that January afternoon are varied and numerous…but they basically boil down to two things: my husband’s audacity in asking questions; my audacity in vocalizing my struggles (both in church and in my writing). We are not, as I am often tempted to tell people, asked to leave our church. We can stay… but there is a kind of asterisk, a caveat. We can stay*, but we will always be a little bit suspect, a little less loved, a little less welcome.

It is impossible to overstate the impact of this on my public writing life. I begin a slow descent into silence.

Spring 2019: Rachel Held Evans dies, and I write a psalm on my blog about grief. Then I pretty much stop writing altogether. The not writing is not really about Rachel, except that her death feels like the End of Something. The bloggers that inhabited the faith-questioning space with me when I started writing online have gone on to other mediums — hosting podcasts or leading conferences — or they have dropped away entirely.

Summer 2019: The ecosystem of our family needs another steady income, so I go back to work full-time. I am grateful (and kind of shocked) to have been given a contract position as a tech writer for a medical company after ten years at home. Still, it’s hard not to feel like a failure — like I am here because I couldn’t “make it” as an author.

In August, I write my final blog post — a half-hearted summary of what I’d been up to that July. Near the bottom of the post, I add an artful flat-lay photo of my new keyboard and my new Boston Scientific badge on the gray desk of my new cubicle. I post it like an afterthought because I don’t expect my new job to change anything, really. I believe that the blog will go on. But a week passes, and I don’t write. And then another week passes. And another.

Fall 2019: I drive 45 minutes to work in the early morning mist and an hour home in rush-hour traffic. The shift to full-time work is profound, all-encompassing, exhausting. I go from buying wine by the bottle to the cardboard box with its accommodating spigot.

January 1, 2020: A review of my journals from 2019 reveals veritable graveyard of monthly “habit tracking” grids and bullet journal spreads. There are lists of goals and plans — most of them having to do with wresting some kind of income out my floundering faith blog. Here are the wispy beginnings of a podcast on “reimagining faith,” a weird foray into “spiritual empathy cards,” and several blind stabs at themes and topics for new books. Looking back at all of this hustle, the end feels inevitable, and my attempts at holding onto my “online presence” feel like nothing so much as the frantic building of a wall of sand in an attempt to hold back the ocean.

Spring 2020: We gape at the TV as the newscasters announce Minnesota school closures and the country begins to shut itself down. COVID. For the next few months, I don’t write at all, even in my journals. Balancing the full-time work with my family’s needs still feels difficult (particularly with remote schooling), but being able to do it from home instead of from a cubicle 45-minutes away helps. I paint walls, put together puzzles, take long walks. Life feels embodied and slow, and I am thankful for the slowness even as the world around us feels scary.

Summer 2020: I pay a chunk of money to join an online writing collective, which I think will help me feel connected and productive — but it only makes me feel lonelier. My journal from these months is punctuated by bits of fiction. I can tell where the regular journaling ends and the fiction free-writes begin because my becomes wider, loopier, sloppier. Once I write these bits of fiction, I am not sure what to do with them. They are scattered throughout my notebooks like so many puzzle pieces.

Fall 2020: The light changes, and I descend into my regularly-scheduled seasonal entropy. The goal this week: to break through the resistance to writing, to journaling, to the daily office, to the deep places, I write in my journal. It feels almost insurmountable, this blasé that I’ve been feeling.

Winter 2021: On a family trip to Costa Rica, I write constantly and easily, filling pages and pages in my notebook. I am taken with the mangroves—their giant, elevated roots rising from the brackish water, their ability to filter out the salt water and carry what is toxic quietly away from their own hearts. There is a parable here, I write. A blog post…except that I don’t really write those anymore.

When I get back to Minnesota, I am officially no longer a contractor but a full time employee at Boston Scientific.

Spring 2021: The stress in my work feels acute and reaches into my neck and shoulders. I keep forgetting to get up from my chair. I have nearly stopped feeling the gentle, prompting buzz of the Fitbit against my wrist. (Get up! Move around! Your body needs more than what you’re giving it right now!) You could replace “Fitbit” with “Holy Spirit” and this sentence would still be true.

Fall 2021: The recurring question of my journals: What does it mean to be a public writer in the world? I use the word “public” because I have never stopped writing, not really. These are my notebook years, my writing never coalescing into finished pieces, but unfurling in unending cursive.

I love the private habit of journaling, but there is a kind of incompleteness to it too. I sense that art is a meant to be a triangle — the work, the creator, and the audience forming three, distinct angles. The triangle of my own work has become so acute as to almost be a straight line — the audience is only really myself…and God, whom I never address directly but is always still there, a holy shadow, a haunting.

Spring 2022: I try to write something else, something public-facing, something to publish…but I have a constant sinking feeling that I have nothing to say. I feel like the Swede in Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral. When he spoke, “all that rose to the surface was more surface.” I open an Etsy shop and start selling crafts made from discarded and vintage books instead.

Summer 2022: The rights to my first book, When We Were on Fire, revert to me — which is just a fancy way of saying that not enough copies are selling for Penguin Random House to rationalize keeping the publication rights. My agent says this is a good thing – “You can do whatever you want with your book now!” It’s not that she’s not wrong. It’s just that I already did what I wanted to do with the book. I got it published. I sent my book out into the world. I never expected it to come back with a cardboard box of all its stuff, world-worn and bedraggled and asking for its old room back.

Spring 2023: I attend an eight-week class at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis called Healing the Wounded Writer: Using a Writer’s Journal to Recover or Build Writing Practice. The women in the class are lovely…but unsure what to say when I talk about the rejection of my church as the source of my own “writer’s wounds.” (Before she shares her journal entry aloud, one young woman gives a trigger warning for “vampires and nonconsensual biting.” Which is a really different kind of thing than “church trauma.”)

After that, I give up on the idea that this class will become my new “writing community.” But I begin a deep-dive into the published journals of writers and artists — John Steinbeck, Anne Truitt, May Sarton, even Alan Rickman — and that becomes its own kind of community, the echoing voices of the kindred dead.

Summer 2023: I find Substack — which is not blogging, of course, because blogging is dead, but which feels an awful lot like…blogging. Up until now, I have known it only as a newsletter delivery system, but then I download the app and find a whole ecosystem of creativity and encouragement and sharing. I am thrilled to scroll through bits of lovely writing without seeing a single woman in a string bikini trying to sell me weight-loss supplements.

I slowly fill my feed with a handful of writers, most of whom write not about faith but about creativity, process, and practice. (Although the more I read, the more certain I feel that we’re talking about the same thing.)

Fall 2023: After years of trying to legislate and manage my relationship with wine, sobriety suddenly feels like a gentle invitation instead of a shaming. I spent the fall learning to navigate the new landscape. Without the warm blurring of wine, the lines of the world feel sharp and austere in a way that is not entirely unpleasant. I write. I am still getting used to it, to standing tall in the wind-swept vastness of this beautiful life.

Winter 2024: It’s the Great Bedroom Shuffle of 2024. Dane moves to the basement (he has run out of room upstairs for all of his various tanks of critters), Liam takes Dane’s old room, and I finally get an office — a room of my own. My Boston Scientific computer monitors take up one whole side of the room with their heft and their psychic weight, but the books on writing and creativity line the other wall, quietly beaconing me back toward a different way of being.

Spring 2024: I attend the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Michigan. This conference was deeply formation for me when I first attended as a college senior twenty years ago. So much of my faith journey up until that point had been trying to zero in on the “correct doctrine.” But here were all of these brilliant poets and writers with different perspectives and theologies. And instead of creating dissonance, they created a kind of prism shot through which the Light of God shone. When I left, I felt lit up with all of that refracted light — utterly and fundamentally changed.

I’m thrilled to be back at the conference after six years (the every-other-year rhythm disrupted by COVID)…except for the part in which it’s weird. The the last time I was here, it was 2018, and I was still blogging, still sure another book was imminent, speaking on multiple conference panels. Now, when people ask what I’m working on, I don’t know what to say: Awkward conversations all morning at the Prince Center, where no one remembers who I am, I write. I had a moment, a flash in a pan, and now both the flash and the pan have gone.

But by day two, none of that seems to matter. I’ve spent an evening, now, listening to the Poets — their words words charged with the Holy, their questions honest and irreverent, their imagery sublime. I buy a book from a young writer, and as she hands me the slim volume, she speaks warmly of my writing and its influence on her work. It occurs to me that I still belong to this triangle of beauty — the work, the artist, the audience. I am all of these things at different times; I am all of these things at once.

Toward the end of the conference, I run into an old friend who has started small press. “You know,” I say. “The rights to When We Were on Fire reverted to me.”

“Oh really,” she says. “Tell me more.”

Summer 2024: After more than four years of allowing employees to work remotely, the CEO of Boston Scientific issues the official, devastating “Return to Office” mandate. My department has until fall to make the switch, but I spend the summer feeling reverberations of grief over the decision. It has amplified the Is this it? feeling I have about my job. It has settled arthritic in my bones.

Fall 2024: My spiritual director sits quietly, considering my rant about returning to the office. “Could this be a Kind Wind?” she asks finally. “Disorienting — but dislodging you into something new?”

Winter/Spring 2025: My boxes of journals and ephemera lost their basement home in the Great Bedroom Shuffle of 2024. I begin to go through them now, scanning the photos and ephemera, re-typing my journals into Scrivener so that entires from when I was 8 and 16 and 23 slowly populate the same long Journal Project as my current entries. I can’t articulate why I’m doing this — I only know that it feels essential to gather up all of the versions of myself into one place. The boy-crazy seventh grader and the on-fire-for-Jesus high schooler and the newly-engaged 19-year-old. The cynic, the drinker, the stay-at-home mom. The blogger. The writer of notebooks.

It feels like an important step to returning to public writing — to acknowledge and embrace the people that I have been and to find the thread of grace connecting them all. To work toward wholeness which, in the end, is just another word for holiness.

Summer 2025: Bracket Publishing releases the new edition of When We Were on Fire. There is a tweet in there somewhere about how weird it is that my book on growing up born-again is getting…born again…but Twitter is X now, and I don’t really want to schedule tweets this time around anyway. I don’t want to try to twist and shape my writing into something clickable, something easily shareable, something that sells.

I take a 60-day, unpaid leave of absence from my job. I write every morning.

I think, This feels like a Kind Wind.

I think, OK, Substack. Let’s put something out there and see what happens.