Inane Ramblings of a Middle-Aged Publishing Professional

Here, reposted from the Young Professionals page at the High Calling, are excerpts from a conversation I had recently with Sam Van Eman about stewarding influence over the course of your career. I enjoyed the conversation; I thought you might as well.

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SVE: YPs [young professionals] are hot off the education press and want to know that they matter in the workplace. Give us a story from your twenties when your voice shaped something at work.

DZ: I remember this time we were brainstorming a new corporate tagline. (I should mention here that IVP is remarkably flat in its hierarchy and wildly collaborative in its strategic planning.) Sally Craft, then leading our publicity team, floated the Wesleyan Quadrilateral—Scripture, tradition, reason, experience—a grid by which we make responsible decisions. We liked the flow of it, but our audience, we thought, is much broader than Methodists. I threw out the language of the Shema, which Jesus identified as the greatest of God's commandments: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and all your strength" (Mark 12:30)

“Heart. Soul. Mind. Strength.” resonated with everyone, and I developed a reputation as a bit of a wordsmith.

Of course, when we announced our new tagline in our next catalog, we screwed up the order of the terms on the cover: "Heart. Mind. Soul. Strength." Sigh.

SVE: At IVP, you work with Likewise, an imprint which focuses on making a difference in the world. The name itself comes from Jesus’ words to the lawyer after telling the Good Samaritan story: “Go and do likewise.” So Likewise has a voice; it has influence. How much of that voice is Dave Zimmerman’s?

DZ: I'd say that even given the "all-in" collaborative culture of IVP, it's safe to say I've been the primary curator of Likewise's voice. I’ve served as the editorial liaison for the line (my colleague, Andrew Bronson, is our marketing liaison). Andrew likes to stay a bit behind the scenes; me, I like the attention. So I blogged fairly regularly about a “Likewise ethos,” and I wrote regular newsletters trumpeting the line to Likewise authors and readers. We’d also often gather together people who matched our "psychographic" within larger events and conferences, so we could commingle with them and reinforce what we saw as the core values of the line.

There's a reverse process in there, of course; the books we've determined along the way to be Likewise books have shaped my worldview and informed my values, even messed with my voice. So I suppose it'd also be appropriate to ask, "Dave has a voice. How much of it is Likewise's?"

SVE: Touché. I read a mystic who said the things we build “are outward manifestations of inward realities.” You’re implying that this goes both ways. Something to ponder.

DZ: Thanks for that. I won’t be sleeping for a few days.

SVE: How much "Dave" would we see in Likewise 10 years from now if you were to stick around?

DZ: Likewise has always had a strong countercultural bent—for example, The Unkingdom of God by Mark Van Steenwyk calls for a posture of repentance as the basis for our discipleship, an orientation he arrives at by thinking of Christianity in anarchist terms. Given that, it's ironic that I'm the editor. I live in a single-family house in the suburbs. No one looking at me would think Who let that anarchist hippie in the building?

The authors I acquire and develop, and the character of the line I've tried to cultivate—I think these are reflective of my aspirations for myself: I want to be someone who's thoughtful, passionate, who doesn't settle for abstractions and isolation. I want to be led by my authors, to be taught by them, to be transformed as I edit their stuff.

Ten years from now the world will look quite different, I'll look quite different, the publishing industry will look quite different. I hope that taken together we'll all look more like Likewise looked on its best days: thoughtful, active, hopeful, realistic, humble, audacious, all that and more.

SVE: Do you have a superhero power when you’re at work?

DZ: I take possession of the authors I edit. I take a little credit for their ideas. I see myself less clearly because I cloak myself in the best of what I see in them. Take Mark Van Steenwyk, for example: I see him as a moral genius, and I see myself as a moral genius for recognizing that genius in him. And I see myself as heroic for having made space for him to share his vision.

SVE: Your talent and his, joining to create something more than the sum of the two. I like it. What’s at stake when it comes to having influence?

DZ: The let-down. I tell people that their idea doesn't merit publication all the time. That's not how I put it, and that's not even always what I mean—I often mean that we're the wrong publisher or medium for their work—but I've sought publication enough on my own to know that what gets heard is "You're not good enough."

That unintended message gets heard even by authors I do acquire for publication; they hear it when I call on them to revise their draft, when I critique their assertions, when I make casual jokes that I thought would strengthen our relationship. I once edited a book that, in one passage, went into more detail than I thought was needed about some particular plot point in some particular sci-fi or fantasy film. I wrote in my comments, "Nerd alert!" I thought I was being funny, but in that one comment I eroded nearly all the trust we'd built together to that point. Writing is an act of vulnerability, and editing very easily becomes an act of tyranny, of colonization, of violence.

SVE: We’re fragile people, and I’ve seen this interplay in many places: between managers and cooks, teachers and students ... between me and my kids! What’s the tension like for you?

DZ: It's weird: editors are both behind the curtain and up on a pedestal. Writers want to hear from us, they want to talk to us, they want to be around us. We have a lot of power. But we're also standing behind our authors, whispering in their ears, steering some of their steps. It's a private, arcane, almost secret work, and yet we get sought out and crowded around when we are out and about in any kind of official capacity.

SVE: It’s clear that you have an influential voice—even power—in others’ lives. Give us another story that makes you proud to don your cape.

DZ: I recently had lunch with a woman who, by virtue of her vocation (and her gender, unfortunately) has developed a tragic lack of self-confidence in her ability to communicate truly life-changing messages in her writing. I've watched people get moved to tears when she talks; I've been similarly moved myself. I've seen people go through paradigm shifts in her audience. She's, like, a dream author. But she's been forced into this artificial mold, and she struggles to find her writing voice. So my challenge with her will be to help her cut free of the constraints that have been placed on her, to help her write like she talks instead of writing like she's being judged for it. It can be a terribly traumatic experience, but it can also be incredibly freeing and empowering.

The editor-author relationship, I'm convinced, is built almost entirely on trust: the author must feel safe and secure with the editor, the editor must help the author find their footing in this new realm. On the days when I get to participate in that, I feel pretty dang good about my job.

SVE: I would too. You’re helping people find their way. What’s the best advice you´ve received on developing influence?

DZ: Well, "Be not afraid" is always a good one. And Frederick Buechner wrote a book whose title was Speak What We Feel, not What We Ought to Say. I always thought that was a good one, too. You have to own your influence and your message—own your voice and the words that take shape in it—while also recognizing that you're not infallible.

Another thing that's been helpful to me: If something's worth doing, it's worth doing for free. It's also worth getting paid to do, of course, but don't let money and all it represents—security, prosperity, etc.—tyrannize you.

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Don't forget: My book Deliver Us from Me-Ville is available as an ebook for 99 cents for a few more weeks. If you haven't gotten the book yet, you can get it for a song right now. (Seriously; it's cheaper than "Come a Little Closer" by Cage the Elephant.) One reader called it "a joyfully sarcastic look at our own self-absorption from a Christian perspective." That reminds me: if you post a review of the book in the next three weeks, send me a link and your mailing address, and I'll send you a free copy of my booklet Parable of the Unexpected Guest.

Hug an Author Day Is Coming! September 15

It was sometime last September that I found myself simmering in the latest frustrating news from the front about the publishing industry: maybe it was declining reading rates, maybe it was the notable failure of an expected bestseller, maybe it was a conversation with an author who was having a hard time of it. Whatever it was, I needed to think about it, which meant I needed to write about it.

What I ended up doing was establishing, for myself and all my author friends, National Hug an Author Day. It was a joke, a lark, but it proved resonant with a number of my author friends, and a number of my nonauthor friends got inspired by it and sought out their own authors to hug, either literally (side hugs count) or metaphorically (by buying a book). So, I decided that we should make it an annual thing.

Therefore, I hereby invite you to prepare yourself for this year's Hug an Author Day!

Hug an Author Day always falls on September 15. That means you have a month to think about, talk about, write about, or otherwise act on your good will toward the author or authors in your life who need a little pick me up. And trust me, they probably do: writing is a lonely, vulnerable thing to do; submitting your proposal (and later your manuscript) to a publisher is an act filled with angst; promoting your finished product makes you feel embarrassed and obnoxious. And don't even get me started on the money stuff.

We have National Record Store Day. We even have an International Cassette Store Day. Don't you think it's time we dedicated a day to acknowledge authors?

Spread the news! Tell your friends and alert your social media that Hug an Author Day is coming. It'll be a good day, I promise.

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Speaking of hugging an author ... My book Deliver Us from Me-Ville is available as an ebook for 99 cents for a few more weeks. If you haven't gotten the book yet, you can get it for a song right now. (Seriously; it's cheaper than "Pusher Love Girl" by Justin Timberlake.) One reader called it "a joyfully sarcastic look at our own self-absorption from a Christian perspective." That reminds me: if you post a review of the book in the next three weeks, send me a link and your mailing address, and I'll send you a free copy of my booklet Parable of the Unexpected Guest.

Free for Now, Cheap for a While

Today's the last day that David C. Cook, publisher of my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville, is making the ebook free for download.

Never fear though! From August 7 through September 7, the ebook will be sold for only 99 cents.

Here's another review from Goodreads:

Building on the teachings of Thomas Merton and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, David Zimmerman outlines the journey from Me-Ville to God's Kingdom that all Christians must travel (and often, re-travel). The good news is, Jesus is the one who comes to Me-Ville to lead the way out!

Each chapter includes ways that the journey changes us, practices we actively engage in as willing participants on the trip (we aren't just along for the ride, after all), and "Escape Routes" or spiritual practices to try when you find yourself back (or headed back) to Me-Ville.

As an added bonus, the book includes discussion guides for each chapter, making it suitable for both individuals and groups to read together.

Just go to David C. Cook's website, click on the book, then click on the link for your preferred ebook platform (e.g., amazon.com for Kindle, Barnes & Noble for Nook).

Please spread the word! And if you've read the book, please consider writing a review on Goodreads, or your blog, or send your friends an email about it. Message me on Facebook with a link to your review and your address, and I'll mail you a copy of my booklet The Parable of the Unexpected Guest (see the sidebar) as thanks.

We Shape Our Tools, and Then Our Tools Shape Us...Into Tools

Father John Culkin, friend and student of the great Marshall McLuhan, once wrote, "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." Once we have created a car, for example, our society evolves to make the car normal, and our behavior adapts to accommodate this new normal. Where we once walked, we now drive. We become assimilated to the tools of our own invention.

We are, I fear, in the midst of this process of normalization-assimilation with regard to social media. Having made room in our psyches for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the rest, we are now experiencing life through Valencia and LoFi filters.

It's not enough for us to like something; we need people to know that we like it.

But we don't feel the need to wax rhapsodic about how much we like something; our reasons for liking it are irrelevant.

At the moment we become conscious of what we're doing, we feel a sudden compulsion to tell someone--anyone--what we're doing. We don't go on and on about it, of course, and we don't feel compelled to demonstrate to that special someone why they were singled out to learn about this recent accomplishment. We just say it so we can say it's been said.

I'm not typically one to complain about social media. I'm not one of those naysayers who thinks Google makes us stupid or Twitter makes us twits. And I'm not really even complaining about social media here. I'm complaining about what we're becoming in what the kids used to call "meatspace"--the real, physical space we actually occupy, with all its commensurate relational responsibility.

If someone walked up to me every few minutes and gave me a 140-character report on what they've been doing since the last time they gave me an update, they'd get about ten minutes out of me before I locked them out of my life. That's the reason some people offer for why they're not on Twitter. I think it's a facile argument and I get annoyed by it. But here's the problem: now, in real life, in meatspace, people are coming up to me on a fairly regular basis and telling me what they're doing.

I don't care. Stop telling me this stuff. Save it for Twitter.

Likewise, here on terra firma the mere fact that you like something is meaningless to me. I get why you might "like" a corporate page on Facebook; they've offered you incentives to earn your like. I get why you might "like" one of my status updates; besides the fact that it's simultaneously profound and hilarious, it's a bid on my part to connect, and you've honored our relationship by offering a brief and modest acknowledgment.

The like button on Facebook is our virtual gift to one another: I have been liked, therefore I am. But in the real world bids to connect take a different shape. If my wife told me, at the end of the day, that her meetings with her clients had gone really well, and I responded simply by saying, "Like," she would not feel loved; she would not even feel acknowledged. She most definitely would not feel liked. She would feel ignored and neglected and even belittled, because she wants me to share in the details of her life, and I've jumped right to my final answer.

So, here's my fear: rather than retaining our relational responsibility to honor people's bids to connect in contextually appropriate ways--to discern the difference between virtual and local relationship--we are becoming zombified by social media, and we're failing one another in our responsibility to love. Our neighbors may have avatars in any number of virtual environments, but they themselves are not avatars; they are real, flesh-and-blood people, and we need to treat them as such when we encounter them as our own real, flesh-and-blood selves.

How do we do that? I don't know. I know how we don't do it--by saying something like "I don't care. Stop telling me this stuff. Save it for Twitter." Apart from that, I'm open to your suggestions.

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Good News: David C. Cook, publisher of my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville, is making the ebook free for download for two days--August 5-6, 2013. Then from August 7 through September 7, the ebook will be sold for only 99 cents. Just go to their page, click on the book, then click on the link for your preferred ebook platform (e.g., amazon.com for Kindle, Barnes & Noble for Nook).

Please spread the word! And if you've read the book, please consider writing a review on Goodreads, or your blog, or send your friends an email about it. Message me on Facebook with a link to your review and your address, and I'll mail you a copy of my booklet The Parable of the Unexpected Guest as thanks.

Good News for People Who Like Old Ebooks

Good News: David C. Cook, publisher of my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville, is making the ebook free for download for two days--August 5-6, 2013.

Then, from August 7 through September 7, the ebook will be sold for only 99 cents.

Here's what one fellow has written about the book on Goodreads:

A book about how Jesus can displace us from the center of our self-involved lives. It's tough to do in America, but Zimmerman, aided by abundant quotes from the spiritually wise, especially Bonhoeffer, provides a route. It includes spiritual practice and the church and focuses centrally on Jesus. I liked his humorous, self-deprecating tone and found the "escape routes" or exercises at the end of each chapter especially useful. God knows I can use all the help I can get getting over me.

Just go to David C. Cook's website, click on the book, then click on the link for your preferred ebook platform (e.g., amazon.com for Kindle, Barnes & Noble for Nook).

Please spread the word! And if you've read the book, please consider writing a review on Goodreads, or your blog, or send your friends an email about it. Message me on Facebook with a link to your review and your address, and I'll mail you a copy of my booklet The Parable of the Unexpected Guest (see the sidebar) as thanks.

Happy Birthday, Frederick Buechner

Today, July 11, is the birthday of the great novelist and essayist Frederick Buechner. I have been known to devour his writings, from his "doubter's dictionary" Whistling in the Dark to his heartbreaking novelization of the patriarchs, Son of Laughter. He turns eighty-seven today, and we should all blow him a nice kiss.

Buechner's midsummer birthday is as good an occasion for me to repost the following, my reflection on yardwork commingled with his reflection on one of the seven deadly sins. This was originally posted to my now-retired blog Strangely Dim in 2005. I hope you enjoy it, and if this is your first taste of Freddy Buechner's writing, well then, you're welcome.

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Chez Lounge

The other night I was driving home and saw a neighbor doing something that I absolutely hate doing, and yet I was jealous of him. He was sitting comfortably on a chair on his sidewalk spraying his lawn. He had achieved serenity, shalom, nirvana, whatever you want to call it. Even his labor was leisure.

Let me clarify: I don't hate sitting comfortably, I hate spraying my lawn. It smacks of waste and futility--waste because I'm doing what God meant for rain to do, futility because grass withers in my presence. Right now I'm watering twice a day everyday because our wildflower garden, which supplanted our above-ground pool, has been supplanted by what we hope will one day soon be grass. It's a faint hope, though, since I killed the pool and wrecked the wildflower garden.

As a result, most of my thoughts while watering are occupied not with hope but with grumblings of how I might otherwise spend my time. I could be writing or serving the poor, although more likely I'd be quoting the Lemonheads: "What if something's on TV and it's never on again?" On the surface of things, to be condemned to sit in a chair watering my lawn for the rest of eternity would be, for me, like an eternity of wailing and grinding teeth. I looked at that guy in his khaki shorts and his long black socks and his fishing cap and Hawaiian shirt, and I thought, That dude is lazy. But then I thought, That dude is lucky.

I'm reminded of Frederick Buechner, whose definition of sloth is hanging on the wall of my office, just high enough that I don't have to see it every day:

Sloth is not to be confused with laziness. A lazy man, a man who sits around and watches the grass grow, may be a man of peace. His sun-drenched, bumblebee dreaming may be the prelude to action or itself an act well worth the acting. A slothful man, on the other hand, may be a very busy man. He is a man who goes through the motions, who flies on automatic pilot. Like a man with a bad head cold, he has mostly lost his sense of taste and smell. He knows something's wrong with him, but not wrong enough to do anything about. Other people come and go, but through glazed eyes he hardly notices them. He is letting things run their course. He is getting through his life.

So if that guy's lazy, then I'm a ten-toed sloth.

Farewell to a Beloved Pet

Yesterday my wife and I said goodbye to our dear cat Lacey. She's been with us for fifteen years; when I first met her she fit in my palm. Since then she's endeared herself to us with her impossibly long meows, and she's habitually sat in our laps long past the point of convenience. She's always been funny in an awkward sort of way, hiding herself from our friends and family but being her whole self unreservedly with us.

We discovered a couple of months ago that Lacey had cancer, and while she'd been bearing up well since then, she'd lost a lot of weight and had a little less life in her eyes every day. Yesterday morning I called the vet; that afternoon we took her to the clinic and returned home without her.

I've never said goodbye to a pet, mainly because I didn't really have pets till after I was married. We had fish in my house when I was growing up, but fish occupy their own universe; we observe fish, moreso than abiding with them. Lacey and I, by contrast, occupied the same space. We've grown older together; we've moved together from one home to another; we've endured sickness and health and trouble and trial together. My wife and I will miss her; I find it a little hard, quite honestly, to imagine my mornings without her.

Nearly fifteen years ago I first came across a prayer by theologian Stanley Hauerwas, included in his brief book Prayers Plainly Spoken, that he wrote in remembrance of his cat Tuck. I've offered it to friends over the years as they've said goodbye to their pets. I adapt it here for my own benefit, my way of saying goodbye.

Passionate Lord,

By becoming one of us, you revealed your unrelenting desire to have us love you. As we were created for such love, you have made us to love your creation and through such love, such desire, learn to love you. We believe every love we have you have given us.

Lacey's love of us, and our love of her, is a beacon, a participation, in your love of all your creation. We thank you, we sing your praise, for the wonderful life of this cat. Her generosity, her enthusiasm, her naivete, her timidity, her patience, her presence--these qualities and others made us better, made our love for one another better, made us better love you.

We will miss her. Help us not fear remembering her, confident that the sadness such memory brings is bounded by the joy that Lacey existed and, with us, is part of your glorious creation, a harbinger of your peaceable kingdom.

Amen

Every Good Thing Begins in a Garden

I stumbled across a recipe yesterday that calls for, among other very trendy things like sea salt, "seven organic, free range eggs." My wife is thinking of making this recipe, which will result in some truffley, moussey, heart-unhealthy bowl of deliciousness for me, I am sure. But for now, it's just the latest instance of a recipe being, for me, a source of humor.

There is no benefit to eggs whatsoever from being "free range." Eggs are immobile; set them down in a free range and they will sit there, slowly spoiling, until you return them to the refrigerator.

I know, I know. "Free range eggs" are the output of free range chickens, which do benefit from the open space both in terms of health and dignity (for the chickens and for those who raise them). But you can't put a misplaced modifier in front of an editor and expect him not to poke fun at it.

But seriously, folks. What really stood out to me about the organic, free range eggs wasn't the modifier so much as the signifier: this recipe is telling me which particular eggs to buy. Not those eggs--they're not organic, and the farming cosmoporation that brought them to market subjected the chickens that bore them to terrible, terrible living conditions. No, buy these eggs--these eggs that hearken back to simpler times, when human hands tilled the earth and fetched eggs out of the nests of loving hens. If your eggs aren't organic, aren't free range, then you're buying the wrong eggs. Your recipe is steeped in the blood and byproduct of factory farming.

Even that isn't my point. My point is, if you're going to give such specific instructions about the eggs, why not go all the way? "Take seven eggs from your hen. Crack into a bowl. Separate the yolks. Whip the whites until stiff peaks form." Something like that.

I'm trying to grow vegetables in my garden. I'm not very good at it--partly because I'm lazy, but mostly because really, what's the point? Why grow a tomato when they're, like, forty cents at the grocery store, and I'm going there anyway to buy some deodorant? Or, for that matter, why do I need a tomato in the first place? They come pre-diced in a can in aisle seven. And even then, if I have such a taste for tomatoes, why don't I just buy a Lean Cuisine in the frozen section, pop it in the microwave and get on with my life? Or, for that matter, why don't I just run by the Arby's and get myself an Ultimate BLT(tm)?

Gardening is so far removed from my normal routine--slow instead of fast, dirty instead of clean, active instead of passive--that it takes a regular act of the will just to walk the twenty feet or so from my TV to my garden plot to see what's happening. And yet I keep trying, year after year. And eventually I get something to eat out of it.

I think it helps me--and I say that I think this because it only occurred to me this morning--to think of a garden as part of a recipe. No one cooks today because they must; it's too easy to get food without cooking. People cook because the experience of cooking has reward to it: health rewards, for sure, but also emotional rewards of accomplishment, physiological rewards from slow and focused activity, and sensual rewards from the scents and sensations along the way. When you take the long view of gardening, you see the essential steps of gardening not so much as labor but as a process akin to cooking, complete with its own rewards. When I spend an evening weeding, I'm not tending to the garden; I'm accomplishing something while indulging in a multisensory experience. I'm not weeding; I'm making soup.

I think this will help me. I won't be sure till several days from now, several days' worth of positive self talk while crawling around pulling weeds and scaring off rabbits. "I'm making soup. I'm making soup. I'm making soup." My neighbors will probably think I'm crazy; if you want soup so bad, just make a run to Panera.

I'm reminded of something cosmologist Carl Sagan once said: If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. That's what a garden is, in a way: a universe from which everything we need emerges, the point of origin for every good thing. In gardening we reconnect ourselves to the fundamentally creative nature of the universe we find ourselves in. We watch goodness come to life, and we ourselves have a hand in bringing those good things forth.

Too bad I'm not very good at it. Maybe next year I'll be better.

Waking Up with Wendell Berry: This Is How You Make a Joke

Whenever I run out of things to write, I freely admit, I write about things I read. Such is the case today, and this week, and this past month. Maybe I'll get original again soon, but for now I'm resigned (and contented, oddly enough) to write about a novel I'm reading by Wendell Berry.

Jayber Crow, I've come to learn, is one of several books in the Port William Membership family--novels by Berry that occupy the same geographical space and chronological time. It's not the first, but so far as I can tell the sequence isn't that important. I've reached the point in this novel where Jonah Crow (who through a series of events came to be known as Jayber) has resettled himself in the town of his childhood, becoming the local barber. Small town folk don't take quickly to newcomers, and so now in the story Jonah is doing the slow work of making friends. The following scene is critical to that process, but it also strikes me as funny.

It strikes me as funny because it's supposed to. Burley Coulter, Jonah's first adult acquaintance, is trying to make Jonah and others laugh. But he's mainly trying to make himself laugh, which amuses Wendell Berry and is meant to amuse us. And it works.

This is, after all, the essential foundation of humor: You say out loud (or in print, which is roughly the same thing) what you find amusing. Sometimes it's observational; sometimes it's absurdist. Sometimes it's crass or profane or mean or insensitive. Sometimes it's a combination of some or all of the above. But you say it, or you write it, or you otherwise demonstrate it, and people discover by way of your demonstration, and by way of some shared experience with you, that it is, in fact, funny.

Humor is a curative process. The making of a joke is sometimes quick and sometimes slow, but it is always methodical and never accidental. The humor we think is accidental has been curated after the fact, actually; we are ourselves the curators, making our own observations and judgments. Kids who say the darnedest things, for example, aren't trying to be funny; it takes the rest of us to identify and call out the humor in their innocence.

Whatever it is, even at its most uncharitable, humor is conscientious, a bid to connect. Jokes are made; comedy is presented; laughs are shared. Here's how Wendell Berry does it in one scene from Jayber Crow:

One of the early signs of my acceptance into at least a part of Port William society was the following letter, folded once and stuck under the shop door in the dead of night:

"Come to a little worter dranking party Sat night at the Grandstand. Whatever you want to delute your worter with will be fine."

I did not then recognize the handwriting as that of my friend Burley Coulter. Had I done so, I might also have recognized at least one of the misspellings as the work of Burley's conscientious sense of humor. "Worter," as I would know later, was quoted from a famous letter-to-the-teacher written by Oma Wages on behalf of her daughter, who during her three years in the eighth grade had come to be known by the boys as "Topheavy":

"Please let Bobra Sue be excuse when she akses. She cant hole her worter."

That Burley wrote anonymously, making no attempt to disguise either his hand or his manner, was a joke on anonymity and on himself, his way of laying by a little something to laugh about at a later time.

Waking Up with Wendell Berry

I'm very newly into the novel Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. It begins with a notice to the reader that I am trying hard to take seriously:

Persons attempting to find a "text" in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

I'm trying, really I am, not to be the dreaded explainer. That is my bent, I'm afraid, but the author has asked in good faith and good humor, and so I'm trying hard to indulge him and honor his request.

To resist explanation, it turns out, is to invite emotional resonance. I'm forty pages into Jayber Crow's 363 pages and already hopelessly in awe of the title character, telling his story in retrospect. By reading his memories of childhood I'm recalling my own memories; by way of his reflections on the impact of time and the wheels of progress I'm noticing how much the places I've lived have changed over the years, and how much I've changed myself in relation to them. I'm observing him observe these other people and recalling my own observations of the people whose paths I have crossed. It's not necessarily comfortable terrain for one such as I, so predisposed to deconstruction, but it's not a bad way to wake up in the morning.

This morning I awoke to Crow, late in life, recounting his time at The Good Shepherd orphanage, where as some odd institutional protocol his name was truncated from Jonah to J., only to be recast at some later date as Jay and familiarized as Jayber. What follows is how my day today begins, and I expect it will shape how my day today unfolds.

For a while after they had come to The Good Shepherd, the newcomers were known as "newboys" and "newgirls." This status of newness we sooner or later simply wore our way out of. . . . I remember a little girl, the E. Lawler I mentioned before, who came to The Good Shepherd when she was about seven years old. She was a slight, brown-haired, sad-looking, lonesome-looking girl whose clothes did not fit. She looked accidental or unexpected, and seemed to be without expectation, and resigned, and so quiet that even in my selfishness I wished I knew of a way to help her.

I watched her all the time. When her class went out to play, she did not take part but only stood back and watched the other girls. She always wore a dress that sagged and brown cotton stockings that were always wrinkled. She was waiting. I did not understand that she was waiting, but she was. And then one day as her classmates were joining hands to play some sort of game, one of the girls broke the circle. She held out her hand to the newcomer to beckon her in. And E. Lawler ran into the circle and joined hands with the others.

I wrote E. Lawler in my tablet so that I would not forget her.

Local Food and Sustainable Religion

I'm not what you might call "self-motivated." I often need external prompts to keep me going on my more mundane projects. One of those projects is gardening.

So every year now (for the second year in a row!) I'm reading a book that relates in some way to the growing of food. Last year was Barbara Kingsolver's wonderful book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a gift from one of my hippie author friends, who noticed that I had read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma (a gift from another of my hippie author friends) and assumed that I must be a hippie foodie. I'm not, but the book was great.

This year's entry is Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in Pursuit of Christian Living, by Craig L. Goodwin. I met Craig at the Inhabit Conference last year, an event sponsored by the Parish Collective, a network of mostly urban and suburban hippies who want their religious life to be homegrown, organic and slow. It's a great event, if you're into that sort of thing.

Craig's family spent a year living locally, and facing up to all the implications of that. They went in fairly ignorant (less ignorant, I suspect, than he likes to suggest in the book, but by no means were they stealth hippies engaging in fraudulent life experiments), and dealt with the surprises as they came. I'm now at the point where the family is running out of staples, like flour, and running in search of homegrown replacements.

The family visits any number of processing plants with very little luck, until one food industry representative directs them to a "recovering conventional farmer." Fred proves to be a good match for Craig's "recovering conventional consumer"; I suspect I'll hear more from Fred as I continue to read. Anyway, Fred turns Craig on not only to local sources of flour but to the ecological logic of what has become, after a century or two of industrial progress, unconventional farming. Show concern for the sustainability of topsoil, Fred suggests, and your land will not dry up. I found this interesting: "The richness of the tropical rainforest is in the way it recycles the nutrients"--the interdependency of the soil and the plants growing in it. "Once the native vegetation disappears, so does the productive capacity of the soil." Deforestation in the Amazon, for example, won't result in more land for agricultural use; it'll result in more useless land and a starker, less stable environment.

The kicker of chapter five, for me, was the surprise twist at the end, in which Craig steps way back from his search for flour and sugar and cheese, and reflects on the parallels between environmental responsibility and congregational life. He's a pastor, so he thinks that way, but I found his insight to be quite compelling, and fertile ground for the church's ongoing reformation. Here's what he wrote:

I am learning that what farmers like Fred are doing agriculturally, I need to do theologically and pastorally in the church. Like farmers, our lives have become disintegrated and fragmented by rapid cultural and technological change. Maybe we've imagined the whole world as little more than a medium for growing souls, pushing and pushing until we erode the fertile topsoil that's essential to our faith--justice, goodness, mercy, compassion. Imagine what might change if we thought of the earth and everything in it as part of God's redemptive plan, as an integrated process of life breaking out "on earth as it is in heaven." Maybe even our stop at the dairy aisle and our choice of flour could be fertile ground for faithfulness.