| December 2007
Winter shrugged, and dropped a swirling cloak of snow all through the week. The wind blew 50, then 75 mph. Last night the gauge hit 90 mph. The empty Sealand vans at the dock, where all the islands goods make shore, took flight, tumbling into the ocean. Our house, on the edge of the ocean cliff, threatens the same some nights. No matter our own cloaks and scarves, there are some winds we cannot wrap against. Nothing is strong enough to clothe our nakedness before such forces.
It’s the season, too, where we wake to dark, pry our lids open reluctantly, only rising because the clock and our schedules force us to it. Our bodies know better. We try to fool them with full spectrum lighting, with a shot of rays in the tanning bed once a week, all this simply a hint of what we know shines elsewhere in other corners of the world. It doesn’t really work. I cannot fully shake off the somnolence of the dark but the effort gives me hope and helps me spend my six and a half hours of daily light carefully, gratefully.
I remember why I live here at such times. I remember when my neighbor plows my driveway, secretly, in the night. When another neighbor drives his Bobcat up a high hill to clear our long driveway after another snow. When my truck lands sideways across the road, helpless to climb the hill to my house, and three men appear within minutes to push me out of the berm.
Often the planes cannot fly, the mail does not come, trips are ruined, the entire town runs out of wrapping paper or milk and eggs. Last week, in the dead of winter, two hunters were charged by a Kodiak bear---a bear that should have been hibernating. The certainty we expect as Americans is less certain here---and for all its frustrations, this is why we live here. We cannot be sure of many things, but we can be sure that someone will help us out of the ditch, someone will give a ride to those who have no car, someone will organize a fund-raiser for the woman with cancer, for the man who was crushed by a boat. We stand in line at the stores, talking to whoever is behind us, not because we know them, but because we live on Kodiak Island together, and that is enough for one hundred conversations.
Adam Nicolson, in his book Sea Room writes about the Hebrides:
“Islands feed an appetite for the absolute. They are removed from the human world, from its business and noise. Whatever the reality, a kind of silence seems to hang about them. it is not silence, because the sea beats on the shores and the birds scream and flutter above you. But it is a virtual silence, an absence of communication which reduces the islander to a naked condition in front of the universe. It is not padded by the conversation of others. Do you want the padding or do you feel shut in and de-natured by it? Do you love the nakedness or do you shiver in the wind? Do you feel deprived by your island condition or somehow enabled and enriched by it?
I know the answer. I shiver in the skin of my own insufficiency before these winds. In the dark, in the island distance, I encounter my own aloneness again and again. I do feel deprived—but I also feel enriched: I am awakened to the aloneness of others. We listen to each other because of it; we seek shelter in each others’ homes, we converse with our ears. We learn how to speak the singular language of Island.
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Fall, 2007
The salmon are still running, but my family and I are not running after them, not with nets or cameras or any kind of eyes. We have left fishcamp for school and town life, with hourly schedules and places-to-be, deadlines to meet---it’s always a hard transition. Along with it comes the daily loss of daylight; the slow climb toward a long night pulls at me. But there are consolations---one of them, trips! This fall, to Arkansas, Georgia, and Tennessee, for an in-studio radio show, a visit to Covenant College, where I gave readings and lectures. A book club who had recently read Surviving the Island of Grace showed up en force reminding me again that writing is not about numbers, but about the real bodies and faces of real readers. Thank you for being there! The meetings and readings on campus were felicitous, the trees gorgeously mutli-colored, the views multi-state, and I will return in January of 2009 as writer-in-residence.
Other quick writing news: Surprise Child will appear in German in the next month or so ; I am working on a revised edition of Surviving the Island of Grace, which will be published in spring, 2008. Two other manuscripts continue to fill my writing hours. Teaching has begun again, after summer break. My new students in the MFA program I teach in (Seattle Pacific University) are wonderful writers, who live all over the country. For them, and for me, and for all who care about writing and teaching, I pass on these words:
“I don’t teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel global doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don’t have any doubt.”
-----Richard Bausch, from Off the Page:Writers Talk about Beginnings, Endings and Everything in Between
___________________________________________________________________________
Summer
2007
Dear Reading Friends,
So,
it's official. I'm not capable of maintaining anything
regular in this space. I hope these occasional words will
help span some gaps of silence between the appearance
of books and essays.
I
am writing from Harvester Island again, in the middle
of our commercial salmon season. It's been a very slow
season so far, with few fish. The whales have been frolicking
in great numbers out our front windows, and the bald eagles
are plentiful, as are the voles and the mosquitos, so
fecundity is still abundantly evident! We hope the pink
salmon and the red salmon will soon make their appearance.
Somehow they do. somehow they seem to magically trace
their path from the sea back to the stream bed of their
birth--the very same. A common everyday miracle no one
can yet fully explain.
A quick catch-up. We did indeed make it through our year
of travel and delinquincy from a real schedule and a real
life. The fake life on the road is infinitely more preferable
than the scheduled life---even a life scheduled around
the salmon and the tides! I met many fine people and students
as I spoke and gave readings at colleges and universities
around the country. Our winter in Guatemala was excellent---warm,
rich, the people delightful, the Mayan culture thriving,
the colors brilliant. All as far from an Alaskan winter
as I had hoped. There was danger as well. My six year
old son and I were held at gunpoint by a car thief one
morning in Guatemala City. We met and made a number of
friends, most of whom have lived there for years, spending
their lives in service to the needy. They live with this
threat, and worse, every day. We left Guatemala humbled
by their lives.
I
am in the trenches of another book right now, with a deadline
hovering over me. This one on parenting---a spirituality
of parenting, of sorts, that will challenge a lot of common
practices and beliefs. A second project, equally challenging
and enriching, is a look at food, all aspects of food:
its gathering, preparation, feasts, potlucks, etc. and
how we use its presence and its absence as a means of
drawing us toward God and one another. If you have any
thoughts to share on either of these topics, please do
write and share them with me. (northernpen@alaska.com)
Thanks for spending these few minutes with me here. I
hope you find the good you are searching for, and the
words that speak all you hunger to know.
Gratefully,
Leslie
___________________________________________________________________________
Dear gracious friends,
Just a quick note to say hello and many
apologies for not writing personally. I've received some
wonderful mail from many of you--you deserve far more than this
note!! Hopefully I'll have time to write more personally
later. For now, please accept this brief Field note.
We arrived in Guatemala City early this morning (3:45 am, to
be exact. Yes, I was counting!!). I won't describe to you
the appearance we created in the airports: 7 people
each swallowed by 3 to 4 pieces of luggage each, an entire
parade of luggage with legs. We smiled politely and acted like
we knew what we were doing. We've begun to settle into the house
we'll be staying in for the next 10 weeks. I won't be roughing
it too badly--the house has white tiled floors, all kitchen
appliances, enough bedrooms and beds for all of us, and even a
backyard. we feel incredibly blessed! Of course every exterior
surface is covered by gates, curly-que barbed wire, wicked metal
spikes, guard dogs and other safety measures, which either makes
you feel a whole lot better or a whole lot worse, depending on
your temperament. my four year old son's wish has come true,
that we would live in a "house that doesn' t move" (as opposed
to a motor home, our abode for the last 2 months), and second
qualification, a "house with toys.' We've met both
requirements. He is happy.
email obviously works here---which is a great relief! Our
phone here, should anyone need it, is 011-502- 5399-3845.
Travel looks like it will be something of a problem. No maps
of Guatemala City---horrnedous traffic, messy, unpredictable
roads, at least in our area . . . guaranteeing good tales
for future essays. I'm looking forward to teaching the seminars
I've prepared here in the city and elsewhere in Central America.
(The topic: Incarnational Teaching)
It's the season of fireworks here. Right now someone is
blasting some surely-illegal-in-the-US bomb kind of things right
next door. Should I surrender?? Not to worry, our hosts have
said. The city will sound like a warzone for the next few weeks.
All part of the birth of Christ, apparently (and an unregulated
fireworks industry)
I'll end the note before it becomes a rough draft of a book
proposal or something. I wish you all a peaceful, or at least
fun Christmas, full of worship, occasional quiet time,
unexpected blessings. Thank you for the great gift of your
friendship, which is worth more than I know how to say.
with love,
Leslie
___________________________________________________________________________
September/October
Harvester
Island
Dear
friends and readers,
It was wonderful to see so
many friends in Sante Fe—and to meet my new MFA students—who are
dynamite! I’m looking forward to a great year with them, and to
seeing them again at Whidbey Island in the spring.
Fall comes early here on
Harvester Island, the birches yellowing by mid-August. Now the
hills are patched with swaths of burnt orange and rose, tawny
yellows. Commercial salmon fishing is all but over. It’s been a
long season, drenched in pink salmon, mostly. Those of us living
out on this west side of Kodiak Island are lamenting not the
passing of summer, but that summer never came. August is usually
summer, a month of warm 60 degree days---our seasonal redemption
that pulls us through long black winters. But little summer this
year.
And I am doing it again—the
weather report. I fall into these words so effortlessly because
the weather so circumscribes our lives out here. Most years I’m
back in Kodiak by now, my weather obsession distracted by the
start of school, travel and speaking engagements, all the usual
activities of the over-committed. But this year is different,
in every way. We are staying out late this extra month, then
heading down the Alaska Highway for eight months of travel,
taking us throughout the States, and then into Guatemala and
Central America. As we go, I’ll be teaching, working on a new
book, and speaking at universities and conferences; in Central
America I’ll be presenting seminars to educators. I promise to
post some of our happenings along the way. (I can still be
reached while traveling through my regular email: northernpen@alaska.com)
As I am about to uproot for
the entire year, I think about stasis, rootedness, change. In
making this move, I discover again that my thirty summers here
have layered a complex storied relationship to this island. The
ground and spaces I have inhabited here have come to inhabit me
in ways I did not expect. Barry Lopez describes this occurrence
as “reciprocity of occupation.” Yet I look forward to the eight
month journey ahead. I believe in both rootedness and uprooting.
We cannot truly see beauty and meaning of one place without
seeing other places. Scott Russell Sanders concludes his essay
“Beauty” by noting, “A universe so prodigal of beauty may
actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes
and brimming hearts and teeming minds, in order to close the
circuit of creation.” I hope to do this, to notice and respond,
to step into the circuit of creation, and to speak whatever
words are given and found.
Thanks for reading!
Peace and blessing,
Leslie
___________________________________________________________________________
July, 2006
Dear Reading Friends,
Thanks for stopping by for a visit! This is
the first of what I hope will be monthly letters and updates.
This will not be a blog. There---I’ve lost some of
you already. But maybe those who remain will appreciate my
promise to keep the painfully quotidian details of my life to a
minimum. If a few squeak by my own internal editor, and I end up
sharing my latest recipe for grilled salmon, or I lapse into
long, windy complaints about the weather or provide unwanted
descriptions of the current state of our outhouse---let me know.
On the other hand, I’m not promising intensely
thoughtful, brilliant, profound prose---I’m promising a letter.
I’m writing this
first letter from our fishcamp, Harvester Island, where my
family and I are deeply enmeshed in the work of catching salmon.
There is a rhythm to this life that has much less to do with
clocks, more to do with tides, weather, the movement of fish
into our nets---and the constant breakdown of our homebuilt
systems. (Our water tank went dry last night, necessitating an
hour long tussle with the water pump. The propane went out this
morning, which means another hour or two . . . Earlier this
month, the generator broke down, leaving us three days without
power and without any means of speaking or hearing the outside
world. But, how soon I lapse! (Oh well, perhaps there truly
is no escape from the ubiquitous ordinary.)
In between my
(pathetic and limited) efforts at keeping the island running,
I’m working on two new books right now, each morning marching
down the graveled hill, laptop in hand, to the beach, then into
a little shed on a dock over the ocean. One book is set here, in
this place that wraps its kelpy arms around me, not letting go.
I’m glad for this embrace---how else to write of heaven and
earth and sea but from within its salty, pungent clasp? The
other book sends me elsewhere, less into the elements that
ground me, more into theology, the way we live together and try
to love one another. (Christianity Today’s cover
story, “The Case for Kids” July 15, will be the fruit of some
of that work.)
I’m also preparing
to teach at the next MFA residency in Santa Fe, New Mexico in
July and August. The residency is timed to coincide with The
Glen Workshop, a truly amazing gathering of some of the finest
musicians, artists, writers and students, all harnessed together
for an intensive week. We’ll each be working within our chosen
art form, wrestling with this year’s theme, “Love and
Affliction: Art and the Paradox of Suffering.” Who among us
would choose suffering? We do not welcome it—yet it comes; it
does not leave when asked. We carry it, then, slung over our
backs, lightly or heavily at times. Yet for all the grief, we
find ourselves more alive, more awake, more filled with longing
. . . St. Augustine suggests that our unquenchable desires may
be the very means by which we can offer unceasing prayer. “There
is another kind of prayer without ceasing, namely, the desire of
the heart. Whatever else you may be doing, if you but fix your
desire on God’s Sabbath rest, your prayer will be ceaseless.
Therefore if you wish to pray without ceasing, do not cease to
desire. “ I hope that I am more afraid of being swallowed
by happiness than swallowed by longing.
This month
both—happiness and longing-- will be present in abundance as we
write, sing, worship, teach, and live together in community this
precious, sacred week in Santa Fe. I anticipate meeting some of
you there, my new students especially. And to see my former
students again---this is pure joy.
Thanks for
checking in. If these letters, like automated voice systems,
don’t assuage your desire to speak with a real person, please
send me an email. I’d love to write you back personally. (northernpen@alaska.com)
With peace and
longing,
Leslie
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