Creative Nonfiction

Teaching a Stone to Talk: “An Expedition to the Pole,” p. 31

“God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things.

“Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates. You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things–unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him.

“You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”

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Lauren is a college graduate with degrees in journalism and writing. This summer she is westward bound to Seattle, Washington, in order to pursue graduate school ... and good coffee.

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Wendy and Nathan break up

This book, I wrote in my last post, seems to mirror my circumstances. It got weirder when Wendy and her boyfriend Nathan started having problems. The chapter about their break up started like this: It needs to be said that we’re not breaking up. And she talks about bringing some of his stuff back to his apartment. She knows it’s coming (she senses it), but she isn’t the one to do it. She doesn’t want to break up with him, though maybe in the past it had crossed her mind.

So then the rest of the chapter happens and so does the following chapter and my stomach does flip flops and my head says, “Yes, exactly.”

Whenever I finish a cigarette I walk to the curb to drop the butt in the gutter and watch for Nathan’s bike down the street. I think we’re trying to be ourselves again, and I want to give him these things that are his, and then I haven’t really thought about what’s going to happen next. For now I leave a note telling him I’m glad he hasn’t been killed. I ought to start with him being alive and then go from there, I think. … [Nathan calls her]

“I think you need to come back over now,” he says. “If you’re not too far.”

“You want me to come back to your place?”

I’m about a mile away. …

“I think you should come back over,” he repeats. “It won’t take long.”

“What won’t?”

“I’ll meet you downstairs,” he says, and hangs up.

[Two pages later]

Also the truth is that at this moment I’m crying about being alone on New Year’s. It’s a week before Thanksgiving right now. “This is the worst time to break up with someone,” I say. “Worst fucking time ever” (I Am Not the New Me, pp. 203-204, 207).

Wendy, you’re not alone.

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Lauren is a college graduate with degrees in journalism and writing. This summer she is westward bound to Seattle, Washington, in order to pursue graduate school ... and good coffee.

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No surprise.

“That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created.” — Annie Dillard

 

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Lauren is a college graduate with degrees in journalism and writing. This summer she is westward bound to Seattle, Washington, in order to pursue graduate school ... and good coffee.

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Surviving Turkey

A view from my hotel room in Istanbul that first crazy night.

I can’t sleep, so a blog post.

The scariest moment of my life didn’t scare me at all. I don’t understand it, because looking back I’m nervous for myself. I get jittery. I keep myself from falling asleep.

I was in Istanbul. Somehow, somehow my luggage got to me. I got my visa. I was in the country legally. I exchanged dollars for lira and was ready to find my way to the hotel.

Okay, Hertz. Jessica said find a Hertz car to get to the hotel. I did. Forty U.S. dollars later, I got my car. The Hertz guy hit on me — I was flattered — then led me to some guy with a skinny soul patch who didn’t own a Hertz car or Hertz uniform. I got into his car anyway. The way from the airport to the hotel I considered my circumstances and created escape plans. If I just jump out of the moving car….

Then I got to the hotel and no one speaks English. Well, one guy did but he seemed irritated. I guess I made my reservation, but never paid for it. What? I gave him my credit card which, of course, didn’t work. I had cash, though, and luckily he too took U.S. dollars. Eighty of them.

I got my room finally, and I realized that I couldn’t plug my dying computer in because I’m in Turkey. Turks don’t use the same outlets as we do. (Americans like their power — GROWL!) So I called the front desk. They answered in Turkish. When they heard the pathetic Caucasian on the phone, they handed it to the one guy who speaks English. The irritated guy. They brought me up a converter. Only it’s a U.K. converter, not a U.S. one. I went down to the desk. They handed me over to the irritated guy again; he says sorry. That’s all the have.

My phone was dying just like my computer. I emailed my mom and another intern, Lydia, who’s supposed to meet me at the hotel. I just send a hi-I’m-safe-can’t-talk-bye message. Then called it a day.

Because I was too nervous to converse with the irritable English-speaking Turk and the other Turks in the hotel lobby, I spent the rest of the day (evening in Turkey time, early afternoon in Indiana time) reading Jayber Crow, watching episodes of How I Met Your Mother on my iPod, and eating cheese crackers for my one meal of the day. I think I fell asleep at some point.

Lydia came at 1 a.m., Turkey time. We slept for a few hours, then enjoyed a huge breakfast buffet in the hotel lobby. I started cheering up. Then I thought about the Facebook comment I got on the way to Istanbul, from some guy I went to school with. Nate. He told me to try Turkish coffee. I did.

If my computer weren’t dead, I would have messaged him back just then.

–

I am not much of a risk taker. I’m scared of calling people on the phone, of doing things like renewing my driver’s license or returning Christmas gifts. I’d rather keep the expired license and stupid gift.

I don’t know why I didn’t freak out that first night in Istanbul. Maybe I didn’t because I knew it would’ve been useless. I couldn’t call anyone. I only had myself and God to keep me safe. It worked.

I wasn’t scared at all. Nervous, yes. Stressed, oh yeah. But not scared.

 

To my friends traveling abroad this summer: don’t be afraid. If you’re supposed to go (and I believe all of you are), you’ll be just fine. God’s got your back. Ser chow.

 

Lauren

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Lauren is a college graduate with degrees in journalism and writing. This summer she is westward bound to Seattle, Washington, in order to pursue graduate school ... and good coffee.

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Poetry to creative nonfiction and back again

I read an essay earlier this semester in Creative Nonfiction about how you should write a poem before you write a CNF piece, to get all your thoughts out. Interesting. I’ve never tried it before–usually I do the opposite–but I’m trying it today. For my CNF portfolio, I’m basically starting fresh on a piece, except for this poem and a 300-word journal entry I wrote.

The essay I’m writing is about how I got to where I am in my poem. It’s going to open up with the scene in the poem, then go through and set up the how. I don’t know how this CNF piece is going to come out, but hey, it could be something.

–

(The line spacing is a little screwed up. So it goes.)

I should have stayed home

Five beers and fourteen cigarettes later:
“You’re the best girl.” I kiss the back of your
ear and pretend that I am.

You light your
fifteenth and watch me turn away. I smile
only to avoid that scrunched-face look you
give to me and, “Are you alright?” Of course.

You find my lie convincing enough to
turn your attention back to your friends. You
explicate your theology.

“Jesus
was not God of God, light of light.” A friend
responds, “I think he’d a’ smoked weed.” You laugh.
I cough. You squeeze my hand. I ignore you.

I attempt to contribute to the slurred
conversation of a couple of drunk
girls. (I laugh—it is all I know to do.)

But really I want you to notice how
uncomfortable I am without having
to ask. “I’m fine,” I say. I’m never fine.

–

Scriptwriting Archive:
Broken-down Poetry, and what it means
The strenuous marriage of writing
Poetry as Therapy, pt. II
Imagination
Sh*tty First Drafts
Cross-train
Go get a life
Wishing writing could change me
Install me in any profession
Tell all the truth but tell it slant–

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Lauren is a college graduate with degrees in journalism and writing. This summer she is westward bound to Seattle, Washington, in order to pursue graduate school ... and good coffee.

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Bird by bird by bird

“… Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was a at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.

“Then my father sat down beside him, but his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’” – p. 19 Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

–

Dear friends, we’re going to make it through this semester.

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Lauren is a college graduate with degrees in journalism and writing. This summer she is westward bound to Seattle, Washington, in order to pursue graduate school ... and good coffee.

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Holy the Firm, pp. 60-62

His disciples asked Christ about a roadside beggar who had been blind from birth, “Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” And Christ, who spat on the ground, made a mud of his spittle and clay, plastered the mud over the man’s eyes, and gave him sight, answered, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be manifest in him.”


Really? If we take this answer to refer to the affliction itself–and not the subsequent cure–as “God’s works made manifest,” then we have, along with “Not as the world gives do I give unto you,” two meager, baffling, and infuriating answer to one of the few questions worth asking, to wit, What in the Sam Hill is going on here?

The works of God made manifest? Do we really need more victims to remind us that we’re victims? Is this some sort of parade for which a conquering army shines up its terrible guns and rolls them up and down the streets for people to see? Do we need blind men stumbling about, and little flamefaced children, to remind us what God can–and will–do? …

Yes, in fact, we do. We do need reminding, not of what God can do, but what he cannot do, or will not, which is to catch time in its free fall and stick a nickel’s worth of sense into our days. And we need reminding of what time can do, must only do; churn out enormity at random and beat it, with God’s blessing, into our heads: that we are created, created, sojourners in a land we did not make, a land with no meaning of itself and no meaning we can make for it alone. 

Who are we do demand explanations of God? (And what monsters of perfection should we be if we did not?) …

–

I think I finally get it, Annie.

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Lauren is a college graduate with degrees in journalism and writing. This summer she is westward bound to Seattle, Washington, in order to pursue graduate school ... and good coffee.

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Grace grows in winter

Grace doesn’t grow in the springtime. Grace grows in the winter, when everything’s dead, when life is the brown sludge beneath your rubber boots.
It comes as a surprise.
We talk about life as having seasons. In the spring, life is born. In summer, it’s sustained. In fall, it starts dying and by winter, it’s dead.
But what if that’s not how it works at all? Maybe life is always about dying. Maybe it’s about repeatedly dying to our worldviews, our theories, our ways of doing things, our attitudes, our agendas, our impatience, our sins.
I think the seasons of life take place between October and December. In October, we start dying, but not to the right stuff. We die to the good we’ve always known. In October, we sin.
Then by November, we’ve killed God. We have sinned enough to shut him out, to no longer care. We’ve let sin creep in, settle on our sofas and stay awhile.
In November we think we’re screwed.
So we started messing around in October, now we’re deep into this new way of living. It’s easy to be short-tempered; it’s easy to walk past you. We’ve become different people. We used to be, by the grace of God, patient people. Now look who we are.
Hope: it’s gone. The trees stay green forever.
But in December, Grace grows unexpectedly. Up from the ground, under your feet, through the snow, through the dirt, through the frozen ground, Grace grows.
Thank God.
You don’t need Grace in the summer when all is well. You need Grace when things couldn’t possibly get any worse.
–
I wrote Late October first, while reflecting on sin — my own sin — and how it seemed unconquerable. A week or so after, I wrote Late
November and Late December while plotting a way out of sin. I want a way out. I’m close.
It’s been fall for a long time; now it’s winter, and I’ve seen sprouts of Grace.
In the past week or so I’ve posted two of the three poems in this series. Here’s the complete collection including Late December, my poem on Grace.
–
Late October
Late October
and the Norway maple hasn’t turned
red or orange or whatever color
Norway maples turn.
Today
and tomorrow:
an endless cycle of green
and green and green
and green and green.
Through the window
the masochists
slit their wrists,
crying but with bliss.
Late November
Late November
and God is dead
like the maple trees and the leaves
falling out of them.
I did it
with a handful of the
foliage of God, yanking leaves
one by one by one by one
—just so I know he’s gone:
he’s dead.
God haunts still,
like apparitions, and
he howls through crooked
branches, waving:
Hi, I miss you.
Do you miss me?
Late December
Late December
and grace grows
like heaths. It is the
dead of winter,
yet grace grows in the dead
leaves crushed to the ground
and stomped upon,
with booted feet,
crushed into snow
and slush: grey, black,
brown.
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Lauren is a college graduate with degrees in journalism and writing. This summer she is westward bound to Seattle, Washington, in order to pursue graduate school ... and good coffee.

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Jesus Wore Klash

The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.


–


Kurdish men wear these funny shoes called klash. They’re handmade, hand-sown clogs with a hard sole and white top. Ever since Lydia and I first arrived at the Sulaimania airport, we saw dozens of men wearing these shoes with their juli kurdi, traditional Kurdish garb.

During my internship with Preemptive Love in Iraq, all the intern guys bought one or two pairs of klash. Jeremy and Gigs, the photographer, have klash too.

–

When Jesus came to earth 2,000-odd years ago, he didn’t come in a sparkly white robe with a glowing orb surrounding him.

He wasn’t the son of a king or religious leader. He wasn’t hot. He wasn’t a different race than the other Jews; he was from the tribe of Judah.

He was born next to sheep. He grew up learning a trade like all the other boys his age.

He was Jesus, son of Mary and Joseph. He lived among the people he wanted to help. He didn’t elevate himself to a higher position. Philippians says, “he made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant.”

People didn’t know him as that outsider coming in to change their situation. He didn’t market himself as a savior.

I wonder what would happen if Jesus acted like a lot of Americans doing development work overseas.

What if he only came for two weeks? What if he came with certain tools useful in his homeland, but not this one? What if his knowledge of the Hebrew people came from Disney movies or what he heard on the news?

I love that Jesus came and lived as a human among humans for 30 years before starting his ministry. He didn’t come out of the womb proving to be an expert. He lived like us. He worked like us. He dressed like us.

I’m convinced that if Jesus came to the Kurds of northern Iraq, he’d wear klash. If he came to America, he’d wear Converse or flip-flops.

And he wouldn’t talk like he knew everything,
without living in the culture for a while.

–

I spent two months living and working with Jeremy and Jessica Courtney, two development workers in Iraq. I saw how their way of living affected PLC’s work in Iraq. Locals respect them because they live like their neighbors: in similar clothing, in houses among other Kurds, they know the language.

Spending a summer with the Courtneys has taught me a thing or two about God.

We say that we have a LORD that empathizes with us. I get that now. Empathy implies experience. It doesn’t mean Jesus gets how we feel because he’s GOD and that’s what he does. It means that he gets it because he lived it.

Ezek.

* photo by Lydia Bullock

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Lauren is a college graduate with degrees in journalism and writing. This summer she is westward bound to Seattle, Washington, in order to pursue graduate school ... and good coffee.

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Georgia peach

“We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God.” Annie Dillard

–

I am supposed to be in Istanbul right now. So for those of you wanting a recap of my past day (and a look into my next few days) here it is.

–

My flight from Indianapolis was delayed because of storms in Atlanta, but I board the flight only 45 minutes later than scheduled and all was well. My window seat is nice. I get to look out on the Neighborhood of Make Believe, or what seemed to be, with the tiny cars and all. And I read.

“That’s a great book,” says the woman next to me, who looks like Diane Keaton.

Jayber Crow. “Yeah! I’ve read half of it already, but it’s been a while so I thought I’d start from the beginning.” For some reason I tell strangers more than they need to know, or care to know. I spend the rest of the flight trying to guess her profession. (English education.)

When we approach Atlanta, the captain announces that the storms would keep us from landing. We hover over the airport for a while (I don’t know if planes really hover; I just imagine it like that) then fly 180 miles west to Huntsville, Alabama where we sit. On the plane. For over an hour.

Meanwhile I’m sending text messages to Daniel, another intern, who’s at the Atlanta airport waiting for our flight. He keeps me updated on delays. I tell him I think I’ll make it back just in time; he tells me the captain announced that they’re waiting for our plane to get in before taking off.

We make it to Atlanta by about 5:00. The captain on my plane asks for only those who needed to catch flights to get up and get off. Everyone gets up and gets off. I’m in the back of the plane. I squeeze in front of Diane Keaton and shuffle off the plane and begin looking for Gate T3. Other side of the airport? Awesome. I run. (Power walk.) I huff and puff all the way across Atlanta’s airport only to find out that I just missed the flight.

Breathe, girl. In and out. In and out.

I wait in line to get my flight changed. Turns out the next flight isn’t until 4:20 p.m. the next day.

[I'll fast forward through my minor freak out, eating dinner, paying $10 for Internet access and getting a call from Jessica who asks me to fly in a day later even so I can arrive with Lydia, another intern.]

I wait in that long line again to talk to Draga, the Delta exec. I talked to the first time I was in this line. The one who told me that I couldn’t get on a flight until Saturday evening.

Me: Is it okay if I fly in a day later?

Draga: No, we can’t do that.

Me: But the people I’m meeting can’t pick me up any earlier.

Draga: Sigh. Talk to her. (Points to woman next to her.)

After this woman finishes talking to the most adorable elderly couple, who speak only Italian, I ask if I can move my flights back a day.

Woman: Of course you can. (Click-click-click of her computer.)

Me: And can I get a hotel for tonight?

Woman: Yes. It will be free for tonight, but will cost you tomorrow. You’ll have to ride back on the shuttle to get another voucher.

Me: Okay. Thank you. And how do I get to the shuttle?

Woman: I’ll take you there myself.

Nicest woman ever. At least compared to Draga.

I wait outside for my shuttle. Finally it hits me that I’m in Georgia – what a pretty state. I remember thinking that as we flew above it a few hours before. The sky is a pinkish blue color now; the weather is 70 degrees and breezy. I get into my shuttle and daydream about perusing the town for a cute coffee shop.

The driver asks where I’m headed – Days Inn. He calls me Days Inn Girl the rest of the trip. I tip him two dollars because I like my new nickname.

–

I spend the rest of the night either laughing on the phone with Molly or sobbing on the phone with my mom. I am one emotional cookie. We were having issues changing my flight out of Istanbul. But $600 later, we get it figured out.

–

Earlier this week I was thinking about the book of Job and how maybe we try to find hidden truths within it, truths that aren’t really there. We take verses out of context; we try to figure out what God means about this and if it justifies that. But if we look too deep, if we look too hard at the details, we might miss the big picture.

It’s a simple story: Job has it rough, but things end up okay.

Maybe the conversation between Satan and God was metaphorical. Maybe Satan didn’t do the taking away; maybe life happened. And maybe Job thought he had everything under control and he realized he didn’t. Maybe God needed to talk some sense into Job in the end, to call him out in the middle of the storm – in the middle of the chaos – to say, “Job. You’re not a god. You can’t control everything. Let go and trust me.”

I’m not saying that the story isn’t literal – I don’t want to cause a theological debate. But if we look at the story of Job in its purest form, we see a guy who’s met conflict, didn’t handle it right, but still made it through in the end.

I see myself like him.

What happens to Job will happen to me. I have experienced conflict, yes. I’ve handled it wrong too. But I’m going to be okay.

So far, so good.
Iraq, here I come. 
(Just later than expected.)
Lauren
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Lauren is a college graduate with degrees in journalism and writing. This summer she is westward bound to Seattle, Washington, in order to pursue graduate school ... and good coffee.

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