My Apologia

I have never once had a burning need or desire to write a book. There. I have said it. You might think that an odd statement coming from a writer. Believe me, I have found it odd myself, but I cannot deny it. I am certainly relieved that other writers have written books. Where would we be without a Waugh, an Austen, a Knox, a Bede? Nowhere, I say! I certainly, for instance, loved hearing about an intriguing book on feminism given me to read by a dear friend. My own bookshelves groan almost audibly with the obvious truth that I am a book lover. There just simply isn’t one with my own name on its cover. And that has never been a source of any angst for me. I truly am content that I am among friends who have written their books, and somehow read my mind down through the centuries; giving me the exquisite opportunity to find and revel in all those many aha, wordy moments that are the prized possessions of dedicated bibliophiles. Novelists especially have my awe filled praise. Whole stories unfolding with intrigue, beauty, adventure and cohesive theme? It’s a bit of a miracle, actually. I am always a grateful book reader, though I never had a desire to write a book myself.

However, if I am perfectly honest, whenever someone I know tells me they are thinking about, or are in the act of writing, or have just sent off their book, I suddenly have a rippling disturbance in my otherwise calm and decisive certainty. This nagging little voice sidles up to my ear and questions: “Should you be writing a book?” It knows just how to get to me, that nagging little voice. In working out my response to it each time, I have, over the years, honed out a bit of an Apologia; a defense, if you will, of my bookless ‘career’.

Great books are like silos filled with grain. They are there for future readers as well as for those present. Sometimes they are stored up for literary famines of the future. They maybe keep hope alive, or remind us that what we think are singular disasters in our own time really are not. They promise us that truly there is nothing new under the sun, but there are literary facets that catch that sun in new and startling ways. They reassure us that love is the beautiful, awe filled, exasperating thing it has always been. That poems have always fallen from mysterious trees in poets’ fruitful minds - inspiration never lacking down through the ages. That God in His Church has rumbled nobly down through the ages in unbroken lineage of truth. That struggles and challenges have been lived through and survived before and we should be comforted. Yes, great books are filled with full harvests of grain that have been sifted from their chaff and wait for us to eat our fill, and I have certainly done my own fair share of plundering.

I would like to posit here, though, that “writing” itself is a different sort of thing; something that encompasses much more than what is contained in physical books but is no less worthy of the name “writing”. Some of the most moving things I have ever read were perhaps one sentence in a letter, an email, or in that gloriously fertile ground simply known as the Post Script where all those after thoughts pool and where so often the crux of the matter actually lies and is finally said. This kind of writing is like sweet, quick birdsong and then silence. Too swift and small to build a book around and yet not too small to move my soul to thanksgiving in praise of language well used. The writers of these missives deserve all the honor of that name - even for something that gets put in the back of a drawer or is saved to a file for later comfort.

People who diligently persevere at daily journal entries are also writers of unusual worth. My husband has kept a journal for years - each Christmas I present him with a pristine, blank paged notebook and he fills it up with the distinctive daily doings of a husband, father, and now grandfather who still, by some miracle, has political hope and a glorious sense of humor. Only he will see it. Sometimes he reads me little lines here and there - memories we both have shared but perhaps I have forgotten or have not seen in his own unique way. He is clever and pithy in his journal writing. It’s messy and crossed out in places. But it is a treasure. He never expects it to be published but he wrote it anyway. It is our own very life growing and tended in the fertile mind of a man who loves the place he has been planted and has reaped a hundredfold. One day his children will find it in a box and read it with tears and wonder and outright laughter. This too is writing. And moving. And worthy. But not a book.

Yet still I wonder where I fall on this writing spectrum. If not a book, then what? A perfect stranger once read a piece of mine and told me that I was a pilgrim sort of writer. I moved through days and episodes of life and through the prayers of the day. I “gleaned” and gathered and sorted and then I threw my thoughts like seeds in the wind for anyone who might come along to catch them. I keep on moving and do not stop to gather anything into a silo. I wondered at this stranger’s words. I think he was on to something.

I am a writer of the here and now. The daily bread. The present inspiration. The passing impression. The color of a bird’s wing caught in the sun and then gone. I do not hoard a day for later to be laced into the fabric of other days and into a book. I give my seeds away as soon as I receive them. Sufficient for the day. Manna that can only be gathered once a day because if saved for later it will go bad. I believe these little mantras of my writing life. It is perfectly in keeping with my impatient streak that this be the particular gift God has given me to open for His glory and if I do not write each day I feel as though I might actually explode. It is what an inscaper does for a living. And this too is writing, though there may never be a book to show for it. It is how my writing life began and how it will probably end. In the present moment. I have come to understand that this is so. Each morning I pray and ask Our Lord if there is anything He wants me to notice today. Anything He wants me to say out loud. Some days He gives me nothing. Other days words come floating out of my Bible or fly out of a tree or “put out my eyes with beauty”. It is how I have entered the writing world and probably how I will leave it. Perhaps it is eccentric, odd, unusual to write only for the day and then to move on. Simply saying SEE what I have seen and glorify the Lord with me.

This way of writing is not without its challenges and may seem quaint or naive in the eyes of those for whom a book shines like the sun on their horizon; those who count the writing of a book the only worth and culmination of a serious writer’s life and have worried themselves into a success driven frenzy about it. A few writers like this have crossed my path and I admit I trusted and admired them in a starry eyed fashion. Somehow they thought me so quaint and naive that they felt no qualms about stealing my content or my style without asking, thinking it perhaps fair game as I am not a “serious” writer like they are and that they could benefit much more from taking my ‘here and now’ inspirations to a wider, more important market where they hope to be heroes. I guess they thought perhaps I wouldn’t notice or perhaps I wouldn’t mind. I did notice and I did mind. They stole my seeds. And I was cut to the quick with disappointment and sadness that they considered me simply an easy target. I was not deemed worthy to be sighted or quoted as a worthy colleague for I had not even one book to my name or the reputation to go with it. I would posit to these felons that books do not a writer make! And every writer is worthy to be honored and sited for his or her own work, no matter how they have been called to put word to page. Seeds must not be stolen. A writer is worth his or her own seeds, no matter how small the bag.

In the end, it is a good idea to honor writing in whichever way it comes to us or to others. Always consider it magic. Books, letters, notes, emails, quips, post scripts, journals, poems written on the back of receipts at the bottom of purses. If you just like to write, if you find joy in simply describing a little scene from your day. If you simply like the way a word looks on the page, this all counts. You don’t have to write a book to be a writer. Be who you are and just take joy in the fact that words are swimming in your brain. And that God’s in His Heaven. That your bag is full of seeds put there by his hand. That someone, somewhere is waiting for what you will say and be the better for it. It may be a book, but it may just be essays that make substack a unique banquet of thought. For that is what writing is for in the end. To knit us together into an understanding of the world we live in, to give us food for the journey, to point out the magic of the here and now or to shout out about the world to come. In a book or in a flight of fancy. This is my Apologia.

Write.

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