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How to Love a Drunk: Bits of My Story are published and #FFWgr

invincible summer within

How to Love a Drunk

When you’re an alcoholic you get to tell your story and admit to your illness at the oddest moments. There is usually no time to prepare emotionally or to get the words just right. What comes is what comes. I actually enjoy these unrehearsed moments. The questions I’m asked push me to think about my sobriety in a new way.

Friday there I was outlining the basics of my recovery to a program director for a youth counselling program we’re looking at for one of the kids.It is completely unemotional task, to tell a doctor the details chronologically. Very unlike the real toll it took to write recently for Today’s Christian Woman. How to Love A Drunk, you probably know, is a story of addiction that includes healing and grace and Tom’s selfless love. This story took weeks to write. I interviewed Tom for the painful and awkward bits that I don’t remember and it was hard. Really hard! But I’m happy with the outcome. And I’ve already received feedback that the story is helping others. That makes the sacrifice as well as the awkward tender feelings worth it.

“An alcoholic is one for the rest of their lives, whether they quit drinking or kill themselves abusing, so love has to prepare for the worst but never give up hope.”

If it requires a subscription to Christianity Today to read it, I apologize. Their online subscription is $9. (This may not be worth it.)

Festival of Faith & Writing

Next week I head to the Calvin’s Festival of Faith & Writing. I’m excited and looking forward to the alone time that will inevitably come. If you’re headed there too feel free to FB message me or text. There will be time to meet IRL some of the fun people I’ve connected with online.

I’m excited to hear literary heroes speak. Anne Lamott wrote Bird by Bird and Traveling Mercies among other favorites. I hope she’s as funny IRL. James McBride’s The Color of Water:A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother is one of my favorite books. Other speakers I’ll seek out include Scott Cairns, poet, Okey Ndibe and Richard Foster possibly Rachel Held Evans, the popular blogger and Jeff Chu who wrote Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America. There is always an inspiring line up.

I’m also anticipating that it will be a good experience to be a part of this Festival Circle:

Suffering and Salve: Writing and Believing in Seasons of Illness and Pain. Illness and suffering can provoke powerful questions in the creative spirit, but they can also drain a writer’s physical, emotional, and spiritual resources. This circle will discuss how a writer’s creative process and spiritual state are affected by suffering and how other writers have engaged with, or disengaged from, their craft in times of personal suffering.

I am looking forward to meeting many friends from my writing world. So much has changed in our lives since Tom and I went together two years ago. And I’m grateful to go all, considering our circumstances. But will you pray that I wouldn’t allow my introvertedness and my current state of mind to be a liability?

And I’ll be back to writing in a few weeks unless something powerful hits. Thanks for being such faithful readers and friends.

Melody

What’s changing, so that I can be writing!

This is such a busy time for folks with kids. We are living the last month or so of school and for whatever reason my kids seem to teeter on the brink of things this year academically, spiritually, emotionally — this has been a challenging and demanding year. With summer looming, there will be any opportunities to stick our feet in the river and less time to write.

I am thinking about that tension.

I’m starting to work more seriously on writing projects. As I listened hard at the Festival of Faith & Writing and looked at my writing life and habits, I realize that I need to cut back on some things before I can ever dream of space to write every day. (I know I have a lot to tell you about that experience, the festival. We’ve been back a week and there’s been no time!)

Projects that I’m working on:

I am working on a book review of the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer for The Englewood Review of Books and hope to do more of those, both for Englewood and other publications.

I continue to write for Provoketive magazine: This included a review of the book Resignation of Eve by Jim Henderson, a piece titled The Accidental Stay-At-Home Mom and others, but by far the most popular essay was The Voice of the Feminine. That content is not repeated here on my blog so you will have to pop over to there to read it. I hope you will.

I am working on a short series of articles on “The F word and the Church.” (Yeah, that F word: feminist.)

I am really excited to hear that I will have some poem in a book about fear titled Not Afraid to be published around August, 2012 by Civitas Press. (This is the same press that published my essay on Depression in their book Not Alone which is available now. If you know someone who suffers from depression this book may help. I have been told by many people that it has been a good, honest resource. I also have many pieces on my blog about my personal trials with the black dog of depression. They are collected here. )

What I want to change:

One thing that I find to be soul crushing and destructive for me is Facebook. Being at-home with such great flexibility to my schedule I see that I allow many things to interfere with the “work” of writing and with spiritual growth. Facebook is such a time waster for me. I’m inherently curious, nosy kind of person and the fact that I can vicariously follow along other’s lives is bad for me. That’s where the soul crushing part comes in. It’s like high school insecurity all over again. So I’ve been tempted to quit completely.

But at the Festival of Faith & Writing I heard over and over that writers must have online presence and following. We have to nurture that and be able to “prove” our popularity to a publisher. But the flip side of that is that it is just not good for me!

If I don’t have time

to think,

to be,

to write and

to allow the Holy One to mold and move me (not really in that order.)

So I’m backing off of social media for a season — except here. I’m really going to try to do this moderately. When I got hooked on Farmville (of all things — proves I can get addicted to anything!) I had to quit cold turkey and I did. I don’t want to do that with Facebook because I don’t like being an all or nothing person. But I’m going to try to limit my time there. And set some writing goals for the next few months. I look forward to sharing those with you.

Another thing that I learned at the festival was that I need to hone the purpose of my blog. Mine has multiple messages and intents. I have been known to write about:

family (dysfunctional and otherwise.)
God and devotion, faith and (dis)belief
women in the church, feminism as a Christian’s option
various justice issues
my alcoholism and addictions
my church – Blackhawk Evangelical Church
poetry on all these topics
prose on all these topics

Is there anything in particular that you come here to read? Where do you see my passions and strengths converging in helpful ways? Would you add more of anything?

Grace & Peace. Melody

When you are Afraid of Home

It was stunning for me to realize that I had no anxiety the entire time I was away at the Festival of Faith & Writing. The thought of returning home brought the familiar burning in my chest — so unwelcome. I do not want to accept its presence. And just for a minute I know that I must drill down and try to find the truth there, asking myself Can I figure out why I am afraid of coming home?

There was a small sense in which this place, this moment wasn’t real.

Just as I lament to myself (a regular foible of mine, to be sure) that I didn’t have any real relationships here at the festival, another part of me knows that it was quite wonderful to wander anonymously. Soaking in wisdom and not be expected to say anything. I didn’t have to be wise or special in any way. I could many times, for hours on end, not utter a single word to another human being; which I found was peaceful, even liberating. (Not speaking except perhaps to an infrequent stranger in a seminar, so that I wouldn’t come off a weirdo.)

But mostly, I was silent.

I wasn’t even writing this week. My head was going, of course. Especially my dreams which were full of thoughts, words, conjectures and I would wake every morning with all that magical and perplexing jumble. Words. Ideas. Inspiration came unbidden, naturally, because of all the incredible people and ideas surrounding. And then it would drift away as my mind became clear and the caffeine settled into my veins.

And then, we return home and there it is. The fear.

Here it is. I didn’t have the sense this week that God is disappointed in me. It was gone – that feeling that is always hovering in and around me that I’m not measuring up. The legacy of a childhood gone awry, the anger and disappointment of my human father killing joy.

Where did it go and why did it have to return? Drilling down, still further, to that little place where I feel God’s displeasure. I have a hunch this is not of God or from God at all.

I was having this amazing conversation at dinner with Tom. He expressed his belief that most American Christians have this lover relationship with God, I knew that I don’t. I have a disappointed-with-me-and-angry-at-me-parent type of relationship with God.

I think I know God. Fact is I hardly know God. If he is even knowable fully in a human lifetime, I sure doubt it. And God knows everything about me. And God is very much not disappointed with me. In fact he’s thrilled. He made me to be a creative, a thinker, a deeply passionate, mostly introverted whittler of words and pictures.

And God likes me – generally.

Of course I’m am still an ugly sinner. Deeply aware of my spiritual lack. Needing a Holy filling daily, even moment by moment. Needing a Holy shaping, a changing by the beautiful Potter who is creating something beautiful out of the pieces and parts of my little life.

No, he’s not disappointed and there it is, that’s the source of my anxiety. That’s the place that I must return to work on, over and over, and again, even as I perfect this craft of writing it is the being that matters most. I must always, and frequently, sit with him and allow the Holy One to perfect me.

It’s a homecoming I am unused to — this beautiful welcome he is offering. It is so good to know that I am home.