Keynote Address
Earlham Ministry of Writing Colloquium

October 24-26, 2007
Haven Kimmel

Since publishing my first book nearly seven years ago I've been asked a handful of questions, the same questions again and again, at readings and during interviews. I won't mention all of them, in case you want to ask them later, but the most persistent by far is, "How did someone like you end up in seminary?" Oh, there are variations. Sometimes it will be, "You went to seminary? Why?" The latter version usually takes the tone I would reserve for asking someone why he or she had taken up a time-consuming and inexplicable hobby, or an extreme sport. At a reading two weeks ago I finally said, in exasperation, "You ask that as if I spent three years as a flute-playing goatherd."

I'm asked the question often enough, in fact, that I've learned to gauge the audience and the time constraints and give one of three answers. Answer a) is the briefest, and goes something like this: "Well, everyone has to be somewhere, doing something." B) relates how, after finishing my undergraduate degree, everyone expected me to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in poetry. However, the MFA programs at that time were staffed by poets enamored of what I call The Aesthetic of the Domestic Appliance. You can practice it, too. All you need to do is look around – you needn't even leave your house – and draw a metaphorical arrow between yourself and whatever you see. Your washing machine is broken? Well so are you, and there's a poem in that. The television won't stop harassing you? Neither will your husband, so get your pencil out.  The refrigerator stopped running, you dropped the last china cup that belonged to your mother (the cup shattered, and – you guessed it – your relationship with your mother was in shards when she died), the prescription in your eyeglasses is old and you lack vision.

I would be the last person to suggest there's no value in drawing these connections; I did, however, wish to write something different myself. I wanted to at least wrestle with, if not defeat, the angels of temporality, of meaning, of – dare I say it – divinity. And so I tried to imagine a place where I would be encouraged to ask the Big Questions, and that's how I ended up at the Earlham School of Religion.

Then there is answer C), which can be very long. It contains a snowstorm, a farmhouse, a period of being trapped down a long lane drifted closed, a furnace that periodically stopped running, and a rottweiler. It involves a stack of books, including a novel by Gail Godwin, and a series of dark nights, if not of the soul at least in my study. There are the details of calling the Indiana Yearly Meeting, where I was told that if it were up to them someone like me would not be admitted to Earlham, so I called Andy Grannell, who said since it WAS up to him I was more than welcome. I sometimes talk about John Miller and Lonnie Valentine and the dear Tom Mullen, but that often leads to the Seminary Subquestion, or Query 2.0, "Did you think you would be a minister when you were done?"

Often this subquestion is asked in cities where the audience feels most comfortable with me, like . . . in Indiana. Indeed, it was asked just a few days ago, and because we all knew one another so well I again gave the long answer. I told the audience that I had hoped to go on and earn a Ph.D. in religious philosophy, specifically in the area of Process Studies, or the theology of Alfred North Whitehead. In fact, I told them, I was admitted into the graduate school at Claremont University, which has the best school for Process Theology in the country. I was given a large stipend and an apartment at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, and two weeks before I was to move . . . well, in this part of the story there's a funeral, my mother, and a numerologist named Alzina. That's not important – the important thing is that I ended up not going to California, a decision I didn't so much regret as mourn for a long time. And then one evening, I told the audience, I was talking to my godmother Dorothy on the phone, and I said, "I just can't believe I'll never write that dissertation on Alfred North Whitehead and the nature of grief," and she said, "You could always write it as a novel." I've told this story many times before, but that night in Indianapolis I made the leap I should have made a long time ago and said, "Well there you go. As it turns out I went to Earlham in order to write my first novel many years later." Now answer C) is much shorter and I once again owe ESR a debt of gratitude.

After that evening I thought a great deal about how, without my seminary education, I could never have written the three novels that compose the Hopwood County Trilogy. I thought about that, but more importantly, I thought about how a life spent in the Society of Friends uniquely prepared me to be a writer altogether.

There are the obvious ways Quakerism is like a training camp for the ordeal of a book-length project: I am able to sit still for long periods, and I consider silence, or doing this [   ] active. Those are a given. But there are deeper and subtler connections between our Faith and Practice, and our vocation as writers. The first can be found in the very foundations of Quakerism, which is fitting, as Quakers are fond of saying we 'have no theology but history.' The second is in our belief in the salvific power of Truth, and the third is found in our belief in Service, or the turning outward from the Self toward the World.

 The causes for the formation of the Society of the Children of the Light, in England in the mid-17^th century, are too numerous and varied to explore much here, given that they include the Puritan, the political, and the scientific revolutions that preceded George Fox's vision of 'a great people to be gathered.' What I'm concerned with today is the spiritual legacy the early Friends left us, one that transcends the centuries. Psalm 46 – and there aren't, in my experience, all that many verses of Scripture so completely at the heart of the Quaker experience – tells us to 'Be still, and know that I am God.' Fox himself, after years of seeking and thinking and consulting with religious leaders, wrote, "When all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do, then, oh then, I heard a voice." The voice was divine, that of God in every person. It was a radical idea, the notion that the individual could have an unmediated relationship with the God of the Psalms, free of the priesthood, the state, any form of clergy. What Fox and Margaret Fell and all the early Friends managed, in my opinion, was a ferocious rebellion, not only against the power structures of the time but in the hearts and minds of the people who gathered around them. It's a rebellion we continue, today.

We worship in silence because the active, listening consciousness of the person within the group is the conduit to continuing revelation. This colloquium is called the Ministry of Writing – the only Ministry I personally am capable of, I fear – but in my experience writing is also a form of prayer, albeit one that takes place in solitude rather than in our semi-formal two or three gathered together (where someone generally spills the milk).

The silence at the desk, before the blank page or the extremely scary computer screen, is different in kind than the silent Meeting for Worship. I think of it as more akin to the silence of the Meeting for Business, what William Wistar Comfort calls 'concentrated.' I can tell you how it works for me. Today I'm referring to my process as prayer, but on other occasions I've called it 'schizophrenia.' (Because I write fiction and non-fiction, I mean this to apply to both forms.) Think about it: the concentrated listening of the Quaker Meeting is something we eventually carry with us; we carry it over into all the other aspects of our lives. Driving becomes a meditative activity, what Rufus Jones called 'organic mysticism,' and speaking of the organic, grocery shopping alone can have, for me, those same qualities. So I'm sitting at my desk, or walking one of my dogs, or putting produce in my grocery car, and all the while I'm listening for what we might call the still, small voice, or 'the voices in my head.' We are a practical people, after all, and extremely hardworking, so it's good to stay busy when we're busy.

When I'm writing memoir, what I'm listening for is the crystalline recollection, the timbre of the past. Given my ontological limitations and the fact that at least one of the major appliances of my soul is always broken, what really happened back there, in the time I'm trying to recreate? What did it sound like, look like? Where was I standing, what was in the room? If I'm writing about someone else, a friend or family member, I have to try to imagine (up against the limitations of not just knowledge, but compassion) their point of view. I have to strive for balance, fairness, accuracy, resonance, humor, kindness. In non-fiction, in scholarly or public essays, how do I condense this information and give it back to an audience in an interesting, genuine way? Here's where another early Friend, the fearsome Samuel Bownas comes in. Bownas wrote A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Minister, subtitled Advice to Ministers and Elders Among the People Called Quakers. He was concerned with the vocal ministry of the 'recorded' or 'sanctified' ministers of the early society. If Quakerism can be called – well, it has been called – an experiment in religious anarchy – Bownas intended to set down some rules. He has chapters on how to receive inspiration, how to discern the true leading, how to stand while speaking, what one should do with one's face, how to conduct oneself cautiously, how to travel, how to dress, how to avoid pride, meddling, and spreading rumors. He makes a recommendation for humility (right there in the same chapter!), how to pray, how . . . oh, how to do everything. Now you might think, given my own anarchical tendencies, that I wouldn't love Samuel Bownas but I do, I absolutely do. I love him because it takes an honest man or woman to make the spiritual gamble we make, and a real revolution requires discipline. I also love his book because I think he's right, separated as he and I are by two-and-a-half centuries.

He insists (as all the Friends before him did) upon plain speech. And he's correct: there's no point in going to all the trouble of listening for God, being given a vocal ministry, and then making it impossible for anyone to understand you. The same is true in creative non-fiction, memoir, the ruminative essay, or scholarship. We should strive for the sentence, the paragraph, the structure that clarifies. Intelligence doesn't obscure, it doesn't eliminate; it invites. Bownas also says, in regards to spiritual openings, "But the danger of borrowing may lie as near, respecting the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, with any other books that may affect our minds, as what we have heard delivered in the openings of life. For it is no more lawful for us to preach what we have read, because we have read it, than it is for us to preach what we have heard, because we have heard it. Nay, I may further add (what thee will find by experience true in due time) that it is not lawful for thee to repeat thy own experience and former openings, merely in thy own strength of memory and will." Putting aside for a moment how genuinely shocking what he says about Scripture is, given the period and his deeply held Christianity, I'd like to paraphrase what's at the heart of his injunction. What we are given in concentrated silence, what we might call A Meeting for Writing, is always new. We can trust what we will hear, what we will be given, even though – or maybe because – it is revelatory to us. In my own experience of writing two memoirs, I can honestly say that I didn't know what I was going to produce until I'd done it; that's at the practical level. I trusted my memory, my voice, my intent, and the silence in which I sat – I rode those things as if on a wave into shore. In the process I learned an enormous amount about not only my own past, but about my town, my church, and my family. Even in the incorporation of a story I'd heard a dozen times myself, I didn't cling to the old method of telling it. If there was a commonly held position on my neighbor, my father, an event, I turned it over and over in my mind until I was able to see it fresh. I imagine, when reading Bownas, that so many things become Scripture for us: tropes, habits, habits of thought, and we can't repeat them.

Earlier I said the Meeting for Writing is both prayerful and schizophrenic, and nowhere is that more true than in writing fiction. Fiction writing is profoundly connected to Quaker mysticism, I believe, because in both cases we are on the via negativa – the road with nothing on it. In Worship we seek to have a direct experience out of nothing: no creed, no theology, no cathecistic text, no iconography, no incense, no hierarchy or priest. No flashing lights, no house-band, no ATM machine, no Starbucks, no reward. As in the Meeting House, so too with fiction: ex nihilo we create a world, a world full of stuff ("Seek things, not names," George Fox said), and characters with backstories and inner lives. We imagine questions, motivations, a crisis, a denouement – all of it revolving around a moral centre and the harmonious resolution of sometimes very ugly contrasts.

A friend who's a painter told me that after having explored all kinds of artistic media she decided writing fiction is by far the hardest, because it's a 'sensory deprivation chamber.' There is nothing to listen to, no color to watch build on a canvas, no blueprint unfurling beneath the hand. There is you, and your mind. Some people find this deprivation extraordinarily difficult, but I never have. I often find it uncomfortable, but Meeting for Worship can be uncomfortable, and anyway who would imagine that hearing the voice of God or writing a novel should be EASY? Watching television is easy, napping is easy (I adore napping), eating cake: a breeze. Art is hard. Spiritual discipline is called that for a reason.

Fiction is the most acutely challenging of the written arts, for me, at any rate, because out of the silence, the nothing, what are you listening for? How do you know that the voices in your head are your characters speaking; how do you know what to include, what to eliminate? How to edit, begin at the beginning and re-create what you already created once? How to write the third, the fourth, the fifth drafts, all toward an omega point of rightness it isn't possible to see or know? For these questions I rely not on the early Friends but on the extraordinary Alfred North Whitehead, my favorite thinker of the 20^th century. Whitehead's theology (not to mention his Mathematica Principia) can be rather . . . dense, so I'll skip everything except what helps me most in writing fiction: his concept of the Lure.

Imagine we are standing in this unit of time – we don't get to stand here very long, unfortunately, before whoops, it's gone – and we're getting ready to make actual the next unit of time, and really all that matters is how to go. How to live. I'm going for plain speech here. In each unit of time there exist the pure possibilities for an infinite variety of choices, each of them leading to a different future, a different plot, a novel (so to speak) resolution. Remember, they are all equally possible – no matter what step we take, the future becomes concrete, reorders itself, gives us another set of infinite possibilities. But is there one, "even one," as Fox said, more right than the others?

In this unit of time, the present I've now stretched way past the breaking point, Whitehead believed there are choices that represent the better – he called them Truth, Beauty, and Goodness – and God is luring us toward that end. What do we have to do to recognize the lure? We have to listen. We have to be prepared to feel that tug upon us. We have to be courageous. In my own writing practice I listen for the next sentence, I write it. I examine whether the leading was true or false. Sometimes I go back and listen all over again. Often the still, small voice I hear, the lure I feel, is to go eat a sandwich. That's part of how I know it's speaking to me, because I often forget to eat while I'm working and it's hard to get to Beauty if you're starving.

The lure, remember, is toward Truth, which leads me to the second way Quakerism uniquely prepares us for the Ministry of Writing. Fox wrote, "Truth comes from within. It is the basis for daily life, like the food we eat." The act of meeting in a group is, in essence, a search for the truth; the voice that speaks to us and out of which we speak is the voice of Truth. I think that means – and I'm no expert – I think what we mean by truth is what is beyond the confusing tangle of modern life: capitalism, our openly dishonest political leaders, our immersion in triviality. More importantly, Truth is what's left after we cease being judgmental, grasping, self-protective, unforgiving, egocentric. Truth isn't supernatural, it's ultimately natural, at one with our desire for what Kant called Quality and Plato called our preference for the best.

It is the mysterious ability of the truth to free us that I'm concerned with today, and particularly freedom from the ego – the trap of the Self. If Truth is of God, let's call the ego The Devil. If I had to name the single greatest detriment to the writing process, and I'm talking about for myself and every other writer I've ever met – it's ego. If I had to name the single most corrupting force upon a document? Ego. The worst posture with which to begin, the most painful and immovable obstacle to Beauty, the voice that says what you've written is perfect just like it is and doesn't need editing: it is the hunger for attention and approbation that killeth, while the Spirit giveth life.

I'm currently a visiting professor in an MFA program on the coast in North Carolina, and if I asked my students a series of questions I know what the answers would be. (And while today I'm using this particular group, I know what the answers have always been, and are for huge groups of people.) If I asked, "Do you read a lot of other writers?" The answer would be no, the would-be authors in the MFA program don't have time to read. Or they aren't interested in reading, so much. They can't afford to buy books and can't find their library card. If I asked them why they write, they would say to be published, to build a career, to become famous.

Very very often, more often than I can count, I'm approached by doctors who want to be writers, and lawyers who want to write thrillers. I've had drivers on my book tours who claimed to have an entire novel written in their heads. In fact, pretty much everyone I meet has a book in here. Do you see how these things are connected? Students don't read because they have such an inflated sense of their own talents they don't realize that virtually every book in print was written by someone better than they are, and that they need to spend hours each day, year in and year out, learning from those people. While I would never say to a doctor that I believe I can perform open-heart surgery, doctors just assume that they can write books. Because they're doctors. Doctors of jurisprudence? Same thing. I don't lecture on tort law, but by golly Mr. Tort is, at heart, Mr. Grisham.

The old devil tells us to say, "I don't need to study writing, I want people to study MY books." The devil looks around at the very few writers whose fame approaches that of Hollywood actors and makes us think we could have that, makes us think anyone in her right mind would even WANT such a thing. (A side note: a friend just told me he'd looked up the statistics, and every year 130,000 books are published. Guess how many people in the United States make a living writing, I mean are able to support themselves by words alone? Eight hundred.) The devil tells us to spend our time in ways that are self-aggrandizing, doing things that will provide us with public recognition, rather than sitting in the isolation chamber of the Meeting For Non-Fiction. He (yes, I'm using the masculine generic and why not) says the goal is to find a niche in the market, or to amuse ourselves (I'm not talking about writing if it brings you joy, as it does my mother – god bless anyone who can feel that), or to prove something to our parents or our spouse. He says we can really get back at the people who wronged us, by either exposing them in memoir or by turning them into fictional characters (but recognizable) and punishing them by proxy. He reminds us that it's time for our genius to be praised, the hymns to us sung, the red carpet unfurled beneath our feet. Talent, he whispers, is the same as power. Talent justifies everything.

The Spirit of Truth says the opposite. Truth says that genius is not you or me, but someone like John Woolman, who recorded that in the act of writing he had sometimes found an opening to the 'Goodness of God'; a man who said that his dream was to "turn all that we possess into the channel of universal love." Truth insists that we are never experts, we're never finished learning, because each time we sit down we must learn all over again. The voice of God doesn't speak the same way twice, anymore than we can step into the same place in Heraclitus's river, once it has rushed past. (It's always rushing past.) The book I wrote last year, the sentence I wrote yesterday, can't be duplicated today. Today I have to sit in silence and listen all over again. I don't get to dictate what I'll be told, or even what I'll write (I think that's a pun). If I have pre-conceived ideas I have to be prepared to abandon them if they're revealed to be false, or faulty. Because the desire for what is true is essentially the desire for the best – Plato's best, Whitehead's beauty and goodness – it's a search for the best in ourselves. I said earlier that responding to the lure of God takes courage, and often that courage means sitting down and beginning. I'm reminded of a query often read before A Meeting for Business (and which I found in Robert Lawrence Smith's A Quaker Book of Wisdom): "Are Meetings for Business [Fiction] held in a spirit of worship, understanding, and forbearance? Is the Meeting aware that it speaks not only through its actions but also through its failure to act?" Are we brave enough to not only write the text, but to stick with it through whatever evolution is necessary to make it right?

Sometimes we do everything well and we STILL get published. I don't know how that happens, but it does. As Friends we should be pleased for what we've done to go out into the world, because, as Robert Lawrence Smith says, "The search for truth, which begins in contemplation, finds expression in action." I used to envy the American Friends Service Committee the work they did, because it would be so fulfilling to see the work of one's hands manifest in the life of another. It would be truly satisfying to help end suffering, at any level. I've admired the Friends Committee on National Legislation, because they dare to say they seek a world free of war and the threat of war, a society with equity and justice for all, a community in which every person's potential may be fulfilled, and an earth restored. I on the other hand can spend thirty minutes looking for the right verb. I've admired and respected all the Quakers who practice 'work as love made visible.' I thought I attended the Earlham School of Religion to become one of those people.

As it happens my ministry was elsewhere, and yours might be, too. Mine turned out to be in Mooreland, Indiana, and in fictional Hopwood County. The voice of the ministry turned out not to be mine, but that of the anguished, doubting, funny Amos Townsend, the reluctant leader of the Haddington Church of the Brethren. But I still believe that what Fox and Fell were imprisoned for, the cause for which four Quakers were hanged in Boston between 1659-61, the non-theology that persuaded William Penn – everything from the Apology of Robert Barclay to the practical mystics, from Elton Trueblood to Tom Mullen – has guided and enriched my vocation. If you're sitting here today you have been given a great, almost secret gift. You know how to sit still. You love the truth. You are brave enough to serve, even if your committee is but one, and there's no way to know if you'll ever reach another soul, let alone if you can put an end to war and restore the earth. As Jessamyn West said of the saint, "One Woolman in a hundred, one Woolman in a thousand might be enough to change the face of the earth. Shall we see his like again? It was a part of Woolman's, as of Fox's, belief that perfection is possible to all. If they were right, we may."