Lindsey Crittenden

Lindsey Crittenden’s prose is by turns lyric, wise, dark, and cheerfully neurotic. An earnest spiritual seeker who can also laugh at herself, in her memoir The Water Will Hold You (two chapters of which appeared in Image), she describes her gradual return to prayer and to the Episcopal Church of her childhood, as well as her family’s transformation through the tragic death of her adult brother. Family is the great theme of Crittenden’s fiction and memoir—in particular the many shapes family can take, and not always because of people’s choices; sometimes circumstances land us in family configurations we would never have imagined for ourselves. As Crittenden dramatizes so beautifully, it’s often the things we don’t choose that come to define us. Her writing is effortless and elegant, her sense of story engaging and true, and the people in her world delightfully drawn. In writing about her life, she mixes serious self-examination with a sense of humor and perspective. Winningly self-deprecating, she attains just enough critical distance from her own good-girl neuroses to invite you both to laugh at her and feel with her as she strains toward that most difficult lesson that competent people have to learn: how to release a measure of control and lean back into God.

Read Lindsey Crittenden's essay The Burden of Bliss in Issue 53, here.

Current Projects

At the time of this writing (Feb. 07), I’m exploring fiction again. Bellingham Review published “The Art of Fiction” in its 30th anniversary issue (Fall 2007) – a story that marked a stylistic departure. Up to that point, my fiction had been traditional in terms of narrative and form. In January 2005, I’d gone off to Ragdale to revise my novel. Despite my good intentions, however, the novel didn’t want to be revised. I tried different points of view, I drew complex plot diagrams, I went on long walks in the snow, I paced my drafty (and, legend had it, haunted) studio, I despaired. And then, thoroughly disgusted, I started to play with notions of craft as set forth in all those how-to-write books. My writing took off – not the novel, but material that up to that point had felt too messy, too raw. Form became a way to control and subvert narrative and genre, and when I left Ragdale my novel was unchanged but I had a good start to “The Art of Fiction.”

A few months later, I landed at another writers’ colony, this time with the intention of spending four weeks exploring. (I didn’t even bring the novel.) I cut a 25-page story to 8 pages by excising all but 3 sentences of backstory; I wrote erotic villanelles; I went for walks. For some reason, I write poetry only when I’m at a colony, and that November I began to write prose poems, so dense I called them “chunks.” Playing with form had once again given me a way to restrain and heighten, to distill and dramatize emotion, memory, and loss. Called “Which Leaves Me,” the chunks adhered into a story that won a contest in Glimmer Train.

For 2008, I set myself the resolution of finishing more stories – whether they were good or not, publishable or not, I wanted to practice writing the ends of stories. Beginnings come easily; middles too; it’s the endings that give me trouble – so I walk away, start something new. This year, I decided to make myself finish what I started. I did just that, with six new “short-shorts,” and surprised myself by the pleasure of getting in and getting out. I like to think it loosened me up. Just this week, I found myself happily immersed in what appears to be a longer story and am excited to be playing around in the unknown again with the assurance that the ending will announce itself.

I don’t know what’s next. Right now, that feels good.

Biography

Lindsey Crittenden is the author of The Water Will Hold You: A Skeptic Learns to Pray (Harmony Books, 2007) and The View From Below, a collection of short stories (Midlist Press, 1999). Her personal essays and articles – on everything from visiting a group of lifers at San Quentin to the pitfalls of too much California sunshine – have appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Image, Real Simple, Bon Appétit, East Bay Express, Health, and Best American Spiritual Writing. Her fiction has won national awards and has appeared and is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Bellingham Review, Quarterly West, and other publications. She has been a writing fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ucross Foundation, and the Ragdale Foundation. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she graduated from UC Berkeley, moved to New York City as soon as she could, and returned to California for grad school in the creative writing master’s program at UC Davis. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at UC Berkeley Extension. Visit her website at www.lindseycrittenden.com.