Shouting Down a Well 5 comments

By Joel Hartse

My 2009 summer reading was supposed to be Canadian literature. My wife and I are moving to the True North Strong and Free for an extended period in just a few weeks, so I planned to spend the summer with Margaret Atwood, Douglas Coupland, Stephen Leacock, and any other recommendations I could get from my Canadian friends.

It seemed like a great idea, but then something happened.

I have been trying not to tell anybody, because I don’t want to jinx it, that I’m working on a real live book that is, God willing, going to come out sometime next year. I’ve been working on it for over a year, but certain circumstances have conspired against me which are going to force me to finish it in the next three weeks. Add that to the academic research I’m supposed to be doing for school, the writing I’m supposed to be doing for work, and the paperwork I’m supposed to be filing so I can live in Canada, and there isn’t much time for reading.

Yet I’ve made time, and for some reason I’m not reading Can-Lit; I’m reading books that are a lot like mine. Partly, I tell myself, this is “research”—I want to see how others are dealing with writing autobiographically about issues of faith and popular culture, and to make sure that I’m not ripping anybody off.

I’m seeing what works and what doesn’t. The list is ever-growing: Patton Dodd’s My Faith So Far; Mark Curtis Anderson’s Jesus Sound Explosion; Jeffrey Overstreet’s Through a Screen Darkly; Jon Sweeney’s Born Again and Again, Andrew Beaujon’s Body Piercing Saved My Life.

These are all excellent books, and there are more, but I’m getting worried. They have done it so well, yet I can’t shake the fear that writing about my and my beliefs is about as navel-gazing as it gets, and writing, especially this kind of writing, is—God knows it has been said before, but I’ll say it again—a difficult act of faith. Faith that even though what you are doing is digging up weird corners of yourself (or, as I am currently doing, digging through my old Christian rock records), other people are going to read it and recognize a spark of something familiar and true.

Faith in that connection is necessary because, even with the internet, the actual acknowledgement of that spark, confirmation that you have done the work well, is rare. A contemporary writer I very much respect once emailed me quite unexpectedly, thanking me for my kind mention of his book on my blog. Writing, especially writing a book, he said, feels a lot like just shouting down an abandoned well without knowing if anyone ever hears you.

Actually, he probably used a much more apt and innovative metaphor. The point is that writing is lonely, and you try to communicate something that matters, and you are rarely sure whether it has happened.

My academic background is in teaching people how to write in English as an additional language –how to master the conventions of a system foreign to the one most familiar. Most of my students have been college students whose career goals don’t include much writing, but of course I secretly hope they all become writers.

Maybe some will. The world needs people like you, I tell them; you will be the ones to explain yourself and your country and your people, you will share unique and special things no one has heard before.

Now I’m trying to get myself to believe this. So I think I’ll pick up another one of these books.