Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. She holds an MFA from the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University and has received fellowships and grants from the Religion & Environment Story Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts at Bucknell University, where she was a Philip Roth Writer in Residence. Her writing, graphic essays, and illustrations have appeared in Orion, Oxford American, The Guardian, Guernica, The Bitter Southerner, Granta, Ecotone, ProPublica, and elsewhere. Her first book, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After, was published last month by Hub City Press. Foreword Reviews called the collection “a gorgeous exercise in open theology.” The book’s first essay, “The Charged World,” originally appeared in Image in 2016, and was her first print publication. She talked with Image editor in chief Molly McCully Brown about hope, scriptural interpretation, climate grief, motherhood, and the notion of faith as wisdom about change.

 

Image: Revisiting your work over the last few days, I was struck by the central preoccupation with apocalypse. I wonder if you might start by talking about the way your relationship with the notion of apocalypse has developed?

Martha Park: I was raised in the United Methodist Church, and my dad, who was a pastor, would tell me that the book of Revelation is about the end of the Roman Empire, that it was a story about a specific historical event that happened in the past. I could not understand how that overlapped with an understanding of apocalypse that my husband grew up with, in the nondenominational evangelical church, in which the book of Revelation is a prediction of how the whole world is going to end in the future. My dad and his preacher friends would talk a lot about “apocalyptic imagination,” and I also did not quite understand how imagination applied to something that had happened in the past. I’d always been spooked by evangelical Christians’ attitude of eager anticipation of apocalypse, and that’s part of what I was struggling with in World Without End: this idea of longing for another world. But what I also came to see, through writing this book, is that just as oppressive empires have fallen in the past, there are a lot of worlds we’ve created that need to end—that will, necessarily, end—because they don’t allow for human flourishing or even sustainable existence for most creatures. And that’s where imagination comes in: removing the expectation of a total, world-ending, God-sent apocalypse, we are challenged to imagine and call into being new ways of being, new worlds.

Image: Your book is full of little apocalypses, little things that come to an end. And it’s also full of resurrections. I love how the title suggests an ongoingness in the face of so many inevitable endings. I wonder how you think about this continuance?

MP: I don’t know if it’s getting older, but as I and people around me experience more loss in our personal lives, I’ve been coming to a sense of the reality that life is shaped around loss—not despite it but because of it. I don’t know if I feel an acceptance of that as much as just the knowledge that it’s true.

Image: I admire how the book is able to treat that feeling—I won’t say without despair, but not as an end point, rather as the point at which something else happens.

MP: Many writers have criticized hope as an immobilizing force. The thinking is that if you’re hopeful about the future, you’re just assuming things are going to work out, so you don’t act. But I think despair works in exactly the same way. If you’re assuming all is lost, why do anything about it? That’s why grief still feels so important, mourning and lament and naming losses and incorporating them into your life instead of pushing against them. But grief is also something you carry into whatever comes after that loss, and that feels different from despair.

Image: I wonder if you might talk about the narrative that scaffolds your new collection, of your own faith and doubt and departure from faith and coming back, very literally, to your father’s church.

MP: When I was growing up in the United Methodist Church in Memphis, my dad had taken a vow of itinerancy, where every three to five years the church packs you up and you’re moved to a new congregation. We would go to a new parsonage, usually right next door to the church, and I would change schools.

Around the time I was in middle school, churches started giving preachers a housing allowance instead of having them live in the parsonage, and that was my first experience of not living within view of the church. We lived in a different part of town and drove to church on Sunday, and I experienced that as a real rupture. I had lived in this little Eden, and moving away from the church felt like a real shift in my experience of faith. I felt more and more distant as time went on, the normal story. In college I wasn’t sure what my relationship to faith would be, living away from home and not really pursuing a relationship with the church.

I was living in Virginia when my dad decided to retire. His retirement came earlier than I expected, and it threw me for a loop; like the experience of moving away from the church building, it was a physical shift. For the first time in my life—whether I was there or not—he wasn’t going to be preaching on Sundays. I felt like I was losing a tether. I had to figure out not just whether I was going to have any kind of continuous relationship with the church, but with faith.

I remember saying to my parents when I was younger, I’m not sure if I believe in all this, so I don’t want to go to church anymore. My dad would tell this story about how, if you remove a coal from a fire, it will burn out, because it needs the warmth of the other coals to stay lit. Meaning, this is a thing we do as part of a community. My parents didn’t seem to worry about how my beliefs were shaping out. Their attitude was, you can have space to figure all that out, but we’re going to keep going to church on Sunday because that’s just what we do as part of this community. When my dad retired, to know that he was no longer doing that freaked me out.

My husband and I had been talking about moving to Memphis, and we were able to move back in time for my dad’s last year. Colin and I bought the house next door to my parents. It was a weird feeling, analogous to my childhood: I no longer lived next door to the church, but every Sunday I was in a car with my mom for a forty-five-minute drive to my dad’s last church. And living next door to my parents felt almost like my house was the parsonage to my parents’ house. I started to realize how much the church was my dad for me—he was the one constant in my experience of faith—and I knew I was going to have to spend some serious time figuring that out, or else him retiring was going to throw me for a bigger loop than I could reconcile.

I attended church every Sunday and didn’t really figure much out except that I needed to spend more time thinking about it. And then he retired, and I started thinking about how I could move out of this individual experience toward something larger that doesn’t need to be hung on the peg of my family.

Image: Can you talk a little more about how your relationship with faith and doubt has evolved over the course of writing the essays that make up this recent book?

MP: I have felt queasy about claiming faith, because the dominant image of Christianity in this country is one I don’t want anything to do with. But I keep coming back to a midrashic kind of interpretive relationship with Scripture, where I find meaning in it all the time. The idea of returning to the same stories we’ve read for hundreds and hundreds of years and finding new meanings, reading them in community, engaging with the way these stories can contradict each other, or undo each other, or speak to each other—all that has been important to me. Intellectually and spiritually and textually, there’s enough for me to hang my hat there, and that’s what keeps me coming back to faith—even to church. Even now, even as unsure as I feel about the larger enterprise, there’s enough there for me to make a life there.

Image: I’m interested in how crucial this notion of interpretation is for you, especially as a writer.

MP: What I find so meaningful about that process of reinterpretation is that it’s an expression of change. There’s that Christian Wiman line, “Christ is contingency.” Ultimately for me, faith is a wisdom about change, and a way of inhabiting and embracing that wisdom. Something about scriptural interpretation and reinterpretation really embodies that. Faith says: Okay, so you’ve read this story one million times, what else is there in it? Is there a way of reading it that you’ve never heard before? And what would that way of reading do for all the other stories it’s in context with?

I’ve found a church community in the past couple of years where I know that the pastor is going to approach any given text in a way I’ve never read it before. And that’s ultimately what I’m looking for. I think that’s a lot of what church was for my dad too. One thing that’s been hard for him and his cohort of retired preachers has been losing the weekly reading and writing rhythm. Each week they would be given a text from the lectionary, they’d read commentary, they’d write, and then they’d come to their congregation every Sunday and tell them some new thing they’d uncovered, or challenge them to think differently about something, or ask them: How does this text speak to the world we’re living in now? To lose that structured rhythm has been hard for them.

Maybe this is all a way of saying that a faith community can be a kind of literary community. I’m obviously really into that.

Image: You’re an illustrator as well as a writer. How do these mediums feel connected to you? And are there spaces or questions that drawing allows you to inhabit differently than writing, or vice versa?

MP: I’ve always worked in both writing and drawing. They feel like very different creative spaces for me. When I’m writing, I’m trying to pull together many swirling stories, questions, and voices and wrestle them into a quieter coherence. When I’m drawing, my brain feels pretty quiet the whole time. I really don’t believe in writer’s block; that resistance is part of the process, and sometimes that resistance is your body telling you to do something else. For me, that something else is usually drawing.

For my new book, it was really special that my publisher, Hub City, invited me to make the illustrations and cover art. It felt like seeing two halves of myself drawn together in a whole.

Image: The concept of climate grief often gets applied to your work. Would you talk about the way your sense of faith as “wisdom about change” interacts with the way you think about climate change?

MP: I think of “climate grief” as a description of what we’re witnessing and feeling on a global scale. What I’m living day-to-day feels less like grief and more like depression. The intensity of the summers in Memphis makes it hard to be present in the world and see or appreciate it. Starting in June it feels like blinders get dropped over my eyes. I feel climate grief on that larger scale when I read about Trump opening up a third of public lands to private forestry or whatever, but living in a place that is too hot for half the year and where the seasons are more and more unpredictable feels more like depression to me.

The way faith is carried forward into that feeling has been interesting. My son, who is four years old, loves to read Bible stories, and I’m having a hard time finding ones that don’t say horrible things, and he can tell if I’m editing as I read. There’s a little kid’s version of Jonah and the whale at our doctor’s office that he loves, and it’s an awful interpretation: “God was angry, and so he whipped up the seas into a big storm. And to appease God and make him happy, the sailors had to sacrifice this man.” I would never tell him this story in this way.

But it makes me cognizant of how many people see natural events as God’s voice speaking to us or God’s judgment on us. I find myself resistant to that idea, and wanting to articulate that, if anything, the effects of climate change are messages from us to us. This isn’t God punishing us; these are the effects of what we’ve done to the world. And actually, through everything, in the natural world, in moments of wonder or health or vitality, I still find a connection to God.

With my kids, especially, I’ve noticed this ability. My son is still small, but he’s so excited for summer because it means he gets to go swimming. Like I said, I struggle in the summer. Summer is very long. The days feel uninhabitable. There’s a spike in gun violence. People drive crazier. It messes with you. Sometimes by August it feels like everybody here is a little insane. I’m interested in that human­–environment interaction, and I’m always working through that.

In Memphis we’re not experiencing hurricanes or wildfires, but Shelby County has been studied as one of the places that’s going to experience some of the worst effects of extreme heat in the next fifty years. Last weekend I was out of town when Memphis was hit by major flooding, and I was always checking our Ring camera to make sure our house was still here. It is a kind of work to raise our children here and be honest with them and ourselves about what it means to live in this region. It really lays bare how vulnerable so many people are, and how immense the task is of caring for people amid what’s coming for all of us. In the summer, that can lead me to a place of despair.

Image: Is your son’s love for summer a kind of antidote to that, even if it also highlights the stakes?

MP: Kids are such attention machines. He’s living in the present moment pretty much all the time, and he doesn’t have this narrative of anxiety overlaying his interactions with the world. And both ways of living with the world are true. The world is changing in ways that will harm a lot of the most vulnerable people. The political climate is unrelentingly punishing the most vulnerable people. And the version of Christianity that’s allied with those politics is also relentlessly punishing them. That would be impossible to bear if we didn’t also live in a world that was offering up beauty and wisdom and enlivening our curiosity and being sensorily pleasurable. My fears about climate change can blind me to the way my son lives in the world. I don’t think either way is complete. We need both of them, all the time, to make it.

Image: Motherhood, as you’re articulating here, feels like so much a part of your work and your thinking.

MP: I don’t have a good elevator pitch for this book. It’s been hard for me to describe to people. My agent would say it’s a book about faith, climate change, and motherhood, but something about having motherhood in there felt tricky to me. I got invited to speak on some panels about motherhood, and I don’t feel like I have that much to say about it in the way I do about faith and the environment.

But I’ve been thinking lately that they’re all the same project to me. I see this as a kind of litmus test. Those three things, if you’re doing them right, are all pushing you in the same direction. I usually resist saying something is right or wrong, but I think faith should be drawing you into a wider community of people you care about, and that if you’re involved in environmentalism, it should be doing the same, and so should motherhood. The inverse is caring about the environment because you care about your individual survival, or being a religious person because it ensures your individual salvation, or parenting in a way that you’re only concerned about your own child’s well-being. I haven’t written much about this yet, but it’s something I am hoping to articulate as I talk to people about the book. The three concerns are involved in each other in more ways than I’ve been able to say.

Image: In your writing I’m struck by a fierce attachment to what is collective about the world. Grappling with faith means you are in engaged with people who think about faith in ways that might radically depart from your own. I wonder how you were thinking about this relationship between the individual and the collective as you were writing this book?

MP: My husband Colin and I have been together for eleven years. At first I was so excited to be falling in love with someone who had a spiritual background, because my previous partner had been a paleobotanist who had no experience with spirituality. But the more I learned about Colin’s background, at every touchpoint where I thought we had something in common, the lesson his church told him was totally opposite of my experience. Nationally, in the intervening years, we’ve all learned a lot more about conservative white evangelicalism because of its influence on politics, but at the time I was really ignorant about how almost every little thing I thought we would share, we didn’t actually share.

That made me want to look outward and understand. Since childhood, Colin has pushed back against a lot of the interpretations he was raised in, and I don’t really know what that’s like, because I’m basically a carbon copy of my parents. Learning about his background made me really interested in how—if you are expecting this world just to end, and people who aren’t Christians to go to hell, and for there to be a whole other world—you think about being a person on this earth.

I moved from trying to understand this individual person to wanting to understand that experience at a larger scale. My in-laws are not the kind of caricature we might see of white conservative evangelicalism. And I didn’t want to write about our family, but I wanted to take some of the stuff that was coming up in my relationship with Colin and go talk to other people and see how their faith was shaping the way they lived in the world. When I wrote the essay about natural burial cemeteries, “Natural Ends,” it was so interesting to see people from totally different belief systems that were sometimes antithetical to each other arriving at the same conclusion. That felt weirdly hopeful.

Image: The natural burial essay is one example of how you’re often physically going to places to try to understand things. I wonder how you think about the function of motion and travel as an artist.

MP: When I wrote “Natural Ends,” I got to be physically present in the cemeteries with the people I was writing about. A few years earlier, when I was writing about the Florida torreya tree in “This Is Paradise,” I wasn’t able to travel, because it was Covid and I had an infant. But even working remotely, I got to know the people in that area of Florida so well that I kind of forget I didn’t get to go there. It’s almost like I have a memory of traveling there. But after that experience, if anything, it felt even more important to spend time in places.

For “Natural Ends,” I felt so nervous about meeting evangelical church leaders in South Carolina, though we’d had a phone conversation. Then when I met them in person, I could tell they were stressed about meeting up with me, and I realized how little time I spend trying to have conversations or relationships with people where I’m directly asking them about what they believe, how that affects their lives. Everything feels so charged now, with theological and political divisions, and with the way that theology and politics have melded in the past year.

It was important not to have a phone between us, to be there and feel how unsure they were about me, just as strongly as I was unsure about them. We can all bring a lot of assumptions about people we encounter only online—that they’re absolutely certain they’re on the right side, that they’re part of a groupthink phenomenon. And having to go meet a guy in a field in South Carolina removed that sense of insularity. It was also really hard and really moving. It meant a lot to me that he let me in, even though it stressed him out. And I don’t think he’s happy with the essay I wrote.

Part of me wants resolution, wants to feel like we both pushed through feeling nervous and uncomfortable around each other but that in the end it was okay. And I don’t think that’s the case in that story, but that’s just true to how life works. If we had more of those kinds of interactions, it would be harder to feel so binary and black-and-white and polarized in day-to-day life, because it’s false that anyone’s going to ultimately be vindicated that they’re the good guy. So, traveling and being with people, that was the biggest part of the experience for me. It can be an important reality check to go to another place and remember I’m not the center of the world.

Image: For much of this collection, your children’s presence floats around the edges. It’s not until the final essay, “Wound Care,” about the complex experience of your son’s birth, that we look motherhood full in the face. Would you talk a little about the decision to end the book with that essay, and the way you think about grief, joy, and communal conviction as related to the decision to bring a child into the world and then to parenting right now?

MP: There’s a certain state of writing I can get into that feels incantatory, where it’s like stuff is being given to me and I’m just receiving it. I didn’t necessarily want to write about his birth for other people at first. I had written some in my journal about it, trying to reclaim snippets of memory, and I wrote about these black holes in my memory of his birth. Then I had switched doctors after his birth, and I found out from my new doctor that they had given me ketamine, and that’s why I had those black holes. And that’s when she said, “You’re not going to get these memories back.” That was such a gift. I had been working so hard and I just couldn’t remember a lot of it, and finally I had an explanation.

The journaling started as a personal exercise, but then I started reading The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry, and it was such a beautiful treatment of how God’s relationship with the human body changed throughout the Old Testament and into the New Testament. It reminded me of something Richard Dillard said when I was an MFA student at Hollins. He told me he used to teach a class on books that write and then unwrite themselves, and the Bible was one of the books he included. At the time I remember thinking that was a perfect description of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And now, reading The Body in Pain, I see it really looking at the Bible as a book that writes its own rules for God’s relationship with the human body and then totally subverts them in its second half.

I felt like the process of birth had done something similar to me. You set out with this story about what birth is going to be like, and then the birth actually happens, and it has its own story. For me a lot of the ultimate meaning of faith is wrapped up in narrative and interpretation, in the idea that stories can hold a lot of meanings. That doesn’t necessarily look like belief to me. I’m very unattached to the idea of “what I believe” and very attached to “what stories can show us.”

So I was thinking about God and the body and that relationship changing over time, about the stories I had about what birth was going to be like for me and then the way birth actually was, and the way my relationship with my own body was transformed through that experience. They were all wrapped up in the same questions, and I didn’t realize that until I started writing. I was waking up at four a.m., reading The Body in Pain, and writing down every paragraph that seemed to help me understand both the process of birth and what faith had started to mean to me over the past few years. After I started putting those things in conversation with each other, every book I opened, everything I looked at, seemed to be speaking into those questions.

I had been tunneling into the story of my son’s birth over and over and over again, and I had started to feel like there was no way to redeem it into a better story. That’s what I’m used to doing: If a story from Scripture troubles me, if I can read enough commentary about it, I can come at it a different way, and I can somehow reconcile it and make it a story I can live with. But I couldn’t do that with his birth. I couldn’t reinterpret it and find a new meaning. I felt like a fish throwing myself upstream.

And then when my therapist said, “How would you tell him the story of his birth?” it took all that weight off. I thought, I’d just tell him I was so happy he was here. And something about that experience was like, Yes. If faith to you is about stories and reinterpretation, and you have this practice that lets you feel closer to God, at the end of the day what you need is someone who’s going to ask you a question that takes all that away and makes it not so freighted, that just kind of dissolves it all.

Writing the book had been a process of getting closer and closer to figuring out what faith means to me, and how I could be a person of faith in the world. I was creating a way of being and a structure, but in the end, though it’s a gift to find that, it’s also just another structure. The story of my son’s birth was never going to become a better story. But when my therapist asked that question and all of that was washed away, all I had left—all I wanted to share with him—was love and gratitude.

Image: You were never going to be able to pull the grief out of it, right?

MP: Yes. And that’s connected to the difficulty of raising a kid in a world that feels inhospitable. I’m carrying this burden—the knowledge of climate change—and yet when he’s so excited because he saw a woodpecker making a nest in our tree, all of that gets washed away, and I’m able to be present in the world and feel gratitude for it. That’s the cycle I’m finding myself in—in writing and in life and as a person of faith and as a mom. I’m building up ways of understanding the world, trying to find a structure that feels safe and inhabitable, and then joyfully watching it all float away.

Image: The book is interested in what we are losing, what we are destroying, but it’s also deeply and foundationally interested in what we are making. Would you talk a little about what you hope this book makes incarnate in the world?

MP: When I started doing research for “This Is Paradise,” at first I would read articles that were like, “There’s this tree that’s going extinct any day now.” But then when I talked to people who are working to save the tree, they’d say, “No, it’s not going extinct. It’s at the botanical garden. I’ve got some growing in my backyard. My friend is taking some up north in a coffee can to see if it’ll grow there.” There’s so much energy and determination and a defiance of the odds. You can receive stories as if the tombstone is already written, but then you go talk to people for whom it’s actually their life, and you find that’s not the case.

There’s so much more life and possibility and nuance than we can receive when we’re hearing these overwhelming stories of biodiversity loss and mass extinction and climate change. That narrative can feel very final because the stakes are so huge. So it’s helpful to talk to people who are doing the work to make a different future possible.

In the last essay in the book, I wrote about Moses’s question to the burning bush—What is your name?—and about other times in Scripture when people have tried to figure out the name of God. I was trying to get at the way we can speak God into existence even without knowing God’s name. That’s what I see people doing in this work to care for ecosystems, to keep creatures from going extinct, to feel closer to the places where they live. I see that as a way of making God incarnate in the world around us.

There can be a sense that the search for God is very arduous, but I feel like the searching is the finding. For me, nothing feels more like finding than the searching. There’s not a destination that feels more meaningful than that.

Going back to my dad’s church, I set out thinking I was either going to become a Christian or leave the church. But it turns out I’m not actually going to do either of those things, and that is an okay place for me to be. It doesn’t ever have to be more resolved than that. That’s what I’m hoping this book can express.

 

 

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