Dear ,

I've been thinking a lot about forgiveness lately, for several reasons. First, because it's woven throughout the memoir I'm writing about my relationship with my mother. In fact, a piece I'm currently working on begins with the words: "If I am every to fully forgive my mother, if I am ever to fully forgive myself . . . "

 

Second, because I recently stumbled across a piece by Maria Popova called "The Workhorse and the Butterfly: Ann Patchett on Writing and Why Self-Forgiveness Is the Most Important Ingredient of Great Art" (today's featured writing) with this epigraph from Patchett's work:
“The ability to forgive oneself . . . is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life.”
 

Third, because forgiveness is an important part of the process in the "Shaping Our Lives by Shaping Our Words" class I've taught several times recently. I was first inspired to include it because of a book I've turned to many times over the years, Dr. James W. Pennebaker's Writing to Heal. In it, he says, as he speaks of "Granting Forgiveness":

For many people, forgiving others for upending their lives can be an almost-impossible task. To forgive the perpetrator of a terrible act implies let­ting the perpetrator get away with an injustice. Not forgiving, however, can result in the continuation of feelings of anger and bitterness. And, although we rarely admit it, truly resenting or hating another person can be satisfying. 

This satisfaction is something I've felt, and I've seen it in many other people over the years, along with the words, "S/he doesn't deserve to be forgiven." I could write about my reaction to these words for a long time!
But instead, I'll let you ponder your own response to them, as they lead so well into the final reason forgiveness has been on my mind: it's Holy Week, for those who practice the Christian faith. And for many years, I sang a solo during Holy Week that contained words spoken by Jesus as he was dying on the cross: "Father, forgive them, they do not understand what they do."
As someone who sometimes has a hard time forgiving, these words touched me very deeply. As someone who often needs to be forgiven, they are a bright light and a balm to my spirit.

Image by Francisco Leão from Pixabay 
 

Whether you are celebrating Easter, Passover, or another holiday, may it be suffused with peace, joy, and forgiveness. And may you, like Ann Patchett, choose to be a "workhorse" when it comes to your writing!

Love and light,

Maureen

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Featured Writing

an excerpt from

The Workhorse and the Butterfly:
Ann Patchett on Writing and Why Self-Forgiveness Is the Most Important Ingredient of Great Art

by

Maria Popova

in

Brain Pickings

“All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her lucid and luminous essay on where ideas come from and the “secret” of writing. “But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.” And yet our cultural mythology continues to perpetuate the perilous notion that great art is the product of great ideas that occur in a flash to those endowed with the mysterious gift of genius.

In her magnificent memoir-of-sorts This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (public library), novelist Ann Patchett offers one of creative history’s finest and most convincing counterpoints to this myth.

She writes in the introduction:

The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living. My short stories and novels have always filled my life with meaning, but, at least in the first decade of my career, they were no more capable of supporting me than my dog was. But part of what I love about both novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive. It isn’t their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from.

Patchett, who knew she wanted to be a writer since her early childhood — “A deep, early love of poetry should be mandatory for all writers,” she asserts in one of her many piercing asides — first set out to figure this out by taking a number of freelance assignments for various magazines, writing essays and other nonfiction while dreaming with crystalline determination about being a novelist. She reflects on a curious duality — on the one hand, the fundamental differences between writing fiction and writing nonfiction; on the other, the surprising ways in which the craft of the latter recompenses the art of the former:

In my mind, fiction and nonfiction stayed so far away from each other that for years I would have maintained they had no more a relationship than fiction and waitressing. Writing a novel, even when it’s going smoothly, is hard for me, and writing an article, even a challenging one, is easy. I believe nonfiction is easy for me precisely because fiction is hard; I would always rather knock off an essay than face down the next chapter of my novel. But I’ve come to realize that while all those years of writing fiction had improved my craft as a writer across the board, all those years of writing articles … had made me a workhorse, and that, in turn, was a skill I brought back to my novels.

But of all the skills essential to the fiction writer that Patchett acquired while writing nonfiction — from having her ego tamed by the constant practice of seeing her sentences slaughtered by editors to mastering “the ability to fake authority” — perhaps most valuable was the unshakable understanding that the chief purpose of writing, whatever its nature or genre, is to serve for people as Neruda's unforgettable “hand through the fence.” Patchett recounts:

In the years I made my living writing nonfiction, I thought of the work I did as being temporary, with a life span that would, in most cases, not exceed a magazine’s last tattered days in a dentist’s waiting room, but the essays kept resurfacing. People would bring them to book signings and show them to me. I read this when my grandmother died. Someone gave this to me when I got divorced. They told me my story was their story, and they wondered if there was more, something they might have missed… The job of these essays had been to support art, not to be art, but maybe that was what spared them from self-consciousness.

In one of the most illuminating pieces from the book, titled “The Getaway Car” and subtitled “A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life,” Patchett considers how this writerly self-consciousness dances with our cultural narrative about great ideas being all it takes to produce great art:

Logic dictates that writing should be a natural act, a function of a well-operating human body, along the lines of speaking and walking and breathing. We should be able to tap into the constant narrative flow our minds provide, the roaring river of words filling up our heads, and direct it out into a neat stream of organized thought so that other people can read it. Look at what we already have going for us: some level of education, which has given us control of written and spoken language; the ability to use a computer or a pencil; and an imagination that naturally turns the events of our lives into stories that are both true and false. We all have ideas, sometimes good ones, not to mention the gift of emotional turmoil that every childhood provides. In short, the story is in us, and all we have to do is sit there and write it down.

But it’s right about there, right about when we sit down to write that story, that things fall apart.

 

Read the full article here.