My friend Anne Jackson has been asked by an organization to travel with them to Haiti to help their work, but also to gain insight and report as a writer.. I’ve asked Anne to guest blog for me both before, during and after her trip. Here is her first entry: When I turned twenty, I was your typical former pastor’s kid living in rebellion – alcohol, clubs, bands, and a peer group nobody’s parents would approve of. Two months before my twentieth birthday, I had just ended a long term relationship – a month before we were supposed to get married. It was rough. I remember returning home the night of my twentieth birthday after having friends visiting throughout the week. My apartment door was wide open and nobody was inside. Littered on the floor were liquor bottles and pizza boxes. It took me three trips to the shared dumpster to empty out all the trash. Exhausted, I collapsed in my bed and cried myself to sleep. I was alone. I was twenty. And I needed to grow up. As I drifted off, I wondered what the week leading up to my thirtieth birthday would look like. Would I be [...]
Last week J.D. Salinger passed away. We all heard the running eulogies on NPR and read them in the papers, and I had a mixed feeling when I heard he had passed. There have only been a few people who’ve told me they could hear Holden Caufield in Blue Like Jazz, and that surprised me. The truth is I read Catcher in the Rye about fifty times while I was writing it. I’d sit and read for an hour and then open up the computer and start typing. I suppose the prose was imitation, but all good writers imitate somebody. Salinger was imitating Borges and so many others, for instance. The trick is to get the writers voice in your head, then write through it to find your own, or at least one that can’t be identified as pure imitation. Phillip Yancey was the only one who really called me out. We met at a reading and later he read Blue Like Jazz and e-mailed me only a couple lines that said You were reading Catcher in the Rye by Salinger and Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott when you wrote this. And he was right. In fact, those were the [...]
I love this video from Fancis Chan about how we seek safety instead of taking risks. Terrific:
A friend left her copy of Scientific American Mind at the house last night, and this months issue is about, well, love. Being February and all the eggheads at S/A wanted to put love under a microscope. The articles contain all sorts of data about what it takes to fall in love and maintain love. Turns out eye contact is important, for instance, and something called secret swapping and unified breathing experiments (which explains why I have a crush on everybody in my yoga class). But most interesting to me was the article on the characteristics of married couples who stay together long-term. What’s the main characteristic? It’s positivity. I spoke this past weekend at a mens conference with Bill Perkins. After the conference, Bill introduced me to his wife of some twenty years. Dr. John Sowers was there and asked what the secret to a happy marriage was, and Bill confessed that when they got married they were fairly naive, but he did say that the dominant thing he wanted in a mate was a positive attitude. Actually, the way Bill said it was “I didn’t want to be married to a melancholic” (I thought he meant a girl [...]
