Words for Readers and Writers

Spirit-Pooled Dialogues

Larry Woiwode

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781433535253
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Letteratura e arti nel cristianesimo

From poetry to social networks, writing affects us all. Having taught the art of writing for years while producing literary works of national renown, Larry Woiwode thus explores the mysterious power of language, offering readers a diverse collection of thought-provoking essays on the meaning and significance of writing. In teaching the art of putting words on a page, Woiwode highlights the crucial role that writing plays in communicating with others and fashioning meaning for our lives. The book's 21 essays will help Christians grasp the foundational importance of writing and to be more intentional about how they use words to express their emotions, desires, and beliefs.

PART ONE

USES OF WORDS

1

ABCs THAT TEND TO FAMILY UNITY

a.

Settled families tend toward melodic unity. Unsettled families create alternating disharmony. A settled family atmosphere can arrive by finding a place to live, one agreeable to both parents, if both are present to weave their baritone-bass and contralto among the melodies of piping offspring. The voices of children affect a family’s composition and establish the countermelodies the children’s lives will assume as they mature and move on. All family members carry secrets in an unvoiced region at the center of their selves—a symphonic and hidden second home to each.

The pressures of the unvoiced region can cause family members to broaden their understanding, first for one another and then for an interrelated community, forming works from words that include others—the other. Healthy members situate even the unappealing in their interiors, from the Grimm or Disney characters of childhood to the Ophelias and Othellos of an adult. Members release ghosts and welcome guests who gather in the sunny or leaf-speckled spheres of their hidden interiors.

These are the characters of bedtime stories or tales of Grandpa growing up. Collections of stories gather inside family boundaries in a compression of artistic collaboration that encourages expression. Stories form a family’s outlook, whatever its origin or ethnicity or age or character, and this outlook is apparent in a family’s ability to use language and in the gestures and the poses their bodies take on.

That is why children—and those who grow into parents—page through albums of family photographs. The fixed and still gestures suggest further routes into the inner self of the family, over paths leading to the past from the present. The ground note underneath, informing integration, is place. When a family needs to define a gap or find what’s lost, they return to the place where their thought began—from the basement of forgetfulness to the kitchen or computer desk.

Place is the home base for both hide-and-seek and philosophical speculation. Both need a binding origin to begin. Both use words in their countdown. A common bond is that all houses and apartments, invested with the artwork of family stories, resound with a variety of routes for each member. The source of resonance is the historical base of the stories families tell. They construct personages and place them in phenomenal existence. That’s the primary use of words.

b.

My wife and I introduced to existence, in this order: daughter, son, daughter, daughter. I hoped to be a father to all, not a patriarch or rival, and before any were able to speak I began to carve a separate space to meet with each. Photos exist of the four, from their early months, sitting in my lap beside an open book I’m reading from. I didn’t use reading as a means of setting my seal on their consciousness—the stories weren’t mine—but as a way of assembling for them, through the metaphor of words, a pleasant and reassuring space where the two of us—or more if I was reading to more than one—might meet.

The meeting place was specific and objective or, if not quite objective—my wife and I chose the books—benign to their forming personalities and not crowded with parental rule. As an adult I could contain the content of a children’s book and in that way establish a realm where each child could rest. One would cling to my shirt, another grab at my lips or hair or the skin of my cheek, imprinting my person on them, I presume, as provider of an external habitation that held a story containing us in its weave.

Each one could enter and strobe the substance of that story in his or her way, while as reader I was merely a medium providing a slip-step to a safe state. The jaded or squeamish or overly worried parent might wonder whether reading-in-the-lap is too intimate. Don’t worry; be happy! Its benefits outweigh outmoded fears.

I write stories and novels, where all is metaphor, aware that the cultivation of metaphor can be a trying occupation. When our children were growing up, I was often so immersed in my work I had to rise from it like a deep-sea diver from ocean depths to keep from inflicting the bends of my mind—overly mature or unfamiliar emotion—on my children or, worse, drawing them into the undefined underworld I was exploring, word by word, as an adult. These are stories that our children, as children, never heard.

Gerald Locklin, a poet who enjoys a day out with his daughter, says,

When we get home I am smart enough

To downplay to my wife what a good day

We have had on our own. Later, saying

Goodnight to my little girl,

Already much taller than her mother,

I say, “days like today are the favorite

Days of my life,” and she knows

It is true.1

Parents can speak of love for a child that wholeheartedly, as long as it’s not habitual, because children are guiltless of a past history of disagreement or agenda, hidden or otherwise. Children are guiltless even of their birth.

c.

Young adults who find fault with their parents or harbor negative views about a parent have difficulty keeping out of trouble. A primary reason is lack of intimacy with a parent. A young adult’s criterion of judgment is often cultural, most of which originates outside the family, at school or on a playing field or in a mall or on Facebook, and has less to do with the character of a parent than with the values of friends. And when values overtake morals, chaos has come again.

A father who does not communicate with his family, however, no matter the views he holds or, worse, who inflicts the silent treatment on a daughter or a son, is on the road to enrolling himself as a target of disdain. A mother may ameliorate that, but eventually the father has to engage in a juggling act to keep his relationship to his children from loosening into the disruptive clatter of free fall.

The way to keep those routes or, better, highways of communication open is by reading to a child from the beginning of his or her perceptions. A developing child experiences your voice forming the shape of a story, the story unites you as one, and in that unity a child learns to listen and respond to your voice. Finally, a father must listen to the newest story from a variety of sources that rise in the voices of his children.

The experience of listening to a child’s story is a parent’s aid to newfound perception. My wife and I encouraged communication in our children, and I’m surprised at how they keep in touch. One or another phones or texts or sends e-mails daily, asking our opinion or advice or merely wondering about their stand in the present. We speak to them from the realm first formed by the stories they heard us read over the years when they, and we, too, were growing up.

2

READERS’ LITERARY GUIDE TO LITIGATION

It may seem odd, or perhaps revelatory, that Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson developed a close relationship, largely by correspondence. James was acknowledged as the superior artist, although Stevenson was no slouch, and their bond seems the sort that occurs in opposites. The lesson of their relationship, with its several different angles, is a lesson practicing lawyers might attend to, and I don’t mean in choosing clients.

A distillation of that relationship can be found in Graham Greene’s essay, “Two Friends.” Greene is reviewing a biography of Stevenson by Janet Adam Smith and in its midst shifts to an examination of the friendship that developed between the two writers.1 The biography of Stevenson, “sees in the friendship the aesthetic appeal to James of Stevenson’s situation”:

The man living under the daily threat of a fatal hemorrhage, yet with such an appetite for the active life; the novelist who could only gain the health and energy for writing at the risk of dissipating them on other ends; the writer who had to spur his talent to earn more and more money to pay for the life of action that kept him alive; the continual tug between the claims of life and literature—here was a situation not unlike those which had provided James with the germ of a novel or story.

This glimpse of Stevenson could as well be a thumbnail sketch of a high-powered, occasionally reckless litigator.

James, on the other hand, once he moved from the security of the family brownstone on Washington Square, off Fifth Avenue, to England, maintained the reserved and distant (some thought cold) composure that perhaps only an expatriate writer with no financial worries in the world can adopt. He seemed comfortable only at his writing desk, and is the exact person one would want to work on contracts and briefs. His weighty seriousness, as Greene points out, was no match for Stevenson’s agile metaphors, as in a moment in their correspondence when Stevenson confronted James on the inability of fiction to compete with life:

These phantom reproductions of experience, even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure, while experience itself, in the cockpit of life, can torture and slay.

One can imagine the effect of this poised and colorful statement in a courtroom, where “phantom reproductions of experience” are recounted, some of which may include a torture or a slaying. In a mode more instructive, perhaps, Stevenson writes to James that “catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet.”2 It is the tricky capture of the note of “the strange irregular rhythm of life” that will enable the lawyer as communicator to keep listeners, especially a jury, alert.

But it was James who proved more relevant to courtroom procedure, and not for his rolling, periodic sentences or fine-tuned sensibility. James nailed down for all artful communication that would follow the concept of point of view. Before his strictures, narrators of fiction were often omniscient or the point of view shifted from epistle to epistle in the earliest novels or from character to character or scene to scene, as with Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy and later their American counterparts. James said in more than one preface (and in his practice) that a novel or story that begins in third person point of view must adhere to that point of view in every movement to its end, for aesthetic and conceptual veracity to adhere.3

His view arrived with such intellectual weight that by the 1940s and 1950s into the 1960s, American writers and instructors of creative writing were talking noisily as telegraphers about violation of point of view, as if it were an imbedded law about the human body.

The points of view can be summarized in simple fashion: first person, meaning “I did this, I did that,” the I—I—I of too many modern novels; second person, meaning “You were the one, you did that,” seldom used for a novel although long stories have been composed using it; third person, meaning “She did that, he did this,” the mode commonly used in distanced writing of a Jamesian mode; limited third, meaning “She or he is I”—that is, limited within the skull of the same, singular person—an effect similar to first person, when handled judiciously; and omniscient, meaning “I am like God” in that I maintain an all-seeing overview of every mortal within my weather below, as epitomized in Thomas Hardy. The shifting Tolstoyan view, however, often accommodates all ...