You Should Read This, and This, and This

I'm now working from home two days a week--which is fabulous--but it is impeding the pace at which I get through my audiobooks. Cry me a river. The things I have to give up for work-life balance, I tell you what.

The balance of being in the office three days a week and out two is just about perfect for this introverted managing editor writer person. I swear traffic is getting worse headed into downtown Cleveland. People, stop living in the suburbs and taking jobs in the city! That's only for me to do. The rest of you should relocate to one of those swanky lakefront apartments and clear up I-77 between 7 and 8:30 every morning.

My hour and fifteen in the car every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday morning still gives me plenty of time to get through almost an audiobook a week, depending on the length and reading style of the author/narrator. I just finished Let's Discuss Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris, which was hilarious. You should read it. Before that, I listened to Eve by Wm. Paul Young, the guy who wrote The Shack. It was a fascinating, magical, fanciful interpretation of the Creation story and the Fall. I wasn't as impressed with the writing as I was the imagination in this book. It was delightful and heartbreaking. You should read it.

Another book you should read is Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, which opens up the doorway for people to be creative. Creativity isn't just for the pros or the degreed or the academics, it's for everyone! Boom! So go read this for a little inspiration to get out there and be creative with your bad self.

I mentioned Love Wins by Rob Bell last time, but I'm bringing it up again because, you should read it.

And before that, I read Origins: 14 Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and you should only read it if you are okay not really understanding 2/3 of what is being said or you are an astrophysicist, in which case you won't have any trouble.

Before that, I read Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan, because he's also super funny, and sometimes you need to laugh the entire way to work. You should read it.

You should also read Lila by Marilynne Robinson and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Also Knowing Your Value by Mika Brzezinski. And Falling Upward by Richard Rohr.

Oh, heck, just read the books. Expand your world and read the books. Look up and out and in and through and read the books. Read the books you would never read. Read the books that might challenge the way you think. Read the books that will help you see yourself new. Read the books that will make you more whole. Read the books that will make you laugh. Read the books that will kick you in the pants. You will be a better person. You will be a changed person. You will understand other people better. You will have more compassion. You will love more, feel more, think more, dream more. Read the books, people. Read all the books.

Off The Page Update

I just started a new series of four posts for Off the Page last week. They all have something to do with faith and doubt, two things that belong together but aren't usually talked about together. You can catch my first post, Becoming a 7-Day Creation Biblical Literalist, and follow along the next three Thursdays.

Previously on OTP, I thought a lot about prayer's role in the face of sickness and disease, specifically my dear friend, Marilyn's battle with breast cancer, in With Wordless Groans. I should read this one over and over again daily. Lately it feels like sorrow and grief are on every corner. The only way I can battle back the sadness is through prayer, and even then it's begging for comfort and joy, comfort and joy, comfort and joy. Sad is okay. It is necessary. But Lord, bring peace swiftly.

I also thought about how we measure our worth and the contradictions we face when wrestling with ambition, humility, confidence, jobs, and more, in How Much Am I Worth?

I hope you'll follow along with the series on doubt. I'm excited about what God and I discussed together as I worked through the writing process. I grew from it, and for that I am grateful.

Lake Michigan, Writers Retreat

Speaking and Teaching, WUT?
October proved to be a month for kickstarting the writing and teaching side of myself. I filled in for a friend at the Cleveland Museum of Art to teach a workshop on ekphrastic poetry at the beginning of the month. I traveled to beautiful coastal Michigan a couple weekends ago to spend some delicious time with writer friends and get some work done on a new poetry manuscript. I also started a writers' group at work, and we had our first meeting two weeks ago. I'm excited for the possibilities of camaraderie and encouragement there. And next weekend, I'm off to the Indiana Faith and Writing Conference to talk about Vulnerability in Writing. If you aren't going around scaring people for Halloween, perhaps you want to join me in Indiana Oct. 30 and 31? Li-Young Lee and my pal Scott Russell Sanders along with a whole host of poet friends are going to be hanging out together. It'll be totes amazing. Wut? (I don't know either.)

In Hindsight...
2014: Breaking the Workaholic
2013: Bad People Go to Hell and Other Parental Panic Moments
2012: The Elliptical and Tonight's Work of Writing
2011: Creativity in Worship
2010: Twelve Apples and a Blog
2009: That Crazy Thang Called "Plans"
2008: Baked Apples, Green Ogres, and Snuggles

The Desire to Be Desired

A couple of weeks ago was the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference, and leading up to that were lots of long nights getting ready. I've been feeling frustrated with my ability to make time for writing, here or anywhere else, but now that the conference is over and I've given my brain a little break from evening writing duties, I am ever hopeful that I can return to writing. I guess it's a season of scribbling notes on my iPhone notepad to get to later.

Well, I am writing, two blog posts a month for Off the Page, and I have a series of heron poems that keep coming to me like little mercies. I've been enjoying the blog posts I'm writing for Off the Page, but it is a different kind of writing than essaying. It's the essaying I miss right now. When I was whining about this to my friend Tania a couple weeks before the conference, she told me, "What, you can't write for the next 14 days? Big deal!" and grant yourself the space and permission not to write for now. I'm pretty sure that's what she said. So, okay, stop whining. There are worse things in the world than not writing for a small stretch of time.

Watching the Cavs game

In other news, it's SUMMER and baseball season. We spend a solid four to five nights a week at someone's baseball or softball game right now, and I loooooove it. There's nothing like sitting outside in late summer afternoons, the pace of a ballgame, an excuse to do nothing but enjoy the evening... ah. I love it. Have I mentioned that I love it?

We're also letting the kids - especially Elvis and Lydia - stay up a bit later now that it's summer, and they've been staying up to at least the half for the Cavs games the last two weeks. It's been fun spending that additional downtime with the two of them, even though it's intruding on my alone time with Brandon, which is always so guarded. Lydia sat on my lap last night for part of the game and now stretches out almost as long as I am. They are amazing people.

What I've been listening to:

I just finished up two books by Bill Bryson - At Home and In a Sunburned Country. I almost started One Summer and then changed my mind. There's only so much of the same voice reading to you that you can take. I loved both books. They were engaging and funny and informative. Before that I listened to Small Victories by Anne Lamott and LOVED it. I'll probably go back to Lamott again soon because she's so funny and tear-inducing, and I like that kind of writing.

I shifted gears and started listening to Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. For some reason it isn't at all what I thought it would be, but I also don't know exactly what I was expecting, so there's that. I'm really enjoying the switch to fiction for a spell, and I love the narrator's voice, the epistolary nature of the writing, and the gradual unfolding of the story. It's no wonder it won a Pulitzer.

What I've been up to:

If you are into Jo Ann Beard or you want to be, you might enjoy the presentation that Jill Christman and I did at the River Teeth Conference: "Negotiating the Plasmapause: Patterned Images, Delayed Revelation, and Sheer Awesomeness in Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth"

The series for Off the Page I mentioned in my last post, The Desire to Be Desired, has wrapped up. Here they are in summary with links to the full posts:

The Desire to Be Desired

I ran as fast as I could through the wood chips and up the wooden steps and beckoned from the highest point of the playground equipment. “You can’t catch me!” I shouted, grinning and staring down into the faces of Nick Germano and Jason Ream, and when they motioned for the steps, I squealed and giggled, sliding half-way down the stainless steel slide, its hot metal burning my hands and thighs. I stopped and waited to see which way they chose to go so I could make my break-away run, away from my chasers.


So went every day on the playground in first grade, then second, then third, sometimes different boys, eventually new playgrounds, but always the same game. Tag, freeze tag, TV tag, hide-and-go-seek tag, You can’t catch me! No one wanted to be caught, not really, anyway. What would you do when you were caught? That was the end of the game, the end of the chase. The thrill was in the running, the pursuit, the simple and potent knowledge that someone sought to catch you. Read More...

What Good Guys Do

One night, my husband and I were out at a country line-dancing bar. He got up to pay our tab and I watched the couples waltz on the floor.

“Hey, how ya doin’?” a voice came up from behind. I turned on my barstool and grinned at a guy obviously looking for a dance partner.

“I’m fine!” I said cheerily. He glanced down at my hand resting on the bar.

“Oh, you’re married!” he said, his arms flinging up in the air into the “I surrender” position. “I’m sorry!”

I nodded, still grinning as he walked away and Brandon came back. They exchanged glances, the guy smiling meekly and my husband giving him a nod of acknowledgement.

“Ready to go, Tiny Dancer?” Brandon asked.

“That guy was trying to hit on me!” I said with astonishment.


“Yeah, I figured,” he said, wrapping his arm around my waist and guiding me toward the door. I continued grinning, the warmth of admiration and the heat of my husband’s palm on the small of my back making me glow faintly on the way to the car. Read More...

Empty Houses

It has been three years since I sat in a dark bar on the dark side of town alone with a colleague, out for a drink to talk about writing and family and his failing marriage. It has been three years since he confessed to having a crush, his hand flitting like a fly on and off of my thigh. Three years since I laughed and blushed, stunned to be so openly admired by someone other than my husband. I didn’t know how to handle this advance, how to stand and stare down disaster before it could take root.

Instead, I wanted to be nice. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. My “no” was mushy and clouded with desire—not for this other man but for this other man’s words, this other man’s advances, the unabashed expression of his desire for me. Me! Goofy and ridiculous me, flabby around the middle me, mother of three, me! “But I love my husband,” I said, again and again, with a grin, because I also loved to hear how beautiful this other man found me, how lovely, how smart, how good.


I would like to say that I stood up and slapped him. After all, he had just shook hands with my husband in our living room, just stood in the presence of all our wedding pictures and smiling faces of our children. I would like to say that I insisted he drive me home, immediately. I would like to say that every email conversation and text message from there on was strictly professional and never slid slyly into flirtatious, that I reported his advances to my supervisor and ended it, ended the confusing, terrifying, anxiety-inducing friendship and work relationship. But I didn’t. Read More...

The Directions Desire Can Take Us

It’s tempting to conclude this series on desire with the pattest of pat answers: If I were truly holy and pursuing God, this fire would be quenched and I would never again face the dichotomy of flesh and spirit, as if my body is evil and my spirit is good.

Except God made me, body and spirit. Adam needed a helpmate and so he was given Eve, before the Fall, before separation from God. Sarah needs a helpmate and so she is given Brandon.

We are made for connection, with God and with others. This connection is rooted in two things: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.


If God is love and we learn to love God by watching Jesus, then loving our neighbors as ourselves is one of the only ways we can express and experience that love for ourselves. It’s a give-and-get kind of relationship, a pay it forward, a pouring out to be filled again and again. Read More...

Back then --
2014: Holiday Greetings from Nine-Month-Contract Land
2013: Why Do We Need Men?
2012: Corrective Lenses and Parenting
2011: In the Center Ring: Motherhood vs. Work
2010: Maybe She's Born With It...
2009: Potty Training Adventures

Tackling Transitions

Next week, a new series of blog posts will begin to be published on the site Off The Page, a ministry of Our Daily Bread. I am excited about this opportunity to reach a larger audience and hope that the posts are engaging, inspiring, and thought provoking-- sincere and maybe even a little funny now and then.

My first series with Off The Page was about transitions and what it's like to change jobs, change communities, and change churches. Here are a few excerpts:

Changing Directions
I recently did one of those things you do in your twenties and thirties: I changed jobs. The job change was a package deal and included a new town, a new commute, a new house, and a new school district for my kids.

I wasn’t really looking to change jobs. It’s rare to think that you’ve found the job you are made for when you are twenty-five, but I was certain I had: administering a graduate writing program, managing a small press and literary journal at the university I had graduated from four years earlier, working with faculty members who had mentored me when I was an undergraduate … I was in happy spreadsheet, literature, and poetry heaven.

Everything had fallen into place to make it happen too. My husband, Brandon, and I had prayed through the job offer and acceptance, the house sale and moving plans, the birth of our second child … every single little detail that summer. And it was good. Read More...

Church Hunting

I hate trying to find a church.

The last time we moved, Brandon and I fell by mercy into a community of believers that met our deep need for friendship and community. We only visited one other church in the land-of-a-thousand churches before we found 5 Stones Community Church.

5 Stones is filled with people who praise Jesus for his extravagant grace, make no claims of perfection but aspire to become the truest versions of themselves, and drape other people in that same outpouring of mercy and forgiveness. For realz, I know that was a lot of church-y talk and all, but I’m serious. Like all churches that exist here on earth, it has its battles and bruises, its history and its weaknesses. It’s made of a bunch of broken people covered by God’s grace, so that’s to be expected. Read More...

Life Together

I started the new year feeling a need for some meaty inspirational reading, so I picked up a book that’s been sitting on our shelves for a while now, Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Hangin’ out with other believers and talking about Jesus is one of my favorite things to do, but deep and sustaining relationships in the church are sometimes hard to come by. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Christians can be kind of judgmental and easily offended. Whaaaaaat?! I know. Crazy. Because of this and my incapacity for small talk, I don’t find it easy to jump right into faith communities. I’m not always sure if they’re going to get me, and I don’t want to offend them by my sarcasm, self-deprecation, wide laugh, and loud grace. Read More...

Bringing the Word

You should know that I didn’t grow up reading the Bible—though we did have a basic illustrated Bible stories book floating around among the Dr. Seusses.

One Thanksgiving Day, I paged through a King James Bible looking for the section on Thanksgiving prayers, resolved that I would provide the most eloquent of blessings on our meal. This made perfect sense to me; after all, I had found the proper formal place setting arrangements for Thanksgiving in the cookbook. Surely there would be an index of holiday prayers in the Bible.

Later still, my mom bought me a red-letter, black, leather-bound, New International Version study Bible for Christmas. I was sixteen, and the hunger and curiosity from internal and external sources burned. I wanted to know: Is there a God? Is he real? Who is he? How do I reconcile all I’ve learned in sixteen years with this book? Can I?

I started reading at the beginning, like you do with most books. Genesis wasn’t so bad, and the start of Exodus is eventful, but then you get Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy all up in there, and my interest waned. Read More...

Tune in beginning May 13 for the next series on Off The Page: The Desire to Be Desired.