Writing About Catholicism and Marriage

My latest post, a reflection on how much power the Church should have in dictating individual wedding ceremonies, is up on Young Adult Catholics. Also, the issue of DignityUSA’s newsletter featuring my article about being bisexual and Catholic is also now available. So much Catholic and marital subject matter today!

Adventures in Book Promotion and Genuine Connection

Last weekend, I went down to Illinois for my cousin’s wedding. My grandfather was with us, and he was very concerned about whether my cousin was marrying another Catholic. After he asked some nosy questions and was assured that the couple were both Catholic, he relaxed — even after I expressed my confusion about the fact that the ceremony would be an outdoor wedding — which the Catholic Church usually won’t officially bless.

At the reception, my parents and I found ourselves assigned to the same table as Rev. Cronan, the priest who had performed the ceremony. My mom, who is one of the most talkative introverts I know, immediately struck up a conversation with him. He explained that, although he was ordained a Catholic priest, he now belongs to a “reform” Church group, where he ministers to people in the Catholic tradition, even though he resigned as a Catholic priest due to disagreements with some official Church teachings.

Seated at the other end of the table, I could only catch this conversation in bits and pieces, but I could hear enough to know that this was a priest after my own heart — one who loved his church too much to stand by when it doesn’t live up to its own teachings.

I leaned over and whispered to my dad, “Mom should be plugging my book!”

He said, “You should be plugging your book.”

But an introvert who is still squeamish about all this promotion stuff is not a good candidate to plug a book from across the long-end of a table, or even to get up and interrupt a fruitful conversation. So instead, my dad offered to switch spots with me, so that I could more organically become part of the conversation (it helped that I had already caught my mom make several references to “my daughter,” who I assumed was me, since her other two daughters are not explicitly involved in Catholic issues).

From my new seat, I was able to enter into a fascinating conversation about Church justice work, and introduce Hungering and Thirsting for Justice quite organically. From that, I learned that Rev. Cronan had also done some work in Catholic publishing, and that he had written a prayer devotional book for a publisher that was run by “official” church leadership. In the midst of that experience, he was told not to use the word “justice” anywhere within the course of the book.

Writing reflections on the Bible, the Gospels, and Jesus’s message to us … but without ever once using the word “justice,” which, apparently, is just too controversial. (A similar thread came up in Kate’s and my interview with Daniel Horan.) It made me realize again how lucky we were to work with ACTA Publications, who not only plastered the word “justice” on the cover, but who let us use words like, “women’s ordination” and “reproductive rights” and “feminist” — without deprecating any of those things. I suggested that, if he ever wanted to try his hand at spiritual writing again, and maybe even use the word justice, he might check out ACTA as well.

In the end, I gave him the copy of the book I’d brought to show some family members. He accepted graciously, and even told me that it will be helpful for him in a project he’s about to undertake working with young adults who are interested in joining the Catholic Church. I was glad I got the opportunity to share about the book, but even more, I was inspired to meet someone else who cares deeply about the same issues that I do. I was reminded again that this is ultimately why I write, and why publication is important. My priority isn’t selling books (which probably means I’ll always have a “day job”), but in forging these connections, in bridging these gaps between one soul and another, and another, and more of whom I may never meet.

When I received my box of five contributor copies at the end of September, I wondered what the best home might be for them. I kept one, gave one to my family, plan to send one to my old parish in Duluth, and gave one to Reverand Cronan. That leaves one more, which I originally meant to give away on Goodreads. Now I’m not so sure. I might wait for the right connection to come up instead.

Two Podcasts about the Book

Last week, the Dating God podcast featured my co-editor Kate Ward and I discussing Hungering and Thirsting for Justice. You can listen to or download the podcast here. Doing the interview was a great experience — I did it holed away in a study room at the Marshall-Lyon County library while Kate did it in person with Daniel Horan in Boston. The wonders of technology! (As an aside, I’m excited to have learned about this blog, so that I can download a bunch of the fantastic podcasts to listen to while I walk my dog.)

Kate Ward also appeared on her husband’s radio talk show last week, which you can listen to here. (Kate’s interview begins about 42 minutes in, and she does a great job of pulling out many of the themes and stories in the book.)

5 Ways Marriage has Improved my Writing

I was terrified of getting married. I’ve always placed a high premium on my independence, and I think part of that was to protect my writing. Relationships take time and energy — and any time and energy given elsewhere is time and energy taken away from writing. I’d seen relationships where one’s significant other actively interfered with their beloved’s passion. In college, a writer friend of mine was dating a girl who scorned his writing, making it something he had to do almost in secret. My sister dated several men who were “jealous” of the devotion she had to her passion, horses, because it meant time spent away from them. When my mom got married, she gave up her horses because there wasn’t a place for them on my dad’s farm. Being single allowed me to avoid this quagmire of competing passions.

I also had a semi-conscious belief that intimate relationships were a liability in my dream to become a writer. I thought loneliness was part of my calling. It was not for me to engage intimately with others, but to observe; to ponder; to record. If I got swept up in a love affair of my own, so much of my creative energy would go in that direction, and I wanted that energy for writing. (There’s a belief that sexual energy and creative energy exist on the same chakra, and perhaps being raised Catholic contributed to my idea that celibacy was the best life path if I wanted to devote myself wholly to my creativity.) If I got caught up in my own life, it might wipe clean the dozens of lives I imagined in my head, each of them providing a different outlet for all the things I wasn’t experiencing on my own. If I was close to someone to whom I could pour out my soul, how many pages in my journal would be left empty? I wanted to live many lives, not just one. And so I held back from living my own, from carving out a singular path that would close off other options, and thus, close off a bit of imaginative possibility.

When Ivan and I were still dating, we watched Phoebe in Wonderland, a movie about a little girl with Tourette’s syndrome and OCD tendencies whose family, especially her mother, struggles to accept her illness. The mother in the movie is a writer — and as the movie progresses, we discover that a significant part of her internal struggle is caused by the tension she feels between her responsibilities as a wife and mother, and her desire to write. Ivan asked, “Are you afraid having a family will interfere with your writing?”

I said, “Yes.”

We didn’t speak of it further than that, but the fact that that fear was out in the open meant that I no longer faced it alone. And after the dust settled from the wedding and the honeymoon and the move, I found that the opposite of my fear has come true. Marriage allowed me to focus more on my writing than I’ve ever been able to before because …

1. Two people means two incomes, which means if I make a little less money per week because I’m doing a little more writing, the lights will stay on and I won’t starve.
2. Two people means shared chores, which also frees up more time for writing. I still do a fair amount of dishes and laundry, which offer prime daydreaming time.
3. My husband has dreams of his own. As the co-founder of Coppergoose.com, and as someone who works full-time in addition to pursuing his own business, he needs time while he’s “off” to devote to developing the site. This benefits my writing in two ways: First, seeing him pursue his passion goads me into giving the same sort of attention to mine. Second, when he’s wrapped up in Coppergoose work, it’s a prime time for me to get some writing done. In particular, he takes a half-day off every Friday to devote to Coppergoose. I’ve begun doing the same, using that time to focus on research and development related to my writing, something that was usually on the back burner so that I could use all my writing time for actually, well, writing.
4. He’s an additional reader, which means additional feedback. I often read acknowledgments by authors in which they mentioned a spouse as a first reader and valued critiquer, and I always hoped that I could someday have such a marriage relationship. Last week, Ivan finished reading my most ambitious novel, then gave me 45 minutes of “big picture” feedback that I’m still mulling over — and he brings the novel up occasionally when additional feedback strikes him. He’s not another writer, which means his feedback is pure reader feedback. This is a good compliment to my writers’ group feedback, which comes from their dual perspectives as writers and readers.
5. Most importantly, I now live with someone who cares about me reaching my dream as much as I do. Ivan doesn’t often ask me what I’m writing, and he doesn’t give me the kind of accountability that my writers’ group or my writer friends do when they ask about progress on specific projects. But he does ask me, particularly when I’m stressed or overwhelmed, “Are you getting enough time for writing?” Fortunately, the answer has not been no yet — but I know that if it ever is, I’ll have someone to help me correct that.

I’m not about to advocate marriage as a “solution” to any writer’s woes (or as a solution to anything, really). Unlike many people, I don’t see being alone as the worst possible outcome, but being with someone to whom I’m ill-suited. I still think that the single life provides particularly fertile ground for writing, especially if you have the self-discipline to make the most of that freedom and alone time. I was incredibly fortunate that, before Ivan, I had friends who stayed up past their bedtimes to read my drafts and who asked, “When am I going to get another Lacey story?” So while I don’t advocate marriage for the sake of writing, I do know this: writing can be lonely. If you have people in your life who truly care about you reaching your goals, who see writing as a worthy pursuit even if it’s just “for the sake of writing,” who ask you when your next draft will be ready or whether you’re getting enough time for writing, keep those people in your life. And if you are going to balance an intimate relationship with your dream of writing, you could certainly do worse than having it be with one of those people.

The Book is Here … but What if They Don’t Like It?

I got my box of contributor copies of Hungering and Thirsting for Justice in the mail yesterday, so I promptly sent an email to all the friends and associates I thought might be interested in knowing about it. Interest was especially piqued amongst those who know me mostly in a Catholic context. My former boss at the Writing Center at The College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University let me know she’d pass the word on to the English and Theology faculty and get a copy for the campus libraries. And the priest from my home parish told me he’d order three copies, and send one to the bishop.

I fought the urge to respond, “But I don’t think the bishop will like it!”

Our publisher has been wonderful in backing us even though the book expresses, sometimes quite strongly, some views that are not in line with official Catholic teaching. And of course, now that the book is out in the world, I must deal with something I don’t have to deal with so much when my manuscripts stay on my computer: people are actually going to read this (I hope!), and not all of them are going to like it.

That fear has been niggling at me for the last month or so, as the reality of publication came closer and closer. I’ve always wondered if I’ll be one of those authors who doesn’t read reviews of her work, and it’s certainly tempting. But I’ve also realized that I already deal with the fact that some folks don’t like my writing on a regular basis.

Over at Young Adult Catholics, I’ve received negative or argumentative responses to my posts for almost as long as I’ve been writing them (my most recent, rather non-controversial post, is here). Some of them are reasonable, well-thought-out disagreements, but more commonly, they are a line or two implying that I’m a horrible Catholic, with no real invitation to continue a dialog past that point. There’s one particular commenter who seems to read my posts for the sole purpose of writing a snarky line or two in the comments. It’s gotten to where, when I see there’s a new comment on a blog post, I cringe before I open it, preparing for an attack. When it’s a supportive or even reasonable response, I breathe a huge sigh of relief and bask in a moment of profound gratitude.

It hurts, and it’s scary. Even in the midst of mostly positive remarks, it’s the negative ones that stick with us. But I keep writing because I need to. I keep writing because, I believe, other people need me to, too. I think the best thing about books and all the other written media out there in the world is that it makes us feel a little less alone. And as a progressive Catholic at a time when the Institutional Church is fondly reminiscing about Pre-Vatican II days, you can get to feeling pretty alone.

I continue to write out of gratitude for all the brave writers who have helped me feel less alone by putting their words on a page or on a screen.  I continue to write so that I, too, can remind people that we’re not alone. This means that I’ll continue to open myself up to reactions from people who don’t like what I have to say. That’s the price we pay for hitting “post” or for opening our mouths. It’s important to keep doing it anyway.

My Changing Reading Tastes and What It Means for My Writing

Over the past year, I’ve noticed a distinct change in my reading preferences. While Young Adult and speculative fiction (even better, both!) used to be my genres of choice, now I find myself more compelled to read memoir and other non-fiction genres. And while I used to regularly read literary fiction, now I sometimes bypass the general fiction category at used booksales altogether. It’s not that I’m not interested in realistic human stories anymore … it’s just that, if there’s a book about something that could actually happen … I’d rather read a book by someone that it actually happened to.

While memoir has always been on the margins of my reading tastes, I’ve hypothesized several reasons that I have a renewed interest in it now.

1. There’s a definite correlation between beginning my relationship with my husband almost three years ago and my interest in non-fiction. Although I’d been in love before, this was my first “serious” relationship, and I was hungry to see how other real people navigated this terrain. Not even six months into my marriage, I’m drawn to memoirs about lifelong partnerships and both successful and failed love. There are a lot of people who know this road better than I do.
2. I’ve also had a pretty strong shift in my internal world in the past several years. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that I’ve made a shift out of my internal world in the past several years. While I used to prefer to hide in my own imagination and would often choose its sanctuary over my real life, I’ve since become much more integrated into the real world. My reading taste seems to reflect this, although it was about two or three years behind my shift in consciousness.
3. For a lot of my life, I’ve needed or thought I needed to escape for one reason or another. Although everyone needs an escape once in a while, myself included, I’m much less prone to it these days. I think it’s because I like my life, and so I seek to read books that help me understand it more deeply, rather than that help me get away from it.
4. It may be that my genes are finally catching up with me. Although both my parents enjoy a good novel (especially a good sci-fi novel), they’re also strongly drawn to non-fiction. My dad devours biographies, while my mom, a nurse, seems to crack open books about health far more often than any of the hundreds of other books on her shelves (although she listens mostly to fiction audiobooks).
5. I may simply have OD’d on fiction. Although I’ve been picking up non-fiction about subjects that interest me (mostly religion and feminism) for years at used book sales, I haven’t actually read all that much of it. I often asked myself if I ever would get around to reading all that non-fiction when novels were so enticing to me. Well, perhaps I was more prescient than I thought, and I now find myself quite well-stocked for my increased non-fiction appetite!

While I still try to read across genres, and actually set something of a reading “schedule/system” to guarantee variety, I do wonder how or whether this new attraction to non-fiction will play out in my writing. Of course it makes sense to write within the genre that you read the most in — but right now, I have very little interest in writing non-fiction aside from journaling, blogging, and responding to requests to write articles. Still, the first book with my byline is not a novel but a collection of true stories from young adult Catholics — in essence, a collection of short memoirs. And my own short memoir-esque piece about being bisexual and Catholic is currently set for publication in two separate collections.

So although I have no immediate plans to write heavily within the non-fiction genre, I find myself wondering what might emerge after all this has settled in several years. I’ve always loved reading retellings, for example, but didn’t write my first retelling until about seven years after I began reading them, and it was a very loose retelling at that. Now, I’m working on a retelling of “Rumplestiltskin” with plans to retell “Rapunzel” during NaNoWriMo and, eventually I hope, “The Little Mermaid.” Does this mean a non-fiction book will be beating at the edges of my brain about ten years from now? I guess I’ll just wait and see, and enjoy all the writing and reading in the meantime.

Blogging and “platform”

In the September issue of Writer’s Digest, there’s an article by Nina Amir encouraging writers to “blog their book” — to post a blog with bite-size book content over time to develop a readership and, eventually, attract the attention of publishers. The article has a “hit two birds with one stone” approach, claiming you can “build your platform” AND write your book at the same time. Although she admits this works better for non-fiction, she encourages fiction writers to give it a try, too. I started wondering whether I should be posting more of my actual writing here, rather than just writing about my writing. Over at the She Writes community, Meghan Ward writes a counterargument, backing it up with the fact that books and blogs are different mediums and don’t easily translate one to the other, and that once you post something on the Internet, it can be easily stolen or plagiarized (that argument worries me less and seems a little self-centered … if it’s so hard to get noticed, why would it be any easier for someone who stole your work to succeed in your place? Without your passion for the subject, I suspect they’d give up before they became rich off your material.) Ultimately, Meghan echoes the more “tried and true” advice of using your blog to supplement your book, to build your platform, without actually using the exact same subject matter or narrative arc.

All of this has me reflecting on this blog and my “platform,” whether I even have one or not, and what my purposes are, ultimately, for writing here. Initially, I opened this blog because I felt I didn’t have the skills needed to build a website from scratch, and I wanted there to be a URL I could direct people to where they could see samples of my writing and that I did know a thing or two about word-smithing. So credibility was the one goal. But another goal was accountability. When I quit my traditional job to do freelance work full-time, I wanted it to be an opportunity for me to take some other big risks, too. I wanted to be published. I wanted to feel like a real writer. I imagined that if I stated my goals on this blog, the added sense of accountability would keep me persevering, even if only a couple of my friends were actually reading it. Until I had real “progress” to report, I filled space here with what I was learning about freelancing and info about opportunities for submissions and reflections on writing.

Ultimately, I did meet a lot of my goals — writing for publication, writing for a real audience, being recognized as a writer by the outside world. And now, it feels a little too “navel-gazy” to keep tracking my progress in that kind of way on this blog; I’m not sure the rest of the world really cares when I’ve sent manuscripts off, and what the results were; now, it’s more important that I just keep track of those things quietly and post here about them only in the breakthrough moments (a “good” rejection, or an acceptance).

Although I like having a place where I can reflect on my experience as a developing writer, I’m not enough of an expert on writing for “writing” to be a suitable “platform”; I know there are hundreds of writing blogs out there with real credentials, written by best-selling authors or by agents and editors who work with or for the big, established publishers. When I started this blog, what I had going for me wasn’t my expertise, but my inexperience as a newbie who was still (and is still) figuring this all out, a sort of, “If I can figure this out, you can too” approacah.

It’s no wonder that there’s a glut of writing blogs on the Internet–bloggers are all writers, after all. But there are also the blogs that offer a subject-matter platform instead–the child psychologist who has published parenting books, but who blogs about developmental psychology rather than writing. If you look at where and what I’ve actually published, Catholicism and sexuality seem to be my niche, but speculative fiction is my passion. Although the majority of my fiction does grapple with the same issues as my non-fiction, I get enough opportunity to blog my thoughts about religion at Young Adult Catholics. I could blog about speculative fiction, or the subgenre I love the most, which is retellings, and I would love the excuse to think and write more about fairy tales. I probably will, inevitably, since after wrapping up my second draft of Rumpled, I plan to plunge into planning my Rapunzel retelling, which is slated as my NaNoWriMo book for this year.

Here are a few things I do know: I’m not really interested in blogging for the sake of establishing a platform. Although there’s something validating in finding publication, my deepest passion still lays with my unpublished work. And I will continue to blog here, regardless of the direction in which this blog continues to evolve, because I like to do it, without getting hung up on whether it’s really serving any “purpose” to my career. Ultimately, that’s why I’ve been writing all along.

The Book is Out!

After mentioning Hungering and Thirsting for Justice so often in passing on this blog, I’m proud to say that it’s finally available for pre-order! Books will ship on September 15.

Hungering and Thirsting for Justice is a collection of ten true stories by young adult Catholics in their twenties and thirties. All of them address different social justice issues, including immigration, GLBTQ rights, the death penalty, abortion, women’s rights, and more. But these are not “sermons” about why one should believe a certain way. Instead, these are stories about how real people have been affected by these issues, and how their journey toward justice has been impacted by and intersects with Catholicism.

This is not a book that puts people or complex moral issues into easy categories. I don’t expect all our readers to agree with our writers, and I don’t think our writers expect that, either. I do hope that this book contributes to an understanding that real people are at the heart of “hot button issues” that get reduced to sound bytes in our culture, especially in an election season. And I hope that this book helps those who struggle to reconcile or integrate their stance on justice issues and their faith background to see that they are not alone.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.” – Matthew 5:6

Persistence = Publication

About four years ago, I wrote a personal essay about the experience of being bisexual and Catholic for a collection of stories by queer-identified Catholic women. The editor was in touch with me at the beginning of the process, but I didn’t hear much about the project as she shopped for a publisher. In the meantime, knowing that publication of the piece was not guaranteed, I also submitted it to Unruly Catholic Women Writers II, which accepted it. Earlier this year, I learned that Unruly is slated for publication by SUNY Press.

And earlier this week, I learned that the queer-themed Catholic women anthology (still pending a title, I think) has been accepted by PenUltimate Press.

Wow.

I immediately responded to the editor of the queer-themed anthology to let her know the piece had also been accepted elsewhere, and to offer to begin discussion about whether it could be offered for reprint so that it could appear in both places. I’m still waiting to hear back from Unruly‘s editor — but what a good problem to have!

More than anything, the experience has demonstrated what we’ve all heard as writers a hundred times: the difference between the published and the unpublished writers is persistence. After four years of silence, I’d all but written off the first anthology. Luckily, the editor heading up the project hadn’t — and thanks to her, we’ll have a much-needed addition to both Catholic and queer literature, with or without my essay included.

Learning on the Job: Book Promotion

With our book Hungering and Thirsting for Justice due for release next month, my co-editor and I recently received some distressing news. The booksellers that usually carry presenters’ books at the national November Call to Action conference will not be setting up a table in the exhibition hall this year. That means that our book won’t be available for sale throughout the duration of the conference, but only during times that we’re able to personally staff a table that will also be used by other presenters (which means that, even if we have the capacity to staff it throughout the conference, it would be unfair for us to dominate space others also need for selling their books.)

We’ll be having a conversation with the publisher soon to determine the best way to get the word out about the books and to sell the books without an official bookseller present. We’re talking about making buttons and business cards so that we can promote it throughout the conference even if the book itself can’t be on display the whole time. While I was initially a little devastated by the news, now I’m seeing that it will be a good opportunity for me.

You can hardly read anything about the writing industry these days that doesn’t stress the importance of self-promotion. The idea always makes me curl up a little bit inside. But I’m a writer, I want to protest, not a marketer!

Except that, nowadays, to be one, you need to learn to be both. And this is a good place to start for several reasons:

1. Since the book is an anthology, in addition to my wonderful co-editor, I also have ten talented writers who care about seeing this book succeed, and who will all have their own ideas and contacts;
2. We’ll be at the largest national gathering of progressive Catholics in the U.S. Most of our writers would identify themselves as progressive Catholics, and most of the stories in the book speak to that experience. In other words, we’ll be blessed with a particularly receptive audience;
3. The CTA community has fostered the co-editor, most of the writers, and me as we seek spiritual homes. Bringing this book back to that community feels like a tangible opportunity to say, “Thank you.” So not only will the community have an interest in it, but something of a personal investment as well.

Part of my squeamishness with self-promotion has to do with the fact that I don’t like to be sold to. I’m the type who won’t enter a store if it’s fairly empty, even if the contents greatly entice me, because I don’t want to be the focus of the sellers’ attention. Although I like independently owned, community-supported shops, I also appreciate the anonymity of big-box sellers. I often receive the highest possible I score on introvert-extrovert continuum tests.

But I’m continuously reminded that not everyone is like me. In fact, very few people are (only 4% of the population has the same Myers-Briggs profile as I do, for example). A lot of people like to be approached and helped while they’re shopping; many people appreciate learning more about something that is in line with their interests, and interacting directly with the creators of a product. I have to bear this in mind, and not carry around guilt that I’m “bothering” people when I set out to share news about something that is important to me.

This book is important to me — and no matter what happens, it has that in its favor. I’d love to hear comments from more veteran writers and self-promoters on the most graceful way to do this, as well as feedback from others about how they feel about being approached regarding something that may be of interest to them.