All This Time I Was Hoping for Something

a Tumblr scrapbook by Lisa Ann Cockrel

[lacockrel]

coming & going

Hey Friends, 

I’ve been part of the Festival of Faith & Writing community for 18 years, and it’s been a great honor to direct the Festival through the last three years of transition and growth from a biennial event into a fully fledged center for academic research and public engagement. And this summer I’m leaving my work at the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. 

You can read my opening and closing comments from the 2018 Festival below. Together they express my deepest hopes for the future of the Festival and the CCFW’s initiatives more broadly—that we be a community of writers and readers always growing in our capacity not just to tell stories well, but to listen well. 

In a few weeks I’ll take up a new post as the residential teaching fellow at Bennington College in Vermont where I’ll work with the brilliant Manuel Gonzalez and Melissa Febos as I complete my MFA in creative nonfiction and a book project. And then I’ll be keeping my ears open for new opportunities to curate spaces—in person, in print, online, via multimedia productions—for writers and readers and artists of all stripes to grapple together with what it means to be alive and kicking at the darkness. 

Yours,  Lisa @lacockrel

2018 Festival of Faith & Writing: Opening and Closing Remarks The following are the scripts I wrote; on-stage delivery varied slightly. 

>> opening remarks /  Thursday, April 12 / noon (before Kwame Alexander)

Hello. My name is Lisa Ann Cockrel. I’m the director of the Festival and on behalf of the Calvin Center for Faith and Writing, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the 2018 Festival of Faith and Writing. 

I’ve suggested before that we could call this the Festival of Faith and Reading, because whether we are novelists or bloggers, book club members or teachers, we are all readers here today. This year, I’d like to encourage us to further expand our sense of this gathering and think of it as a Festival of Faith and Listening. 

Before we were the readers and writers we are today, we were listeners. As children, we listened as our parents, older brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, teachers, read aloud to us. And we fell under the sway of the rhythm of words, under the sway of stories. We listened to the people who cared about us—our first real friends—tell us about this new-to-us world. 

During the two years since we last gathered together, listening has been in short supply. It seems like everyone’s scrambling to have something to say, to respond with their quick take, to maintain a platform or foster a brand or increase followers. Friendship has quite literally been commodified. And in algorithm-driven echo chambers, we are increasingly talking to ourselves or people pre-determined to agree with us.

If you like you this movie, you might also like these movies… If you like this book, you might also like these books… If you like this person, you might also like these people…

But here at the Festival, we’re trying to mix it up. And we encourage you to mix it up. Yes, you’re gonna find a lot in our program about honing the craft of writing and hustling hard in publishing. If you want to be a published writer, put your back into those things absolutely. But the real beating heart of this gathering is in the poetry readings. And in the talks in which writers share the stories that animate their work. Dearly beloved, what we are really gathered here to do is to sway together to stories. Again. This is a celebration of life. This is a Festival. Of Faith & Writing. Of Faith & Reading. Of Faith & Listening.  

A few weeks ago, I took my niece to the finals of the Louder than a Bomb Youth Poetry Slam competition in Chicago where she’s a senior in high school. The Auditorium Theater, this beautiful Louis Sullivan palace just on the other side of Lake Michigan from here, was packed to the rafters with thousands of people, a DJ spinning music from the stage, and kids who were there to hear their friends recite poetry danced in the aisles. Let me repeat that: kids were there to see their friends recite poetry. And as the host does at all Louder than a Bomb bouts, the MC began the proceedings by calling out, “The point is not the points!” and all the people said: “The point is the POETRY!”

The point is not the points, the point is the … poetry.

The energy is always incredible at Louder than a Bomb, because they listen hard to each other. They lean in, TO. EACH. OTHER. I don’t have a DJ lined up for us this weekend, but I’d like us to emulate the spirit of that gathering. Let’s embrace the opportunity to be together IRL this weekend. Let’s see each other as people, not contacts or followers. Let’s listen to each other. Let’s defy the algorithms. Let’s mess up the algorithms! Let’s dance in aisles. Let’s connect with old friends and make new ones. The points is not the points, it’s not the platforms or the publishing, the point is the poetry. The point is the people. The point in the people sitting to your right and your left, in front of you and behind you.  

And without further ado, it’s my pleasure to introduce one of the people sitting behind me, a bestselling, two-time Newbery Honor-winning author, and National Book Award Finalist, who also happens to be a longtime and beloved professor at Calvin College and co-chair of our English Department. I know him as the famous guy on the other side of my office wall. You know him as Gary Schmidt.

 >> closing remarks / Saturday, April 14 / 6pm (after Bill McKibben) 

Friends, Readers. Thank you for being here at the 2018 Festival of Faith and Writing. I want to echo Jennifer and Jane’s thanks to the Calvin Center for Faith and Writing’s faculty fellows and staff and also add to it our gratitude to the two of them for their leadership at the CCFW. The team here at the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing hosts these gatherings, but the guests bring the party, and you have brought the party indeed this year.

We are grateful to you for your thoughtful questions, patience, good humor, righteous anger, and helping hands.

Earlier today I overheard one of our featured speakers—a poet who travels around the world reading and teaching—remark with gratitude how refreshing it is to be in a place where you don’t have to get past cynicism to connect with an audience. The audience here is ready to listen and engage with candor and enthusiasm and heart. Thank you.

When we set up this stage, our campus’s building services asked us if we had anyone on the keynote roster who would need an ADA ramp and we said no, but we wanted them to set it up anyway. They kinda looked confused and we explained that we want everyone in our audience to see this stage and know they have access to it, one way or another. 

It’s a small thing. It’s almost nothing. We have more work to do to make the Festival more accessible and welcoming to a diverse community of readers and writers. And we thank those of you who love this community for engaging that project with candor and enthusiasm and heart as well. My friend Chris Smit who heads an amazing organization called DisArt says, “Access is process, not a product.” We’re in process and we’re listening.

It’s my hope that over the last few days you’ve listened you’ve heard stories that have delighted and challenged you, that compelled you to seek out new conversation partners, new perspectives, new authors and new books, alongside revisiting wise, longtime literary companions.

As you travel home tonight—or tomorrow or Monday, whenever you’re able to leave—riding through, riding out, riding from Winter Storm Xanto, this April blizzard they are calling historic, please be safe. We want you to come back in two years to tell us your stories, to listen alongside us to old poems, new poems, perhaps some poems you’ve written, to wait in line for the shuttles and boxed meals and coffee. We are not the same without you.

And by God’s grace, none of us, including the Festival will be the same in the future, thanks in large part to the friends we’ve made in this place, the stories we’ve heard here. And the stories we will hear here in the future. We look forward to gathering together again with you in 2020. Go in peace, friends.

[lanostalgiedujour-blog]

[subve]

Bande à part (1964)

[wickedpligrim]

a cool look

[lacockrel]

The entrance into ecstasy is surrender.

"It occurred to me then that seeing a (snake) handler in the ecstasy of an anointing is not like seeing religious ecstasy at all. The expression seems to have more to do with Eros than with God, in the same way that sex often seems to have more to do with death than with pleasure. The similarity is more than coincidence, I thought. In both sexual and religious ecstasy, the first thing that goes is self. The entrance into ecstasy is surrender. Handlers talk about receiving the Holy Ghost. But when the Holy Ghost is fully come upon someone like Gracie McAllister, the expression on her face read exactly the opposite—as though someone, or something, were bing violently taken away from her. The paradox of Christianity, one of the many of which Jesus speaks, is that only in losing ourselves do we find ourselves, and perhaps that's why photos of the handlers so often seem to be portraits of loss." —Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain

[lacockrel]

Seeing comes before words.

"The visual arts have always existed within a certain preserve; originally this preserve was magical or sacred.  But it was also physical. It was the place, the cave, the building, in which, or for which, the work was made. The experience of art, which at first was the experience of ritual, was set apart from the rest of life—precisely in order to be able to exercise power over it. Later the preserve of art became a social one. It entered the culture of the ruling class, whilst physically it was set apart and isolated in their palaces and houses. During all of this history the authority of art was inseparable from the particular authority of the preserve.

What the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art and to remove it—or, rather, to remove its images which they reproduce—from any preserve. For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power.

Yet very few people are aware of what has happened because the means of reproduction are used nearly all of the time to promote the illusion that nothing has changed except that the masses, thanks to reproductions, can now begin to appreciate art as the cultured minority once did. Understandably, the masses remain uninterested and skeptical.

If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power. Within it we could begin to define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate. (Seeing comes before words.) Not only personal experience, but also the essential historical experience of our relation to the past: that is to say the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives, of trying to understand the history of which we can become the active agents.

The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose. This touches upon questions of copyright for reproduction, the ownership of art presses and publishers, the total policy of public art galleries and museums. As usually presented, these are narrow professional matters. One of the aims of this essay has been to show that what is really at stake is much larger. A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history. This is why—and this is the only reason why—the entire art of the past has now become a political issue."

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)

[etr-gu]

The journalist David Carr, who diedsuddenly last week, was the younger brother of John Carr, who is a cherished colleague of ours at Georgetown.

The Jesuit priest James Martin, too, is a cherished colleague of a kind, working the seam where religion and society meet from America House and...

[robertogreco]

The way we best show our love to the whole world is… to love with a particular passion some little part of it.

William C. Placher (via a comment on “think locally, act globally”)

[etr-gu]

In his column for First Things, the late Rev. Richard John Neuhaus used to relish pointing out articles that contradicted each other in the same day’s New York Times – evidence, in his highly rhetorical presentation, that the Gray Lady’s left hand didn’t know what her right hand was doing.

Myself, I relish finding pieces in the

[sarazarr-deactivated20160519]

By shifting our practice of friendship to a more committed, honored form of love, we can witness—above all—to a kingdom in which the ties between spiritual siblings are the strongest ties of all. Marriage, Jesus tells us, will be entirely transformed in the future, barely recognizable to those who know it in its present form (Matt. 22:30). Bonds of biology, likewise, are relativized in Jesus’ world (Mark 3:31-35). But the loves that unite Christians to each other across marital, racial, and familial lines are loves that will last. More than that, they are loves that witness that Christ’s love is available to all. Not everyone can be a parent or a spouse, but anyone and everyone can be a friend.

Wesley Hill in current Christianity Today piece on friendship.

(This is one of the theological differences between me and my Mormon friends here in Utah. As I understand it, they believe that marriage and family are forever—that the family unit as it is on earth more or less continues in the afterlife. New Testament seems clear on idea that these bonds have a finite life span and a societal purpose in this life, but not beyond. I’d be interested in discussing this over a non-caffeinated, non-alcoholic beverage sometime with any LDS friends reading this!)

[chromjuwelen]

1965 International Harvester Scout 800 Advertisement Sports Afield September 1965 (by SenseiAlan)

[newyorker]

The message of all of this was something beyond the mere maintenance of law and order: it’s difficult to imagine how armored officers with what looked like a mobile military sniper’s nest could quell the anxieties of a community outraged by allegations regarding the excessive use of force. It revealed itself as a raw matter of public intimidation.

Jelani Cobb reports from Ferguson. (via newyorker)

[lacockrel]

America Is Not for Black People

"By all accounts, Brown was One Of The Good Ones. But laying all this out, explaining all the ways in which he didn't deserve to die like a dog in the street, is in itself disgraceful. Arguing whether Brown was a good kid or not is functionally arguing over whether he specifically deserved to die, a way of acknowledging that some black men ought to be executed.

To even acknowledge this line of debate is to start a larger argument about the worth, the very personhood, of a black man in America. It's to engage in a cost-benefit analysis, weigh probabilities, and gauge the precise odds that Brown's life was worth nothing against the threat he posed to the life of the man who killed him. It's to deny that there are structural reasons why Brown was shot dead while James Eagan Holmes—who on July 20, 2012, walked into a movie theater and fired rounds into an audience, killing 12 and wounding 70 more—was taken alive.

To ascribe this entirely to contempt for black men is to miss an essential variable, though—a very real, American fear of them. They—we—are inexplicably seen as a millions-strong army of potential killers, capable and cold enough that any single one could be a threat to a trained police officer in a bulletproof vest. There are reasons why white gun's rights activists can walk into a Chipotle restaurant with assault rifles and be seen as gauche nuisances while unarmed black men are killed for reaching for their wallets or cell phones, or carrying children's toys."

--from America Is Not for Black People by Greg Howard

[roxanegay]

At last night’s reading, during the Q & A, an older woman recounted a story of how she once couldn’t get a credit card because she didn’t have a husband. I think she said the year was 1969. I thought about her story all night and kept thinking, “May I be worthy of the work you have done to make my...

[lacockrel]

[ayjay-deactivated20161206]

The new regime is not totalitarian, fascist, socialist, capitalist, conservative, or liberal, according to the accepted and common definitions of those terms. It is not even adequately described as corporatist, although corporatism is very much at home within it. The “pink police state” is not a police state in the sense that George Orwell would be familiar with, but one in which a militarized, national policing apparatus is woven into the fabric of trillions of transactions online and off. Nor is it a “pinko commie” regime in the sense of enforcing “political correctness” out of total allegiance to Party; rather, it enforces the restrictions and permissions doled out by its sense of “clean living.” To invoke Michel Foucault again, ours is an age when governance is inseparable from hygiene in the minds of the elite that rules over both the private and public sector. To them, everything is theoretically a health issue.

James Poulos (via ayjay)

[wesleyhill]

roommates forever

“For most of our adult lives, Rebecca and I lived in houses full of roommates and loved it. Before our most recent move, we rented a rambling five-bedroom house with four friends. When we started talking about getting married, we realized our biggest fear was that we’d leave these important kinds of friendships behind and end up living in what she jokingly called a “love/torture cave of nuclear family loneliness.” Neither of us wanted that. It turned out two of our closest friends (Rebecca and one member of that couple had gone to college together) felt similarly and we decided to do something different and move in all together. At the time we didn’t know anyone else who had done such a thing, though later we discovered a friend of a friend living in another co-op house less than a mile away, and she has helped us figure this out. We found a house we liked and made an offer. A couple days after we closed, before we’d even painted the walls and moved in, they found out they were expecting. …Yes, all four of us are on the deed and, yes, we share the 30-year mortgage and food and maintenance expenses. No, there’s no division of the house into separate sections. And no, all four of us are not all having sex with each other. (Why do many people assume that if adults are willing to share a kitchen, they probably also want to share a bed?) We are just two couples who plan to live together and raise children in one household, hopefully for decades. …While most people take for granted that dual-parent households usually have more resources to deal with life’s challenges than single parents, why stop there? By forming a household with friends who share our values, we realized we could build an even stronger system of support than we would have in separate homes. The model is not even new; it’s an echo of raising children with the support of an extended family, but with less drama, I expect.”

— Two Couples, One Mortgage. Via Leah Libresco — whose other related links and comments you should read!

[lacockrel]

That last sentence is naive as all get out (and the dotted line between the kitchen and bedroom, happily, should not be dismissed), but I love this spirit and vision.

[theparisreview]

“All the literati keep at least one imaginary friend.”

Joseph Brodsky (via theparisreview)

[midnxght]