An Argument For Church From Someone Who Doesn’t Go

My father-in-law Jim recently passed away from cancer.  Several weeks before his death, my wife received a call that her dad had checked into hospice.  We began packing immediately and drove 800 miles through the night to North Carolina so that we could be sure to see him as soon as possible.  In addition to our emotional worries regarding Jim’s health, there were a lot of practical matters to consider:  Where would we stay?  I had to get back to work.  Would I rent a car or would we rent Megan one?  For how long?  At what financial cost?  Who would help Megan with our girls?

All we focused on was getting to the hospice to see Jim, and before we even had a chance to start doing the math and thinking about money, Jim’s wife called with the news that her Sunday school class had met.  Someone had an extra house outside of town that Megan and our girls could stay in indefinitely free of charge.  We arrived at the hospice, spent the day there, and then another member of this Sunday school class met us so that we could follow her out to the home we were being lent.  She did this after a full day’s work and the drive was at least thirty minutes out of her way, over an hour by the time she would get to her own house.  When we arrived at the home, the owner was already there inside cleaning it and changing the sheets.  Next, the two women took a grocery list Megan had been putting together and got ready to head to the store.  On their way out, they asked if we had any need of an extra car.  They paid for the groceries.  Everything that had just begun to hang over us had suddenly been taken care of by these  two women and the members of their Sunday school class.  My family, especially Megan, was free to concentrate on what was important, to spend time with Jim.  After I departed, this Sunday school group was in constant touch, offering to help, watching my girls, and just letting everyone know that they were around to love and help.

It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to church, and by that I don’t mean that my family doesn’t pray together, that we don’t talk about Jesus, or that I don’t read the Bible, but we haven’t been attending church as a family.  What transpired in the day or so that we all rushed off to North Carolina caused me to begin to think just how much we were up on our own up in New England.  We do have a growing group of friends, and I realize that it’s not just church folks who can rally around and help out those in need, but the kind people that were friends of Jim’s, those who came together as a part of Sunday school class, they all created for me one of the more convincing arguments I’ve experienced for church attendance.  I thank them for their example of Biblical love.   It’s an example I’ll be sure to try and put into practice myself.

What Casued You to Start Writing?

Around the year 2000, I felt like I had a crummy life.  I understand that this feeling of crumminess was very relative.  The world is full of people whose struggles were much deeper than mine.  I was divorced, an experience that caused for me to for a certain length of time to believe that God didn’t care much about what happened on the earth, or else He wasn’t about to do anything about what was right.  I didn’t believe other people’s promises and I didn’t believe my own word.  I went out to bars too much and woke up too many mornings exhausted.  I thought I was bummed out from getting divorced and because I was lonely, but upon reflection, I was too filled up with the depressant alcohol and suffering from not enough sleep.

I lived in an ugly cycle until I was sick enough of it to be moved to action.  I decided to run a marathon, move to someplace where I didn’t know anyone, and write a book.  Right, pretty random.  I thought myself a warrior of sorts.  I’d heard people talk in terms of running a marathon or writing a book as a kind of pinnacle of human achievement.  I read this book by Paulo Coelho called The Alchemist. It was a journey/adventure story and I thought I could go on one.  That was my move from Indiana to Charlotte, NC.  That I thought writing a book and running a marathon was such a unique achievement is kind of embarrassing now given the number of people I know who take on both experiences.  Go to any major city in the United States and you’ll see ten to forty thousand people run a marathon. I will say the marathon cleaned up my life.  I couldn’t keep being a person who ate bar food and drank beer 3-4 nights a week. If someone wants advice on how to deal with a divorce, I’d say to abstain from alcohol and exercise every day.

I can’t point to one event or idea that caused me to begin writing.  There were a couple impulses firing all at once.  I enrolled in the M.A. program at UNC Charlotte and got a degree in English Education.  I met a man named Dr. Sam Watson who loved to write.  I caught his fever.  He and Dr. Lil Brannon pushed me towards what is called the National Writing Project’s Summer Institute.  I didn’t want to give up two weeks of my summer, but in the end, the 6 credits persuaded me and the experience changed my life. I read Donald Murray’s Write to Learn and Stephen King’s On Writing. Both of those men made me feel as if writing a book was something I could to.  I didn’t think very hard about why I wanted to run or write.  I just thought both acts would be better than drinking and not sleeping.

During the summer institute, I found that I liked it when most of my days began with writing followed by reading with lots of conversation mixed in.  The world often annoys me with its fluffy conversations:  Nice weather we’re having? Did you see the Bears got Peppers?  I heard gas will go up to $3 this summer.  Of course I say many of those very things, but I like something more complex too.  The people at the summer institute—those I was reading and writing with—helped my mind to open up and relax.  That summer, I was slated to go back to Vance High School, where school started at 7:15 and I taught up to 180 students.  As much as I wanted to make good on my personal promise to start writing, I knew myself and knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep it if I kept my current job, and so I quit and got a job working where school started at 8:30 and where I would teach 100 students.

As fall came round, every morning I sat down and tried to write down everything I could remember about my divorce.  If I would have known more about what I was doing, I would have called my pages a memoir, but I didn’t have much understanding about that word.  That’s another embarrassing admission for an English teacher to make, but let’s be honest, I got into the profession to coach basketball.  I changed a few names and called what I wrote fiction.  I wrote a page or two a day, tried to stick somewhat to the subject of divorce, and in less than a year, I had about 300 pages.  Even I could see that what I had written was not a book.  It was mostly a long summary with very short or nonexistent scenes.  I knew I needed help, and I decided that I could get some in an MFA program for creative writing.

I want to leave you with the title of an essay I really enjoyed. I think if you have grieved deeply, or if you liked the first Rocky movie, or have run long distances, you ought to track down Jeremy Collins’s essay “Shadow Boxing.”  It originally appeared in the Georgia Review and I came across it in the 2009 Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses collection. Also, if you’d care to comment, I’d love you to tackle the title question of this entry:  Why do you write?  Or perhaps, why don’t you?

How Would I Improve Public Education?

How Would I Improve Public Education?

Exhausted and frustrated, five years ago I quit public education.  In the years that have followed, I’ve tried to think about ideas which might have improved the situations within which I worked.  I mean for this to be a catalyst for conversation, and I’m happy to have these ideas refuted and/or debated.  I realize I am a person offering suggestions for a field I have departed, but the students in my writing courses are often future teachers, and I am in continued professional conversation with those who work in the public schools

  1. All of the professional staff in the school should be in the classroom teaching students. It’s too bad that just about anyone who displays ambition in public education, anyone who wishes to get a substantial raise in pay, must leave the classroom.  If all administrators (from assistant principals to superintendents) were required to teach, class sizes could be reduced and those who have become administrators because of their dislike for teaching or working with students might be driven from the field.
  2. Decision making power should be given to teachers with the most experience. How should money be spent?  What meetings should be held for what purpose?  What should the curriculum be?  These are questions that teachers should be working together to answer.  When I taught in Charlotte, all of my classes had over thirty students enrolled and in one class many of the students had previously failed the course.  I had a thick grammar manual and literature anthology neither of which was a very effective tool for engaging students who were not very interested in reading and writing.  How much did those textbooks cost?  What else might I have done with the money?  Too often those who had advanced degrees in something besides English Education were driving my curriculum.
  3. Teachers should be the highest paid employees in education. In many of the places I worked, it was too easy to get the job of teacher.  Although some of the smartest and most admirable people I have ever met are teachers, I also worked with people who frequently missed school, wouldn’t bother the students if they didn’t bother them, and were in education because they couldn’t find anything better.  There were times when the school year began and the school was still looking for a warm body with a degree to fill an empty position.  Teachers are often not paid and treated with the respect accorded to other professions, and so those professions continue to draw the smartest and most dedicated people.
  4. School should be process and project oriented. Standardized tests murder students’ passion for learning.  What rewarding job is like taking a multiple choice test?  The more school requires students to sit quietly in their seats working their way through multiple choice tests, the worse off its students will be.

These are ideas I hope to develop, refine, or altogether change, and I’d appreciate your perspective.

Best,

Bill

How Do I Find Time to Write?

“The dawntime is precious; the world is quiet.  No one will interrupt you; you are rested and ready.”  –William Stafford

When I’m asked how I find time to write, I begin my answer by talking about my wife.  Because I try to write everyday, at least a page, that means that she spends at least the first three hours of everyday by herself taking care of our two kids while I’m holed up in the basement talking to myself and zipping away on the keys.  If I were a father with no wife, I am sure I would write much less.  I’ve heard of writers who practically resented their families because of the time it stole from their writing, but I write much more a married man with children than I ever did single.  There was too much time spent late-night in bars, too many sleepy and lazy mornings.  I work best when I am working off the foundation that my family provides.  I work best when I know that if I don’t write first thing in the morning, I probably won’t write.

When I first decided that I wanted to write, I re-arranged my life so that I could do it.  I taught at Vance High School in Charlotte where classes began at 7:15 in the morning.  I quit that job and began teaching at Weddingtion Middle School where school started at 8:30 and I knew the janitor got there at 6:00 to open the doors.  That gave me at least two good hours of work before my day actually began.  Back then I thought 5:30 an ungodly hour to get up, but I wanted to write more than I wanted to sleep.  Now I get up at 4:45 three days a week when I am teaching.  I’ve decided that I like to write more than I like to play golf, more than I like to watch sitcoms or see the New York Knicks play seventy of their games.  I’ve read that those who read on the web like bulletted lists.  Here’s my list, in order of importance, of how I think I’m able to write:

  • I have my wife’s blessing to do it first thing
  • I get up early
  • I try to write everyday
  • I know that work leads to more work.  What feels like work today is a little closer to fun the next.

Note:

My novel, Love on the Big Screen, is forthcoming with Cherokee McGhee press in January of 2011.  If you’re on Facebook, I’d appreciate it if you’d become a fan of the press and send me a message hello.

Comment on Potential Covers

Vote for your favorite cover for LOVE ON THE BIG SCREEN.

My novel, Love on the Big Screen, is forthcoming from Cherokee McGhee Press in January of 2011.  Right now, the press has posted three drafts for potential covers.  If you’re interested in voting for the one you like best and leaving feedback on them all, follow these instructions:

  • If you’re on Facebook, become a fan of Cherokee McGhee Publishing.
  • You can reach that link here:  http://bit.ly/c04cmM
  • Click on the “photo” tab at the top of the page.  You’ll see a window there for my book, Love on the Big Screen.  If you click on that, three covers will come up.
  • Click on each cover and leave comments on what you think.  Don’t feel like you have to be all positive.  I know I would love some blunt criticism, and I think my publisher would too. Hope you are well!
  • Love to have you as a facebook “friend” too if you’re willing.