Wrestling with the writer's life

On my morning walk down the sleepy staircase in our new Pennsylvania house, my heart jumps at a clacking sound. Forgetting for a moment that I live on a thoroughfare shared equally by motorcycles, semis, and plain people going to church, I wonder whether something has gotten inside the house a neighborhood dog, maybe, rooting through the kitchen trash. But then I catch my breath and remember: It is just the clacking of Amish and Mennonite buggy wheels, passing feet from the front door. Clack, clack, clack.

I like Pennsylvania. It represents only a subtle departure from my childhood home in Upstate New York. I am still in the Northeast among kind, country people who know how to find the bulk food store and don’t fret about their grammar. I knew Mennonites in my childhood—one friend even let me try on her traditional dress and cap—and found myself not altogether different from them. My own upbringing was agrarian and homespun. I recall scenarios from my childhood: singing four-part harmony hymns, canning, baking, and even avoiding higher education for the sake of wifehood. As an adolescent I spent a good deal of mental energy wrestling because I believed my deep desire to become a writer somehow opposed itself to the lifestyle that had reared me, and which I had gladly chosen.

I’m telling you all this to explain why I want to have Julia Spicher Kasdorf over for dinner. Kasdorf, a poet raised in the Mennonite tradition and currently a professor at Penn State University, tiptoed into my brain when I found one of her works, The Body and the Book, on a library shelf. This series of essays describes Kasdorf’s Pennsylvania youth and the consequences of her choice to write about the Mennonite life. While I read them, I can’t help but remember a scene from my own life in which a friend pointedly asked me, “You’re so smart. Why can’t you drive a tractor?” And another instance, just before I made the choice to enroll in a classical liberal arts college to study literature: “Why in the world would a woman need to learn Greek?” And many other sensitive cases in which people told me, “Don’t write down what I just said. I don’t want to read it in a book someday.”

If you think of the Pennsylvania counties like a huge rolled-out crust, my pie touches Kasdorf’s right at the edge. And when I started reading her book, I felt like she was writing about my own struggle to reconcile the simple life with the pursuit of academics. She mixes the real stuff of quilts and buggies with the jargon I learned from the abstruse, red, literary criticism textbook that almost killed me in college. When I used the book, the edges frayed. By the time my even more literary husband used it, it started falling apart like a braised brisket in the fourth hour of cooking. Since our marriage, we have wrestled the questions about literary balance together, always guided by the belief that in God’s kingdom, every vocation matters and deserves celebration. None, even the invisible world of writing, is truly impractical. It is not every day you read about a Christian fighting the same battle. And one that is still alive and working only an hour away? That, for us,is unheard of. Those people you have to invite to dinner. You would be crazy not to.