Transcript for Episode 23
Elise:
My guest today is Jessica Mesman. Jessica is a writer and editor, and if you've read her work, you might also say she's a spiritual companion through unlit spaces, a voice of reckoning and of relief, a Pilgrim journeying through the ruins and artifacts of faith and culture showing you the life and art waiting to be uncovered. Her book Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship in Letters, coauthored with Amy Andrews Alznauer, won the 2014 Christopher Award for literature that affirms the highest values of the human spirit. She writes regularly for US Catholic, and her essays have appeared in Lit Hub, Elle, Vox, America, and Christianity Today. She was a writer for and general editor of Image Journal’s blog, Good Letters, and served as editor and host of Image’s podcast. Jessica founded the award-winning blog Sick Pilgrim, and she co-founded the conference Trying to Say God: Reenchanting the Catholic Literary Imagination. Jessica, welcome.
Jessica:
Thank you so much.
Elise:
So I first encountered your writing years ago when a friend of mine gave me Love and Salt. And my first thought was, how did I not meet this woman? Because our time in Pittsburgh overlapped. And I was really sorry about that fact. And I also recognized in your writing a kindred spirit on a lot of levels, but not the least of which was this real identification with place and the way that place shapes us physically, psychologically, socially, and spiritually. And you do write about Pittsburgh some in Love and Salt, but the place that you keep coming back to is New Orleans. can you describe what it was like growing up in New Orleans?
Jessica:
Yeah, I mean, I was really fortunate to grow up there, because it's magic, and you're just steeped in a sort of enchanted religious environment that doesn't exist anywhere else that I know of, at least in the United States. You know, your life is ordered to the liturgical year, whether or not you're Catholic. And pretty much everyone is Catholic. Even, we used to say, even the Baptists are Catholic. My grandmother was Baptist, and she called herself Batholic. there's this real, I don't know, fluidity among the Christian traditions. There wasn't this dividing wall between Catholicism and Protestantism for me, growing up. It was just all kind of part of the stew, along with voodoo traditions, superstition, Mardi Gras parades with Greek gods on the floats. So just kind of growing up in that, I think it was so important to my imagination and that even though, you know, I didn't grow up in a family of intellectuals or readers. I’m the first person in my family to go to graduate school and only the second to go to college. So I think it just awakened some kind of an intellectual interest in the imagination and religion.
So that's the first thing I would say.
Elise:
Yeah, and I think that that idea that your imagination was brought alive by a place is so important for a life of faith. That imagination actually is crucial to kind of thinking about our faith lives. Do you have other reasons why you think New Orleans won't let you go, or to ask the question another way, why you don't want to let go of New Orleans in your thinking?
Jessica:
Well, primarily it must be because it's where my mother was born and raised in where she's buried. So I have this deep connection to the place as the home of my mother and the place that I feel most connected to her. But I also am really interested in the idea of a place having a sort of presiding spirit or character, which is, you know, comes from the Latin genius loci. I've been looking into the idea that certain places have unique qualities, not just in terms of their geography, but in how they impact our imaginations and our character when we live there. Which, I came to this conclusion because I went through this really strange obsession with 1970s British horror movies about, yeah, about rural religion and its connection to rural landscape and how, when those traditions are forgotten, somehow, the land carries on the tradition, even without the people. So you can still offend the tradition of a place even when the people aren't practicing it anymore. So that gets into, you know, a lot of pagan religion, and the idea that there's a God or a deity in charge of a place.
But I kind of like thinking about it in those terms, because I've moved so much and I've written and so much about feeling disconnected from the land. And I wanted to really deliberately try to reconnect with the places that I've been moving to. And I mean, I move like every two years, just because, I don't know why. I mean, I think I was cursed with an academic itinerant lifestyle. And I never end up getting back to New Orleans. I just keep relocating to random places across the country. And they have more often than not been rural because that's where arts communities are, and liberal arts colleges.
You know, so trying very deliberately to uncover the character of a land, because that's kind of done for you in New Orleans. When you grow up in that area, you don't have to look very far for history or religious tradition. But I've found that a lot of the places I moved lacked that kind of imaginative excitement for me because it wasn't quite as obvious. So I've been very deliberate about trying to uncover it and reconnect with the land in any way that I can, or examine, through my writing, the ways that certain places have changed me by living there and to appreciate the ways that they've changed me and shaped me. Not just through relationships with people, but just from living on a certain plot of earth.
One of the readings that really inspired me to do that as well—I mean, it's not just all this pagan stuff and weird folk horror from England—but was Laudato si. And when I wrote a very in depth feature story, reported feature story about religious sisters, Catholic religious sisters in America who have been at the forefront of the green movement and who have been pioneers of green theology and have reinvented their orders in order to reconnect with the land where their congregations are living, really taken it upon themselves to do the work to reconnect the people in those communities with the land. And I realized that it was a very Catholic thing to do when I read Laudato si, and I saw all of the references that Pope Francis used throughout Catholic history, that it wasn't just the pagans that wanted to connect with the land. It's also our duty to understand our connection to the land and to foster a relationship with land. Otherwise, ecology is doomed when we lose that relationship and neglect to understand our dependence on where we live, you know, everything goes out the window, and we're seeing the effects of that.
I mean, I think for a long time I was writing about home because I was just dreadfully homesick and grieving, but I've gone down all these other rabbit holes and found that it's a much deeper, interconnected problem. And there's nothing I love more than, like, trying to figure out a really arcane problem, which is why I'm Catholic.
Elise:
Exactly. How many hairs can you split?
Jessica:
Right. And it's also, you know, that's an essayist for you. So yeah.
Elise:
All of that is so great. And I have so many thoughts about it, and maybe the first one, just your emphasis on relationality, and that relationality, it's material, it's bodily, it's interpersonal, and it's also immaterial, spiritual, imaginative—that the two things are necessarily intwined. And I think that that connection is sometimes broken and cordoned off in our discourse. We tend to think of home and place in these really evocative but overly spiritualized terms sometimes. And we forget that connection to the way a place where you grew up smells and, like, what it is took for you to walk to your bus stop, or whether you had city water or well water—all of those kinds of things really influence a sense of place.
And when you were referencing Pope Francis's Laudato si—I'm reading a book right now by the theologian Douglas Christie called The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology. And he's really trying to yoke a contemporary ecological move movement with monastic traditions, like the earliest ascetic traditions and the Christian west, primarily on exactly what you're discussing, that those monks and nuns went to the desert and were shaped by that physical place. And that is what gave, them a theology. So, so I’m curious, what would you like to see more of in contemporary Christian discourse or spiritual writing about home and place? What are some words, language, ideas that you would like to lift up for us to be writing about, thinking about, imagining more?
Jessica:
Oh, that's a good question. I think I'd go back to this idea of a place having a prevailing spirit. I know a lot of Catholics would shy away from that terminology, but for us, the prevailing spirit of any land is going to be Christ. So how do you find Christ present in that landscape? And I mean, granted, my idea of what and who Christ is, is pretty expansive, but I think if we overlook the inherent spirituality of the earth and creation, then we're missing a dynamic of Christ that is essential to our faith, and I'd love to see more writing on that. I also think you see a lot of resurgence of back to the land and people gardening in their front yards instead of having grass, and that's all great. These tangible projects you can do to restore your little plot of earth, you know, around you and to reconnect to it. But I think that we need to think more about how we are personally being changed by those actions. I think we see it too much as us working on the earth, and we're not looking at the reverse. We're not looking at the earth working on us. And that is a spiritual process.
Elise:
That's really beautifully put. It’s the discipline, too, it's attentiveness. And it's also humility, right? Like this closeness to the earth’s humus. And you have to allow yourself to be changed, which is scary for anyone.
Jessica:
And I mean, if you’re a novice gardener you learn that in your first season, you know, you learned that the earth is going to teach you how to garden, really. You're not going to be able to just read a bunch of books and go out there and construct a perfect specimen. You're going to have to engage in some kind of relationship with your land. So it's valuable, but if we don't commit ourselves to contemplation of that process and really think about how we've been changed and what we've learned—and not of our own will. I think it's a, it's a mystical approach for sure. It's a contemplative approach.
Elise:
You know, we're talking about a prevailing spirit of the place, and you mentioned that for Christians, we have to be seeing Christ in these places. And of course you made me think of that quote of Flannery O'Connor's that always gets trotted out at this moment, that the South is Christhaunted. But actually, I'm just interested in this concept of haunting generally. I mean, you've written about ghosts and spirits and haunting, and this is a really resonant concept, I think, with a lot of people, even if they may want to shut it down really quickly. And I wonder too, that you mentioned that New Orleans is always going to be placed because your mother was born there, you lived with your mother there, and she's buried there. So why is haunting and allowing yourself to be haunted by love, really, as much as by pain, important in a Christian thinking, really?
Jessica:
So not to take your question too literally, but I have always found a kind of therapeutic experience in watching scary movies, but only a specific kind. So, like, psychological horror, religious horror, stuff like The Exorcist, which is dreadfully terrifying, but also a deeply, deeply religious experience to watch. But I also love horror movies that explicitly deal with grief. And there are so many. Horror, to me, is the genre that deals with grief best, because grief is just a much more raw and animal experience than we often are shown in more polite genres. Grief is not polite.
And so to watch a film, for example, like The Babadook, which is one of the best examinations of what grief really feels like to me, a movie like that helps me to see my experience reflected back to me in a way that makes me feel less alone and less crazy. I don't want to spoil it for someone who hasn't seen it, but it's been out for a really long time, so it's your loss if you haven't seen it. You have a family that is grieving and that grief manifests itself in a monster that they end up finding a way to just barely tame. And that is my reading of the film. So that's sort of my literary interpretation of it. You might have a different one if you watch it. But that is really powerful to me in that you have to accept that when you have experienced a personal tragedy and lost someone who ordered your world, like your mother, that grief is never leaving you. So you have to find a way to just barely tame it. But to keep it near you is also to keep that person alive in your memory. To have that grief die and leave you would be to lose what you have left of that person. And whether or not that is a responsible or healthy emotion to feel, it's a reality. You know, you might go through years of therapy to think that you need to let go of your grief and move on. But I think that holding it in tension is what makes life bearable for me. And horror movies and horror literature are comfortable in that tension, and showing what it really is, what it really feels like.
I also think I'm drawn to that genre because it's very much a way of stripping away masks. Horror is just continually finding something else under another layer, under another layer. Detective fiction is the same for me. I love both of them, wanting to get down to the essential core of the really real in a movie like Poltergeist, which is my favorite movie of all time for so many reasons, not the least of which is, Jo Beth Williams reminds me so much of my mother in that movie that sometimes when I watch it I feel like I'm with my mother again. But you get to the real foundation of what it means to be family, of what a mother is willing to do to save her family. And she's even willing to die. She's willing to go into that light that is so terrifying to everyone else. She's willing to go through that, like, hero's journey process and come back out on the other side with her family intact. Those sorts of narratives show us what that really looks like in this really extreme way.
And I'm just drawn to that, because to lose somebody is a horror. And the world feels unreal and the world—and grief so often feels like fear, that those things are just intimately connected to me. So that is a very convoluted answer to your question.
Elise:
No, not at all, not at all, actually, because I liked the revision of our language of grief that you have given us, that it feels like fear, it feels like horror, and yet it's also the monster that you need to keep with you. And maybe, as you said, maybe you will one day let it go, but that's its own kind of loss that you have to work through. You know, when I moved back to Pittsburgh, I was so excited to do that, because I too had just been wanting to get home. And when I moved back, the shock for me is that it didn’t feel like home. And I was just grieving for a whole year, and I saw ghosts of myself everywhere, and I hated them, and I wanted to exorcise them.
And then finally I realized, they're just always going to be here. I have to, it's, to use your language, put them in tension with myself, and that will be who I am from now on. And I think that sometimes Christians jump really quickly to the, well, you can get over it, or you can move on, or there's something better, focus on the positive. Like, we have an eternal reward. And those things all may be true, but we can't always just jump to that “get over it place.” And I wonder, you know, what has been useful to you in kind of dealing with this dark matter, so to speak. Like, why do you want to persist, and why should we persist, in thinking about these things alongside being an Easter people?
Jessica:
Well, we just do. You know, some of us just do, and either we're broken and hopelessly bereft of faith and not truly Christian, or we are all of those things and yet that's the way that our brain and our psyche work together. So I think there's a real denial of human nature in that kind of full solar Christianity where you don't admit darkness is part of humanity and is the common thread of the human experience. Not to be too grim, but experiencing grief and loss is going to happen. The life is an ongoing project in losing people and coping with the loss of the things that we love. So how do we keep that in tension and not lose hope? I mean, that's the project of Christianity for me, not denying that that is a key part of the Christian experience.
I think what attracts me to Catholicism and keeps me there is that recognition that there's always this earthly, bodily element. What draws me is the acknowledgement of the reality of that darkness and the reality of grief. A practice, like the way of the cross, where you enter bodily the story of Christ being led to his own crucifixion, is one of the practices that I return to again and again, and it’s endlessly fruitful for me. Because we are all walking on that path at some point in our life. At some point, your Good Friday is coming. For me it came really early. I was 13. So finding a way to walk on that path with some kind of ultimate hope is essential.
Elise:
Right. One of the oldest Catholic traditions, the memento mori, remember your own deaths, that learning how to live well as learning how to die well—you're right. We're always confronted with our losses and our own diminishment. And it's to our own peril that we forget that, I think.
Jessica:
I mean, we all know those people, I think, they're rare, the people who seem relatively untouched by tragedy, who make it to adulthood with no major losses, with no major grief. I wonder what those people would be like under different circumstances. I think we're too quick to call that blessing, and that may be the French Catholic in me that believes in the power and transformational power of suffering, but there is a depth to your relationship with Christ if you have engaged in that relationship while going through horrible grief and doubt that I just, I don't know that—I think that's a gift. I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but I do think it's a gift.
Elise:
You're not the only person I've heard speak of it that way, that the worst thing, the thing you never wanted to happen to you, is at one and the same time a gift, as you said. And I wonder, do you think that we should be putting literature out for people—because you're right, there are people who seem to be untouched by tragedy or who are so unwilling to let tragedy have any role in their lives that they push it to the side and it's as if they had no tragedy. So should we be putting literature forward or talking more explicitly within the church and within culture generally about what good mourning does, what good grieving does, and why we should be actually practicing that, not as self-flagellation, but as actual worship and growth and relationship with God?
Jessica:
Well, a couple things first. I would never want to prescribe for anyone what grief should be or look like. Because like I said earlier, grief is just an animal, horrible process, especially early grief. But grief is cyclical. So you may find yourself back in it just as you were in those early days, 20 years down the road, for some reason. When you're there in those really deep valleys, you're not thinking of any kind of spiritual project happening. You're just enduring. But I do think we have moments later when we can gather ourselves to ourselves a little bit where we can look back on those darkest, darkest moments, and look at the spiritual significance we experienced then. But while it's happening, forget it. You're just trying to live.
And another point I want to make is a lot of this is coming from my own personal experience. The development of my theology of grief and experience of grief is in contrast to my father's way of coping, which was utter denial. And really, he left the Catholic Church. He became an evangelical, very right-wing fringe, Pentecostal kind of church, extreme even on the extreme, what we would normally think of the extreme side of evangelicalism. And his approach being very much—when you hear me say things like to skip over the struggle and get to the end and to just focus on heaven, and God, and Christ, and how we're all saved, and it's all going to be fine in the end for the saved and the elect. You know, that's, that's my dad's theology warring against mine, which is much more incarnational and bodily and now. So it's one element.
And I'll tell a little personal story that demonstrates this, which, I mean, my mother died—
I'm 43 now, so she died 30 years ago. I went on vacation with my dad last summer, and he sat me down and lectured me, from the point of view of a Christian, about how damaging it was that I could not let them know my mother go. And how he was really concerned for the state of my soul. You know, it was a really shocking conversation for me at 30 years out. I love my dad. It laid out the differences in our theology, like, just bare on that table between us. Whereas his opinion is that I'm engaging with grief at this point has no purpose. And that my mother wouldn't even want me to do this. You know, he was making the point that it would pain her that I was still suffering and that somehow, you know, I would be hurting her at this point to continue to grieve her. Whereas my philosophy of all of this is the absolute opposite. That this is my connection to her. This is how our relationship goes on. And it's not a commitment to feeling terrible. That's not what grief is. That's not what mourning is. It's just that we believe that our relationship continues beyond the grave. And I think, I mean, we believe that as Christians, we believe that as Catholics—time doesn't have power over us. We are people of eternity. And, again, I feel like maintaining that relationship, if we think of grief and mourning that way, of what it means to have a friendship and relationship with someone after they have died, it's just like we pray to the saints or we have a, you know, we have our patron saint who is with us. I think of it in kind of the same way. And that, to me, makes my grief less about sadness and more about concrete action.
Elise:
Thank you for sharing that story. Thank you for giving so much of yourself. How does it move you into action?
Jessica:
Well, I think most of my writing has been about grief in whatever tangential way. It's always motivated by longing, whether for my home, or my mother, which are kind of the same for me, it's a searching for a restoration of that loss. But in the act of writing that loss is temporarily restored to me. So that is one concrete way that I act out of grief that I think is positive and productive and healing. I also think that just the action of not forgetting, of remembering, like you said, memento mori. I feel like that productive practice, that when we think remembering the dead and caring for their graves, that those are works of mercy for us as Catholics. And I think that those are tangible actions that we're supposed to engage in. We're not supposed to deny death and pretend that it doesn't reshape us and our souls.
I think there's a quote from Pope Benedict, I'd have to find it, that I used to trot out all of the time, about all of us being connected by either guilt or grace. And I think examining the ways in which everyone that we've come into contact in our lives has had some shaping impact on us and vice versa, will increase our understanding of our responsibility to each other. And that relationship is important beyond the temporal. It's a pretty awesome responsibility. So that's not something that I'm willing or able, just in my personality, to let go of a relationship as transformative as a relationship between mother and daughter. So for my dad to even suggest that that was a possibility, even if it was a healthy thing to do, which I dispute that, we have to admit that it's just not in my nature to do so. And so how do I live a productive, Christian life when I can't let go of that? So I have to find a way to frame it in those terms. But I'm not inventing this. This is all there in church teaching. You just have to kind of dig for it, because we don't talk about it anymore in Christian publishing.
Elise:
That's right. And you know, as I hear you talk about, as you said, the awesome responsibility as people who are really living atemporally, that the living and the dead are caught up together, it makes me also think about the emphasis that you place on friendship in your writing. And that might be, as you said, friendship with a patron saint, or, you know, a figure that is long gone from this world. But you also lift up other writers, thinkers, who are your friends, in your own work. And I was hoping that you might say a little bit about how this aspect of relationality and memorialization, friendship, works for you, and why it's so important in your life and in your writing?
Jessica:
I never really had great, close friendships growing up. I mean, I was a loner. I had a couple of best friends, you know, over the years, one of whom was mostly a pen pal. I mean, that says everything you need to know about me right there. And this isn't even the pen pal I wrote a book with. This was when I was a small child. And yeah, so that was like setting the precedent. I think I was always very internal and a little bit shy. I didn't have really profound, life-changing friendships until I was in graduate school. And I think it's because I started interacting with other writers who finally understood, on some level, you know, just the way my brain works.
So, you know, growing up in a small town, outside of New Orleans, I didn't have a lot of community there, outside of my family. So I went from feeling like—I wouldn't even say misunderstood. I don't think I even realized that I was misunderstood—I mean, I kind of thought it was just, that was just life—into finding a community that could share, you know, my values and my goals and my dreams and my obsessions. I mean, that was the biggest benefit to getting an MFA for me, was just being in an art-school community for three years with a bunch of other freaks.
But the problem with that was that I was still a very religious person, which I always have been. And I mean religious, like, very literally. I just really love religion. I don't know that—I'm not particularly holy, God knows. And I'm not pious in any way. And I don't particularly love rules, but I love, I just love religion. I love the act of worship. I love liturgy, and I love thinking about religion and theology. Those values were not shared there. And in fact there was at the time, a lot of hostility towards them. So when I found the one person in my program who shared both of those elements that were so important to me, that was life altering. And we entered into a correspondence when we left graduate school. And then that's what became Love and Salt.
The things I've been describing are still rather superficial. I mean, being able to share deep conversations with someone is important, but I never anticipated that embarking on that friendship with Amy was going to take me down the road it took me, which was another intense experience of grief. But because of what I had been through at that point, Amy was one of those people. She was one of those lucky few that had not experienced anything like that in her life, any kind of really substantial loss close to her. I was able to walk through that with her in the really dark moments, in a way that I was prepared for by my own experience.
And I've never, you know, up to that point, I don't think I ever really thought I had much to offer another woman, another friend. I thought I was bad at friendship. I used to joke about it all the time, and I was just, I was a terrible friend because I like to go into my cave and think for two weeks at a time and not see anyone. But I learned what friendship really is in that relationship. And it's that willingness to accompany someone through the dark spaces, and to just be a witness to their grief and not fear it. I think so many people are so terrified of death and so unsure of what to say when it intrudes upon the living, that they don't know how to accompany others through it. And it was in those moments with Amy when she was suffering so deeply that I was able to be there.
I didn't realize this until much later, until she told me. I was just doing what I do, which is grief professionally, you know? I could be a professional mourner. People could pay me to show up at funerals, you know. But when she told me how valuable that was to her, that was life changing, because I loved her so much. And all I wanted to do was be able to help her. And I felt so powerless to do so. And when she told me, years later, about how much she considered me in those moments to be a servant of God, I just changed my opinion of how we should approach each other and how we should approach friendship with, like, a real moral seriousness. You know, what we often think of as friendship is really just acquaintances. But to really enter into a deep friendship with someone is not to be taken lightly, because you may end up having to walk down that path with them.
Elise:
And I'm thinking back to something you said earlier, that, in a way, grief can become a gift. And in this sense, it was your gift, your unique gift that you were able to give to Amy in that moment. And as you said, you didn't know you were doing it. But now you do. And the moral seriousness of friendship, I think really cannot be overstated. I know in my own life, my friends seem like miracles to me, and I'm a big, believer in dreams. So I had a dream once, and I was in church, and I was walking up the aisle to receive communion. And the priest held the host up to me and said, “You have your friends now.” And then I took communion and I ate it. I have just been contemplating this dream for years. And some folks are probably thinking, right now, well, that's pretty woo-woo, and maybe tuning out, and that's okay. But that's, that's me…
Jessica:
Those folks tuned out a long time ago in this conversation. It's my fault.
Elise:
No, no, it's not. But it's only recently been revealed to me. And I mean that very seriously, that language of revelation, that if my friends and the Eucharist somehow got entwined in my mind in a way that I don't believe was just my brain chemistry, then I have a profound responsibility to people around me, and friendship might tell me something about how to act more justly in the world, which I think is also the question that we're grappling with here. Right? Or am I really way off base?
Jessica:
No, not at all. I think it's what it means to be a person, what our obligation is to each other and to the land. All of these things are connected. But I want to point out that if people think your dream is woo-woo, they will also have to think that St. Therese of Lisieux was woo-woo.
Elise:
That's right.
Jessica:
Because she, there's a beautiful quote from her about how thrilled she was to receive her first communion because—or I don't know if it was her first communion, but she may have been referring to receiving communion daily. I don't know. I don't remember, but she talks about the delight she takes in that, because she's being reunited with her mother in the host, because Christ is in the host, and Christ contains all of the living in the dead. So you are receiving your friends in the host. You are, that's just that's, you know, a saint said so! There's also, you know, misquoting C.S. Lewis is a sport for a lot of religious people, so I don't want to misquote him, but I'm pretty sure it was C.S. Lewis who also talked about the fact that if God knows all, than God, why shouldn't he know our dreams? So I'm a big believer of paying attention to what your subconscious is communicating. Yeah, I think that's a really profound articulation of why we should be taking friendships so seriously, and relationship so seriously.
Elise:
Well, thank you. Thanks for that companionship in that moment.
Jessica:
I just wanted to add that the way I was accompanying Amy, this is important to the next phase of this conversation, was through my writing. We were not together during that time of deep grief for her, we were writing letters across miles. So to think that my writing could be an accompaniment to someone else, aside from the personal transformation, the spiritual transformation I experienced through that friendship with her, the transformation of what I thought I should be doing in my writing happened then, in realizing the power to accompany and walk along someone in my work.
And it really changed, it changed my ambitions for my work. You know, I came out of a very literary MFA program. And I think the aspiration is always, you know, the big book deal, the collection of essays that gets a New Yorker review, all of that. Sure, great. But I think I, is a moment of realizing the true vocation, and how all of the experience in my life had come together to actually provide succor, not just like the delight of reading a wonderful book, which God knows I love and appreciate and that is the vocation of some writers, to write a really fabulous detective novel, is also a great gift. But what the gift that I could give was to take all of that experience of, and survival, through grief, and willingness to sit in it, and willingness to look at it with clear eyes and not run from it, and put that into my work. It's not like I'm selling a million copies of books. It's not like I'm on a bestseller list. But I get, regularly, I have become friends with people who have read my work. I have established community through my work. That is just invaluable. I just always have to say now that I'm so rich in friendship because of the work that I have done, and to me, that is a great reward that makes it worth continuing to do the work and to do the thinking, because I see what it means to people in dark times and places just to have someone witness them, and their experience back to them.
Elise:
And that's really what Sick Pilgrim has done over the years. I think for so many of us. It's been a form of accompaniment. What do you see happening now in spiritual writing—and I'm making air quotes around that—as a genre right now? Where do you see signs of life? What's exciting you? And, you know, what might be some critiques you have as well?
Jessica:
Well, I mostly have critiques.
Elise:
Yeah.
Jessica:
The problem is, for me, you can write a vaguely spiritual, beautiful literary spiritual essay and get it published in a secular magazine and have it read widely. But if you're writing explicitly Christian spirituality, it's very difficult to write in a literary way and have it published anywhere, because the way Christian publishing works now, everything is prescriptive, and spiritual books are much more like how-to books. To the point where they want you to be able to have bullet points and call outs, you know, on the page, they want pithy quotes that can become soundbites, and beautiful scripted lettering, you know, for your Instagram account. And all of that writing has its place. And I'm not, there are books like that, that I love, that have been edifying and helpful to me, but they're not what I do. And they're not what I really enjoy discovering other people are doing. And I think there needs to be a place for that point of kind of quality, literary—I don't mean quality in terms of “this writing is better than that.” I mean, the literary quality, the idea that we're not coming to an easy conclusion, for example, we're not telling you how to live. We're not breaking down life into digestible bullet points. That's not the point of the literary piece. The literary piece is a piece of discovery, in the writing and in the reading. And it's just a totally different experience. And I don't see places for that, especially for new writers, it's very difficult to write that kind of work and break in anywhere.
So that was another thing I wanted to encourage at Sick Pilgrim, was to have a place to start doing that kind of work and thinking, and hopefully continue to work towards getting those kinds of writers book deals, and getting those kinds of writers broken into Christian public so that they could have some kind of platform. Because I honestly, I know a lot of people are just, you know, shun Christian publishing. And for that reason, that it's too prescriptive, it's not literary, you know, they want success on the, in the secular side of things. But a lot of my heroes and favorite writers were explicitly Christian, devotional writers, like Caryll Houselander, people who were published by Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. They were my role models. I wanted to have, you know, a sort of sophisticated, literary, Catholic place for artsy types to repair. That's what, that's what's missing. And we've had those, you know, there've been brief moments of that throughout Catholic literary history. I don't see that right now. I see a lot of, like, more academic writing happening, and that's interesting. I see a lot of, also, snobbery and infighting among Catholic literary types. You know, like, these plots of land are really hard to stake out in publishing. So once you do it, I mean, people are very defensive of it and protective of it. And that is another thing that I think is a problem, is gatekeeping. And I'm constantly trying to work against that, because then—you know, I see value in having your pod of people, and encouraging your own pod of people to do their work and publishing them. But if you don't continually expand and keep your gates wide, then you just become an incestuous, you know, a club, and I don't, I'm not interested in that either. So I, that was really, you know, all of those things, accompaniment, recognition of the difficulty, unto impossibility, of Christian life, and creating a space for experimentation and literary work that is explicitly Christian or Catholic. All of those things were why we started Sick Pilgrim.
And that's still really important to me. And I'm still looking for ways to do that and support those writers, but I don't see the publishing world responding or changing yet. And I can only hope to continue to try to push that needle. But until then all those tastes change or they see some kind of market value in it, I don't know where that work is going to go. But I think, you know, I'm a believer in grassroots. And I'm fine with creating minor spiritual movements that maybe will be remembered fifty years from now. [Laughs] We'll realize that Sick Program was really influential. It will be written up in somebody's dissertation. That's fine with me. I'll take it. Thank you. Love and Salt could be a minor spiritual classic. That would be cool too. You know, I just, but I still think it's a frustrating line of work. It's a frustrating life's work to have taken up. But minor successes give me a lot of joy and satisfaction because I feel like it's so, it's so important.
Elise:
Right. You really were able to articulate some things that I had seen but not understood. And that's just this issue of, I see kind of spiritualesque writing in a lot of secular, high literary journals and publications. But then when I look for that from a believer’s perspective, that kind of literary panache in the Christian publishing world. I don't see it. And now I kind of understand a bit more why, so thank you for kind of laying that out, and maybe that's where we're all pushing forward. This role that art gives us so many ways of talking about God: God as mystery God that we don't even have an adequate name for. And art and writing is one way to do that. Who are some of the people that—Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Jessica:
No, you were going to ask the question that I was going to answer! So go ahead and ask it.
Elise:
Okay. I was just going to ask, who are some of the people that you are seeing doing this work of like pushing the genre forward here, who do you keep coming back to?
Jessica:
I was going to put in plug for a book that I just read and endorsed, which is Awakened by Death by Christiana Peterson. So this touches on so many of the things we've talked about, it's a book about grief, about her own experience of personal grief, but it's also a book about memento mori and the beneficial, hopeful practice of engaging with one's death and one's experiences of death. But it's written in a literary way, in a poetic way, that is not prescriptive but is a source of accompaniment. So it sort of hits, it rings all my bells, you know. That is one book that I was impressed by that is public.
And I'm sticking to the books that are published by explicitly Christian presses, because that's where my interest is. You can find lots of great literary, quasi-spiritual or spiritual-adjacent books out there. But I'm interested in writing by Christians about the Christian experience that is literary. And I think that's one example.
So I would love to see more like that. And I think it's going to take editors that see the value of that kind of work. But then I also know, as an editor, of the role that you're up against with your marketing department. And so if we don't buy those books, and if more people don't start buying those books, they're going to think there's no market for them. So that's another part of the problem, is getting the consumer to see the value in those kinds of books. And I've been told so many times, you know, “This is too dark. You have to find some way to make this more hopeful.” And not to bring up Flannery O’Connor again, good Lord, but like, her that quote about if, you know, someone wrote her and said they didn't find her work uplifting, and she said, if your heart had been in the right place, it would have been uplifted.
I feel that again and again. Like a book like Christiana's is not a conventional type of Christian book at this point in our history in publishing. But it finds the hope in counterintuitive spaces, which is what we need right now. We need, I mean, we're living through horrific times, so we need more writing that is willing to, like, go into those spaces and dwell in those spaces. And you will find the hope because we are Christian, you know, I hold on to that. Like, that's like the tether. I'll bring up Poltergeist again. You know, she holds on to that rope when she goes into the light, so that he can pull her back. We're never going to go too far if we're rooted there or anchored there. You can go into those darks and still be helpful. And I just hope that there will be more recognition of a need for that, that will give more writers and opportunity to write the kind of work that I'm talking about.
Elise:
I surely hope so too. And hopefully people listening will have a better sense of the world of publishing behind the curtain, and see that, you know, what they see on the shelves, there's a whole series of decisions that are made, and, like you say, that sometimes come down more to marketing than to the decisions that authors or editors might want. And I want to ask you, as we come to the conclusion of our conversation here, you mentioned from the very start of our conversation that you're interested in place now, and really thinking about the genius of place. Do you have a project in mind, and especially thinking about pushing the industry forward, are you working toward that yourself right now?
Jessica:
Well, I've been working on a memoir for fifteen years now. I was trying to find my way through this material and my connection with the land in New Orleans. So that is an ongoing project, but I find that almost anything I write at this point, whether it be a magazine article or an essay, will somehow approach this idea or this, this problem of, how can we really know who we are if we don't know where we're from? And if you move around a lot, and you have an itinerant lifestyle, and you're not rooted to the place you're from, how does that alter your sense of self and your spirituality? I'm having a, I mean, I'm having a very difficult moment spiritually because I'm living in a place that I feel literally no connection to. It's the first time that I've ever lived somewhere that I feel like I just couldn't find the thread. And that is an interesting problem, because I'm an essayist, so everything's an interesting problem. But how is it affecting my spiritual life to feel very alien to this landscape and very unconnected? So those are a few of the things that I'm working on.
Elise:
I love it. And it is, it is unique, right? I mean, sometimes the connection is that there is no connection, and I really, I'm excited to read what comes of all of these thoughts. Thank you so much for being here, Jessica. This was a really enlightening conversation, but it also felt like a balm, especially during these, as you said, horrible times.
Jessica:
Same here. Thank you.
Elise:
Thank you.