Transcript: Episode 15

Hey friends, and thank you for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

At least in theory, the seasons have officially changed over to spring here in the Northern Hemisphere and to autumn in the Southern, and seasonal shifts tend to be points when we sort of notice the passage of time and maybe also take more notice of what we ourselves are up to, like “oh yeah, the earth is rotating around the sun, and I am a human being, weird, how’s that all going?” So if that’s the mood you’re currently in then I hope today’s episode will help you dig into that reflective space.

I am actually in a part of the world that currently cannot decide what season it even is, we’ve been having what’s normally spring weather in what should be the depths of winter and then yesterday it snowed six inches, so my body has decided time has no meaning and everything is chaos. But I’m going to do my best to hold the chaos at bay for this recording session.

This month, I’ve been thinking about how writers relate to their work as a vocation, or how we experience creativity as a calling. In the last episode, which was looking at the writing life, or writing as a practice, I mentioned the common idea that writers are people who can’t not write, people who feel they must write, either just for themselves or for others.

Last month I got into the problems I see (and problems I have experienced myself) when this idea is framed in essentially negative terms: the trope that if anything can stop you from writing, you should stop. Because number one, it means you’re not a real writer, and number two, the creative life is a constant existential bummer that most people just can’t handle (so stopping is actually probably in your own best interest).

If you have also found yourself struggling with this masochistic framing in your writing life and you haven’t yet caught last month’s episode, maybe hit pause on this one and jump back to February’s episode first. Today I’m going to be building off last month to talk about the flip side of the trope of the obsessed creative – the positive framing of having a creative vocation, how that frame might shape our ideas about writing, and what a creative vocation might look like in our lives. But I don’t think we can really start to envision that until we’ve acknowledged and rejected the negative framing first.

(Or at least until we’ve decided that we want to reject it. I know it’s not as simple as just being like, “begone, shitty and weirdly macho cultural narrative, I reject you!” and then suddenly your secret divine inner creative self is freed forever like Athena popping out of the head of Zeus. If only.)

(I always want to connect with that myth in a very like serious and contemplative way because it’s objectively pretty badass. Zeus swallows his original wife Metis when she’s pregnant with Athena because he’s afraid that his kid will be more powerful than him [a totally reasonable parenting decision]. But Metis is the goddess of wise cunning, so it was maybe not the best idea to swallow her, and when Athena is born, Metis helps her bust out of Zeus’s head.

Which should be very cool, but my actual mental association with this story is always one of those corny gag potato chip cans with the springy snake inside – like you pick up a very obviously fake can labeled Patriarchy Pringles in like Comic Sans font but then whoa! a feminism snake!! who could have seen this coming???)

The idea of vocation in Western culture comes directly out of Christianity – the term developed from the Latin vocāre, which means “to call.” And for centuries it specifically meant a call from God to an oath-bound religious life. We think of “vocation” now as also having the secular meaning of a particular job or career path we choose and that usually requires some kind of formal training.

But the religious connotation often persists, even outside of Catholic and Protestant discourse. So I want to start there, since I think that spiritual connotation is relevant to the idea of having a creative vocation, regardless of someone’s personal position or experience in regards to Christianity or to other religions.

My own experience with the spiritual side of vocation is that of a kid growing up Catholic in a very Protestant part of the South who was secretly obsessed with the idea of having a religious calling. Like, I was not an especially overtly devout child – I didn’t go around talking a lot about religious topics, because honesty that’s what some of the Baptist kids at school did and they were terrifying and thought I was going to hell because I was already baptized like some sort of gauche weirdo and also I had not been saved, which they could not explain to me because we were all seven but which they felt was an extremely serious oversight on my part.

So my fascination with the idea of having a vocation was something I kept to myself and turned over and over like a catechismic worry stone – would I possibly receive a calling? If so, where and how would it happen, and how would I recognize it?? Would there be one or more saints in attendance, and would it be some gentle, comforting saints like maybe Saint Thérèse the Little Flower, or would it be creepy saints like Saint Valerie carrying around her own decapitated head???

Despite the somewhat neurotic flavor of these fantasies, the thing I liked about the idea of a religious calling but couldn’t really formulate in my childhood was the sense that a calling could set a person on a path where they would be in the constant company of deep meaning – a path of connection and belonging and service that you could be led straight to if you were able to just not miss the signs.

As I got older, I realized I was likely not religious calling material: too queer, for one thing, and also too skeptical of any spiritual institution that can’t directly and simply acknowledge human error without opening a massive rift in their theological spacetime continuum.

But my sense of longing for the call persisted all through the very drawn-out end of my life as a Catholic, and that longing was easily subsumed into the idea of vocation as finding a truly meaningful career, the one true job that you’re “meant to be doing.”

And even when the Christian God isn’t described as the source of the call, this is still the gooey center of the secular narrative of vocation as well – you’re still supposed to be following a somewhat mysterious call coming from inside yourself, the call of your gifts or your bliss or your best self or whatever, that will lead you onto your true path (again, if you can just not miss the signs).

Catching those signs is often framed in terms of accessing personal freedom rather than spiritual attunement, but there’s a strongly implied dimension of fate, of certain paths being aligned with your true freedom while others aren’t. And that sometimes-hidden spiritual dimension to vocation is part of what encourages us to identify our selves with our jobs and to seek our foundational validation in work-related achievement.

But whether God is around for the discussion or not, there’s a major problem with vocation-as-career, namely that not everybody in our society gets to choose their career, or even gets to have “a career” rather than simply “a job”: a means to make money.

Spiritual writer Cole Arthur Riley writes about the complications of calling in her book This Here Flesh, specifically through the lens of her family’s generational experiences as Black Americans. She writes, quote:

“Like many who don’t have the socioeconomic privilege of really choosing their occupation, my father’s calling to work (read: hustle) was not about what he would do; it was about how he would do it, and by what means of selfhood. … It can be difficult for me to belong to rooms where people’s chief idea of discerning their calling is deciding what job they’ll choose. … I’ve found myself silently asking, Do you think you’re the only ones God has ‘called’? … We cannot talk about work as calling without contending with the fact that there are those who have been denied choice, equity, and dignity in their work.”

The conflation of calling and economic work that Riley is expressing here does a deep disservice to those who don’t have open-ended options in the work they do for economic survival. And I think reducing the question of calling to the choice of a job also does a kind of disservice to those who do have that freedom – both by blinding them to that oppressive root assumption that a calling is a privilege, and by reducing their vision of the call to a range of jobs someone can imagine themselves enjoying.

And I think that this is an important point for creatives because this reduction fundamentally confines everybody’s ideas of what a calling can be and how it can be made real, how it can be brought into action. Our possibilities become restricted to the market economy, which then naturally teaches us to value vocation based on money.

And I want to point out that this is true whether you personally put a high value on money, or whether you reject money as evil and inherently oppressive. If you’re wearing either your giant paycheck or your tiny one like a badge of honor, you’re relying on dollar amounts to tell you what work is worth doing – which means you’re letting the market restrict your agency and your impact in the world. And I think it’s helpful (and even empowering) for creatives of all stripes and backgrounds to be aware of that, since our work doesn’t often fit clearly into the market economy.

Here’s Riley’s take on the fundamental limitations of conflating a vocation with a job. She says, quote, “How boring to spend the whole of my vocational energy trying to figure out if I am choosing the right work. It is of much greater interest to me to talk about how I’m going to do the work with integrity. How am I going to protect dignity as I work? And what truths are calling out to me as I work?”

That last line in that quote strikes me as a possible core value for creativity as a vocation – an overlap between our work as in “our job” and our work as in “our writing” (whether we write as our job or not). The storyteller’s vocation is to listen for the call of truth in our daily experiences and to give those truths body and voice, to breathe those truths into words. This vocation is a path you can follow regardless of the work you do for your paycheck, and regardless of how much you publish or if you publish at all.

If your writing is first and foremost a vocation, in the old Latin sense of the word, you become free to measure your creative life by its impact on your spirit – or to borrow Riley’s phrasing, by how it encourages you to protect dignity in the world (both the dignity of others and your own). Writing as vocation follows an internal rubric of integrity, not an external one of success. You might be working toward some external measures as well, but the external success is not the vocation itself. Whenever you write with creative and spiritual integrity, you’re already living your creative vocation, no matter where you currently fall on any external path.

There’s another layer to writing as a vocation that calls back to what I was talking about last month, those themes I noticed when I binge-read a bunch of writing life advice. Two of the common threads were trust and persistence, and I see a similar convergence happening when it comes to creative vocation.

I think the thing that remains compelling about the concept of vocation, in all its permutations, is its core paradox of surrender and will. You are led to your calling, by god or fate or affinity. And in being led, you put trust in that calling. You surrender to it. But through practicing that calling, that vocation, you also reshape yourself and the world. You do stuff, you make things, you persist in your practices. You act – which requires agency and will.

A vocation is an application of will born from surrender. This paradox appears often in theology, and the theology of creativity is no different. The creative act requires an equal convergence of surrender and will, of receptive discovery and skillful craft.

Thinking about this generative paradox has brought up two questions for me this month that I’m now bringing to you: Where can I practice more surrender in my creative work, and where can I practice more will?

I want to share some of what these questions have unearthed for me, but I also want to be clear that I don’t think your response to them will be the same or should be the same. It’s just that my own brain is the only one I’ve got full access to for illustrating the point.

When it comes to creativity, I almost always find it easier to be clear-eyed about myself, or about what’s currently working and what’s not, when I approach this kind of question from an angle other than writing, at least to get my thoughts going. Over the past year or so, I’ve been doing collage art as my main non-writing creative medium, and the interplay of surrender and will is a lot easier for me to track when I think about my collage practice.

Creating a collage inherently involves aspects of constraint and accident that have to be surrendered to – you’re constrained by the materials available and the reality that those materials almost never glue down exactly they way you might have imagined them doing (especially when you accidentally breathe too hard while doing your final layout and blow little teeny fiddly extremely important bits of your paper all the way across the room which then somehow just refuse to fit back together properly after you gather them all back up again).

The weird thing is, I’ve always found constraints difficult to work with when writing fiction, which is my primary writing genre. Like, I know how powerful outlines can be, but I’m the kind of writer that if I try to create an outline, as soon as I finish it and start writing I will immediately find a way to break the entire thing within two chapters, in a way that really cannot be fixed. (This has happened so. many. times.) But as I’ve been thinking more consciously this month about the way I do collage, I realized I’ve actually built extra constraints into my style, and I actually really enjoy that part of it.

Some collage work uses found images in ways where the original elements are still mostly there, but are combined in unusual ways – so there are larger figures layered together, and the artist has a fair amount of control over how those larger pieces are combined. But the style I gravitate to involves cutting out very small bits of a ton of images, bits that can no longer function as coherent figures on their own, and then puzzling those bits together into figures without any concrete goal for what the final image will be.

That’s not actually the best description but the visual art tangent is not the point here. My point is just to say that when you work in that kind of collage style, the constraints of the materials play a massive role in what ultimately gets created. And at least right now, I’m very drawn to that.

So bringing this back to writing: I mentioned in the last episode that I recently gave myself a challenge to write every day for 21 days in a row, which is a longer stretch than I ever do when I’m in my usual routines. When I gave myself that challenge, I was imagining that I might do a lot of small bits of work on a fiction project – at least a couple paragraphs a day, with some longer sessions thrown in.

Instead, most of what I wrote was poetry. And it started because on the first day of the challenge, I came up with a haiku as I was dragging myself out of bed that morning, and I quite liked it so I wrote it down. (In the spirit of full disclosure, it was a haiku about my cat. But like, an artsy haiku about my cat, okay, that sort of sounds like it’s not about a cat.)

After that first morning, it was like the little cat haiku had nuzzled its way out of a drawer in my brain where I’d been storing all the fixed-form poetry, and I just kept coming up with poems when it was time to write something down for the day. And… I liked most of them. It even felt easy to be prolific and consistent for those 21 days, in a way that I’m really not accustomed to.

My initial reaction to this was basically just “huh, that’s sort of weird!” But considering the question of surrender through first thinking about collage showed me that maybe the restrictive form of all those quick, short poems was actually the thing that made that flow and that consistency possible.

If you’d asked me at any point during the past 20 years what kind of writer I am, I’d have immediately told you that I’m a fiction writer. Despite the fact that before I decided to study fiction when I got my degree, I wrote much more poetry than I did fiction. And I’ve written just as much creative nonfiction over the years since deciding I was A Fiction Writer.

This brings to mind one of the quotes I referenced earlier from Cole Arthur Riley: “How boring to spend the whole of my vocational energy trying to figure out if I am choosing the right work. It is of much greater interest to me to talk about how I’m going to do the work with integrity.”

When considering where I can practice more surrender in my creative work, I’m seeing that I need to surrender the idea of the kind of writer I think I am. I need to surrender the idea that there is one true right kind of writer for me to be, and that meeting that expectation is the most important aspect of my writing vocation. And I think I also need to discover ways to make my writing practice more like my collage practice – a practice that embraces constraints of form in the service of creative surrender.

Essentially, what I need right now to follow the call of my writing vocation is to make it easier to surrender. And I’ve learned from collage and from my 21 day writing experiment that form is a powerful tool for me personally to do that.

Like I said, what comes up for you when you consider where you might practice more surrender could be really different than what I’ve discovered, maybe even the exact opposite – maybe you’ve gotten too attached to constraints in your style.

The point with this question of surrender is to try to feel out where your practices or your ideas about your writing have started to eclipse the possibilities of your creative work. And I think one good way to feel that out is to look for the moments when you do feel that creative flow and possibility (in your writing or in any other area of your life) and then to consider what makes those moments different – what have you been able to let go in those moments that made room for a different kind of experience?

So this brings us to the second question about following the call: Where can I practice more will in my creative work?

(And as a reminder to myself as much as to you: This will is not the will of numbly following rules or punishing ourselves or imposing expectations on the writing process. This is the more subtle but also more powerful will that’s born of our creative surrender.)

In the religious framing of vocation, will is represented through the vows taken by those entering the religious life – oaths that represent an active choice, and that require awareness and agency if they are to be lived out with dignity and integrity and not just with rote and empty adherence. Thinking about creative will through the lens of an oath or vow might be able to help us stay aware of the distinction I was talking about earlier in the episode – the difference between our external work and our vocations.

I think keeping that distinction clear within ourselves is important for avoiding the fallacy Riley points out when she writes about not belonging in rooms where everybody seems to believe that discerning a vocation looks like getting recruited during a career fair at a fancy college. There are infinite ways to live out a vocation that have nothing to do with the kind of work we have access to, and we have to offer that dignity to others as much as to ourselves.

But when we do offer that understanding to ourselves, suddenly it becomes easier to hold the distinction between actions we take to fulfill our vocation and actions we take to meet other needs and goals – even when those actions may overlap, or even when they directly align.

A specific publishing goal might currently align with your creative vocation – but it is not the vocation itself. Writing in a certain genre might currently align with your creative vocation – but it is not the vocation itself. Whenever you write with creative and spiritual integrity, you’re already living your creative vocation, even as the external work and trappings evolve and change. To apply your will to living out your vocation, you have to be willing to surrender those trappings in favor of hanging onto the thing itself.

I think a lot of us are carrying around creative vows we’ve made without necessarily realizing it, vows that are all about external measures of work and success but that have little or nothing to do with living out our vocations. We’ve vowed stuff like “I will finish my memoir this year,” or “I will be a published novelist with one of the Big Five houses.” Goals that sound good on paper, but that we may not be able to meet if life turns out to have other plans. And even if these goals are good guideposts to aim for, and even if we do reach them, they ultimately have nothing to say about our creative integrity – about the impact of our creative lives on our spirits.

We forget to leave the necessary room for mystery and meaning, the reverent space that makes deep storytelling possible. And if a writing vocation isn’t at heart the call to tell deep stories, stories that move our spirits, then what else is it?

Thinking about this in terms of a more familiar kind of vow, it would be pretty weird to go to a wedding and hear the spouses vowing to do the dishes every evening and buy a house together in a specific neighborhood within the next five years. Things like that might be part of the external trappings of the partnership, but they are not the partnership itself. The marriage vows speak to a chosen relationship that is both deeper and less defined.

So, with all of this in mind – what sort of vows would you offer to your creative vocation? How can you apply your will and agency to the practice of surrendering to your vocation? And what would make that kind of vow feel joyful and freeing, and not just solemn? What do you willingly choose as your expression of devotion to the creative relationship that moves your spirit?

I want to wrap this up with one more quote from Cole Arthur Riley, describing her own relationship to writing as her calling.

“As a writer, I have to think that God cares deeply about the words on this page. If it’s true that God made the whole world with the simple utterance of words, I think it’s very possible they would allow for a sacred power in mine, and that this would allow me to commune with the divine in some mysterious way, and even that the craft and work of writing would have something to say about how the world hangs together…”

Whether or not god or any specific idea of the divine has a place in your writing, I think the creative act is always something fundamentally more than the sum of its parts. And I think it’s the paradox of vocation, that convergence of will and surrender, that allows the “something more” to enter in and show us how the world hangs together.

If you’d like some prompts to guide you on a deeper exploration of your writing vocation, you can join the podcast newsletter to get access to this month’s writing praxis tip (and you’ll also get all future monthly tips right in your inbox). Just scroll down in the show notes wherever you’re currently listening and look for the link. You can also join by visiting inspiritedword.com/contact and hitting the big peacock green button that says “Join the newsletter.”

And until next month, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.