I refuse to submit to the spirit of fear
As a child, I was taught to fight dark forces. Only now am I starting to understand what that really means.
I have been thinking about demons again.
During my evangelical Christian childhood, the little dudes were everywhere, somehow managing to be both agents of supreme evil and mangy little jumpers. Get too close to a demon-host without a protective prayer and—schroop!—it’d be in you, just like that! Like a virus or a hopping, predatory leech. A friend told me that once he walked into a house and saw demons in a child’s stuffed octopus. They were watching him, waiting to pounce. Terrifying! Those little critters were always looking.
Having reached adulthood, I thought I’d successfully banished such entities from my consciousness. Now, I am less certain. Perhaps it is the off-smell in the air, the tumbling news cycle, the weird, greedy men posturing and ripping the flesh off the poor. The world feels charged, crackling at its uttermost edges. Meanwhile we stare at each other through digital lenses, unspoken questions lodged in the throat: Where do we go? Who is evil? Who is well? Where is safety? I don’t know if there is Something among us, but it’s hard not to feel that, if there were, this is very much what it would feel like. Some nights, I wonder if we are all possessed by something with a million eyes and heavy breath.
I don’t know if there is Something among us, but it’s hard not to feel that, if there were, this is very much what it would feel like.
But I have felt something like this feeling before. In my twenties, I took two ill-advised trips around the country. On the first I was 26, with a brand new Honda I’d decided to drive away from Florida, just to see what happened. What happened was that I hit the I-10 intersection, turned toward California, and didn’t return home for a month.
On that trip, I learned to love the west and to trust my gut. I spent very little money, mostly on gasoline and Trader Joe’s runs. I ate room temperature brie and baby carrots straight from the bag. I slept in my car, then on stranger’s couches, then in a dusty tent I bought on Craigslist for $8 and began pitching anywhere that looked uninhabited, sleeping wherever I liked and feeling utterly safe, upheld by mountains or the great swaths of rock beneath me. A neuroscientist might say that my prefrontal cortex hadn’t fully developed, and so my security was an illusion, a fluke of an immature brain. And, yes, it may be true that I did not believe that anything could happen to me. It’s also true that nothing happened to me, and I was utterly happy, eager to return.
And so, two summers later, I started another roadtrip, which I began by visiting my brother in Wyoming, where he was working on a dude ranch. He was 18, a brand-new grown up, and our philosophical paths were already diverging, but we shared a sense of humor and a love of the west and were happy together, careening around red cliffs on a four wheeler and spinning up plumes of dust in the path of the sun.
On one of our final nights, I told him of my plan to repeat my adventure and return to the wilderness, that I had brought my tent and would once again go it alone. I was eager to tell him my plans, thinking he would understand. But he did not share my enthusiasm. Instead, he was visibly concerned. He began telling me everything that could happen to me. Animals. Accidents. People. Strangers who could rape me, hurt me, steal from me. I did not have means to defend myself. I should really have a gun! He wanted to get me one, and would teach me how to shoot it. It might be necessary soon, anyway, given where the country was going. He even offered to sponsor my admission to a program where I would learn how to win a gunfight—some kind of survival camp taught by ex-Marines.
Yeah, no, I thought, I’m not going to shootout camp—over my literal dead body. The thought alone was absurd. Those who know me well know that, while I’m enthusiastic about urban berry foraging and have been known to raise the occasional pea plant, I’m not well-suited for a dystopian apocalypse. I don’t want to learn knife-throwing or how to heal a wound with saliva and maple leaves. I have zero desire to bury pinto beans in the backyard. If the situation ever comes to gunfighting in the streets, I’m dead! I accept that.
I told him as much, or at least demurred in some way, thanked him for his concern, told him I would definitely not be needing a weapon. Then I changed the subject, tried to shake it off, got ready for bed. I thought I was okay. Then I fell asleep.
All night I dreamed of annihilation. Fires howled in my ears. Strangers surrounded my car, screaming, beating the windows with obscene pink fists—someone horrible walked toward the tent—tall and with hovering, long shadows— My dream-brain fragmented into a thousand questions: Who would protect me? Where could I go? The shards attacked and attacked until everything turned into a recoiling, until I became the recoil, retreating until I could not retreat any more. I knew I should defend myself, that I had to kill!—but I could only lash out, could only flail with my wavery, watery dream-fingers, while I choked in the smell of my own terror—
A sudden blur of light. A cough in another room. Something looped me under my rib, yanked, and—the fever broke. I was heaved up and out of the hot, fetid sea in which I was drowning and into my own bed, where I was reassembled as a real and breathing body.
That body sat up, blinked, and there I was: myself, and safe again. Then I thought: Well! I think I just met the spirit of fear.
As a child, I’d learned that Bible verse— “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and of a sound mind.” I’d taken it absolutely literally. The spirit of fear was a demon sent from the devil, that could capture you and…do what exactly? I wasn’t sure, but it was best to steer clear.
So I tried not to be afraid, or, at least, not to appear afraid. I was mostly uninterested in childish activities undertaken with other children, so I picked the scariest, most solitary activities and applied a sheen of bravado to them. Climbing things, going up ladders, picking up snakes. I have a distinct memory of overhearing a childhood friend, who, while watching me climb the backyard apple tree, said to her father, “Nellie will go to the very top! She’s not scared of anything!” Which statement puffed me up, because I knew she was wrong but extremely pleased she’d not seen the truth. Of course I had no fear of the apple tree, which had always been my friend and would not allow me to fall. But I was afraid of many things. I am afraid of many more now.
Still, after that unsettling Wyoming night, I began to suspect that my friend had been more right than either of us knew. Sure, I have my anxieties and worries; like my brother, I am also unsettled by the world, scared by what we have created and what may be coming for us. But through some admixture of nature or nurture—certainly not through my own merit—I have never been someone who dwelt in the hallways of fear, who felt others were out to get me, or that it was imperative I protect myself at any cost.
That night I’d wrestled something new, a different and darker angel: The feeling of desperation and contraction, of something coming after you—a murderer at your heels, a death knife at your throat. Of retreat, abandonment, isolation. Of I’m in this by myself. Of I’m going to keep what’s mine even if I have to shoot you to do it. It felt real. It was real. It was the spirit of fear, and it was serious business. Driving away from Wyoming, I thought: There are folks who live with this thing. People live that way all the time. And I thought: If that thing was with me all the time, ratcheting a knife in my gullet, yanking me about by my molars…well, I would do anything to be rid of it. I would vote for anyone, betray anything, tear the skin off of any living being.
That night I’d wrestled something new, a different and darker angel: The feeling of desperation and contraction, of something coming after you—a murderer at your heels, a death knife at your throat...
I smell it now, the stench that pervaded that dream. It’s not a demon, exactly—at least, it’s not the kind of grimy, little, voyeuristic being I used to think of as a demonic. Instead, it’s a mindworm, a meme, a virus we catch from each other. It can masquerade as a thousand things, and in a thousand things—common sense, patriotism, resistance—but it degrades the core of our humanity, the vital substrate of who we are and what binds us to each other. It’s being spread, on purpose, by our most powerful digital networks and our most powerful men, and it’s gnawing through the brains of the people I love, gnawing at the foundations of the country I love. I feel the spirit of fear every time someone—a friend, a bot, or a greedy and craven man—tries to tell me that my enemy is my neighbor, or the people across the border, or a stranger on social media. I feel it every time someone tells me I need to hunker down, pick a side, protect what’s mine. I see it. It’s with all of us. It pounds its dream-fists on the tent.
And wherever it walks, it walks with paranoia, retreat and retraction. Social disintegration, broken relationships, rumors of violence and war. Sarah Wilson, who writes about the future we’re all headed into, addressed this recently on a podcast. Sure, she said, if you really want to, you can respond to the events of the world by saving yourself—moving to the middle of nowhere, stockpiling supplies, bunkering against the apocalypse.
But do you realize—she ended, gently—That if you go this route, you will need to defend yourself? Probably with guns?
I burst out laughing! I did realize that! I have been told that so many times, in so many ways, and by so many well-meaning people. That the devil or the libs or the Republicans or the hikers and wildlife of Idaho were after me, or that America wasn’t going to be safe and that the government was out to get me and I should really take pertinent steps, should really find a weapon, trench in, get ready to punch someone who disagrees. Didn’t I want to defend myself? Didn’t I want to prepare?
No. I’m not going to live that way. Do you hear me? I refuse to live that way.
I refuse to live in a defensive posture. If the human community gets out of the precarious position we’ve put ourselves in, it will not be by succumbing to the same mind-patterns that got us here; by defending our little bean patches with our little bean sticks, stealing and hoarding territory, and worshipping those who horde the most resources, but by recognizing and accepting reality—and by building networks on the recognition that we are all in this together and that we all share the same fate. I won’t bow to politicians or influencers or anyone who tries to spread this demon to me or to other people, that screech at me about everything I have to fear, no matter what color they wear. I won’t do it. I get to choose. And with power, love, and a sound mind, I will.
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The art of letting things burn
Notes on fireproofing, certainty, and that one mediocre Evangelical film I still think about.
The movie Fireproof dropped in 2008. That’s the 2008, the year we turned on the Large Hadron Collider and hurled particles at each other in search of connecting glue of the universe, the year the California Supreme Court decided to let same-sex couples marry; the year Barack Obama campaigned with a Shepard Fairey poster, and everything felt iconic and weird, and the kids lit HOPE up in big letters—it was the year, remember, when he actually won. It was also the year that Britney melted down and Heath Ledger died in his apartment and Abraham K. Biggs died on live webstream, the year that Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual collapsed and the markets reeled, blistered, and then went under. It was the year that all the houses built on cheap credit were scraped out of people and sat like rotted-out teeth on the crests of the suburbs. It was that year. I graduated from college that year with a cohort of people who were scared to death, and with reason.
In the midst of the melée: Alex and Stephen Kendrick, brothers from Georgia, showed up in Hollywood with Fireproof, a very Christian movie they’d made on a shoestring budget—just half a million, according to LA Weekly. Early showings of the film were bought out by pastors who were so enamored by the message of the film that they passed out tickets at all three Sunday services. “Faith based films” were on the rise, spurred on by the recent-ish success of The Passion of the Christ. They were a reaction to Hollywood’s gutter-morals, the erosion of family values, the refusal to acknowledge a higher power, the illicit sex. The world was getting scarier and there were no films that were safe for good Christian families. So Fireproof won big. It made a bucketload of money—pushing $34 million—and climbed as high as #4 at the box office, shocking everyone outside the evangelical world, and spurring us evangelicals to cackle with glee. They’d underestimated us.
I include myself in the “we,” because of course I was there. This was back when I still joined my mother for chummy evening readings of Created To Be His Helpmeet, which was the book on marriage for conservative families, and one of the seminal works by Debi Pearl, who was soon to become infamous for her association with a few high-profile cases of extreme child abuse. Debi wasn’t directly involved, but newspapers often mentioned the Pearl books were—let’s say, influences. But at the time, Debi Pearl’s teachings on marriage didn’t seem too awful. They were even a little bit amusing. Debi, for example, insisted that men could be sorted into three categories: “Mr. Command Man” (who took charge of situations and was not to be crossed), “Mr. Visionary” (who had lots of ideas and never followed through on any of them), and “Mr. Steady” (who had no good ideas, zero romance, and was likely to be a factory worker). A woman adapted her relational tactics depending on the type she found herself married to, but in general, for best marital results, all three types were to be respected, obeyed, and regularly fucked, in that order. This was the natural way of things: men needed respect, women needed emotional support. And when Fireproof showed up—promising a glorious depiction of just such a Christian marriage in full color and surround sound—my dad bought tickets so the whole family could see it five rows back from the screen.
And so we come to the movie, which is bad. Almost unbelievably so. It centers on the marriage of Caleb and Catherine, a dim and blisteringly-white couple who just can’t seem to connect. Caleb, a thirty-something firefighter (played by evangelical golden boy, Kirk Cameron) is competent at his job but otherwise awful at being an adult. He’s angry and frustrated for no reason, and the first fifteen minutes of the film mostly consist of him blowing up at his wife for not having dinner ready. Meanwhile, Catherine (Erin Bethea) is coping with her depressing marriage by carrying on a flirtation with a co-worker. The marriage is on the rocks—until Caleb’s dad challenges Caleb to take “The Love Dare,” a 40-day project that just might “fireproof” their marriage. The Love Dare challenges Caleb to take care of the dishes, say nice things, and buy thoughtful presents. It’s all baseline good partner stuff, but it’s brand new territory for Caleb, who’s both furious at being required to behave decently and flabbergasted that his wife doesn’t fall at his feet at the first sign of human kindness.
“How is it that I get respect everywhere I go except in my own house?” Caleb whines to a friend.
“A woman is like a rose,” his friend replies, “If you treat her right, she’ll bloom. If you don’t, she’ll wilt.” Cut to next scene.
If all this sounds mind-numbingly boring, that’s because it is. If the characters sound like caricatures, that’s because they are. There’s no depth or spark anywhere. It’s just unlikeable people doing uninteresting stuff to prove a point, a morality play filmed on 21st century equipment. By far the most interesting part of the whole film is when Caleb realizes he’s addicted to porn, and, in response, takes the family computer outside and smashes the bejesus out of it with a baseball bat. At least something happens.
But here’s the thing: I knew all of this when I watched Fireproof in 2008. As young as I was, as indoctrinated as I had been, I’d read Mailer and Dickens and Chekhov, watched Vertigo and There Will Be Blood and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I’d already decided that evolution was a thing and that I actually loved science and that, whatever my family thought, reality mattered. I knew that Fireproof was shallow and chintzy, a Mona Lisa screenprinted in primary colors on a keychain.
Watching it now, though, I’m struck by what I didn’t see then, which is that the whole film is just afraid. It’s about what humans do when they see change coming and are unwilling to look. In the world of Fireproof, everything that is messy, or out of control, or comes with too many questions, is to be sterilized, set straight, and preserved by turning to Jesus. When Caleb gets saved, halfway through the film, he miraculously executes a 180-degree, Stepford-Wives pivot into being a Nice Human Being, with no questions, no doubts, and no existential problems. It’s not so much that his problems resolve as that they cease to exist. He walks around with this eerie beatific smile—and then settles into a colorless, question-less relationship with his wife (who, of course, can’t resist the charm of new, angelic Caleb).
And then there’s the movie’s real point, which is salvation—preserving your immortal soul so that nothing bad can ever really touch you. The film returns, again and again, to a park with a literal wooden cross that the characters always seem to visit in a light that most resembles heavenly glow. They and the viewer circle back and back, once to be rebuked, once to hear the message of salvation, once to accept it, once to make vows, and each time it gets weirder because it’s the same scene, the same golden paradise sunset lighting, the same cross in the middle of nowhere, the same demand to convert, convert, convert. Nothing changes because the cross is the avatar of an unchanging, interminable eternity, the reward you get for boiling all the life out of your life on earth. Here, “fireproof” is not so much adjective as imperative verb. Destruction is coming. Make sure you aren't flammable. The promise of Fireproof is that you can somehow save yourself and the ones you love from change, destruction, and death.
In Fireproof, the cross is the avatar of an unchanging, interminable eternity, the reward you get for boiling all the life out of your life on earth.
That’s a pretty sexy promise if you’re scared of the future. My people lapped it up in 2008. They were scared of losing the way things were, scared of losing their houses, their jobs, their way of life, scared that their kids would leave the faith and go to hell, and also scared they’d have to live next to people who were different than they were. The reminder of an eternal land of unsullied happiness was and is nice. It’s the reason why the Kendricks boys are still making mediocre movies and that faith-based films still hit top #3 box office spots. Safety sells. But it’s cheap. It feels so cheap now.
When a friend gave me the prompt to write about "fireproofing valuable objects," I thought, Good lord. I haven’t fireproofed anything in years. After I lost my god, I threw away anything that could hurt me with its impermanence. Pictures, journals, mementos, relationships. I cleaned out the closets and scrubbed my brain until I was confident that there was nothing I couldn’t live without. It worked, too. I was as clean as a whistle inside; you could hear the wind blow right through me. And then one day I went on a first date with this Russian guy, and he had a seizure—right there at the table—and that night, after we parted, I sat in the car for a long time. I knew, I knew, that I should probably walk away. But I didn’t.
Instead, I watched him almost die once or twice a week, and saved him whenever I could, and so came to see our future laid out plain, in which there could be no truly happy ending, only a succession of happy days that would last as long as they lasted until the medications that kept him alive stopped working, or he miscalculated a dose, or another organ gave out. Then there would be a lot of very lonely days. Then—nothing. And there was no deity or chemical solution in the world that could stop it from happening.
That’s why, when Caleb saves his eternal soul and suddenly learns to love his wife, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe we learn to love by coating ourselves in protective chemical, or that we can love something else by sanitizing it, scouring off the sin and dirt and living tissue to make it eternal. This morning the Amazon jungle is a cauldron of smoke, and the kids outside are out by the pool tossing a plastic ball. My sister is about to deliver a second child—the first one almost killed her, but she ached for another—and the people that raised me don’t talk to me anymore. The one I love is at the doctor, getting liquid in perfume-sized vials that will keep him alive for now. Later, we’ll go to lunch. And it seems to me that the meaningful thing about all of this is that, sooner or later, everything burns.
I don’t believe we learn to love by coating ourselves in protective chemical, or that we can love something else by sanitizing it, scouring off the sin and dirt and living tissue to make it eternal.
At the end of Fireproof, every I is dotted and every T crossed, and Cat has learned to respect her husband, and Caleb has learned to do the dishes. The camera sweeps around their lily-white car as they load in for church, Bibles in hand. They will talk about Jesus. They will ask no difficult questions. They will do this on repeat for the rest of their earthly days. In the final montage, colored with every ounce of sepia that the Kendrick brothers thought they could get away with, we see the happy couple welcoming their parents to their Christian home, pictures of compliance, and, then renewing their vows in the flaxen light which surrounds the cross. The camera pans down from above. We look down at everything from a distance. We are meant to be sure that the faithful band in happy communion is saved, everyone will be together forever, where they’ll never be apart, and nothing will ever change.
And it’s creepy. I don’t recommend it.
(Editor's note: This piece was written in 2019 in response to a prompt given in workshop by Clancy Tripp. It's been slightly edited for publication here.)
How to host a story dinner (and why it might be important)
Creating connections with other humans feels more vital than ever. Here's a DIY guide to a process I found surprisingly successful.
IMPORTANT: This piece started out as a simple explanation—intended for a friend—of an unusual approach to human dialogue and peacemaking. It then grew to encompass much more: Origins, personal anecdotes, and a sort of rubric for holding a story dinner event yourself.
Because of all that, this article is nearly 3,000 words long. But you don't have to read all of it! I’ve divided this thing up into sections and recommend the following strategies:
Keep in mind, too—this piece was written in the summer of 2016, before Donald Trump was elected to his first term of office. When posting this article (February of 2025), I nearly edited out any mentions to that zeitgeist. They seemed almost quaint in retrospect.
But I ultimately decided to leave all the references in—unchanged. If anything, I find them a reminder of how important this work is, how much we have left still to do, and how much I need to recommit myself to it.
Okay, let's get into it?
1 | The Beginning
The premise of a story dinner is simple: it’s a time for a group of diverse humans to gather around a common table to eat food, drink something delicious, and tell their stories — not the job interview versions, but the real ones: the ones that involve failure and doubt and uncertainty and, maybe, a few moments of glory.
Weirdly simple, right? Despite that, it’s proven to be monumental in my life, and, in a time when we all desperately need practice listening to our neighbor, it’s an idea whose time has come.
I stumbled on the whole thing accidentally.
One afternoon, deep in the heart of a midwestern winter and exiled to a place I’d never wanted to return to, I realized I’d been lying to just about everyone, including myself, about some very vital things. For years, I’d been maintaining a facade of a belief system that I no longer really held, had people-pleased to the point that I no longer even knew myself. It was making me miserable. I decided to stop, take off the mask, and be myself, whatever that might cost and whichever relationships I might lose.
And, as soon as I realized I’d been lying, I also realized the problem: there was almost nowhere I’d felt comfortable being honest. There was no community, no place to express doubt or uncertainty — at least, nowhere I wasn’t also scared I’d be preached to, where people would shame me or try to change me into something I wasn’t.
So, impulsively, I started a Meetup group for doubters, religious refugees, and ex-fundamentalists and created an event I called “Beer and the Truth.”
I described it like this:
“Let's meet at a common table, have a drink or two, be human beings, and tell our 5-minute ‘misfit stories,’” I wrote. “Come to tell your story. Or come just to listen, laugh, and hang out with friendly people. No pressure or judgment.”
Come to tell your story. Or come just to listen, laugh, and hang out with friendly people. No pressure or judgment.
I clicked the post button, scared to death.
But then the event filled to capacity within forty-eight hours, all strangers. It was our first story dinner, and it was one of the most holy and profound and human experiences of my life.
3 | Why tell stories?
I’ll state the obvious: we’re not exactly living in a time of reasoned and respectful discussion. Everyone is yelling, all the time. In the echo chambers of our internet feeds, on the radio waves, the blue and red boxes on television sets, we’re all yelling at each other, as if across a chasm, voices raised, ears closed.
You are right, and they are wrong, and if you can just say it loud enough, long enough, and cleverly enough, those idiots over there will stop their foolish ways and start behaving.
It’s obvious something’s wrong, but there seems no good way to change it. Small voices are lost in the cacophony. If you want to accomplish anything, you need to make noise, establish a brand, tweet out a zinger. We’re connected in every possible way and profoundly disconnected on a human level.
Clear-eyed prophets have been warning of this for years, but the danger they spoke of is becoming increasingly less abstract. The dystopian hypothesis of Neil Postman’s Entertaining Ourselves To Death has found human and ideological embodiment in the person of Trump, the celebrity candidate of 2016, a TV exaggeration come to life, who yells at everyone, who listens to no one, who deals in shame and ridicule, in stereotypes and cartoon characters, who traffics in Jerry Springer-esque one-liners.
We are stunned. But we also eat it up, because it’s kind of entertaining. We’re too wise, too mature, too smart to yell with Trump, of course, but it’s cathartic and pretty fun to yell at and about him...and at and about his followers. Why don’t they get it? Let’s yell louder and maybe the morons will hear us!
It’s a big, complex problem, and it’s not obvious how we fix it, but it is clear how we don’t.
“You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviors,” says Brene Brown. Why? In her book, I Thought It Was Just Me, she goes on to say that “[s]hame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”
In other words, you will never convince your irritating neighbor to change his mind — or even to see your point of view — by belittling him. You will only succeed in making impossible for him to do so. But pouring him a glass of wine and asking about his life? Well, that’s something to try.
You will never convince your irritating neighbor to change his mind—or even to see your point of view—by belittling him. You will only succeed in making impossible for him to do so.
“Even if my neighbor doesn’t understand my religion or understand my politics, he can understand my story. If he can understand my story, then he’s never too far from me,” says Paolo Coelho, in his introduction to The Alchemist, “ . . . There is always a chance for reconciliation, a chance that one day he and I will sit around a table together and put an end to our history of clashes.”
Or, as Brown puts it, “Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story.”
If we ever hope to fix the rifts between ourselves and other people, to heal the disconnects we humans are constantly creating and aggravating, we have to be able to talk to each other, to resist shaming. We have to re-humanize each other, to dismantle our caricatures and assumptions about others and begin to view them as complex beings with histories and loves and hurts.
One of the most efficient ways to do that is to sit with your “other,” look them in the eye, and hear their story.
3 | The Story Dinner
Here’s what happens at a story dinner:
We gather around a table, order food, introduce ourselves, fill up the beer glasses. Someone makes a joke about awkward social behavior. It’s a big table, but not too big; we keep it to maybe 10 or 11 people. Many are nervous, and it’s understandable: this is distinctly out of the ordinary and no one knows what to do with it.
When everyone is ready, whoever is leading the festivities welcomes everyone, and then gives what we’ve affectionately named The Spiel:
#1: “This is a place to tell your story.”
“This group was formed because we wanted a place to talk, honestly, in safety. We wanted a place to express doubt, belief, frustration, happiness, joy, to say the words, ‘I don’t know.’ We wanted a place where it was okay to be human, to talk about your thoughts, your decisions, and your inconsistencies without having to justify them.
“This is that place. You can take off your mask here.”
#2: “What is said here, stays here.”
“To ensure that this remains a safe place, don’t discuss anything you hear tonight with anyone else in any other place.”
#3: “Please honor every storyteller.”
“Some may say things that surprise you or make you a little bit uncomfortable or, you feel, are just plain wrong. Please respect them by not reacting in a way that would make them uncomfortable.
“Remember that you are hear to listen, not to judge.. Give each person the same respect you want them to give you.”
#4: “Say as much or as little as you like. There’s no test.”
“There’s no pressure, and no checklist you have to check off.”
#5: “Keep it to around five to eight* minutes or so.”
“Remember that there are many people around you who also deserve time to speak.”
“Be aware that I’ll keep an eye on the clock and that I may have to cut you a little bit short in order to ensure time for everyone.”
*Time allotted can change, of course, with the number of participants.
#6: “Please give each storyteller your full attention.”
“Feeling truly seen, truly heard, is rare. We so often divide our attention. We half-listen to whatever is going on.
“At this dinner, we want to intentionally give each person our undivided attention.”
#7: “Don’t interrupt during the story or attempt to analyze it afterwards.”
“Sometimes it’s tempting to ask a question or make a comment in the middle of a story, or to break an uncomfortable silence. We try not to give into that temptation here.
“After everyone has told their story, you’ll have a chance to discuss things, if you like. But until that time, we’ll be going straight from story to story, without discussion.”
#8: “Please ignore your cell phones.”
“Turn ‘em off, silence ‘em...whatever you have to do to ensure they don’t
distract you or the group. Tonight is about the people in front of you.”
#9: “We toast each storyteller when they’ve finished.”
“Yeah, it’s corny. But it takes courage to tell the truth, and that’s worth honoring.”
It takes courage to tell the truth, and that's worth honoring.
The leader asks if there are any questions.
Then we settle down in our seats, order another round, take a deep breath, and begin.
4 | "Wait, does this story dinner thing actually work?"
The whole rubric was cobbled together from my longtime crush on L’Abri, a passing familiarity with the rules of The Ungame, and a love for Alcoholics Anonymous theology that was pretty irrational, given that I’d never attended a meeting in my life.
It was also absolutely untested. I took my little handwritten list of guidelines, marched into the pizza place, and confronted a room full of strangers.
Three hours later, after laughter and tears and about ten small pizzas, they were my dear friends. The night, far from being awkward, was intimate and moving and powerful in a way I could never have expected.
The bonds we formed that night held, too; we formed a community, went on picnics, texted inside jokes, hosted more story dinners with new people. We continue to meet in various configurations. And, for the most part, we are pretty good to each other.
As one of us put it, “It’s kind of hard to be mean to someone once you’ve heard their story.”
It’s kind of hard to be mean to someone once you’ve heard their story.
5 | Guidance & Practical Tips
So, if you want to host one of these yourself, how do you keep it running smoothly? What should you keep an eye out for? We’ve picked up a few tips.
A good theme can go a long way.
Consider providing a focus for the night to give people a direction for their stories.
Our story dinners focus on people’s spiritual and religious journeys, with the central questions something like “Where am I spiritually and how did I get there? What’s my church refugee story?”
Other themes might be, “How did I land where I am politically?” or “How has the race conversation played out in my life?” or “How was I parented and how I do struggle as a parent now?” or “What things have I left behind to get to where I am today?”
Hold the dinner in a quiet, private place.
Find a place where you won’t be interrupted. A neutral location (a restaurant with a private room, say) works great for us. But so could someone’s home, if that level of comfort is there.
If you decide to hold it in a restaurant, do give the waitstaff a clue of what you’re up to so that you won’t be interrupted by countless check-ins and offers of refills. Ask the server to put refill pitchers on the table, and tell them you’ll give them a sign when you need service again. Tell people to have their orders and requests ready so that you don’t waste the server’s time when they do show up.
Treat the restaurant and the waitstaff really well.
Inform others to do the same. Generosity and goodwill set a great tone for the evening. (Plus, if it’s a great venue, you want them to like you.)
Don’t let your group get much above ten participants.
Eight is great. Ten is workable. Twelve is really pushing it. Anything over that, and, considering time for breaks, ordering food, etc., you’re in for a long, long evening.
Keep in mind that, aside from the time factor, it takes considerable mental resources to listen attentively to other people, especially when they’re telling you real and sometimes uncomfortable truths.
After about nine or ten stories, I find I’ve reached the limit of what I can process, and just want to sit back and enjoy chatting with everyone.
The leader starts the storytelling.
It’s tempting to assign it elsewhere, or demure and ask if anyone wants to start, but the truth is that the leader sets the tone and model for the evening.
I’ve said some difficult things about myself during story dinners—things I’ve never actually said anywhere else. Bad things that have happened to me, things I’ve done that I’m not proud of. My first story ended with with something like, “So...uh, I just don’t know.”
If you are vulnerable and open, others will feel that freedom, too.
Don’t forget breaks.
On such a vulnerable evening with no established etiquette, it can be awkward for participants to know how and when to excuse themselves. Make it easy on everyone and call breaks at appropriate intervals.
The leader initiates the toast — and uses it, too.
Toasting each person at the end of their story is a lovely gesture of affirmation and support.
And it’s also a gentle and efficient way to step in if someone is overstepping their allotted time by a significant margin. I’m not religious about time-keeping, but sometimes, out of respect for others, I occasionally do need to help someone wind their story down.
Stepping in with a toast is a winsome and respectful way to do that.
Alert your guests in advance regarding the nature of the event.
It’s a bit jarring to go to what you think is a normal dinner party and, halfway through, find yourself next to a person sobbing convulsively over their crippling struggle with substance abuse.
Be intentional about who is at the table.
Disclaimer: Every story dinner I’ve held has been populated primarily by people of diverse backgrounds and opinions who don’t know each other. In a way, that adds to the safety of the evening.
So, if a significant portion of your group is coming from your friend/family set, be especially wise about who you invite (and the theme of the evening). That’s not to say that you shouldn’t give people a chance to surprise you, but I would be wary of inviting, say, both halves of a recently ex-ed couple.
You might also consider a few extra directives to ensure that personal storytelling doesn’t become an exercise in gossip or underhanded digs at anyone else. A simple “I know we all have some history together, so do your best to be kind and to focus on your story,” might suffice.
6 | In Closing
Look, take none of this as gospel. It’s just one set of ideas. There’s no perfect way to fix our cultural communication problem, to calm down all the yelling. But I’m firmly convinced that we must try. Even if we don’t know what the outcome will be, we still, as Chinua Achebe put it, have the “obligation to struggle.”
Recently, I attended a political discussion with the same group of wonderful rascals who attend the story dinners. We circled the big questions, round and round, but then the conversation settled a little and came to rest on something vital: that politics are made by people, that real change happens in small, local ways when ordinary people commit to see each other as human and to work together to clean up their corner of the world.
Real change happens in small, local ways when ordinary people commit to see each other as human and to work together to clean up their corner of the world.
You may not be able to calm down partisan mayhem. But, by God, you may be able to get a two very different people to sit down at the same table and listen to each other. And this is a worthy work, the seed where change can start.
It’s easy to get caught up in sweeping, complex problems and forget that we, too, have a corner of the world which desperately needs our attention. We have to fight apathy and find the courage to build bridges to each together, whatever that looks like, and however small the effort seems.
We must tend to our corner. Because we cannot give up on each other now.
Where do we go from here?
Carl Jung addresses the moment, in a way.
“The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things.”
Carl Jung
I accidentally wrote a dead book. What do I do now?
I finally finished my book and all I got was this uncomfortable truth.
I'm going to start by doing something absolutely insufferable, which is to start off a blog by quoting myself. (It's short. There's a point.)
Here you go:
A realization that hit me hard early in my graduate degree was that craft was not vision, and, while even a tiny amount of vision could make up for a multitude of technical sins, no amount of technical prowess could make up for a lack of vision.
If a piece of work was fundamentally lifeless, it could and would not be revived—not by might or willpower or impeccable sentence-wrangling. The work had energy to channel, or it did not, and it was prudent to figure out which statement applied to the situation at hand and cut my losses immediately if the outlook looked bleak.
That paragraph is quoted verbatim from my MFA thesis, where it languished in the middle of a section about creativity and the philosophy of AI. In the section, I wondered where writerly “vision” came from and whether such vision could be replicated by a machine. Interesting stuff! Certainly zeitgeisty enough for any self-respecting thesis.
But now all that high-falutin' talk of craft vs. vision has come back to haunt me, because I've finished my book and large swaths of it are, yes, fundamentally lifeless—they feel patched in, or too heady, or simply aren't breathing in the way every bit of a book needs to breathe. This book has no energy! It's kaput! It is an ex-parrot! (Confused? See [a] below.)
What's worse: The book has taken a long time and many drafts to complete. So much for “cutting my losses immediately.”
You shouldn’t feel sorry for me, though. This realization, while discouraging, has put me firmly on the path to figure out exactly what it is that makes a work lifeless or energetic.
One promising hypothesis has come from Nuar Alsadir’s book, Animal Joy, in which she discusses the mechanics of communication—namely, the unique vitality that only emerges when one speaks authentically, which is to say—from one’s own body. Drawing on her experience as a psychotherapist, Alsadir talks of Wilfred Bion’s theory about elements of thinking:
Alpha elements are the brain-to-brain elements, ego-ridden, thoughts which are digested and can be articulated in concrete forms. Beta elements, meanwhile, are the raw experiences—the sub-language textures that can be communicated body to body without the higher linguistic brain being any the wiser. Alpha elements can be deceitful; beta elements never can be.
It occurs to me that the kind of writing I instinctively recoil from — from others or myself — is the alpha-lead stuff, in which it’s clear that the writing is ultimately an elaborate performance—a theatrical mask. Brightly painted, yes, and very possibly beautiful, but an obfuscation.
My hypothesis here: The lifeless sections of my book are the ones that my body and instinct had nothing to do with. They're the bits of my book that came from my ego, the part of my brain that wants to make itself feel better by being A Really Excellent Writer.
The lifeless sections of my book are the ones that my body and instinct had nothing to do with. They're the bits of my book that came from my ego, the part of my brain that wants to make itself feel better by being A Really Excellent Writer.
There's no easy craft fix here. There's no way to replicate beta-lead work through technical means. Amateur writers try to induce a similar effect via explicit body words (all those elbows and bones!), but this shortcut works only sometimes and only on a surface level. If the work itself is lifeless, such sensory writing isn't so much evocation as affectation. The brain, speaking of and as the body, is wholly unconvincing, rife with ulterior motive.
In short: The long way ‘round is also the only way ‘round and that is: To get work that speaks, body to body, you have to tell the truth from the body. Feel your way forward a little. Be willing to slow down, stop for a while, wait until the body knows what it wants to say.
In my situation, there’s no rectifying the bad bits through revision (that part, at least, I got right in my thesis!). Poking at dead things won't make them any less dead. The only way forward is to throw out any corpses and go back on the hunt for what lives.
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Postscripts and references.
[a] If you didn't catch that reference, that means you're lucky enough to be seeing this for the first time. (I envy you! Sincerely!)
[b] Mats Eilertsen, who I listened to on repeat while writing the above.
(2/2024)
On winter and its music.
January is cold and miserable. I love it.
January has now ended, which means I can say this: January is my favorite month of the year. No one expects anything of it.
Folks who like Valentine’s Day start to get a little fruity-eyed at the beginning of February, but January—January is great. It has nothing imposed on it. In Ohio, it’s gray and gray and gray, and mostly rainy, and free as a whistle. Everyone else stays inside thinking fondly of the bygone holiday season but not me—I’m out in the drizzle in my not-quite-waterproof gear, nose pointed toward the horizon, frizzy-haired, feeling alone and fantastic and utterly relieved.
Last week, when it was below freezing and somehow raining instead of snowing, I went to the zoo, and every zoo employee I ran into looked at me strangely. The implied question: Why on earth are you here? I was there because no one else was; the zoo was cold and damp and abandoned. A turtle and I stared at each other for two full minutes, ala Annie Dillard. It was unmitigated bliss.
Some of the relief of January for me is the re-establishment of routine. December is a month of nonstop interruption and exclamation points, when the world rings bells and flashes lights and insists that everyone achieve their personal apex of happiness.
January is the Monday of the year; the time when we’re all dumped unceremoniously onto a blank slate with a lot of mundane shit to get through, and since we’re out of flashy toys and holidays to distract ourselves with, the only thing to do is…start. Work, school, bedtime, kid drop-off, kid pick-up, Friday all-hands meetings. January is the reestablishment of boring patterns and the same old, same old. (How do you eat the frog? One bite at a time.)
My music for January has that kind of energy: repetitive motifs, minimalist, notes against a ground, phrases played so many times in a row it takes three days to evict the sound of them from your skull. Routine, but with the light breaking through.
Here you go.
#1: William Basinski | The Disintegration Loops
The same loop, play over and over for an hour, as it fades from existence. Metaphorical bliss if listened to attentively. Meditative in the background of projects.
#2: Caroline Shaw | The Beech Tree
Caroline Shaw is one of my "drop everything for new releases" composers. This isn't a new release, but it's beautiful—and beautifully played by the Attacca Quartet.
#3: Dawn of Midi | Dysnomia
Uncannily precise, constantly evolving, mind-blowing. Dawn of Midi didn't release another album after Dysnomia, but this one will last forever.
#4: The Mistral Noir | Daniel Herskedal
My music service files Herskedal's albums under "jazz," which I'll allow because there's no category for "horns whispering secrets to each other."
BONUS: Satyagraha | Philip Glass
The piece that made me finally "get" Philip Glass, played by the artist who played it for me somewhere in a little church in Cambridge. It's come back to me many times over the years and each time it's a little bit richer.
(1 / 2024)
What we talk about at 12:23 AM on the Amtrak train.
The train at night is unsettling, but there are plenty of strangers to talk to.
Second night ever on an Amtrak train and—wonderfully—I am no longer violently, gobsmackingly ill.
What I am is: Wondering whether I can sleep.
Where I am in time is: Late. Probably after midnight.
Where I am in space is: Stuck in the observation car, avoiding my assigned seat.
(Need the sonic backdrop? Play this in the background.)
I like the observation car during the day. In it, you are almost completely surrounded by windows—glass on both the sides as well as the roof—with sunlight pounding on the corners, lighting up the booths and the observation chairs and the hats of the Amish people. It’s a communal space, a whole enclosed terrarium of people—every seat is taken during the pretty parts of the trip! You can eavesdrop with abandon. Sitting in the observation car during the daytime makes me think of the part of that Arlo Guthrie song The City of New Orleans where he describes the people hanging out in the club car:
… the sons of Pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father’s magic carpets made of steel
At night, though, the situation changes. The light draws in around the train and disappears from the outside world and the experience of riding on the train fundamentally changes. The windows, which are so darn cheerful during the day, so full of vast and distant and benign landscapes, grow ominous as the dark thickens, as reflective and unknowable as the eyes of wild animals.
It’s an eerie and unsettling thing, sitting between them, hurtling through unseeable scenery in your little pod of abrasive light. It’s like being on a spaceship, or in the Edward Hopper diner, if the Edward Hopper diner was going 80 miles per hour across Arizona.
I guess an easier way to say this is that the train is a little bit scary at night, which is probably why the few of us who are left in the observation car start talking.
“I actually feel like I’m high on some drug,” Patrick tells me. He’s a music producer who has been steadily tapping away at a laptop in the adjacent booth. He’s taken off a massive pair of headphones to talk to me, and now he shakes his head at the windows.
“It was fine before. But this,” he says, “This is fucking weird. We're just so separate from the dark on the other side. Isolated from the landscape by the glass. It’s like a very spiritual experience with none of the profundity.”
He’d wanted to visit some pals in LA and had decided to take the train for the experience. His home base is Philly. He definitely (“definitely!”) plans to fly home.
Noah got on the train in Albuquerque and is heading to Los Angeles for a wedding. He’s a few booths away and soft-spoken, hard to hear above the sound of the engine. He’d moved from LA to ABQ a few years ago for a litany of reasons he seemed not to fully understand himself.
“I just felt it was time to move — Albuquerque seemed interesting — I needed — I don’t know — some kind of change —”
He trails off. He talks as if he is reluctant to talk, and it’s hard to tell whether that’s because he wishes to be alone or because his small talk has gotten as rusty as mine.
“It’s been hard to meet people,” he admits, finally, “COVID. I’ve gotten kind of used to not talking.” He will, eventually, be the first to leave the conversation.
Before that, Patrick asks me what I think of being on the train, and why I think it feels so strange, and I tell him I’m not sure yet. I think it has something to do with time, and the lack of escape. There’s so much darkness out here that we normally just fly over. Now we have to acknowledge it—really feel that it’s there—
We talk until one of us asks a question no one feels like answering. It’s 2 AM and makes no more sense to talk.
I can’t bring myself to climb over my seatmate, so I move myself and my possessions from the dining booth to one of the little two-seater couches, where I curl up in the fetal position and try to rest. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s very bright. I sleep in fits and spurts all night long, and whenever I open my eyes the blackness of the windows stares back at me. The constant din of the train, the hum of it like the hum of deep space—the constant invasive light—the constant unknown—
This is the experience of nothing, I think, suddenly, waking up during the night, It’s almost as if I am nothing! That’s why it’s wonderful!
Though when I wake at 6:12 AM with an ache in the middle of my neck, the thought does not feel like an epiphany so much as an experience that’s neither spiritual nor profound.
Elon Musk has a plan of salvation. It won't work.
Giving up and moving on is an American tradition. But where else can we go?
One warm night in my mid-twenties, I sat in a Florida parking lot with an electrical engineer. We were, alternately, making out and discussing plans for saving the human race. I was mostly dependent on God for this project at the time. His plan—to my astonishment— was to colonize Mars.
“It’s the only thing left,” he said.
Are you kidding me? I thought. It was the first time I'd ever heard such a thing. Imagine! I was indignant. Imagine living unprotected in waves of solar radiation (you couldn’t), or, more likely, in transparent bubbles through which you watch the fleeting rivulets of cold stewy unbreathable air? Imagine living off of the three tasteless plants you could cultivate under grow lights in hydroponic corridors under Martian soil?
Worse: Imagine doing all these things and remembering a planet once-upon-a-time, which produced millions of colorful plants and birds, which was strewn with crystalline lakes and rivers, which smelled like soil and honeysuckle and iron, and on which you’ll never stand again? The prospect was awful. I couldn't believe anyone seriously entertained it. But it turns out that my electrical engineer was one of many who believed that mankind's fallback plan should be a freezing, inhospitable planet 90 million miles away.
A more famous adherent to this idea, obviously, is Elon Musk—American deity extraordinaire!—whose Space-X rocket prototypes exploded a few months ago.
The Reuters article in my newsfeed paired it with an image of a thick tongue of flame, as though the rocket had been part of a funeral rite. What a sight! There weren’t any people aboard, of course; it was an unmanned probe, part of testing for the Spaceship project, destined—according to Elon—to take billionaires to the moon in 2023, and to lay the groundwork for Elon’s big ambition: Mars. According to reports, the test was a relative success—the rocket did successfully land before bursting into flames. An impressive technical achievement. The engineers would go back to the drawing board, tweak something about the fuel tank, and spend another million or so to test another prototype. A rocket in the sky would grace the sky again soon enough.
A few days before Elon’s rocket exploded, though, the Atlantic published a piece by Shannon Stirone that I wanted to wave in the face of every citizen of the country: Mars is a Hellhole. The article itself is great—you should read it—but you can get the gist from the headline.
Mars sucks. Mars is awful. It’s hot, and bleak, with an impossible atmosphere. As a prospect for future human settlement, it needs to go.
Mars sucks. Mars is awful. It’s cold, and bleak, with an impossible atmosphere. As a prospect for future human settlement, it needs to go.
It is manifestly unsuited for human life and no amount of technological prowess is going to turn it into a paradise. Can we just put this to bed this now?
Well, it doesn’t seem like it.
Okay, then.
Of course, Musk is a high-level god in the American pantheon, which is to say: He’s got the money and power to do just about whatever he likes, and he does it all in the brazen, devil-may-care spirit of the mythical American cowboy. He’ll spend millions on car elevators. He’ll name his kid an unintelligible string of babble. He’ll sell you a flamethrower. And for these reasons he is venerated from the sacred halls of Reddit to the boardrooms of startups in Silicon Valley. For these reasons some, at least, are inclined to believe him when he says he can do the impossible—say, for example, move humanity to Mars.
And, granted, maybe he can do certain nigh-unto-impossible things (like, say, popularizing the electric automobile on the shores of a gas-guzzling country). But we’ve got to put our collective foot down when he starts romanticizing Mars as a future place for humanity.
Elon's plan of salvation isn't even close to new. Moving on to the next "pure" place is how this country has always dealt with its problems. Ancestry.com informs me, personally, that I’m from a long line of leavers. My ancestors headed to the American continent on some of the first ships out of England, landed on the east coast, headed to Pennsylvania, then on to Ohio, then moved further on whenever we felt like it. That was how we coped, and how we still cope: When things get too crowded, dirty, or smelly, we leave. Find a fresh, untouched, pure place. Build something new.
And I think that's kind of the American assumption, right? There will always be fresh material. There will always be a new tomorrow and somewhere else to move to. There will always be a place to expand to, and materials to expand with, so...go ahead! Pull up roots, make more fuel, build more rockets, make more worlds. It all seems so possible because that is the assumption which has fueled our culture.
The problem, of course, is that this assumption is manifestly false. We are fragile beings on a fragile planet, subject to the laws of physics and biology. Neither or resources nor our time are endless. Limitless expansion has always been a lie, because limitless expansion is literally impossible. And evolutionary theory warns us of what happens when a species refuses to recognize and adapt to its limits.
"Limitless expansion has always been a lie, because limitless expansion is literally impossible. And evolutionary theory warns us of what happens when a species refuses to recognize and adapt to its limits."
To be fair, though, maybe Elon’s not completely wrong? Perhaps human life will, indeed, peel itself away from the crust of this planet and move elsewhere in remnants, in little Ark-like pods of explorers. Perhaps we will even form refugee civilizations capable of sustaining themselves on hydroponic plants and vitamin capsules. But even if that happens, I have zero expectation that that life will cease to be of Earth in the ways that matter. Any group of people, transplanted anywhere else, will face the same problems as we do here, but in a place that’s way less habitable and way less pleasant.
Can you see it? Our great-grandchildren growing up in pods on an inhospitable planet; eating mineral pellets and suiting up in veneers of airtight, flame-retardant...stuff?
I can. I imagine Earth sliding into myth. I imagine children of the future being told about this planet as children now are told about heaven, that ethereal, unreachable place, perfect for humans—but unattainable. I imagine mankind's culpability being slid through a thousand interpretive lenses until it is not our fault at all. I imagine the past morphing into the future, and the Earth as paradise, as unattainable utopia…
Yes, it’s bleak. That we have come to this, despite all our technology and all our best efforts, would lend itself to some version of the Christian prayer: “What must we do to be saved?”
Which is actually the wrong prayer, or at least, an outdated one. We already know what we must do. We have very little time to do it, and apparently no collective willingness to admit that we have no other choice. So I guess the prayer becomes now, “What will we do to be saved?”
As long as we persist in taking Musk’s very American idea seriously—that is, so long as we insist in denying reality—the answer will continue to be “Not much.”
