Stretching my Reading List

Calvin Seminary Chapel on a spring morning

When I told told you I was going to Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing, I had no pictures. Now I have lots. It's a readers conference rather than a writers conference although there are lots of writers there. I participated in a workshop on short-story writing and got a good start thinking through a new project. But the emphasis is less on the details of craft and more on the big picture. I come away reminded of why I do this stuff and motivated to think more deeply about the larger questions.

The festival is a time of seeing old friends and making new ones who share a love of quality literature that explores serious questions of faith. Natalie Miller, Kim Childress and I were all in the same SCBWI critique group in Indianapolis a long time ago. Now Kim is an editor, drawing us both in with projects.

Caldecott Award winning illustrator David Diaz was a hoot taking his picture with Kim at the Zondervan reception.

The Calvin College drama department put on a play of Walter Wangerin Junior's allegorical fantasy Book of the Dun Cow.  Actors donned elaborate masks and strutted for all the world like roosters, hens and other barnyard animals in an intimate theater-in-the-round setting complete with trapdoors and a walkway around the outside wall. It was a fascinating theater experience that made me want to reread the book. 

The author I was most looking forward to was Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian writer interviewed here by Susan Van Zanten. Adichie was raised Catholic. "It's a culture," she says, "not just a religion." Her novel Purple Hibiscus wrestles with public holiness along side private domestic violence. Nigeria is intensely religious, she says. So much so that the next question after "What's your name?" is often "Where do you worship?" followed by "Come to my church." Not exactly typical USA.

This conference is about faith and writing, not necessarily Christianity. The author who impressed me most was Leila Aboulela, a lovely Muslim woman from Sudan. Like Adichie, she grew up reading English books about children who ate strawberries and played in the snow. Her favorite book is Jane Eyre, which she sees as a distinctly Christian book. The main story problem of being unable to marry the man she loves because he is already married is easily solved in Islam with multiple wives. But Aboulela admired Jane Eyre's strength of commitment to her religious beliefs, refusing to become Mr. Rochester's mistress. Aboulela's novel The Translator (now on my to-read list!) is a Muslim version of Jane Eyre.

I left with a longer to-read list and a stack of beautiful new picture books. Festival 2014 is already on my calendar.