Hearing is Believing

I teach an "intermediate creative nonfiction" class here at Dartmouth College. This term, I'm teaching it as "Ordinary Extraordinary: Literary Journalism, the Lyric Essay, and the Art of Fact." However I teach it, though, I always like to start with a bit of sound. I used to use Scott Carrier's This American Life piece, "The Test." But I've decided it's too bleak -- brilliantly bleak -- to begin a course with. (In the course of looking for that piece online again, I found this fabulous archive of all of Carrier's uncanny stories. As I write, I'm listening to his portrait of Charles Bowden, one of my favorite writers.

Last year, I used Quince Mountain's very funny, and very sharp reading of his story "Cowboy for Christ" at the launch party for Believer, Beware, a book I co-edited with the staff of Killing the Buddha. I asked my students to break into workshopping by workshopping this reading. But Quince is well past that writing now, so it seems too far past.

Right now I'm leaning toward Larry Masset's "A Night on Mt. Shasta." Twenty years ago, long before This American Life, I sat on the floor in a room at Hampshire College one night while a strange man named Masset played this story and others. That night was part of how I became a writer. I haven't listened to the story since, until today.

But I'm still poking around. Some audio documentary/storytelling sites worth remembering: The Moth. (Every hipster knows this site, but not everyone is a hipster.) Mortified Angst. Radio Diaries. Transom. Risk. Hearing Voices. Third Coast Festival.

What I Read Instead of Work, 1/5/13

Not-work is a subtle exercise. Sometimes work can creep up on you. This morning I accidentally woke up early and read George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss to put me back to sleep. But I love George Eliot now like I loved Tolkien when I was twelve, and pretty soon I was so happy with words I decided I could do some work. That meant re-reading, for the fourth time, James Baldwin's "Down at the Cross." Which provoked a perusal of Cornel West's 1982 first book, Prophesy Deliverance! The combination resulted in the mini-essay I needed to write on Baldwin for an anthology of literary journalism, the essay that had been defeating me for weeks. I should have kept going--next up was a mini-essay on Mailer's Armies of the Night--but I decided to take a break with Lucas Mann's excellent forthcoming book of literary journalism, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere. I could justify this as part-work, since I'd promised to write a blurb for the book, but the truth is it was a pleasure I didn't want to interrupt with a re-reading of Mailer.

I decided to relocate to my office. I don't have internet at home--to save me from even further distraction--so the first thing I did was look at the New York Times. "Just the headlines," I told myself. But how could I resist "Former CIA Officer is the First to Face Prison for a Classified Leak," especially since it led with a happy photo of said spook putting a sneaker on his laughing 8-year-old daughter, a sure sign that his imprisonment is an injustice. Or that the NYT thinks so.

A passing reference to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in the article caught my interest -- the spy had been invited to teach there, and had even taught Liberty U students surveillance techniques in Washington. It wasn't hard to find a picture of the class, which suggests that these students may not have such stellar careers in front of them. From there I wandered around the spy studies programs of Liberty and even further right Patrick Henry College, both dedicated to applying a "Christian worldview" to intelligence work. Their faculties are full of retired heavies with still-active consulting gigs, and their alumni seem to get placed. I justified my digression by tweeting it. Maybe somebody will do some actual journalism.

Back to Mailer, only to be interrupted by an essay by my pal Nathan Schneider, author of a great forthcoming book called God in Proof.

Back to Mailer. Phone call. Need to get my head back into the work. How? By poking around the internet, of course, and landing on this: "Be Wrong as Fast as You Can," by Hugo Lindgren, on work that never gets written.

How I Avoided Work, 1/4/13

Daily Distractions:

A Romance of the Sea-Serpent, or The Icthyosaurus.: A Collection of the Ancient and Modern Authorities, with Letters from Merchants and Men of Science, by Eugene Batchelder, 1850

Literary Journalism Studies, a scholarly journal dedicated to the genre known here as mutant journalism. I've been poking through back issues and lamenting the existence of Tom Wolfe.

"Grinding obviousness, bizarrely sprinkled." Victoria Beale on Alain De Botton's "School of Life" imprint.

Michael Herr, Dispatches, and Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar"

Got to talking awhile back with some students about a Wallace Stevens poem mentioned in Michael Herr's Dispatches.

* * *

Below is the Wallace Stevens poem Herr alludes to on p. 107 of my edition of Dispatches -- the last line before section IV of "Khe Sanh."  It's called "Anecodote of the Jar."As for some of the other mysterious terms -- Tet, Dien Bien Phu, etc. -- some of you may have had that in high school history, others can learn all they need by context (Tet = the moment when every sane person understood the war would never be won; Dien Bien Phu = the moment when the French, before the Americans, were biblically defeated by their own vanity, plus overwhelming numbers).

The history, of course, is not the point. We don't read Dispatches to learn about the Vietnam War anymore than we read Moby-Dick to learn about whaling. Then again, one should never rest too easy on symbolism. One of you asked about the insertion of symbols in creative nonfiction, whether it could be done. With the reminder that rules are for breaking, no -- just as you shouldn't insert symbols into fiction, or a poem. One doesn't insert symbols, one -- perhaps -- finds them, recognizes them, maybe even accentuates them. There really was a white whale, there really was a war. The rest is in the telling. And Dispatches, in particular, is in the words.

For instance: rereading the "Khe Sanh" section, I had to stop and read this simple bit aloud a couple of times: "A vision of as many as 40,000 of them out there in the open, fighting it out on our terms, fighting for once like men, fighting to no avail. There would be a battle, a set-piece battle where he could be killed by the numbers, killed wholesale, and if we killed enough of him, maybe he would go away."

There's the devastating kindness of this passage, its sweet empathetic suspension of disbelief, for just a moment, for just long enough to evoke not only the delusion of the generals but also the vulnerable childishness of that delusion: "maybe he would go away." But there are cross currents in this passage, so read it again, with ears for the emphases and the deliberate cliches: "A vision of as many as 40,000 of them out there in the open, FIGHTING it out on our terms, FIGHTING for once like men, FIGHTING to no avail. There would be a BATTLE, a set-piece BATTLE where he could be KILLED by the numbers, KILLED wholesale, and if we KILLED enough of him, maybe he would go away."

My third time through I realized that "maybe he would good go away" isn't even the most absurd, most heartbreaking phrase; I think it's "there would be" -- "there would be a battle." That's the saddest, most pathetic verb tense in the language. I'm using the term "pathetic" colloquially, but it might apply formally, too -- part of what makes Dispatches so powerful, so unlike other war stories even as it traffics in machismo and cynicism, is that he never allows "the Mission," as he describes in a bit of magical realism, the grandeur or depth or romance of tragedy.

Ok, enough of that -- if you still want it, the Stevens poem:


I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Daily Distractions 1/3/13

Today's detours:

"You can't get an ought from a was." -- Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on the so-called paleolithic diet for rugged hipsters, at The New Inquiry.

"It looks like it's MLA-bashing season again." -- anonymous professor quoted by Gideon Lewis-Krauss in "In the Penthouse of the Ivory Tower," at The Believer.

Whenever we say the word "beautiful" in front of others, [Dave Hickey] argues, our feelings are transformed from private experiences into actions with public consequences, taking us into the political arena of give and take—what he calls "wrangling" over ideas that, in essence, resembles the disputes over the value of physical things in the capitalist marketplace. We utter the word "beauty," Hickey contends, at least in part "because we are good democrats, who aspire to transparency and consensus."
--Laurie Fendrich, "Dave Hickey's Politics of Beauty," The Chronicle Review

And because I have a weird thrumming in my left ear, "Home Taping Is Skill in Buddha," by M. Sophia Newman, at Killing the Buddha.

Julie Morstad, The Wayside, 2012

I haven't posted anything here in a year, but a strange book that arrived in the mail yesterday prompts me to revive this blog. The Wayside, by Julie Morstad, published by Drawn and Quarterly, dedicated to innovative comics and illustration. I mistook it for a sketchbook, essentially an advertisement for a commercial advertiser. Then I "read" it. And tweeted my enthusiasm. Like so:

I thought I didn't care bout Julie Morstad's THE WAYSIDE, review copy sent by @DandQ. Threw away publicity 1-pager. Then, oh my, I looked!

THE WAYSIDE's just a book of illustrations. Like Henry Darger was just a janitor. Comparison apt: serious little girls, eerie games.

But unlike Darger's, Julie Morstad's girls are clothed, & seem to possess their own imagination rather than representing artist's.

Publisher @DandQ compares Julie Morstad to Edward Gorey and Virginia Woolf. Yes, and. And but -- well, oh.

At which point urgent news interrupted:

Charles Johnson ‏@Green_Footballs

Whooping Cough Epidemic Declared in Vermont http://lgf.bz/Wa5m8G 

There's a digression here. Two, really, since I live in Vermont. But the first is obvious enough. The second has to do with the source, Charles Johnson, once one of the most popular bloggers on the internet, an ardent supporter of the "War on Terror" and a virulent anti-Islam polemicist. At some point he had a change of heart. Now he's a lefty and a critic of his former comrades. But he still pays attention to news he deems dire. I got in an online fight with him once, and posted something about it; I was almost immediately deluged with hatemail from his followers, some of it menacing, much of it obscene, plenty of it just silly, declaring me a "moonbat," a special term of Little Green Footballs. Now those same zealots declare Johnson a moonbat. "Moonbat" almost works to describe some of Morstad's drawings, but they're all isolated on blank white pages -- clean white spaces.

Anyway, there was one last tweet, inconsequential:

Julie Morstad's THE WAYSIDE really just a collection of drawings. But a line like a hair, or a hair like a line, binds them.

Sweet Heaven When I Die, Reviews

The reviews so far of my new book, Sweet Heaven When I Die:

“The book belongs to the tradition of long-form, narrative journalism best exemplified by writers such as Joan Didion, John McPhee, Norman Mailer and Sharlet’s contemporary David Samuels. Sharlet deserves a place alongside such masters, for he has emerged as a master investigative stylist and one of the shrewdest commentators on religion’s underexplored realms.”

                        --Michael Washburn, The Washington Post

“For Sharlet, the story of American religion is not a polarized one of fundamentalists vs. secularists. It’s a vast landscape, and each essay in his remarkable new collection of literary journalism explores a different crag or cranny of it…. There’s no better guide to this ‘country in between.’”

                        --Brook Wilensky-Lanford, The Boston Globe

“Superb… Compelling…  Stunning… A fine book, by a deeply thoughtful writer.”

                        --Steve Yarbrough, The Oregonian

“A Must-Read…. Brilliant portraits of the religious fringe… fleshed out in lush three-dimensional detail—a lifetime in a dozen pages, a biography distilled to its purest elements…. Sharlet impresses with his ability to mine the common humanity that lingers in even the most radically minded thinkers.”

                        --The Daily Beast

“Sharp and intimate.”

                        --Rolling Stone

“All I had to do was open to the first lines of  ‘Sweet Fuck All, Colorado’: ‘When I was eighteen I fell hard for the state of Colorado as embodied by a woman with long honey blond hair and speckled green eyes, who drank wine from a coffee mug and whiskey from the bottle.’

                        --The Paris Review, Staff Pick

“A beautifully written bricolage of reported narrative, character study, and memoir tracing his travels among the faithful in the United States.”

                        --Jeremy Keehn, Harper’s.org

"The characters in Sweet Heaven When I Die are rough, unfulfilled, often doomed. But that’s what makes this collection so strong, so human. We always suspect that by the end, they will be betrayed by their beliefs, will be disillusioned or destroyed. But failure doesn’t make belief meaningless. It may be the only thing that gives faith meaning at all."

                        --Kansas City Star

“A fascinating tour through some of the darker, or simply more baffling, corners of American faith and spirituality. Sharlet proves himself a worthy guide both because he's a keen observer and because he approaches his subjects with a sense of openness.”

                        --Bookforum

"[A] collection of beautifully written narratives... Sharlet's previous works have incisively critiqued fundamentalism and American power; Sweet Heaven is equally thoughtful, but tender, acknowledging that between the extremes of snake handlers and nihilists, most of us wander through life groping for meaning, with consolation that in the act of finding, we too, may be found."

                        --Durham, NC Independent

"Brilliant portraits of faith, despair and the fictions that keep people going... [Sharlet's] often-elegiac prose rumbles with the fierce rhythms of the blues…. By bringing back the stories of people they’ve met on their own wanderings across battle lines, Bottoms [author of Swalling the Past] and Sharlet bear witness to something greater than their personal dilemmas. Call it faith, call it fiction, call it both. But to read these books — both works of passionate, troubled empathy — is to feel less alone. "

                        --Margot Harrison, Seven Days

“A collection of powerful, moody, hopeful, sad, unsettling and even uplifting essays into the deepest realms of truth, belief, hope, and the blues.”

                        --Lebanon, NH Valley News

“[Sharlet] uses his gift for clear, resonant prose to slowly unravel each subject…. Rich and intriguing reading.”

                        --Booklist

“In the end, [Sharlet] says, it's in not knowing the ultimate answers, in leaving ourselves open to the possibility of change, that we can continue to draw hope…. Call it narrative journalism or creative nonfiction, Jeff Sharlet's collection of feature-length pieces demonstrates his mastery of the form.”

                        --Ron Hogan, Shelf Awareness

“In every wonderfully told, intimate, (auto-)biographical detail, we learn something of more wide-ranging significance. Perhaps we learn a bit about how to die and how to live. At the very least, we learn a lot about the religious field in America…. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth, much like Cornel West after him, drew from Christianity’s concept of love a model of “protest against the course of the world,” a way of being ethical in a world mired in injustice. Sharlet searches for such pockets of love-as-protest that persist in unlikely places in America—from personal relationships in the heartland to radical politics in New York City. It is rewarding to join him on this search.’
                        --John D. Boy, The Immanent Frame / Social Science Research Council

“A fascinating collection of essays… outstanding, at both reportorial and literary levels…. Strongly recommended.”

                        --Scholars & Rogues

“While reading and re-reading Jeff Sharlet's Sweet Heaven When I Die, a couple of songs replayed over and over in my head. His lovely and haunting collections of essays made my thinking musical. Perhaps it is the beauty of his language, the lyrical quality of his descriptions, that direct me to hymns and pop songs… Perhaps, it is because his reflections on religion, trauma, belief, unbelief, practice and loss feel like poetry.”

                        --Kelly Baker, Religion in American History

“[Sharlet’s] quest is personal, and Sweet Heaven is richer for it: infused with both his searching and his skepticism, the collection is documentary journalism with a hint of poetry. Recommended.“

                        --New City Lit

“Sweet Heaven When I Die tells tales of religious weirdness, which is also to say the wildness, the wilderness, the untamable regions. If we don’t make space for the weird in religion, we simply don’t get religion in all its complexity, its messiness, and its wild parts…. Sharlet’s rare gift has been to make friends with the weird and almost, but not quite, make peace with it…. A great, incisive writer.”

                        --S. Brent Plate, Religion Dispatches

“Marvelous vignettes of this bizarre country of ours and its double-bizarre inhabitants. I loved The Family and C Street but I think this is his best so far.”

                        ­--Bookavore, Word Bookstore staff pick

"Writing in the tradition of William Least Heat Moon and John McPhee, in Sweet Heaven Sharlet's travels reveal people in place and time. The stories are at once humorous and sad, while the characters from all corners lead lives both fulfilling and desperate."

                        --The Observer (Shepherdstown, W. Va)

“Part reporter, part prophet, Jeff Sharlet is an American visionary in the lineage that runs from Twain to Robinson Jeffers to Sam Shepard and Joan Didion. In Sweet Heaven When I Die, he scours the desert margins of our culture, politics, and religion, training his eye on outlaws, anarchists, fanatics, and saints. In this way, he reveals the unexpected shape of our nation’s center, which is to say, our heart.”

--Peter Trachtenberg, author of The Book of Calamities

Fall Book Tour

Following are some of the events I’ll be doing this fall in support of my new book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, and around other topics. Bookstores interested in hosting an event should contact my publicist, Whitney Peeling, at whitney.peeling@gmail.com. Universities, colleges, and other organizations should contact my speaking agent, Annette Luba-Lucas at lectures@andersonliterary.com. You can also write me directly at jeff.sharlet@gmail.com.


September 13 / Middlebury, VT Town Hall Theater, sponsored by the Vermont Book Shop

September 15 / University of North Alabama

September 21 / Norwich, VT Norwich Bookstore

September 23 / New York, NY New York University Bookstore. This is an event for Heather Hendershot and her new book, What’s Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. I’m the respondent. She’ll speak a bit, then we’ll have a conversation.

September 26 / Asheville, NC Malaprops Bookstore

September 27 / Chapel Hill, NC Flyleaf Books

September 28 / Durham, NC Duke University Center for Documentary Studies

October 9 / New York, NY Union Theological Seminary. The American Christian Right and the global equality struggle.

October 12 / New York, NY Details TBA

October 18 / Concord, NH Gibson’s Bookstore

October 21 / Shepherdstown, West Virginia Shepherd University

October 22 / Washington, D.C. “Religious Politics & Secular Values: A CFI Institute”

October 23 / Washington, D.C. Busboys & Poets

October 27 / Burlington, VT University of Vermont

October 30 / Pasadena, CA All Saints Church Rector’s Forum

November 3 / Hanover, NH I’ll be hosting the Dartmouth English Department’s second creative writing event of the fall with guest writer Donovan Hohn, author of Moby-Duck. Sanborn Library, 4 pm, free and open to the public.

November 7 / Lewiston, ME Bates College

November 8 / Amherst, MA Hampshire College

November 9 / Cleveland, OH Case Western University

November 10 / Iowa City, IA Prairie Lights Books, 6:30

November 16 / Cambridge, MA Porter Square Books

February 28 / Knoxville, TN University of Tennessee

Sweet Heaven When I Die, First Reviews

My new book, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between is out. It's getting good reviews.

The Boston Globe calls it a "remarkable new collection of literary journalism... intimate in tone and expansive in scope," and adds that "taken together, these essays begin to give shape to a multifaceted America that is so much more than east and west, left and right, religious and secular. And there’s no better guide to this '"country in between.'"

The Oregonian says: "Superb... compelling... stunning... From what people in the publishing business tell me, collections of essays are not easy to sell these days. I hope Sharlet proves conventional wisdom wrong. This is a fine book, by a deeply thoughtful writer."

The Daily declares, "In a crowded field, 'Sweet Heaven' stands with the few books that aren't afraid to look at the realities of American religion."

And then there's Michael Washburn, writing in The Washington Post.

Jeff Sharlet delivers a fine dose of thoughtful skepticism in “Sweet Heaven When I Die,” his collection of 13 trenchant essays on how we gain, lose, maintain and blindly accept faith. The book belongs to the tradition of long-form, narrative journalism best exemplified by writers such as Joan Didion, John McPhee, Norman Mailer and Sharlet’s contemporary David Samuels. Sharlet deserves a place alongside such masters, for he has emerged as a master investigative stylist and one of the shrewdest commentators on religion’s underexplored realms.

Best known for "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," the author offers a disquieting meditation on hope while discussing parental loss, artistic desire and the haunting music of Dock Boggs in a chapter called “Born, Again.” We cling to hope, Sharlet writes, “when the odds, no matter how good, are still that: odds, chance, a gamble in which the rules may change at any time. . . . We hope when we understand that circumstances are beyond our control, when will is not equal to effect, when we are not the subjects of a story but its objects. Hope isn’t optimistic; it’s the face of despair.” In this lamentation, he underscores how life itself puts faith in question.

In another essay, Sharlet combines autobiography and reportage to bring to life a group of Westerners in self-imposed exile who worship Christ in mountain churches and then congregate in local dives. He visits an old, distant friend and finds comfortable ground because when they “talk about God . . . both knew that’s a conversation without many conclusions.”

Sharlet also visits the opposite side of the spectrum in his reporting on BattleCry, the “furious youth crusade” of fundamentalism. In his account, BattleCry is the type of fundamentalist organization that embarrasses temperate Christians and enrages nonbelievers. Yet with its “warrior” mentality and its loathing of “queers and communists, feminists and Muslims,” the organization offers a vision of faith unencumbered by ambiguity. Sharlet quotes BatleCry’s leader, Ron Luce, as saying, “The world is a forty-five-year-old pervert posing as another tween online.’ ” BattleCry offers a sanctuary for like-minded believers.Speaking with a young entertainer at a BattleCry event, he realizes that her calm stems from the fact that she has “found faith that promised not answers but an end to questions.”

This is the prevailing division of the world that “Sweet Heaven” presents: between those who use faith as a tool for answering life’s difficult riddles and those whose faith is less an instrument than a blindfold. Sharlet contends that this latter faith exists without belief because it operates without understanding.

“Sweet Heaven” goes beyond “fringe fundamentalisms” and believers’ personal struggles. Sharlet also delivers commanding portraits of philosopher Cornel West, Yiddish novelist Chava Rosenfarb and radical environmental and labor activist Brad Will that dramatize faith made heroic through intellectual, artistic and political perseverance. But these more traditional pieces lack the intimacy of other essays in the collection.

In a chapter called “The Rapture,” exploring New Age extravagances, Sharlet reveals his pragmatic skepticism. He anchors the essay to New York-based healer Sondra Shaye, a self-described “fairie” who adopts the persona ofJesus as part of her therapy for her clients, all of whom pay good money to have her bless real estate deals and tackle their health problems and anxieties. Her payoff is handsome: She claims she earns more as a healer then she did in her previous job as a corporate litigator. Sharlet presents her story as a lesson in 21st-century faith. “Money is the means by which Sondra and other New Age healers show themselves to be a religious movement that’s within the economy of belief,” he writes.

As Sharlet chronicles the economies of belief — private, public or fraudulent — he remains more agnostic than atheist, more charitable than cynical. And though he obviously finds blind faith corrosive, he tempers his criticism by declining to impose his own beliefs. Sondra the healer seems to get something right when she tells Sharlet “doubt is your revelation.”

The Shack

Notes for a review I never got around to finishing:

Recently an acquaintance of my wife’s, a woman she’d met a few times through work, presented her with a gift for our two-month-old daughter: a tiny, hand-knit, beige sweater, a wrap-around tunic that ties at the side with a button in the shape of a ladybug. “Isn’t it wonderful?” my wife asked. She likes wrap sweaters, herself, and she thought the ladybug was adorable. I’m sure it is. But I could only feign agreement. My stomach was lurching with the adrenalized vertigo peculiar to new parents, torqued between deep fear and cold aggression in the face of a perceived threat to one’s child. There was no threat in the sweater, of course. Rather, just the dangers of free association, between its ladybug button and the toy ladybug left behind as calling cards by the child-killer who sets in motion the plot of The Shack, an evangelical bestseller self-published in 2008 by an Oregon motel clerk named William P. Young. I read The Shack with the intention of reviewing it several months ago, but until that moment with the ladybug, I couldn’t account for why this awkward allegorical novel has won the hearts and minds of Christian America like no other fiction since the 1995 debut of the apocalyptic Left Behind series, which went on to sell some 50 million copies worldwide.

The Shack is as unlike that violently fundamentalist fever dream as possible: almost action-free, clogged with philosophical allusion, soundtracked by a series of chapter epigraphs drawn from Bruce Cockburn songs, and dedicated to a transgendered God who takes the form of a jolly, fat black woman in an apron, seemingly borrowed from a bottle of Aunt Jemima maple syrup, and calls herself Poppa to remind you that even though she’s a a mountain of maternal love she’s also your father. The Father, in fact—The Shack is ultimately committed to the same muscular faith that ripples through Left Behind. It’s not the theological destination that differs, it’s the path. Left Behind, perhaps the definitive evangelical text of the 1990s, attacked secularism and liberalism head on, its story of a small band of evangelicals doing battle with a United Nations bent on eradicationg religion an outright declaration of culture war, at the least. The Shack isn’t like that. The Shack loves everybody, even liberals. They’ll learn, if they’ll just relax for a minute and pull up a seat for pancakes with Poppa. The Shack is fundamentalism a la Alice’s Restaurant.