Dear Friends,

I wanted to give you something for Christmas. Something free and different.

Yes, yes. I know that everything on this website is free (okay, well, if you click the links to my books you’ll see that the books aren’t free). And the Advent readings are certainly free. But they aren’t different.

Okay, maybe they are different. I don’t know.

I’m starting over.

Dear Friends,

I have a Christmas present for you. And this is for you even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, don’t get Christmas, or even if you are a Bah Humbug kind of person.

I hope you’re not. But still.

This is a Christmas present for everyone: adult and child alike, solitary or in company, at home or away. It’s for anyone who likes words and even for people who don’t realize they do (one of my not-so-secret aims is to show you that you do like words, that you actually love them–did you know?). It’s a gift of something simple, brief, and lovely. Something you can enjoy once or again. Something that will make you think and imagine or that you can turn your mind off to and just let the words come– as they will, as they want to.

(Well-aligned words are Such Lovely Things, don’t you think so?)

Here’s the gift: I’ve read aloud and recorded something Favorite of mine, and I’m inviting you to listen.

What is it? It’s a short story. No. A poem. No. A Memory and a Conversation, a look over the shoulder, a Christmas or ten of them heaped up and then unspooled in a glorious line of words.

It’s Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

Who is Dylan Thomas? Dylan Thomas was a Welshman and a poet. He lived a short, loud and inebriated life, and he loved Christmas. He loved his memories of Christmas, anyway–the Christmases he had known when he was a child in (you guessed it) Wales.

He wrote A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and the work is certainly a testament to his love for and fond memory of his childhood Christmases. Well, whether or not he actually loved these memories is, I suppose, up to question, as he died in 1953. We cannot ask him. But this bit of prose certainly suggests that he loved those Christmases Past and snow and Wales in the snow.

Any work of literature mustered up in love is worth something, isn’t it? Add to that Thomas’s adjectives, his specificity, his brilliant and tempered use of alliteration; include his evocation of the child-mind, so richly done in this text; his appreciation of postmen; his love of mystery; his brilliant description of uncles (“there are always uncles at Christmas”) and aunts.

It’s so so good.

And it might be difficult to follow. So allow me to explain that this is a memory, and memories come as they will, right? Often memories lead to other memories in ways that make sense to our minds at the time but that, written out, might be confusing to the one who is following along.

Know that this is what is happening here: someone is remembering his childhood Christmases, and he is doing so in the aggregate: all-in-a-heap. One thought of Christmas past leads to another, and just when you are really and truly settling in to this stream-of-consciousness, you realize that he is now relating these Christmases to someone else–likely a child.

In fact, the way that this narrative becomes a conversation makes one wonder if Thomas is himself one of the uncles he mentions who has been dozing (and remembering) in front of a Christmas fire, and then has been interrupted by a niece or nephew and so begins telling them what he has been reliving in his mind.

It’s wonderful.

And, as I said, it’s for everyone. For people who began their holiday celebrations last night with Hanukah. For people who have never heard of Christmas. For people who celebrate Christmas in the summertime, never with snow. It’s for you and your children, for your baby who can barely crawl. For your great-aunt who might even now be “teetering at the sideboard.” For the uncles who are on their way to your house for the holidays.

Why is it for everyone? Because it’s beautiful–and beauty is for Everyone, most especially at Christmas.

So where is it? See below. Download and enjoy.

Merry Christmas!

With Great Joy,

Rebecca

click here to download

The post A Merry Christmas Gift for You: A Child’s Christmas in Wales appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It has always been the field at the bottom of our neighborhood, the backyard of the community pool. Earliest memory finds us there with baby William at his first Easter, eight months old and unable to walk and sitting in the sand that is the volleyball court. We were late for the egg hunt, but really, he wouldn’t have been able to hunt for eggs yet anyway.

Soon enough it was the field where he first played soccer, and Everett and Emma after him. Once, on the sidelines of a friend’s game, little Everett accidentally scratched Will’s eye, and we ended up spending a good portion of the afternoon in the emergency room.

And once, distracted by the action of six-year-old William’s game, Bill and I both were surprised to find the game stopped by the cry, “There’s a baby on the field!” and one of us (both?) went hurrying out to retrieve our toddling daughter.

At age four, little William came crying toward us. He didn’t like the game. He didn’t want to play anymore. I stood with infant, stroller and toddler and wondered what to do, but Bill made an early show of fatherly wisdom that we still talk about today:

“You don’t have to play,” he told our teary boy, “but first I want you to go back out on the field and kick the ball one more time. Just once more.”

William re-entered the game and kicked the ball once, twice, lots of times. And he played soccer forever after.

Our days of sitting sideline on that field are long over now. Each of the children graduated to different sports or different fields or both, and now that field serves only as backdrop to the pool. Occasionally I see parents like we once were toting bags and chairs down the hill, their children racing ahead of them. We ourselves haven’t been down on that field in I don’t know how long. We have no reason to go.

But it’s funny how I know that field and how it’s divided up for games. There is where I sat with my in-laws, there where baby Emma played in the grass during practice. There where Will sustained the eye injury, and where his father encouraged him back onto the field.

***

We pulled into the driveway this afternoon to see our kids all leaving the house. They were dressed for playing. “We’re going down to the field to play soccer with Nathan and Katherine. You come too!” they said.

It was 82 degrees and the sky had only scattered clouds. We changed our clothes, we grabbed some blankets. I brought the novel I’m currently reading.

And of course we took the dog.

***

The days around here are full and normal. All five of us aren’t always home for dinner; people come and go based on class, meetings, work, friends. But I am consistently aware of two realities:

1. we are on borrowed time and
2. this isn’t going to last.

By the end of the coming summer, Will will be married and Everett off on his gap year or in college.

Everything will be different so soon. Which is fine and good and the normal, healthy course of things.

But what I’ve decided in these weeks and months of “last times” is to *not* pressure the family to make something of it–to plan trips and getaways and special events. Instead, I’ve just decided to let it come and enjoy it.

It’s been working out nicely.

***

This afternoon, in glorious 80-degree, sun-soaked winter light, I tossed a Frisbee with my dog and family. I watched my kids play soccer and walk handstands across the field. I lay on a blanket next to my husband and listened for the umpteenth time to his recent playlist, which includes all kinds of things I would never hear if it weren’t for him, plus the occasional number from Hamilton.

I watched our dog make friends with a bear (okay, it was a dog, but it was hard to tell) named Gus, and I watched my husband make our dog a drinking bowl out of a Frisbee.

I lay on my back and read my book. I lay on my back and watched hawks make wide circles in blue sky. I lay on my stomach and sang harmonies to Bill’s playlist and realized that I actually can read something as gorgeous and complex as Wolf Hall while enjoying Mood Robot. 

I closed my eyes and felt the sun soak through my clothes. I listened to the sounds of my grown and near-grown children play soccer with their friends. I watched their young, strong, powerful bodies run across the field. And later I discussed some of the merits of Wolf Hall with Nathan and Katherine, who asked me to read them a sample. Which, of course, I did.

***

The field at the bottom of our neighborhood is where my children learned to play soccer. It’s where baby Everett gave little William an eye-scratch and where Emma got a soccer trophy (I remember how badly she wanted one).

But today, if you were to come down to the field with me, I would show you where our grown-up children played and where I played with them, where the soccer goals were and where Will did his handstands.

Where our blankets lay and I used my purse as a pillow and read a book or didn’t on a February afternoon.

It was right there. I remember.

The post Field Day appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

That might be what a writer wants.

But that’s not always true. Having made room for these things precisely, a writer can find that they are absolutely not what she wants. She can find herself repulsed by the blank screen, even terrified. Given the space and time, she fails to write and instead examines her hair for split ends, the interwebs for distraction, or, with blindly searching fingers, the table’s undersides for abandoned gum.

Okay, maybe not that last bit.

No, the writer wants silence and space not for their yawning emptiness but for what might possibly, conceivably come of them–if silence and space result in something.

It’s the Something that the writer wants: that perfect word, that shining sentence. The paragraph that miraculously hits the mark.  And then scores more paragraphs, coming with ease or terrible labor, that somehow bring to light that thing that was in her head–the thing that was the reason she looked for silence and space in the first place.

But then, what of it?

Once–more than once–satisfied with a string of paragraphs, I sent them off to a dear friend. Here, I was saying. You know the story, or you know it well enough because I’ve told it to you. Read this, I was saying. This, I was saying, is good.

And she responded, in good faith, with something sensible along these lines: I see what you’re saying and I think it’s good, but I don’t really know how it fits, you know, within the structure of the whole, so I can’t really tell, in a way, how good it is.

It was true– and it wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t be expected to appreciate it. She couldn’t even understand it, really, perched isolated like that in the body of an email.

A writer doesn’t really want to write email, I think. Not really. This writer doesn’t, anyway.

So what, in the end, does a writer want?

I’ll tell you.

A writer wants what I had on Friday evening, sitting comfortably in a living room I had never seen before in a town I’d never visited. I was sitting with readers, all members of a book club, and their names and faces were brand new to me–but their love of books was not.

I can tell you that a writer wants readers like those souls sitting there, who had read my book and were considering it, who had opinions and ideas of things in the book that they liked or didn’t, were sold on or maybe were not sold on at all.

A writer wants readers like Melanie, who suddenly spoke up about some paragraphs of the book she especially liked. She said she read them and she read them again. She folded down the corner and marked them, and then she read them aloud to her husband. She told us all why she loved this part, how this part especially rang true for her. How she knows that sometimes faith and life are like this: not things you can plot out so specifically, but that somehow occur, are born, come to light nonetheless.

Melanie said she especially liked that part–and I said I liked it too. I said I loved it, in fact. That, in fact, it was one of my favorites, and I remembered silently that I sent that very part to a friend once who, through no fault of her own, couldn’t possibly appreciate it at the time.

A writer wants moments like this–when the sitting in silence and isolation result in paragraphs that result in a book that connects one like this with Melanie. I didn’t know her until Friday, but I will always know her now and will know, on the chance occasion I re-read that more-favorite-than-some-to-me passages in the book, that Melanie loves it too.

Thank you, Melanie, for loving that part of my book.

Every writer, I think, wants a Melanie.

Afterward, Frank walked back alone to campus, chilled with perspiration. The sky was invariably dull; his mind teemed. He could reconcile none of it. Belief was audacious at best, with repercussions he couldn’t conceive of. Maybe belief was even stupid. And it wasn’t a sudden revelation, in the end. It wasn’t a specific conversation that did it. He can’t remember which time it was–the day or the month–when the leaden sky was peeled back at the corners and Frank was able to see.                                                                                                     Healing Maddie Brees, p. 50

The post What Every Writer Wants appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I feel as if I’ve done a lot of traveling lately. It’s that time of year, right? Summer vacation. We’re gone, we’re here, we’re gone again.

Definitely not complaining. I love to travel. But lately it’s got me thinking about how I pack.

Like most people (everyone?), I’m guessing I have the normal categories: clothes, toiletries, shoes. Standard, right? That’s standard.

But when it comes to packing, what really matters to me is the Carry-On.

You know the Carry-On. That’s the smallish bag you keep with you on the plane, the one you squeeze into the space under the seat in front of you. The one that holds your wallet and your chapstick, maybe your toothbrush (depending), and anything else you’ll be wanting to grab during the flight.

So the Carry-On is vital. But for me, it’s not just for planes (do you do this, too?). It’s for car-travel. And even though we don’t have to wedge it under the seat in front of us, it’s what my daughter and I have come to call it even for travel in the car. We always pack a Carry-On.

In a way, the Carry-On is the Most Important Luggage of my trip. Because while I consider the clothing, shoes, etc. to be necessary, the Carry-On sort of contains (this sounds so ridiculous) all my hopes and dreams.

Okay, granted. That definitely sounds over the top. Bear with me.

The Carry-On represents, firstly, that 1) I’m going to be away from the normal demands of my life for awhile, and 2) I’m going to Sit.

Sitting is not a normal thing for me. Even if I’m writing, I try to spend much of the time on my feet. Sitting isn’t terribly good for you; and also, I manage a household. On any given day, I am up and about Doing Things, and I am doing these things Most of the Time. Most of what I do, on any given day, does not find me doing the sorts of things that one can find in my Carry-On.

As such, my Carry-On usually contains things I Should Get To. Blank paper and envelopes for notes I need to write, a bill I need to take care of. The general flotsam of my desk, culled and reorganized (or not) into a doable, smallish stack suitable for the road.

And it contains the Dailies. My Bible, my journal. Whatever it is I’m reading at the time. My laptop and its power cord. A phone charger. The Things I Need to Do My Job(s). (Writer. Mother. Wife. Person.)

Then finally (here is where the Hopes and Dreams come in), it holds a representation of the Things I Would Like To Do. As in, if I had All the Time in the World. Which one basically does (or can imagine one does, anyway) if one is flying to Shanghai. Or riding as passenger around New York City. Or anywhere at any time ever on I-95 near Washington D.C.

Hopes and Dreams are really hard to get to, but maybe if one simply had Enough Time….

Take the trip I’ve just returned from. We were gone for exactly one week, and my Carry-On for the ride in the car to and in and from New England included the following: my journal, Bible, Psalter, notebook. Issue # 37 of Ruminate magazine and the July-August issue of Smithsonian. My mother’s journal (not my mother’s journal, but the journal I keep and write in about being a mother). My laptop, its charger. A blank thank-you note; a Compassion International letter. A new book of poetry written by Christopher Janke; a creative non-fiction book, Wake, Sleeper, by Bryan Parys. Andy Crouch’s Culture-Making. A copy of my novel (can’t quite say why) and the wonderful sci-fi, literary fiction brilliance that I’ve read once before but am So Glad to have re-read on this trip: P.D. James’ Children of Men.

That’s for one week, Saturday to Saturday.

Listing it out like this (or looking at it in its bulging bag, or swinging it over my shoulder to tote to the car) makes me feel a little bit silly. Do I truly imagine that I’ll get to it all?

And yet. It’s an interesting thing to distill it like this. To pack into a discreet container The Things One Really Loves and Hopes To Do.

This is where the moral goes, right? The application. The metaphorical point to all of this.

Truth be told, I don’t really know what to say. I could ask in a tone tinged by a Capital One advertising campaign: “What’s in your carry-on?” Or I could encourage young mothers who don’t currently have time or room for carry-ons of their own that they might, someday, have carry-ons in their futures.

Or I could comment on the truth: that we got home on Saturday night and most of the laundry was done by Sunday, but I didn’t fully unpack my carry-on until Monday night. Or was it Tuesday? Because, for the most part, I wasn’t using any of it.

In which case the point would be how hard it is, in this life, to make time for what I love. For what we love.

And that maybe it’s vital to do so.

“Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them,” says Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. As such, this notorious demon suggests, delights and joys are dangerous because they very well might–horrors!–lead us to God.

I love this very much.

What is it with God and delight? What is it with Him and pleasure? The more I look for Him, the more I see Him appealing to me with precisely this: the things that truly delight me; the things I most desire (Psalm 37:4).

No matter how hard omni-media try portray Him as Kill-Joy; no matter how the Commandments are preached as prescribed misery, I have learned and am learning that the opposite is the case: that the One who declared this world Good is also the author of delight.

That yes, He has rules and laws, but these, too, when followed, are actually meant to be life-giving. To delight us.

That He Himself is actually the greatest delight we can know, and all the other delights of this world–like a cold beer, the soft fuzz of a newborn’s hair, sunlight limning a cloud or the stunning beauties of a well-crafted phrase–are the edges of the beauties of Himself.

Which amazes me.

And also makes me hope (Oh! here’s the point!) that you always pack a Carry-On. That you don’t leave it untouched at the foot of the stairs, but that you dip into it often and are repeatedly delighted. And that you find Him also (somehow) tucked miraculously inside.

The post Carry-On appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

What was I doing? Standing on some, maybe. Or I had thrown one across the room? Maybe I’d written in one: our old family copy of Charlotte’s Web, which I somehow managed to take with me when I left my parents’ house, and which I read to our children three or maybe four times, is inscribed in crayon with large and clumsy efforts at spelling “Becky.” Maybe I wrote in lots of books, maybe I tore their covers, and maybe my mother thought I shouldn’t.

“Books are your friends.” I know I’d heard it more than once–likely many times. I vaguely remember reconciling myself to the statement sometime in high school, for the first time encountering, rational and aware, a mantra that had been ingrained and accepted, a patent fact since time out of mind: “Books are your friends.”

It was true, and I knew it. It had been true–steadfastly, steadily true all my life.

There was that panic at some point during middle school when our local library suddenly announced they would be having a book sale. I walked in fear for days. Which books would they be selling? And why? And could we go to the sale so that I could buy my favorite ones?

Afterward, to my very real relief, the entire series of The Borrowers remained intact, still shelved in Fiction N.

Yes, books are friends. Companions. Anne (of Green Gables) was my best friend in 8th grade. And Charlotte whispers to me from every spider I gently whisk into a tissue to deposit outside.

Others accompany me in other ways. Daisy’s dock-end green light and the “fresh, green breast of the new world” are with me every time I return to Long Island and so often when I think of capitalism run amok. The Movie-Goer makes sense for me of life and also the imponderable mystery of New Orleans; The End of the Affair tells more truth about God than I can neatly summarize.

I pace lawns and terraces with To the Lighthouse‘s Mr. Ramsay; I knit socks and brood over tree-top rooks with Mrs. Ramsay. With Ms. Woolf’s Lily I gaze at a table pitched upside down in the branches of a tree; with her Mrs. Dalloway I hear the clocks’ chimes as “leaden circles dissolving on the air.” These characters and scenes are more presently with me than what I served last night for dinner. Recalling them comforts me and also quickens thought.

Reading makes me reach for the dictionary, for a pen. The best and favorite of my books are endlessly dog-eared, their passages underlined or bracketed in the margin, their end-pages re-invented as lists of vocabulary words.

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark–readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.    

-Possession, by A.S. Byatt, p. 521. Random House, 1990. Last week I finished reading it for the third time. I read it on my own first in 1993, a second time with a book club ten years later, and now, thirteen years after that. And I find I am not finished with it. My reading this time, again on my own, sent me–as the best books do–to The New York Times book review, just to see what the reviewer made of it back in 1990. But that wasn’t enough. On Saturday evening, I found myself reading The Paris Review No 159, Fall 1991, and also lists of other books by Byatt. I was wanting to find analysis of the poems she wrote for this novel; I was wanting to find discussion on her many uses of the word “possession.” I was looking up “liminality,” I was considering new meaning for the color green. I was making for myself a list of Things To Read Next: Byatt’s The Djinn of the Nightingale’s Eye; Eliot’s Middlemarch (again, gladly); Angus Wilson’s The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot.

The book had set my mind spinning, and I was wanting conversation. Someone to talk about it with; someone to send my thoughts running with after these and new ideas. If a book is a friend, then it is the best of companions. And if it is a companion then certainly it has things to talk about. Ms Byatt, in 1990, started a conversation. And on Saturday night in my dining room on my laptop, I tried desperately to join it.

Liminality: noun. Being in an intermediate state, phase, or condition. 

And now I, too, have started a conversation. It’s not quite as long as Ms. Byatt’s. At 310, mine is the shorter by 245 pages. But this book of mine is an invitation to conversation.

We are in a liminal phase, this book and I. There are current readers out there, but I don’t know them. They are librarians, book bloggers, book reviewers. People in the publishing industry who rightfully get a head-start. And I’ve heard back from a very few. A very very few. The book and I are waiting now for the book’s full release. We are very much in-between.

I won’t say I’m not enjoying this phase. I will say it’s difficult. I think liminality is, by nature, a difficult and complex condition.

But it’s fine. Time passes.

And soon enough, there will be readers. Readers who have asked some of the questions the book is asking, perhaps. Readers who may possibly have answers. Readers who will discover things I meant to tuck into the book’s pages, and maybe some things I didn’t.

What I hope is that this book become conversations, and that we will have new friends because of it.

The post Books Are Your Friends appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.