Stretching my Reading List in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Calvin Seminary Chapel on a spring morning

Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last weekend was a readers conference rather than a writers conference. The college campus swarms with writers along with librarians and English teachers, college students and retirees--2000 of us mobbing this campus of 4000 students. I participated in a workshop on short-story writing and got a good start thinking through a new project. But the emphasis of the Festival is less on the details of craft and more on the big picture. I came away reminded of why I do this stuff and motivated to think more deeply about the larger questions.

Conferences are times of seeing old friends and making new ones who share a love of quality literature that explores serious questions of faith. Natalie Miller (left), Kim Childress (center) and I (right) were all in the same writers critique group a lo-ong time ago. Now Kim is an editor, drawing us both in with projects. Naomi Kinsman is one of Kim's authors at Zondervan, and David Diaz? He won the Caldecott for Smokey Night by Eve Bunting. This year he has illustrated Gary Schmidt's Martin de Porres; the Rose in the Desert (set in Peru and due out in June 2012).

Gary Schmidt was at the festival, too. He is on the faculty at Calvin College. He's also the author of several young adult novels I have appreciated: The Wednesday Wars, where the only Protestant in the class gets stuck in study hall learning Shakespeare while his Catholic and Jewish classmates go to religious instruction; and Okay for Now, whose new-kid-in-town protagonist discovers art and skills of observation copying Audubon birds in the library. (I have a soft spot for straight boys with artistic sensitivities.)

Fransisco X. Stork was another YA author I appreciated. As a Mexican American he likes to write about Latino characters. In Marcello in the Real World his character is a high-functioning Aspergers-syndrome teen in his first job outside the protective environment of his special school. Marcello has "a special interest" (one might even say "obsession") with God. I loved the book, but was disappointed that Stork (a gentle grandfatherly man) seems to be more concerned with the fact of faith than with its object.

 The books I have mentioned so far are mostly set in the United States even when they involve minority characters. Some of my favorite speakers were African. Chimamanda Adichie is Nigerian (here interviewed 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 Sudanese/Egyptian Muslim woman living in Britain. 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 distinctly Christian. 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 admires Jane'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.

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.

Although I had systematically combed the library for books by the authors before I went, I left Grand Rapids with a longer to-read list. Also a stack of beautiful new picture books. Festival 2014 is already on my calendar. I love being stretched.

The Need for Many Stories

I plan to attend Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, next month. If you are one of our international readers, you probably can't be there. But if you are in the US, especially the Midwest, you should put it on your calendar for 2014 even if you can't make 2012. I recently blogged about how much I love this bi-annual gathering of writers, librarians, English teachers and enthusiastic readers.

Calvin College is a Christian Reformed school, but the Festival is not limited to evangelical participants. It welcomes anyone whose writing stimulates discussion about faith. The closing speaker this year will be Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian novelist and short story writer I first ran across in 2009 when a friend sent me a link to this video on YouTube.

Adichie, the daughter of Nigerian university professors, talks about "The Danger of a Single Story." She shares how as a child she read English books. Consequently the stories she wrote were about blue-eyed white children eating apples and playing in the snow. I have long been passionate about African children having stories about children just like themselves. That is one reason we at ICFW promote books with settings outside the US. Aussies have a right to read stories with bilbies in them instead of rabbits.

But Adichie brings out a different reason for these stories. It is not just the "natives" who need them. Those of us who read stories also need to hear more than one, or our perception of reality is distorted.

I recently gave a chapter to my American critique group that included a scene in a hospital in a South African township. "You haven't shown us how grungy the place is," someone commented. "Isn't the character's daughter concerned about the level of care?"

Now, when I lived in Mozambique during their civil war in the 1980s, the hospital didn't have aspirin. When we visited a sick seminary student, the sheets, although freshly washed, were ragged and blood-stained. It was winter, but several glass panes were missing from the window, and a cold wind blew through the ward. Believe me, I was very concerned about the level of care!

That was reality.

But it is NOT the reality of Tembisa Hosptial outside Johannesburg. After all, the first successful heart transplant was done in South Africa, not Minnesota. Tembisa Hospital may not have as many private rooms or all the sophisticated equipment of the ICU where my husband recovered from his heart attack last summer, but the wards are clean and neat and well-supplied. The nursing sisters are well-trained and competent.

Why did my reader assume that since the hospital is in a township, it must be grungy and inferior?

He didn't have enough stories. His perception of Africa is based on Somali refugee camps and the crimes of Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army--a single story of poverty and violence. Those stories are true, but they aren't the whole story of Africa.

(Note to self: include references to slick clean surfaces, antiseptic smells, and efficient nursing sisters in the hospital scene.)

No one story encompasses all of reality even in a limited place and time. For that reason we need LOTS of stories--lots of books set in Nigeria, Mozambique, South Africa; India, China, Vietnam. The people who live in those countries need stories with which they identify, but perhaps even more, we Americans need stories that tell us multiple truths about the world beyond our borders.

After 9/11 we wondered, why do they hate us? If we had read more stories of their world, we would better understand their helplessness before the weight of our giant economy, their resentment of our support for perceived injustice that passes from generation to generation.

Stories. So many stories we have never heard and therefore we cannot begin to understand. And if we don't understand, how can we expect them to understand when we speak of One who left his heavenly reality to walk among us, participate in our stories and transform our tragic endings into joy?

I read Chimamanda Adichie's novel Purple Hibiscus when I first heard her in 2009. Now I have ordered her book of short stories. I want to soak up everything she has to tell me before I hear her speak at Calvin. I want my heart to be open to listen to what this articulate African woman has to tell me about her story and to be stretched to take in many other stories so that I can better see the world through God's eyes and touch it for his kingdom.

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LeAnne Hardy has lived in six countries on four continents. Her books for children and young adults come out of her cross-cultural experiences and her passion to use story to convey spiritual truths in a form that will permeate lives. Find out more on her website.