Through revision, I enter the realm of the unspeakable and find the words that have eluded me.
Whatever artistry may occur within the manuscript, the magic happens for me in the last draft. Whatever I have been resistant to say must finally be said. In the end, I see where my pencil has been leading me.
I can only say that I believe the Mormon Church is changing because the people inside the church are changing, particularly, the women. And if the women in the Mormon Church are changing, that means the men in the Mormon Church will change – slowly, reluctantly to be sure, but inevitably.
Pico Iyer describes his writing as “intimate letters to a stranger,” and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration.
How do we create beauty in a broken world? How do we create a view of sustainability in an economy that is crashing? How do we reconfigure our lives, how do we pick up the pieces and create a meaningful life? So, yes, we have a different form of leadership but the questions remain the same.
I don’t think of myself as an American; I see myself as a human being.
I think about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who said that it’s the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer, I believe that it’s our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that capacity.
Hope radiates outward from the center of our concerns. Hope dares us to stare the miraculous in the eye and have the courage not to look away.
I really do believe if there is hope in the world, then it is to be found within our own communities with our own neighbors, and within our own homes and families.
Hope is not attached to outcomes but is a state of mind.
The climate change movement is a river overflowing seeping into every nook and cranny.
I love the ordered mind of history because it takes us out of the chaos, momentarily, and says, “Ah, so this is the story we are engaged in.”
I don’t set boundaries for myself when I am writing; if I did, I would be paralyzed from the start, unable to write a word on the page.
I come from a culture that embodies the need to convert others to “the truth.” The Mormon Church has one of the largest missionary programs in the world. That does not interest me.
If you waste water, you die.
I would say I am at peace with the mystery of my mother’s journals. Of course, I will always wonder, but isn’t that the creative tension of living with uncertainty? By leaving me her empty journals, my mother has made herself very present.
The act of civil disobedience is the act of taking our anger and turning it into sacred rage. It is a personal and collective gesture of resistance and insistance.
I appreciate all of the unexpected places, internal and external, that my writing has taken me.
This is an incredibly creative time. It is a difficult time. It is a disparaging time. A time of cultural and global transitions based on the realization that the Earth cannot support nonsustainable practices anymore.
There is an unraveling, a great unraveling that I believe is occurring. Not without its pain, not without its frustration. Perhaps the fundamentalism we see within America right now is in response to these changes. We fear change, and so we cling to what is known.