We just got back from a two-week road trip throughout the western United States. Gush, gush, gush, my cartoon character self would say, if prompted. It was glorious.
As often happens, I thought I’d pen a reflection or two while sitting in the Idaho countryside or staring at a crystal blue lake in Wyoming. But I didn’t write, not in the least.
Instead, as the recent “Rhythms of Rest” post noted, I rested from writing. But that didn’t stop me from making my way through a stack of books, including one that I devoured in forty-eight hours because I couldn’t put it down.
John West’s Lessons and Carols is hard to describe. It’s memoir. It’s spirituality and Christmas, mental illness and alcohol recovery, love and loss. As the back cover states, it’s a “genre-bending memoir that explores the aftershock of alcoholism and mental illness through a fresh look at the powers of poetry, ritual, and community.”
I kept reading because I was enthralled, intrigued, desperate to see where he would take me as a reader.
I am thrilled to share this space with John today, so cozy up and dive on in!
Cara Meredith: How are you coloring outside of the lines, all over again, when it comes to your writing and this book in particular?
John West: I think writing a book is all about knowing which lines to ignore and which to respect. Lessons and Carols is written in little fragments—some only a sentence long, some a couple pages long, most somewhere in between. It’s all in the present tense, with few markers for where we are in time. There are citations galore. In short, I colored outside of a lot of lines, which makes Lessons and Carols, I think, a somewhat difficult book. But because I colored outside of those lines, I had to be really rigid in other places.
There’s that adage that a book teaches you how to read it. I think that’s totally true, and since I was breaking readers’ expectations left and right, I really needed to be clear about the rules I was following, the lines I wouldn’t color outside of. The structure of the book—modeled after the Anglican Christmas tradition—had to be inviolable, the order of the kinds of materials I was working with had to be strict, etc.
But I think you might be asking about more than form. I wrote a draft of this book before I met my daughter, and I thought when I had written that draft that I had “colored outside the lines,” and been pushed to learn all sorts of new things about myself. But then, our daughter. Then, a new draft. And then, I realized many of the things I thought I had figured out needed to be revised yet again.
Cara Meredith: You wrote a book! Tell us! What upside-down idea were you trying to turn right side up again?
John West: There were a lot of versions of this book—I wrote it over seven years—so there are a lot of answers to that question! I think, in the end, the book is an effort to make myself legible. Not really to others, though that’s a nice side benefit, but really to myself. Addiction, mental illness, loss: these things didn’t make sense to me. I’m not saying that this book represented an epiphany for me, but it was an opportunity to put myself down on paper, squint a bit, and see if any of it made sense.
Cara Meredith: Okay. We talk so much about audience when it comes to book-writing, but what did you learn about yourself along the way?
John West: I learned that I am not the kind of person that finds catharsis in writing. I’m the kind of person who finds catharsis before I write.
There’s a lot of heavy stuff in this book, and when I started, I thought, maybe naïvely, that I would, like, dispense with some of the baggage I’d been carrying with me. Instead, I discovered that I had to offload that baggage before I could write anything that would make any sense to anyone.
Cara Meredith: Putting ourselves out there when it comes to storytelling is always a risk. What is the biggest, fleshiest risk you took with this book?
John West: This might sound silly, but I think the personal stuff was easier than I thought, and the stuff about other people, especially my daughter, was the hardest. I really wanted to make sure that I wasn’t violating her privacy, and I think (hope?) that I accomplished that, but there’s always the risk that she’ll grow up, read it, and be very upset about her portrayal.
Cara Meredith: Publishing a book is a shiny milestone! What else are you celebrating in your ordinary, everyday life?
John West: The same week my book was published, a team I was on won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism, so it was a really big week for me! But the real stuff I’m celebrating, when I can celebrate then: dishes done, admin done, emails responded to, etc. Even more, really being present with my daughter (now three-and-change), really being present with my life. It’s a struggle, always, but I think I’m getting better by degrees.