The Things We Make

The Things We Make

My Daughter Paints

My youngest child is three years old, and every day she paints.

She paints lions and footprints. She paints me, and she paints rivers, roads, and bugs. For a while, she painted without giving much attention to the finished product. She would paint until holes appeared in the paper and then move on to the next. I would make a great show of laying the art out to dry, but she hardly noticed. Her focus was always already on the next creation.

Recently, that has changed. When I gather up her morning’s work, she cries out, “Don’t throw them away! I want to keep them!” Sometimes, she hunts for a magnet and tries to hang them on the refrigerator herself.

She recognizes these lions and bugs as the work of her hands, and she no longer lets them go so easily.

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We all make things. I write stories, and my daughter paints bugs. My husband builds window seats and picket fences out of wood, and my son makes castles with lego bricks.

Making some things feels like wearing our heart on our sleeve or serving it up on a platter. This is true of memoirs. Sometimes this feels true even of our first attempt at sourdough bread when there are new guests at our table.

We are not all artists or writers, but most of us, perhaps all of us, create. We long to know that what we have made is good. Not perfect or ground-breaking, necessarily, but good.

Perhaps it shouldn’t matter what others think of our creations. Sometimes, we succeed in being philosophical. Some people just do not like the taste of sourdough bread, after all. But I do think there is a desire in each of us to hear the words well done.

Hearing those words is far less important than simply doing the work. It may even be that the creating matters more than even the thing we make. Which means that those words, well done, are something special.

They are a gift we give one another.

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Here are five gifts given to me.

I hope they make you just that much more eager to read the work of my hands when it releases February 2. I hope, too, that you will seek out these creators. Each one has written a book (or more than one!) that means something special to me.

Each one should be confident that what they have done is very well done, indeed.

“When it comes to finding God in ordinary places, no one does it better than Christie Purifoy.

Her words in Roots and Sky met me when I was unable to connect with any other books.

Somehow her personal journey to find home turned into a spiritually informative pilgrimage for

my own soul. This book is hope for the weary and wandering, and Christie Purifoy’s smart,

grounding voice is a new favorite.”

—Emily P. Freeman, author of Simply Tuesday

 

“I have been terrified of hope. Because if hope disappoints, does that mean God is also a

disappointment? Christie reminds us that hope, like dreams, is made of stronger stuff. She invites

us into a year of her life lived in real time in an old Pennsylvania farmhouse, chock-full of hope

and decay, promise and weeds, work and wonder.”

—Lisa-Jo Baker, author of Surprised by Motherhood and community manager for

(in)courage

 

“In Roots and Sky, Christie Purifoy paints an elegant expression of the church calendar—Advent,

Lent, and Ordinary Time—with great depth of thought, expression, and insight. Planted in the

rich soil of everyday liturgy, Roots and Sky is an astonishing, rhythmic work of unmatched

artistry. There is no doubt: this book is a must-read for the lover of the quiet, contemplative, and

beautiful.

—Seth Haines, author of Coming Clean

 

“This is not a book. This is a sanctuary. I met God here, in the hushed and unrushed space that

Christie Purifoy has so exquisitely created for us. With a lyrical pen, Christie lights the candles,

prepares the altar, and helps us see the sacredness of our everyday moments. Step inside and

breathe again.”

—Jennifer Dukes Lee, author of Love Idol

 

“Roots and Sky is the best kind of read: it reached me, passively and deeply, as I got lost in the

pages. Christie ushered me into my own heart, through the back door, as she invited me across

the foyer and into the rooms and out onto the sprawling green lawn of her one hundred-year-old

farmhouse. God met me at Maplehurst, too.”

—Sara Hagerty, author of Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in

All Things

These Farmhouse Bookshelves (+ A Giveaway!)

Alaska is far away.

Maybe you think you know this, but however far away you imagine Alaska to be, double that. Because Alaska is really, really far away.

I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to spend a week with other writers on a remote Alaskan island. I wish that each of you could have the chance to be dazzled by the Alaskan sun and scoured by the Alaskan wind. I wish that you could taste King salmon only just pulled from the water.

If a two-day journey isn’t an option for you, what about a book instead?

View from Harvester Island

(the following includes affiliate links)

Here is a memoir of that same remote island. It is also one of the best memoirs I have ever read.

Surviving the Island of Grace: Life on the Wild Edge of America by Leslie Leyland Fields is the story of a young woman from New Hampshire struggling to make a home and a marriage on a primitive and remote island in the Gulf of Alaska.

This is a memoir of marriage, motherhood, spirituality, and poetry. It is also a memoir of wilderness and the dangerous and exhausting work of commercial salmon fishing.

Even if you can’t imagine enjoying a book about fishing (much less actual fishing!) I highly recommend this book. The writing is stellar, the story captivating, and the whole thing is edged with lyricism.

This is the most particular and most universal of stories. Now, I too, am asking the question at the heart of this book: how do we bear the terrible, beautiful grace that sustains our lives?

This was where we unraveled the rest of our lives, it seemed, even as we sewed up the holes in the nets. There was something about this space, about standing out there on the beach under the open sky – the clouds or sun, mountains on every horizon, though it was ocean all the way to the edge. The walls were gone, how could there be a larger space to stand in, and yet, it became a sort of confessional. – Leslie Leyland Fields

I picked up another Alaska memoir in the bookstore at the Anchorage airport: Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs: A True Story of Bad Breaks and Small Miracles by Heather Lende. This one reads more like a collection of personal essays than a cohesive memoir. The tone is cozy and, at times, a little too cute, but Lende’s work as an obituary writer for her small-town paper lends the book some serious depth.

Lende organizes her chapters around the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, but she incorporates other traditions as well, such as Buddhism or Native American spirituality.

I kept this one tucked in the seatback pocket on the long flight from Anchorage to Seattle. At one point, my seatmate asked if she could read it, and I passed it over. She laughed out loud for the rest of the flight.

It’s a good book.

I wonder if to be human is to know that we can’t ever banish pain and ugliness from the world, only learn from it and create something beautiful and good out of it – like the newest totem pole in Sitka, the one called ‘You Are Going to Get Well.’ If you ever see it, you will believe that’s possible. – Heather Lende

One of the guest writers at the Alaska workshop was the novelist Bret Lott. You can’t go wrong picking up any of his fiction (I adore the strange, hilarious, heartbreaking first story in his collection The Difference Between Women and Men: Stories), and his novel Jewel was once an Oprah Book Club pick.

I especially recommend his latest, a collection of essays called Letters and Life: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian.

For writers, his essay “On Precision” is outstanding. For everyone, the final long essay on the death of his father is beautifully crafted. I aspire to write personal essays like this one.

As a writer you must always be striving for that which you cannot yet achieve and for that which you cannot yet know. – Bret Lott

I have two bonus recommendations for you today. The first is Girl Meets Change: Truths to Carry You through Life’s Transitions by Kristen Strong, a pretty and practical book for any woman who struggles with life’s transitions.

The second is the most recent book from Emily P. Freeman: Simply Tuesday: Small-Moment Living in a Fast-Moving World. I don’t think anyone writes Christian formation quite like Emily. Her writing is accessible but also lovely, straightforward but rich and wise.

In my eagerness to read it, I mistakenly ordered two copies. Leave a comment here, and I will enter your name in a drawing to win one of those copies. A winner will be notified by email.

Tell me, friends. Read any good books lately?

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