Uncategorized – Hugh's Blog

Bio statements

Before the pandemic happened (correlation, not causation – at least, not directly) I spent a lot of time as a c-level speaker at festivals and symposia and conferences. I was often mentioned on the program under the phrase, “…and other exciting speakers!”

As in, “Come hear Brian McLaren, Shane Claiborne, and other exciting speakers!”

Anyway.

The point is, I always got asked for a brief bio for them to read before I came on stage or, rarely, to be printed in the program.

I haven’t been asked for a bio in probably four years. But this morning I’m being interviewed for a podcast about being a pastor, and was asked for a bio. I looked at my old one and it was horrendously out of date, so I wrote a new one.

In this process, I learned two things:

I) I still hate writing about myself in the third person.

2) My life is weird as shit these days.

Hugh is a sixth generation Mississippian, a descendant of enslavers, and the pastor of Open Door Mennonite Church in Jackson, MS – a multiracial peace church formed in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement. He is a writer and storyteller and has been the publisher of a newsletter called Life is So Beautiful for more than a decade.

Before becoming pastor at Open Door, Hugh spent 12 years working as a pastor among unhoused people and those struggling with addictions. This taught him much of what he knows about both second chances and grace, but not much that is useful at congregational meetings.

He and his spouse Renee live in the Fondren neighborhood of Jackson, where they run a small scale kitten rescue called Purr and Pounce and live with four permanent cats and five chickens.

Bio statements like this are always a bit weird, partly because you have to decide what is most important to convey in just a few sentences, which means you are necessarily curating. And since this is designed to be read by an audience for a specific event, they are even more heavily curated. For example, this one was for a podcast about preaching, so I focused heavily on my work in faith spaces, and didn’t mention my nonprofit experience.

If I were in a more secular space, I would reduce all that church work to something like, “Hugh is the pastor of Open Door Mennonite Church in Jackson, MS.”

I know all of social media is curation, but it is never so glaringly obvious as when you are writing your bio.

Maintenance work

“In August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and—from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone.” – William Faulkner

The foretaste of fall that Faulkner mentioned is where we have been in Mississippi the last few days. The humidity, after being brutal all summer, has resumed normal levels, and for the first time in many weeks we went 3 days in a row without a heat advisory from the Weather Service. I took advantage of the conflux of nice weather and a weekend to get some things done outside.

As regular readers know, I live with depression, and so this past spring I was in a bad place, and thus did not get the spring clean up done outside. The muscadine vines did not get pruned, and the mulch did not get put down, and the shrubs were not cut back, and so my yard has suffered all summer from that initial neglect. And by the time I felt up to doing it, the heat was here, and while the mind was willing, the body was weak.

With gloves on, I tugged at vines and pulled weeds that were firmly established. I cut down dead shrubs and cut back the muscadine vines that threatened to take over the nearby rose bushes. I thinned the goldenrod patches and marveled at the 8 foot tall swamp sunflower stands.

When done (for the day, not done as in finished with the tasks) I had taken several wheelbarrow loads to the brash pile in the back yard, there is a large vacant space where I can put a new rose bush, and you could see the edges of my driveway once again.

I sort of despise maintenance work. I begrudge the time spent. I would much rather enjoy watching the butterflies and hummingbirds in my yard than be bent over, ass in the air, grubbing roots out of the beds.

But if there is no gardening, then there is no garden.

My therapist pointed out once that, compared to many of her patients, I spend a lot of time doing preventative mental health maintenance. I exercise regularly and take long walks outside, I journal, meditate, and pray, I have a rigorous sleep schedule, and I have pretty strong boundaries in place around my energy.

Which led me to add it all up, and on a given day, I might spend 2 hours doing things that can be though of as maintenance. Which seems like a lot, honestly. If I am awake 17 hours or so, and I’m working for 8 of them, that means I’m spending almost 1/4th of my free time on maintenance. Just doing things to make sure the other hours of my life are as pain-free as possible.

There are days I let things slip, just like I let the yard slip this spring. But my body rebels much faster than my yard does, and thus the feedback loop is shorter, and so I return to the rituals and routines faster. Because, as my friends in recovery are wont to say, it works if you work it.

In that kitchen

In that kitchen I learned about alchemy – the practice, if not the word.

If I close my eyes, I can see the light filtered through the handmade green gingham curtains that move with the breeze. I can hear the news being read over the small radio to the left of the sink, next to the snuff box.

It was on those worn linoleum tiles, peeping over the edge of the counter, on my knees on the green vinyl chair, that I watched it happen – the battered aluminum bowl, the scoops of flour, the sweet milk, the knob of Crisco the size of an unshelled walnut.

Done without measurement, the muscle memory made deep by years of daily practice making biscuits, feeding your family for pennies.

In the old days, it was believed that if you knew the right words, you could turn base metal into gold, but in that kitchen, I learned the deeper truth, the even older magic: That with time and intention, you could turn flour into food, scraps into sufficiency, and ingredients into love.

Goodbye, affiliate links

If you google “best wireless printer”, the whole first page is full of weird sites that have endless lists of printers listed, with links to Amazon or Best Buy or wherever. They are all affiliate links – you click a link and the website makes a percentage – often not just from that sale, but from all your purchases from that merchant over the next 24 hours.

To be clear – there is nothing inherently wrong with affiliate programs, per se. And Amazon is far from the only company doing this. But it also incentivizes shitty behavior. Like the whole first page of Google on that printer search.

Over time, people have came to distrust affiliate links, so websites began to hide them with URL shorteners, or redirects, or clever server-side tricks, all to keep people from knowing they were clicking on affiliate links, and thus sending money to the website owner.

After all, the reader comes to think: Did you put that link in there to help me, or because you make money from it? Is this really your favorite novel of all time, or did you just want to make money from me?

These are questions I never want my reader to have to think about.

So: I’m announcing a change in policy. Going forward, I will use NO affiliate links on any of my properties. Not here on my blog, not in my newsletter.

To be clear, this will cost me some money. About 10% of my income last year was from affiliate links, mostly in my newsletter where I recommended books or movies. But when I launched my membership program, I said that this would mean I never had to sell ads on my website or newsletter. It also means now that I never have to use affiliate links.

No Relation, by Paula Carter

As I said yesterday, I’m playing with flash writing. I struggle, because I love words. But that is probably because the writers I have been most informed and shaped by also loved words. I love a good story.

In other words, I need to read more writers who tell stories with economy.

Several websites pointed me to the memoir No Relation, by Paula Carter (https://bookshop.org/p/books/no-relation-paula-carter/12167871). It’s 147 pages, and it’s a small format book – slightly smaller than a trade paperback. The synopsis, from the publisher:

When Paula first met James, she was 26, in graduate school, and not ready to be any kind of mother to his two young sons. But, years later, after caring for them and watching them grow, she finds herself unsure of what to do when her relationship with their father ends. In a collection of striking flash essays, Paula reveals the complexity of loving children who are not her own and attempts to put language to something we have no language to describe. No Relation is a deeply personal, beautifully rendered account of a seldom-remarked on kind of love and loss.

I did not expect to like this book, being someone who doesn’t generally read relationship memoirs, but it was a pleasant surprise. It turns out, I had a lot of resonance with the author, being someone who was once in love with someone who came with kids.

But the reason I bought the book is because while it’s a full memoir, it’s made up of ~85 very short (all under 250 words, I think) standalone flash essays, and I wanted to see how she did it.

It was well done, and it had that feeling like you are watching a magic trick, and you know you are watching a magic trick, but it doesn’t feel like a trick – it feels real. Put another way, the technique faded into the background, as it should.

Recommended both as a memoir, and as an example of the flash-essay-as-book technique.

Flash writing

In 1964, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, when attempting to define obscenity, that while he didn’t know how to define it, he knew it when he saw it.

I’ve been playing for the last week with Flash writing, specifically Flash Nonfiction, and as I’ve attempted top explain what it is to other people, I keep running into the same problem Justice Stewart had – Flash is easier to recognize than to define.

That it is short seems to be a thing everyone agrees with – but just how short is the question. Some say 1500 words, while others say 150. Arguments are made for everything in between.

It also needs to be a complete story – a beginning, a middle, and an end. In that way, it’s not an excerpt, or a snippet, or a vignette.

I was introduced to it in a memoir writing class taught by Janice Ray, and I fell in love with the format.

I like that it has constraints – similar to how Robert Frost is said to have said that free verse is like playing tennis without a net. One thing I loved about Twitter when it came out was the 140 character limitation. It made me a better writer, and communicator. This feels like that.

But one thing I really like is that I can do a first draft in like 15-20 minutes. Not a good draft, or even an adequate draft, but enough to see if the project will work.

I posted, without context, the first one I ever wrote last week. This was entirely written and edited in less than 30 total minutes. It’s not amazing, but it’s good, and encouraged me to keep trying.

Expect to see more Flash writing here in coming weeks. (Members got another piece of Flash Memoir this past Saturday.)

Kottke shoutout

My work on the web has always owed a lot to Jason Kottke. When I first started blogging at the end of 2003, he was my age, but already an elder on the blogging scene. A lot of my thoughts about blogging, the open web, owning your content, and publishing on your own site were shaped by or originated with him. And in the last few years, he’s been supportive of me and my work.

In fact, some of y’all only know who I am because you first heard about my work via Kottke.org. A couple of times over the last few years, my newsletter Life Is So Beautiful has gotten linked to by Jason. And when he went on sabbatical a few years ago, he put my newsletter on the list of recommended reading for folks while he was gone.

And now, my site is on his new blogroll, or what he’s calling the KDO Rolodex.

I have been tempted for years to put up a blogroll of my own, but it’s a pain to keep them up to date, and I’m an ADHD human, and it just feels like a recipe for letting people down.

I’m writing

Make the coffee, shuffle to the office, fire up the computer, because it is the morning, and that is when I write.

I don’t really know what I’m writing about, but I’m writing.

I’ve been on the road for four days, and my back aches and I’m undercaffeinated and I overslept this morning, but I’m writing.

The stack of mail on the table that waited for me to return reminds me that I have so many open loops I need to deal with – but I’m writing.

We won’t even speak of my overflowing email inbox, and the people I have let down because I am a chaos machine with poor executive functioning skills – but I’m writing.

It’s a Federal holiday, so the banks are closed and the mail won’t run and would anybody even notice if I didn’t write today, but I’m writing.

My cats missed me while I was away and are currently rubbing against my legs demanding to be cuddled, but I’m writing.

My country is collapsing and people I love are threatened and I don’t know what to do, so I’m writing.

Re: The Super Bowl and Whiteness

When examining art that confuses you, things to consider might include asking if you are the intended audience, or if this is a medium you understand. If it isn’t, perhaps ask people who do understand it to explain it to you.

Or, you can accept that not everything is for everyone, and that whole universes of art exist that are powerful and brilliant but were not made with you in mind.

Or, I guess, you could bitch that it was boring on Social Media.

One more thing for people who look like me:

The USA will be majority non-white in less than 20 years. More and more, pop culture will not feature you, prioritize your opinions, or solicit your favor. Markets will not swing based on what you want, and people who look like you will be less prominent in mass media.

You have a choice: You can see this as an opportunity to learn new things, to see art outside your gaze, to develop in understanding of the world around you, or you can complain, whine, and whither into hatred.

This is a cultural sea change the likes of which our country has never seen before. I hope we do not waste it.

The reference shelf

On a shelf over my desk, at eye level when I stand, are 8 reference books. They are mostly “How to write English good” books – a dictionary, a thesaurus, Strunk and White, Garner’s English Usage, etc. Because I preach and write occasionally about theological matters, I have an Oxford Annotated Bible there as well.

One can argue that Google is faster, and for some things it is. But my goal is not to be faster – it’s to be better.

The things that are wrong with my writing will not be improved by my doing it faster. And while the internet may contain a vast collection of information, sorting it is becoming harder and harder.

When I was a small boy in Mississippi, I would often use the word _ain’t _in speech. To which my aunt would reply, “Ain’t ain’t a word, because it ain’t in the dictionary”. It would frustrate me, but part of me really liked that there was a standard, a “right” way to do it.

That doesn’t mean I don’t break “the rules”. I do all the time. But if I do, I want it to be because I know I am breaking them, and not because I am ignorant of them.

A row of english reference books on a wooden shelf.