final days forum

Discovering beauty at night

Clarity often steps from the shadows after midnight. Words that never materialized during the day suddenly take on flesh and they flow from the writer's fingers. The silence of the hours after midnight often energize creativity. When morning comes, it is particularly refreshing because the writer's labor already is accomplished.

For the writer who discovers clarity at night, this is the chief aim of writing.  Before a person is moved by a story or prose, the writer herself was first transported into clarity.

Speaking from the heart, not the head

Honesty flowers, originally uploaded by net_efekt.

An extraordinary spoken-word poet, Karen Thompson, once told me that I was a good writer, but as I performed, my poetry flowed from the head, not the heart. The words stung, but I got it and I'm still getting it.

Karen is the leader of the Speakout, a poetry group in Denver, and she is loving and straightforward. In simple words, she showed what we all must learn in life -- that authenticity is the golden key for genuine conversation and the currency for lasting relationships.

Her words intially were hard to hear because of the mask I cultivated as a journalist. Journalists are taught to focus on others, and to step away from themselves so as not to color a story with our opinions. This is an ethical aim when it comes to fairly conveying a fair news story, but it's a lousy way to cultivate a well-rounded life.

My natural reticence since childhood to share too much about my private life didn't help. While I don't advocate reckless sharing of inner secrets -- trusted friends are in place for that -- my church, Colorado Christian Fellowship, trained me to strive to for emotional accessibility when I interact with others. CCF, and specifically, my care group leader, the elegant-in-powerful-love Betty Rice, encouraged me to follow God's lead and go deeper, to face the hidden, broken places, the places that get patched up, but never healed. God wants better for me (and you). He wants me clear-headed, flat-footed, ready to share the truths I've learned, and armed with the force of his love and acceptance. His friendship, his cleansing, his peace, empower me to be present in every relationship, for God is never about hiding from the pain.

Thinking I knew all this because I had seen personal growth -- I was surprised, painfully so, when I did not share my heart when speaking this weekend at my girlfriend Cynthia's birthday party in Dallas. It was a milestone year for her and her husband, Leroy, did it up. He asked me to speak, along with other precious friends of hers, and I choked.

I could barely sleep that night. Memories haunted me. Cynthia walked with me during some of the darkest emotional nights of my life when I was single. She and her husband were a loving couple who knew how to befriend and encourage single people while displaying the beauty of married love in Christ Jesus. Cynthia was patient, wise. She didn't point fingers, quote cliches and condescend as the wife taking pity on the never-married woman. She tutored me for marriage. And when I did marry last year (to a powerful truth-teller, no doubt!), she was there again, supportive and excited about what God had done, just as he said would.

Why I choked at the party and failed to detail those times of sitting at her table, chattering away and eating her mushroom rice like I'd never had a meal before or eating her cinammon rolls like they were manna, still stumps me.

But I will move past it. One day I probably will write about how Cynthia mentored me to always believe the best is yet to come. One day I will write about her as the friend I love! For now, may I not neglect to practice the God-lessons Karen, Betty and CCF taught me about transparency, lest I neglect to drink fully of transparency's infinite grace.

Judy Howard Ellis

Spider-Man, Hollywood and the devil

Spidey is getting divorced and making a deal with the devil? Gawker Media's cool new blog, io9 (self-proclaimed as "strung out on science fiction"), reports that Marvel Comics has released Amazing Spider-Man #545, which tells the tale of Spider-Man making a pact with a demon to save his Aunt May's life by ending his marriage to Mary Jane.

Many fans are outraged; they should be.

Marvel, and far too many Hollywood studios, seem wedded to the idea of self-implosion as the way to wrap-up a story franchise, revive ratings or lure fresh audiences. They convert beloved storylines into estoric non-wonders that reveal more about the struggles of the writers than the intricacies of the story itself. And that's devilish, indeed.

Case in point: I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End during the Christmas holiday. I had regretted not seeing the film this summer because I enjoyed the first two installments of the pirate adventure. But the latest film featured an incoherent supernatural mush about life, death and life again that certainly wasn't Christian theology, but I don't think Blackbeard would have believed it, either... Savvy?

The film violated its own story conventions, the guideposts a reader needs to enter the "story universe" the writer creates. When story conventions are broken, they leave the audience wondering what happened to the characters and the story they once knew. As Robert McKee writes in his fantastic book, Story, "the audience knows these conventions and expects to see them fulfilled."

I also felt betrayed when Alias self-destructed. The fabulous television series concluded with a head-scratching existential ending that defied the general clarity of the previous episodes. Did the writers write themselves into a corner they could not escape? If so, the fans, not the writers, suffered the most. 

When admired stories possess a center based on convictions, violating the story's conventions is particularly vexing. An excerpted comment by NefariousNewt on the io9 blog about Spider-Man says it well:

Stan Lee's original vision is being erased and Marvel is becoming one of those mega-corporations that does what it wants and no longer cares what the die-hard fan thinks. I think this might spell the end. Spider Man has always been my favorite superhero, because he was just like me: wanting to do right, juggling the needs of his personal life and the career he has chosen, and putting himself before others day after day, all the while living on the edge of poverty, the truly anti-heroic hero. Now, I'm ashamed...