The Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing: A Debrief

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Tuesday, April 25, 2006
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I'm back from the Calvin Festival and my notebook is littered with incomprehensible notes, some of them puntuated with exclamation marks. Actually, that's a pretty good metaphor for the whole event: hard to process, but very exciting. Just so you know, writing conferences are about two things, making connections and making breakthroughs. You want to meet interesting people and make a great impression on them. You also hope that something in the conference presentations or conversations will make an impression on you, will change the way you approach your own work. I don't know what impression I made on other people, but the Calvin Festival made a big impression on me.

All the Names
I expected to meet a lot of new people -- including a few I already "knew" from online -- and I wasn't disappointed. Right off the bat, I re-connected with Aaron Harrison, a college student who staffed at Worldview Academy two summers ago. He caught me reading Mark Twain when I was supposed to be paying attention to the conference. Not long after, Ron Benson introduced himself. He's a Master's Artist reader and occasional commenter. We sat together during Andy Crouch's interview with Marilynne Robinson and had a great conversation about Don Miller, narrative theology and letting the text speak (and teach) for itself. I also met David Taylor for the first time, after reading his "Diary of an Arts Pastor" blog for quite a while. (By the way, he's posted a far more interesting summary than this one at Christian Writerdom: A Top Ten.)

During my first session, I had the pleasure of meeting Kimberly Culbertson, editor of the new Relief Journal. My friend Karen Miedrich-Luo is Relief's creative nonfiction editor. I met Andy Crouch and warned him that I'd been blogging about him, and also had a chance to chat with Image editor Gregory Wolfe, who I hope to meet up with again when I'm at Seattle Pacific University in July. Susan Cowger and Laurie Klein from Rock & Sling were very kind and more than willing to exchange witty banter. I managed to spell two words on their miniature scrabble board: "shined" and (ominously) "untalented."

Saturday morning, I had a chat with Paraclete's Lil Copan, who mentioned that when she reads a proposal, she skips straight to the excerpt -- which is what I've always secretly hoped an editor would do. (She seemed very impressed, by the way, when I said that I didn't quite know what my book was. Mental note: there's such a thing as being too honest when speaking with an editor.) After reading twenty-two novels as a Christy Awards judge, I was very excited to meet executive director Donna Kehoe, who impressed me as both smart and gracious. It's a pleasure to work for someone like Donna, even if it is a pro bono gig! We had a quick "state of the industry" chat, in which I didn't say anything idiotic (as far as I can recall). After Marilynne Robinson's lecture (more details below), I met Terry Glaspey and Carolyn McCready from Harvest House. We had such an interesting conversation I ended up walking to the opposite end of the campus from where I'd been heading.

Two people deserve special notice: Anthony Connolly and Dave Long. Anthony and I hadn't seen each other for a few months, ever since he pulled up stakes in Houston and moved to the wilds of central Missouri. We stayed in the same hotel and had a great time hanging out and comparing notes. At a conference like this, it makes all the difference to have a friend well-versed in your work to bounce impression off of. He met up with a buddy from Goddard, Bill Moser, and the three of us had dinner the final night. Meanwhile, I managed to buzz around Dave Long like an annoying gadfly (or perhaps even a less socratic pest) most of Friday, getting dinner and a date at the bookstore for my trouble. Dave has posted "memorable moments" from the festival at On Calvin -- making no menton of me!

Calvin Quirks
Now that I've dropped some names, let me address a few quirks of the festival for those who haven't attended. This was my first time, and I'd been warned that there's "a lot of walking." The reason is that Calvin College is divided down the middle by a freeway, bifurcating the campus into 'west' and 'east' zones, connected by a sky bridge. Since there's so much going on, and the sessions are spread out all over campus, there's a good chance of striking up a conversation with someone and then never catching a glimpse of him for the rest of the event! That's what happened with David Taylor. I cornered him at the Baker table, we had a brief, vivid chat, and before leaving for an appointment he posed an intriguing question for when we met up later. Only, we didn't! I learned from his conference update (linked above) that he'd gone to all the cool sessions I'd missed, so that explains why we never saw each other again. The same thing happened with Kimberly Culbertson. So be warned: if you want to see someone again, make specific plans.

Also, you need to know that the conference is a little schizophrenic. Is it a writer's conference, or a reader's conference? Actually, it's a little of both. Unlike Art & Soul, Calvin has less of an academic focus, but it still has little in common with the typical "how to" writer's conference. A few first-timers expressed frustration about this, but the organic mix at Calvin is much more stimulating, in my view, than the more programmatic commercial writer's conferences. Still, Calvin is probably not a great place to go if your only goal is to sell a manuscript.

Which leads to one final quirk. The publishers you'll meet at the event, for the most part, aren't publishing the sort of thing being discussed in the sessions. I was surprised at how well the evangelical houses were represented at Calvin, in spite of the frustrations panelists and participants expressed with CBA publishing. That, I think, is another metaphor for the festival. There's still a wide gap between what Christian publishing says and what it puts in print. In many ways, though, the Calvin Festival serves as a "reality check" for the ambition and hype associated with other evangelical writing conferences. There are things said openly there that could only be whispered elsewhere. No one at Calvin, faced with the reality of contemporary writing, boasts much about how evangelical fiction is "as good as anything out there."

Marilynne Robinson's Conversation is a Mind-Altering Drug
On to the good stuff, by which I mean Marilynne Robinson. In a word, I was astonished. The quality of thought present in Gilead and the essays collected in The Death of Adam is very much on display in Robinson's casual conversation. Some writers have a hard time living up to what they've written, but she isn't one of them. During Andy Crouch's interview with her, I had the impression that I could copy down Robinson's words verbatim and they'd be ready for publication. Her sentences are densely packed, but charming all the same. I told Andy afterward that I wouldn't have traded places with him for all the world. I couldn't even hope to trade observations with Marilynne Robinson. She's amazing.

During her lecture the next day, she picked up on a theme from the interview. In spite of her criticism, she is optimistic about culture today, and insists that the greatest mistake writers make is believing the lie that readers are stupid drones we must accommodate. Instead, she says we must assume the reader is more intelligent than we are -- we must strive to live up to our readers, not talk down to them.

One vivid image I recall from the lecture: Robinson describes staying up after bedtime reading an old library copy of King Lear with a flashlight, calling it "a coal of promethean fire." What practical use could a Shakespeare play be in a small Idaho town, except to captivate and inspire?

After Robinson's interview, Anthony leaned over to me and said, "I'm going to have to read some Calvin." You can imagine my joy. Robinson has written the introduction to a new collection of Calvin's writings, which I plan to take with me to Worldview this summer as inspirational reading. By the way, follow the link and read Marilynne Robinson's comment on the Amazon summary, correcting some misapprehensions about Calvin.

Salman Rushdie on the Basketball Court
When I was listing the festival's quirks, I decided to save one until now: all of the plenary sessions were held on a basketball court the college refers to as the "fieldhouse." It's a crowded, warm, uncomfortable venue -- something the college's speakers acknowledged throughout the weekend, suggesting that, because of the size of the event, they had no choice. Still, there was something pleasingly surreal about hearing Salman Rushdie cracking jokes about his jump shot and having a score board hovering over his head the whole time.

Not surprisingly, Rushdie made a point of equating all religions with one another and consigning them to the realm of the "beautiful but false." He adopted a concept from Daniel Dennett, suggesting that religion was a parasitical idea that forced its hosts to act against self-interest just to perpetuate itself. (He did not, however, explain why atheism -- which has also forced one or two people to act against self-interest over the years, is not similarly parasitical.) I found myself grateful for any parasite that compelled self-interest to take a back seat; I wish I could host a few more.

An honest writer has to deal with religion, Rushdie said, because so many people in the world are religious, and it's important to illustrate both the good and the bad. Myths have so much power, but what are they? Dead religions -- beautiful stories stripped of their truth claims. Myth is what's left behind when a religion rots away -- packed, ambiguous, psychologically rich stories that seem to tell us something profound about ourselves.When the truth claims remain, when writing comes from a place of reverance rather than irreverance, Rushdie is bored. As he explained all this, I found myself thinking about the popularity of "story" language among modern evangelicals. It's fashionable to emphasize the narrative elements of Scripture and de-emphasize the systematic, abstract, doctrinal side. There is even, following C. S. Lewis, a fascination with talking about the Gospel in terms of myth. I wondered whether, in Rushdie's terms, this is indicative of our own acceptance of the death of Christianity.

Why I Wish Copan, Wilson and Pott Had Their Own TV Show
Lil Copan, Books & Culture editor John Wilson and Eerdman's editor Jon Pott held a session on "invisible books," publications over the past year that had undeservedly escaped most people's notice. The conversation broadened to include invisible CDs and magazines, too. Afterward, I told both Lil Copan and John Wilson that, if the three of them ever got a panel show on cable, I would watch it all the time. The chemistry in this trio is perfect. They're the sort of people you'd gladly pick up the dinner tab for, just to listen in on the conversation. And at the expense of using an over-used term, these editors "get it." They appreciate what's good in the Christian subculture without ignoring the painfully obvious elephant in the room. If you wrote something that never sold, that never got you the acclaim you desired, but these three noticed and approved, you would feel that you'd really accomplished something.

A Note on Sycophancy
Since I'm clearly such a sycophant, I want to insert an aside here about conference sycophancy and when it's appropriate. I've spoken to John Wilson twice -- once here and once at Art & Soul -- and really all I had to say was how much Books & Culture had meant to me. He was gracious both times. (See his excellent summary of the event here: Words Made Flesh.) This is what I would call appropriate sycophancy -- prostrating yourself at the feet of someone you genuinely admire, and offering thanks without the expectation of return.

Anthony and I both witnessed examples of what I'd call inappropriate sycophancy over the weekend. This is where authors who clearly have something to sell buzz around editors and lamely attempt to turn every conversation into a promotional ad for their work. These authors give off a vibe they're probably not aware of, one that signals their intention before they ever open their mouths.

I was chatting with a couple of editors at one point when a mysterious fourth person loomed over my shoulder. He didn't join the conversation, he just had a sort of jumpy eagerness about him. I knew right away what was going to happen, and sure enough it did. He waited for his break, then tried to pitch himself breathlessly to one of the guys I was talking to. (Note: I wasn't talking about my book. We were just chatting about the conference.) It was ... awkward. The thing is, when you act like this, it's hard to be perceived as a person, an equal. You put everyone on edge, and they're relieved when you finally go. Anthony said it best. The key to talking to editors at conferences is not to care whether they can advance your career or not. Just act like a normal person. If they want to see your proposal, they'll ask -- it's what they do for a living, after all.

CBA's Closing Window
In summing up the event, Dave Long makes an interesting comment: "...I felt for the first time a growing sense that, perhaps, the window of opportunity CBA has for talking about how it's going to 'adapt' is somehow narrowing. Or perhaps certain voices are growing weary of the talk and are getting very antsy to see the results." I got a similar impression. Inside the bubble of evangelical publishing, it's easy to ignore the frustration of fiction readers who expect the blending of faith and art to produce "serious" work. At a conference like Calvin, though, a lot of the recent hype rings hollow. Readers don't want to hear that things are changing; they want to see the books. And they don't have the built-in respect for the standard excuses that people in the bubble tend to have.

It may have happened, but I didn't hear any editors at the festival say, "We're just interested in commercial, genre-driven fiction." Most everyone suggested a desire to see both literary fiction and the kind of 'high genre' stuff you see in the general market, where art and genre meld. And everyone -- editors, writers, readers -- wanted to be able to point to more examples of serious fiction with faith elements. But frankly, it doesn't seem to be happening, or rather, everyone is hoping it will without anyone having to do something about it. This seems to be a conversation you can only take so far before everyone sighs and says that the economics prevent any meaningful fruition. All the editors seem to want the right things, but for a variety of reasons only a few are in a position to act.

All the Books
No summary would be complete without a list of the books I acquired at the event. Sadly, to borrow my phrase of a moment ago, "the economics prevent[ed] any meaningful fruition" -- i.e., I was on a strict budget. Still, I managed to pick up a few interesting things. I finally bought a copy of The New Religious Humanists, edited by Gregory Wolfe, and Adam Zagajewski's essay collection A Defense of Ardor. I also picked up a couple of copies of Rock & Sling, including the one that published Anthony's "Alphabet of Grace." During a trip to the nearby Baker Books outlet (which includes a vast selection of used books), I bought a copy of M. J. Bosma's Exposition of Reformed Doctrine from the 1920s. If you happen to be in Grand Rapids, check this store out. The selection of used Bibles is impressive. Everything from a black calfskin ESV thinline (which, by the way, looks just like a Nelson Signature Series edition) to an old Everyman's Library edition of the New Testament with the King James text set in single column, elegantly paragraphed, complete with quotation marks around speech.

Any Breakthroughs?
So I met a lot of people and made some impressions (for good or ill). But did anything make an impression on me? How will the Calvin Festival influence my work? One thing it did was reinforce my commitment to "serious" writing -- both to creating it and reading it. I'm an odd fit at a gathering like this. My novel The Pattern of Wounds isn't going to work for an evangelical publisher as far as I can tell, and it isn't 'spiritual' enough for the non-evangelical religious presses. Because of the genre elements, it isn't going to seem high brow enough, either -- and maybe it isn't. All of this has led me recently to think about "fitting" better into some category. Not anymore. I'm just going to stick out and see what happens. I like the novel. I would read it and others like it. And there are bound to be more people like me (though I admit that's a frightening thought). At least it's set in Louisiana, which several people told me over the weekend is a hot spot at the moment.

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My conclusion? I wish I could do the whole conference over and attend the sessions I missed (without missing the ones I attended). Would I recommend it? The next Calvin Festival will be in April 2008 and I definitely recommend it.