Samuel Snoek-Brown

A Writer’s Notebook: Introduction

My friend Lori Ann Bloomfield and I have been swapping e-mails about writing exercises lately (from which exchanges I’ve cribbed some of this post). We were talking about first lines, and I mentioned that my story “Bathe in the Doggone Sin” started out as a first-line exercise. Which got me thinking about writing exercises in general, and how useful they’ve been for me. My story “Distance” was originally just a character sketch, for example. “The Simple Things” began as a response to a newspaper article, and “A Smooth, Clean Cut” was an exercise in developing a scene.

Yet for some reason, I’ve read a lot the past year or so about how wasteful writing exercises are. If you’re going to write, the usual line goes, then write something productive, and stop wasting time on exercises. Most recently, I stumbled across an article at Wordplay, by K.M. Weiland, about why Weiland quit writing exercises. I won’t dispute the whole article; Weiland makes a few good points and is also careful to point out that this is only her perspective — if exercises work for you, she says, then keep doing them. But I will comment on her third point: “Writers don’t practice writing; they write.” The idea is that a lot of writers use exercises as an excuse to avoid the “real” work of writing, and I agree that exercises can become a great way to procrastinate. But how can we distinguish between practice and work? As far as I’m concerned, the practice is the work and the work is the practice — the two go hand in hand.

So I think on that point Weiland is wrong: Writers know that writing is like any other skill — it requires practice, like playing scales on the piano. (My friend Ryan Werner, who is both a musician and a writer, has made this comparison frequently; for a while he was posting Notes in his Facebook page on the similarities between music composition and creative writing, and I’d love for him to rework those as articles for his Suite101 site.)

When I mentioned this to Lori Ann Bloomfield, she brought up visual artists and the importance of sketches and painted studies, of trying out new skills or toying with ideas on paper or canvas as an essential part of the work itself. It’s a great analogy, I think, because just the other night I was flipping through a guidebook on Amsterdam (my wife and I are going there in April) and reading some little sidebars about Rembrandt, looking at little images of his sketches, and I started thinking about all the sketches and early drafts of paintings we saw on display in Vienna last winter — especially Klimt, Kubin, and Schiele. The visual-art world puts a lot of value on those exercises and rough drafts, displaying the sketches and studies as art in its own right. And I thought, we writers are artists, too, and our exercises serve the same purpose as a visual artist’s sketches, so we ought to celebrate them accordingly.

Which is why I’m going to start a weekly feature on this blog. Each week, I’m going to try an exercise, sometimes with a purpose (developing a character, starting a new story, fleshing out a scene), but sometimes just for the exercise. And good or bad, I’ll post the results here each Friday, along with a link to the source of the exercise.

So, tomorrow, look for the first of my Writer’s Notebook entries.

I wish I was cool enough to quote LL Cool J

I’ve said in previous posts that I’m a bit of a number cruncher. But there’s one number that I always avoided crunching: the ratio of my submissions to my rejections. I know without looking that the number is high. It’s bound to be–competition is fierce, and rejection is practically as much a part of the writing process as drafting or revision. I admit that every rejection notice still makes me cringe, each one a sting in the ego I work hard to eschew in the first place, but I’ve gotten used to it. I had a professor once who had a piece a glass embedded in his foot, and it was just a part of who he was, but every now and then it would shift and cut into him in such a way that he’d have to break out a cane and hobble around until he got used to it again. Rejections are like that for me–I don’t like them, and I haven’t figured out a way to make them not hurt, but I understand that some days you just have to limp through until you can accept the pain.

But acceptances? Those I still celebrate the way I celebrated birthdays as a kid, running around the house screaming and hopped up on sugar. Which is why February has so far been a terrific, sugar-high month for me.

Earlier I posted that a friend’s long-running project, Driftless Review, was up and running online, and that my first article for that e-zine was online as well. Then, the very next day, I received word from the literary journal Temenos that they had accepted one of my short-shorts for publication. I was elated, fists pumping and all grins the rest of the evening.

And today, I learned that another literary journal, Forge, has accepted another of my short-shorts. Two in almost a week? I’m over the freaking moon here! I feel like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, when he first realizes he has the house to himself and he tears through everything in a giddy frenzy, jumping on furniture, screaming with his hands in the air. My poor wife, when she returns from work, isn’t going to know what to do with me.

Yet there’s also a calmer part, somewhere deep inside, the true root of the ego. He’s in there with his arms folded, a calm smile on his face. He says, “See? I told you so.” And even though he’s the part of the ego that’s the most necessary to let go of, he’s also the part I love the most. Because when I sit down to write and wonder if what I’m working on is ever going to be any good, he’s the guy who quells the mob of internal editors, he’s the guy who says, “You can do this, this is good.” So I figure he’s entitled to feel a little smug when a publication proves him right.

While you’re here, go check out the current issues of Temenos and Forge. I submitted to them because they publish good stuff, so they’re worth checking out. Check out Driftless Review, too. I helped found that journal because I believe in their vision and I trust the drive and taste of their guru, Russ Brickey. If you see something you like on any of those sites, let them know. And if you have someone lounging around inside your head saying, “See? You can submit to these guys, too,” do it! Rejections are the reality of writing and publishing, but every acceptance is a reward, and if I deserve rewarding, I bet you do, too.

Writing as work; or, a new literary daydream

Wish I could claim this idea as my own, but I can’t. In fact, it’s a kind of convoluted web of connection, appropriate to the Internet but a bit confusing. I was reading a recent entry in the terrific little blog Literary Rejections on Display, which was in turn a reference to an e-mail commenting on someone else’s essay, so I followed the link over to The Millions, where I found Tatjana Soli‘s fascinating essay, “The Writer Career Arc, or Why We Love the Susan Boyle Story.” Go check it out for yourself, and feel free to offer comments there and/or here, because this seems like a conversation worth having. As for my comments–I posted on the essay at the site, but I plan to write up something lengthier here this coming week, so stay tuned.

Also, while I’m here: Happy Valentine‘s Day, everyone! This is a day of love, not just a day for lovers, so I wish you much happiness and compassion today and every day.

Patrons of writing and teaching: St. Francis de Sales and St. John the Apostle

I’ve been writing off and on about my “patrons of writing,” but I feel I need to acknowledge that, for me, the term I chose comes from Christianity, specifically Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and the Christian notion of “patron saints.” So I figure it’s about time I mention a couple of my Christian patrons. According to the catalogue of saints and patronage over at Terry Jones’s Patron Saints Index, there are four main saints devoted to writing and writers, but I’ll focus on two of them:

I’ll start with St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of writers (particularly journalists) and teachers. Francis was a 16th-century Frenchman whose aristocratic family had intended him for politics, but he had a strong religious streak in him and in his early twenties he gave up law and politics and entered the priesthood. Francis was my kind of guy, actually: He began his religious life in a dark mood, believing for a while that he had been predestined for Hell. Then, through a lot of study and meditation, he came to view God as manifested love, and he devoted his life to compassion, teaching and writing on Christian love extensively.

On a more personal note, I hold this gentle saint in esteem not only for his combined patronage of writing and teaching, but also because he’s a patron for the deaf — in fact, he used a form of sign language to preach to the deaf so they wouldn’t be denied the teachings of the church. This is in the 16th century, mind you! My own father has severe hearing impairment, spent most of his life wearing a hearing aid and has in his old age bumped up to two hearing aids,* so I have a special place in my heart for anyone — especially a writer and teacher — who looks out for the hard-of-hearing.

(Incidentally, while the image I’m using here links to Idylls Press‘s Cafe Press site selling it on coffee mugs and t-shirts, I initially found the image at a very cool little site called Catholic Fiction. Both it and the Cafe Press site are worth a visit.)

The second Christian saint I revere is St. John the Apostle,** author of the Book of Revelation (talk about a dark mood!). I mention St. John not as much for his authorship, though, as for my own connection to him: I’ve been to the Basilica of St. John and John’s tomb in Ephesus, Turkey. More interestingly, tradition has it that Jesus appointed John guardian of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and that Mary accompanied John to the Anatolian peninsula. According to some stories, Mary actually died in Ephesus, and there is a small devotional chapel, the House of the Virgin Mary, built on a hill just outside Ephesus, that allegedly marks her last place of residence on Earth. No religious governing body has officially confirmed it as the final home of Mary, but the Catholic Church has named is a Holy Site, and the little chapel remains an important pilgrimage site for Christians and Muslims alike. I’ve been in the chapel, too. Both it and the Basilica of St. John are deeply spiritual places that were among the highlights of my trip to Turkey a dozen years ago.

As a Buddhist student of compassion, I have learned to think of all living beings as my mother, as an exercise in developing compassion. And the majority of the world views Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the greatest and purest archetype of motherhood. So, for looking after Mary until her death as well as writing one of the most complicated symbolic religious (and political) texts in the world, I tip my hat to St. John the Apostle.

* EDIT: My dad read this post and emailed to tell me that A) he’s not “in his old age,” he’s middle aged; and B) one ear has now been deemed “helpless” so he’s back down to one hearing aid. Thanks for the updates, middle-aged Dad!

** John is a highly controversial figure. It’s unclear, really, if the same John who wrote the three epistles attributed to him also wrote the Gospel of John, or whether either of those Johns also wrote the Book of Revelation. Tradition says they’re all the same guy, but modern scholarship has turned up too many discrepancies to make that assumption. It’s also unclear whether John actually took Mary with him to Ephesus, since another tradition has her dying in Jerusalem. I choose not to get involved with those controversies here, so for the sake of John’s writing patronage, I’m going with tradition and am describing only why certain stories about John appeal to me.

“They said my writing was funny, just not ‘Archie Comics’ funny”: How to read a rejection letter

One of my early mentors once told me he’d rather get a handwritten rejection than a form-letter acceptance. It’s a great line. It speaks so well to the kind of personal attention we crave as writers. If we’re in any way professional about our work, we know that editors and agents are so overwhelmed with other people’s writing that any time they dare set aside their work and take up a pen — a pen, in this digital era! — and write us a note, it means we merited their personal attention. We imagine the editor as the teacher in A Christmas Story, derisively dismissing story after story — “You call this a paragraph? Margins! Margins! Margins!” and “Oh, my life’s work down the drain!” And then the editor comes to our little story, a gleaming page in the stack. We don’t get the Christmas Story treatment (“Oh, the theme I have been waiting for all my life!”), because it turns out we’re not quite good enough to publish, and because this is a post about rejections. But our story is good enough to give the editor pause. She leans back in her chair, holds the pages closer to the desk lamp. “Huh,” she says. “This isn’t so bad,” she says. “This writer clearly has whole oceans of undiscovered talent, and if I encourage him in just the right way, he might emerge as the greatest author of our generation.” And she reaches for a fountain pen and her stack of personal stationary.

We are such egoists. We all would rather get a handwritten rejection than a form-letter acceptance.

But I know that my mentor was only quipping when he said that, because he knew it sounded cool. The truth is, there is no such thing as a good rejection. If there were good rejections, we would not every one of us have felt the devastation of a lover touching our cheek gently and explaining that we should really just be friends. Rejection is rejection, and is hurts every single time.

That said, some rejections are less devastating than other rejections, and once in a rare while, a rejection might even hold out some hope. You just have to know how to read the code.

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

Most of the time, you’ll get some variation of “Thanks, but no thanks.” Usually they’re a little longer than that, and they tend to rely heavily on empty rhetoric and passive voice: “I regret to inform you that we are unable to accept your story,” leaving us to dream of gangs of fiction-hating illiterates pinning back the arms of every member of the editorial staff. There’s a mean-looking fellow with scars on his face and rings in his eyebrows and fingerless gloves, the biker at the end of Weird Science maybe, and he’s snarling, “This story is too good for your shitty publication, and we won’t let you publish it.”

This isn’t the case, of course. What we have here is a form-letter rejection, which sounds terrible but which is actually fairly innocuous. On the one hand, it means not only that you aren’t good enough to publish, but also that you didn’t even stand out enough in the masses of submissions to merit any notice at all; you were just another printed page among tens of thousands of pages. But it also means you didn’t stand out in a negative way, either; it means your story was not so terrible that it stopped the reading frenzy so the editor could read it aloud and the whole staff could laugh and laugh at you. I’ve been in that room with the stacks, digging through the slush pile, and I can tell you, sometimes it gets ugly in there. It’s nothing personal, really, but it is a sick reality, as distressingly illustrated recently by the gang at Virginia Quarterly. So sometimes, you’re grateful for the form rejection, because it means you’re not horrible, and since the form letter is so impersonal, you can more easily set it aside — reject the rejection — and get back to the writing.

The personal touch

But sometimes you do get a personal note. Sometimes it’s handwritten and sometimes it’s typed (or e-mailed), but you can usually tell the personal from the impersonal. Usually it’s a comment about the writing itself, something specific, maybe even a suggestion: “The story has merit but the ending feels too pat, too stagey. I wish you’d extended that ending, showed us what happens to Jane next.” Or “I’m not sure I believe the friendship in this story, but that scene at the bar was beautifully written.” This is definitely a rejection, but what you want to focus on is the fact that someone was briefly invested in your story enough to make a note about it, and then — better still — they felt it worth the effort of passing that note along to you. Take the hint, fix the problems, and get that story back out on the market where it belongs.

“Please submit again.”

The best rejections come with this personal note: “Please submit again.” With the ease of e-submissions, I’m half suspicious that this line is sneaking into form rejections, but generally, if you see this line, you should take it seriously, and it’s a very good sign. It means someone’s made a note of your name, that you stood out in a good way and they want to see more. The best of the best will actually ask you to submit the same story rewritten, which means you’re halfway in the door. (You’re not all the way in — I once had a rewrite rejected, so don’t take a resubmit as an excuse to get lazy.)

But this is getting pretty rosy. If only I can get that personal rejection, you think, the world will be okay. I’m one step away, you think. That mentor guy was right after all, you think.

You’re wrong.

“It’s not you, it’s me.”

Sometimes, the personal rejection just confuses matters. One of my favorite lines on the tv show Friends comes from “The One That Could Have Been,” in which an alternate-universe Chandler is trying to become a writer; he enters the coffeehouse and flops on the chair and explains his latest rejection letter: “They said my writing was funny, just not ‘Archie Comics’ funny.”

In my world, the line reads more like “We really liked your story but we’re not going to publish it,” and it’s the most frustrating personal rejection you can get. They might as well stroke your cheek like a lover, smile pitifully at you, and say, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

And the more praise the editors lavish in their efforts to let you down gently, the harder it is to swallow. Believe me. I’ve been there. (One publication actually sent me their voting records, showing how each editor responded to the story — I got four votes yes and one vote no, and they still didn’t accept it!).

But here’s what you need to know about this kind of personal response: Sometimes editors need to feel good about themselves. They reject a lot of good stuff, and some great stuff, and if they’re going to get any sleep at night, they need to know they didn’t just devastate a good writer. So they let you down gently, they encourage you, they ask for more.

Why? you’re thinking. If the story is good, you’re thinking, just publish the damn thing! But it’s never that simple.

Most publications receive thousands — maybe tens of thousands — of submissions, and while 90% of it will be wrong for the publication for all sorts of reasons, that still leaves 10% good stuff, maybe 3 or 4% great stuff. And at that point it’s not a matter of taste, it’s a matter of math. The typical lit journal runs maybe 120, maybe 150 pages. If it’s all fiction, that means maybe a dozen stories, on average; if it’s multi-genre, it’s a LOT less, but that journal might be sitting on 100 good stories, maybe 30 or 40 great stories.

You’re at a cafeteria but everything’s delicious and exactly what you want, everything is your favorite food. But there’s only so much room on the plate. And the lasagna shouldn’t feel bad because you picked the falafel instead. Maybe you’ll pick the lasagna next time.

So when you get the “This is great!” rejection, take heart. You’re good — you’re really good — and maybe the next person’s plate won’t be so full. Maybe the next person will have room for the lasagna. You might not be “Archie Comics” funny, but you’re funny. Maybe you’re “Jughead” funny. Try them next.

For a much more detailed examination of the rejection letter, check out Brian Doyle’s excellent article in the Kenyon Review.

Or, to vent some frustration by lambasting horrible rejection letters, check out the terrific blog Literary Rejections on Display.

New publication

Just a quick note to say I have a new publication online.

Something like two years ago, a friend of mine in Wisconsin, Russ Brickey, had the idea to start a regional literary magazine, which he decided to call Driftless Review after the geological region where our little town lived. He also kindly enlisted my help to bounce early ideas off. We hammered out a few details and then Russ was off and running, and he had the makings of what looked like a pretty cool little `zine. Then, when my wife and I decided to move to Abu Dhabi, Russ asked me to serve as a kind of “foreign correspondent,” writing a column on the arts and literature of our new home country.

For a while, Russ was working hard to finish his PhD, but he’s recently become Dr. Brickey, and with a little more time to devote to the `zine, he’s got the thing up and running, and my first column (which I’d actually written a long while ago) is online.

You can find the details of the first column on my Publications page, or you can link directly to Driftless Review from here.

Patrons of writing and teaching: Anansi

Anansi in the Linguist Staff — Linguist Staff (Oykeame), 19th–20th century (see http://www.metmuseum.org for more information and the full citation)

Since February is Black History month in the US, I thought I’d write about another of my writing patrons, Anansi the Spider, King of Stories. I first learned of Anansi from my college friend Moses Elango, who is from Cameroon, but many people encounter Anansi long before their college years: Anansi is a common figure in African and African-American folklore (in parts of the US, he’s known as “Aunt Nancy”; in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, he turns up as “Mr. Nancy,” and the follow-up Anansi Boys tells the stories of his children). While he shares a lot of characteristics with traditional mythic trickster figures like the Native American Coyote, he is most celebrated as a storyteller and master of knowledge and words. In the Akan culture where he originated, knowledge of oral history was considered profoundly important and the ability to speak eloquently and recount engaging stories was a mark of superior intellect; storytellers often served as “court linguists,” the most revered of all court positions not directly tied to the royalty itself.

Anansi and the Box of Stories: A West African Folktale, adapted by Stephen Krensky, illustrated by Jeni Reeves

Anansi takes the form of a spider because of his ability to “weave stories,” though he didn’t invent stories himself. According to the traditional mythology, stories exist separate from the mind (which explains why we writers sometimes shrug off explaining our best stories and offer simply that “the idea just came to me”), and, like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods to share with humanity, Anansi ventured into the sky to retrieve the stories from the sky-god Nyame. Nyame demanded a heavy price in exchange for the stories: Anansi, a simple spider, needed to capture Onini the Python, Osebo the Leopard, the Mmoboro Hornets, and Mmoatia, the dwarf, and bring them all to Nyame. Anansi accepted the challenge and then easily captured all the creatures not through force but through cunning use of trickery and debate—he used his intellect and his gift for words to catch his quarry. Nyame handed over the stories and Anansi in turn shares them with humanity.

Of course, Anansi is not an entirely magnanimous character, sometimes choosing to hoard his knowledge or to use his intellect to trick human beings, steal food, or other mischief, which is why he’s considered a trickster figure. But I think this works perfectly well with his role as the King of Stories, because anyone who’s ever tried to wrestle a story away from an unwilling muse knows just how troublesome Anansi can be. Still, we keep coming back for more, keep asking Anansi for stories, and most of us are willing to offer him anything in return for a good tale.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place*

Hemingway posing for a dust jacket photo by Ll... — Hemingway posing for a dust jacket photo by Lloyd Arnold for the first edition of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (Image via Wikipedia)

Just about every book on writing you’re likely to ever pick up will begin with this advice: Find a place to write. It’s strange advice, in some ways, because the most important thing about writing should always be the writing — the words themselves — which means it shouldn’t matter where you write or even how you write. But for many of the same reasons research has shown that environment can effect our study habits or even our moods, where we write and what we use to write do impact what we write and how productive we are. Which is why today I’m working on an old computer.

It didn’t start out this way. What actually happened is this: Strictly speaking, we have only one computer in the house, and on weekends, my wife likes to catch up on work or surf the Web or play video games just as much as I do, which means we have to take turns on our laptop. But last week was extraordinarily busy, filled with non-writing errands and activities, and this weekend I wanted to catch up revising my novel. So, rather than play rock paper scissors over who would get the house computer, I hauled out my back-up computer.

This thing is not quite ancient, but by computer standards it is a certified antique, a blocky old Toshiba that’s only capable of running Windows 98, and even that is a dicey proposition. The graphics are cheap, the DVD-ROM drive has up and quit on me (and was ridiculously slow in the first place), and the whole system has an annoying habit of shutting itself down whenever it goes to screensaver, no matter what power settings or display options I set on it.

But I keep it around anyway, mostly out of sheer nostalgia. This old laptop was a gift from some very dear friends of mine. These friends are technophiles and have several computers between them, so this old reject was merely a cast-off for them, but they gave it to me several years ago because they knew that at the time I was desperate for a computer and couldn’t afford to buy one, and they knew that because I was traveling a lot at the time, a laptop would come in very handy indeed. It was, in short, a lifesaver, and I’ve come to love the buggy little thing.

Most importantly, though, this is the laptop on which I wrote my dissertation — the novel I’m revising now. I’d started this book about a decade ago, scribbling out what was at first a short story and then typing it up on my in-laws’ old desktop (that thing was still running Windows 3.1, if you can believe it), and then I knocked out notes here, scenes there, and cobbled together maybe 40 or 50 pages on various computers over the years. But by the time I needed to take the book seriously and try to write it up as my dissertation novel, I was working almost exclusively on this old Toshiba.

Then, in the summer of 2007, I broke my back. (I fell out of a tree. Yes, I was almost 31 then, and I was in a tree. Don’t ask — it’s a long story.) This broken back turned out to be somehow both horrible timing and perfect timing. On the one hand, I was laid up on pain killers yet barely able to sleep at night during the exact summer when I was supposed to be writing the bulk of my dissertation (which at that time had stretched to barely 80 pages and needed to be much, much longer). On the other hand, I had an entire summer with nothing to do but lie on my back and write, and thanks to my Toshiba, I could do just that. Once I got through the pain killers and was able to concentrate on the book, I managed to pound out something like 200 pages — plus a scholarly preface — in just a couple of months. That first draft was exhilarating writing, a whirling fury of prose that came so fast I was surprising myself, seeing words appear on my screen that I didn’t even know were in my head and watching a story unfold so fast and unfamiliar is was like I was reading someone else’s book. I loved the work.

But the other thing that happened is that I came to associate the novel with that Toshiba laptop. The graphite color of the plastic casing, the layout of the keyboard, the buggy little idiosyncrasies of the software — they all felt like part of the writing itself.

The current revision of this novel has been brutally difficult so far, good solid work but definitely work. I have agonized for hours over a single paragraph. And then, this past weekend, my wife wanted our computer and I remembered my old Toshiba, which I lugged overseas with me just for old times sake, and I said, “No problem — you take the new computer and I’ll work on my book on the old laptop.”

And the writing just flowed.

I pounded out a whole chapter, some 30 pages or more, in under 90 minutes, and the text is good. It isn’t brilliant, it still has work to go, but I am excited by this novel again and I’m racing toward the end. My novel has found its home.

I don’t have one place to write, necessarily, and I’m a firm believer in cultivating the ability to write any time, anywhere, under any conditions, because the writing is that important. But I also know that sometimes familiarity and environment can benefit the writing tremendously, and I believe some pieces have their own homes. And my novel, itself a buggy antique of a story, feels perfectly comfortable on my well-loved old laptop.

(This post goes out to Crystal and Terry, lifesavers and terrific friends.)

* I shouldn’t need to point this out, but just in case: The title of this post is indeed a reference to the Hemingway story of the same name.

Good-bye, Mr. Salinger

J. D. Salinger is dead. We can’t say the world will miss him, because we’ve been missing him for almost 40 years. And if Hemingway’s example is anything to go by, I hope we never do see the novels he never intended us to read, for the sake of his legacy. But he did leave us a hell of a legacy and a literary benchmark to aspire to. Wherever you’ve wound up, Mr. Salinger, I hope you have found peace–you’ve escaped the world at last.

Patrons of writing and teaching: Thoth

Among the many, many files on my computer, I have a collection of seemingly frivolous notes and scribbles related to writing, which I insist are vital to what I do and will someday, surely, come in handy. Mostly, I’m wrong. But every now and then, as I’m cleaning out my files and tossing the lists of character names and writing exercises and newspaper articles, I come across something truly unnecessary but personally delightful. Today, for instance, I found my list of writing and teaching “patrons.”

I started this list a few years ago when I first started this blog (when it was at its original site). At the time, I was using as my profile pic an image of Je Tsongkhapa, a renowned Buddhist teacher, and one of my initial posts served to explain why. The short version: As a manifestation of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of writing, poetry, and knowledge, Tsongkhapa was not only a renowned teacher but also a famous Buddhist poet, and he remains among my favorite authors and poets. He feels special to me. And I started thinking about how he–or rather, Manjushri through him–was a kind of Buddhist “patron saint” of writers and teachers.

So I looked up the Catholic patron saint of writers and teachers, and then I looked up Hindu gods special to teaching and writing, and from there the project snowballed until I had a list of such patrons, images scattered in a Word document filled with typed notes.

And I thought it might be fun to share them here.

So, having already written about Tsongkhapa, let me begin here with the bookmark that hangs on my writing desk at home: Thoth.

Thoth is an Egyptian god, ranked by some as the third most powerful or important male god in the Egyptian pantheon (behind Ra and his son Horus). He is known by countless titles, but the one I like best is “Lord of Divine Words.” He is a kind of celestial librarian, really, simultaneous protector and disseminator of religious wisdom through writing. The ancient Egyptians (and indeed the Greeks) credited him with inventing writing and language, and he is the god of almost everything related to education, religion, or the written or oral arts: science and math, including astronomy, botany, geometry, land surveying, mathematics, and medicine; religion, including astrology, magic, and theology; philosophy and politics; and the literary arts, including the alphabet, oratory, reading, and writing.

According to some sources, Thoth also began his career as a moon god, the flip-side of Ra’s sun, and so I suppose he’s also especially important to those of us writers who prefer to write late, late into the night.

Best of all, he’s also a key figure in the Amduat, the description of Ra’s passage through the Underworld in the Egyptian “Book of the Dead.” I say best of all because I am today returning to a long and difficult revision of my novel, which describes a woman’s harrowing passage through her afterlife and which mirrors in some ways the descriptions in the Amduat. It’s time I got back to that revision now, in fact, and I’m going to need Thoth’s help.

Look for more writing and teaching patrons in future posts!

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