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Dear Calvin Conference writer! Here are the main quotes from my presentation: Â You might be interested as well in "Sentencing Ourselves to Pieces," just below, a brief essay on the necessity of teaching and reading whole books (rather an excerpts--as some are now insisting).
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(Apologies to other subscribers! But I hope you'll take a look at these as well. They're fabulous quotes---and I promise to make a real blog entry with these words soon!)
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The Art of Bloodletting:Â Translating Suffering to the Shared Page
The only books worth reading are books written in blood"Â F. Beuchner
When suffering strikes, we are often silenced by pain. In such times, the act of writing may feel frivolous, exploitative, or irrelevant. Yet it these dark, raw places of our lives that most demand our fullest attention, our most artful labors. How do we begin to write from within our afflictions? And how might the practice and the disciplines of writing offer a means of shaping our suffering into meaning for both writer and reader?
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"Forgetting is a wager we all make on a daily basis and it exacts a terrible price. The price of forgetting is a life of repetition, an insincere way of relating, a loss of self. But there is an even greater cost. Every tragedy in the past is an opportunity for redemption. And each time we forget, we lose another moment to experience God's mysterious redemption in our lives. "Â --------Dan Allendar, Â "Forgetting to Remember: Running from Our Stories" Mars Hill Review, p. 65
Patricia Hampl reminds us of the responsibility that comes with our experiences.
"We do not, after all simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something---make something---with it. A story, we sense, is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing."
-----Patricia Hampl
" . .. the job of art IS to generate beauty out of suffering, but in such a way that doesn't prettify or falsify the suffering. What would offend me was if someone looked at a car wreck and called it lovely . . ."
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----Alan Shapiro, Interview in The Writer's Chronicle
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