Alison Hodgson

Expert on the etiquette of perilous times.

Six years and one day after May Day

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Yesterday I remembered  a post I had written on May Day back in 2006. That was a really good time for me. God’s love had become profoundly real. I was grabbing people’s sleeves and telling them, “The Bible is FULL of the love of God.” This was often met with nervous glances. No one knows what to do when someone says something obvious with total wonder. Only kids can get away with that sort of behavior.

I had been held hostage by the grace of God for years, roughly since I became a mother. Stockholm Syndrome had finally set in and it was wonderful.

These days, I’m focusing on hope and clutching at people’s sleeves again stating the obvious with awe. Hope seems to be really important to God too.

Up until a few months ago I’d missed that as well.

If you’d like to read that post, it’s right HERE.

The choice in the gap between our talent and our desire

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Jana Riess, in her  session at The Festival on memoir, recommended “The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life” by Ann Patchett and referenced this,
I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

I like it because it acknowledges the disappointment that comes from not measuring up to our desire.


Filmmaker David Shiyang Liu created a wonderful video based on Ira Glass’ thoughts on the creative process.


The last workshop I attended at Festival was a panel with Susan Isaacs, Mark Richard and Scott Teems. 
I chose it because I had wanted to see Isaacs and missed her other sessions. This panel was to be on 
“Navigating Faith and Work: Hollywood and the Writer” which wasn’t of particular interest to me, but 
I enjoyed it. 


Mark Richard talked going to New York and meeting up with a bunch of other southern writers “because 
that’s what Southerners do when we get to New York — we find each other.” After, I don’t know how 
many years, there was only Richard and another woman who made it. Richard said it wasn’t because he 
was the most talented, but because he didn’t give up.


Teems said, “What challenges you the most doesn’t challenge your talent, it challenges your desire to be
a writer.”


This seems to contradict what Ira Glass is saying, but it doesn’t. So many of us surrender our desire to write
when we come to terms with the realities of our lack of talent. For many, it doesn’t occur to us that our
abilities are organic and that writing is first and always a practice.


In “Your Life as Story”(Which I highly recommend to those structuring memoirs) Tristine Rainer says, 
“…the central character should have a clear desire line—it can bend, it can turn unexpectedly, but it should
 not break; it should be intense and continuous.”


When we get clear on what we want: to write, and what we need to do: to write, then it gets pretty simple—
rarely easy—but simple, and our desire can carry us through.







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Ren’s here today and the kids are all playing upstairs.  I have been outside working in the gardens.  I am exerting a lot of effort just to stay on task, that being getting plants that I recently bought in the ground.  Unfortunately this requires moving around and dividing some existing plants, some of which are in the sun, that is quite bright today, so I am trying to work in the shade, where I have good ideas of other projects and next thing you know I’m tempted to start painting the house again.

Not good.
On the upside, it’s gorgeous out.  The light keeps changing as the sun shifts and moves throughout the trees.  No gardener is ever satisfied, and it is a practice to focus on the beauty that is, rather than the weeds, the bare spots where plants didn’t make it and all the projects that are, by default, being pushed off until next year.  Although I am tired and slightly overwhelmed, I have been continually struck by the loveliness surrounding me, so much of which is the fruit of my labor.
I need to get back to work, but I wanted to write this down, because it is a record of my own growth, as much as my garden’s.

https://alisonhodgson.com/2008/09/386/

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It’s shaping to be a busy week, but good.

Last week was hard.  The black dog was biting me and I’m not referring to Jackie Boy, but the black dog of depression.  Actual dogs can be put in kennels.  This black dog settles over me like a shroud.  
One day I was having a seriously rough time and wrote an e-mail to a group of friends.  I let them know how I was, which was pretty bleak.  My tendency is to try and work things out alone or to confide in Paul and my siblings, especially Torey, but I decided to let this group know that I was struggling.  At the end of the e-mail I said I was going to  go find Eden and dance with her since I know that praising God is a way out of the darkness.  I put the e-mail in my draft folder because I didn’t know if I really wanted to send it, then I did a little work on the computer.
I don’t know how long it took me to notice that Eden had come to me and was stretched out at the foot of my bed.  She lay in the sun, a foot propped up on her other knee and she was singing. She sang the song that she and Lydia danced to on Easter morning.  She didn’t know all the lyrics, but her voice was soft and sweet.  “The Godhead three in one…the beginning and the end, the beginning and the end.  How great is our God, how great is our God.  Sing with me.  How great, how GREAT is our God!”
I set my computer aside and embraced Eden and kissed her face.  I thanked her for singing and told her that she comforted me, that she helped carry me to God.
“It’s all thanks to Miss Jeannie,”  she said, referring to her dance teacher, “she taught me how to worship God and now I can teach other people.”
I work so hard to be a good provider for my children and yet I am becoming more and more aware that they are God’s provision for me.

https://alisonhodgson.com/2008/04/468/