Posts by Michael

I am a husband, father, minister, and writer.

April 2, 2013 by Michael

Needles-n-Things

You were a champion at the doctor’s office. You took that needle like it was a hug, hardly blinking, and only repeating what I told you before the nurse came in. After your exam, I explained it like your doctor had. There would be a pinch. It would be quick and it would hurt. Then it would be over. You repeated the words pinch and hurt because you knew those words, understood them. And then the nurse came.

You stared at her, watching her like she was going to mess up. And afterward, you just looked down at the little sticker. You touched the spot on your thigh. And later, on the way to the car, you repeated a few times, “It was a pinch, daddy.” It was your way of saying that thing still hurt. I asked if you were okay and you nodded. But you said a few more times tonight, in case I forgot, “It was a pinch, daddy.”

April 2, 2013 by Michael

Lianne La Havas

David sums things up nicely, both from our venture last night and to some good things worth looking forward to.

David W. Swanson

The past few days have been non-stop activity. Good stuff, this busyness: Good Friday and Easter Services to plan and lead, the highlight of the year for us with the transition from grief to celebration. We feasted around our table on Sunday afternoon with friends, delicious food, a lot of laughing, and an egg hunt in the back garden for Eliot and his friend. As good as these days have been there’s been little time to stop and, as I told Maggie and Michael on our way to Lincoln Hall last night, I’d been intensely looking forward to Monday evening with friends at the Lianne La Havas concert. I wasn’t disappointed. And if the smiles, nods, and enthusiastic commentary around our table was any indication, neither were the rest of our small party.

The coming days hold more good activity. I’m especially looking forward to the Wheaton Theology Conference and the three-anniversary of…

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March 28, 2013 by Michael

Dear Work-In-Progress

I am not going to leave you unfinished. It’s just that every time I see you–all those tracked changes, in blue and red and green–I feel like I’m walking across the country without shoes and in climates that shift from sunny to frosty and back again. My feet itch and sweat and fall into that stupid numbness. They tell my legs to stop all that walking.

I look at you and I want you to be better. Not perfect. Just better. I want the words to be right, the sentences to sing. I want the story to work, the plot points to combine into some seamless experience I remember someone calling the fictional dream. But I feel like an insomniac and not a dreamer. So I close the document that teases me. I open you back up when I feel the promise emerging again. I start, get going, and I stop again. But I’m not done with you. You’re not done with me. One of these days we’ll make each other happy or we’ll make each other crazy.

See you later.

March 27, 2013 by Michael

Parent-Teacher Conference

We went to Bryce’s parent-teacher conference the other day. After I got over the fact that daycare centers require such things, I felt my chest swelling as his teacher said how well he was doing, how he, as their oldest child, was helping and getting special jobs and relishing them in his own way. She asked what our concerns were, took notes as we (Dawn really) said what she wanted to them to focus on. It was brief. I almost wondered why we had set up the meeting in the first place. It was short and short things get short-changed in my mind. It took reflection time for me to appreciate that short meetings can be meaningful, that they can shape the way we approach the long marathon of fatherhood.

After the teacher left, we looked over his binder which captured in pictures and notes and forms his track record over the last year. I’m not one of those parents—at least not yet—who says, “Time has moved so fast,” because I’ve taken this experiment as slowly as it’s come. But that book was another reminder of my boy’s growth, of my wife’s growth as a mother, and of my own. Maybe someone should require Parent-Teacher conferences where us parents are the subjects of discussion.

March 26, 2013 by Michael

Story Week at Columbia College, pt 2

Last week I went to a few sessions at Columbia College’s festival for writers. It was another generous time at what they called one of the largest free conferences for folks interested in writing and publishing. Sadly, like good gatherings, it ended.

The last session I went to consisted of a panel–including two publishers, one editor, and two agents. They talked for an hour about submissions, traditional and self-publishing, marketing, and voice. They said a lot. I wasn’t trying to write their comments or answers to questions, as much as I was taking them in. Here are a few quotes were worth capturing from the panel:

There’s no threat of books and stories going away. None.

…how it’s going to end up, I’m not too sure.

Publishing is the intersection between art and commerce.

No one place is central to the conversation.

There’s a really bright future. For every book.

There were certainly less inspiring words. But I’ll keep these and revisit them. Perhaps you will too as you write, revise, and submit.

March 20, 2013 by Michael

Reading To You

We had been to the Harold Washington Library before, but you were too young remember. So when we walked in from the State Street entrance, you looked around and your eyes trained up, especially when we walked into the round atrium that, as a space, feeds the soul.

We went to the children’s library, to get books and to read. You pointed out the security, the police, like you always do, and the matronly officer who I wanted to call auntie spoke with a smile that you exchanged for one brighter than her own large grin. You walked around pulling titles, saying “This one” and “That one, daddy.” We sat on a multi-colored bench, the one like the old benches that you used to be in parks on the south side when I was a boy, before the city built shelters on corners, when churches like our family’s bought advertisements to tell people waiting on 95th or 87th or Halsted to come and worship.

After we read our first book, we went downstairs and thumbed through the four books we checked out because we would really read them later. You were excellent in quieting down and listening to three authors read excerpts from their fiction, listening and only occasionally murmuring, as if each of them was pulling you next to them, lowering their voices, and, for a few minutes, reading to you.

At HWLC for Story Week

March 19, 2013 by Michael

Story Week at Columbia College Chicago, pt 1

A room of generous people, lavish with their words, though precise, all of them attentive to turns of phrase, metaphors, and descriptions and dialogue and little slices of character as expressed in five to seven minutes of reading. Students and teachers, each one accepting parts of the label emerging writer, gather and clap for their friends who stand behind the podium stammering and then flowing and for their professors who seem used to the space and the art and for that newly published novelist whose work is being read as if for the first time to a hungry audience of well-wishers. Then there is Sapphire, the bold poet whose voice stood up in the written form of a novel she said people forgot they didn’t like, and who reminded me that writers could be activists or not but that all writers needed to be good, and who remembered some of the greats by going down a notable list of influences that read like a canon because it included folks like Richard Wright and Lucille Clifton and Sonia Sanchez.

Sapphire signing books

March 17, 2013 by Michael

Three Years With You

So many things happened this year for you. You learned more than I can recount, you felt more, spoke to more strangers who never really were strange to you, and generally made me question how the world is so wrong that you cannot keep exactly that posture, the one with so little suspicion and fear and distorted curiosity. You made me question my own hardness, that sinister firmness that has deep roots in whatever is my past. You redeemed little bits of all that, you and your smiles and the way you periodically ask if I’m happy or the way you tap my bald spots in the bathroom and question why there’s no hair there or the way we spend time pointing out fire trucks and police cars. You are a blessing. You are an undeserved gift.

Uncle David, move the camera, so I can blow out my candles.

March 14, 2013 by Michael

Only Your Best Work

This is one of those quotes that is about writing but can be about everything in life that requires preparation, work, revision, and the courage to surrender the results. Anything where we choose can be around these words. Anything that calls forth effort is like writing and requires careful editing. A decision where to take the person you love for a quiet, meaningful conversation. The answer to a penetrating question. Picking what to where for an important meeting. Not rushing is essential because it means we run through the slow work of foundation-building. From Writers Digest:

But building a career requires that you lay a strong foundation of only your best work--and nobody’s first draft is the best it can be. Careful editing is the mortar that holds the story bricks together.

March 13, 2013 by Michael

Grief: A Looping Line

The path of grief is not a straight line. You don’t start off in the deepest slough then climb up each step to get back to peaceful. Grief moves forward, but in a looping line. You’re going along, making progress then you hit a loop and your stomach lurches and everything is flipped upside down and you land right back where you were a few weeks or months ago. Eventually, the loops get smaller and spread farther apart, but they’re still there to…well, to throw you for a loop.

Read the full post here.

Michael Washington

Reflections on the Spiritual Life

Author / Michael