There is a bias toward conflict in all literature; yet, at least some writers believe that the end of literature is peace (Seamus Heaney) or wisdom (Robert Frost). I have always been drawn to this type of writer, perhaps because my own life story seeks these goals.

Sanders himself explains why the audience is small for stories about ordinary goodness: “Trouble is more interesting than harmony. It’s paradoxical: we wish to lead happy lives but wish to read about miserable ones. We hope for peace and read about strife.” In his book A Private History of Awe, Sanders tells how he searched for works of fiction that focused on sustained marriages over a lifetime but could not find enough artistic works to merit a college course.

Sanders calls A Private History of Awe a “spiritual memoir” because it contains his search for answers to the perennial questions about the meaning of existence. It took him a long time to admit that his primary quest as a writer is spiritual, because, as he explains in his author’s note online, “For years I shied away from writing about religious experience, in part because of the hostility that many literary readers show toward all references to spirituality, in part because these matters have always seemed to me better left private. Yet the questions I’ve kept returning to in my adult life are essentially religious ones, and I found myself unwilling to abandon this terrain to the televangelists and fundamentalists.”

Sanders may not be following the dominant contemporary literary fashions, but he is following the oldest of all traditions of autobiography, which most historians of the genre trace back to St. Augustine’s Confessions. He also follows in the steps of Thoreau, Emerson, Annie Dillard, and Kathleen Norris.

Do you have favorite spiritual memoirs? Is trouble always more interesting than harmony? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

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One of the things I like most about this book is that it owes its origins, in part, at least, to a course taught by Jeff Gundy at Bluffton University when Lee Snyder was president. You can find the syllabus for Jeff’s class here and imagine deeply engaged class conversations as Jeff and the students, including Lee, read books by Anne Lamott, Thomas Merton, Dinty Moore, Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, and Cynthia Yoder. The topics included the finding of vocation, since all these texts have a spiritual dimension, and the course was developed as part of a larger, Lilly Endowment-funded, emphasis on vocation in liberal arts colleges and universities.

 Spiritual memoirs have their own tradition, and, according to some, it is a gendered tradition.  Those who have studied the history of the form usually begin with Augustine’s Confessions  and also recognize the important contributions of cloistered, powerful, medieval women, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, and Marjorie Kempe.  Jill Ker Conway, herself both a former college president and a scholar of memoir, has observed, “There are archetypal life scripts for man and for women which show remarkable persistence over time. For men, the overarching pattern for life comes from adaptations of the story of the epic hero in classical antiquity. Life is an odyssey, a journey through many trials and tests, which the hero must surmount alone through courage, endurance, cunning and moral strength.” Conway notes that St. Augustine, in the prototypical memoir, Confessions,  assumes strong authorial agency through hundreds of pages and then, even when he surrenders to God, “he makes us believe that his inner struggle is of vast and world-shaping significance”    (When Memory Speaks, 7, see first chapter here).

The first women memoirists were, like Augustine, religious figures. But unlike him, they told their stories not as heroes but as meditators on the nature of God and as ones who experienced direct revelation of divine illumination. They did not focus on the will or the intellect, and thus were not heroic action figures but receivers of revelation. Conway traces this archetypal pattern of female surrender and service, which may include ecstatic visions but does not include what she calls “agency.” Women, even spiritual leaders, frequently do not think of themselves as actors on the world stage but as players called by God to partake in the divine and to give witness to it. Conway goes on to trace the evolution of this archetype from spiritual to secular in the 18th and 19th centuries, when finding the ideal mate and acquiring domestic security replace the surrender to God in women’s narratives.

Why this historical analysis as background for reviewing the memoir of a Mennonite woman college president? It’s a bit of a side question, but I wonder whether Mennonites, with their emphasis on community, peace, and servant-leadership follow this gender division in their autobiographical writing or whether both men and women adopt more of Julian’s position toward God rather than Augustine’s. I’ll take up this question when I review Rudy Wiebe’s of this earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, a Canadian bestseller, and winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award.

But now to Snyder’s memoir itself. First, a few minor criticisms. The title At Powerline and Diamond Hill: Unexpected Intersections of Life and Work and the hard-to-decipher cover art do not serve the author or publisher  (Cascadia Publishing House) as well as they might. Also, I could not uncover the logic in the organization of the book with its six parts, an introduction, and three epilogues. If I did not know and admire the author, I might have gotten confused by the loose thematic structure which sometimes jumps decades between paragraphs. Non-linear structures can be excellent 21st-century forms, but they work best with strong thematic focus. This book celebrates both calling and challenge and the ordinariness of everyday life–life and work flowing together and apart over almost 70 years. It works well as a series of pearls strung on one thread, or stacks of laundry neatly folded. It does not have the tightness of construction of Karen Armstrong’s  The Spiral Staircase, reviewed here.

I’m looking right now at the cover of Kathleen Norris’ Dakota, one of the books Snyder read in Jeff Gundy’s class. I own the hardcover edition, which is evidently no longer in print, and love the cover of this edition.  The image starts with blue sky, cumulus clouds, and ends with flat stretches of red land and black hills running along the bottom of the cover. The simplicity of the word Dakota with the subtitle A Spiritual Geography floating in the sky and clouds draws the reader into the work in a way that one might covet for this book, which is so much like Kathleen Norris’ (down to the way weather is discussed in both books). I can picture Oregon: A Mennonite Woman’s Journey with Mt. Hood on the cover and strong themes of what Oregon means as the place of birth and childhood but also the place, physically, spiritually, intellectually, and psychologically, to which Snyder keeps returning throughout her life.

In any case, Oregon does figure prominently in this book, and Snyder opens with an introduction that lays out her purpose beautifully, placing herself squarely in the women’s spiritual autobiography tradition of accidental leader following a spiritual path. “Growing up in a Mennonite family,” she says, “I did not know women who had career goals. I never had any.” Sometimes statements like that sound disengenuous coming from leaders who have a need to deny their power, and Jeff Gundy, who writes the foreword, challenges a similar one where Snyder says, “While I never actually rebelled against the community’s strict expectations, rituals, and beliefs, I gradually began to see that the sharp lines of separation and supposedly clear boundaries were much murkier than anyone wanted to admit.”  He is right to question her, even with tongue in cheek, because Lee Snyder’s career trajectory is amazing–from farm girl with only a year of college to young wife and mother, years of voluntary service during the Biafran war in Nigeria, administrative assistant at Eastern Mennonite University, assistant dean, academic dean, president of Bluffton University, and denominational head for several years during a decade of presidential leadership. Along the way, while working and mothering, she somehow finished three degrees, concluding with a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Oregon with a dissertation centered on Joan Didion.

“Why do you want to go to college?” asked her father before she set off across the country with her high school sweetheart for one year of college before they married. “Will you have a good man to work for?” came from her mother when she took the position of academic dean at Eastern Mennonite University, and “Why would you want to do this?” asked a board member’s wife when she interviewed at Bluffton. All three questions indicate how radical her path was when judged by traditional Mennonite standards for women. How did she resolve them? By her thorough knowledge of the Bible and its narratives of unusual people called by God to do particular work in the world, by her careful reading of great writers, by her loving relationship with Del, her supportive husband, and by her daily practices of contemplation, some of which included traditional tasks like folding laundry. When she gets a particularly nasty letter in her work as academic dean, she goes home and scrubs the toilets!

What I find most amazing about this book is exactly what I find most wonderful about Lee Snyder in real life. Just barely five feet tall, soft-spoken, and self-effacing, she never commands with her presence. I think about a poetic line describing Emily Dickinson– “demure as dynamite”– when I look at her. Like the frangipani blooms that perfumed her days in Africa, she permeates a place with a spirit of love and power combined. This memoir,written out of gratitude to those who have loved and taught her, comes out of a place of genuine humility. Desiring to serve, she was called to lead.

Let me conclude with just one final observation. Snyder’s story could be told as a tale of rebellion, will, heroic struggle against the odds, and even sexual abuse (she briefly and somewhat enigmatically describes an incident with a construction worker when she was seven years old). In our feminist age we might want to see more criticism of all the people and structures that held her back. That would be the tale of “agency” that Conway seems to desire for women.

But this story is not about the individual hero. It celebrates God’s surprising mercies, forgiveness (even to the man who molested her), learning, and above all, the community of faith that formed her in the beginning in that special place in the Willamette Valley of Oregon and has continued to draw out her many gifts over a lifetime.

“Is life’s purpose something you create or discover?” asks an unnamed professor in this book, probably Snyder herself. Lee Snyder would never claim to have created her life, but she has not been the passive recipient of it, either. Somewhere between the Oregon sawdust trail of her youth and the president’s corner office, she discovered harmony, a peace that passes understanding, something larger than the mere resolution of the contradictions and conflicts in her life. Her story is not a testimony to striving, or “agency;” instead, it testifies to the possibility that the still small voice inside, when rooted in faith, love, and a physical home in the world, can lead both to great adventures and to a larger spiritual home that we carry with us always.

Each of the six chapters in this book reveals important turning points in the life of the author.  In Chapter I we learn that in his youth Parker took guidance from external heroes and tried to live up to their moral and ethical genius rather than listening to the voice calling his own soul into being.

In Chapter II the author shares the introduction to letters to his granddaughter with this inscription: “Perhaps these notes will help you do sooner something your grandfather did only later: remember who you were when you first arrived and reclaim the gift of true self.”  This chapter also contains some of the most insightful reflections on the author’s own childhood.  He wanted to be a pilot and ad man when he grew up.  Instead of just scoffing at these early dreams, Parker shows how his calling to be a writer and a teacher actually grew out of them.

Chapter III shares the wisdom Parker learned from a Quaker mentor Ruth.  Vocational guidance can come from doors that close behind us even more than from paths that open before us.  We learn that Parker was fired as a graduate student on a project at Berkeley in the 1960′s.  And, in one of my favorite stories, he discovers in a clearness committee meeting (a Quaker practice for listening to the voice with the help of others) that the main reason he was attracted to a job offer to be president of a small educational institution was to see his picture in the paper with “president” underneath it.

Chapter IV comes at the apex of the book’s structure and tells the story of the dark night of the soul, Parker’s walk with depression–what helped, what didn’t–and the blessings wrestled from the experiences.  The image of his friend Bill coming by to visit, taking off Parker’s shoes and socks and massaging his feet–the only part of his body that still had feeling–lends radiance to a period filled with darkness.

Chapter V focuses on leadership in a way that few other treatises on this subject do.  Leading from within requires knowledge of both shadow and light in the soul of the leader.  The goal of the wise leader is service to the community.  Parker uses his experience in Outward Bound when he learned to lean back into the empty space, rappelling down a cliff.  The advice the frightened climber got–”if you can’t get out of it, get into it!”–makes a great mantra for leadership.

Parker concludes this small book with a tall subject:  the four seasons.  Treating each season as a metaphor, he weaves together the gifts received throughout the other chapters in the book.  The doors that closed behind him become the Autumn revery on the hidden wholeness in all things. He describes personal losses, and the clarity gained by them, in the winter season.  Spring brings with it “humus,” decayed vegetable matter, that he likens to the humiliations earlier shared with the reader. He ends the book with a meditation on the abundance of summer.

I decided, upon this re-reading, that Parker Palmer is to literature what Vivaldi is to music.  Each season perfects the last one and prepares for the next.  Only a Midwesterner could have probed the pleasures and pains so deeply of autumn, winter, spring, and summer–in that order. Only a citizen of the world could tell the stories in so universal a way.

I fear this capsule summary violates the spirit of the book, which should be read slowly, lectio divina style, biting off small amounts and chewing them.  Each page is bathed in silence, and the reader will do well to reflect in silence about her or his own life, not only at the end, but throughout the book.

I selected autobiographical tidbits from the book in part so that I can end this review with questions.  In a clearness committee meeting, no one gives advice.  No one asks rhetorical questions.  Each person asks some question to the wild animal soul of the other person.  The person poses the question, often about a vocational choice.  Three or four other people hold the spirit of the questioner in the light, to use a Quaker saying.

If Parker were to consider the vocational choice of writing a memoir, here are a few questions I might ask.  As it turns out, they are questions any memoir writer could use, and that is why I call this book a memoir writer’s memoir:

• Who were you when you first arrived?  What were the signs of the shape of your soul?
• What did you aspire to?
• How did you choose your mentors?
• What contributions did your father, mother, siblings make to your life?
• What did teachers and parents praise you for?
• What did they disapprove?
• Were you a golden child, class clown, outcast, other?
• What gifts from your childhood do you want to give to your granddaughter?  To yourself? To others?

These are just the questions for Volume I, Parker.  So you just might have to live another 70 years to get to Volume VI!

Transformation through suffering became the theme of the day.  I spent this afternoon with a book I want to commend to all:  An American Awakening:  From Ground Zero to Katrina The People We Are Free to Be by Episcopalian scholar Courtney Cowart.

The story begins on that beautiful morning of September 11, 2001, as Cowart prepares herself for an important day in her life.  She is working as a scholar in spiritual formation and American church history by night and a grantmaker at Trinity Church Wall Street by day.  She begins with this sentence:  “At 6 a.m. I open my eyes in a fairytale bed:  a curvaceous nineteenth-century Second Empire sleigh, drawn by curved swans keeping watch over me at night.”  She then describes her work of making grants to people working for social justice and honing the art of spiritual formation.  She says, “I do this work, however, from an extremely comfortable and decidedly unsqualid perch.  I am very afraid of suffering.”

Preparing for a meeting of her own spiritual mentors who will be filmed in a documentary, Cowart starts her day with gratitude, focusing on each person who will be part of the filming.  As she moves from the people to the project, she finds staying in the present moment more and more difficult–too much excitement.  Her outfit for the day follows the pattern of luxury she has already described in detail from the curvaceous bed to linen sheets to marble mosaic floors.  She chooses a royal blue raw silk tunic, favorite black suede Manolo shoes, and pearls.  We readers know what awaits her.  She does not.

Cowart’s story traverses the path she sets up in the beginning.  She already has achieved the material American Dream.  Every beautiful passage she sets up, from early awakening to joyous greetings of the stars of the film, is tinged with irony.  She rejoices in the pleasures of love, successfully shielded from the suffering she fears.   She is about to discover a deeper, more connected, form of love.

The moment of awakening for this already spiritual, but fearful, woman comes as she runs over the rubble after the first tower has fallen and the earth trembles, groaning in anticipation of the death of the second-tower leviathon.  As the toxic ash speeds over and around her, Cowart cries out, “Take me!” Her description of the huge rush, near violent, release she feels is as powerful as the story of Paul on the road to Damascus.

Cowart writes beautifully and movingly about transformation. St. Paul’s Chapel, one of the properties owned by Trinity Church becomes the epicenter for healing at Ground Zero.  Cowart becomes a spiritual first responder, helping to coordinate many gifts that poured in from around the country and around the world.  In the process, she loses her fear, finds her courage, and begins to move from a distant Good Samaritan to an activist working to transform the Jericho Road itself.

Years later, when Katrina hits Louisiana and Mississippi, Cowart takes what she learned in Manhattan after 9/11 and applies it to the new suffering.  She has moved from “take me” to “send me” as her heartfelt cry.

Her last chapter, “Live Like You Are Dying,” invites the reader to join the call to compassion in reshaping the American Dream.  Cowart realizes that the millennial generation, those 16-25 years old today who were children during 9/11, hold the keys to a new America.  She celebrates that 1.1 million volunteers, many of them high school or college students, responded to the call to help rebuild New Orleans and other ravaged cities and towns.

Cowart recognizes the profundity of Mr. Rogers’ response to a journalist who asked what to tell the children who witnessed 9/11 either in person or on television.  His response was, “Tell them to keep their eyes on the helpers.” They obviously learned a deep lesson.

The 9/11 generation helped elect Barack Obama to the presidency after this book was published, but Cowart already saw their potential and believes the seeds of national transformation planted by millions of acts of kindness in these two great tragedies will bear seeds in a new kind of fearlessness born of compassion.

Her own transformation of moving from privilege to passion, of awakening from luxury to suffering to joy, could not be greater, and her concluding words are worth quoting in their entirety:  “As we write the next chapters of this story together we know there is another national narrative unfolding in America–not the war story but a spiritual narrative about the way God is entering our lives and waking us up to his compassion.  In the extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice, the unprecendented acts of collective generosity, the sanctification of suffering, the large-scale awakening to a sense of shared fate, the mobilization of millions of volunteers–many in their teens and twenties–we see a glimpse of the conversion of life of which we are capable, and the fire of God’s own life which can and is bringing all of us into his eternal joy.”

Barnes and Noble chose this book as the best memoir of the year.  Interestingly, it follows almost none of the story structure guidelines found in Your Life as Story.  It contains very little dialogue, for example, and it moves from a chapter on the author’s pre-stroke life to two chapters about how the brain functions.  Then we get to the story of the stroke itself, lasting until chapter 13, when the focus moves from narrative to reflection.  The last several chapters resemble nothing more than sermon applications, as Taylor explains first what kind of care is helpful and what is not for stroke victims, and then how the stroke has changed her life for good.

I had seen this YouTube video–Jill Bolte Taylor at the TED conference–and the four segments from Oprah Winfrey’s Soul Series, so I had the author’s literal voice and her passionate presentation style  running in the back of my head as I read her book.  The voice on the page resonated with the one I met first on the screen.  As she described what she discovered when only her right brain functioned, I could feel my own fluid, energetic self, the self that is connected to everything and everyone else.

The right brain is a mystic; the left brain tells stories.  Taylor’s epiphany comes after her recovery.  As she says in Chapter Fifteen, “My stroke of insight is that at the core of my right hemisphere consciousness is a character that is directly connect to my feeling of deep inner peace.  It is completely committed to the expression of peace, love, joy, and compassion in this world.”  This is the boon she received from her hero’s journey into her own mind and brain.

What Taylor learned, everyone who writes spiritual memoir must also learn.  We need both sides of the brain.  We need the right side to quiet our racing left-brain guided minds.  Then we need to call upon the language centers of the left side in order to tell the story of what we learn in the stillness.

The jacket cover rear flap contains a picture of Taylor with her arms around her mother, Gladys Gillman Taylor (G.G.) The picture jumps off the paper with the love energy that G.G., Taylor’s mother exhibited when she first arrived from Bloomington, IN, to the hospital in Boston, right after the stroke.  The first thing she did was lift the covers of her daughter’s bed and crawl in beside her. Her calm, her devotion, her teaching (everything from eating to walking to reading), and, most of all, her belief in a full recovery, built strength that made all the difference to her daughter.

I wished for only one thing as I read this story.  I wished for more before and after insights about the family relationships.  Taylor hints that her parents’ divorce and her brother’s schizophrenia had made her angry before the stroke, and that she chose not to dwell on those memories once she recovered them.  Her pure right-brain experience taught her that she had control over whether to allow negative thoughts to repeat themselves endlessly.  Instead of delving into the personal narrative, she shows us how she took control.  This is one of the most constructive sections of the book and the reason she writes the book.  She learned something all of us need to learn.  I hope to apply her suggestions to my own life.

I would also like to know a great deal more about her mother, father, and brother–not out of voyeurism, but because I sense that the human drama of her stroke of insight is not fully complete until more of that story is told.  The decision to make her family members minor characters compared to the stroke itself and to the real hero of the story–the miraculous human brain–had to be a conscious one.  Perhaps some day the time will be right to tell the family tale with the conflicts as well as the joys.  I would gladly read that book, also.

This book was “written with” Steve Erwin.  By now you know that I am not a big fan of ghostwritten memoirs, but this one may be an exception.  A powerful story in the hands of a sensitive writer can sometimes take precedence over the reader’s desire to hear the author’s own voice.  In this case, I felt I was listening to the author directly as I moved from exciting episode to episode, following an almost unbelievable story.

Immaculee Ilibagiza is the daughter of two victims of the genocide and the sister of two talented young men who also were murdered.  Her family was deeply religious (Roman Catholic), loving, creative, joyous, and committed to education.  Immaculee was 22 years old and studying at the university when war broke out between the Tutsi Rebels and the Hutu-led government.  Ethnic rivalries had never been a source of tension in Ilibagiza’s childhood because her family was deeply engaged in education and good works, helping others regardless of whether they were Protestant or Catholic or Hutu or Tutsi.

When the killing started, Ilibagiza and seven other women sought refuge in the home of a Hutu Protestant Pastor Morinzi.  He overcame his fears of retaliation and agreed to let the women stay in one small bathroom next to his own bedroom.  There, in a space 3′ X 5″, they huddled together without speaking for 91 days.  The pastor brought them food–table scraps–that had to be taken in and out very carefully.  The women flushed their toilet only when the other toilet was being flushed.

Drunk, drug-crazed Hutu killers entered the house often during the 91 days.  One of the hardest parts of the ordeal was not knowing what was happening to family members on the outside and hearing former friend and neighbors say hateful things about all Tutsis, even about Ilibagiza’s saintly father and mother.

Those were the psychological challenges on top of excruciating physical deprivations.  But the spiritual battle raging inside Ilibagiza mattered more than anything else.  She entered into a deep prayer life based on promises she had memorized in the Bible:  ask and ye shall receive.  If you have faith, you can move mountains.  Negative thoughts, angry, vengeful thoughts and doubts often crowded out the prayers, but Ilibagiza took refuge in the last gift her father had given her–a red and white rosary–and prayed for 18 hours or more on most of those days.  She also had the memory of his words to the crowd of Tutsis that gathered in fear outside her famiy home:  “Love will always conquer hatred.  Believe in yourselves, believe in each other, and believe in God.”

Sometimes people in great pain disassociate from reality.  Most people try to ignore or repress their suffering.  Some just find a place above the fray to look down on what they cannot endure.  Ilibagiza found a safe, warm place inside herself.  God gave her images of the future–of herself talking about her sufferings at the United Nations, in English, a language she had never studied.  She asked the Pastor for a French-English dictionary and any books he had in English.  Using the grammar section in the dictionary and the books, she taught herself rudimentary English in that crowded bathroom!

This memoir belongs to the literature of survival through spiritual strength–The Apostle Paul’s letters from prison,  Martin Luther King, Jr.’s letter from a Birmingham jail, Corrie Ten Bloom’s The Hiding Place, Linda Brent’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave, and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning come to mind.

When Ilibagiza comes to the place where she can forgive the killers of her family, she not only finds release from pain, she also receives her life mission:  to help others forgive the unforgivable.

Since I share the same convictions from which Ilibagiza writes, I admire this memoir.  I admire it all the more because the convictions did not come easily.  The story does not seem pious; instead it seems real.  It challenges me to ask, “could I have the same courage?”  No one knows the answer to this question unless tested, but one can practice in everyday life some of the habits that made it possible for Ilibagiza to draw on her faith while under fire.  She memorized Bible promises, she had a habit of prayer, and she had the capacity to listen for the still small voice that gave her the blessing of images of her future.  She recognized negative thoughts as the enemy.  Without fighting them, which only makes them stronger, she shifted her mind to the positive promises of God’s presence and power.

Here Ilibagaza shares some convictions similar to Viktor Frankl, a Jewish holocaust survivor.  Frankl’s psychologocial theory he called logotherapy explains our need as humans for meaning and says that there is tremendous power in inserting our will in the small space between a stimulus and a response.  A Buddhist would agree.  The one thing we can control when all else is taken from us is our attitude.  Such are the lessons of prison camps–and of our own mental prisons–if we prepare ourselves to learn them.

There is a bias toward conflict in all literature; yet, at least some writers believe that the end of literature is peace (Seamus Heaney) or wisdom (Robert Frost). I have always been drawn to this type of writer, perhaps because my own life story seeks these goals.

Sanders himself explains why the audience is small for stories about ordinary goodness: “Trouble is more interesting than harmony. It’s paradoxical: we wish to lead happy lives but with to read about miserable ones. We hope for peace and read about strife.” In his recent book A Private History of Awe, Sanders tells how he searched for works of fiction that focused on sustained marriages over a lifetime but could not find enough artistic works to merit a college course.

Sanders calls A Private History of Awe a “spiritual memoir” because it contains his search for answers to the perennial questions about the meaning of existence. It took him a long time to admit that his primary quest as a writer is spiritual, because, as he explains in his author’s note online, “For years I shied away from writing about religious experience, in part because of the hostility that many literary readers show toward all references to spirituality, in part because these matters have always seemed to me better left private. Yet the questions I’ve kept returning to in my adult life are essentially religious ones, and I found myself unwilling to abandon this terrain to the televangelists and fundamentalists.”

Sanders may not be following the dominant contemporary literary fashions, but he is following the oldest of all traditions of autobiography, which most historians of trace back to St. Augustine’s Confessions. He also follows in the steps of Thoreau, Emerson, Annie Dillard, and Kathleen Norris. One of my hopes in this blog is to shine a light on the work of spiritual memoir writers. Spiritual memoir will not be the only category explored here, but it will definitely have a place of honor.