White Knuckle Love

When I was in elementary school, I decided that I wanted to be a writer. I wrote my first short story (though it felt very, very long at the time) in 3rd grade, and spent my entire adolescence writing poetry and personal essays.

I stopped this kind of creative and personal writing when I went to college for music, and somehow became convinced that I wasn’t actually a very good writer anyway. When I started graduate school, I was happy to pick up regular writing again, though academic writing is a very different undertaking than poetry and essays! I largely sought to make my academic writing also be beautiful, and didn’t consider that I might still have creative and self-expressive writing back in my life at any point.

When I undertook a year-long training as a hospital chaplain, I was surprised to discover that the act of listening to patients in their hospital beds — their stories, their struggles, what gave them hope, what they wondered about — sparked my desire simply to tell their stories. I witnessed so much courage, so much beauty in those rooms and I needed to put the stories down somewhere. This, along with the rather intensive use-of-self training that comes with clinical pastoral education, awakened my desire to narrate my own experiences and tell my own stories.

I initially started this project thinking it would be a kind of narrative textbook for pastoral care. I thank Michael McGregor and the generosity of the Collegeville Institute for helping me take a leap into instead writing a memoir. The process of writing it was deeply satisfying and I am so proud to have a non-academic book to my name!