Author: kathleenjowitt

Open letter to my bishop

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Dear Bishop,

I write to express my profound discomfort with various aspects of the Church of England’s conduct over the past few days, as the news story regarding the ‘Just Pray’ advertisement has unfolded.

Firstly, I note that the DCM agency was entirely within its rights to run or not to run any advertisement it chose. I think that its blanket policy to avoid religious or political material is sensible, and, one assumes, designed to avoid exactly this kind of mess. It is no great effort to imagine the reaction in the tabloid press had another faith group or a secular body attempted to run a similar advertisement. I consider that the Church’s attempt to present this decision as a ‘ban’ and an ‘attack on free speech’ is dishonest and I am ashamed to be associated with this disingenuous act.

Since the agency’s policy is to avoid religious or political content, the question of whether the advert is, in fact, offensive, is not particularly relevant, and I have been equally disappointed by the Church’s emphasis on this aspect. However, I would take this opportunity to make it clear, from my perspective as a practising Anglican, that I would have been extremely uncomfortable had I been in a cinema where this advert had been played. I find the idea of involving non-consenting strangers in my religious practice distasteful in the extreme.

I find the attempt to attack the agency’s decision by using the Equality Act 2010 hypocritical, to say the least, given that the Church has obtained several exemptions from it (much to the distress of myself and numerous other Anglicans). I am equally disappointed that the Bishop of Chelmsford has mooted the possibility of taking advantage of his position in the House of Lords to place political weight on the question – an abuse of privilege, so far as I am concerned, which contradicts any assertion of ‘persecution’.

Lastly, I have been deeply concerned today by the sight of some emails between DCM agency and Rev Arun Arora which give the impression that the Church of England was aware of the likelihood that the advertisement would not run as early as 3 August this year. If these are genuine, this gives the lie to its claim to have been ‘bewildered’ on 22 November, and the hypocrisy and cynicism is revolting.

I would urge the Church to make the true position clear as swiftly as possible.

Yours sincerely

Kathleen Jowitt

All-Purpose Build Your Own Socially Liberal Christian Rant

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I had this in another place, and today seems as good a day as any to wheel it out again, with a couple of updates and additions. If anyone was in any doubt as to my feelings on the subject, I think that:

a. a cinema is not an appropriate outlet for an advertisement exhorting people to pray, because:

b. I would feel deeply uncomfortable involving non-consenting strangers in my own religious practice, which would in effect be the result of showing the ‘Just Pray’ advertisement;

b. the Church of England has not been discriminated against in any way, shape or form (see Miss S. B.’s excellent post for more on this).

 

There is a limited pool of news stories on Christian issues, and the talking heads are tiresomely predictable. Now my outraged response can be tiresomely predictable, too!

Link to offending article (unless it belongs to a known click-baiter, in which case, summarise). Select response(s) as appropriate from the below list:

George Carey says something – OH GEORGE CAREY NO

George Carey says something else – no really you are not Archbishop any more NO ONE CARES and also YOU ARE WRONG

Michael Nazir-Ali says something – see above

Andrea Minichiello Williams of Christian Concern says something – well I am a Christian and damn straight I’m concerned about this woman SPEWING HATE AND BIGOTRY

Christians are persecuted in this country! – no, Christians are treated the same as most and better than many. Try Egypt.

David Cameron claims to endorse Christian values – see Isaiah 58:3-7

Pope does something – aha I approve of this Pope

Pope says something about poverty – at least SOMEONE remembers the point of the Church (see Isaiah 58:3-7)

Pope says something about sex or gender – yes, well, that’s why I’m an Anglican… oh, wait.

House of Bishops says something about poverty – at least SOMEONE remembers the point of the Church (see Isaiah 58:3-7)

House of Bishops says something anything else – FFS hurry up and disestablish so I can get out of this with a clear conscience

Daily Mail is concerned about erosion of traditional Christian values – someone must be doing something right

Archbishop of Canterbury goes too far – Archbishop of Canterbury does not go too far enough!

Women bishops – and about time

LGBT clergy – can we stop treating them as second-class citizens?

Fundamentally changing the nature of marriage – like Marriage With Deceased Wife’s Sister; see also shellfish, mixed fibre clothing, what Jesus said about marriage ahem ahem

Destroying the institution of marriage – possibly this would be a good thing?

Mention of Anglican Mainstream – No, it’s not mainstream

Mention of Church of England Newspaper – No, it’s not representative of the Church of England. Try the Church Times.

Find someone who is talking sense. Alan Wilson is usually a good bet; so is Vicky Beeching.

Consider, rhetorically, whether they are clinging to their crosses where the Breton boat-fleet tosses.

Include appropriate Dave Walker cartoon.

Post.

Where I am with Speak Its Name

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I saw this floating around Twitter a few days ago:

It made me wince in recognition. I have seen some truly terrible self-published books. (I have also seen some truly terrible traditionally published books, and in most cases I muttered, ‘Get a proper editor!’ and in one I appended, ‘And make it someone who knows that low-church bishops don’t wear soutanes, or at least don’t call them that!’)

It made me smile. On this count, at least, I have nothing for which to reproach myself, except perhaps for only paying my army of editors in promises of gin.

At present Speak Its Name is with five different people. Two of them are looking at overall language and structure and hunting plot holes. Another two are nitpicking: searching for errors in my portrayal of the High and Low Church wings of university Christianity respectively (though the word ‘soutane’ is not used in my book).

And the fifth is telling me where things just don’t make sense. He opened his critique with the words ‘I am probably one of the most critical people you will meet’, so I was expecting it to be dire; in actual fact it was rather like being savaged by a very fluffy kitten, particularly after the first general editor had suggested I cut half the first chapter. Having said that, I’d cut forty thousand words off my own bat, before any of this crowd got to look at it, because I knew those bits just didn’t work.

I’m working on incorporating all those people’s suggestions into my text. I’m waiting on some of their suggestions; these are all people who have day jobs and/or children, and I’m only paying them in gin! I’m also glumly aware that I need to standardise my inverted commas, some of which are straight and some of which are curly, depending on which program I was using when I wrote the scene in question. I’ve already fixed all the en dashes that should have been em dashes.

The inverted commas are going to be tedious, but they’ve got to be done. It’s all got to be done. In a little while – perhaps a month, perhaps longer – people will start reading it, not because they are kindly pulling it to pieces for me, but because they want to read it. Now, that’s scary.

Was it all worth it?

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St Mary Major, Ilchester
St Mary Major, Ilchester

I was talking to one of my former colleagues the other day.

‘Kathleen,’ he said, ‘you read a lot. Have you ever thought about writing?’

‘Well, um, yes,’ I said. ‘In fact…’ And I went into the whole thing. Novel. Started out as Trollope-esque ecclesiastical comedy. Ended up as Christian lesbian coming-of-age. Written. Currently editing. Self-publishing. Likely to be read by all of seventeen people, but I don’t give a damn. And all the rest of it. This was a fairly significant conversation, because it was the first time I’d let on to anyone in the ‘real world’ about it.

As it turned out, he was about four thousand words into what sounds like a very interesting sci-fi thriller. I was impressed at his being willing to talk about it at such an early stage. I’ve been writing mine for years and am only just getting over the temptation to deny everything.

I think he was quite impressed by my having a finished novel, and a little bit horrified by how much I’ve deleted. At present, Speak Its Name stands at just under 80,000 words. At one point it was over 115,000, and that doesn’t include the huge chunks of earlier drafts that I didn’t deem worthy of copy/pasting into ‘Speak Its Name FINAL’, ‘Speak Its Name FINAL 2’ or ‘Speak Its Name FINAL 3’.

(I really do hope FINAL 3 is the last one. I want it off my hands!)

‘So…’ he said, ‘if you had known, back when you started, that you’d be cutting all these words, that you’d be self-publishing, would you still have written this book, as opposed to a different subject?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, because I needed to write it, because this needed writing about.’

And – I didn’t say – because I simply wouldn’t have believed it. Over the years I’ve read plenty of books, articles, blog posts, whatever, that told me how hard a writer has to work and how difficult it is to get published.  I ignored all of them. If I went back to the October of 2007, found my twenty-two year old self sitting at her aunt’s dining table and writing detailed character profiles in colour-coded ink, and told her that she’d have to rewrite the whole thing from the perspective of somebody’s love interest, lose about 40,000 words in the process, and that even at the end of it she’d have to publish the thing herself, she’d have said, ‘Oh, really?’ and kept right on doing what she was doing.

Was it worth writing 40,000 words that will never see the light of day? Was it worth all that time, all that effort, writing a novel that I’m having to self-publish because it falls between several mutually exclusive genres?

Well, if nothing else, I’ve learned how to write a novel. I’ve learned how to combine characters and plot, and dialogue and description, and what needs to go in, and what needs to come out.

And I’ve learned by doing it for myself. I could have read the theory until I was blue in the face, but I wouldn’t have understood it at the level I do now. Those moments where I went, ‘oh, but Becky needs to be the one who sets this going’, or ‘well, how about I just take out everything that’s not from Lydia’s point of view and then see what’s missing?’, those moments of deep insight whose profundity I can’t put into words, would have been worth a very expensive creative writing course.

And writing this particular book was a lot more helpful than any counselling session, in working out how to be bisexual and Christian myself. (None of the characters are me, but most of them have at least one of my issues.)

And I’ve written a book that I’m proud of, that I think is worth putting out into the world.

And I’ve developed the confidence along the way to take responsibility for that myself and not give a damn what anyone else thinks.

Any one of those on its own would have meant I hadn’t wasted the past eight years. Combined – hell, yes, it was worth it.

Notes from the Netherlands (with pictures, lots of them)

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A brief ‘what I did on my holidays’.

I spent a lot of time people-watching. Or bike-watching, I suppose; the people just happened to be riding the bikes. Comparing the fashions in velocipedes between the Netherlands and the UK’s nearest equivalent, Cambridge.

Continue reading “Notes from the Netherlands (with pictures, lots of them)” →

What I did (and didn’t do) at the weekend

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Leiden

I’ve been away in the Netherlands for a few days – the first trip abroad with my husband since our honeymoon six years ago. We were staying in Leiden, which is a university city made distinctive by its many water courses and bicycles. We live in Cambridge, so really it felt very much like home. On the other hand, Cambridge is not so well supplied with windmills or pancakes.

Anyway, I’d intended not to do too much, and in between late mornings and early nights I had a lovely time wandering around several Dutch cities and taking a couple of hundred photographs. I took Speak Its Name with me and got a bit of editing done on the ferry, but other than that it was a work-free weekend.

One of the things that happened while I was away was the launch party for Purple Prose. To quote the explanation on that page,

Purple Prose: Bisexuality in Britain is a book about all the different aspects of life as a bisexual person. We talk about definitions, stereotypes, coming out and dating. We talk about being bisexual and disabled, being a bisexual of colour, being non-monogamous, and being bisexual in different religions. We talk about other minority sexualities such as pansexuality and asexuality. We talk about being trans and genderqueer. We look at bisexuality in the workplace and in fiction. We talk about what to do next.

In terms of my own personal investment in the project, one of my poems rounds off the chapter on bisexuality and faith.

I spent the morning proof-reading it to the best of my current ability (I have a stinking cold, and so will not have been nearly as thorough as I usually am) and thinking how useful it would have been to me had it existed ten years ago, when I’d barely heard the term ‘bisexual’ and didn’t imagine that I was allowed to use it of myself.

However! I am pleased to have been able to contribute to its existing now, or, rather, some months from now. Thorntree Press is currently crowd-funding publication via Indiegogo. If this is something you’re interested in, do have a look at the page and, if you’re able to, chuck a couple of quid in its direction.

Breaking the surface

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So… the reason for the existence of this blog is this: the novel that I have been working on (and off) since 2007 has been sitting on my computer for long enough, and I am fed up with this state of affairs. It feels like high time it was published and read by people who are not me and who are not necessarily my friends.

I have tried to find a publisher and/or agent without success. The main reason, I think, is that even I don’t know what genre the dratted thing is. The best I can do is ‘modern-day University of Barchester, with same-sex relationships’. I don’t even know whether it should be shelved under ‘General Fiction’, ‘Teenage’ or ‘LGBT’. It’s fiction. I know that much at least.

Apart from that? Does the ghost of Section 28 still haunt us? (Yes, but this may or may not be the reason I can’t find a publisher.) Are student politics terminally boring? (Yes, which is why I have edited most of them out.) Are you just not allowed to have characters who are simultaneously queer and Christian? (Possibly, but I missed the memo if so.) Whatever. I believe that there are people out there who would be prepared to read Speak Its Name (for such is its, er, name) despite, or even because of, these reasons.

I am not particularly invested in the idea of being a super-high-powered-world-renowned-high-earning-genius-famous-prolific author – but I have put a lot of work into writing this particular book, and it would be a pity if somebody who would like to read it, or something like it, never got to because I was being too proud to put it out there under my own steam.

And so I am taking deliberate and considered steps towards self-publishing. (After all, if it’s good enough for my parents…) At the moment the novel is working its way around a list of kind but ruthless friends and their red pens, and I am hoping to make it available, probably via Lulu.com, by the end of November.

More about the book here

Re-emergence

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The trees outside my window are so very green,
leaves bright (the sun flows through their veins),
the buses very red, their white roofs
(did you know their roofs were white?)
zig-zag zig-zag until the lights,
their secret numbers only secret
from the ground. Up here they’re bold and black;
it’s changed, and I, I bounce, I bounce, I bounce,
I bounce back faster now, I bounce
back higher now; I go up
(whoomph) and everything’s
on fire; this world
is good to live in; this world
has people in who make it
worth living in this world
if only for the grace
of living in the same world
as they do, and besides
the trees are so very green.

Further notes

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A summary of what I was trying to say yesterday (hat tip to The Fluent Self for the vocabulary):

My stuff is my responsibility

Their stuff is their responsibility

Depression = my stuff

My distress caused by my depression = my stuff

Their distress upon perceiving my distress = their stuff

Their desire that I not be in distress = their stuff

Their feeling that they should help me = their stuff

Their distress about not being able to help me = their stuff

Their distress that I don’t trust them to help me = hell of a lot of their stuff

And I resent having to deal with their stuff on top of my own stuff.

Don’t get me wrong: I know all about what that feels like. There is nothing like feeling that you’re not helping to make you feel like you’re a terrible person. But at the same time, dumping one’s own distress onto a person who already has plenty of distress is not a helpful thing to do.

That said,

My feeling guilty about their distress about not being able to help me = my stuff

It just seems like a pity that we have to get that far, you know?

Switching internet dialects for a moment, I’m not being depressed at people. I’m not asking for help. If I do need help, I will ask for it explicitly, and I will ask the person I deem most able and trustworthy to supply that particular help at that particular time. For example, earlier this week I was at a restaurant and I could not voice a preference as to what I wanted to eat. I asked my husband to order for me. This worked because a) he knows what I like and don’t like; and b) he didn’t pre-empt me.

Admittedly, it wouldn’t have worked a year ago, because I wouldn’t have had the gumption to admit that I was having trouble with the choice before me, wouldn’t have let myself have a preference (apart, perhaps, from ‘cheapest thing on the menu’), and, left to myself, would have gone hungry. But that’s my stuff, and I’ve been working on it.

‘How can I help?’ people ask, and there isn’t necessarily an answer they’ll like. However, there have been things that helped (me, specifically me, at specific times and places), and I find myself wanting to list them, with the extremely firmly stated caveat that they may not work for any given person, and they couldn’t possibly work for everybody. Some of them won’t even work for me any more, because I’m not the same person I was a year ago.

What helped? What helped me?

1. Knowing that I was not the only one. And I mean really knowing – not in the abstract sense. This is why, even if I didn’t know it was helpful for me, I would fight for the right to meltdown in public. It’s all very well knowing that one in three has some sort of mental health problem, but there’s nothing like seeing your bright, competent, cheerful friend in tears over a perfectly simple pizza menu* to make you realise that other people don’t have it together, either.

Everybody going round pretending that everything is peachy doesn’t help anyone. I can’t keep the mask up all the time and I don’t see why I should bloody well have to.

And the other thing about knowing that you’re not the only one is that you also know that there is someone who will get it, to whom you don’t have to explain in words of one syllable that yes, usually you can cope just fine with ordering pizza but at the moment the choice between anchovies and peppers has turned into a philosophical quandary and whatever you choose will be WRONG and you’re a terrible person and what if the peppers were air-freighted and are anchovies sustainable and who the hell do you think you are being in this restaurant in the first place did you know you could feed a family of four for a week on what you’re about to spend in here? And they will understand this because their brain wouldn’t let them brush their hair this morning, but they will also be capable of getting the pizza.

2. Relatedly, knowing that it is normal to not be OK all the time. And that it is OK to let yourself not be OK. This actually is one that I wish everybody knew. Sometimes, just admitting that things actually are horrible is enough to make them not horrible again. Sometimes they keep being horrible, but at least I don’t have to waste all that energy pretending they’re not.

3. Forming a contingency plan. If it should so happen that I should walk into a pizza restaurant and find myself in such a state that I cannot express a preference, then I will order a Hawaiian pizza, because it is more interesting than Margherita and it contains nothing I actively dislike. (For example. And low blood sugar really doesn’t help.)

4. [content note: discussion of suicide – in the abstract, which is rather the point]

I’d like to have known, six or seven years ago, that wondering idly which of these buildings were tall enough to kill someone if they jumped off, or how long it would take to drown in this particular river, was a sign of my brain not being right. I ignored this at the time because I knew that I had no intention of doing anything about it, but subsequent experience teaches me that this is not something I think about much when my head is in a good place. And of course I never mentioned it to anyone, because I didn’t want them worrying over something that wasn’t actually going to happen.

[end content note]

5. A code. Some shorthand that conveys to my nearest and dearest that I’m feeling awful, without my having to go into detail about how and why I am feeling awful. ‘Brain slug infestation’. ‘A bit down’. ‘Gone mad again’. And knowing they’ll accept that and leave it.

6. Having someone around who’ll tell the well-intentioned and infuriating to back the hell off.

7. Walking. Gets me out of my head and into my body.

8. The internet. I am much more articulate in writing than I am in speech, and I can work things through much better that way. (Sometimes I’ll write a post and direct my husband to go and read it, either as a precursor to our discussing the issue, or in place of it.) And since the internet is full of people who also seem to work that way, many of whom also get it, it is an excellent source of support. Even if most of the time we just talk about Doctor Who.

* it wasn’t actually pizza. And I am mixing up me and everyone else here. But I am not wanting to tell the real story at this point, so.