God between the lines: five writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry talk about the spiritual source of their art.

When many of us read, we do it not only for pleasure, but to develop ourselves intellectually and spiritually. But why do writers write? In the following profiles, critically acclaimed writers Andre Dubus, Ron Hansen, Pattiann Rogers, Doris Betts, and Barry Lopez explain how their love of language intersects with their love of God.

I am conscious of my relationship with God in my work as a writer, absolutely. When I was very young, an undergraduate, I realized that I had to try to have a good soul, that the soul was related to my talent as a writer. It's like a pitcher's legs in relation to his arm. The talent is in his arm, but without the legs he wouldn't be a pitcher. It's not that I have a good soul, but I knew then and have always known that I have to try to have a good soul, which means to get into a relationship with God. And so I pray for help, and I look to God when I work. When I'm writing I am aware of the presence of God whether my characters are or not. Writing comes from outside myself -- my work is to get inside with a pen in my hand, using words and concentration.

I know writing is the right thing to do whether or not I'm writing well because God gave me a gift. After my accident, there was a time when I couldn't write. I decided that I had to even though I didn't want to. I knew that if I wanted spiritual fulfillment, I had to write, and I had a duty to do that because it's a gift.

The experience I've had with my accident is relevant to my work because some of my characters are more grateful for ordinary things than they used to be. My accident put me in the condition of constant fear and anxiety throughout the day about what's going to happen next and what can happen in a wheelchair. But along with that came gratitude that I'm here. I thank God now for small things that I never thought of thanking anybody for before.

I'm a Catholic, and because I can't have any other sense of myself except as a Catholic, it carries over into my writing. The characters are doing things that I see as sacraments, even though different readers may say, well, he just handed her a bottle of cold beer on a hot day, or all he did was pick up a child. I don't care if anybody else sees them as sacraments, and I don't mean the seven sacraments of the church because I think those sacraments are theory. I believe that sacraments are happening all the time. Family life is very sacramental, for instance. Even grocery shopping can be sacramental. It looks like an errand, but what's really happening is what the hunters and gatherers did, someone getting nutrition for her family. Sustenance is an essential pleasure, and even though it may be through the exchange of money, it's just as holy as planting that little bit of corn and killing a bear or whatever somebody had to do long ago. It's not as glorious, and it may not be as much fun, but it's holy.

Writing is sacramental. God gives me the concentration, and I attempt to become the character, knowing what that person feels and why she is acting this way and that way. That's holy, too. After working like that, I have a fuller sense of myself. I feel good having done some work in my calling.

I describe my writing as a calling, a vocation, a purpose. Vocation is something you can't do without. If something keeps you from your calling, you get very distracted, and after a while, you don't know who you are any more. If the writer is not working, he tends to feel like just an antenna and not a human being anymore.

I think God wanted me to be a writer, to tell you the truth. I was born for it.

From "Dancing After Hours," by Andre Dubus. [C]1996 by Andre Dubus. Reprinted with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Believing she was homely as a girl and a young woman had deeply wounded her. She knew this affected her when she was with people, and she knew she could do nothing but feel it. She could not change. She also liked her face, even loved it; she had to; it held her eyes and nose and mouth and ears; they let her see and hear and smell and taste the world; and behind her face was her brain. Alone in her apartment, looking in the mirror above her dressing table, she saw her entire life, perhaps her entire self, in her face, and she could see it as it was when she was a child, a girl, a young woman. She knew now that most people's faces were plain, that most women of forty, even if they had been lovely once, were plain. But she felt that her face was an injustice she had suffered and, no matter how hard she tried, she could not achieve some new clarity, could not see herself as an ordinary and attractive woman walking the earth within meeting radius of hundreds of men whose eyes she could draw, whose hearts she could inspire.

On the landing outside the bar, she was gazing at the trees and blue sky and setting sun, and smelling the exhaust of passing cars. A red van heading east, with a black man driving and a white man beside him, turned left from the road and came into the parking lot. Then she saw that the white man sat in a wheelchair Emily had worked here for over seven years, had never had a customer in a wheelchair, and had never wondered why the front entrance had a ramp instead of steps. The driver parked in a row of cars facing the bar, with an open space of twenty feet or so between the van and the ramp; he reached across the man in the wheelchair and closed the window and locked the door, then got out and walked around to the passenger side. The man in the wheelchair looked to his right at Emily and smiled; then, still looking at her, he moved smoothly backward till he was at the door behind the front seat, and turned his chair to face the window. Emily returned the smile. The black man turned a key at the side of the van; there was the low sound of a motor, the door swung open. On a lift, the man in the wheelchair came out and, smiling at her again, descended to the ground. The wheelchair had a motor, and the man moved forward onto the asphalt, and the black man turned the key, and the lift rose and went into the van and the door closed.

What happens when you're writing is very close to what happens when you're at prayer: the insights you get, the feeling of well-being, a peacefulness and joy in creation -- all those things come from the same part of the spirit.

These feelings have always been the same for me. What has changed is being able to name them and arriving at a vocabulary to do so. Once you put all of your experiences together, you see that what connects them is the Creator, the spirit of God. I'm not necessarily conscious of this when I'm writing; it's something that comes after the fact.

But in my conscious moments when I'm not writing, I'm very aware of trying to live a Christian life. That isn't necessarily going to infuse the subjects I choose to write about and the way I go about writing them, but there are all kinds of moments to pause and reflect in the course of writing. Writing doesn't just pour out, so you're constantly rethinking what you're trying to do and why you're trying to do it.

There are moments when I put my work down and back away and ask, Do I really believe this, do I trust it, is it exactly what I meant to say? It's at that moment of reconsideration when faith comes in. God's creative spirit reinforces whether my reaction to what I've written is appropriate or not. It's almost like conscience, but not exactly the same.

This then affects the way the story gets shaped, the way the characters react to stimuli. I think a Christian writer is aware that there is something going on in the writing that matters. There's an old expression that says art should both delight and instruct. The part that only delights is as empty as television. I have a reason for writing a book, and the instruction in it, even if it's subterranean in my own mind, for a careful reader will rise to the surface.

One of the great influences my Catholicism has had on my writing is the fictionalized stories of Christ being told to us over and over again. We ultimately get a sense for how important the story is and the truth it's telling. We have this incredible metaphor of the liturgy in which symbols are given great importance, which helps me as a fiction writer in that it says what I do really does count. If you have any kind of talent or creative imagination, a fictional imagination, it's rewarded in the Catholic Church as it might not be in other places. The church has taken literally the idea that Jesus was a storyteller, that he talked to people in parables. Often you hear in homilies people reflecting on a film they've seen or books they've read. They're saying that these art forms are telling the truth about the human condition just as the gospels do.

Fiction reading is significant in that it works simultaneously to help people both break out of themselves and get into themselves. You leave your own soul, body, and world to enter into another person's, to look through their eyes and feel what they feel. At the same time you have the chance to look back at yourself from their perspective and say, How am I different from this person? What is my life history as opposed to that one? Where is my dream taking me if this person's is taking him or her there? It's a way of analyzing yourself at the same time that you lead yourself.

Writing is in many ways a spiritual exercise. Saint Ignatius Loyola would have people imagine a scene from the gospels where Jesus is talking to somebody, and he would have that person enter into the scene and, through an active imagination, become the character. With that kind of exercise, Jesus is speaking directly to you about your life's circumstance. The same thing happens in fiction. I'm presenting a story of these people doing these great things, but the reader enters into that scene and puts herself in places that she would never be otherwise and gets to see how these things bounce off her. That's another way of God speaking to your own life circumstance.

When I was starting out, I understood that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed to read a lot of fiction and learn the tricks of the trade. But I realized that what's going to make my fiction deeper and more important is to achieve some clarity through prayer and meditation. I found that there was a limitless need for reflection and reconsideration by reading scripture. So I now read a lot of theology, I read the breviary every day, and I go to Mass every day.

There's certainly a redemptive quality to writing. I can get rid of certain feelings or thoughts and have them out in the open, but in an orderly, transformed way. It's a way of taking account of events in our lives and giving them a pattern and a purpose. For me, it's a way of taking confusion and finding clarity.

From Atticus, by Ron Hansen. @1996 by Ron Hansen. Reprinted with permission of HarperPerennial.

Atticus painstakingly washed the dishes after dinner and Scott dried them and told him, "We'd had about a hundred feet of rain fall on us, but then it didn't rain at all for two days and the highways were being used again. And so I took my Volkswagen out to the jungle for the first time in a month and painted for half a day. And then I remembered that Renata expected me for dinner at six and it was already half past five and getting dark. I hurried into the Volkswagen and took a shortcut into town, skidding wildly in mud, and going way too fast for the road. Suddenly I rushed up on a half-dozen Mayan kids in their finest white shirts and pants, probably heading to work in the hotels. I honked the horn and they jumped from the road and frowned at me and there was this pothole filled with rainwater that my front tire plunged into, ramming hard, splashing their good clothes with muck. Their hands flew up and they yelled in fury and I thought I ought to go back and say how sorry I was. But then I thought about how late I was and how Renata would be fuming and how often their clothing must get ruined in the monsoon season. And I was gazing back in my rearview mirror to see them slapping the gunk from their shirts when the car slammed forward, blam!, into a trench of mud where the ground had crumbled away. I got the engine going again but then looked out the side window and saw the mud was as high as the door and my tires were turning fruitlessly in the slime. I shifted to first gear and then reverse, hoping to rock the car forward, but it only settled another inch or two. And I thought, This is how God repays your thoughtlessness. And then I looked up to see the Mayan kids were hulking around the Volkswagen, angrily peering in. But before I could say anything I saw them bend from my sight and lift the Volkswagen and heave it forward until all four tires were on hard ground again and I could roll free of the mire. I got out of the car to thank them, but the kids walked ahead without saying a word. You have no idea how indian that is."

Am I aware of my relationship with God in my work as an artist? I'll answer that with one word: always. I say this even though I cannot define God and even though the writing process is mysterious. Trying to articulate what happens during the writing process often falls because the core of what happens can't be reached. But my best poetry has occurred when I have been seeking something through the writing: a clarification, an investigation of a mystery, or a question that seems unclear to me. The work of writing a poem is the effort to come closer to an understanding of what is being sought.

Always with me is the feeling that there is a benevolent presence in the universe, and that this benevolent presence -- God -- is on our side, wishing and longing for our goodness. I feel obligated to this benevolence because its full being may depend on us to some degree, on our witnessing to it or for it. Its presence may come into full existence only through the symbiotic relationship that we have with it.

You can see this seeking in the efforts of all the arts to come to grips with the questions that people often in solitary moments of reflection ask themselves: Who are we? Why are we here? How is it that we can not only investigate ourselves but also this universe of which we find ourselves a part? These are the questions that are to me so crucial and that have motivated and propelled my work. Sometimes I try to investigate those questions as fully as I can. Other times I simply want to forget them because they're frustrating, and all I want to do in my poetry is say that this moment of life is a pure gift I didn't do anything to deserve, and I want to give something back in gratitude for that gift. The poem then becomes the effort to express gratitude for the gift of life, which may result simply in honoring a specific flower, a bird, or the way a tree looks against the sky.

When I write, I have an audience in mind. Sometimes that vision of an audience shifts a little, but I believe that for any writer, the imaginary audience being addressed has a great influence on what gets written. My poems have not always had the same imaginary audience, but the most satisfying and best poems I've written, I feel, have been addressed to God -- a being to whom I felt some obligation, a being I believed was wishing for certain things from me and who would understand my struggle to achieve those things. The most liberating audience is my conception of God, who desires us to investigate and will accept the way that I can do it -- through language and poetry. My belief in that audience, even though I can't define it, extends the boundaries of what I'm able to do with language.

For me, the natural world offers a structure and form for language. The features and lives of the natural world are rejuvenating, fascinating, stimulating, and terrifying. This is the world that we have come from and of which we are an integral part. Our language has been influenced by the earth. The patterns in which things grow and the forms that they take have influenced the form and structure of our language. Whether it's wind or shadows or rivers or animals or flowers, their processes and histories are part of our being and part of our language. These are the rhythms, motions, and patterns that we respond to because we're related to all of these lives and elements. They are vehicles for me to try to understand both myself and the world that we live in-and not only understand, but honor and praise as well.

The physical world is also an avenue for me to try to understand any intention behind our existence here. It's a revelation of the benevolent presence, because life in this world is a gift. If we've been given this gift, then someone, some being, some power, has been the giver. I think there's something life-engendering that happens during the acts of giving and receiving. The act of giving is generous, but the act of receiving is also generous. I want to receive this gift and offer a gift in return.

I do consider my writing life to be a form of prayer. Prayers can be of many different kinds. Of course, we have Christ's prayer as an example, but I think actions can be prayers too. The definition of prayer in regard to my work includes offerings of many kinds.

My poems have, in part, been my attempt to create my own soul. In them, I try to be the person I want to be and the person that I can't be all the time, and I try to discover that person. I want to create the voice that I long to be if I could be that voice all the time. By allowing the language to lead and inform me, by not too tightly controlling the language, letting it have the freedom to take imaginative risks, the poems are creating me at the same time that I create them.

From Eating Bread and Honey, by Pattiann Rogers. @1997 by Pattiann Rogers. Reprinted with permission of Milkweed Editions.

Egg

Perhaps the light inside this temple is less than a small candle barely burning beneath a violet shade, an uncertain diffusion like a glow of glacier at night without moon, a presence like morning over a pale field before dawn, dimmer than day with no voice to declare it. Were there ears to hear inside these halls, then a constant connecting like scales of organ chords played In arpeggio by two hands might be heard as the spine assembles itself, a sound like the low pizzicato of cello as the first faint plicking of pulse commences.

One could claim a belief in crosses exists predestined in the pattern of arteries forming their junctures yet to appear.

Were a seer present she might say the attention inside this temple is like that of rock spurs suddenly quaked and rebounded by lightning

Were a shaman present inside these translucent walls, he might say the sentiment is like that in a random meadow of columbine filled with mountain air before rain.

And were a master in the making here, he might claim the process witnessed in the rising and joining of warm wax cells and oils is god, the exquisite weaving of salt robes and red twines is the presence of god.

Though not one single star exists in the curved breadth of this structure, yet the only possible place where any star might be found is inside the immeasurable horizon of the thin-skulled cranium about to be.

Could it be a worship of any kind beheld in this first absence moving toward a possible breath of protest and sacrament?

When the last latching occurs, bringing the rude kick and the cry, then this temple must fail, fall, shatter away altogether, and the world, at once, begin anew.

"Spiritual element" is a phrase that, when applied to my writing, throws me for a good definition. I've been known to pray and curse when a page was bad. Let me say that writing stories is not like writing a homily, when one is conscious of a thesis and of a theology against which it is tested. I tell the story -- what I believe and value gets into it whether I aim at it or not. If one consciously aims at it, the results are didacticism or allegory. I don't do missionary work with my stories, nor do I evangelize, persuade, or underscore. But I hope and believe that this part of my working life and my teaching are both informed and enlightened by the assumptions of the gospels. If they're not, I'm living and writing falsely.

I started writing before school -- bad rhymes -- but language is always the earliest source, not philosophy. Sources change as we age. I used to think I had to know great truths in order to earn the right to print on paper. I now think I only have to know the true questions. I'm more willing to start with a metaphor, a disturbing scene, Blake's "end of a golden string" that may wind into a ball. Stories are more like gifts than achieved ends.

Spirituality is a pilgrim's progress to this pilgrim. It's up and down, and I don't presume to advise others about the journey, except to state that there is one, which was sufficient for me when I read others, and which I hope will be sufficient to others.

I came to theology as an adult, but as a child I heard the Briarhoppers sing, "You gotta walk that lonesome valley; you gotta go there by yourself." The two have fused. Everything you experience by yourself gets into writing. You just aren't always sure when or where.

From "This is the only time I'll tell it," by Doris Betts. @1977 by Doris Betts. Reprinted with the permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the author. Originally published by New Orleans Review.

Maybe we should have given Zelene the baby.

Except for me, everybody else on those rocky farms had more babies than they could feed.

Tom Jamison could have fed his -- he'll never get that excuse from me -- that man was always crazy. After his wife died he got drunker and crazier, and it was nothing but accident that Zelene Bolick was walking past his house and heard that baby scream and keep screaming. She beat on the locked front door, she called, and finally ran on the wraparound porch to a kitchen window in time to see him sticking the baby headfirst down a bucket. How Zelene got inside she never said much about. That woman must have exploded through the glass. As usual, she wore half a blanket for a shawl; I guess she wrapped up her head and dove straight through the panes.

Tom, maybe thinking the whole wall would come next, let go the baby's feet and ran out the back door while Zelene yanked the baby's face out of the water and blew breath through the mouth. That picture -- her with a scatter of bleeding cuts and her blanket shining with broken glass bits while she matched her big lungs to those little ones -- well? It affected us. The baby, a girl, was nine months old.

When she had brought back breath and screams, Zelene opened her clothes and fixed that naked baby flat against her naked breasts and buttoned her tight inside and started running to the crossroads with the blanket wadded to her front. The lump was still glittering with glass when Zelene ran yelling into my store. Blood on her forearms had stained down to the elbow points and dripped oft

While we waited for the Sheriff, she laid the bare baby girl on my counter by the cash register. "Give her your coat," said Zelene, breathing hard.

I wished that wooden surface was softer when I saw the bruises. Would you drive off a sparrow with a log? I just can't tell you.

The Jamison baby cried through my red wool coat. "He's bringing the country nurse," I told Zelene.

"O.K," she said, stepping back to shake a few bits of glass to my oiled floor. "I'm going back and kill him." Before I could move, she lifted the biggest ax off my shelf and was gone.

I don't know exactly how to respond to this question about God and my work as a writer because it's like asking if I'm aware that I breathe.

Writing for me is indeed a moral act. My relationships with language and the reader have moral dimensions, and the evocation of place in my work is an attempt to see God in all the manifold forms where we find that spiritual force.

lt's very much an issue of spirituality for me rather than religion. I have always felt that the world is informed by a spiritual force and that the civilization of which I am a part is in a state of spiritual collapse. This is largely because of the evolution of the most destructive economic force loose in the world today: hypercapitalism. It's profoundly immature, and it represents a profoundly immature understanding of wealth. It's a desperately wrong misplacement of energy, and the worst of it thrives because we live in a despiritualized landscape and despiritualized communities. In order for capitalism to thrive, it has to produce more and more consumers. One way that it does this is through the destruction of community, both at the family level and at the larger neighborhood level, by being unilaterally opposed to sharing and to the idea that a person's joy lies in relationship with another person rather than relationship with a product.

What I'm trying to do in my work is be aware of the spiritual dimension in people and place and to evoke them as a reminder that this dimension is present. Many people feel a sense of spiritual loss and don't know where to locate a spiritual fountain or source of spiritual well-being. All social institutions in some way have responded to the forces of capitalism by becoming entertaining with what they believe is their product. The essential relationship between the human being and the spiritual forces in the world is distorted by these strategies to sell products as salvation. I think people are suspect of it. For the last 30 or 40 years, we've seen rising interest in the United States in Buddhism, Hinduism, and other organized religions because people are desperate for spiritual content.

When you talk about writing from the outside, there's often a tendency to see it as an activity or strategy toward goals. None of that exists for me. Writing is a way of life. Writing is my prayer, a conscious effort to commune with God. It's a daily activity, and it informs everything that I do in my life. I'm not trying to accomplish something through this prayer; rather, I'm trying to keep something alive in myself and in the world.

The only way I've ever understood my impulse to get closer to God is to bear witness to something and make it come alive in a story and give it to people. I'm given a great deal. I'm given time, food, air, and loving support of other people. So I must create a reciprocity there; I have to give back.

I love to be in the landscape occupied by animals and to be tutored by them and their place. I may write a story about polar bears, but I'm not a naturalist in the sense that my interest ends with an understanding of the biology and ecology of polar bears. What the reader will find in that story is that I'm after something else: Why is the bear beautiful? Is the bear beautiful because of the way it's integrated into its place?

The questions that I'm after really have to do with love and issues of community. Roman Catholicism and the extended metaphors, allegories, and methodology that I was exposed to growing up were all founded on issues of love that rise up in the New Testament. I don't believe you can reduce all of a writer's work to just a few thoughts, because the human psyche is infinitely complex, but my own struggle is to make an inquiry into the meaning of loving relationships.

The writer, more than anything else, is a recognizer of patterns. I see a pattern in life of how things are related and recreate the pattern in some way in a short story or more consciously in an essay. The prose of an essay is much more intentional in that I have a conscious idea of what I'm getting at. It's very different in fiction. I have no idea where the story is going when I begin, and it's never planned. I just enter the landscape of the story and go where it wants to go. The process is about recognizing a pattern and making the pattern come to life.

Any gesture we can make to create a place where the spiritual can come to life is significant. I don't care what it is -- a mother who gives up her private life for the sake of her children, a priest who offers Mass, or whatever the act is that brings spiritual power to the community. We're in desperate need of this. For me that act is writing and creating a relationship with place, but it's important for me to have it understood that it's nothing verb special. I'm just another guy working in the garden. It breaks my heart when I see people starving, so I just work harder in the garden.

From Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, by Barry Lopez. @1986 by Barry Holstun Lopez. Reprinted with the permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

The way we are disposed toward the land is more nebulous, harder to define. The reluctant traveler, brooding about events at home, is oblivious to the landscape. And no one is quite as alert as an indigenous hunter who is hungry. If one feels longing or compassion at the sight of something beautiful, or great excitement over some unexpected event these may effect an optimistic disposition toward the land. If one has lost a friend in the Arctic to exposure after an airplane crash, or gone broke speculating in a northern mine, one might regard the land as antagonistic and be ill-disposed to recognize any value in it.

The individual desire to understand, as much as any difference in acuity of the senses, brings each of us to find something in the land others did not notice.

Over time, small bits of knowledge about a region accumulate among local residents in the form of stories. These are remembered in the community, even what is unusual does not become lost and therefore irrelevant These narratives comprise for a native an intricate, long-term view of a particular landscape. And the stories are corroborated daily, even as they are being refined upon by members of the community traveling between what is truly known and what is only imagined or unsuspected. Outside the region this complex but easily shared "reality" is hard to get across without reducing it to generalities, to misleading or imprecise abstraction.

The perceptions of any people wash over the land like a flood, leaving ideas hung up in the brush, like pieces of damp paper to be collected and deciphered. No one can tell the whole story.

ANDRE DUBUS has published nine books of essays and short stories. He has received numerous grants and awards for his writing, and his short story, "Dancing After Hours," was named a 1997 O. Henry Prize Story. Some of Dubus's writing in recent years has been influenced by a 1986 car accident that left him without the use of his legs. He lives, teaches, and writes in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

RON HANSEN is the author of six books, including four novels, a book of short stories, and a children's book. He has been nominated twice for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award for his most recent novel, Atticus (Harper Perennial, 1996). He is currently the Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University in California.

PATTIANN ROGERS recently published her seventh book of poetry, Eating Bread and Honey (Milkweed Editions, 1997). Her book Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions, 1994) was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Books Published in 1994, and her poetry appeared in The Best American Poetry 1996. Rogers has taught at seven universities, including, most recently, the University of Portland. She lives and writes from her home in Colorado.

DORIS BETTS has published nine novels, the most recent of which is The Sharp Teeth of Love (Knopf, 1997). In 1993 she was elected a Souther Writers Fellow, and her short story, "The Ugliest Pilgrim," won an Academy Award for its short film adaptation in 1982. Betts is the Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina and lives on a farm in Chapel Hill.

BARRY LOPEZ is highly acclaimed for his writing about place, especially his travels to obscure locations. His numerous honors include the American Book Award for his nonfiction book, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (Bantam Books, 1986). Lopez lives and writes from his home along a river in rural Oregon.