Writing to Show Hospitality: Luke Gilstrap on #CreativeUncertainty

This guest post by Wichita-based poet and writer Luke Gilstrap is a continuation of the Creative Uncertainty series. Every other Wednesday, I ask a writer or artist to stop by the blog and share with us about the role uncertainty plays in their creative life. If you’re interested in being a contributor, check out the Submission Guidelines.

Nicole: Hi Luke! The #CreativeUncertainty series is all about sharing how our practices around creative work have changed or lent meaning to the uncertainty we’ve all been experiencing since the start of 2020. I’m curious: In what ways does the experience of uncertainty invigorate your creative work?

Luke Gilstrap: When I’m writing fiction, I don’t like to talk about what I’m working on—not because I’m trying to keep it a secret, but because I sound like I’m hallucinating. Everything is uncertain, especially when getting down the first draft. Characters I don’t know the names of slowly stand up at the edge of my imagination like islands on the horizon. But this uncertainty forces me to slow down, which I think is generally a good idea. I’m not of the fast-drafting school, and I’ve never been satisfied with fast results.

Conversely, slowing down brings my awareness to this pulse below the surface that seemingly makes no sense. The pulse beats for a long time, and I avoid it as long as I can. Because while I’ve liked the results of past uncertainty, I never like it in the present. There’s nothing romantic about doubt. It’s all fear for me. Sometimes my prayer is, You can’t possibly be asking me to write about this.

But He is. Uncertainty, slowing down, gives Him time to chip away at my fear of writing. And He needs a lot of time, because I’m very afraid most of the time.

For the past two years, I’ve been working on a novel that started off being autobiographical but evolved into a modern retelling of the lives of Sts. Joachim and Anna (a revelation that came about because of your second book, Nicole! shout out!). For most of that time, God has also been asking me to write about the Syrian refugee crisis. (Actually, God started revealing my concern for displaced people in my writing much before this book.) After a year and a half, God started to get louder, chip harder. I take the smallest steps possible. I spent a month trying to type “Orthodox church resettles Syrian refugees” into Google. The day I did, the first result was of a priest who shared the first name of the Syrian character in my novel I had been so afraid to write. Now he and I are becoming friends as he helps me write this book. And believe me, the research connections—where God is taking my writing beyond the limits of myself—are getting more and more miraculous.

Nicole: That leads to my next question. What does it mean to you to be a “Christian writer”?

LG: I was lucky enough to be a part of a graduate creative writing program full of students like me. Or rather, full of students who shared the same fear as me: the fear of being labeled “too religious” for secular readers and “too secular” for religious readers. As a fiction writer, the tightrope is especially thin. The day you are labeled a “Christian fiction writer” is the day you are assumed to write in the genre of Christian Fiction, namely, Amish romance.

And yet, in my writing I can’t seem to get away from explicitly religious subjects. People who pray—people who sometimes look up to the sky as if for answers, who get on their knees even once in their lifetime—are my favorite people to write. I love the sounds of the Psalms, the Gospels, the Liturgy, and (I hope) these sounds find their way into my poems.

One of my former teachers, Robert Cording, once told me he’d set out to never write a poem his parents (or anyone else) couldn’t understand. That struck me as a Christian way to be. The Pharisees, the highly educated, were the ones who misunderstood Jesus—not the people on their knees.

But even more than this, I remember something I heard Carolyn Forche say at a guest reading for our class. Someone had asked her what she thought it meant to be a religious writer, to which she said, “If you want to be a religious writer, be religious.” If you want to be able to write about prayer, pray. If you want to be able to write about belief, practice believing. Writing is hard work, but prayer is the real work.

As Christians, we’re lucky to have people who tell us how to pray, some time-tested methods that really do change us from the inside out. And while that change is happening inside us, when we are becoming gentler, stronger, holier people, our writing is better for it. Our characters are better people, our words are truer. Liturgical prayers and the Psalms aren’t just effective. They’re beautiful! Beauty inspires beauty. Christ’s light inside us spills onto the page.

Nicole: The “Amish romance” line literally made me laugh out loud. So besides Beverly Lewis (jk!), what authors or books have nourished your creative soul most recently? What made them helpful?

LG: I recently read Wounded by Love by St. Porphyrios for the first time. I wish I could afford to always keep several copies of this book on hand and give them out to everyone. I have never felt so understood by another saint (or writer). Reading a few pages at a time, I usually cry. His writing makes my chest physically ache with love for Christ and other people.

Writing about the end of his life, “…when I appear at the Second Coming and Christ says to me: Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment? I will bow my head and I will say to Him: “Whatever you want, my Lord, whatever your love desires. I know I am not worthy. Send me wherever your love wishes. I am fit for hell. And place me in hell, as long as I am with You. There is one thing I want, one thing I desire, one thing I ask for, and that is to be with You, wherever and however You wish.”

Nicole: Last but not least… We aren’t front-line workers, scientists, or “essential” businesses. So what role do you think creatives play in the midst of social change and uncertainty?

LG: The creative works I love the most all resonate with a sense of hospitality. In our present age of social distancing the need for hospitality is obvious. I’ve been stressing this to my writing students this year, but I think this applies to all creatives: we have a unique opportunity right now. We get to host people from all around the world inside the framework of our art. The novel, Gilead, the new Little Women movie adaptation, the music of Ambrose Akinmusire—these are all places we get to live in, because these artists are hospitable. I love, too, thinking of the different mediums of our creative work as different modes of hospitality. Different people need to be welcomed and served in different ways. I think of writing a novel like building a home for someone with different rooms and different feelings in each room. I think of writing poetry like setting the table and making one great meal. In both cases, the focus is on them, the readers, not me. I want to make spaces where other people can belong, and I want to see what they’re free to do or feel in these spaces.

Nicole: I love the idea of books and art creating places to live in, and I suppose even commune in with one another during this season of social distance. Thank you for giving me something to reflect on, and for participating in the #CreativeUncertainty series!

Luke Taylor Gilstrap lives with his wife, Megan, and his son, Oliver, in Wichita, Kansas. He received his MFA from Seattle Pacific University and teaches writing at Friends University. His poems have been published at River City Poetry and are forthcoming in an anthology from Darkly Bright Press. Follow him on Instagram at @luketaylorgilstrap.