Discover more from A Stylist Submits
On this second anniversary of A Stylist Submits, I don’t want to pause for even a second.
But foremost if not first, thank you to every one of y’all that is here today to read these words. God has blessed me with a vital readership I never presumed I would get to have when I began to clear my throat and thumb through thick novels two years ago. Readers like you are the flame-blown glass of a tall and deep chalice, and I am glad y’all are here.
Today’s milestone invites us to linger, and so I have lingered over what I’ve written to this point. Those words have raced, expanded, slowed, contracted, sung, and whispered. And in my recollection, they are only as satisfying as the coarsened face of a weathered, wind-battered headstone. They are not nearly enough.
You might’ve noticed in my metaphor of the chalice that y’all are the vessel I need but not the thirst itself that drives me to drink. I thirst for the writing itself, for the perfection always before me but never reached. And, as y’all might have guessed already, I have grown thirstier and ever more ambitious these past two years. Even as God has provided and provides now, I want more.
Signatures and Confessions
In his poem “107th and Amsterdam,” William Matthews envies the “phalanx of cabs” and the “two black men” who cross Amsterdam Avenue around two a.m. He envies the ultra-true personality of the men’s yells and the cabs’ honking, their “ballet” of profanities like “a kind of signature, a scrawl on the air,” because it is speech he himself can’t write:
Tonight I talked for hours and never said one thing so close to the truculent heart of speech as those horn blasts, that dash across Amsterdam
The poem imagines that the men and the cabs are bellowing, “We’re here, room for all of us if we be alert.” But the poet’s envy of “the truculent heart of speech,” rendered in the poem’s form itself, could well bely that there is actually room for them all. In the five stanzas, there are the poet, the men, and the cabs, but only the poet’s words. He places his competitors within his own verse and beneath his own signature, there on the page above them.
I want very badly to be the best, I confess it. I want to write the best, truest, and most beautiful words ever written, in any time or language. I want to best my forebears, my peers, and my descendants at the same time, to utterly overwhelm them always. I want to scrawl my signature on the night air of global literature, in such large, celestial lettering that no one can look away from it.
These statements are the ultimate end of my ambitions as a writer, and I cringe to think them, never mind articulate them for y’all to read. But they are my true confession.
Did you notice the noun-verb phrase that dominates my ambitions? I, tacked to want, trailed by the airs of my self-advancement. That phrase is the familiar signature of self-advancement, the Luciferian and inescapable sin of pride. This pride far oversteps my desire to write perfect texts comprised of perfected words—it is my desire to be perfect myself, for myself, by myself, in myself. This pride tempts and snares all of us, and particularly those of us who write and love the sight of ourselves as bylines affixed above small galaxies written for other people.
What, then, can we do with literary ambition? How am I to rest in God’s promises while wanting so badly to improve and test my work?
Promises and Submissions
What drifts into my mind first, gently as though from a distance, is a question: To you who boast tomorrow’s gain, tell me, what is your life?
In its tune of praise, it is gentler than it reads. It bears me back upon itself to an earlier verse, a statement rather than a question, which is equally gentle and unmaking: Unless the Lord doth raise the house, in vain its builders strive.
The hymn which carries these words through the centuries is quite rightly titled “All Glory Be to Christ,” and it promises the satisfaction of living waters, “a cup of kindness” we may drink. Oh, and the answer to the hymn’s earlier question? “A mist that vanishes at dawn, all glory be to Christ!”
As He does in the book of Job, God gives us mystery, and it comforts instead of dispiriting us. We are irresolute and temporary people. That only gives us all the more reason and need to praise the secure, eternal Christ who saves us. The hymn still implies God can and perhaps will raise our houses. But if we are creatures dissipating like mist in morning sunlight, then the Lord must establish the labor we cannot secure on our own.
He must raise our houses. And we must praise Him for it.
To allow God to establish our work then, is to submit to His will for it. He establishes the perfection, truth, and resonance of every word I write, if I offer them all to Him like prayers—praying by the promises He has given, uncertain even in the act, but still determined to approach Him.
And in all this, I think the tension of writing ambitiously will remain. Writing will pose the temptation toward prideful self-advancement, but as the act for a given lifetime, it must advance by skill, curiosity, and challenge toward perfection. I hope the tension remains, but as a blessing. What is more generative, more spurring, than the friction of what can’t be resolved?
As I submit it to God today (and this evening, and tomorrow morning, and into perpetuity), this tension between my self-advancement and His advancement of the work is a blessing I can trust Him to use as a tool to form me, even as He holds me against the vanity I badly want. He certainly can.
Iron and Gratitude in the Work
Not that God’s tool here is a comfortable experience. The comparisons to the granular discomfort of physical friction and to the sticking blade of a spur are purposeful. But hope and artistry can abound in the discomfort of the soul, as the poet G.M. Hopkins demonstrates in “My Prayers Must Meet a Brazen Heaven.”
In sixteen lines firmer than hand-thrown ceramic mugs, Hopkins laments the futility that has befallen his praying:
My prayers must meet a brazen heaven And fail and scatter all away. Unclean and seeming unforgiven, My prayers I scarcely call to pray.
The poem’s iron tension is in the uncertainty of what the poet’s prayer is—he can “scarcely call” his words to heaven prayers, since they are “unclean” and confronted by “a brazen heaven.” The fourth line above also signals a reluctance to pray at all in the double meaning of “[m]y prayers I scarcely call,” where prayers are like doves to gather and send forth.
Hopkins mentions “heaven” with inexactitude and without mentioning its king across both the poem’s stanzas, so that the celestial throne room seems a gleaming, beautiful stronghold firm against his meager entry. “I cannot buoy my heart above; / Above I cannot entrance win,” Hopkins writes, as though the feeling of full and unhindered entrance into heaven would resolve his discomfort. But he is hard-souled against that eternal land, which is metallic against him in turn:
My heaven is brass and iron my earth; Yea iron is mingled with my clay, So harden'd is it in this dearth Which praying fails to do away.
Hopkins is irreconcilably against the heaven he wishes to reach because of his iron “earth” and “clay”—likely his surroundings and his nature, which are “harden’d” against paradise. There is nothing to “do away” by prayer, and there are no “tears.” There is not even prayer properly understood, given the previous stanza.
And yet, and yet. So gently that it is nearly inaudible, a small miracle strikes the poem’s last couplet:
A warfare of my lips in truth, Battling with God, is my prayer.
Despite himself, the poet has been given a definition of prayer that at last enables him to pray: the “warfare of my lips in truth.” And though it is “[b]attling with God,” God is present for the prayer’s battling. He hadn’t been named in the poem until its final line, which makes His appearance a bolt of hope for the “clay uncouth” of the poet.
But is the poem’s tension resolved? The poet now has his definition, but he may not have his relief. He is able to pray but still faces his brazen heaven. The “warfare of my lips in truth” won’t necessarily ease the “dearth” he mentions, even if it is how he can pray. There is no relief for the soul, and there is prayer for it.
This paradox of Hopkins is the tension I see in writing unto God. In writing anything, vanity is always near at hand. Unto God, writing that pleases Him is always possible. There is no sure sure avoidance of the temptation, and there is writing I must do. It may not be the ironclad existence of all writers, but truly I tell you it is my own iron tension.
It is eased, here and there, by gratitude.
I am grateful to God for the chance and means to write, and I am overjoyed that He has placed such unimaginable, regenerating pleasure in it. I am grateful to y’all for sharing in this strange, pleasing work I get to do. And I am also grateful for my peers who write, organize, and advance in such a way that I am challenged to do the same. There are certain swimmers whose strokes create ripples which entice the rest of us to join the swim:
There is
who is envisioning and enacting the Christian poetry that can pass through the digital door and again into mass culture; there is who has spun her fiction into an unfurling universe and a devoted readership; there is who has gathered the globe of readers and then opened their own supplement of short stories in ; there is who has co-formed the collective that wants to revitalize pulp fiction as a genre; there is who opened his own publishing venture to produce his novel Calm Before an Earthquake (read it, y’all) alongside his uncompromising, global literary criticism; there is like a shepherd of faithful aesthetic theory and practice, out to gather us stubborn goats from our wild crags; and there are countless more whom I’ve gotten to read, meet, and enjoy over the last two years.A few of these sweet people have brought me and my work along with their own, which is both encouraging and baffling. You introverted readers selected by your extroverted friends will know the feeling: it’s like dropping a meager worm into a lake and then suddenly needing to water-ski on your heels as a pod of dolphins drag you by the rod—at the breakneck speed of laughter—toward the far reaches of the water.
There is nothing but ambition and skill in this large coterie; I pray there will also be much submission, beginning with myself. My work still has tests to undergo: the bearish second novel, the closed-door pen-pal revisions with
, a December trip into the snow-speckled Appalachians to ride beside a game warden for six hours, and a long-shot pitch to write about that ride-along for my favorite print magazine. My ambitions are great, but I trust God’s hand upon them is and will be greater.Downstream of these tests I’ve set before my writing, here is one for yours: I want to publish guest essays at A Stylist Submits.
These future essays will need to be stylish and obsessed with Christianity, literature, and the surprises that meet a thoughtful, rigorous mind open beyond its easiest preconceptions. (The “About” page of this publication is still a good primer for what I mean.) I just ask that you only pitch me if I already subscribe to your newsletter, and that you understand I won’t accept every pitch.
I plan to pay the writers once I’m done working with them on their essays, because that is (thankfully) feasible and (respectfully) necessary. This adds a separate avenue for y’all to bolster the work: upgrading to a paid subscription will now be a way of supporting other writers you might not know but will want to read.
As of today, this publication is still only me, my notebook, and all of you kind enough to subscribe. But I trust there is good work to be done by others at A Stylist Submits, just as I trust that y’all can be God’s tool to help us write it.
Thanks for being here, y’all. May the living water satisfy you always, and may the reformation of your hearts toward love and truth be unending.
This is stunning, Kevin. Beautiful.
Thank you for your presence here. For your support of others. For being the first fellow writer to ever interview me. For your talent and your grace and your words.
Here's to many more! 🌿
Just here to say your pun on "submission" has been seen. And also, great article.