As some of you know, I suffered an emotional collapse just over a year ago—All Saints Day, to be exact. It took me a few months to recover, with the help of an excellent psychiatrist and some medication, although it has taken this full year to begin to feel like myself again (whoever that might be). I no longer take meds. Leaving the New York City stress factory has helped my healing. Being able to retire as an Episcopal clergy has been a pivotal blessing: The Episcopal Church (or, to be fair, any church) is a petri dish for killer stress. Moving to Portland, Oregon, has revived my spirit and improved my vision. Everyone here is so positive—and, as those of you who know me know, I have to struggle to see the good news. But mostly I think I am just happy to be more than four thousand miles away from the east coast, where I lived all of my former life (although I miss many of you who live there, especially my [adult] children and my aging mother).
We have a surprising number of new friends here, most of them writers. I have been writing almost constantly since we got here in June. I have nearly finished a book critiquing the church (but also offering some reflections on what I see as a way out of the current Christianity quagmire). There have been several short stories (a new genre for me), a fistful of poems, notes for a new play, and the draft of the first third of a novel.
A couple of my older plays are being read by theaters—one of them, Enlightenment, is based on the last years of Thomas Merton; it has not been produced. It excites me to know that theaters are interested in it. The idea for the play was first suggested to me in the early 1980s by my agent at the time, Lucy Kroll. She was right that I should write it, but the play itself had to await the publication of Merton’s complete journals because of privacy issues. When the journals came out in the late 90s, I read them all and quickly wrote the play. It had been gestating for a long time and was ready to be born. After one staged reading in New York, however, the script sat in my desk drawer for seven years while I worked long, frustrating, and mostly fruitless hours for the church. Last month I completed a revision and sent it off to a theater here on the west coast. When it is produced—and I know it will be—I will let you know. Soon, I hope.
Perhaps the most unexpected accomplishment of these months has been the founding of my new publishing company, KenArnoldBooks, which will issue its first four titles in January and February of 2008. The launch party will be in early March. I will have much more to say about the publishing program as time goes on—but it should surprise no one who reads this blog that I am looking for books that are radical in their perspective, daring and provocative. I am not seeking to publish orthodox thinkers or writers. Nor am I only interested in religion—but insofar as I am publishing books with a spiritual bent, they will represent all traditions.
So, a year after a frightening encounter with demons, I am engaged with the work that has always mattered most to me: writing and publishing. And for the first time in my life I am doing both with as much freedom as we ever achieve. I can write (almost) whatever I please and publish only what interests me.
May you all know such freedom in your own lives. If you do, hold on to it; if you don’t, do something now. We so quickly run out of time. The demons are always waiting.
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2 comments:
There is an important learning here for all of us: when I am as committed to, and enmeshed in, a particular system or structure, as you were in TEC (both as deacon and as publisher), it sometimes take a psychically violent act to call our attention to the need to extract ourselves from it. Sometimes this takes the form of a psychotic break, a temporary psychosis which leads to a rebalancing of the inner energies. Whether or not this label is correctly applied to your 2006 experience, I am not qualified to say, but the principle is important for all who seek lives that are both committed and balanced.
As an East Coast person, I am a bit puzzled by the role that geography appears to have played in your life-giving changes. I’m not sure what conclusions, if any, can be validly drawn from this aspect of your experience.
Then there is the role in these emotional and spiritual cataclysms of a strong support system. You refer to the writers’ community in the northwest and a skill psychiatrist in NYC. I know that Connie played an important role, and I’m sure there were others. My point is not that we need a complete list, but rather that such major life changes, particularly when they come in a relatively compressed time frame, almost always require strong support from some kind of community, formal or informal, to be successfully navigated. One of the sad ironies of your story is that the church, which should be a major source of such support, was, for you, the obstacle in your path that had to be overcome.
I continue to find your comments very inspirational. Over the past year, I have struggled with a number of business challenges and a feeling that I was at the lowest point of my career and personal accomplishments. Yet, at the same time, some of the very best experiences have come out of this period for me personally. I have learned that family and friends are more important to me than ever – and far more important than what I do for a living. And I have stretched and challenged my beliefs in so many new ways that I feel I have grown more in my faith in the past nine months than I have in the last decade. Thanks for sharing your experiences Ken. I am truly thankful for you, Connie and your gift of communicating the feelings and ideas that make us who we are.
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