Interview with Margaret D. McGee
Shortly after reading Margaret D. McGee’s gentle, focused book Sacred Attention: A Spiritual Practice for Finding God in the Moment, I emailed her with some questions about her writing and about publishing in the spiritual genre. She graciously wrote back, and here is the content of the emailed conversation that developed:
Sheila
I enjoyed the opening of your book when you write about the way you began what you called a nature journal to store up details for future fiction would write. What writing projects were you working on when you started your nature journaling?
Margaret
I was working on both short fiction and a novel, which may or may not ever come to fruition. As all writers know, fiction comes to life in the details, especially sensory details that evoke a specific time and place. Sitting in my studio on a sunny August morning, I simply could not “make up” the right details for my main character’s rainy winter evening. I wanted the details to be exact and true; that is, if my character hears a great horned owl hoot in the dusk, then it needs to be credible that great horned owl would actually hoot at dusk at that time of year. (I know it is credible, because I heard one just the other night — a thrilling call in the darkness!) It finally dawned on me that if I started making nature observations right now, today, then next December, if I wanted to write about sunny August morning, I’d actually have some material!
Now I have about three years’ worth of nature diary entries, with details from all the seasons of our climate on the Olympic Peninsula. Today I write much more nonfiction than fiction, but that doesn’t matter. My nature diary is still a great resource.
Sheila
How do you use it as a resource for your nonfiction? Have you expanded the way you use it?
Margaret
It’s similar to the way I would use the diary for fiction—to flesh out a particular time and place. Often in my nonfiction, I’m writing from memory about an event that was very significant to my inner life. Though I know when the event occurred, my memory might not contain many details about the outer world. Using my nature diary, I can describe in general what the environment would have been like. I won’t say it was raining if I don’t remember whether it was raining on that particular day. But I will say that the prickly rose was in bloom out in the woods, if I know from my nature diary that it was in bloom at that time.
Sheila
In what ways do you think writing and paying sacred attention are similar?
Margaret
In some ways, I don’t think I’m ever really paying attention until I do start to write. Often I’ll start a piece thinking that I know what it’s “about,” only to discover, when trying to get it exactly right, that the piece has layers and layers of meaning that I hardly noticed at the moment, but that reveal themselves in the process of writing it down.
Sheila
I agree. This is the experience that makes me love revising. Can you share an example of this from your own drafting and talk about the specifics of how you paid attention and what was revealed? I think as writers we are always interested in learning how this process goes and sharing in another writer’s experience builds our confidence that what we are doing is actually what writers do.
Margaret
When I think of examples, what was revealed always seems so self-evident! I think it must work like a magician’s act—if the magician explains the trick, then it’s obvious and not very magical. So … here’s an example anyway. In the last chapter of Sacred Attention, I tell about chopping wood, a task my father taught me that I still enjoy today. The chapter describes how I hear my father’s voice in my ear, warning me again and again to stand and hold the axe so that I won’t accidentally cut my own leg instead of the wood. Then I explain that his Grandmother Grace died of just such a wound, and he was present at her death as a little boy. In retrospect, his childhood experience must have affected the way he taught me to chop wood. (I’m grateful he taught me at all!) And yet, when I first wrote about chopping wood, I knew all the parts of that tale without fully connecting them in my own mind. Only in writing it down did it dawn on me how his care in teaching me must be related to his grandmother’s experience. Though I never met my great-grandmother Grace, her spirit, and my father’s, are always with me when I chop wood. This realization gave me a sense of the connections that tie our lives together, that make life whole. It came to me only after reworking the chapter a number of times.
I have faith that every moment, every conversation–every breath is holy and contains meaning. Don’t spend a lot of energy looking for the meaning, but just write down the truth of the moment, the real things that happened in the real time and place they happened. Quiet down and let the meaning rise up. In my experience, it will.
Sheila
Right at the opening to your book in your acknowledgements you say that the book is a short one that took a long time to write. Of course, I was immediately intrigued to know more about your experience building the content of this book. If you’d like to talk about how long it took to write the short book and why it took a long time, I’d be very interested in hearing what you have to say.
Margaret
The earliest first draft of a segment of Sacred Attention was written in 1997 for an Advent service at the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, where I was a member. At the time I had no thought of writing a book about paying attention. In the next few years, I wrote a variety of short nonfiction pieces, some for the church newsletter of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Port Townsend, where I was also a member. (Long story, told in my book Stumbling Toward God.
After my first book came out and I was thinking about what the next book would be, only then did I notice the common theme of paying attention that linked these short pieces. I wrote more on the theme and submitted a proposal. The book was accepted by SkyLight Paths Publishing.
They got it out in 2007.
Sheila
How long was it after you noticed the theme that you submitted a proposal? And then how long was it from acceptance to seeing the book out on shelves?
Margaret
Boy, I’m not sure about the first question. Months, I would say. I signed the contract with SkyLight Paths in January of 2007. I delivered a completed manuscript on deadline in May of that year. The book was in my hand by October 2007 and in bookstores in time for Christmas.
Sheila
That is a writer’s dream come true–to have a book, once it is ready, get to market very quickly from a publisher! Do you have any insights to share about publishing in the spiritual genres? What happened next in your own publishing experience?
Margaret
I’ve been very lucky to find publishers willing to publish “spiritual memoir” books from a relatively unknown author such as myself. Unless the author already has a well-established readership, a book that’s mostly about her own spiritual journey will be tough to market. And it’s true that, though I have devoted readers who have told me how much my first book, Stumbling Toward God meant to them, it was hard for that book to find its market.
I understand the compelling need to write about one’s own spiritual life, and I would never discourage anyone from doing it. I’d just say that, if your own journey is your whole topic, you might have difficulty finding a publisher and a readership, unless you happen to already be famous. It’ll likely be easier to find both publisher and readers if you write about a subject matter outside yourself that would be of interest in the spiritual/religious market, then use your own stories to bring that subject to life. Sacred Attention is more in that direction, and I expect my next book will be even more that way.
Sheila
I bet you might not want to tell us what the next book seems to be about, but perhaps you can talk about your current writing practice. What is your routine and pattern? What helps you the most when it comes to getting the writing done? Would you like to give us a peek inside the idea you are working on?
Margaret
Deadlines help me. Starting In the Courtyard, a web site I update monthly, has been a good outlet for current musings and things I want to get off my chest. I recently finished a series of essays there on the idea that God is Love. I don’t know whether any of this material will ever show up in book form, but it could.
After an experience at my home parish in St. Paul’s of creating a courtyard with a labyrinth in it, I’m also interested in writing about creativity in community. I’m a speaker and program facilitator at local churches, and these events provide great deadlines for producing new material. Last week I gave a Quiet Day at St. Hugh Episcopal Church in Allyn that included material about making the center of the courtyard labyrinth at St. Paul’s. Again, I don’t know whether that material will ever show up in book form, but it could.
And there are more topics, current and future. The possibilities are endless. Thank God!
Sheila
Thank you for this conversation. It is always rewarding to read about the ways that a working life and writing life can mesh and nurture each other and the writer. Below, I am going to include the links to your articles and excerpts online as I did in my review Sacred Attention last week, so readers who want to read your work won’t have to waste a second searching to find more of your inspiring voice. Very happy holidays to you!
Work by Margaret McGee Available on the Internet:
An excerpt from Sacred Attention is on Amazon.com. It contains an extraordinary story and is at this link as well.
Another of Margaret’s writings on Christmas appears on her website, In The Courtyard.
“With Apologies to Dana Carvey” posted Episcopal Life Online contains
ruminations on church ladies — fanciful, real, and future.