Writing as Compassion
Kate Moos, managing producer
William Maxwell treats his personal material as if it were history. It is one part memory, one part research and one part hearsay but one hundred percent compassion. Compassion in my mind is an admixture of feeling and sustained attention with regard to others. Compassion is the absence of cruelty. Compassion is steady and relaxed—allowing patience where we may not have any for ourselves. Compassion is acceptance of what you didn’t realize or can’t understand. Compassion is not attainable without process—going through the various methods of drafting. Each one provides you with another perspective, another point of focus. Each method provides more ingredients to the approach that helps the content to stand on its own so that the writer can leave it behind them.
—Nancy Beckett
Most Wednesday nights I’m at the kitchen table staring into my laptop screen at a living room full of women. It’s my writing group, which is presided over by Nancy Beckett, an incredible playwright and writing teacher in Chicago. My admiration for her insight, depth, and crazy, mordant Irish wit never evaporates.
Everyone else assembles in her apartment for our three-hour sessions; I Skype in from St. Paul.
This week we read an excerpt from the great editor and writer William Maxwell’s creative nonfiction, and, as is the drill each week, Nancy gave us her deeply insightful lesson, a portion of which I cite above.
What I love about this work is that it goes past how to string sentences together, though there is that. It reminds me why I write. As Nancy would say, “People write because they can’t help themselves.” I write in order to know. I write in order to be changed.
(photo above: Tina, one of the group members, reads from her novel-in-progress.)
The Charter for Compassion
Last week I wrote about Karen Armstrong’s “Charter for Compassion,” and I ended my post with the question: “Will anyone notice?” It appears my question has been answered. When I went to check the Web site earlier today, it was down, presumably because of a spike in traffic. If the link above isn’t working, you can have a look at the charter on TED’s site.
Andy Dayton, associate web producer
Countdown to Compassion
Andy Dayton, associate web producer
Last time we put out our program with Karen Armstrong, one of our producers wrote about Karen Armstrong’s call to build an international “Charter for Compassion.” In her speech, Armstrong states that “I think it’s time that we moved beyond the idea of toleration, and moved toward appreciation of the other.”
Now, we are once again replaying “The Freelance Monotheism of Karen Armstrong” one week before the Charter for Compassion itself is unveiled. In some ways, the charter’s mission is surprisingly simple — it’s essentially a call for everyone around the world to follow the Golden Rule. Less than a month ago, Armstrong articulated this mission in a letter co-signed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu:
“It is not simply a statement of principle; it is above all a summons to creative, practical and sustained action to meet the political, moral, religious, social and cultural problems of our time. In addition to participating in one of the many launch events, we invite each individual to adopt the charter as their own, to make a lifelong commitment to live with compassion.”
It seems a little serendipitous to me that the charter is being released on November 12, the same day we’re releasing our program with Buddhist thinker Matthieu Ricard to podcasters. Ricard is another person very interested in the idea of compassion. In his conversation with Krista, he offers the idea that compassion is a skill that we develop with practice: “You don’t learn to play the piano by playing 20 seconds a week,” he says, and much like we exercise to keep our bodies fit, we should also be practicing compassionate thinking to remain spiritually fit.
While the charter’s mission is to tell the world why we should be compassionate, Ricard is teaching how we can be compassionate.
I’m interested to see what happens after the charter is officially revealed. How will it be received? On what terms will it put forth its mission? Will anyone notice?
"Brain Game"
Trent Gilliss, online editor
Malcolm Gladwell’s article has been garnering a lot of attention in the media lately for his comparisons of football players and dogs fighting in the ring. It’s a fine piece, but Jeanne Marie Laskas’ investigative work that appeared earlier in GQ is better. A bold statement for me considering how much I enjoy reading Gladwell’s work.
Laskas focuses on the human toll of those forgotten players who suffer in solitude, the ethic of a multi-billion dollar industry who buries its head in the sand, and the fight of an outlier to seek truth according to his personal morality and his religious convictions. Laskas’ article is a blue-collar testimony to great journalism. She puts the human being and the moral dilemma at the center of the story, which, I hope, moves powerful interests to act for the good of those former NFL players who are suffering and have little means to live the rest of their days in relative comfort.
(photo: “Headless” by Albert Cesario)
One Man Standing
Trent Gilliss, Online Editor
On the social matrix of the Web, one meets all types of interesting people and finds interesting stories through these happenstance relationships. Take, for instance, Sinan İpek. In a random checkup on the status of SOF videos, I found this Turkish filmmaker had commented on two SOF videos with themes of women’s rights: one about Kenyan women striving for a more verdant future and another about Diana Matar’s exploration of women and the veil in Egypt.
This documentary is too long for me to consider it a video snack, but it’s a compelling 25 minutes of narrative that grips you from a tender, darkly lit opening scene. İpek could have told the story of a paralyzed son and his mother’s love in an exotic land and made it feel foreign to this Midwestern American’s eyes. Instead I felt united in their fight for decency — as a journalist, as a father, as a compassionate bystander, as a citizen of the world, as a kid who used to throw snowballs at my neighbors never noticing the person behind the glass watching with eagerness.
Watch it over your lunch break, in the wee hours of the morning or in the still of night. You won’t regret it.
