Why Did I Write?

Brother Joshua Seidl, SSP

     I like to tell stories.
     That subtitle statement stands as a complete sentence and a complete paragraph on its own. I wrote for the love of writing, the art, to draw a picture with words, or become a video like scene before your eyes lifted from the printed page to pull you in to be an active, observant participant. I love the feedback and reaction of others who hear or read my stories. I tell true stories and fiction, and I seldom let on about the difference. That’s not to be deceitful on my part, but to entertain myself and my audience.

     Not for fame and fortune.

     I certainly did not write to make money.
     “Ah come on,” some of you might be brushing that comment off, “A typical response.”
     Oh, I can assure you it was not for money. I’m keeping my daytime job, as the saying goes. I’ll go even deeper to convince you it’s the love of writing and story telling that drove me and not money. The first novel, Hawk Dancer, just sort of grew out of a short story I wrote for an advance creative writing course and it got bigger and bigger. I shared sections with Uncle Charlie Browne. To tease me, he proofread the parts I sent, bought several red ink pens, ran out of ink. He also made encouraging, constructive suggestions and asked questions. Auntie either enjoyed having the story read to her over and again, or knew how to cater to men’s egos and told us she enjoyed it. I opt for the former reason. I had an instant audience and I wasn’t going to let go. The story got bigger.
     We both thought, “What the heck, let’s make a book.”
     None of us figured we stood much of a chance getting published, but we were having fun with the story. I decided to match up publishers with our genre of historical fiction. I worked on Pastoral Life magazine at the time and among many other skills, I did the magazine’s page layout in Page Maker 6.5, the most advanced program at the time. So, even if we didn’t get published, I could run off a few nice copies for us to enjoy and pass on to a future generation.
     Hawk Dancer took us five years to complete. The final year was spent polishing up the story, proofreading over and again, and editing the story down to its current size of 519 pages. I was in discussion with publishers that year and we went with Publish America, a print on demand (POD) publisher with the traditional value of paying us authors. Many new authors end up paying to see their book in print, or finding grants and backers for their books. I’m a monk and can’t afford that, and my religious congregation, though in the publishing business, prints theology and the likes, not fiction. If the book was to be printed, then it had to be through a regular, traditional styled publisher who would pay to get it printed and pay me royalties. Publish America’s leading role in publish on demand technology came through for us in 2004 and five plus years later, I’m still satisfied.
     Now that that I convinced you, (hopefully), that I wrote for the love of it and not for fame and fortune, let me explain my motivations to produce the Birch Clump series of books. (Series, because I have two more books in the works for a total of four that I think will round out this story and then I might move on to some other story later on.)

Why I wrote

     The original short story, found on this web site, is The Cure. It’s a tri-cultural story, Native American, Métis and Euro-American set in late December, 1957. A terminally ill Ojibwe lad of six years is the main protagonist, though more is said of his Euro-American adoptive parents the Vanwestderdykes and their estranged Potawatomi neighbors, Job and Hazel. In many aspects it is a modern Northern Great Lakes telling of the Guadaloupian Las Tres Culturas event of 1534 down in Mexico and a theological dissertation on Pauline inculturation disguised as a short story and later as two novels.
     In other words, it’s a fairly modern American Civil Rights story, driven, dynamic and capturing, pigeonholed in the publishing world as historical fiction. I wrote the stories because I like playing the part of a crusading monk; and the results of professionally administered personality tests agree with my own self assessment. I guess that makes me normal, but not afraid to let my wacky side show.
     Don Quixote lives! (At least he’s alive in those who told me they love my novels.) He’s Anishinabe Ojibwe/Northwest Euro-American, standing somewhere between 5’ 2” and 6’ 4”, blond or dark hair and handsome piercing eyes (well sometimes glazed over eyes when he wonders off into space while you’re trying to talk to him).
     My professor said he could see the short story becoming a Christmas holiday convention. Well, although the story of The Cure proved to be a tradition in many households, not enough homes picked up on this so that I could afford to quit my daytime job to start my own congregation of religious friars to treat social biases and spiritual ailments. Such endeavors await the calling of the Spirit.

Focus of these novels

Most people know the tragic history of the usurping of these lands from the Indigenous Nations. Hawk Dancer sought a new avenue of cooperation between the cultures in these modern times, one of inculturation that might in some small degree rectify our unchangeable past. These books propose the promotion of indigenous cultures within our general society and markedly so within the Churches here in the USA and Canada. Inculturation is the opposite of acculturation, enculturation and of assimilation policy or theories.
     Inculturation is a word coined by a Belgian missionologist in the 1920’s. The concept, though not given a particular name, exists in the Gospels, the Letters of St. Paul of Tarsus and is honed in his missionary life. Saints Cyril and Methodius are credited with inculturation or the promotion of local culture in their missionary works in the Slavic countries translating the Good Message, creating the Cyrillic alphabet and incorporating the Gospel Life and the Slavic culture in a mutual cooperative. Inculturation in opposition to acculturation or assimilation is evident in the message of Guadalupe.
     The respect of American Indigenous cultures, languages and people were not, for the greater part, a consideration of early and late missionary activity in these lands. Hawk Dancer (and its overlapping follow up companion novel, Cloudburst) dynamically demonstrates in positive measures how this can be corrected and in some circumstances is being amended. Jacob White, the protagonist who opens Hawk Dancer, is the founder of a Native American religious order of Friars: The Franciscan Congregation of St. James, better known as CSJ or the Congregation of St. James.
     Fiction, for me, is used like smooth sanded gesso on a wood board in preparation to write an icon. It’s the base the iconographer needs to write out the great mysteries in picture form, to portray the lives of the saints, their messages and for us to see and read the history of the Church. Another history writer described using fiction as knitting needles to make and embellish a new garment.
     Hawk Dancer drew from what other people have told me, from what I have witnessed of their lives as well as from my own experiences. At the same time, these novels are not a biography of any particular person. For example: A Native American college classmate of mine bumped into a long lost and unknown sibling quite by chance. They were illegally separated shortly after birth and adopted out of their tribe. Another friend told me of his close call with death from a long illness as a child. He shared some of the dreams, visions and mystical visitors he received during periods of what the doctors called delirium. Those two situations involving three different people leading independent lives, along with other stories from dozens of sources were molded into a single character in the novels.
     This weaving of experiences shared by others and some of my own experiences, witnessing and interpretations is used in creating all my characters. Some place names are real, some fictional. Menominee and Escanaba are real towns in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The village of Birch Clump is purely fictional even though its location fits neatly over another real life zoned community half way in between Menominee and Escanaba along Highway M-35. Flashes of other existing small communities in northern Michigan and Wisconsin formed the fictional village centralized in these novels. Birch Clump is to the novels as Lake Woebegone is to Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion.
     The veneer of a small country setting in the pristine forest along the shores of Green Bay as it narrows towards Lake Michigan flavors the village as the perfect place to raise children, even children kidnapped from the hospital. Birch Clump is by no means an idyllic place of blissful serenity as some readers who emailed me for directions to the village might have thought. The introduction to the village is wrought with the greed of lumber barons and iron ore smelters and the depression they left in its wake once the region was stripped of marketable resources.
     Birch Clump recuperated from the injuries sustained by the barons to become the sleepy country setting many of us dream of. It’s a peaceful place far removed from the dangers and smog of the big cities. It’s also a perfect setting for some of society’s social deviates to hide out in. It is a neighborhood where people come together and help one another out. It is a place where everyone knows each other; maybe knows each other too much at times, or thinks they do. Author and readers might be tempted to escape to a place like the Village of Birch Clump. The sad reality of moving to escape the city or a bad neighborhood is to discover how much of the problems we attributed to others originate within our own households.
     I love Birch Clump. At times I wish I grew up there and dream of retiring there. Yet I know the dreams are not unlike the infamous “White Flight” from America’s inner cities during the 1960’s. Alcoholism, drug addiction, dysfunctional kids and families blamed another race of people who moved into the neighborhood for their problems. They sold their dream houses at sacrifice prices, moved to the suburbs, but things only got worse. The problems were not from strangers who moved into the old neighborhood they fled, but from within themselves. The beloved Schuller-Fern family found in the novels can attest to this. They fled Germany for Birch Clump, Michigan. They fled Birch Clump for various larger cities. They fled the metropolitan centers for Birch Clump. They were about to flee Birch Clump when Karen Schuller-Fern swore she would run no more and began to look within for the source of and the answers to their problems.
     The Macias and Vanwestderdyke families are core examples of inculturation and the need for conciliation and a mutual embrace between local culture and Churches. The word conciliation is used more often than reconciliation. The latter assumes a mutual point of good will to return to. Conciliation stresses that a point of ‘mutual’ good will has yet to be established between the cultures, societies and the Churches. In fact, the word reconciliation is used only once in Hawk Dancer, but not in reference to inculturation. The term conciliation is not used at all in the first novel, in part because it does not exist on a national scale between Churches and the First Nations. I acknowledge there are isolated areas that have established a near mutual rapport. For that reason, the terms conciliation and reconciliation are used in Cloudburst.
     The two families just mentioned come to a point of spiritual despair in their lives. They question if God has abandoned them and they hesitantly go in search of their indigenous faith roots for a cure. They are angry with God at the time, but they also fear the consequences of abandoning the western Church traditions they were raised in as they seek out Indigenous faith healers.
     Petty arguments of whether God can be called Father or Grandfather are presented at this time. The question or suggestion of whether or not those who follow the indigenous faith traditions are pagan is boldly treated in Hawk Dancer and revisited in Cloudburst. The question of whether or not a person or family raised in the European Church tradition can return to or incorporate their Indigenous faith traditions or prayer form is acted out in the novels. [Note: The second novel was presented for publication prior to the issue of a “return” to indigenous faith tradition being raised in Brazil by Pope Benedict XVI. Therefore, the arguments I used were in no way influenced by that May 13, 2007th occasion.]
     I thought of the Lakota Elder Black Elk who was a prolific faith healer well before and following his conversion to Christianity. Healing took place when he knew only his Lakota faith traditions. Healings took place through him even after his baptism into Christianity. God, by whatever language and teaching tradition, was present in Black Elk’s healings without specific regard to what religious tradition(s) he incorporated at the time.
     The same thoughts are in place with the short story, The Cure, as it developed into two novels. Man-made traditions and rituals enabled the characters to pray. They worried if the ethnic or the indigenous form would be accepted; but God was and is and will always be perfectly immanent and transcendent in all matters of our lives and of faith, creation and of what is seen and unseen.
     The novels’ Native American Friars of the Congregation of St. James (and the lay people and handful of non-indigenous clerics who provide the encouragement and moral support for the experiment into inculturation) is my vehicle to demonstrate the practicality and very real possibilities to advance indigenous cultures within the Churches. Institutional racism, biases and assumptions are challenged, struggled with and many social obstacles are overcome in the novels, and to a certain extent in real life, though the journey is by no means over.

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