Excerpt from an interview with Jiayang Fan on the Longform Podcast:
I guess what I would want to encourage in aspiring writers who have scraped up against that self-doubt as a result of a life not lived, you know, for a career in journalism, is that, please write into your self-doubt; write into that sense that perhaps you are not deserving. There’s something authentic and pure in that voice and your investigations into yourself and the world deserves to know the quality of your uncertainty and there is something very, very edifying, I think, to the world to know about the really complicated barriers between a writer’s lack of sense of self and the self that emerges on the page. And that we need you - I’m speaking directly to those writers now - we need you more than ever because you give us something that writers from traditional backgrounds, in all their certainty and grace and eloquence, cannot, which is, you know, the truest exploration of how a self becomes a self and to those writers, please continue listening to podcasts like these ones and also to believe that you have something really worthy of being heard.
Marilynne Robinson wrote in her essay collection titled The Givenness of Things:
I hope I will not seem eccentric when I say that God’s love for the world is something it is also useful to ponder. Imagine humankind acting freely within the very broad limits of its gifts, its capacity for discerning the good and just and shaping the beautiful. If God has taken pleasure in his creation, there is every reason to assume that some part of his pleasure is in your best idea, your most generous impulse, your most disciplined thinking on whatever is true, honourable, just, pure, pleasing, excellent, and worthy of praise. I am paraphrasing Paul, of course, but if you have read Cicero or The Egyptian Book of the Dead, for example, you know that pre-Christians and pagans made art and literature and philosophy excellent and worthy of praise, out of love for the thought of all these things. (…) My point is simply that, from the time the first hominid looked up at the stars and was amazed by them, a sweet savor has been rising from this earth, every part of it - a silent music worthy of God’s pleasure. What we have expressed compared with what we have found no way to express, is overwhelmingly the lesser part. Loyalties and tenderness that we are scarcely aware of might seem, from a divine perspective, the most beautiful things in creation, even in their evanescence. Such things are universally human. They forbid the distinctions “us” and “them”.