Go for it, get it right
I'm writing you from the Collegeville Institute in central Minnesota, adjacent to the campus of St. John's University. I'm here for a writing retreat with ten others who write about religion and spirituality in various genres. I'm also here with countless mosquitoes. If I stay long enough, I fear I will become more mosquito bite than man.
Collegeville is a lovely place, and the Collegeville Institute people are extremely generous and supportive hosts. We're on a lake, surrounded by woods (hence the mosquitoes), and the campus of St. John's University is itself a work of art. The other day I stumbled upon these amazing reliefs on the concrete walls of St. John's Prep, a high school adjacent to the university. My favorite was one of a Benedictine monk coaching two boys playing basketball:
In the 1950s, the monks of St. John's Abbey, who founded the university in the 1850s, commissioned the architect Marcel Breuer to design new buildings for their monastery and the university. The centerpiece was the Abbey Church, one of the most striking Bauhaus and brutalist structures anywhere, but Breuer also designed academic buildings, dorms, even the gym. He also designed the apartments and offices of the Collegeville Institute. The building where I'm staying isn't especially bold, but nearby there is a series of small wedge-shaped student apartment buildings. It looks as if Breuer cut three sides of a square into the earth, lifted it up like a flap, and the building just filled in the empty space. You can walk up the grass- and tree-covered roofs like they're tiny hills. (Actually rather steep hills by Minnesota standards.)
Regardless of what you think of brutalism (and remember, the "brut" in brutalism refers to a material, raw concrete, and not the style's alleged inhumanity), you have to admit that St. John's is doing something with its campus. It isn't just throwing up a forgettable building on the cheap. Even the newer structures that don't follow Breuer's vision are interesting. Just across the street from me is a collection of student dorms that look exactly like Monopoly hotels. They're monochrome and everything.
The natural and built setting here offers a nudge toward greater aesthetic ambition. It tells you to go for it, to take a chance. But -- and this is the tricky part -- it also tells you to put in the work to get it right. For architects, people need to live and work and learn and worship in your creation. For writers, they need to think and understand their world within it.
While I'm here, I'm working on the first draft of my burnout manuscript. It's going well. I'm putting a lot of thought into the book's overall narrative structure and my role as the reader's guide through the topic. That's not something I had to think about when I wrote my first book, which was meant for a more strictly academic audience. It's a good challenge. I ought to have a full draft -- with many gaping holes, to be filled in through more comprehensive research and reporting later -- by the end of the month.
An announcement for people in North Texas: I will be one of the featured authors at the next LitNight Dallas reading series, Tuesday, August 13, starting at 7:00 at Chocolate Secrets on Oak Lawn Avenue in Dallas. I know: you're wondering why a chocolate shop is hosting a reading. But it's actually a really good venue. There's a very nice performance space in the building, and Chocolate Secrets has a good wine list to go with the chocolate. I plan to read from an unpublished essay about trying to understand what my father's thoughts were during his final days, through thinking about a selfie he took the day before he died. As I try to discover his thoughts, I only find my own.
Among the other featured writers is Sara Hepola, author of the NYT best-selling memoir Blackout. I'm honored to be sharing a stage with her. I hope you'll come out to hear us!
You'll hear from me next on Labor Day, and after that I'll go back to the usual first and third Monday schedule for this newsletter. Please forward this to people you think will appreciate it, and encourage them to subscribe. I hope you're having an enjoyable summer, and thanks for reading!
Jon