pull up a chair

before the sun rises over the steel mills of gary, indiana, tomorrow morn, i’ll be motoring toward motor city for a three day festival of words, words and more words. with a fat dash of big questions stirred in for good measure.

i’ll hit the brakes before i hit the outskirts of detroit. in fact, i’ll be stopping mid-mitten, at just about the palm of the hand, to pull into the fine burg of grand rapids. i could roll down the windows and listen for the voice of anne lamott, a faith-filled writer you might have read. but i’m actually a bit more keen on listening closely to uwem akpan, the nigerian catholic priest who penned the haunting “say you’re one of them,” five short stories of african atrocities told through the voices of children; or amy leach, a shy and brilliant essayist whose debut book, “things that are,” is a madcap collection of nature essays encouraging communion with the wild world (she’s been said to be “a descendent of lewis carroll and emily dickinson,” be still my heart — a girl after my very own chambered vessel, indeed).

a clutch of poets will be in the bunch, and i intend to be in the room when mary szybist, the author of “incarnadine,” winner of the 2013 national book award for poetry, tackles “reverence without curtsying.” or when jeanne murray walker, poet and playwright, talks memoir, or okey ndibe, the nigerian poet, novelist, journalist and political commentator,  takes on “negotiating between the visible and invisible: deities and writing.”

i’ll have notebook flapped open and pen perched (for i’m among the last of the pen-and-paper note takers) when guggenheim fellow eliza griswold, best-selling author of “the tenth parallel: dispatches from the fault line between christianity and islam” steps to the podium, or when james mcbride, author of the brilliant “the color of water: a black man’s tribute to his white mother,” and most recently, “good lord bird,” a comedy about the abolitionist john brown, which won the 2013 national book award, settles in for a thursday night’s conversation.

it’s called the “festival of faith & writing,” and who knew that such a gathering of great minds has been convening every other year on the rolling campus of calvin college — smack dab between the literati-littered coasts — since 1990. and that over the years, elie wiesel, john updike, maya angelou, salman rushdie, annie dillard, kathleen norris, and donald hall — to name but a handful — have been putting voice not to unwavering belief but the far more animated living-breathing blurred boundary between doubt and hope.

it’s that very crack in the veneer of faith, the place where shadow seeps, that birthed the festival in the first place.

“because of a long interest in writers between the cracks — writers who struggle with and deal honestly with the challenges of human experience, while writing with skill and poise and quality. these are not people who are easy believers, but that is part of what makes reading such authors worthwhile. we can learn a lot from these folks and their honest portrayals of the human experience,” says dale brown, the former calvin english professor who dreamed up the festival, one literary invitation at a time, and presided over it until he left the college to run the buechner institute in 2007.

it’s a mere 204 miles away, and it’s a landscape i’m learning, one page at a time.

if laptop and lulls allow, i’ll post dispatches from the front. fine thoughts, stirring questions, readings you might want to track down. if not, click on any of the above links and partake in a virtual festival of faith & words, all on your own.

in the meantime, what writers/thinkers/poets might you drive a couple hundred miles to encounter, page to page?