in which we return, at long last, to the book-making assembly line…
by bam
it’s been just shy of a year since last we dropped in on the so-called word factory here at typewriting headquarters, where at the time the bare bones of a book were chugging along the bookmaker’s assembly line, where the supply chain includes alliterations, prepositional clauses, pithy twists of phrase, and occasional insights, all dropped in as the book-in-the-works rolls down the line.
inside the room where the typewriting happens, all was ablur: alphabet keys clacking away, sunlight and moonlight clocking in for their consecutive shifts as the one at the keyboard clackety-clacked, barely noticing the celestial variation as long as the screen stayed aglow.
back then, a precise 37,226 words had been tallied on the factory’s modern-day abacus, the one that spits out the word count with the click of a single key. and there’d been a hard deadline of june. but round about march, it seemed a draft had been drawn to its natural end. so off went the words (59,324) on the pages (110), in hopes of an early editorial read. a bit of a thumb to the wind, to gauge which way it was blowing. or if it was blowing at all.
not long after, all went silent.
and stayed silent. inexplicably, worryingly, for months.
but now, minus the inexplicable tale of the inexplicable months in between, there’s something akin to hope rising. there’s a title, a cover, and even an editor. and, of course, there’s a deadline (more on that in a minute). nothing in the word-factory world seems to come without deadline.
the title, fairly straightforward: The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text. the cover, still under wraps. the editor, a writer/scholar/author/professor who i think might be a certifiable genius. but even better, for a writer seeking to braid inter-religious threads: she happens to have been raised jewish, converted to orthodox judaism during her freshman year at columbia, and while studying for her master’s at cambridge in england, she converted again––to anglicanism and, in 2011, was ordained an episcopal priest. these days, she’s an associate professor at duke divinity school, and nonfiction section editor at Image, the journal that, per their website, “fosters contemporary art and writing that grapple with the mystery of being human by curating, cultivating, convening, and celebrating work that explores religious faith and faces spiritual questions.”
bottomline: the newly-appointed editor of my next adventure in bookmaking (she edited my first book too) knows her stuff, is more than fluent in dual religions (encyclopedically versed in the history, practice, and wisdoms of judaism and christianity), and should keep me from tripping into any unforeseen landmines, or swimming too far into the deep end. a good editor is just that: part-lifeguard, part-life-rope, part-landmine detector.
so, soon as said editor drops a pile of edits and queries and what-were-you-thinkings and i-don’t-get-its here on the assembly line (delivery promised for monday), i’ll be working night and day and day and night to whittle down the word count, untangle the knots, piece together the puzzles, and liberally sprinkle the whole kittencaboodle with ample heaps of fairy dust, all in the hopes of a book that won’t be a bomb.
it’s a book about seeing the sacred out in the wilds, which turns out to be the beating heart of an ancient theology, a foundational worldview that long, long ago rooted celts and jews, egyptian hermits and wandering t’ang dynasty poets. and it’s never quite been erased, even if little mention is made of it now. (its disciples would count as diverse a flock as henry david thoreau, annie dillard, mary oliver, and thomas merton, to name but a familiar few.) somewhere along history’s timeline––certainly by the middle ages––it was given a name, The Book of Nature, a text without words, a text built on an alphabet of birdsong and moonrise, raindrops and thundering skies. it arises from a belief that God first spoke through all of creation, and millennia later came a second sacred text, the Book of Scripture. the two books––one wordless, one spilling with words (783,137 in the King James Bible)––ever in conversation.
in the beginning, long before books and literacy, how better to divine wisdom, glean sacred knowledge, than to look to the heavens, the seas, and the stirrings of earth? and now, in an age when words are as likely to be cudgels or wedges, in an age of balkanizations and polarizations and endless debate over turns of a phrase or translation, it’s the wordlessness of this text––the wholly immersive sensuality and rhythms and spirals of heaven and earth, its ubiquity, dynamism, and subtlety––that i count as its genius. and its holy and silent way in.
who’s not felt the goosebumps rise on the nape of the neck when the sandhill crane trumpets across the autumn sky, or the monarchs come in like a cloud, or the lightning bolt scythes through the night? it’s as close as i come to feeling the faint hem of God brush up against me, or enfold me and hold me. there’s a divine animator always at work, always in wait, enraptured, seeking our gaze or our notice. read the great book of creation, run your fingers across its pages and lines, inhale its sights and its sounds and its scents, and you will––perhaps––know something of God, the God who longs for nothing so much as our company, for our sure and undivided attention.
while i strap on my seatbelt, buckle in for the long editing weeks ahead (all will be due by the third week in march), i’ll still post bits here on fridays, mostly a montage of bits that over the years have captured my imagination and my enchantments. it’ll be something of a potpourri till i’m back from book-making adventures. but i promise good morsels.

have you stumbled on anything sacred while out in the wilds?
under the full moon of february, snow moon, consider all this unfolding, unfurling, pushing up toward the deepening light:
“Tree sap makes the vertical climb from roots to swell buds, bucks shed their horns, ewes lamb and nannies kid, great horned owls, bobcats, minks and coyotes mate, and the first northern larks, robins, belted kingfishers, red-wing blackbirds and sand hill cranes return to this northern land I am the current steward of.“ |
Oh a hearty congratulations!!! I can’t wait to pre-order. May the editing process be saturated in love, new revelation, and joy! (I hear it is usually not this, but you never know!)
Oh dear gracious! What a kind well-wish. I’m holding my breath and taking super strength vitamins this weekend, to gear up for whatever is coming. Eeek!
You give me a preview of what comes next for me – my book manuscript being edited now…and only a phrase of encouragement, “I am appreciating what I am seeing.” That’s all I needed, so worried that what I had to say would not meet the publisher’s needs. Now, waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
Last week I drove 3 hours to the Mississippi River where the bald eagle count that week was over 1,000 at Lock & Dam 18 on the Illinois side across from Burlington, Iowa. SO many eagles fishing and in the air! Magnificent! Truly the Book of Nature and God’s delight. .
HOLY MACKEREL!!!!! 1,000+!!!!!
oh, if only editors were even a weeeeeeee bit more inclined to point out the positive. the occasional glowing remark goes a LONG way to fill in the dents on the other remarks. the ones that feel as if a pound of flesh was just gouged out.
your road trip sounds heavenly!!!
Yeeeeeeehaw!!!! I. Can’t. WAIT to have it in my hands. Keep breathing, dear heart. Gazing at the brilliantly bright moon with you in my heart. xoxoxo
gazing at that same moon, and by the commutative property, with YOU in my heart. you bring light many a night. xoxoxox
BAM, you are the perfect person to be writing about the Book that continues to teach, challenge, inspire and delight us! Blessings on this journey leading to the Vernal Equinox! xoxo
a string of hearts i send in reply. ❤ ❤ ❤
Miracles put into words, that is what I look forward to in your new book. As every morning, I watch thousands of crows fly off from their nightly suburban roost to eat in the rural cornfields, I think the Book of Nature is the best religion of all.
oh, my kindred kindred sister of the soul….xoxox
I am beyond excited that there is a new book forthcoming. I’ll be waiting with great anticipation for the day it will become a cherished member of my forever library.
I read, and reread, Slowing Time and In The Stillness of Winter when I’m in need of a quiet, comforting friend.
Thank you, Barbara. I can’t wait!!!
Beverly❤
oh, dear gracious, what a blessing this note you’ve left here at the virtual old kitchen table. i pray this one draws you into something akin to a chambered nautilus, that coil at once delicate and strong against the force of the tides……
bless you much.
It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us. ~John Ruskin ❤ Blessings to you as edits begin! xox
Perfect words. You always know them……
Xox
Was just finishing The Stillness of Winter (again) and wondering about the new pages promised. So happy for you and anxious to have the latest in my hands. Blessings as your creation is crafted.
thank you, dear dear JS.
i might need to dip into Stillness myself to remind myself why it is i won’t give up on february……xoxox
I find it all sacred, requiring only a quiet devotion- my pew is often a rock warmed by the sun. Every tree a teacher, every web as wondrous as stained glass windows, crows in black robes like the elders of the church- the quiet solitude as serene as any chapel.
I hope your book makes wonder such a want- that all reading it might fall in love, to above all- preserve it for our children. I anticipate with great appreciation to see the inform-ation the wonder gave you, that you’ll share like sap to the soul…as only you can.
There is a scripture in the trees, I have read it.
There is a heaven here and there…
from what I’ve seen and haven’t seen, from what I’ve learned and unlearned- the unseen is too far-
and the unlearning is the hardest.
Good luck, take care-
Oh beautiful one….I am absorbing every drop of your truth in silence here. Oh, you are a gift. See you in church—oh, don’t I wish. Some day I will find my way to you in Maine…..❤️❤️❤️
home now, hours later, and circling back to this blessing left here at the table. “my pew is often a rock warmed by the sun…..every tree a teacher…..” your poetry, and imagery, takes my breath away. you have always taken my breath away. i can’t read the word “thin place,” without thinking of you, picturing your barn with the slats where the light streamed in, and how you told me you went there to the hay loft to cry, to feel oh so close to Beau and to the sacred divine…..xoxo
I have the swing here…what a full circle to bring you to it. I think what it is that flows through me is the voiceless intention of wonder, thank you for listening. We all need to hear it, and to love it as surely your book will bring that notion to all eyes blessed enough to pick up truly, any of your books. There is no one like you, such a loving soul as I have ever known. Thank you for the corn-crib cathedral remembering. Peace to you and yours.
i thought i’d leave this here, in case any of you wander by hungry for some sustenance. a magnificent woman named Tallu Schuyler Quinn died in Nashville Thursday evening, after chronicling her last years living with brain cancer. her writing — breathtaking! (i’ve been following her for years) — will be published by random house in a book titled “What We Wish Were True.” she wrote fearlessly and insatiably curiously about dying and what death might be. these are her words about what might come after death….
It might be I’m a waxy leaf, rushing downstream, following the curve of the water, flipping, tumbling, somersaulting down the watershed, a delight in the water
Or a graceful and deep-throated pelican, joining its companions in a perfect V of flight, falling into formation, circling over our beloved Jekyll Island, dipping down for an early fish at the first pang of hunger
Or maybe I will be cosmic. A ball of light, a star in the night sky, obvious and out loud. Wayfinding, unapologetic, shooting
Or maybe I will be a song, golden words rolling off of someone’s tongue, a tune anyone can hum. Or maybe I will be the ear who hears it
Or a sturdy stick, hewn by nature, the height of a man, found in the forest by some hiker needing a third leg of support. Not precious but perfect
Or as some tenacious perennial herb, comfrey maybe, driving its deep taproot into the soil, devoting my energy to make a flush of new dark leaves and purple blossoms, medicine for the earth
Or maybe a wide quilt, large enough to cover a multitude, made from cotton rags and worn denim, heavy and laid over a soldier terrified of war
Or a crop of corn, an old heirloom maize that has been saved and planted for centuries by all my relations, dense nutrition for a whole community, and there is always enough
Or a box turtle, lounging on a log to get as much of that hot sun, patient to get my fill of heat, content to go slow, content with only what I need and nothing more
Or a feathery asparagus patch, spears pushing up stronger and thicker year over year, outrageous green beauty, order beneath chaos
Or maybe I will be the forest floor, sweet, damp, constantly renewing itself through death and decomposition
May we become all of this and more
—Tallu Schuyler Quinn
here’s a link to the book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/705301/what-we-wish-were-true-by-tallu-schuyler-quinn/
This touches me as I lost my precious friend M to a cancer of the brain. Cruelly though- she could not communicate for the last several months but she would send emojis (which I disliked much)- she used them in powerful ways as she could. Every so often, my phone would alert me to the wonderful wordless messages from my friend- now those silly emojis make me smile, remembering. Thank you so much, I will read more to see if my friend’s daughter might glean comfort. How can anyone be this selfless in such turmoil, to leave words that must have cost her all the layers, that last line- “….and more”. Angels surely visited her, this is what they often whisper to the wonderers- “more”. Good morning, take care.
good morning, beautiful. how lovely to find you here…..i hear the creaking of your porch swing, against the bitter cold of winter in the northernmost woods. i too have saved for years texts with very few words and more emojis from a friend whose brain cancer made every syllable she uttered a gem and a treasure. that tallu could wrote so prolifically and poetically……..angel, indeed. xoxox
as long as i left her words above, i thought i’d circle back and leave this beautiful love note to her from The Nashville Food Project, which she founded to feed the hungry in body and soul back in 2011.
someone might wander by the chair and need to know about Tallu, her heart, her undying spirit. her extraordinary goodness.
Celebrating the Life of our Founder Tallu Schuyler Quinn
A Statement from The Nashville Food Project
It is with the heaviest of hearts that we have learned about the passing of our beloved founder, Tallu Schuyler Quinn.
A Nashville native, Tallu founded The Nashville Food Project in 2011 at the age of 31. With fierce hope and an expansive vision, she shepherded the organization for a decade through an incredible evolution. What began from a modest church kitchen and a handful of volunteers delivering sandwiches to homeless camps morphed into multi-pronged, interrelated initiatives for food justice. Under Tallu’s guidance, hundreds of thousands of scratch-made, nourishing meals have been shared across the city. A robust food waste recovery program has diverted hundreds of thousands of pounds of food away from landfills to be stewarded instead for highest best use. And an agriculture program for farmers and community gardens sprang up in green spaces across the city empowering Nashvillians from a myriad of backgrounds to grow for themselves and their communities. Then in July 2020, Tallu was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. She died from the disease on February 17, 2022. Tallu was 42.
“As a very young woman, Ms. Quinn saw a desperate need in her city,” Margaret Renkl wrote in The New York Times in 2021. “Step by step, enlisting thousands of others in a shared mission, she found a vast array of ways to meet it.”
Indeed, community beats at the heart of the mission Tallu helmed at The Nashville Food Project – “bringing people together to grow, cook and share nourishing food with the goals of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in our city.” Her vision for community food security in which everyone in Nashville has access to the food they want and need, is both radical and achievable. But she’s also been known to say that the “bringing people together” aim of the mission is its most radical claim. She believed good food is more than a basic human need, it is a human right, and it can foster more than good health – it imbues a sense of belonging and purpose. She demonstrated in her life and work that community built through food can highlight our interdependence with one another and the Earth while piercing through the loneliness, isolation and feelings of scarcity so often associated with poverty.
Along with a boundless energy and open, accepting love for humanity, Tallu also embodied the values of the Food Project: hospitality, stewardship, justice, interdependence, learning and transformation. The latter she often spoke about with a “fiercest hope” that people and situations can change. An inspiring teacher, speaker, writer and leader, she could fire up a crowd to action, weed a raised bed or clean out a walk-in cooler with equal intensity. She championed and shared the joy, hope and love in difficult food justice work. But even as an uplifting visionary to all those around her, she wasn’t afraid to deliver a realistic picture too, ever empathetic and aiming to untangle the systemic problems that lead to the need for food justice work in the first place.
For example, in an August 2019 newsletter for the Food Project she does not sugar coat the struggle and “peril in America for those who are impoverished, non-white or born elsewhere,” she wrote also adding women, children and seniors to the list of most vulnerable.
But rather than fall paralyzed at a never-ending news cycle of “fires ablaze, a poisoned planet groaning beneath the weight of overpopulation, drought, displacement and centuries-old conflict and war,” she urged that “it’s radical to stay active and believing that we as individuals or small communities can make a dent of a difference.”
“I recently heard someone speak about the difference between hope and optimism,” she continued. “Optimism is a feeling, a mood. But hope is a decision, a choice. Hope is something to practice, and to be enacted. And when the invitation comes to attend to the problem before us, we can lean on what we have learned from our practice.”
Tallu believed the work of the Food Project embodied that practice – local solutions to overwhelming global issues. “When you come here I believe you will find that the tangible work of chopping vegetables and digging in the dirt to the benefit of our wider community will ease your mind, connect you to others, engage your creativity, and offer a chance to give yourself again to that most important spiritual practice – hope.”
Tallu lives on in the organization she founded, but also in her many eloquent writings. In another letter she reflected on TNFP’s approach recalling a Wendell Berry quote: “if it can’t be weighed, measured, or counted it doesn’t exist.” And while she recognized this as a necessary part of funding the work – the counting of meals, volunteers, numbers of garden plots and the weighing of produce, she challenged us to think beyond a charity mindset and the emergency food system.
“But how do we measure the other stuff? How do we talk about the connections between us as what matters most? Starting your day with a purpose. What it feels like to be a member of a community who loves you. The mindful presence required when communicating with someone who speaks a language different from your own fluent tongue. The blessings before you when a meal begins. The excitement that rises up in you when you eat delicious food. The contentment you feel when well nourished.”
She believed in community work and the importance of the harder-to-measure impacts – the meals shared together that can make our city and world a better place.
After her cancer diagnosis, Tallu continued writing on her CaringBridge website even as her vision began to fail. While she continued to touch on the issues of her life’s work, she also delved even deeper into matters of love, family, grief, the body, death. She eloquently and honestly shared her thoughts in stories that are at once humorous and heartbreaking, clinging to life while also showing us how to let go. She taught those around her with her presence to the very end. At the one-year anniversary of her diagnosis, for example, she wrote a reflection that included this ending: “I understand that whatever pain our family is facing is only the flipped side of what holds us together in love.”
Tallu’s extraordinary writing during this difficult time of her life led to her writing a book. Her memoir, “What We Wish Were True: Reflections on Nurturing Life and Facing Death,” will be published in April on Convergent Books, a division of Penguin Random House. “Life,” she wrote, “will dash and devastate, all while handing you a damn dream come true.” Of her writing, Renkl of The New York Times says this:
“She shares unvarnished accounts of the indignities of cancer, and cancer treatment, but invariably her essays are also deeply felt and beautifully rendered meditations on the gifts — yes, the gifts — of struggle. Of suffering. Of temporality itself. A spirit of generosity and flashes of wit shine through even her saddest words.
“Taken together, these essays of living a spiritually and emotionally rich life in a failing body are nothing less than a master class in how to be fully human. In recalling the events of her own life, and in plumbing those memories for meaning, Ms. Quinn prods readers to find meaning in their own struggles, to recall the too often overlooked beauty in their own lives.”
Tallu grew up in an artistic Nashville family with a songwriting father, Thom Schuyler, and artist mother, Sarah whose painting of Tallu’s brain inspired the cover of her book. Tallu attended Harpeth Hall School and later earned a B.F.A in Papermaking and Bookbinding from the Appalachian Center for Craft in Smithville, Tennessee. She loved working with her hands, its slow, focused meditative nature intersects with her quest for the divine. She received a Master’s of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University in New York, where she focused her studies on art, ritual and liberation theology. After seminary, Tallu moved to Nicaragua, where she lived and worked with poor farmers on food security projects using methods of agriculture that build communities and protect the land. But before seminary, her job in an urban grocery store in Boston opened her eyes to food injustices and food waste. Both profound experiences laid the groundwork for her vocation. After returning to Nashville, she helped run the local arm of Austin-based Mobile Loaves & Fishes. The Nashville Food Project grew out of those experiences.
Tallu is survived by her husband Robbie, and their children Lulah and Thomas Quinn. She is also survived by her parents Thom and Sarah Schuyler and brothers Roy and Luke Schuyler. She loved to cook for her family and loved ones. She loved creating, studying papermaking and bookbinding. And she loved music, specifically the Indigo Girls who she had seen live, remarkably, more than 40 times. Despite working in an incredibly difficult field, she made the time and space for these joys even as she called on us to consider our own joys and power to fight in many ways against despair.
“To be restored to wholeness, to stay hopeful that healing — whatever that means to us — is possible,” Tallu wrote. “I believe in these things. I believe in it for me, for you, and for all of humanity. And for this earth we have misused and abused…I think about how my purpose may be the same in death as it continues to be in life — surrendering to the hope that our weaknesses can be made strong, that what is broken can be made whole.”
Really unbelievable to me that there are too many on this earth who do nothing but harm to it and it’s inhabitants- and yet, they still stand aloof numbly, on the very soil she knew would protect, engage and feed the masses if she could only teach what she knew to be true, how she had to be a blessing to those who knew so little joy.
I have pre-ordered her book and will greatly humble myself to read it. To be as humble as Tallu, to serve others not only in their time of dire need, but in her own- she still did all she could to garner that hope. She DID move mountains- how many can say their life was a bulldozer? You have such a way of knowing Bam, and sharing the beauty in the awful- how blessed are we, we still have this day and anticipate many others, to choose hope.
(I’m so sorry about your precious friend, I could say- I can’t imagine. But I do- and it was and is, a loss I feel I’ll carry with me all my days. Is our playing field of life a proving ground? Do we get plucked once we find an answer that serves a higher purpose, when we make an impact so crucial that it acts like a catalyst for others? I just don’t know, but I sure wonder about it.) Bless your heart, take care.
ohhh, beautiful terry. you will swoon over Tallu’s writing, i know. and her way of seeing will feel like coming home to you, since you see through a similar powerful life-shaping lens. we can read the book together and send notes of passages that knock us off our chairs. xoxox
Yes.