I Interviewed Myself

And I was not easy on me

Have you seen those in/out lists everyone is sharing? They started around the new year, but I’ve seen a few folks make them for the beginning of months as well. Mine for April would look something like this:

In:
Assuming the best
More protein at breakfast
Functional medicine
Rainbows & prisms & disco balls
Out:
Cloudy days
Calling the Bible, ‘the word”
Books other people loved that I hated
Forgetting to water my plants

When I was thinking about how I wanted to share about The Understory, I made my own in/out list too:

In:
Share what feels natural
Tune out the inner critic/skeptic
Enjoy the process
Talk about it as much as I want
Out:
10,000 podcast interviews
10,000 guest posts
Talking about it as much as I think I’m supposed to
Forgetting to water my plants

I recently saw

Ruth Allen

share an interview with herself about her new book Weathering (which looks gorgeous and right up my alley and I’m going to request it from my library as soon as it’s available), and I chuckled. This is exactly the type of thing that feels enjoyable to me because I love asking questions and I also love talking to myself. I talk to myself more than I talk to anyone (my friends and husband agree that this is true). I’d much rather talk to myself than about myself.

Whenever I finish doing a podcast interview with someone who actually read my book and put together a list of thoughtful questions themselves, I feel so, so appreciative. It’s no secret I’m a fan of genuine curiosity about the other and I think it is so full of care when a host does so. So without further ado, here are the questions I’d want answers to about the book.

1. In the description, it says the book is about “religious and political unrest in the evangelical church.” Is this yet another book about how all Republicans are hypocrites and a tired story of faith deconstruction?

I’m so glad you asked this because the early feedback is in and some people do not like their books with a side of politics. Here’s the honest, honest truth: this is not a book about my politics or my faith. It’s a book about how I took a good hard look at my politics and my faith, and had to be willing to let what was dead truly die. I don’t talk about Trump or abortion or voting or the insurrection as much as I talk about what I learned about myself in my reactions to certain things. I was more interested in why I reacted in certain ways or why others reacted in certain ways to certain things in our current cultural climate than I was in the issues themselves.

I never want to tell anyone what to believe or how to vote, but I wanted to explore why we believe the things we believe or vote the way we vote, like, what’s the story beneath the story of our revulsion or acceptance of certain things? Often times we make choices about things in our lives in reaction to something else, instead of in total support of the thing itself. The Understory explores the stories of my own reactions, inactions, grief, and resilience.

2. So wait. Is it a book about the forest then?

It is! I look to the natural world to help make sense of my own spiritual and political landscapes. And even more than that, I try to flip the normal Christian script of “Look up! Look how good everything is!” to “Look down, look at how much death is involved in any bit of life.”

So much of my disillusionment over the past several years has been because of what I perceive as power dynamics, this belief or posture of “manifest destiny” that I see many Christians having. We take the mandate to “subdue the earth and take dominion over it” as if that is about control and leadership and “ground won,” when really it’s about cultivating and fruitfulness. It’s a farming metaphor, not a war metaphor. And while both farming and war both have their fair bit of death involved, only farming is intent on the life that comes after the death. We’re not out to kill, steal, and destroy anything that gets in our way. We’re out to create environments where what is dead or dying can become regenerative and help cultivate new life. We’re glorified composters. Or, well, actually, we’re glorified compost itself. As Professor Keating in Dead Poet’s Society says, “We’re worm food, lads.”

3. But wait, you believe we’re just worm food? Aren’t you a Christian?

Yes! I mean, it’s the most amazing thing that we can be Christians and also not deny science. N. T. Wright says, “We’re just dust, but God can do new things with dust.” I’m looking around the landscape of the church and our politics and all of it, and I’m like, “It’s all dust, it’s disintegrating.” And God is like, “Yes, and I have always been in the work of making new things from dust.”

4. What gives you the right to write about ecology and theology?

Ooof, that’s kind of rude. A friend told me once there are two kinds of writers (there are probably more, but for the sake of clarity, I’m just quoting what she said): Experts who teach you everything they know or explorers who bring you along with them as they learn.

I am an explorer, always have been. I read close to a hundred books as I wrote The Understory and spent plenty of time in the woods too, but I’m not Robin Wall Kimmerer or Peter Wohlleben. I am not an expert teaching you what I know. I am learning as I go and inviting you into the story with me. If you’ve read The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating or In the Shelter from

Pádraig Ó Tuama

, those books are more along the lines of what I was doing. It’s more memoir than it is spiritual formation, more exploration than education.

5. Did the book turn out like you imagined it would? Is it the book you thought you would write?

Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that is about the natural world—space, time, land, the forest floor, weeds and wildness—but no in the sense that I wanted it to be more than it turned out to be. I have a pretty detailed outline structure I use for my books and this one was no different, but because in many ways I was living the book in real time (grief, competing truths, death, regeneration, etc.), I couldn’t predict exactly where it was going. It felt both very structured and in a sense completely lacking structure.

I think another thing that didn’t turn out like I envisioned was I thought it would be more about the actual understory of the forest (the bushes, shrubs and plants below the tree canopy), and it turned out to be more about, as I said, space, time, land, rotting logs, fungi, soil, forest litter—like almost the ancillary parts of the forest (although, if you ask any ecologist worth their weight, they would tell you there’s nothing ancillary about those elements at all, in fact, leaves and trees and plants are the sexy parts, but it’s the decaying stuff where the real magic happens).

6. The subtitle of the book is “An invitation to rootedness and resilience from the forest floor.” I haven’t heard you talk about rootedness or resilience once in this interview. Are you a liar?

No! I mean, I hope not =) You can read the process of how we came to that subtitle here, but you should know that, as I said in that post, “As much as writing may be an art, publishing is a business and we authors have got to choose our battles.” We authors don’t always get our first, second, third, or even fourth choice of a subtitle. The publisher needs to sell books, so they’re going to pick a title or subtitle that will feel as universal as possible in order to do that. My preferred subtitle was “Field notes on grief from the forest floor,” which would have encapsulated the book precisely, but perhaps not have had as much selling power.

The truth is, a lot of book publishing is a gamble. We have a good idea but maybe it’s not still a good idea in two years when it finally hits the shelves. We design a cover, pitch a title and subtitle, but maybe no one cares about that stuff when the book finally gets published. We hope it will hit a moment in time and culture, but we also want it to have staying power, to be just as helpful or good in a decade. So it’s like, well, it’s like the parable of the sower. We’re scattering seeds and hoping for a harvest. Some of the seeds fall on good soil and some fall on rocky soil. We can’t always tell which soil is the good stuff from the seed-throwing vantage point. E.B. White wrote that “writing is an act of faith,” and I would say actually, most of our vocations are acts of faith, but that’s certainly true of a subtitle.

Ultimately the book doesn’t talk a lot about rootedness or resilience. What it does talk a lot about is being here, right here, right now, wherever here is, which is a form of rootedness, even if it’s not the kind of rootedness we think about with centuries old trees. And it is definitely about resilience, but not resilience in the sense that the old things stand forever and ever, but more that a regenerative world is one in which there is constant loss, death, disintegration, and then new life. That is actually what resilience is, not holding onto the past, but asking what new thing God is making of dust.

7. Are there any questions you think I should ask or that seem important before you go?

Well, that’s just an odd question since you are me and I am you. But maybe you should ask what my hope for this book is?

8. Okay. What is your hope for this book?

Great question, I couldn’t have thought of a better one myself. I hope that The Understory will be a quiet companion to the many out there who are not loudly exiting stage left of faith or politics or whatever, but who are quietly grieving the mounting losses of the things they thought would stand forever.

A friend said to me (and I’ve quoted him so many times I should pay him royalties at this point), “All along I thought my faith was in Jesus, but it was really in institutions and people, and while they’re all crumbling, I’m having to wake up to that reality.” It was a me too moment for sure when he said that, and I can confidently say, on this side of that grief, it’s Jesus, Jesus, Jesus for me all the way. I hope I will never put my faith in an institution or person again, not because they will disappoint me, but because it wreaks havoc on our world when we orient ourselves around earthly things like that. Earthy things fall apart. Earthy things crumble. Earthy things die. That’s just the nature of being earthly. And that isn’t bad and we shouldn’t be surprised and, in fact, I think we should celebrate. Because a dead thing is not so far from becoming another living thing that’s better than the dead thing ever was or could be. So yeah, I hope readers hold some funerals in their hearts while they read The Understory, and, when the time is right, they can walk away from the grave.

The Understory is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold. Preorders help me a lot as an author but they make no difference to you, so you do you, boo.

Here’s what some uber kind people who actually read the book have texted me about it while they read:

“Lore, this book is so f-ing good. Can I say that? You can put that on an Instagram graphic if you want: "This book is so f-ing good" —

Chris Yokel

“Lore. Your book is stunning.” —

Emily P. Freeman

“I just wanted to say I have felt a holy hush over my soul as I’ve read your words.” —Aundi Kolber

Those aren’t the official endorsements but they’re the ones that actually matter the most to me =)

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