Memory, Faith, and Becoming with Martha Park (Episode 15)
Charlotte Donlon talks to Martha Park about her reading and writing life, her new book— World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After —, and the themes of memory, faith, and becoming.
Learn more about Martha Park and her writing and work here.
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Why It Matters: What draws me to Martha Park’s work is her willingness to dwell in uncertainty, to ask questions without rushing to answers, and to honor the complexity of her own story and the stories of others.
We don’t have to resolve every tension to find meaning. We can embrace mystery as we become more of our full selves.
>>> Navigating faith and doubt can often feel like standing at the edge of something too vast and unknowable.
>>> Giving our attention to family, spiritual inheritance, and the body’s wisdom remind us that becoming whole sometimes means learning to live with ambiguity.
>>> Sometimes it helps to acknowledge the pull between certainty and wonder as we long to find connection to ourselves, others, our places, and the divine.
After Listening to This Episode, You’ll Walk Away With:
More energy to embrace your own questions.
Willingness to see uncertainty as a space for growth.
Encouragement to recognize that memory—however fragmented or elusive—can still be an anchor.
Please check out this third mini-season and subscribe on your favorite platform. I’d also appreciate it if you could take a minute to rate the podcast and leave a comment to help others find it. Thanks so much for your support!
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As you listen to this episode, I invite you to reflect on your own memories, both personal and collective. Consider how faith and doubt have shaped your path and how the stories you carry have formed you.
Where do you see glimpses of those who came before you?
How might embracing uncertainty open new doors for growth and connection?
What does it mean to become more of your full self, your whole self, not in spite of memory, faith and doubt, but because of them?
This mini-season is an invitation to lean into the fullness of your human experience, to honor the complexity of your history, and to find more belonging as you continue to become more of who you are through your own memories, faith, and doubt.
About Martha Park:
Martha Park is the author of World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After, an illustrated collection of essays exploring the intersections of faith, motherhood, and the climate crisis across the South.
A writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee, Martha received an MFA from the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University. She has received fellowships and support from the Religion & Environment Story Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry, where she was a Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence.
Her collaborative illustrated journalism won an EPPY Award for Best use of Data/Infographics and was a finalist for the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Insight Award for Visual Journalism. Martha’s writing, graphic essays, and illustrations have appeared in Orion, Oxford American, The Guardian, Guernica, The Bitter Southerner, Granta, Ecotone, ProPublica, and elsewhere. She writes a newsletter, irregularly.
Learn more at marthaparkwrites.com.
Episode Transcript:
Charlotte Donlon:
Welcome to All of This & More. I'm delighted to introduce my conversation with Martha Park, writer, illustrator, and author of World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After.
Martha's work invites us into the generative space where memory, faith, and doubt coexist, and where the stories we carry help us make sense of who we are.
In this episode, we explore how Martha's relationship with her family and her experiences of motherhood have shaped her understanding of faith and uncertainty. Martha speaks candidly about the ways memory, sometimes--elusive, sometimes vivid-- can be both a comfort and a challenge, especially when grappling with trauma, loss, and the mysteries of belief.
We discussed the role of narrative in forming identity, the freedom found in embracing uncertainty, and the ways both faith and doubt can be sources of growth and self knowledge. Martha's reflections on collective memory, ancestral stories, and the complexities of spiritual life invite us to dwell in the questions while honoring the unresolved and recognizing that becoming whole often means living with paradox.
Thank you for joining us for this honest and thought-provoking conversation about memory, faith, doubt, and the ongoing work of becoming our full selves. You can learn more about this episode and Martha's writing and work at allofthisandmore.com.
Charlotte Donlon:
Welcome to all of this and more. I'm Charlotte Donlon and I'm so excited to be talking to Martha Park about her new book, World Without End. Martha, for those who aren't familiar with you and your work, can you provide a brief bio?
Martha Park:
Yeah, so I am a writer and illustrator based in Memphis, Tennessee, and my first book is titled World Without End Essays on Apocalypse and After. It's a collection of essays and illustrations that was published by Hub City in May of this year.
Charlotte Donlon:
Before we dive into some questions about your book, which is beautiful by the way, I'd love to hear a bit about your writing and reading life and some of the ways that you find belonging for your creative life and beyond. So my first question is, how do writing and reading help you belong to yourself, others, and the world?
Martha Park:
It's a great question. I think as far as belonging to myself, I definitely feel my most centered and present when I have a writing and reading practice. And as far as belonging to others, I think quite literally, I spend a lot of time reading to son, which I'm really enjoying. He's getting into chapter books and I like that it's my first experience with these longer books of us kind of inhabiting a world together through a book. And I'm just obsessed with it. And I think belonging to the world, I spend a lot of time, I have two small kids, I work from home and I spend a lot of time alone. And a lot of my mental engagement with the world right now is through reading and absorbing other people's stories. And so in a lot of ways reading feels like a kind of just lifeline into a larger world outside of the world of small child parenting I'm in right now.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yes, I totally get that. And since you're a visual artist too, can you also tell us a bit about how making art, making your illustrations helps you belong? How that piece fits in? I
Martha Park:
Think that I've always made art, and as soon as I got pregnant with my son, I got rid of all my art materials and bought an iPad. I was like, I'm not going to fight this. I'm going to make this easy for myself. And I think writing requires a lot more time to allow associations to build and accrue and to have the quiet to discern what I'm actually trying to do. And with illustration, I love that I can just pop out my iPad and draw at any time. It can be in the dark. I don't have to make a mess. And it just allows me to keep that thread of create creativity and also just a creative engagement with life and with the world in a way that's a little bit less demanding of my time and presence than writing can be for me. Okay.
Charlotte Donlon:
Okay. And what art did you make before you did illustrations on your iPad?
Martha Park:
Yeah, so previously I have done, my background from college is in printmaking and fine art and then around 2015 maybe, I started doing more graphic essays and comics still on paper. And then I gradually was learning how to do that more digitally, but I was still kind of drawing images on paper, scanning them a lot of times, adding the text digitally, but it would be handwritten. And so it was kind of like once I knew I was going to be having a kid, I was like, I just need to learn how to do all of this digitally rather than needing to scan and put things together. And that's just been a long process and it is nice to just kind of integrate all of those parts into one place for now at least. I think eventually I've been kind having dreams lately of having a studio where I can paint or doing more stuff on paper and feeling like a real energy in that direction. But that's kind of a pipe dream at this point in my life just logistically.
Charlotte Donlon:
Okay. I was going to ask if you miss it or if you have plans to return and when you say you've been dreaming about it, like daydreams or literal dreams while you're sleeping?
Martha Park:
Both. Yeah, both. I think it was like my son took my studio when that became the nursery, so it's like physically I don't have the space for it, but I'm feeling very itchy to be back in that creative space one day.
Charlotte Donlon:
Thank you for sharing some of those details. I feel like I could talk just about that for an hour, but we'll move on to the next question. So beyond belonging and being connected to yourself and others and to larger stories, how has your writing and other creative work formed you personally over the years? Is there something that comes to mind when I ask that question specifically?
Martha Park:
Yeah, I mean think, so this book is a lot about my relationship with my dad. He's a retired United Methodist preacher, and that's really where the book starts is through our relationship and kind of specifically our writing relationship. When I was little and we'd get into fights, I'd write him letters and slip them under my door and he would always write me back. And as a kid growing up, he would incorporate me in his sermons a lot of the time. And I really felt that that showed this kind of respect for me. I think a lot of people think that that would feel bad, but to me it was like the stories were never embarrassing. And I think he liked to kind of mess with me, but to me that taught me that we had a shared space in writing that was safe for us.
And so writing the book was, I felt like my way of almost teasing him back. I can incorporate you and my work too. And I think this book specifically allowed me to start in my childhood perspective of faith in my dad and write my way to an adult relationship with both of those things and really allowed me to pack a decade of life experience into a container that really was that transition for me. And I don't know how that transition would've gone for me otherwise. I know I hear writers all the time say, writing is how I process things, and I feel the same way if I haven't been able to sit down and write my way through something, it feels pretty unresolved. And so I think it's a gift to have that tool to be able to work your way toward something being more resolved that might feel more troubling or anxiety producing without that space.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yeah, and I do love that your dad's a pastor and you have a relatively healthy relationship with your parents and the church and your faith and your doubt, I would say, and it is interesting to see how the book, and we may talk more about this later, but how the book structure does, it starts with you and your dad and then it ends with you as a mother. And I'm just going to want to ask this question, even though we're still talking about your reading and writing life with the structure of the book and the fact that it's a collection of essays, were you aware that the essays you were writing might be in a collection one day? Can you speak to that a bit? Because they fit together really well and the arc and structure and everything is lovely. So can you tell us a bit about how that part unfolded?
Martha Park:
Yeah, thank you for saying that. I think I've been really glad to travel around and talk to people and hear that the book works the way I'd hoped, which is that the essays, I really have a hard time articulating this and I think it's something that doesn't bother anybody but me. I think this is just a personal problem, but I didn't want the book to be an essay collection. I wanted it to be a book of essays. And there's a difference for me mentally that I think is not a real thing, but it was like I want it to be a book structured in essays that led from one to the next and created a journey. And I don't like the way an essay collection can imply that it's like I'm just gathering up material and putting it together. And I don't know why essay collections are some of my favorite books, but that wasn't what I felt like I was writing.
And I also knew I wasn't writing a memoir, I just write essays, I write essays, I read essays, I love essays. And the way essays work for me in the writing of them is also that usually as I'm writing one, I'm collecting a little side document of all the stories I didn't get to all the questions that this essay is leading me to that I know aren't going to get incorporated in that one, but they'll lead me to the next one. So because there is this kind of associative progression from one essay to the next for me in the writing, that's how I want it to feel in the reading as well. And I think because they felt a little free floaty previously, it was the process of pulling them together and doing the illustrations and kind of the long lead time it takes to create a book. It was really reassuring to me to see the way that they did all kind of hang together in the way I was hoping they would and kind of have that journey. I've been writing these essays for seven years, the first one I wrote 10 years ago. And so it's just a long time. And you're hoping that as you pull them all together, they'll work the way you want them to.
Charlotte Donlon:
I mean, they work brilliantly and I think mean maybe the rewriting you did where I think in the note in the back you said some of them have been published elsewhere, but in different forms. So was it through that rewriting process and revision process and pulling them together once they were in the order that helped them sort of be parts of a bigger hole in a more cohesive
Martha Park:
Way? I think that the rewriting was interesting. It was kind of like I had space that I didn't have in the publications the first time. And so there were just things that I wish I'd done a little bit differently or spent more time on, but then I was able to see, okay, you've addressed this question here, and so it is then echoed in this essay later. And so how do we make sure those are moving and not just kind of reiterating if the question is starting here, how do we build on it and the next one? And I think just being able to see those threads and how they continued over the whole book kind of allowed me to make sure there was this forward movement. So I felt like each essay kind of had a pair, and so it was like one essay was speaking to another and they all had a partner essay.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yeah, I definitely get that vibe. And when I reread it a second time, I could see even more sort of the complexities that you were working with in ways that are super interesting and noticed more the flow, and not only chronologically for you in your life, but life and death in general, the progression of different things in general, not just your life. And thank you for your thoughts on an essay collection versus a book of essays. It makes sense to me, and it's definitely not an essay collection where each essay just sort of stands alone and does its thing. This is way more than that. And I mean maybe a memoir and essays. I think you're right. I don't even think that is the correct genre or whatever because you're writing about so much more than your life, but there is a good amount of you in it, and I love the parts of you that are in it. So again, we could just nerd out on that for a while. But I will ask another question. So especially as a mom of two young children, how old are your kids now?
Martha Park:
My daughter is turning one tomorrow and my son will be five in September.
Charlotte Donlon:
Okay. Well, happy birthday to your daughter. What aspects of the writing and creative life deplete you and what aspects nourish you, especially right now in this season of life?
Martha Park:
I think right now I'm finding the fragmented nature of time is not really conducive to some of the things I'm trying to start new right now. I think getting enough momentum to be sure that you're working on the right project is a hard part to get to when your time is very fragmented. I've been trying to work on something for a couple of years, but really since January trying to really get it going. And this is just not, especially in the summer, it's not going to happen. And I don't know if I actually find that depleting. I think I find fighting that depleting, and if I can just accept it and roll with it, it's better for me and for everyone, even if it means the writing doesn't get done right now. And I think what was the second part of that nourish? And what was the other one?
Charlotte Donlon:
Yeah, what nourishes you and what depletes you?
Martha Park:
Yeah, depletes you. Nourishes you. Okay. So nourish. I think probably what is nourishing me in this season is to allow myself to make whatever small starts and small steps toward a project I can and to not feel bad that they're small. And I feel very grateful for the mental space I'm in after a book coming out and having the most intense part. I think Colin was very worried I'd have some kind of dramatic ego death and spiral into depression. And I just feel so happy that this book exists and I don't feel any kind of next project pressure. But I do feel like I am in summer and summer camp kit schedules are a thing, and that's just kind of grounding me in real life and that what is the most nourishing thing for me right now is just to allow myself to live the life I have and to make the art I can make and to not put too much pressure on what that should look like.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yeah, I love that. And something I say often is that all of life is the writing life. So I would tell you if you were a client or just in this conversation, summer is part of life, and while you aren't getting to write as much as you prefer, everything is still forming you to be who you will be when you do have the time to write more of what you want to write. And it sounds like you're already sort of embracing that idea with, what did you say it would be depleting to fight it. So accepting that this is where you're at for now. And I mean, I'll be honest, my kids are 22 and 20. I didn't like summers in general. I didn't start writing until I was in my thirties, but I never liked summers because there's not much structure. There's all this stuff, they're home more. I love them, but it's like the energy is different. So summers were always very hard for me, and part of what I'm trying to learn now is how to embrace summer and enjoy the good things of summer without thinking it's terrible.
Martha Park:
Yeah. Well, it's physically brutal in the south as well.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yes, there's that too. And I think people in the south especially, they drive more aggressively. It's just more intense in the summer because
Martha Park:
Everyone's so, yeah, I think hot by September everyone's a little insane and exhausted and it's just a hard time. And so I think I've tried to, I think of summer now as kind of my hibernation period instead of winter, and it's like this is kind of the gestating, seeing what ideas come up, not necessarily actually bringing things to life and finishing them season for me.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting how instead of things like growing and clearing out the weeds and playing your writerly garden has a different season structure than the natural world, which is a good thing to know. Okay, so let's go ahead and start talking more about World Without End. I'd love for you to share a bit about how the book came to be, and I mean, if you've been writing it for seven years, there's a lot you could share, just anything you choose to share.
Martha Park:
Yeah. So the first essay in the book is from my thesis in my MFA program at Hollands, which I graduated in 2015, so it's been around a while. And I always knew that that essay was going to be an introduction to whatever was going to come after it. It just felt like it introduced me and my dad and our relationship with each other and with Faith and that it was kind of the intro. And it wasn't until 2020 that I kind of figured out what the book shape was going to look like. I had tried to write it as more of a memoir about going to my dad's church for his last year as a pastor. And I'm just not a memoirist. I don't have that much to say about myself until I'm kind of in conversation or in community with other people. And so in 2020 when I was pregnant with my son, I wrote a couple stories for the Bitter Southerner.
One was about the arc encounter and the other one was about this rare tree in Florida, which is so funny. That was such an isolated and isolating period. But it was when I really started writing reported essays and seeing how much other people's stories allowed me to have more expansive questions and also have more insights about my own experience than if I was just writing about myself. And so since 2020, I had been incorporating reported essays and journalism into the book. Then I think the last piece in the book is the last one I wrote, and it's about giving birth to my son. And we had a very traumatic birth experience that kind of altered my perspective on faith, and also it takes the book on a journey of being very in my brain to in my body. And so it felt like the right ending for the book. And I think I wrote that in 20 22, 20 23. So then the last couple years have been just kind of editing it and pulling it all together, but that was the shape is just kind of moving from a personal story to a more outward looking story and then trying to integrate that all together.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yes, and again, I mean I said this before, but the different movements you do throughout the book are just really lovely and
Martha Park:
Thank you.
Charlotte Donlon:
If I was still in school, I would try to write an essay about it or something. I might still do that one day. So what did you discover about yourself, your faith, your doubt, mystery that you weren't necessarily sure of before you started writing these essays or while you were putting them all together for the book?
Martha Park:
Yeah, I think writing them in particular, I really did set out on my dad's last year as a minister thinking because that's where the book started for me. I thought it was just going to be more about that year that I was attending church, and I kind of thought that was going to take me to someplace decisive, and I didn't know it until I wrote this book, but I've always been really comfortable with uncertainty and really uncomfortable with certainty. And I kind of thought that writing and attending church for that year would allow me to find a kind of certainty that I was comfortable with a kind of confidence about where I landed with faith. And I think writing, it actually just revealed to me how it's not only being really comfortable with uncertainty, that it's like my actual mode of being and that there wasn't going to be the kind of certainty I thought I might find, and that my feelings about faith, my relationship with faith might never be more resolved than they are right now, and then that's an okay place to land and that I feel good about that.
I think I thought I was going to have a different result. I thought, well, the versions of certainty I've seen just didn't seem right to me. They weren't like mine and I didn't find them myself. And I think there's just actually not a version of certainty that I'm ever going to find that is going to feel right to me. And one of my friends read the book and wrote me a really lovely email talking about uncertainty as a really deeply generative place. And I think that I really do feel life kind of snuff out when there's a little whiff of certainty about something. And I guess I saw that as sort of a weakness or a lack of mental clarity or rigor, and I wanted to make sure I was being as rigorous as possible about discerning what I actually believed. And I just don't feel that way about uncertainty anymore. I feel really good about it.
Charlotte Donlon:
That's so interesting to me. I don't like certainty mainly because I think it's all a sham. So when I see people comfortable with uncertainty and nuance and gray spaces, to me that's a picture of faith and
A deep sort of soulful existence. So I'm glad that you landed with uncertainty instead of certainty. It sounds judgy for me to say that, and I'm sure some things you can be certain about some things, but I'm with you, right? When you think you're certain about something, it can all be shuffled and turned upside down. Yeah. Well, and thanks for sharing those thoughts, and I can see you in the book trying to find that certainty and then not finding it and then being like what comes to mind is the conversation with the pastor when he asks you if you go to church, and that's sort of what came to mind when you were describing your uncertainty. That's the essay called Natural Ends, right? Yeah. Can you share your thoughts on where the intersection of memory, faith, doubt, and mystery is evident in this book? And when I sent you these questions, I told you that the essays that stand out to me from that perspective are Arkansas Prophecy, natural Ends and Wound Care. Of course, it's probably woven throughout all. Maybe those were the ones where I felt the most connection. And I'm interested in hearing you talk about any of those essays from this perspective.
Martha Park:
Yeah, I think those three essays in particular are interesting to think about alongside each other because Natural Ends is doing the thing I kind of came to later in the book maybe, which is really trying to investigate different forms of Christianity, and especially thinking about the influence that conservative white, evangelical Christianity has had on the landscape at large, and thinking about these kinds of theological and cultural divisions and where there might be surprising areas of overlap or where we could talk about these without it being pit one side against each other or just a conflict narrative. And then wound care is very much about my personal experience, giving birth and about doubt and faith through that experience. And then Arkansas Prophecy is a real outlier kind of essay. It's one that I had in the drawer that my editor added to the book that I hadn't seen as part of the book, and I'm so glad she did.
It's a really weird little vignette about going with my mom and my Aunt Lynn to visit my great Aunt Connie in Arkansas. And Connie was having a lot of memory loss issues and living in a nursing home. And I had seen Connie a lot over the years and had not seen her in that state as she was getting older in that essay. There's just a lot of funny conversations that my mom and Lynn are having while driving about faith. And as we're eating lunch with my great Aunt Connie, she starts telling this story about her father being abusive to her and her sister. And her sister is my mom and Lynn's mom who has passed away, and she's telling this story about remembering him beating up their mom and how one time he had had a heart attack and my grandmother, Juanita was running to get help, and that the whole way she ran, she was praying that he would die and that she had never forgiven herself for that.
I had never heard that story, and I don't think anyone would've told it to me if it was not someone experiencing profound memory loss and disorientation. I think as I was writing that I thought this could be really troubling to someone that she's kind of betraying these family secrets or telling stories that maybe she wouldn't even in a different version of herself, wouldn't even want to tell. But I found it just really moving the way that her minds kind of disintegration allowed her to bring these stories out that had been hidden for so long. And I think also in the book, there's a lot about my dad and church and obviously as a male family member kind of being a conduit to faith for me. And it was really important to me to bring in the impact my mom has had on my faith experience. And I think that was just a very matrilineal kind of story about family memory and abuse and healing and just about a different strain of faith that I'm not getting everything just from my dad, that there's this whole other part of my family and how it impacts me as well.
I hope that's addressing your question. But I think in that one, it was like there was kind of a strain of conversation between my mom and Aunt Lynn felt very representative of faith versus doubt and the way that memory kind of carried forth, like an ancestral relationship to God, praying that your abusive father would die was just really moving to me. And I think really also spoke to the character of the women in my family that are part of this relationship for me between me and God as well.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yeah, I'm so glad that Catherine included that essay.
I think it is an integral part of the entire book, and not having it there would make me sad, I think. And with wound care, there's so much happening with your own memory of the birth and body memory and then how that experience showed you things about God. And you say that you're not a memoirist, but I mean that essay is, I would say pretty much pure memoir and it's excellent, and I would love to see more memoir from you and when you ever want to write some. Do you have any other thoughts on when care specifically and memory and faith?
Martha Park:
Yeah, I think probably the inverse of Arkansas Prophecy in some way. That essay is so much about memory and kind of memory being loosened even as she's struggling with day-to-day memory, her long-term memories of these traumatic experiences are kind of just coming out at lunch, just unbidden in the middle of everything. And in wound care, I kind of start the essay where I'm trying to piece together a birth story that I read a lot about birth stories. I had a doula going into birth, and we did a lot of work preparing, kind of setting a narrative for what we envision birth might be to kind of hope it would guide us. And then I emerged from my birth experience to create a narrative out of it just seemed laughable. I was like, I don't even know what that means, what that would look like. And I had these black holes in my memory of the C-section that I had, and I got a new doctor afterward who requested the hospital records and was the one that let me know that my doctor had given me ketamine without me knowing.
And so she was the one who told me, you are not going to get those memories back. That's just gone. And it was such a gift. I had been struggling and struggling to try and create this narrative and it just wasn't going to happen. And I think that it taught me a few things. I was trying to redeem a story that wasn't going to be redeemed. That experience was not going to be made into a story. It was never going to be a story that helped anybody. And I think for me, as someone who's spent years writing this book and trying to piece together kind of a narrative about faith, it allowed me to wash some of those expectations away for that project as well and say, well, here are all the pieces I've got, and it's brought me to this place which is just one of many places, and that it's not necessarily a neat narrative arc in the way some people might expect or hope for either.
It also just, it allowed me to be comfortable with that idea of no ultimate arrival, that I'm in the place I'm in right now, and that's not the end of the story. It's not mapped on a specific narrative arc, but it's enough for me right now. And so that experience of just thinking about narratives, narrative structures, the pitfalls of narratives really applied to my healing after that birth experience and into just trying to articulate the effect it had on my experience of faith, but also the effect of the whole project of trying to write a book about hoping I'd land somewhere and not really landing there.
Charlotte Donlon:
It feels very freeing. Did you experience that as moving toward more freedom with all of this and less pressure?
Martha Park:
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, just kind of releasing myself from my own expectations for where I would hopefully end up. I think I just found it exhausting when I thought there was an answer to be found or a certainty to be found. It seemed very exhausting to be always questioning things, but when I released that expectation, then the questions just are life-giving and exciting and are the actual arrival I was hoping for. It just wasn't where I thought it might be.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yeah. Thank you. I want to hear a couple of excerpts from the book using some prompts I gave you, but before we do that, I have one more question about your understanding of the James River and Rivers in general. I'm just interested in that image and how it's transformed over the last five years for you since your son was born.
Martha Park:
So our son is named James River and we named him after the James in Virginia, which was a river that just kind of changed my life and my relationship with the natural world. And we left Virginia and moved to Memphis, which is on the Mississippi River, which is a totally different experience. And I think the James appears to me a lot in my kind of relationship with the natural world here and how much I miss that experience of being able to really access water there and live in water there in a different way. I really miss that and I think I was really glad I was able to bring the James River in into that last essay. It's interesting because the project I've been trying to write for a couple years now here is about the Mississippi River and growing up with these family stories about it flooding the stories of floods and the fact that for the past few years it's shrunk down through drought towards measuring negative 11 feet and kind of how the natural world and rivers specifically for me illustrate the way that the stories we inherit from our families of a place radically don't align with the places we're living in now and how that illustrates the changes that the world is going through is the climate crisis.
And I've returned to this kind of ancestral homeland where none of the stories I've inherited from my family aligned with the place we're actually living in now and that that's just a very uncertain, we're in the middle of that story and don't know where it's going to go. I think rivers, they often seem like that kind of, there's a reason we call 'em bodies of water. I think we just have a very deep human relationship with bodies of water and that with rivers particularly they allow me to understand my life in the world in different ways that I'm really grateful for.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yeah, thank you. I love that you're going to be writing more about rivers hopefully in the coming months and years. So I'd love for you to read 200 words or so from the book that represent at least in part the mind body and soul space you're inhabiting right now. Not that it would be a complete picture of anything, but just a glimpse.
Martha Park:
Yeah, it was interesting that you mentioned this because I think a lot of times I feel like I'm in such a different place right now than I was when I wrote wound care, but I'm currently going figuring out some autoimmune stuff that I've been dealing with. It always kind of changes and takes new forms and you have to reevaluate everything, and I get really sick of that kind of pattern. And so wound care is still kind of speaking to me. So I don't know if this is 200 words. I'm just going to read what I've got here in the body and pain, the making and unmaking of the world. Elaine Scar describes pain's, resistance to language, which she argues is not simply one of pain's, incidental or accidental attributes, but is essential to what it is. As hard as it is to describe your own pain, it's perhaps even harder to really hear the story of another person's pain to feel it with them unless you've been through something similar, scary rights that another person's pain can neither be denied or confirmed. Leading pain to be cited in philosophical discourse as an example of both conviction and skepticism to have pain is to have certainty. She writes to hear of pain is to have doubt. When I try to describe the experience of pain of being utterly transformed by birth, I'm aware that I may be speaking to or may be heard only by those who have experienced a similar pain who know through experience what language fails to apprehend.
Charlotte Donlon:
I mean, it feels like a prayer to me for you to read those words, especially with where you're at right now with it. So thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you. I'm going to let it sit without elaborating on what you just read so that we can hear another passage. Can you read 200 words or so or however many words from the book that you wish people who love you would read and reread regularly?
Martha Park:
Yes. Again, this may be too long, but this is what I've got. So this is a little section from a road trip I went on with my friend Nathan. Nathan, who was a seminarian who'd left his conservative Southern Baptist upbringing behind When he came out, he'd landed in the United Methodist Church just in time to see it slow, painful split over the full inclusion of L-G-B-T-Q members. Nathan and I had recently gone on an absurd road trip for work, driving four hours to a fundraising luncheon and four hours back on his birthday in the pouring rain. We talked as usual about faith and theology, and I wrote down something he said that day and thought about it. Often these texts don't have any inherent meaning outside of the meaning that we as a community decide to give them. This sentence shrugged off by Nathan as he drove, has stayed with me returning to my mind.
Often I had never consciously thought of scriptural interpretation as a decision made within the context of community as a prism through which we could discern a community's choices about what or who was important to them. No matter whether you believe the Bible is the literal word of God handed down from on high or a collection of texts formed and revised over centuries, the Bible doesn't tell you how to read it, what meaning to take from it. It's too contradictory, too fickle, too strange to pretend otherwise, any interpretation is a choice that says far more about the person or community doing the interpreting than it does about the text itself.
Hope that works for the prompt.
Charlotte Donlon:
No, that's great. And especially right now, I wish people who love me would read that too. Same. It is interesting to think about how the theological claims we make are decisions made in community and how we can change those. We can be members of other communities or our communities can decide something new, make new choices. So right now it's pretty rough out there in the world. And this was a question I wanted to ask earlier on, but I like asking it right now, especially after that passage from your book. How are you nourishing yourself? What other forms of art, books, movies, TV shows, music are helping you inhabit this world that's so difficult right now?
Martha Park:
I have found a lot of people, it seems my attention span is really struggling lately, and I've been trying to absorb fewer things. I found that I got into a habit of anytime I was doing anything, I'd feel like I wanted to listen to a podcast or something. And I don't know where that, it just seemed like my mind got uncomfortable just being quiet or felt like I should somehow maximize doing the dishes by also learning about something. I don't know, it just seemed really weird. I didn't know where that was coming from. So I've tried to actively stop doing that, stop multitasking. And I've also been reading things that work with my attention span right now so that I'm not fighting it. So I've been reading a lot more poetry and comic books, like graphic books. And then my husband and I have been obsessed with this TV show that's called Portrait Artists of the Year, and it's just British people painting portraits and there's something about just watching people see something in the world and then place their interpretation of it, and then everyone just talks about how it's nice that I really appreciate it.
I think especially with how much AI is rising to the surface and it's relationship to human creativity, it's just been very nourishing to just watch people paint.
Charlotte Donlon:
That sounds lovely, and I think I might have to start watching that show tonight.
Martha Park:
I recommend it. Yeah.
Charlotte Donlon:
Great. Is there anything else you'd like to say about the book or your work before we finish up?
Martha Park:
I would say I've really enjoyed hearing from people who have read it, and I'm not on all of the social media platforms, but I love Instagram. I'm on Instagram at @marthaepark and I would love to talk to people who read it or have thoughts they want to send me. I'm open to any and all conversations about just faith and family and the environment and all of it. I'm into it.
Charlotte Donlon:
Wonderful. What a gracious invitation
Martha Park:
And thank you so much. I've had a lot of long conversations lately with random neighbors about their spiritual upbringings and people are always so apologetic about it and I'm like, I'm here for it. Let's do it.
Charlotte Donlon:
Well, thanks so much for taking the time to have this conversation. I really love your writing and it's an honor to be able to talk to you about it.
Martha Park:
Thank you so much. This has been so fun. Thanks, Charlotte. I.