This essay appears in Issue 28 of The Mockingbird magazine, now available to order.
Jeanne Murray Walker fell in love with words at a young age, and it changed the course of her life. Although raised in what she describes as a “fortress” of fundamentalism, it was, she writes, “through sustained attention to the imaginative language of metaphor and symbol, allusion and ambiguity… [that I eventually] came to inhabit a wider and more vibrant sense of the world — and of God as its creator and redeemer.”
In the 60 years since Walker won Atlantic Monthly competitions for both fiction and poetry as a college student at Wheaton, she has continued to explore the power of words in a remarkably wide variety of forms and genres. Best known for her faith-infused poetry — of which she’s published nine volumes, including Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking (2019) and her retrospective collection Helping the Morning (2014) — Walker’s gemlike words offer fresh angles on faith. Take this excerpt, from her 1989 poem “Birth,” which puts us in the mind of a mother welcoming her newborn:
… In one minute,
a new order, a new earth, transforming
old orthodoxies, transfiguring the room.
In the end, we are faithfulto what cannot be avoided.
Light breaks from your new knees
and shoulders. Light peals
like an unbearable, high bell.
“We are faithful / to what cannot be avoided.” Such sentiments suffuse Walker’s other works: award-winning plays, short stories, essays, and two memoirs, her latest being Leaping from the Burning Train: A Poet’s Journey of Faith (2023). Along the way, Walker has been a dedicated and beloved college educator, notably at the University of Delaware, where she taught for 40 years and where, as well as at her alma mater Wheaton, her papers and letters are archived.
Through it all, Walker’s ongoing explorations of the written word, which she considers quasi-sacramental, have kept her ever grounded on a kind of shared religious pilgrimage, one in which she and her readers, “venture together toward hope, toward the reversal of death: resurrection.”
— Ben Self, interviewer
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Mockingbird: Jeanne, thank you so much for chatting with me. As I was preparing for this conversation, I had so much fun reading your poetry. I found it both accessible and profound. You don’t have to be a poet or an academic to enjoy it, and I just love it.
Jeanne Murray Walker: Well, I’m very glad to hear that because, after all, the point of writing is to be read.
M: Much of your recent memoir, Leaping from the Burning Train, deals with your upbringing among Christian fundamentalists and its reverberations through the rest of your life. In the prologue, you write that “over the decades I became increasingly aware — with a shock of recognition — that certain strains of American Protestantism bore similarities to other fundamentalist movements around the world.” How would you define a fundamentalist?
JMW: What a good question. I think of fundamentalism as quite literal, and some parts are wonderful. I mean, I memorized chapters of the King James Bible when I was a child, and that aspect of fundamentalism has served me well. When I went to graduate school, I knew the Bible backwards and forwards. I knew the 66 names of the books of the Bible in order and could recite them.
I remember a quiz game that we played as teenagers. Everybody had a Bible, and the guy in charge would be calling off verses — you know, Hezekiah 4:10 — and the person who could find it first would stand up and read it. There were teams, so you either won or lost. I don’t think there were any prizes, but we were just really, really interested. I think that’s part of the reason I ended up going to graduate school for English literature and reading old texts. It was a very text-oriented form of Christianity.
M: Right, at least oriented toward Biblical texts. Not necessarily other texts.
JMW: Yeah, but once you start reading the King James Bible, you have a key to unlock a lot of other texts. I did my PhD in the English Renaissance, so all the language I was reading by John Donne and George Herbert and various other writers was written in the same King James English. For me it was a wonderful way of translating over to texts that were also often religious, but were not biblical.
M: We live in a time when, as one of your reviewers put it, “dark, Dickensian memoirs about growing up in fundamentalism abound.” Yet, even as you address problematic aspects of your upbringing, you have quite a few positive things to say about it. So what were some of the most positive aspects of growing up in that community?
Hope Olson, Dandelion Wine, 2021. Acrylic on panel, 24 x 24 in.
JMW: Well, I think we took care of each other. We all saw each other once a week on Sundays, but there was also a core community within the bigger community that met for prayer meetings on Wednesdays and lots of other occasions. So we saw each other several times a week. And it was one of those situations where all the adults parented all the children. If you were doing something that your parents wouldn’t like, the other parents would come along and say, “Hey, maybe you don’t want to do that.”
One thing that has also often been overlooked is the singing, just the joy of singing together. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a choral group, but because they sang every week, they were pretty good, and they sang all the different parts. And when you’re doing that with something as simple as hymns — like “This Is My Father’s World” — it’s really thrilling.
Then there’s the food. We went to a Baptist church, and they had potluck dinners at the drop of the hat. Each family had the dish that they usually brought. And so you really looked forward to Mrs. Dubicki’s baked beans or whatever it was. And if you eat together, that’s a form of communion.
So there were a lot of aspects of that fundamentalist culture that drew us together and kept us together. I used to have sleepovers with the kids from my Christian school — you would go over to their house and they would have prayer before dinner, just like you did at home. It was a real community.
M: A lot of people don’t have that kind of community nowadays, even people who go to church.
JMW: I think that’s right. I belong to an Episcopal church at the moment, and we do different things than I did as a child. Every so often, we partner with a local organization to take in people off the street and feed them for a week, letting them sleep in the church at night, while they do job training during the day and the kids get established back in school. That kind of thing also draws the church members together. Community still has to do with things like eating and sleeping, and so, you know, it reaches into the common areas of our lives. It’s not just something we do on Sundays.
M: I’m interested in what causes people to be drawn to fundamentalism. In the memoir, you write,
My fundamentalist parents were always driven by anxiety about change. … [My mother] was a teenager during the Depression when her parents lost a good bit of their farmland. In 1933, she taught twenty-two kids in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Minnesota for $60 a month. My father, during the war, dropped out of college. After they married, they wanted something they could count on at any cost, something that would not change. No wonder they joined the fundamentalist movement.
Elsewhere you add that things like gambling or card playing became symbols “of the kind of financial and moral risk my fundamentalist parents abhorred.” I thought that was a really compassionate insight. Does this imply that fundamentalism has a greater allure in times of unrest?
JMW: That makes sense to me. What I was trying to do in that passage was explain why my parents, and especially my mother, needed to hang on. My father died when I was 13, so I didn’t really get to know him as an adult. In some ways, my mother did have a flexible personality. She could get along with pretty much anybody and had millions of friends. She had a wonderfully capable personality in terms of being outgoing in the world. Many people just adored her. But she also hung on tightly to her worldview.
Then again, she did not really understand metaphor. She was very literal and practical. She lived pretty much there, present in the moment. She wasn’t a philosopher. She was a nurse, the kind of person who, if she happened to be out and someone needed help, would jump into action. I remember, we were in a department store once — back when there were department stores — and somebody was having a seizure. Suddenly she became a big authority and took on the responsibility to help this man. She cleared the area. She always carried tongue depressors with her in her purse, so she stuck a tongue depressor between the guy’s teeth so he couldn’t bite his tongue and took care of him until a doctor came. So she was flexible in some ways, and excellent in a crisis, you know? As a teenager, that was enough to make me honor her. I understood that I had a very fortunate family.
M: I love how you describe your parents as aspiring to be “immutable as rocks.” On the one hand, they did evolve. But when it came to the “fundamentals” of their beliefs, they were just not going to change their minds.
JMW: That’s absolutely right. And my mother had a little trouble with that as the years went on, because later in life — about 10 years after my father died — she ended up marrying somebody who was not famously religious. It came about because all her friends wanted to match her up. She lived another 20 years with Jim. He was an oil man in Dallas, and he’d been out there with all these rough, spirited, Southern guys. He smoked cigars. Well, my mother had thrown all of her own cigarettes and cards and things like that into the furnace when she became a fundamentalist! She tolerated some of that from Jim because she loved him, but it wasn’t easy.
M: I loved the chapter about how your parents founded Lincoln Christian School. It was a tiny private school in Nebraska, but you make it sound heroic. That’s where you first learned to “subvert authority” — not, presumably, the lesson that was intended.
JMW: No. Haha.
M: You write, “I more-or-less invented my own education.” Tell me about that.
Spot illustration by Ruthy Kim
JMW: My father started the school from scratch in a church basement. He didn’t know anything about education. They didn’t have supplies or real curricula. They tried to hire teachers who could sign a statement of faith and also take on four grades at once. They mostly taught reading and math. But we had a lot of freedom. We could pursue basically whatever aroused our interest. I remember I got in my head once that we should study Indian tribes, and the teacher said, “Okay. Take your book and do some research.” I ended up making a plaster of paris igloo for one of the tribes. That’s how it went. If you got interested in something, the teacher would say, “Go do it.”
M: I’m sure that approach served you well later. Although I imagine you struggled when you had to enter public schools in the 8th grade.
JMW: Yeah. As I look back, those 8th graders in Lincoln, Nebraska, were pretty tame. But I had been made very aware by the fundamentalists that it was “us” and “them.” You needed to be on your guard to make sure they didn’t wreck your faith. But I didn’t have any trouble making friends. I had a very close relationship, which I still have, with somebody in my grade who’s now on the West Coast. I see her every couple of years.
M: Was she a fundamentalist?
JMW: No, she was a Lutheran. We actually tried to get her saved! There used to be these revivals in big stadiums, like football stadiums full of fundamentalists and other people they had dragged along. She would go to those meetings with me, but I don’t think it changed much.
M: You eventually started to break out of the chrysalis of Christian fundamentalism that had been spun for you. You write: At age 16, “I saw for the first time that I was living inside a fortress. … I had to choose whether to stay in the fortress or to leave. About three years later, I left.” And yet, there’s nothing inevitable about leaving fundamentalist Christianity. Many people stay. So what made you leave?
JMW: I think it’s important to say I never lost my faith. You know, I’m a pretty devout Episcopalian now. And it doesn’t have to be Episcopalian — it’s just very important to me to worship; I feel like I’m a creature, I was created, and there’s a purpose for my life. And that supersedes any denomination. You find people who have that in common with you, and then you worship with them.
M: Right, but what drove you away from fundamentalism?
JMW: Probably the literalism of it. You know, my work is to write. And I primarily have written poetry, which is about metaphor. So I think the literalism of the fundamentalists is at heart why I couldn’t stay.
I can still worship with those people. When I used to go back to Dallas to visit my mother when she was still alive, I would certainly go to church with her. I bear no acrimony towards them. It’s just easier for me to understand and worship in an Episcopal setting, or even a Catholic setting, really.
M: In the book, you write about having this terrible feeling as a teenager that you were losing your faith because suddenly a particular image you had of the Second Coming didn’t make sense to you anymore. At the time, you couldn’t see that doubting that image didn’t mean you were losing your faith. Later you discovered the famous example in psychology of the “rabbit/duck sketch … If you look at it one way, it’s a rabbit. If you blink and look at it another way, it’s a duck.” And that illustration helped you realize that there are different ways to read the same scripture, sometimes at the same time, on a kind of spectrum between the literal and the more allegorical.
That discussion really resonated with me, but it was also challenging. To me it seems like certain passages of scripture — the creation story, the flood narrative, the Book of the Revelation — are pretty clearly meant to be read allegorically. They’re not supposed to be factually accurate depictions of events. But many parts of scripture are meant to be read primarily as factually accurate depictions of events, like the Gospels. So there’s a tension there, right? Do you feel the need to classify certain things as a duck and others as a rabbit?
JMW: No, I don’t think so. Reading scripture is so interesting. Episcopalians always have prescribed texts for every Sunday — an Old Testament passage, the New Testament epistle, and the Gospel passage, right? There’s a three-year rotation in the readings, and by doing that, you find that the texts come alive in different ways at different times. So the process of reading the scripture is in some ways like the process of reading any great work. It means different things at different times. I think Shakespeare is like that. The plays can mean different things at different times. That’s the mystery of language, don’t you think?
M: Yeah, but there’s definitely a portion of the people in mainline denominations — say, the Episcopal Church — who don’t feel the need to stake any real truth claims. Like, with the resurrection, they might say it’s just a metaphor for spring and rebirth, and it doesn’t matter whether it actually happened. And to me, it does matter.
JMW: Oh, it does matter to me, too. Absolutely. I think for me the resurrection is the linchpin.
M: You mentioned Shakespeare. I know you taught Shakespeare at the university level for many years. Do you have a favorite play? I’m just curious.
JMW: I am very partial to his later plays. He wrote the comedies first and they’re a lot of fun. Then the tragedies, they’re a little hard to deal with. But the late romances are just great, and they don’t very often get performed unless you go to a Shakespeare festival, or somewhere where they try to do all the plays.
M: You mean like Measure for Measure or The Winter’s Tale?
JMW: Exactly. Particularly The Winter’s Tale. That may be my favorite Shakespeare play because the woman who dies comes back to life. And it cannot be done just by reading. You have to do that play on the stage. It’s like a miracle every time I see it.
M: One of the things I like most about your memoir is that it’s both a story of deconstruction and reconstruction in your faith. As you write, the book is
about returning home — or, to put it a different way, about the journey I had to travel in order to preserve the heart of the faith we all clung to so fiercely in my childhood. … I can truly say [to quote T. S. Eliot] that in writing this book the end of my “exploring” has been to arrive where I started “and know the place for the first time.”
What do you think led you back to that point?
JMW: I never gave up gathering with people who worship, and I think that has been a really fundamental part of my journey. You know, it’s pretty easy to just give up church — on Sunday morning, you sleep in, mob around in your pajamas, you have a late breakfast, you just relax. Not me. I really need to have church. I’m lucky enough to have a priest now who is young but very smart, and when he speaks on Sunday morning, I listen, because it’s thought provoking and important to me. Church has always been for me like a guide rope.
It has to be the right place, but you just go, and you say, “I don’t know who you are, God, but I worship you.” I think it’s really important to not believe you’re your own creator. There is this mystery about the world and about life and about yourself that you’re constantly trying to understand and it leaves a big space for God. I never abandoned that. There’s a great deal of mystery involved in life and death and friendship and language and everything else. And I’m not in charge of it!
M: In a recent interview with Slant, you said, “Poetry chose me.” You make poetry sound like a religious vocation. Has God been searching you out through the medium of poetry? Do you attribute your lifelong love affair with language to the workings of the Holy Spirit?
JMW: Yes, I do. I also think the Holy Spirit is tricky and uses all kinds of different methods on different people, depending on what they’re going to respond to. I knew early on I loved the written word — I was probably five years old or something like that, and I learned how to read in about 10 minutes. I was sitting with a book by myself, and I took the book to my mother, and I said, “Look, I can read!” And she was doing something in the kitchen, stirring something or whatever. She didn’t even look down at me, like, it’s not important. And I’m going, Wait a minute! The whole world has changed! So the Holy Spirit figures out what each person needs.
M: As I’ve mentioned, I love your poetry. Sometimes there are points in your poems where the phrases seem almost perfect. They’re like little gems. This is going to sound silly, but it feels like the words were almost ordained, right? Do you mind if I read just a few of my favorite lines from your poems?
JMW: Oh, do.
M: From “Leaves Leaving”: “They outdo each other / drawing secret metals / from the earth / to turn magenta, crimson, / orchid, sun-bather cinnamon. / They wrap the brown grass like a present.”
From “Poem for the Missing Beauty Operator”: “In a village where the streets were so tiny / and shagged off to the wilderness on every side, / we girls and women bent our heads to suffer / for refinement, bobby pins stuck in / like little crucifixes right over perfect wheels of hair.”
From “After Terrorism”: “Maybe the John Deere of history / has to drag catastrophe into our library with an 18-gauge chain / before we finally stand up and say, Well, what have we got here?”
I could go on… I wonder, do you ever feel like the words choose you? Is writing poetry all labor and effort and persistence, or are there times when the words just drop out of the sky into your lap?
JMW: Yeah, if you work hard enough. By working I mean reading a lot of good stuff, thinking a lot about the language, and doing some kinds of exercises, the kind I used to teach my students to do. Like exercises that have to do with sound, so you can make sounds in a line that sound like music. Or that teach you to think about stops — places where language stops and there is silence.
M: The last chapter in your memoir is perhaps its most beautiful, but it’s also heavy, because it’s about your mother’s Alzheimer’s. I know you wrote an earlier memoir entirely about that subject about a decade ago. But your last paragraph has just stayed with me. You write:
My mother never lost her faith, and I suspect she did not find her slide into Alzheimer’s as distressing as I did. Faith is the conviction that this world is not tragic but comic. Maybe it gives a person the ability to see whatever joy and beauty and wit flickers in the disorienting darkness. Or maybe it is the result of noticing those flickers. I don’t know. And how can we know for sure that the flickers are clues to how the story will end? We can’t know for sure. Nevertheless, most mornings I wake up believing that we are perennials not annuals — a feeling that itself is a gift. Surely what dies will spring back to life. I suspect it was my mother who taught me that faith.
I love that.
JMW: Thank you.
M: I have to ask, from all the experience you had dealing with that really challenging disease as a daughter and caregiver, what is some advice you might give to someone trying to care for a loved one who has dementia?
JMW: That’s a hard question. I think it depends on who it is and what their relationship to you is. It’s probably easier to deal with a parent who has Alzheimer’s than it would be to deal with a husband or a wife. Because as a spouse, you have to live with it every day, whereas in my case I didn’t live with it every day, although we called my mother every day to make sure she heard our voices. My husband was fantastic about that. He loved her too, so I wasn’t the only one.
As far as what helps, I would say I learned to just answer my mother straightforwardly based on whatever weird things she said — to talk back, in other words, and not to try to correct her. I think that’s the most important thing about caring for someone with that disease. For a while, as loved ones, I think we don’t fully grasp that this condition is not going to change. But once you understand that, then I think, wherever they are or whatever they’re doing, you have to participate in it.
M: Which is a kind of grace.
JMW: Yeah, but it’s not so easy, because you’re stuck standing in the rain somewhere, and she’s off in Africa.
M: One of your best-known poems is “Staying Power,” which has been published in numerous anthologies. At the end of the poem you write,
Say God’s not fire, say anything, say God’s
a phone, maybe. You know you didn’t order a phone,
but there it is. It rings. You don’t know who it could be.You don’t want to talk, so you pull out
the plug. It rings. You smash it with a hammer
till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbery
metal bits. It rings again. You pick it upand a voice you love whispers hello.
As you age, how has God continued to whisper to you through that “telephone” that won’t stop ringing?
JMW: Well, when I was little I heard about this still, small voice. I thought there was really a voice. But in my experience, it’s more like a presence that appears over and above and around whatever situation you’re in and it aims you towards the truth. But it’s hard to talk about. I’m not really sure I have language for it, except in that poem, for example.
It’s funny, everywhere I go I see that poem. The irony of it is, I wrote that poem in about 20 minutes. For 40 years, I’ve had a writing workshop with another poet. Usually they take place on Friday, and she contributes a poem, and I contribute one, and we comment on one another’s work. So I wrote that poem after I got home from school one day, just before I went to see my friend Deb for our workshop. Now, I was probably working on that poem at some deeper level for months, but I wrote it very quickly. It just came to me.
