Take heart and keep writing

I came across the loveliest quote today that I want to share with all my writer friends who are toiling away over manuscripts, many of them in some form of lock-down. Ironies abound there, but we’ll set them aside.

This quote comes courtesy of the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. It’s a comment from the great storyteller Katherine Paterson. I love its humility and its profound truthfulness.

I know my gift is limited. I know I cannot stand toe-to-toe with philosophers or theologians and solve for myself or anyone else the problem of evil, either natural or moral. But we who are writers can tell a story or write a poem, and where rational argument will always fail, somehow, miraculously, in metaphor and simile and image and simple narrative, there is both healing and illumination.

Take heart, friends. Keep writing to and for each other. It’s a great thing we do, even if it doesn’t always seem so.

— Karen