michigan – Houghton STAR

On April 14 to 16, the Houghton Department of English and Writing will sponsor a trip to the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This bi-annual festival, a self-described “exploration of the communities made and served by religious writing,” has been a popular event in the faith-based writing community for over twenty-five years.

calvinfestRGB This year, professor Lori Huth will lead a cohort of Houghton faculty and students, which includes professor Linda Mills Woolsey, professor Stephen Woolsey, and professor Laurie Dashnau, as well as eight students from the English and Writing Department. This gathering provides a way for young authors to receive expert feedback regarding their work, as well as a way for faculty to hone their own composition skills while further developing their philosophy of writing instruction.

Over the years, the festival has featured such celebrated plenary speakers as Maya Angelou, Elie Wiesel, and Madeleine L’Engle. In a continuation of this tradition of excellence, this year’s featured speakers include celebrated author Zadie Smith; Lutheran pastor and faith author, Nadia Bolz-Weber; John Darnielle, the frontman of the Mountain Goats; and over seventy other professionals currently working in the writing and publishing industries.

Students expressed excitement about learning from authors they know and love, as well as being exposed to new voices. “I especially read a lot of Andrew Clements when I was younger,” shared Rachel Zimmerman ’18. “The chance to come full circle in college and see him as a speaker is really wonderful. I’m also looking forward to hearing from people I haven’t heard of before.”

“I always find it encouraging, and inspiring, and empowering,” said Woolsey, who has attended Calvin Festivals in the past. “Part of it is sheer numbers. You can see up to two thousand people who share a passion for words, for ideas, for the imagination, and everyone’s there to celebrate that.”

Aside from its impressive selection of speakers, the true heart of the festival is in smaller gatherings, where writers can receive valuable advice and encouragement from successful authors and teachers. At these sessions, writers of all experience levels can receive advice on such diverse topics as developing and adapting stories for the screen, successfully pitching their manuscript to an editor, and crafting dynamic characters. Visitors can also submit their work to a variety of fiction workshops, in which published authors and professors can provide individual feedback to aspiring writers.

In addition, the festival will feature a selection of informative sessions with industry veterans, which address the more practical and economical side of the writing business. In these sessions, attendees will learn how to communicate effectively with online audiences, gracefully deal with the realities of rejection and writer’s block, and tactfully explore some of the ethical issues surrounding literary creation.

As part of engagement efforts with the community, the festival also sponsors a number of events—such as lectures, concerts, and gallery showings—that are open to the public. This year, these events will include a reading from young adult author Andrew Clements and artist discussions with John Donnelly and Makoto Fujimura, as well as film screenings and concerts.

Gatherings like the Calvin Faith and Writing Festival are indispensable, not only for their practical service to the writing community, but also for the valuable camaraderie and support they invite between creators. “You see people making themselves vulnerable as they share their own creative struggles, triumphs, and disasters,” Woolsey shared. “So it’s definitely not just for students—it’s something for every thinking person who understands why stories and ideas matter.” He paused for a moment, smiling fondly, before adding, “There’s no other gathering I know of that’s quite like this.”

I have a friend named Art Tanderup. Talkative and friendly with the kind of laugh that exemplifies a down-home joie de vivre, Art is a normal Nebraska farmer. I met Art last April in Washington DC where we both arrived to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. I came as part of a Facebook prayer band called #PrayNoKXL. Art came because the pipeline route literally runs through his backyard.

I met another friend in DC named Greg Greycloud. Greg lives in South Dakota and is a member of the Lakota Sioux Nation. Intelligent and witty with a kind and compassionate heart, Greg leads a ministry encouraging Lakota men to embrace their roles as responsible husbands, fathers, and leaders. Greg came to DC because the pipeline route illegally crosses land that belongs by treaty to his people.

What the three of us share in common is a deep conviction that the Keystone XL pipeline is a morally and ethically wrong decision. Here’s why:

The Tar Sands. The purpose of the Keystone pipeline is to transport bitumen (a thick sludge-like mixture of sand, oil, clay, and chemicals) from Alberta to the Gulf Coast for refining and export. The highly intensive process of extracting bitumen turns once lush boreal forests into alien landscapes largely devoid of life with chemical laden tailing ponds so large they can be seen from space. This devastation is not only destroying an entire ecosystem, but has also resulted in significant health impacts to Native communities living downstream.

The Ogallala Aquifer. The Keystone pipeline runs directly over the Ogallala Aquifer—at 174,000 square miles, North America’s largest. In many places the aquifer sits just a few meters below the surface of the ground. In spite of all the modern safeguards pipelines do leak. Just last week a pipeline in Montana spilled 50,000 gallons of oil into the Yellowstone River. A leak in an Arkansas suburb spilled five times that amount in 2013, and in 2010 more than 1 million gallons of bitumen spilled into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. The Kalamazoo leak was so devastating that 5 years and $700 million later it still hasn’t been completely cleaned up. What happens when the primary water source for our nation’s breadbasket Great Plains states becomes polluted?

Native Treaties. Despite their protests, the pipeline route in South Dakota crosses over land legally granted to the Rosebud Sioux Nation by United States treaty. Sioux President, Cyril Scott went so far as to call Keystone “an act of war against our people.” With our country’s shameful treatment of Native Americans going back hundreds of years, shouldn’t it be time to stop breaking our treaties and start showing respect and honor to those whose land we have already taken away?

Eminent Domain. TransCanada, the foreign private corporation who owns the pipeline, is now using eminent domain to take away the land of ordinary Americans who don’t want the pipeline to run across their property. Shouldn’t private property rights be a concern of all Americans, and particularly for ideological conservatives? Shouldn’t my friend Art have the right to refuse 900,000 barrels a day of toxic bitumen running across his farm (his livelihood)?

Climate Change. Because of the highly energy intensive processes associated with their extraction, transportation, and refining, the tar sands have a much larger impact on the global climate system than does conventional oil. While oil continues to form an important part of our economy, it’s time to modernize our infrastructure by forgoing antiquated fossil energy and focusing on clean energy sources, such as wind and solar, that will always create domestic jobs, that are endlessly renewable, and that don’t harm God’s creation or his people.

Proponents of the pipeline spout all kinds of claims about jobs, but the reality is that it will only create 35 permanent jobs. 35 jobs in exchange for more broken Indian treaties, unethically enforced eminent domain, pipeline spills of toxic tar sludge, possible contamination of our country’s largest aquifer, environmental destruction, and a bleaker outlook for the global climate system. Keystone is not a political issue. It’s a common sense one.