Confessions of an Amateur Believer: An Interview with Patty Kirk (Part One)

Check out Part Two of this interview. You can read the first chapter of Patty Kirk’s new book here. Visit her online at www.amateurbeliever.com

Patty Kirk grew up in suburbs of Orange County, California and in rural Connecticut. She earned degrees from Tulane University and an MFA from the University of Arkansas. As a teenager, she drifted away from the Catholicism of her youth. She came back to her faith more than a decade later. In between, she lived abroad for ten years, studying languages and teaching English in Europe and the Far East; she met and married her husband, a Christian; she started cattle farming and then, when the price of cattle dropped, she taught seventh through twelfth graders at the local public school. Kirk now lives in Oklahoma with her husband and two daughters. She is Writer in Residence and an associate professor of English at nearby John Brown University. Confessions of an Amateur Believer, which came out earlier this year, is her first book. It is poignant and funny, one of the best spiritual memoirs I have read in some time.

Early in the book Kirk describes a quilt she once saw. The quilt was enormous, a mosaic of rags, stitched together to create a larger image that was nearly impossible to identify from close up. But when the quilt was hoisted into the air, the image turned out to be the face of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. Kirk wrote:

The face became clear to us as the quilt inched upward. We backed up to see it better. It was amazing how real looking the assembled rags became, how the yellow fabric and torn edges and threads became skin and anguish. I heard the people around me wondering over it, murmuring my thoughts: “How did she know how to do it? Could she see the whole picture as she pieced the individual scraps? She must have worked from a sketch - don’t you think? - and just filled in between the lines with different hues, like a giganctic paint by numbers.”

In some ways this book reminds me of that quilt. It’s comprised of thirty-three starkly honest meditations on Kirk’s spiritual journey. The chapters work as stand alone essays, but the essays are pieced together to form a larger image. I talked to Kirk on the phone last week and asked if this structure was a conscious choice.

Well, yes and no. The book is a product of a whole bunch of essays that I wrote without ever having a book in mind…In fact, I have a pile of essays from that same period - probably twice as big as the essays in the book - that I didn’t include: all my spiritual struggles, all my questioning, and other things from my life…

I liked the stand alone qualities of the chapters…They seemed to come complete to me when I was writing them, and I wanted to honor that element. And so what I ended up doing was being really, really, really careful about the order I put them in - thinking alot about stages of my spiritual development. (Though I feel like I went through these stages, and came back out of them, and that I keep on going in and out of these stages. The struggle hasn’t ended. I haven’t found rest and now I’m all “fixed” as a Christian.) Still, my goal was to give a sense of overall progression.

I like the idea of separating out this one image of the quilt because - as you were saying it, as you were reading it - I was thinking, before you even got to the point, that that is how the book works. And I never noticed that before.

That’s how the quilt worked, too. I mean, here were all these pieces of clothes that were made to be something else but were their own things, and the artist then pulled all of them together. So they were pulled out of their context and yet they still had vestiges of that context. These threads and seams that used to attach them to some part that doesn’t even exist anymore. I like that as an image of how the book came together, because, in a way, it did, even if it wasn’t by intention or by design.

Did you learn anything new about yourself and your journey as you gathered and arranged these pieces for the book?

Yeah. During the time I was working on it I went to a faculty development workshop at my university. At John Brown, all students have to take a class in their senior year they call “Christian Life” (though I think it has a longer title). They read a book by Richard Foster called Streams of Living Water, which talks about the different traditions of Christianity and how we can learn from all of these different traditions.

Posted on April 9, 2007 12:00 AM