‘The moments to seize hold of’: Essayists Brewster and Klose raise an ode to joy

Episode transcript

Ashley Lisenby: Welcome to “Rethinking the News” by The Christian Science Monitor. I’m Ashley Lisenby, one of its producers. Each holiday season, editors and writers discuss some of the most meaningful stories of the year.  This year, staff will discuss stories that exemplify five main themes: faith, gratitude, love, hope, and joy. Today’s theme is joy.

Listen as Home Forum Editor Owen Thomas talks with correspondents Murr Brewster and Robert Klose about the joy they identify and express through essay writing for The Home Forum.

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Owen Thomas: Hello, Murr and Robert. You both should be flattered that when the planning group for this conversation thought about joy, they thought about you. Our readers agree, based on what I’ve heard. You’ve both provided many joyful nonfiction personal essays for The Home Forum, which has been a feature in the Monitor for more than a century. You’ve written about everything from tiny islands off the coast of Iceland and your adoption of two orphaned boys from Russia, to lenticular clouds and helping hordes of frogs across a busy highway in the rain, as I recall. But first, let’s hear a little bit more about yourselves. Robert, let’s start with you.

Robert Klose: I live in Maine, in the wilds of Maine, but I grew up in New Jersey, and I came to writing pretty early due to the graces of a very inspiring teacher in college, in my freshman English comp class. And her encouragement was all I needed to hear because I think the idea of writing was always in me. And so writing has always accompanied me through my adult life, at least. And what I really enjoy, of course, is that whatever emotional response I can get from a reader, good or bad, or indifferent. And in my understanding, any response is good. And, but I make my primary bread by teaching at the University of Maine.

Thomas: Robert, when was your first essay in the Monitor, do you remember? 

Klose: I sure do. And it wasn’t a Home Forum essay. It was in 1986. I had just come back from a year in Germany. I had a Fulbright year. And I had a very compelling experience while I was in Germany, and I took a side trip to Poland and I visited actually one of the concentration camps there. And it made a tremendous impact on me. And so I just wrote a very short essay called “Roses of Majdanek,” and Majdanek was the name of the camp. And I sent it to the Monitor and I’m not sure how high my hopes were for publication, but they actually called me and they said they wanted to print the piece and more delighted I couldn’t be.

Thomas: OK, thank you. And Murr, what about you? And while you’re at it, would you please explain the mystery of your first name?

Murr Brewster: Well, there’s nothing terribly special about it. I was christened Mary. Mary Elizabeth Brewster. And for whatever reason, in college, people started calling me Murray instead of Mary. And then it got shortened to Murr. And when I moved out to Portland, Oregon, I just started introducing myself that way because it was different. And people remember it. And the only interesting thing about it is I married a man whose mother was named Mary, and her friends called her Murray.

Thomas: Do you want to say a little more about yourself?

Brewster: Yeah. I grew up in Virginia and went to college in New England, and I got a biology degree. And what I did with that biology degree was I moved to Portland and became a letter carrier, which was a great job for me because it was fun and useful and straightforward. And I punched a time clock every day, which a lot of people don’t think much of. But I love it because it allowed me to punch out every day, which the glory of that should be – should resonate with some people out there. I did that for 31 years, and then the best part was it led me to my dream job, which is retired letter carrier. Right before I retired, I started writing. And it was really the first writing I’d done since I was in high school, believe it or not. And I haven’t stopped. Or at least no one has stopped me.

Thomas: Good for you. We will not stop you. A lot of your writing points to the serendipitous nature of joy. Recently, you wrote about your journey of self-discovery as an adolescent into early adulthood. I’ve always enjoyed your honesty, your perspective, and your humor. But in this particular essay, I also enjoyed your first-person view of the opening up of choices for young women. How does this particular essay reflect joy?

Brewster: Oh, well, you’re right. I’m very lucky. I’m no stranger to joy, and I write about it a lot. Though in fact, the two examples you gave were really good ones the ... the frogs and my personal chickadee, also, Studly Windowson, lands on my hand, thumps my heart every single time. But this story you’re talking about wasn’t about that kind of moment of joy, but it’s still related, I think. It’s about how we learn really early on to mold ourselves to other people’s expectations, or maybe what we perceive to be their expectations. And then every layer of pretense we add, it pushes us that much further away from who we really are.

If we’re lucky, we get a pretty good run at a happy childhood. And then in adolescence, we start to let other people tell us who we should be. I think it can take a long time to chip away at the pretense and rediscover your authentic self, but it’s worth it because it takes a lot of energy to maintain, oh, falseness. I guess you’d say it’s all-consuming and it’s distracting. It keeps you from seeing the world around you and all of the moments of joy that are there for the noticing. For me, most of joy has to do with that: Noticing. We have to quiet ourselves so we can pay attention. So I’d say most moments of joy are serendipitous, but you can learn to be ready for them.

Thomas: I like what you said about peeling away those layers. I accused you of being brave the other day. You resisted it a little bit, but it is really brave to be your authentic self and to not worry about all those layers falling on top of you again.

Brewster: Well, thank you.

Thomas: Robert, you wrote a piece in October about apple picking with the child you were paired with in the Big Brother program. It was another example to me of how confident and competent you are at finding and sharing joy. What made apple picking especially joyous to you, something you wanted to share?

Klose: I think, generally, joy kind of goes hand in hand with moving through life – I don’t know if I want to say slowly, but more slowly than this society demands. If one’s not rushing from place to place and one is not overworking, let’s say, that slack and pace just allows one to see and hear more. And in the case of the apple picking, I set Saturdays aside for this child in the Big Brother program and I do not do any school work on Saturdays. I don’t answer emails on Saturdays to do with school. I don’t answer phone calls to do with school. I don’t grade papers. Because if I were to relent, I would be doing schoolwork seven days a week most of those days, most of the hours in those days. So Saturday is kind of sacrosanct. So that’s my date to move slowly. And with this child, as I said in the essay, he was somewhat resistant to the idea of apple picking in the age of computer games. So I was – I didn’t know what to expect when I got him to the orchard.

But when we got there and he saw the size of these Wolf River apples, they were as big as melons, some of them. He just – his joy was just effervescent. And so what that points up is that incidences of joy are moments, the moments that we have to kind of seize hold of. And I always like to go back to the poem by Carl Sandburg called “Joy.” And he starts by saying, “Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by. Because if you don’t, then, of course, it will recede.” And that was the import of the apple picking. This was my moment with Sebastian and his joy was contagious and I shared it with him. And so for that brief hour, that’s what we had. And then the moment receded. Now we have a memory of it.

Thomas: We all discovered you, me, and Murr discovered that we all carry around three-by-five cards or a notebook to write down things as they ... as they strike us, as they occur to us that you have to be alert to joy. Not only that, you should probably write it down if you’re going to write about it later.

Brewster: If you have a memory like mine, you’d better write it down.

Thomas: Lastly, let’s talk a little bit about joy itself. Murr and Robert, what do you think – is experiencing joy something that can be taught? Is there a blueprint for joy? Is joy even something that can be sought as an end in itself, or is it simply the outcome of something else? Robert, you want to start?

Klose: As a teacher, my impulse is to say joy cannot be taught in the pedagogical sense, but it can be modeled. And I have one class, for instance, of fifteen 18-year-olds at the university. And every so often I can sense their stress level or the frantic nature of the lives they lead. And I’ll – and what I did a couple of weeks ago is I said, “Everybody put down your pens. Close your books.” And I had a bag next to my chair. I had baked them brownies. I said, “This is what – we’re not going to do ‘The Odyssey’ right now by Homer. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to eat these brownies.” And that’s what we did.

So in that sense, I didn’t say to them, “Let’s take a moment to be joyous.” But I think that was a reflection of our capacity for it. And as I often tell them, I don’t talk about joy in any direct sense, but I do say, “Look, some day you’re going to graduate. No one’s going to care about your grades. What you’re going to remember is having each other. You’re going to remember this class, I hope, and maybe you will have learned a few things. And that’s it.” So I look at joy in terms of modeling rather than in any and any kind of overt communication of the sentiment.

Thomas: Well, it also speaks to your wanting to provide an opportunity to share joy. That’s critical, too, I think.

Klose: Well, I think I always believed if students know – and I’m speaking as a teacher again – if they know that you care about them, they’ll do anything for you.

Thomas: Wow.

Klose: And I just have to give you one more anecdote. A couple of years ago, I was teaching about great white sharks for goodness’ sake, and one of the girls started to yawn. And so I said to them, “Everyone, put your books down, put your pens down. I want you to put your heads on your desk, and I’ll tell you when to wake up.” And I let them take a 10-minute nap and I woke them up and we proceeded from there.

Thomas: Wow.

Klose: So I guess that what the message is: Part of joy is not taking things too seriously, ‘cause too seriously can dampen joy.

Thomas: Wow. Thanks. Thanks, Robert. Murr, what about you?

Brewster: I want some brownies now, but...

Thomas: Take a nap. I’m going to take a nap. 

Brewster: So I don’t know if you can hunt it down and throw a net over it, but absolutely you can give yourself a better chance to sort of trip over it. It’s – the way I see it, it’s like there are seeds of joy everywhere. But you have to prepare the soil, which might mean really critically looking at where the noise and clutter is in your life. The busyness, the overconsumption, which if anybody’s paying attention, you realize that has diminishing returns. Quit accumulating stuff and see if maybe the internet can get along without you for a while and go outside and have a look around. I’d also say give yourself a chance to be surprised. I kind of appreciate that you mentioned that frog piece that – if anybody hasn’t read that essay, I’m a member of a team that gets together on winter nights, on cold, rainy winter nights and collects frogs as they migrate across a busy highway and we ferry them across to the swamp that they’re aiming at. And that’s wonderful enough in itself. I mean, you cannot be unhappy when you’re catching a frog, you can’t.

But one time, a cool thing was I was all bent over crouching in the rain, going for a frog. And suddenly I noticed there’s this sort of curvy, sinuous crack in the pavement and a salamander had slid right in there, like pie filling. I probably woke up the whole swamp, whooping and hollering then. It was just amazing. It still makes me smile. So I think you can also aim yourself at joy a little bit by knowing where it’s likely to hang out waiting for you. Because we’re all different. My whole day can be made if I read a great phrase from a really gifted writer. Sometimes I come across something so good I actually yelp when I read it and I memorize it and carry it around with me in case there’s a joy shortage and I need it later.

Thomas: I think both of you have helped our readers experience more joy. Once you discover it, and I think it is a discovery, joy is so easy to share, and if you’re the least bit receptive to the joy being shared, it will find its way into your consciousness and multiply. So thank you, Murr and Robert, for helping our readers to see and experience more joy. 

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Lisenby: Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, share it with your friends – and find the full set of staff interviews at CSMonitor.com/MeetTheMonitor. You can also give the gift of Monitor journalism. Visit CSMonitor.com/Holiday for our discounted holiday offer. 

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