From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel, Nightwatch. Leax’s poetry collections include “Reaching into Silence,” “The Task of Adam,” “Sonnets and Songs,” and “Country Labors.” His non-fiction writing and essay collections include “Grace Is Where I Live,” “In Season and Out,” “Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism,” “120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About,” and “Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World.”
I’ve read Nightwatch, which is aimed at young adult audiences. It’s a coming-of-age story, focused on a boy named Mark Baker from his young childhood to his ten years. It’s a good story with an “edge” I haven’t usually seen in young adult books.
In 1993, Leax published Grace Is Where I Live: Writing as a Christian Vocation. It describes how he became a writer, starting with believing he would be a novelist. Early on came the discouragement of teachers and mentors, who didn’t think he was cut out to be a novelist. He turned to essays and poetry, it was there he found early acceptance and success.
While Grace Is Where I Live is not a how-to guide, it is filled with a kind of humble wisdom – wisdom learned the hard way. Leax discusses holiness and craft, stewardship and witness, and story and place – all vital considerations for a writer who is also a Christian. He includes his notes from a sabbatical journal, and then distills what he’s learned about his writing, his calling, and himself in the final four chapters.
Of all the books on writing I’ve read, this one comes closest to my own experience. “I have a sense,” he writes, “that calling is not to be confused with being a writer – one punching out the books and making a name, being read and admired. The calling has to do with sitting here and accepting silence if necessary. The silence of not writing. The silence of keeping back my poems until I have tested them in time. The silence of having the poems rejected.”
The last silence is the worst, he says. If you consider your work a calling, rejection can mean God is not ready for you to be heard, striking “at both my best and my worst. And I cannot separate them.”
He tells a beautiful story in these essays – a story of finding his way to what he was called to do.
Grace Is Where I Live is long out of print; even in one or two newer editions. If you can get your hands on a copy, it is well worth the time and effort.
Top photograph by Christin Hume via Unsplash. Used with permission.
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