A new job, a new book, a new season
Veeka at the overlook over Lewiston, Idaho and the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers.
It’s fall now, and I’ve come out with a bunch more articles; my daughter has moved back in with me, I just republished my most popular book and I’ve just come out with a new one on Mongolia.
Oh, and I have a new job: Contributing editor for religion for Newsweek magazine. More on that in a minute.
Veeka enjoying a restaurant stop at Snoqualmie Pass. Our summer was full of nice outings plus summer school.
I was so glad that Veeka moved back home after 17 months away. She hadn’t seen her bedroom in ages, so she walked about, wonderingly picking up her things and noticing all the gift cards that had piled up while she was gone. A week or so later, we first set off for southeastern Washington, first in Walla Walla where I was helping someone complete her autobiography. We also visited the Whitman Mission National Historic Site just west of town, which gave a nuanced view of the white settlers who showed up in the 1830s and why they ended up massacred by the Cayuse Indians. My own view: the Whitmans didn’t deserve to die like dogs, as they were blamed for the diseases that were decimating local tribes because of the influx of white settlers from the east. Tragically, the tribes later paid a steep price for that massacre, a lot of which had to do with clashing cultures and the white folks’ cluelessness on how land ownership meant nothing to the Indians.
Then we drove to the Lewiston-Clarkston area on the Idaho/Washington state line, which I hadn’t seen in six years. We were there to do a travel story for the Washington Post on Stacia Morfin, a most extraordinary member of the Nez Perce tribe who was a precocious marketing whiz in her teens, but got involved in drugs and ended up in federal prison. To survive emotionally and spiritually, she turned to her heritage, remembering the Nez Perce songs her father had taught her. She took up drumming, went to a prison sweat lodge and gradually developed a self regard and identity that inspired her to do something related to her tribe.
Stacia Morfin lecturing on the boat.
A related piece I did on her for the Sun Valley Magazine in June talked more about her personal journey and how she went from being in a federal prison to a kick-butt entrepreneur who’s put her tribe on the national map. What got her through three years of incarceration was singing the Nimiipuu songs her father taught her, taking up drumming and going to a makeshift sweat lodge on prison grounds. She realized she’d lost her way in the greater white culture.
“At the time I didn’t see the full destiny there was for my life,” she remembers. “There was a lot of work internally I had to do before moving in the opposite direction. There was a lot of forgiving I had to do. It was easy to forgive other people; it was hard to forgive myself. There are thousands of things I did I’m not proud of.
“I made a promise in prison that I’d share parts of my story because I knew it’d help somebody. It was tough to be in prison, but it was necessary for that shift that needed to happen in my life.”
The end result was that she founded Nez Perce Tourism, a cluster of services that offer tribal tours, whitewater rafting, Appaloosa rides (the Nez Perce bred the Appaloosa into existence) and boat rides up the Snake River, which Veeka and I took one sweltering day. This was the week when temperatures were soaring past 115ºF in that part of Washington, breaking all sorts of records. How Stacia managed to stay cool in her buckskin dress, I don’t know, but she spent three hours pointing out sites along the river that had significance to the Nez Perce.
During the two evenings we were there, Veeka and I visited restaurant/wineries in the town of Juliaetta, Idaho, which was the loveliest town up a valley east of town. With alpine views and orchards and cottages set in hollows, I felt like I was in Europe somewhere. During the days, we had a hotel pool to cool us off and during a visit to the Hells Canyon visitor center, Veeka got to jump into the Snake River.
The new cover for my book.
We also visited Portland a week later, then Veeka did four weeks of summer school and then spent five days at the Washington Family Ranch, a Young Life camp in central Oregon that I wrote about here. While Veeka was at camp, I worked on understanding the intricacies of Amazon’s online publishing platform and on Aug. 14 was able to republish my 2008 book Quitting Church. You can order it here as I added a long update at the end for 2021. I kept the 2008 text in there, as the problems I pointed out back then still bedevil churches; in fact, they are worse, as church attendance statistics are plunging. Of course Covid-19 didn’t help at all, with people forced to not attend church for six months or more. This has been my best-selling book because the problem is so universal. So many people are perplexed over the churches they’ve encountered or can’t find one they like. I’ve had so many bad church experiences, I am very reluctant to try another one. But we have a Monday night Bible study that functions as a cell group, so we’re OK. Please order it and leave a nice review!
Remember that I traveled to Mongolia for three weeks in July of 2019? Well, my efforts resulted in a book about the central figure in it all: Yanjmaa Jutmaan. After many starts and stops over the past two years, “Finding Joy: A Mongolian Woman’s Journey to Christ” was came out on Sept. 3. We self-published it for faster release, as Yanjmaa is beginning to travel more and talk about her ministry of counseling and inner healing and we needed a bunch of available books for a Labor Day retreat she spoke at near Seattle. I’ll be saying more about this when we get the online version posted on Amazon; right now, we just have a print version available. Near the end, it was a ton of work coordinating the proofing, the cover design, the formatting and the actual printing of the book in time to meet our deadline. I’m happy to send it to folks via snail mail; $16 including postage.
Veeka wondering how she’s going to navigate her canoe around Lake Diablo.
One other side trip we made later in August was to a family getaway weekend at North Cascades Institute on Lake Diablo in the far northern edge of the state. I’ve been trying to get there for years and finally we made it to a weekend of classes and exploring and hikes. Most adventurous was a canoe lesson Veeka and I had on Lake Diablo itself, which is bright turquoise because of all the glacial melt. Fortunately, the winds had died down the morning we had the lesson and she and I managed to navigate around a nearby island even though she hadn’t been in a canoe since she was 8. We really liked the wonderful food served there; the cheery attitude of the staff and the sheer beauty of the place. She definitely wants to go back.
So much more has happened to me since Sept. 3 that I’ll be saying more about in a future blog, but I did want to say my Newsweek job started Sept. 1. I kind of fell into it; heard in June they were looking for an experienced hand to do religion enterprise work, so I contacted certain people and what I had to offer is what they were looking for. I was ready to go on Social Security and was about to sign on the dotted line when this opportunity came up, which I didn't want to turn down. To date, I’ve done four articles, so I’ll link my first one (on revivals) and my fourth (on a Facebook group of Christians against covid denialism) for starters. It’s so nice to be back on the beat again, as I haven’t done full-time religion reporting since mid-2010. Even though the newsroom is in New York, my position is remote, which is helpful considering my daughter’s needs, which are still immense. The idea is that I work on pieces and topics that other writers aren’t reporting on (or reporting on much), so it’s a departure from the breaking news kinds of pieces I did for years at the Washington Times.
I know this is brief and I’ll have more to say later this month.
