Sue Monk Kidd: Firstlight
by Cindy Crosby, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 6/14/2006
 Sue Monk Kidd Credit: Sigrid Estrada |
RBL: It must be interesting for you to return to your early writings as a spiritual seeker after more than two decades have passed.
Kidd: Someone said to me, “Do you still believe all that?” It’s not about believing or disagreeing with what you believed at 30 years old; what 57-year-old would be the same now as they were then? It would be a sign of immaturity. I look at those early writings and I see my potential to grow, expand and to take things in. All the seeds are there that sprouted into who I am now.
RBL: How would you describe yourself spiritually today?
Kidd: My own spirituality is an unfolding process. It’s about an expansion of the heart and soul and mind, and coming into deeper relationship not only with the divine but with one’s self.
RBL: What tradition do you see yourself belonging to?
Kidd: I see myself in the Christian tradition, but I also call myself an orthodox eclectic. I explore a lot of different avenues toward the transcendent.
RBL: Such as?
Kidd: From Buddhism, I took an understanding of what I call “deep being”—being at the core of oneself and how to dwell there. It taught me how to bring my heart, soul and mind into the present in an attentive way. Also, can we look at the divine through a feminine lens? Can we speak of God with feminine language, image and symbols? This is incredibly important to me. My picture of God gets bigger as I am able to incorporate more and more things. Some of these things include ambiguities, unorthodoxies, lots of questions.... I’m redefining my experience constantly. But I do see it all in this great contemplative Christian tradition.
RBL: How does this influence your writing?
Kidd: When I speak about spirituality, I get into abstractions. This is why I am driven to write stories. To bring it into the personal. That’s the challenge.
RBL: What does that look like?
Kidd: I wake up every morning and I am jolted by the fact that I am alive and in an incredibly sacred and mysterious world. How am I going to be in relationship to that? So, it’s about being awake, and being in relationship with God, and how God is manifested in tree and tide and everywhere. It’s about rendering this in everyday moments; that’s what Firstlight is about. To take the expanding spiritual impulse and make it concrete.
RBL: What reading informs your writing?
Kidd: Right now I’m mostly reading literary fiction. It is very spiritual for me, and helps me understand my own experiences in the world. Before that, I went through my contemplative phase where I read the mystics of Western religion, such as Thomas Merton, St. Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the women mystics that I had not experienced in my Protestant upbringing. I didn’t leave this phase behind, it just opened out into the next thing.
RBL: Which writer influenced your fiction the most?
Kidd: Carl Jung helped me more than anything as a fiction writer. He opened the mysteries of the human psyche: what we are about, our interior motivations, our conflicts. He helped me figure out how to write my characters.
RBL: What are you working on now?
Kidd: I had thought when I finished The Mermaid Chair I’d write a third novel. But in the midst of it my daughter, who is a very fine writer, asked me to coauthor a book with her about some trips we took together to sacred sites in Greece and in France. This book for Riverhead will be an exploration of how to move through feminine passages of life, a reflection on the sacred sites we visited together and the evolution of my own spirituality. It’s also about the story of our mother/daughter relationship. This summer I’m knuckling down and working on it.
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