Welcome to Tony's Field Notes
My new Substack newsletter, and my first post. If you like, please subscribe.
Definitely Not a Blog
This will be a place that I won’t feel dirty after writing, and you won’t feel dirty after reading.
When I started blogging, I lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment in married student housing in New Jersey. My wife and children had left for Minnesota after the first year of my three-year commitment to a doctoral program. We’d made the three-year commitment together, but like many aspects of our marriage, it didn’t stick.
The school didn’t allow commuting, and remote learning was anathema in 2004, so they required me to be officially “in residence” if I was going to stay in the program. I explained that I’d be living alone, and I requested to move into the apartment building for single students, which was newer and less expensive.
No, I was told: Since you’re married, you have to live in married housing, whether or not your family lives with you; that’s the policy. They at least let me move from a two-bedroom apartment to a one-bedroom, which saved me a little money.
I’d driven every piece of furniture back to Minnesota that summer, just nine months after I’d moved it all from Minnesota to New Jersey. I flew from MSP to EWR, took the New Jersey Transit train to Princeton Junction, then took the seminary shuttle bus out to the squat, bunker-like apartment complex on Route One, a commute I’d make every two weeks for the better part of two years.
I slept in a sleeping bag on an air mattress. My desk was a discarded door I’d found leaning against a dumpster, set on the backs of two chairs. My laptop had been the parting gift from the church I’d pastored for seven years before decamping to the East Coast. I put the computer on the horizontal door, flipped it open, registered an account with Blogspot, and started writing, alone in a dark apartment.
It’s no wonder my blog gained a reputation for being angry, belligerent, and confrontational. Into the mix of my own personal pathos, add the intellectual aggression that’s rewarded in a PhD program. That was the stew in which my writing simmered.
It worked, at least on one level. My readership grew, leading first Beliefnet and then Patheos to court me and pay me. At its height, I was posting eleven times per week, arguing with readers in the comment section, and pulling 100,000 pageviews per month. I checked my stats and rankings daily. If I used the names “Mark Driscoll” or “Rob Bell,” the numbers ticked up.
Good and beautiful stuff emerged: blogging through the issues led me to affirm LGBT marriage and ordination, and a popular series on the atonement led to two books on the topic. But on balance, Theoblogy was bad for my soul, and probably bad for the world. My blog reflected the unhealthy state of my spiritual life, and, for some reason, I foisted that on the world.
Time has passed, thank God. Nineteen years later, I’m in a different marriage, one that is full of light: last night, after reading a bit, I put a bookmark in my book, turned off my light, curled up next to Courtney, who would stay up reading hours after I’d fallen off to sleep, and whispered to her, “This is my favorite part of the day.” To be next to her, safe, comfortable with myself — I wish everyone could experience that feeling. And it’s all-the-more acute because I’ve known its lack.
I turned in a book manuscript last week. It’s with the editor now, and I’m in the purgatory time, not knowing whether he’ll love it or hate it. I think it’s my best book. I’ve been working on it for ten years. I started it just after I turned in my last book, a book of which I was also proud, but the release of which was scuttled by internet scandal. More drama, more trauma.
Since 2013: I wrote, pitched, and wrote some more. I parted ways with my agent and pitched it on my own. I asked friends to read it and hired an editor. I signed with another agent and finally got a modest deal. Mary Karr says that you shouldn’t write about something until it’s seven or eight years in the past. Maybe the universe agrees with her and impeded my publishing ambitions to save me from myself.
Having steeped for a decade, it’s a better book. The anger has been excised (I hope), relegated to memories of times past, no longer the immediate motivation for writing. The axes have been ground, the shoulder chips removed.
The truth is, I love to write. So I’m gonna write. If you’re interested in reading along, you can subscribe. It’s free to read once a month. To read weekly, please throw a few bucks in the jar. Maybe you read my blog back in the day. If so, rest assured, this will be an anger-free zone.
Pax et bonum,
Tony