How to Read A Book as a Sacred Text

 

The summer that I did my chaplaincy internship was a wildly full twelve weeks. I was thirty-two years old and living in the haze of the end of an engagement as I walked the hospital corridors carrying around my Bible and visiting patients. “Hi, I’m Vanessa. I’m from the spiritual care department. How are you today?”

 It was a surreal summer full of new experiences hitting like a tsunami: you saw them coming but that didn’t mean you could outrun them. But the thing that never felt weird was that the Bible I carried around with me as I went to visit patient after patient, that I turned to in the guest room at David and Suzanne’s or on my parents’ couch to sustain me, was a nineteenth-century gothic Romance novel. The Bible I carried around that busy summer was Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
 
I love the idea of sacredness. I want to be called to bigger things, outside of myself. I don’t want my life to be a matter of distractions from death and then death. I want to surprise myself and to honor the ways in which the world surprises me. I want to connect deeply to others, to the earth, and to myself. I want to help heal that which is broken in us. Which is why I went to divinity school at thirty years old.
 
But God, God-language, the Bible, the church—none of it is for me. And halfway through divinity school, I realized that my resistance to traditional religion was never going to change. I wanted to learn how to pray, how to reflect and be vulnerable. And I didn’t think that the fact that I didn’t believe in God or the Bible should hold me back.
 
I, like many of us, have such complicated feelings about the Bible that it’s distracting to even try to pray with it. Too many caveats feel necessary to even begin to try. So I asked my favorite professor, Stephanie Paulsell, if she would spend a semester teaching me how to pray with Jane Eyre. Throughout the semester, we homed in on what I was searching for, a way to treat things as sacred, things that were not usually considered to be divinely inspired. The plan was that each week I would pull out passages from the novel and reflect on them as prayers, preparing papers that explored the prayers in depth. Then, together, we would pray using the passages.
 
This proved more challenging than I’d expected. I so resisted praying. In Judaism, prayers are prewritten and always in Hebrew. It felt like too much of a betrayal to my Judaism and to my family to pray in English. I just couldn’t do it. Stephanie would invite me, gently, to pray every once in a while. But I always resisted, so instead she would hand me books. She gave me Guigo II, a Carthusian monk who developed a four-step reading practice to bring his fellow monks closer to God. She gave me James Wood, a fellow atheist who wrote How Fiction Works. She gave me Simone Weil, a Jewish woman who escaped to America from Vichy, France, only to go back to Europe and die of starvation because she would not eat more than the prisoners of Auschwitz ate, unable to handle her privilege of escaping.
 
Eventually, we decided that sacredness is an act, not a thing. If I can decide that Jane Eyre is sacred, that means it is the actions I take that will make it so. The decision to treat Jane as sacred is an important first step, surely, but that is all the decision was—one step. The ritual, the engagement with the thing, is what makes the thing sacred. Objects are sacred only because they are loved. The text did not determine the sacredness; the actions and actors did, the questions you asked of the text and the way you returned to it.
 
This premise is obviously quite different from traditional ideas of engaging with sacred texts. What makes the Bible sacred is a complex ecosystem of church legitimacy, power, canonization, time, ritual, and other contributing factors. When the sacredness of the Bible or the Koran is questioned, great bodies of people and institutions will rush to defend them. Regardless of how these sacred texts are treated by an individual, they are widely considered to be sacred texts. In how I was treating Jane Eyre, I was saying the opposite: if one treats Jane Eyre as a doorstop, it is a doorstop. If one treats it as sacred, then it can be sacred.
 
Over the months we worked together, Stephanie and I discerned that you need three things to treat a text as sacred: faith, rigor, and community.
 
Faith is what Simone Weil called “the indispensable condition.” And what I came to mean by faith was that you had to believe that the more time you spent with the text, the more gifts it would give you. Even on days when it felt as if you were taking huge steps backward with the text, because you realized it was racist and patriarchal in ways you hadn’t noticed when you were fifteen or twenty or twenty-five, you were still spending sacred time with the book. I solemnly promised that when I did not know what a passage was doing, or what Brontë was doing with her word choice, rather than write it off as antiquated, anachronistic, or imperfect, I would have faith that the fault was in my reading, not in the text. In Friday night services, rabbis do not talk about what year the book of Genesis was most likely written and how the version we have today was canonized. A good rabbi instead considers the metaphor of God separating light from dark instead. That was how I set about considering Jane Eyre.
 
Faith does not mean that I think the text is perfect. Perfect and sacred are not the same thing. My parents, who are sacred to me, are not perfect. Things that are not perfect can give you blessings not only in spite of their imperfections, but because of them. When I was fifteen, I saw Rochester keeping Bertha at home and out of an asylum as an act of mercy. At thirty, his locking her up in an attic and all but forgetting her was not nearly enough to impress me and became something I had to forgive, rather than a virtue of his. Both times, Rochester’s and the novel’s presentation of that act were generative to me. The text was in conversation with my evolving sense of what mercy really is. The text’s imperfections accompany me in my own imperfections and will continue to act as reflection points for me whenever I return to it.
 
Rigor means that you keep at it even when your heart isn’t in it. You have to do the work whether or not you are in the mood. You have to be slow and deliberate even if you aren’t called to be so that day. It was a commitment, not a hobby. The best secular example of rigor I can think of is the way my brothers look at a baseball scoreboard. We see the same numbers. But they keep looking and looking at them until it becomes clear to them what pitch the pitcher is going to throw next, and they are usually right.
 
Another example of this kind of rigor is the way you might read into a text message from someone you have gone on a date with. You read it and reread it until you think the “truest” meaning of the message has revealed itself to you. You show it to friends to get their opinions. I was going to do that with Jane Eyre. The person receiving a text has faith that there is a real meaning behind that text and if they can figure it out then they will be able to better manage their own emotions and expectations. And I have faith that Jane Eyre always has some sort of important news to give me.
 
Community, the final component for treating a text as sacred, is the simplest of the ideas. It means that you need a gym buddy, someone to force you to work out even when it feels like the one thing you don’t want to do. You need someone to question your opinion when you are most sure you are right.
 
And even more than that, a kind of magic happens when you work in community. Other people’s points of view will blow your mind and open you up to things that you never would have seen in the text on your own. Speaking out loud to someone you respect will help you find your own voice. Engaging with others in sacred, committed, rigorous spaces allows you to treat them as sacred, which is the point of all this anyway.
 
 
Adapted from Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice, by Vanessa Zoltan, published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.,m 2021
 
 
Reading Jane Eyre as a Sacred Text. By Vanessa Zoltan. The Paris Review, July 12, 2021.

I have spent years of my life reading and loving Charlotte Brontë's novel "Jane Eyre." But in the last few years I have realized something: The main character of this novel isn't Jane, but Bertha; the woman who we call "The Madwoman in the Attic." As I have looked closer and closer at Bertha over the years, I have realized something important. I don't think she's a madwoman. I think she's an angry woman. I think she wields her anger like a scalpel, and I want to learn from her precision.
 
I think women are made to straddle this line of mad and angry all of the time. When I was a college advisor a student of mine was on a club soccer team. She was playing, for fun, like usual, when a male student on her team said to her, "Anne, you need to work on your hustle." When she politely ignored him, he "teased" her, saying, "we need to work on your issues with authority." They were in the same year in school; he was not the team captain. Throughout practices and games alike, this young man would harass Anne under the guise of teasing. He would tell her to "lighten up" and say that she didn't have a sense of humor because she did not find him belittling her funny. I gave her the advice I was given throughout my life: ignore him. It was not Bertha-informed advice.
 
Anne felt that by enduring his teasing, she was not standing up for herself. She was being made to swallow her anger, which is crazy-making. But if she had answered him, she would have been seen as confrontational, or even dramatic or "psycho." She kept going and kept saying nothing. Her silence infuriated him, and the harassment got worse. She quit the team. And those are the only options we so often feel we have: Endure a form of harassment and say nothing, which will make you so angry it will get you to do something like quit, or say something, break the mold of what society deems as appropriate femme behavior, and be seen as crazy.
 
It is convenient for patriarchy to diminish women's mental capacity when we're pissed. But also, patriarchal behavior can make us seem "mad" when really, we're angry. My student stopped responding to that guy, per my (probably bad) advice. She started pretending like she couldn't hear him. This is literally behavior that appears to be unhinged from reality.
 
I have found myself in these situations too many times in my life and yet as a white, cisgender woman, fewer than others. I get to go to the bathroom in peace and am seen as acting "mad" much less quickly than women of color, who by and large have to endure more frequent and egregious forms of this form of toxicity. I'm speaking for myself when I say that these are situations when I feel as though my only two options are to let myself be steamrolled or to call someone out.
 
My grandfather left me a little money when he died and my uncle could not stand it. I agreed to give him half of the money but we had to go back and forth ad nauseum about the details. During this seemingly endless sending back and forth of documents, he would send me the changes that he wanted made and I would do the editing in the document. I was working two jobs at the time and this added part time job of doing his legal work (on top of my own) got to be too much for me.  When he sent me yet another round of edits that he wanted me to insert into the document I finally told him no, he could make his own requested changes to the document. Also, I didn't say this, but I was finding it humiliating to help him essentially sue me.  The wrath that ensued when I said I wouldn't continue as his legal secretary was one of the most striking about-faces I have ever seen. I was an "entitled bitch" and got emails and phone calls telling me so for days. I transferred the money into his account as he continued to call me names.
 
There have been dozens of smaller incidents like this one: when my college boyfriend would have me hold his beer in front of other men, even though surfaces that appeared structurally sound abounded. I could either hold the beer or not, but all eyes were on me. Or the years and years that one of my brother's friends called me a clever nickname for Vanessa — Vannoying — because I "always had an opinion about everything." I couldn't say anything, because I would be proving his point.
 
Then there have been the bigger indignities. The ones that still bleed when I pick at the scabs. My C-suite level boss shook my assistant-level self and screamed at me as my feet dangled in the air. When he put me down, tears were in my eyes, so he patted me on the head and said, "Oh look at you, acting offended by this." A man I went out with acted offended when I asked if he was married because of his strange behavior two or three weeks into our dating. "You're being crazy. I can't believe you don't trust me." When I reminded him of that moment after I had the proof that he was indeed married, he sighed in anger and said, "I wasn't married when you asked."  He had only been engaged and had gotten married a few days after that conversation. Then there is the other boss, the one I can't tell you about because of the document I had to sign to keep my health insurance for a few months after he fired me for being the victim of harassment.
 

I have been on the wrong end of this dynamic too. My mom would sometimes get so tired and angry at my dad and us kids that she would "take a long walk." She'd leave the door open as a symbol that she couldn't do one more thing for us and that she would be back. We would always be scared that mom had gone a little bit crazy.

 I am trained as a chaplain. I am supposed to live a life of kindness, compassion and empathy. But there are so many moments in my life when I feel like my two options are to swallow my anger or to be seen as "psycho."  To be made mad or to be seen as a madwoman.
 
I am called confrontational, a pain in the ass and worse. I am called these things often enough that I wonder if I, on some level, enjoy confrontation and being thought of in such terms. Upon much thought, I have come to the self-satisfied conclusion that I actually find confrontation scary and uncomfortable. I just really don't want to make another person's suggested changes to a document when they could do it themselves.
 
Bertha Mason Rochester in Jane Eyre is called the "madwoman" because she lights beds on fire, stabs people, sneaks into rooms and rips veils, lights the house on fire. But when you look more closely at her actions, they make perfect sense. She sneaks out one night after ten years of being locked in the attic by her husband. Her caretaker has fallen too deeply asleep and Bertha has stolen the key. She does not injure her caretaker who is being paid to do a job. Bertha lights the bed of the man who is locking her up on fire. She never lunges for the maids who come to help tend her. But she stabs her brother who knowingly leaves her locked in an attic. When she is in a room with the woman who her husband is going to marry, she does not hurt the young, unknowing fiancée (Jane Eyre herself). Bertha rips up the veil that Jane will put on in the morning to marry Bertha's husband. Bertha doesn't hurt Jane: she warns her.
 
Bertha is not a madwoman, she is an angry woman who we, her readers, have been calling psycho for years.
 
One of the odd things to me is that when I am called angry or crazy, I am not feeling any of those things. What I am actually feeling, like Bertha, is trapped. I sobbed, unable to catch my breath, after my boss shook me. I felt stuck. I had just been assaulted and publicly humiliated and there was nothing I could do about it. I responded in a way that was described as "unprofessional and hysterical." My body responded without my permission. If I could have gone about my day, that is what I would have chosen to do. But instead, I was so loud… so unwieldy. My sobs echoed in the bathroom and so I was sent home so I would stop "causing a scene."
 
Bertha's anger is magical because it seems to me that she is in complete control of it. My anger comes when I lose control. Bertha plays her anger like an orchestra.  She doesn't take out her anger on Jane. She chooses sisterhood; warning another potential victim of Rochester. She takes out her silence, which has festered into rage, on the man who has gagged her and locked her up.
 
 I do not believe in violence. I think that it is sometimes necessary but much more infrequently than it is used. So I do not suggest that we use Bertha's strategy in its particulars for addressing our anger. (In her situation — essentially kidnapped and imprisoned — her behavior is completely reasonable, though.) Even though those of us reading this are likely never to be locked in attics by our husbands for ten years, I still think that there is much that we can learn from the way that Bertha expresses her rage. She looks herself in the mirror; she rips the products of the patriarchy; she is loud and she is persistent.
 
Our anger has been made quiet for too long. "Madness" is the diagnosis of a single person, not of a movement of intersectional solidarity. Anger is what drives us to stand up for each other and for ourselves in a persistent way that cannot be ignored. We are choking on the flames of our rage and being made mad by our sewn lips. It's time to breathe fire and leave behind scorched earth.
 

On being the madwoman in the attic: What "Jane Eyre" taught me about women's anger. By Vanessa Zoltan. Salon, July 17, 2021.

Vanessa Zoltan is a trailblazer in the spheres of religion as well as literary criticism. A self-proclaimed “atheist Jew” chaplain, she explains in her new book, “Praying With Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice,” that ritualistic deep analysis of your favorite novels (or even TV shows) can be a form of prayer.

 
She came to her realization while studying at the Harvard Divinity School and feeling a lack of connection with traditional religious texts. Zoltan wondered if she could forge a similar type of meaning-making from a rigorous analysis of Charlotte Brontë's “Jane Eyre,” working with a mentor and peers to treat one of her favorite books as sacred.
 
The concept was so successful that Zoltan evolved it into a weekly book club, then a podcast about Harry Potter, and now, a media company. Today, Zoltan is the CEO and founder of Medford-based Not Sorry Productions, which produces literature-meets-spirituality podcasts like “Harry Potter and the Sacred Text” and “The Real Question,” facilitates more than 100 local meet-up groups around the world, and holds a series of international pilgrimages that explore sacred reading and writing.
 
In her book, Zoltan’s tender and intelligent essays cover themes from hope to heartbreak to obsession, through the lens of real-life experiences, triumphs, and trauma paired with literary quotes and plot analysis. Zoltan also includes a detailed guide for the reader to do the same with their own beloved texts. Each of her essays, she explains, is meant as a sermon. Each time a reader engages with a text as sacred, they’re really engaging in an act of faith — and one of love. In advance of the book’s release this week, we sat down to chat over the phone.
 
A. There’s a long tradition of text being sacred because it’s divinely inspired. But the way that we do it, I would argue, is no better or worse — it’s just different. What we’re saying is sacred can be an act, not a thing. That it’s the relationship between you and the text that makes it sacred.
 
 
Q. How do you create that relationship?
 
A. We have four levels of criteria for a sacred text. The first is a recommendation, that you should love it. Living in a sacred relationship with a text is an arduous process, so it’s best to do it with something you are predisposed to love. Then there’s faith, rigor, and community. Faith means you believe the more time you spend with the text, the more gifts it will give you — even if it sometimes frustrates or disappoints you. Rigor means a commitment that every day for five minutes you read your text. The last is community. It’s not necessary, but it deepens the relationship between you and the text. It’s like having a gym buddy.
 
Q. Why did you decide to focus this book on “Jane Eyre”?
 
A. In my childhood, my mom kept telling me I was too young for “Jane Eyre,” so when she finally gave it to me for my 14th birthday, I couldn’t wait to read it. In Judaism, we would say “beshert” — Jane and I were meant to be. Or, as Rochester would say, it was meant to be my “best earthly companion.” I read it again in college and in my mid 20s, and I haven’t put it down since. It enchanted me.
 
Q. I loved it, but it’s been a while since I read it. What about it is so continually enchanting?
 
A. It’s a book that is messy enough that it can meet you wherever you are in your life. I used to think it was a book about true love — Rochester and Jane can hear each other’s voices across hundreds of miles. But now I see it as a book that’s entirely about resistance. The start of chapter two is, “I resisted all the way.” It’s passionate enough and weird enough that you can have this complicated conversation with it.
 
Q. I was intrigued by the practices you described that can be considered treating a text as sacred — particularly florilegia and marginalia. I’ve been doing these things since I was a kid.
 
A. Yes! Many readers have probably kept a quote journal. That’s called florilegia and it’s a medieval Christian practice that’s typically done with the Psalms. You write down “sparklets” — phrases, words, sentences that sparkle up at you. When you’re done, you read your own florilegia journal. Then you start over again. Marginalia is taking seriously what is written in the margins of your book, which many readers do — where you underlined or wrote an exclamation point or a “wow!” That’s also a codified Christian practice from the Middle Ages.
 
 
Q. The book includes serious considerations of your Jewish history and ancestry, and the fact that all four of your grandparents were in the Holocaust. How did you decide how to approach that?
 
A. The whole book is an attempt to address my grandparents’ stories and the stories of people who died in the Holocaust. That group are victims of genocide. To a large extent, we are all inheritors of trauma. I think it’s important to resist the meaning-making of trauma. I don’t believe that the poor shall inherit the earth; I believe that we should have no poor people. I don’t like glorifying suffering.
 
The way for me to look directly at the horrors that they went through was through “Jane Eyre.” It’s like a solar eclipse — it’s too strong to look directly at it. If I actually contemplated what they went through, I think it would so thoroughly devastate me, and it would be futile. And so I have to look at it through one of those cut-out things for an eclipse — the cardboard cutout for me is “Jane Eyre.”
 
Q. Your book made me think about the necessity of deeper reading, instead of quickly finishing a book and shelving it. How do you recommend pursuing that on an individual level?
 
A. The place to start is to give yourself permission to re-read. Sometimes we treat books like trophies — I know I do. We’ll say, “I’ve read this many books this year! Look at my shelf!” But, it’s OK to spend time re-reading one book, and having faith that that time you are spending with the book is a gift. Also, when you’re in distress, turn to the book.
 
Q. Do people do that often when they’re distressed?
 
A. Certainly with the Harry Potter books. I’ve met so many people — one says every year on the anniversary of their father’s death they reread “Prisoner of Azkaban,” where Harry thinks he sees his father. It’s not only OK, it’s important to do that. You can ask the books to make you braver and better at loving.
 
Q. I’m interested in definitions here — we’re looking at texts in a loving and humanistic way, but also we’re talking about praying. So, what is praying?
 
A. It’s so many things. Right now I’ll say that praying is talking to something that you don’t know and asking for help. I may have a different answer in five minutes.
 
 
 
Vanessa Zoltan on ‘Praying With Jane Eyre’ and how pop culture can be sacred. By Gina Tomaine. Boston Globe, July 4, 2021.

Vanessa Zoltan, author of the recently published Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice, is not your usual chaplain. She is an atheist who produces podcasts about treating Harry Potter, Twilight, and romance novels as sacred texts, and she runs pilgrimages and walking tours that explore sacred reading and writing. In this episode, Vanessa talks with Eve and Julie about what on earth (or in heaven or hell) drew her to attend divinity school despite being a devout atheist. She explains how her spiritual education led her to find sacred engagement in her favorite secular books and how, particularly in the case of Jane Eyre, textual examination helped her navigate (but not forgive) problematic, contradictory, and racist narratives. Vanessa also shares advice for how we can read any book as a sacred text.

 
Eve: It was during your time at divinity school that you decided to try treating Jane Eyre as sacred. I have a bunch of questions. The first is why? Why then? Why do it? What does it mean to treat something as sacred?
 
Vanessa: What happened? I had mono, so I had a fever, but my favorite professor was preaching really close to my dorm room, and so I was able to walk even with my fever. She was preaching on the Song of Solomon, and she was preaching specifically on the piece of text that love is stronger than death. That moment of text reminded me of Jane Eyre—in particular, Rochester saying, “Be my best earthly companion,” which is a line that I love a great deal from Jane Eyre.
 
I was sitting in this church thinking about “best earthly companion,” which I would say is quite an atheist way of looking at marriage. And nothing negative was triggered for me, right? Whereas when the Shema is sung in temple, I picture all of my relatives who were saying the Shema as the gas came out of the showers. It is just a very unfortunately triggering prayer for me. And so I was like, “Ooh, I only have positive associations with Jane Eyre.” And so I wrote to that professor, Stephanie Paulsell, “Hey, this sounds weird, but can you please teach me how to pray but instead of with the Torah with Jane Eyre?” And I think that’s actually a very Jewish instinct. Rather than try to learn how to pray extemporaneously, learn how to pray with the text.
 
And she’s a Christian minister, but she said yes. And so we really spent a semester rereading Jane Eyre quite rigorously and doing some close reading. And then she just kept assigning me books to try to figure out what it meant to treat a text as sacred.

Listen....
 
Sacred Text.  Vanessa Zoltan Guests on the Book Dreams Podcast.  LitHub, August 19, 2021.

Website Vanessa Zoltan

I have been a longtime fan of Vanessa Zoltan’s work as the co-host of the brilliant podcast, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. I am also an avid romance novel reader. So I was delighted to learn that Zoltan was starting a new podcast, Hot & Bothered, which proposes that writing romance novels can be a sacred practice. The first season profiles romance novel-writing neophytes grappling with the writing process, and includes discussions with romance novelists, academics, and cultural critics about the romance genre. Although the podcast celebrates romantic love, it also focuses on the often complicated, non-romantic relationships people have with writing, identity, and friends and family, among other topics. Presiding over the process is the New York Times best-selling romance novelist Julia Quinn, whose beloved Bridgerton Series is currently being adapted into a Netflix series by Shonda Rhimes.
 
 Zoltan, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, worked as a non-denominational chaplain before becoming CEO of Not Sorry Productions. The feminist organization, which she also co-founded, produces Harry Potter & the Sacred Text and Hot & Bothered, creates educational workshops and live shows, and runs Common Ground literary pilgrimages.
 
CAILEY HALL: Hot & Bothered focuses on romance novel writing as a sacred practice, which builds on the work you have done reading Harry Potter as a sacred text. What does the sacred mean to you? How do you define it?
 
VANESSA ZOLTAN: What I mean by the sacred is something that you are in an intentional relationship with that gets you better at loving. Some people can treat their kids as sacred. Some people treat their relationship with their plants as sacred. I’m stealing from St. Augustine’s Confessions, where he says that if the lesson you get from reading the Bible is that the love of God and the love of man is one love, or that God is love, then you are reading the Bible correctly. And if you are getting a different message, then you’re reading it wrong. I think the same is true for the sacred. If it is getting you better at loving your fellow man in the world, then I think you are in a relationship with something sacred.
 
CH : Thinking about the relationship between the sacred and love, I’m interested in what led you to want to make a podcast about romance novels. You begin theorizing this in the first episode of Hot & Bothered, where you say that romance novels often seem like they’re trying to conjure good men, and imagine happy endings in a way that still feels difficult to do in the real world.
 
VZ : I have always been a sucker for stories about love, but I thought that I was too smart for romance novels. And then Trump got elected. Someone had sent me The Duke and I by Julia Quinn years before, and it was sitting on my Kindle. I read it because I wanted something “dumb” to distract me. But I realized romance novels are cathartic, inspirational, and not dumb — they’re brilliant. My favorite quote about this comes from Ursula K. Le Guin responding to accusations that her writing is escapist: “Nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom.” That’s how I feel about romance. They’re not about escaping from reality, but to imagination.
 
We are in this moment when we are realizing that there is a literal conspiracy of high-powered men subjugating women. I just read the Alan Dershowitz article in The New Yorker. These stories are never ending. Even someone like Michelle Williams isn’t exempt. You can be a successful actress and get $80 a day, while Mark Wahlberg is going to get paid close to a $1 million a day. I think romance novels are a way for us to get better at imagining the men we deserve, and the way we deserve to be treated, and then demanding it.
 
CH : This season, each of your writers is focusing on a specific trope. What are your thoughts on the productive confines of tropes?
 
VZ :
Tropes offer a safety net of knowing that everything is going to end well. Because everything is going to end well, you get to go to deeper places of despair, where you think that someone is dead, or that a relationship is irreparable. We are often scared to confront despair, or we exploit already exploited people in order to confront despair. White people love going to movies about slavery and then feeling like they did their good deed for the day. Romance novels allow you to confront despair in a more productive way.
 
Tropes also give you just enough structure to allow for freedom. We all know this: if you’re given too much freedom, you don’t know what to do, and you end up completely overwhelmed and confused. The episode that I’m currently writing is about my friend, Olivia, and her wife Molly, who chose the trope “secret baby” because they were having a hard time getting pregnant. They wanted to imagine a story about being able to get pregnant by accident. It freed them up to imagine happiness for the two of them as parents. The fact that a happy ending — and a happy ending with a baby — was a foregone conclusion, allowed them to work through a lot of their feelings, and to realize that they would be happy no matter how they made a family. While we were interviewing them about the writing process, they became foster parents.
 
CH : The episodes so far have focused on writing as an often difficult process, and all the complicated emotions writing brings up. Did you expect that the podcast would confront people’s relationship to writing and to themselves?
 
VZ : A lot of people look at romance novels and think: I can do that. Turns out it’s hard! When I first started treating secular things as sacred, I asked my professor, Stephanie Paulsell, to teach me how to pray. I couldn’t pray with the Torah because the language about God was too distracting and difficult for me. So I asked if we could pray using Jane Eyre. We talked about reading, writing, and walking as forms of prayer. Traditionally, writing has also been a female way to pray, for political reasons. I consider writing the romance novels that I write — that I have no intention of publishing — to be my way of praying. Prayer is hard. You don’t always want to pray. You are in a fluctuating relationship with whatever it is you are praying to. You are in a relationship of doubt. A prayer life is not an easy life. Any life of dedication is relentless. It never ends.
 
It’s the same with writing a romance novel. If you are committed to writing 10,000 words in three months, it is relentless. The task hangs over your head. And if the process is relentlessly getting you better at loving, then I would say that is a good relationship to have. It works for some people. Hot & Bothered is offering them this invitation: here is a different way you can pray. Here is a different way you can be in a constant relationship with love, and romance, and goodness, and despair, and hope. But it isn’t going to be effective for everyone. Writing can be masochistic for some people. I don’t think it’s for everyone. But I also don’t think that something has to be right for everyone in order to be mostly a force for good.
 
CH : Could you say more about the historical reasons that writing as a form of prayer has been a traditionally female practice?
 
VZ : Stephanie Paulsell’s term for this is scriptio divina, or “sacred writing” (from the Latin lectio divina, or “sacred reading”). When women are sequestered, writing is one of the few things they can do. And writing has been a form in which they can discreetly dissent. A great example of this is Teresa of Avila. There’s also a tradition of women claiming God is telling them to do things, and therefore the church can’t silence them. Hildegard of Bingen claimed that God was writing through her. There are these moments that are available to women throughout history and they grab them through writing — or preaching. In the Methodist tradition in the United States, they believed that God could tell you that you were a preacher, and that was your ordination. There was this brief loophole moment where Black women could declare: ‘Guess what, God told me I’m a preacher.’ And then they closed the loophole. But there are these great grabs for power amongst women, claiming the voice of God is going through them, claiming religious authority, and using writing as a mechanism for dissent.
 
 
CH : I love that you’re tracing a literary genealogy from someone like Teresa of Avila through to contemporary romance novels.
 
VZ : It’s what women do now, by self-publishing through Amazon. It’s why I can’t totally hate Amazon. It has allowed writers in rural areas, who wouldn’t have access to New York publishers, to self-publish — and sometimes find an audience. Self-publishing is this moment of women and other marginalized groups claiming their own authority and saying: these gate-keepers aren’t working for me. So they find other markets.
 
CH : Yet romance novels are still more stigmatized than other genre literature.
 
VZ : My first question to anyone who thinks romance novels are stupid is: have you read one? And they almost always haven’t. As soon as I started reading romance novels, I found that so many brilliant people read them. And I thought, Why was I a snob for so long? I’m also convinced that if men wrote these books, people would talk about them differently. John Updike made a career of writing marriage novels. Why is he winning Pulitzers while romance as a whole genre is derided? I want to say: Just imagine John Updike wrote this romance novel and tell me what you think.
 
CH : Hot & Bothered has already focused on different kinds of relationships beyond the romantic. You examine relationships between friends, between parents and children, between mentors and mentees. The podcast is showing the different kinds of communities that romance reading makes possible. Did you anticipate that this would be something the podcast would develop?
 
VZ : It definitely came about holistically. I’ve realized that I don’t like focusing on romantic love as the be-all-end-all. A lot of romance authors focus on female friendships. I love that about the genre. If my romantic relationship were to fall apart, I would still have friends and a very rich love life. I think you can’t talk closely about romance novels without talking about more than attraction and first kisses. If we’re going to talk about love, it’s important to talk about all forms of love.
 
We’re doing an episode on friends-to-lovers. It’s such an interesting trope — what is the difference between a friend and lover? Is it really just the sex? And we realized: No, there are sacrifices once you’re not someone’s friend but their partner. One of the benefits of being friends with someone is that they can piss you off, and you can just take a while and think about it. There’s more space for mistakes. Whereas if [my partner] Peter and I make a mistake with each other, we have to confront it immediately because we have to eat dinner together that night. It’s a different dynamic. It’s weird that we put a value judgment on one being better than the other, when they’re just totally different from each other.
 
CH :
What is in store for upcoming episodes? And potential future seasons?
 
VZ : We have a ministry rule, which is that you preach from your scars, not your wounds. And I am concerned that in Hot & Bothered, I am telling stories from a few wounds, rather than scars. We’re going to talk soon about a man who lied to me for years, and was married the whole time we were dating. You can’t talk about love in romance without talking about your own love life. And that is something that I didn’t anticipate. We’re also talking about babies, betrayal, motherhood, religion, and friendship. Those are some of the big things coming up.
 
In future seasons, I want to focus on two of the biggest consumers of romance novels: women in prisons and women in nursing homes. I would like to do sacred reading in those spaces. I think there are endless seasons. Reading romance as an Amish person? Romance is a complex ecosystem that we want to spend a lot of time in, and that deserves more attention than just one season. I want this to be a reality show. Everyone talks about how great “The Great British Bake Off” is because it’s kind. But what’s kinder than people who love reading romance novels?
 
Writing Romance Novels as a Sacred Practice: An interview with Vanessa Zoltan. By Cailey Hall. Los Angeles Review of Books, August 11, 2019.