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  • The Steady Beat of the Great Creator
  • Stephanie Paulsell (bio)

A little over a hundred years ago, a young writer, still in her apprenticeship to her vocation, visited a medieval church in a village in West Suffolk, England. Although only twenty-four years old, she had already experienced terrible losses; in the last ten years, her mother, her father, and one of her sisters had died. Months later, although she had no inkling of this as she wandered through the meadows and fens of West Suffolk, a beloved brother would be dead as well.

This young woman had lived through several bouts of what her doctors called madness, which ranged from periods of severe depression to the intrusion of voices she could not block out. Once, she heard birds speaking Greek in a tree outside her window. Two years earlier, she had tried to kill herself.

Throughout all that had happened to her, this young woman had clung to the practice of writing. In addition to the stories and story fragments on which she was constantly at work, she kept a journal to experiment with form and voice, to test the weight and heft of words. Each time she became tormented by voices in her head or disappeared into depression, her journal fell silent. But the instinct to write "wells," as she put it, "like sap in a tree,"1 and she always returned to keeping a diary. She started back slowly each time, with a word, a description, a shopping list. A sentence, two sentences. A ladder of words she climbed back into life, a wheel of words she turned and turned until it began to sing.

The daughter of a famous agnostic, this young woman was not a Christian, emphatically not. On a rare visit to a church service nine years earlier, she had refused, on principle, to kneel—although she did find the hymns "splendid." On the Sunday of her visit to the church in West Suffolk, she regarded the people she saw making their way to services with a kind of bemused wonder. One could understand such piety in the long-ago days when local sheep-farming thrived, she reasoned, but what could account for it now?

When she recorded the day in her journal, however, it was to religious language that she turned as she tried to find words for the connection she sensed between her creativity and a larger, more encompassing creative force. "Don't I feel," she asked herself, "the steady beat of the great Creator as I write; & doesn't the Church there record its pulse this evening, & for six hundred years of evenings such as these?"2 [End Page 91]

This young writer's name was Virginia Stephen, who, six years later, would become Virginia Woolf. Her conviction that the practice of writing connected her to what she would later call "something in the universe that one's left with . . . a fin passing far out"3 runs throughout her work her whole life long. The language Woolf will later use to describe the distant presence she experienced through writing pointed more to the invisible connections that thread through all of life than it did to God. But in West Suffolk, as a young writer still discovering what she is able to do with words, Virginia Stephen turned to the language of the creator God to describe the larger creativity of which she felt her own practice of writing to be a part.

When my mother gave me the first volume of Virginia Woolf's letters the Christmas after my first semester in college, she launched me into an ardent reading of Woolf's writings. I was drawn to this thread in her work, her attempt to say what the practice of writing meant in her life. Writing meant so many things to her: independence, vocation, devotion, rapture, struggle, ecstasy. Although Woolf would not have put it this way, her practice of writing seemed to me deeply religious.

Writing has always seemed to me a kind of religious practice, and so I have been drawn to writers who hint at a similar conviction. Or perhaps it is the other way around, and...

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