Let’s begin with your recent memoir, Easter Everywhere. I was touched by this book, perhaps because it is so intimate, as if you were retelling a story to a close friend. It talks about your fluctuating relationship with God, and the stages of your life when you questioned the ideology of the Lutheran church. Do you think the process of rejecting ideology, authority, and order in society is necessary to regain a sense of certainty?

My relationship to God, or the Divine, or the Universe, whatever you want to call it, has always been rather rocky. I can never get comfortable with one set of ideas about the divine, or one practice. When I hear how people want set rules and how they get comfort from staid ideas (in religion), I can never ever identify with that.

We all have to work this out ourselves; we need the structures, the religions, the literature, the art and idea of people and groups that have come before… but we need to look at it honestly…

My relationship to the universe has been defined by confusion and chaos, great love too, and hope. Also much doubt. I have gone through many phases. As you mention, my memoir narrates my young life as the child of a minister and then my falling away from church, and then in my thirties coming back to an interest in theology, and ideas of God. Since I finished that book I have had many more phases and ideas. I had several years of reading the Transcendentalists and being very interested in those ideas, of the transformative power of nature and man/woman as a part of that nature and therefore a natural part of the god head.

More recently I have been reading Trangpa. His book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, is very fine and influenced me a lot. I also read, many other Buddhist texts as well as the monk Thomas Merton’s Asian Journal. I have felt called to move through the idea of a finite God, or presence, even though my idea is not all that finite. I feel the move for me has to be to give up any preconceived ideas of the divine so as to get closer to it. I must unknow what I think I know. It’s only through unknowing that I can have any direct experience of the raw universe. This summer, I read a lot of William James and his idea that thinking and the movement of the mind is divinity itself very much thrilled me.

Do I think, to get to your question directly, that you have to look at your belief system carefully and see where its acquired and where it has real life, energy and movement that can push you and help you — absolutely, no one should rely on some big institution for redemption (Church or University). We all have to work this out ourselves; we need the structures, the religions, the literature, the art and idea of people and groups that have come before… but we need to look at it honestly and make sure it’s ALIVE FOR US.

Contemporary memoir writers often recount their travels around the world or outside of their element, in search of spiritual connections or in hopes of life-changing events. But you’ve unpacked an experience much closer to home; your upbringing as a minister’s daughter in suburbia. You describe everyday culture of adolescent Americana; Cherry coke, Kmart, Tiger Beat magazine. Do you feel more of a connection to writing about daily events, as a bridge back to psychological and spiritual struggles?

In Sanskrit I have heard that the word for writer is “Piler into Piles,” and I think that is perfect. What we do as writers is to collect sensory details of all kinds — sights, smells, how sand feels or cashmere — and we use all of these thousands of senses to build a narrative. That happens as you say in the daily, I mean whether you travel around or not, all you really have is the day-to-day, the warm rich sent of your beef stew or the drowsy feeling on a late winter afternoon. We must make our fictional worlds with what we know, materially, emotionally, sensually and so yes, I think the day-to-day is key, really. You don’t need to travel the world to think of yourself as a complex person or a spiritual individual.

Which genre do you feel most compelled to write in?

I like both nonfiction and fiction. I really don’t have one I like better. For me, to pick would be like saying I liked one of my children better then the other. I find nonfiction very helpful in telling my own story to others, but also to myself. To me that’s what memoir is: you tell your story to your own self, and it helps one to feel centered in life, or at least to get down what one part of life was like. I feel the need to write about the self often comes when you see your life for a while as a story that can be told; it has a slant, it has a theme. Most of life is not like this of course; it is just chaotic life.

Fiction is more about the unconscious I feel, and about desires that go deep into the hidden soul and mind.

Language, or artistic expression as a whole, could be said to be only a symbol for reality. Aldous Huxley, for example, regarded writing and art as an “elegantly composed recipe, rather than the actual dinner.” Do you think writing is a limited form of expression or has writing always been fulfilling to you?

I am driven to write and I have been since I was a little girl. I wrote poems as a child and as young as ten I wrote every day in my journal. I had a bad stutter as a child. In my speech there was no way for me to be fluent or have any grace, so I went to the page very young to find flow and music in language.

I get frustrated at times with what I am working on, and I have had, like all writers, stories that have not worked and have had to be abandoned, but I still feel strongly drawn to the daily work of writing.

I have great faith in books. Do they solve all problems? Of course not. But some of the most meaningful conversations I have had with others, the deepest communion, has been about books.

Do you use other artistic mediums (besides writing) to express yourself?

I wish I had more things I could do! I can’t draw or paint. For a while, I was in a rock band called Ruffian with my girlfriends and we played out some in clubs around New York City and Brooklyn. That was great fun. We started the band as we were all going through bad breakups and rather than talk about it all the time, we decided to do something more pro-active. So we bought guitars, started to learn to play a few notes, and then started to write songs. I still have my guitar by my bed, but I am sad to say it does not get used much lately. I also like to collect things for my little house in Brooklyn. I have a tiny Victorian and I like to find cheap things at thrift stores to decorate it. I just found an old Exit sign!