Cultivating Inspiration to Create
A Review of
Break, Blow, Burn, and Make: A Writer’s Thoughts on Creation
E. Lily Yu
Hardcover: Worthy Books, 2024
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Reviewed by Tommy Welty
The right word can create or wound. Consider the kind words of a friend in the midst of grief’s fog. Or, maybe remember a sharp critique when you needed compassion. Words have power. The Christian confesses that it is a spoken word that calls the cosmos into being and that we overcome by the words of our testimony. In Break, Blow, Burn and Make, E. Lily Yu writes, “Used rightly, language hallows. It concentrates life and attention to life, reminds us of what is holy, and leaves us alert, awake, and startled by the wonder of the world and the word” (114).
Break, Blow, Burn and Make is a deftly written and devotional collection of essays on faith and writing. The temptation for sentimentalism or sermonizing when discussing writing and faith is there but E. Lily Yu capably resists both. I enthusiastically annotated and wrote marginalia until what wasn’t marked became the exception. The clarity of thought, careful arguments, and precision of language helps E. Lily Yu’s collection sit confidently on the shelf with the great cloud of witnesses she draws from such as George MacDonald, Madeleine L’Engle, James Baldwin, and Annie Dillard. In a closing chapter she writes: “Although in the end we are alone with God, alone answerable for our lives and decisions, alone choosing to say either ‘Thy will be done’ or ‘My will be done,’ we are not without models, comforters, and teachers” (189).
Alluding to MacDonald’s golden thread, these essays are woven together in a three act structure. The first section opens with an illustration of a withered leaf and in it Yu makes the case that much of literature is devoid of “love, wisdom, grace, and light” (24). The second essay “Reading Badly, Reading Well” – which deserves its own in-depth engagement – outlines how puritanical writing diminishes the reader as a person in the world. “The claim that reading is a moral act because it produces empathy is so common and accepted nowadays,” Yu says, “that most people do not stop to wonder why, exactly, reading must be morally justified, unlike singing, dancing, drawing, driving, golfing, diving, or climbing Mount Everest” (41). To recover quality reading Yu insists the reader must not read as an act of moral development or as a practice of empathy but rather the reader must develop discernment, “The reader who would redeem reading must cultivate a keen discernment, tasting and testing what is good and pursuing that. This, of course, is the responsibility of the Christian as well” (53).
In the second section of the book, which opens with an illustration of leaves on a branch, Yu moves into the practices of writing. In this, the longest part of the book, Yu discusses vocation, craft, inspiration, courage, and solitude. It is only in the essay, “Craft,” where I felt the book lag. It’s not that the essay was poorly written but rather it seemed offered with a shrug. Yu introduces the craft talk with “… writers have generally agreed upon a number of skills and principles that are core to the craft. I will lay some of them out briefly, along with what I know, and the books that I have found most helpful. The reader may take what is useful and leave the rest” (107).
But the second section’s opening essay, “Vocation,” was a personal highlight. Yu writes that “Every person, I believe, has been created with a holy and royal purpose. Each one of us has been placed on this planet to do at least one beautiful thing that no one else is capable of doing” (94). Much of what she’s writing transcends the specifics of fiction writing and addresses all of life. Yu challenges and invites the reader to understand that: “One clings to one’s status, one’s skill, one’s identity as an artist, as others cling to job titles, political affiliations and family roles, to avoid standing a naked human being in the vastness of eternity, seeing that we are like grass that withers, and finding in that moment, that we are staggeringly loved” (90-91).
The final section opens with an illustration of a mature tree, recalling the words of the first psalm that those who meditate on the Word will be like a tree near life-giving waters. It is in this third group of essays on the spirituality of reading and writing that Yu treads into life-giving waters. Break, Blow Burn, and Make is not a theology of writing but rather an exploration of writing as an act of faith. Though she draws on the theology of N.T. Wright in Surprised by Hope and Makoto Fujimura in Art + Faith these essays are more devotional in nature than theological.
Yu concludes the book with something of a purpose statement: “I wish to set aflame those for whom the book is written, who will know who they are, with longing for the one light shining out of history and the arts that is older and brighter than all creation. I am writing to draw closer to the kingdom of God” (217). In this Break, Blow, Burn, and Make is a success. Finishing, I picked up pen and paper to write poems and prayers.
Tommy Welty
Tommy Welty is a pastor and poet in Southern California where he lives with his wife and children. His writing has appeared in Ekstasis, Solum Literary Press, Stone Circle Review, and elsewhere.
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