Ideas in Progress: Julie Durbin on vocation, mission, teaching, and the creative life (Part II)

In part I of this interview, you told the fascinating story of the many hats you have worn and currently wear—missionary and traveler, writer and musician, and of course, professor. So, let’s pick up now with this last one, in honor of the recent conclusion of the spring semester. What are your favorite classes to teach?  

Ever since fall 2017 when I was invited to join the team that teaches our introductory humanities course at Geneva College, that has been my favorite. The course was created by Eric Miller and Shirley Kilpatrick, and it brings together cultural history, literature, philosophy, and theology in a pursuit of good questions, namely, what does it mean to be human and what is the good life?

Our most recent song I wrote was an homage to the course. Written with my husband, Fred, it’s called “Have a Carrot,” a reference to The Runaway Bunny, which featured in Shirley’s lecture on the humanities as a quest. We wrote and performed it for a party that was billed as the twenty-year reunion of HUM 103, but it was also Shirley’s retirement party. [Editor’s note: readers may also enjoy reading or re-reading Shirley Kilpatrick’s own lovely essay in Current earlier this spring, The Carrot, The Onion, and The Pomegranate]

When people find out that you’ve written a song, they want to know what your intentions are: Recording? Publishing? A life of fame and fortune? I’d say getting to sing our song for Shirley, surrounded by people whose lives have been changed by Eric and Shirley’s work, was the best life I could wish for a song.

But to get back to the course itself and why I love teaching it: As a former missiology student, I’ll say the course works on gospel contextualization. If God is real, so what? What questions should we then be asking about life? In classes for my intercultural studies degree, we read about the danger—and prevalence—of shallow conversion, where the gospel doesn’t permeate to shape consciousness at the deep level of worldview. Where you get a church to start, but if people really get sick, it’s back to the witchdoctor. And that’s what happens when Christians don’t keep asking the fundamental questions of life, with great earnestness, in healthy communities.

Another favorite to teach is the worship course at Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, New York. Students who take it come from a variety of denominational and cultural backgrounds, and the course is a broad historical, theological, and practical study of Christian worship. It’s a subject I care deeply about, and it’s helpful to have a rhythm of returning to it each summer with dedicated graduate students.

I have also taught developmental reading and writing for the last twelve years. In these classes, I’ve been learning to pay attention and remember that students are people, and there are many reasons a student may need help. It’s something I must learn anew every day of every semester. My hope is to help students enter the world of words and find their place in it.

You teach writing, but you also compose music—and I love the story about the song you composed in connection with the Humanities course! How did this particular interest come about? What inspires you to create–whether writing or music?

I have more experience performing than composing. My aunt started teaching me piano when I was six, my family often sang in church, and I have been leading worship in one way or another for about 25 years. In college, I learned mezzo-soprano arias, like, “Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix,” but also started to pick out the chords to “Zombie” by the Cranberries on my first little guitar.

Songwriting in general has been a sporadic but energizing hobby. As a child, I attempted one or two ambitious ballads meant to evangelize my imaginary hearers by covering the whole of the gospel in a few verses. They weren’t the best songs.

I finally had a little spurt of songwriting one year while I was living alone in Ukraine. I was reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and practicing her morning pages and artist’s dates, designed to help blocked artists feed their souls. And one day, I got a silly couplet stuck in my head: “Crows, pigeons, stray dogs and cats/are the only wild creatures who live where I’m at.” It came together with a tune, so I decided to crank out a song, feeling free to do so because it was just for fun, just silly. Later that year, I wrote a moody song about turning 33, and then I wrote another for my cousin’s wedding. I learned it was at least possible.

The impulse to make my own music was reinvigorated about a year into my marriage with Frederic S. Durbin, a novelist of speculative fiction who was finishing a book that captured my imagination. [Fred has also written for Current]. I wanted to spend more time with the characters and the world he’d created, so I started to doodle melodies on the piano, playing what developed into a kind of soundtrack. Because the story was set in an alternate 1880s, I opened my hymnal and messed with a few songs from that era. Soon, I found that similar tunes came to me, and we wrote a few hymns and songs together, what we call our “Hearken Songs” after the family name of the main characters.

More recently, I got to participate in a songwriting workshop run by Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist of Over the Rhine at their farm north of Cincinnati, Ohio. These workshops are an intense weekend of learning and listening with about 16 other people. Linford and Karin share their best secrets, give time for each songwriter to play and receive feedback on a song or two, and then put us in small bands to write and perform a song on the last day. It was wonderful. One piece of advice that sticks with me is, “make a collection.” Always be listening for great lines, for beautiful language, for images that you can’t stop thinking about. Whether you are ready to write or not, you can always be collecting.

On the way home, we spent a day in the city at a lovely library. There, I grabbed a few books off the shelf, and one of them was Mary Oliver’s Upstream. Among many others, I copied this line: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

What inspires me to create? It’s fun! It’s a way of tapping into my neglected soul. It feeds me with the best deep rest. Since marrying my husband and becoming friends with his friends, I have learned to recognize and almost hallow creativity. To give it space.

I’m inspired to create when I’m moved, particularly by a character I can relate to. I’m always looking for myself, and when I see a piece of myself in a character, that makes me want to absorb, dwell, think, write, paint, play melodies.

Or if I’m perturbed by something—angry, distressed, desiring to mend what feels irrevocably broken—I imagine that amazing essay I should write that would fix the world.

Two songs I’ve worked on recently reflect how inspiration or perturbation can be sources for creativity. “February Morning,” was inspired by both the Asbury revival and the East Palestine train wreck. I was walking between buildings after a morning class, tired and headachy as usual, but I felt something persistent inside, a humming of spiritual expectation, and I wanted to capture it in song.

On the way home from the workshop, my husband and I wrote another song called “Shadowboxing.” I started it in a fit of frustration over the political divide, particularly in the Church, and the way we can get into a pattern of demonizing others, creating monsters of our own imagining for our own temporary benefit. Such endeavors always end in death.

I loved your review essay for Current a few months ago. It was heartbreakingly powerful, but certainly needed. What are the questions that fascinate you in your reading, thinking, and writing? Any particular books that you have read recently that really stood out? 

I don’t have any large writing projects going, but there are important questions and issues that keep resurfacing for me.

In recent years, I’ve been very interested in work that explores the intersection of worship, liturgy, education, and public life. So James K. A. Smith’s books on cultural liturgies as well as The Liturgy of Politics by Kaitlyn Schiess are on the shelf next to me as I write this. I’m very interested in the power of our liturgies—whether practiced intentionally or not—to form and deform Christian community. We’re seeing political rallies joined to evangelical worship services in unholy matrimony, and a subverted gospel with a new set of reactionary pseudo-virtues proclaimed. (See Adam Perez’s work on Sean Feucht).

My two grad school experiences shared an emphasis on narrative. In Duquesne’s rhetoric program, it was narrative and communication ethics. In Biola’s intercultural studies program, it was narrative as an educational philosophy. Now I teach humanities with colleagues committed to the power of story to teach us who we are, to enliven the creative imagination, and to cultivate virtue.

I am interested in the stories we tell within communities, particularly the Church. When we devalue the humanities, when we rob ourselves of the lenses of history, language, literature, philosophy, and the arts, we become unable to perceive the story we are actually living in, let alone to recognize the stories we are telling.