Today I’m happy to welcome Andrea Palpant Dilley, a gifted writer (and fellow Whitworth alum :)) whose memoir Faith and Other Flat Tires tells the story of her crisis of faith, her walk away from the church and her journey back. You can read more about that here. Today, Andrea talks about how she balances her dual roles of mom and writer.

Andrea, tell us something about yourself.
I spent part of my childhood in Kenya as the daughter of Quaker medical volunteers and imagined myself growing up to be an expat serving on another continent. Now I live in a small suburban house in Austin, Texas. The scope of my life is much smaller than I once envisioned. My husband Steve teaches philosophy at a Catholic university down the road while I pass most of my time filling the kiddie pool out back, frying fish sticks in the kitchen for my three-year-old, and breastfeeding my two-month-old.

Madeline, my eldest, has no idea that I’m competent at anything requiring more than a first grade education. She knows that I can read her the picture book “Ox Cart Man.” She has no idea that for the first two years of her life I struggled to produce my first book and that now I’m trying to write a second. She has no idea that I have a degree in English literature, or that I used to work professionally as a journalist and then as a documentary producer/director. My kids, though, are my best accomplishment, if you can even call them that. They are, like everything else, a gift.

You’re obviously a busy woman. What choices do you make to balance home life with writing?
Raymond Carver said in Fires that he “understood writers to be people who didn’t spend their Saturdays at the laundromat and every waking hour subject to the needs and caprices of their children.” He lived in tension between his art and his family. I live inside that tension, too.

I often write in the margins of my day, often after my husband Steve gets home from work. The other night at seven p.m., I found myself sitting in the driver’s seat of my Honda, not traveling anywhere, but writing in the driveway. Steve was putting the kids to bed. The house was too noisy and the café down the street was too noisy, so my car had to suffice as a quiet space. My neighbor walked by and gave me this look, as if to say, “What in the world are you doing?” I wanted to roll down the window and say, “This is what it looks like to be a mother and a writer. Glamorous, isn’t it.”

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
My five-year-old niece the other day was walking around the house saying, “Just glue your butt in the chair! Just glue your butt in the chair!” She thought it was the most hilarious phrase. Her dad, my older brother, had been talking to her about doing her homework, but it’s good advice for writing, too. Most writers have messy, complicated lives. I’m one of them. I can’t afford to “wait for the muse.” I have to force the muse by just sitting down at my desk (or in my car) and putting one word in front of the other. It’s painful but productive.

Which are your top three favorite reads from the last year and why?
Well, to be perfectly honest, I’ve only had time to read one book this last year. By the time I have a moment to myself—usually in the evenings—I’m either writing under deadline, catching up on email, or crashed out on the couch watching a TV show. But I did have time to read Lauren Winner’s Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. I like her writing style. She’s sparse, straightforward, insightful, and self-deprecating. After reading about her conversion story in Girl Meets God, it was kind of a relief to find out that even Lauren Winner—this smart, accomplished professor, writer, and speaker—struggles with faith in those mundane, middle spaces of life.

My experience of struggling with faith is a fairly common one. For those of us who struggle, we sometimes hide and stigmatize our own doubt. But all we have to do is look at Job, Lamentations, and the Psalms to find that doubt can be a healthy part of faith. After coming back to the church, I felt a clear calling to write about my spiritual crisis. I wanted to normalize that experience and tell a story that brought doubt back inside the space of the sanctuary.

Tell us about why you wrote your book, Faith and Other Flat Tires.
Active doubt (as opposed to passive skepticism) can be a vital, soul-searching part of faith. In Mark 9:24, a man says to Jesus, “I believe, help my unbelief.” Flannery O’Connor calls this the foundation prayer of faith. During my own faith crisis, people gave me space to pray that “prayer of unbelief.” In writing this book, I hope to offer that same safe space to others.

What was the best part about writing your book? Most challenging?
As an undergraduate English major, I had a very romanticized idea of what it meant to publish a book. I pictured myself being hoisted on the shoulders of my community and carried through the public square, so to speak. Now I’m looking at the publishing experience from inside, and it feels more like limping through the public square, feeling lonely and vulnerable. I’ve put myself out there not only in terms of my story—which I tell candidly—but also in terms of craft. So the experience of self-exposure has been the hardest part of writing and publishing this book.

The flip side is that, by being open and honest about my own faith struggle, I get to have some pretty profound interactions with readers. After reading my memoir, a college student sent me a long letter in which she described herself as a “worn out theist” who felt like the book “offer[ed] solidarity in the ongoing struggle of the human condition.” I take her feedback as the greatest compliment, that somehow my work has spoken into the malaise of modern life and the search for meaning. (As a side note, she became a Christian a few months after we started dialoging. It was God’s hand in her heart and not mine, but I was privileged to play some small part.)

And finally, why does story matter to you?
A friend of mine used to say, “All we have are our secrets.” In some ways, I agree with him. Our private pain, our private joy, those are the experiences that define us and make us unique. In other ways, I disagree with him. I believe in transparency in community. If we can’t share our stories openly and honestly, what do we have left but our lonely, isolated selves? I love it when people open up about their stories, past or present. It feels like such a privilege to enter in. That’s what story gives us—that “entrance” into each other’s lives. [Comment from kj: Love that!] The space of faith, in particular, requires solidarity. The more we share our stories, the more we come into community. The more we travel together as pilgrims on the same, long road.

For more information on Andrea, visit www.andreapalpantdilley.com. Faith and Other Flat Tires is available at amazon.com, zondervan.com, Barnes & Noble, and local bookstores.