Drought, Wildfire, and Lush Garden Imagery: An Interview with Laura Reece Hogan

Featured in the “More Organic Than It May Appear:” A Symposium on Creativity and Motherhood, Mary, Queen of Angels 2021 issue of Dappled Things.

Author, poet, mother, lawyer, and lay Carmelite, Laura Reece Hogan inhabits not a cloistered ivory tower in some faraway sheltered place but the real yet invisible world of God’s kingdom in the middle of a sunshine-filled California city. Weaving vivid poem-making and evocative essay-writing among her daily tasks, she manages to write clearly of that other heavenly kingdom through down-to-earth icons of birds, gardens, and God. 

Her poems in the chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press, 2017) are informed by creation in and around her home as well as the seasonal power of wildfires and precarious times of drought that impact life as a resident of the Golden State.

Song of the Sown

Who is the seedling heartbeat of the tree?
You were, and are, and ever shall be;
Yet, she-who-is-not also might come to be—
In muddy, graced intertwine of root and leaf.

. . . 

Yet between; ah, the joyful, painful between
Of simply with--a disintegrating unity
As sown seed gives over self to sod—Selah
And becomes green unfolding we. 

Each of the twenty poems in O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press, 2017) is arranged according to the story arc in Solomon’s Song of Songs and explores the Creator’s love for His beloved, rich with vibrant descriptions of Creation and grace.

In addition to her chapbook, Hogan has also written I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock, 2017) which considers the Apostle Paul’s view of joy in the face of suffering. Her full-length volume of poetry, Litany of Flights, was the first place winner of the 2020 Paraclete Poetry Prize and will be published by Paraclete Press in late fall of 2020.

Laura and I met virtually via Twitter after I discovered her work in the Poiema Poetry Series anthology, In a Strange Land: Introducing Ten Kingdom Poets (Cascade Books, 2019, edited by D.S. Martin), in which eight of her poems were featured, including “Litany of Flights.” 

The recollection of the many ways in which flight is embodied left vivid images that registered long after they were read. In a list of twelve “flights,” two in particular stand out:

The effortless type, wind-splayed, motionless pinions
in thermal recline, as the Psalmist says, blessings breeze his love even
in sleep…

in a moment, caught up high by the Beloved, the one
making all things work together, wings, body, arch, air—caught up, like the
Shulamite bride, to regions beyond aeronautical wisdom, transported in joy…

 Hogan’s penning of lyric poetry partnered with her vocation intrigued me. How does a left-brain thinker, holder of two degrees in law and theology, render such right-brain creative and artistic offerings? The online world makes many good things possible; I reached out to Laura with my questions.

Here is our conversation:

JC: You have several degrees in a variety of vocations: how did you make the leap from lawyering to lay Carmelite? And then again, the leap from counselor to creative writer? 

LRH: The leaping was more organic than it may appear. I grew up writing poetry and short stories. My first love was writing, but I also later became interested in law. In college I majored in English and found it difficult to choose between pursuing law or a PhD in English. The legal path won out, and for a while my writing was oriented to the law, both in scholarly journals and in the work I did as a lawyer. The next turn in my path came when I stayed home full-time to care for my young children. I began to write creatively again, and in retrospect I can see that I developed the visual quality of my writing during that time. I encountered the work of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross and it sparked a passionate interest in spiritual theology and the Carmelites. This deepened and eventually led to my Lay Carmelite vocation, and also to the MA in Theology at the seminary. The writing I have done over the last few years—both theological and poetic—is a culmination of all those pieces of my life. 

JC: An endorsement of I Live, No Longer I says, ”Laura Hogan . . . unpacks St. Paul’s rich theology of transformation in Christ through the lens of his cross. Theologically sophisticated, it is also highly personal, drawing on her ability to see God working in the ordinary, the everyday, and especially the painful. . . . Joy can coexist with suffering. This is because God is always present, though often hidden, in whatever darkness we experience to bring about personal transformation and closeness to God and others.” What in particular drew you to write this book about the Apostle Paul and his take on joy amidst suffering? 

LRH: Actually, Paul’s joy was the surprise of this project. I initially went to seminary to explore a different question, namely: if we suffer as part of the human condition, does that suffering have some kind of connection to the divine? The investigation started out as a look at self-abnegation as seen, for example, in the work of Jean Pierre de Caussade on self-abandonment. But everything I considered failed to really get to the important, deeper questions of why and how—was there transformative significance in suffering, and if so, how did it work? Enter St. Paul. My scripture professor loved to tease me about taking my biblical studies courses out of order—I did that because I had to take courses as they fit into my family’s schedule. But I now believe it was divine providence at work, because by the time I got to Pauline literature, I was primed to see the profound depth in Paul’s theology and personal spirituality. The more I dug into the Pauline text and the more I connected it to the practical aspects of my own spiritual experience, the more a distinctly Pauline spiritual theology emerged. In particular, I became increasingly aware of Paul’s experience of Jesus Christ according to three types of moments: experience of the divine in self-emptying, in community or creation, and in transformative union. The delightful surprise was that Paul’s rejoicing in the Lord was at its height in the confluence of these moments. To me, there is no greater encouragement during difficult times than that our relationship with God sustains all and encompasses all, and we can take joy in that relationship, that love, even as we also are experiencing pain or darkness. The book came out of wanting to share my experience of St. Paul’s valuable, life-changing insights with others. 

JC: The theme of your chapbook, O Garden-Dweller, revolves around the very tangible presence of place in your California home—your garden, a historic drought, California wildfires and the tapestry of words in Scripture’s Song of Songs . . . how did you decide to meld those disparate pieces together?

LRH: As a Lay Carmelite and contemplative, the Song of Songs holds a special place in my heart. Carmelites St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, as well as others such as the Cistercian St. Bernard of Clairvaux, considered the Song of Songs to be the scriptural text which describes the mystical relationship between God and the individual soul. Taken in this sense, the Song is a touchstone text in the contemplative life. It suggests several evolving moments and turns in the divine-human relationship, and reveals the depth of love in the relationship. So that text, which is also lush with garden imagery, is a constant in my own spiritual life. I also have such a tangible sense of the divine in both my inner and outer landscapes—they intertwine for me. Many years ago when I experienced a “dark night” which strangely coincided with the drought in California, I started paying attention to how drought and wildfires might have spiritual correspondences, for myself and perhaps others as well. O Garden-Dweller follows the arc of the Song of Songs, in which the Bride longs for the Bridegroom and suffers in his absence: at one point she is wounded by the watchmen as she searches for the Bridegroom. Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross associated this wounding of the Bride with the “wound of love,” which plays a role in transformative spiritual experience. Additionally, John highly associates this wound of longing with dryness and fire. For me, the inward spiritual experience of divine absence and presence, and the outer natural experience of drought and wildfires converged, as reflected in these poems. 

JC: You’re a writer, lawyer, wife, mother of three, and lay Carmelite—how do you balance those roles and callings? 

LRH: I would say that as God calls, so he equips. I mean this in the sense that no one should be expected to do everything, but only what she or he is called to do, both in the scheme of life and in the course of a day. As I move forward in my own life, the demands of these various roles and callings have changed, and the reality of the specific demands can be a little unexpected and hard to anticipate. The key to balance is a focus on the one constant, the One who calls. God always seems to guide and help, and also use all that has come before, sometimes in surprising ways.

JC: What do you feel drawn to most in the days ahead?

LRH: Currently, some of my time is devoted to the upcoming release by Paraclete Press of my poetry collection, Litany of Flights, as well as writing new poems. I am also working on my next project, a collection of lyric essays.

Jody Collins

Jody Collins is the author of Living the Season Well: Reclaiming Christmas (2017) and Hearts on Pilgrimage: Poems & Prayers (2021). Her articles have appeared at salt+clayGrace TableEphesians ProjectThe Joyful LifeShe Lovesmagazine, and Refine (the Retreat) Journal, among others. A former teacher, she now works as a freelance editor and publishing consultant; in her free time, she loves tending her garden and spending time with her family. 

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