A. Arwen Taylor and Dr. Bruce Jorgensen, English
Suppose a sociologist wants to conduct an inquiry into the relationship between addiction and religion. She has two options. She might collect information from addicted people of faith and faithful addicts, observe them and interview them, or she might – although no ethics board would approve this – attempt to instill both addiction and faith within a group of test subjects, and then observe the results. Kenneth Ketner, after C. S. Peirce and Walker Percy, proposes a third approach to such an inquiry, and it is this approach which I have taken.
Knowledge, Ketner contends, progresses not just as we observe the effect of X on Y, but as we creatively establish relations between X and Y. It is this creative relational ability of humans that makes human language more than icon and index, and human behavior more than conditioned response. Why should human learning be any different? So although I am not a sociologist, I am a person of faith and the subject of at least one medium-grade addiction, and I am also a writer, and I decided that it fell to me to make this investigation after Ketner’s recommendation, as a literary thought-experiment. To this end, I have written a novel which explores addiction in terms of faith – and faith in terms of addiction.
Wholesome Herbs is a variation on bildingsroman which tells the story of Lydia, “Liddie,” Donne, a life-long caffeine-addict ex-alcoholic with parents hooked on anti-depressants and in various stages of Church disassociation. In the summer before her senior year at BYU, she has decided to overhaul her moral self, and become a Whole New Moral Person. This is complicated by her immediate negative reaction to a new roommate whose wheat-storage habits are interfering with her diet Coke habits; her own tendency toward depression, and her “treatment” of that depression with manic caffeine overdoses, rather than therapy or medication; an ex-boyfriend who still loves her still but is in some sense addicted to his own “Otherness” and will not, so far, join the Church; and her increasingly strained relationship with a disfellowshipped mother and a father so hopped-up on Effexor that he barely recognizes her anymore, who tries suicide twice in the course of the story and succeeds on round two. As the book progresses, Liddie starts to see her own moral ambivalence in her treatment of the wheat-storing roommate, and her parents’ crippling anti-depressant addiction reflected in her own caffeine addiction. Liddie, as well her parents, and even her Apocalypse-conscious roommate, is trying to repair the natural gaps and fractures of this human existence using other bits of human existence – which are equally gapped and flawed. Addiction fills this hole in her life where her faith should be; where her faith steps in at the end, to make her other addictions unnecessary.
I finished writing the first draft of Wholesome Herbs at 11:15 on the night of 30 December, 2005, just in time to be able to write this report before the end of the year. It is currently 121,718 words in length, which fills up 367 pages, and I intend for it to be published before another New Year’s Eve finds me still starving here among my artwork. Dr. Jorgensen has already offered several suggestions regarding agents and publishers, so the next year will see me polishing, tightening, clipping, editing, proofreading, redrafting, and probably punching myself repeatedly in the head, before I send it off to see who wants it.
Writing this book over the last two years has been an invaluable experience both in terms of my writing ability and in terms of my personal faith. Although I’ve written short stories and poetry for years, the sheer size of a novel has given me the a working ground for dealing with plot structure, character development, pacing, and consistency of style, and I feel I’m that much the better writer of short stories and poetry, not to mention term papers and ORCA reports, for it. Moreover, the experience of creating this book has been invaluable to me on a personal level: intentionally or otherwise, I’ve found myself imposing the deepest conflicts of my own life on the lives of my characters, and then been forced to find, for them, a way out of those conflicts. There are no easy answers to the difficult questions of family dysfunction and mental illness, but there are answers, and I’m grateful to have had this opportunity to confirm that for myself.