Molly McCully Brown Has Faith that Attention Will Save Us

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

Whatever multitasking, social media doomscroll, or email hell you’ve got yourself in right now, I want you to slow down, take a deep breath, and give your full attention to this interview.

There’s a lot that’s vying for our attention right now. There’s trouble every day. We are at a time when it is especially tempting to give our full attention to the trouble and forget that there is still beauty in the world, and that humans still have the capacity to create art. During my conversation with Molly McCully Brown, who is the editor in chief of Image Journal as well as a poet, essayist, and creative writing teacher, she reminded me that by giving art and other human beings our full attention, we begin to see new ways to combat daily injustices.

What I appreciate about Brown is how her religious authenticity and faith in humanity inform her writing. As a Catholic, she is especially drawn to questions around the body, art, mystery, doubt, and mysticism. But notice I said she is drawn to questions, not answers. It’s that focus on exploration rather than formulations that allows her to write poems and essays that resonate with people, reminding us that pain and beauty are recurring themes in each of our lives.

Below, we talk about how paying attention to art and humanity gives us the strength to continue living, why art thrives in times of political repression, which writing techniques we favor, and how to turn our anger at God or injustice into creative activism.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Josiah R. Daniels, Sojourners: Tell me a little bit about Image Journal.

We’re a quarterly journal of art, faith, and mystery, which I think is such a wonderful way to talk about what Image is and what it does. You know, but we are a literary journal and an expansive place for people to think about how religion, faith, belief, doubt, mysticism, and struggle intersect and animate our lives, both in the places that you might expect those things to be present and in the places where it feels more surprising to find them.

I’ve been a [contributor and] grateful community member and reader of Image for a long time. It’s such a gift and such an honor to now have this tenure as editor in chief.

The first essay of yours that I read was “Bent Body, Lamb.” The essay is, in a lot of ways, a conversion narrative. What led you to that conversion?

A lot of things led me to that conversion. Even from childhood, I was drawn to faith and really interested in questions of theology, questions of belief, and questions of religious practice.

One of the things that essay talks about is that I was born an identical twin. She died when we were just infants. And I think her loss — but also a continuing sense of her presence and her personhood — meant that, from a very early age, I was asking questions about what spaces exist outside of and beyond and around this world we’re living in.

I really fell in love with poetry and with folks like Gerard Manley Hopkins. In some ways, I came to Catholicism through literature and poetry and through theology in college.

Catholicism is a faith that sort of inevitably wrestles with and acknowledges the centrality of the body and understands the body as something that is not apart from our souls or a kind of temporary vessel that we’re eventually going to escape when we come to enlightenment or fulfillment. And I guess I should say I have cerebral palsy, which is a neurological disorder that affects movement and balance and muscle tone. So, grappling with my body has always been central to how I think about what it means to be a person in the world and a soul in the world.

How does your faith inspire your poetry and writing now?

Poetry rewards slowness and it rewards attention to things we might otherwise overlook. It rewards contemplation and the ability to still the most frustrated and anxious and agitated and desperate parts of ourselves.

For me, faith and prayer do much the same thing. That relationship and commitment to stillness and contemplation feel like the thread that yokes both my art and my faith, if that makes sense.

Why do you think it is that in times of political repression and political turmoil, art and poetry thrive?

I mean this in the least simplistic and the least cloying way possible: In times of repression, in times of violence, in times of suffering, in times of difficulty, we’re hungry for beauty. We need it, right? It is one of the things that art offers, and it offers it not in a denial of what is dark or violent or difficult or unjust, but in grappling with that and making something out of it that is nuanced, something that is musical, something that retains faith in the world as a place that is revelatory and worth saving.

Art offers us goodness and brightness, not in turning away from what is hard or denying what is hard but in a willingness to grapple with it and engage with it and stand up against it. Art is the thing that is always trying to make meaning out of what can feel meaningless.

The kind of continual insistence that there is beauty in the world and the willingness to look at what is most terrible and hold it and grapple with it and engage with it — not with a kind of didacticism, not out of rage, and not out of a sort of particular investment in one singular kind of meaning-making — but out of a desire to make a connection, makes the world feel survivable. This is the gift of art, it’s the responsibility of art, and it’s the thing that keeps me getting out of bed in the morning, you know.

Say more about why art inspires you to go on.

I recently wrote an essay for Image about the power and the privilege of attention. Attention is really the thing we most owe one another. But also I think it is the thing that has the potential to save us and allow us to continue to climb out of the darkness.

I almost always find that when I am feeling so acutely the weight of the world, the failures of language, the insufficiency of art and language to battle what feels most awful and most unjust about the world we live in, the first step is to actually pick my head up and look at the world around me. I often find that when I feel the least like I have access to language or the least like I am a strong person who can do good work and make meaning, it’s actually because I’ve just retreated entirely into my own interior and I’ve stopped paying attention to the world around me.

I try to start in the places where I feel least inclined to do that looking and attending. A piece of that attending and looking always lives for me in attending to other people’s art, other people’s language. I’m so glad that we don’t make art alone in the world, and that we don’t make art in a vacuum; I write alongside other writers, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and thinkers. The fact that people make art in concert is part of what allows it to be such an extraordinary thing.

Art requires moments of silence, moments where you’re living and contemplating and looking, but you’re not feeling the pressure to make and produce. Because a consistent sort of manic production empties a well.

In the moments I feel like, “God, I can’t face the world, and I can’t change the world, and I definitely can’t make [art] inside the world,” it’s a signal that my well is empty. And the way you fill it back up is to do that work of attending to the world, and then to the things that other people are making and have made, which saves my life every day.

I think one of the other ways you find strength is through humor. I think you’re a very funny person.

I’m so glad to hear that. I love that that is a thing. I feel like it’s not always a feature of my writing on the page, and so I’m glad when people know me and they’re like, “Oh, also, you’re really funny.”

I don’t consider myself to be a funny person, but what I do know is it’s really hard to be funny on the page.

It’s so hard.

How does humor provide some relief to the more serious topics that you write about and talk about?

Almost everything is most interesting and most revelatory when it exists in relief against something else. We have light because we have darkness, we have joy because we have sorrow. Everything has another side. I think the ability to see that and acknowledge that is part of how we move through the world and survive the world. Humor is often one of the easiest paths to joy. Because humor is this engine of connection.

So much great humor is rooted in surprise. When we think of revelation, we tend to think about it as this thing that is hard and serious — and it can be — but revelation can come through humor and the surprise of humor and the ability to see something that at first looks dark or serious or insurmountable or strange.

Humor is often a way for me to remind myself, even the hardest things have another side. It’s a way to invite myself back into the world and invite someone else toward me.

You write the following in Places I’ve Taken My Body: “The truth is I want the same thing so many activists work for. I want a different, better world than the one I came of age in.” Two questions for you: Do you consider yourself an activist? And what does a better world look like to you?

In that essay, I’m talking particularly about wanting a different and better world for future generations of disabled people who are coming of age and then who are moving through the world. I do consider myself an activist, and I would actually say I feel pretty strongly that my faith calls me to be an activist. I think about education as a kind of activism and the work that I do as a teacher as a kind of activism. I think about editorial work as a kind of activism, because I am making choices about voices to platform, conversations to foreground, those kinds of things. I also think about art as a kind of activism, as a way of creating community and making change. The sharing of individual perspectives and the cultivation of empathy is part of how we make change in the world.

It’s also part of my job to be of service and be an activist in more direct ways, whether that looks like political action or mutual aid. Those are all core pieces of who I am.

One of the challenges that many people who belong to marginalized communities often feel is that, by virtue of one’s own identity, one has no choice but to be an activist. Because the act of living is an inherently political act.

That can be exhausting, right? It can sometimes feel more like a burden than a calling. That’s part of what a better world looks like: more spaces in which people are safe to be activists and to engage in that kind of work. But it [would also be a world where people] feel that the act of living is not perpetually an act of activism.

When I think of a better world for future generations of people with disabilities, it looks like a world where access is more universal. It looks like a world where we are combating ableism at both the level of infrastructure and the levels of thinking and policy. But it also looks like a world where there is more community.

One of the things I felt often as a young person with a disability is that I didn’t have access to people who looked and moved and lived like me. I certainly didn’t see them in the media. I didn’t see them represented as partners or as parents or as politicians or as citizens of the world. I only saw them in medicalized spaces, as patients or as sites of experiment, as sites of pain. Most of the narratives that I could find growing up were narratives of illness and cure. Or they were narratives of what we call inspiration porn: “Oh, look, don’t you feel great about yourself because this child with Down syndrome made a basket on his high school basketball team, and now you get to feel great about humanity, because he’s a vehicle for your own edification.”

A better world for me, and this is the thing that maybe my work as an artist and as an editor feels most key to shaping, is a world in which there are other kinds of narratives.

You also write the following in Places I’ve Taken My Body: “I told a priest, once, that I worried I only believed in God because I needed an object for my anger, but even that wasn’t the whole truth: Sometimes, I worry I believe in God only because the prospect of my rage, unhemmed by the channel faith provides, is too frightening for me to confront.”

How do you channel the mad you feel into your faith?

Part of the way that I do it is through activism. [My faith] calls me to work for change, and so one way that I do it is through that righteous anger, which can be a really powerful thing.

When we get angry about things that are unjust, we can use that anger to make change. It’s fuel. For a while I believed, “Oh, the goal is to never be an angry person.” I understood that I was too angry, that I was unproductively angry, that I was converting other emotions into rage, because anger was a more comfortable thing for me to feel than fear or despair or uncertainty. Coming to a healthier and more centered place as a person has been thinking about the difference between that and the anger which is a kind of controlled blaze that you use to do things, to cultivate a new field for planting. This metaphor feels especially acute at this particular moment in time as there’s an out-of-control forest fire that is burning down everything in its wake.

Both faith and art allow me to sit with anger and other emotions before I convert them unknowingly. Feel uncertainty where there is uncertainty, feel grief where there is grief, and feel gratitude where there is gratitude.

I don’t say any of this to suggest that I don’t still struggle with this. I still sometimes rail at God both for what feels hardest and most complicated in my own life and for what feels f------ unforgivable about the world that we live in. I don’t want to pretend that I have clean answers, that I sort of move through the world with a perfectly calibrated amount of anger that only allows me to do good work. That’s not true. I think that this is a year-by-year, month-by-month, week-by-week, day-by-day, moment-by-moment navigation for me.

You’ll remember that when I was in your writing workshop at The Glen in 2023, I had a disagreement with one of the other participants. Recently, I went to another conference, and he and I ran into one another, and we sat down and had an incredible conversation. One of the things I’ve been thinking about since that interaction is this: As a writer, how do you confront some of your own trauma and baggage but do it in a way that is humorous and in a way that invites people to see things from your perspective instead of pushing them away?

This is the craft thing that I tell my students all the time, which is that one of the crucial keys to writing personal nonfiction, especially personal nonfiction in which you are a kind of central figure or a character, is that you have to be willing to make yourself as fallible, error-prone, flawed, f----- up on the page as any other — more so than any other character.

Part of learning to write good nonfiction is learning to be willing to paint a version of yourself on the page that is not admirable. Maybe even most of the time. This is just one of the truths of human life that there is no one you hate more than someone who is like, “I never make a mistake or have a flaw or treat anyone poorly or wrong.” But the person who is like, “Oh my god. I was a b---- to this person I shouldn’t have been a b---- to, and I also spilled mustard on my shirt,” that is the person who you’re immediately like, “That girl, I’ll root for,” right? Part of how we invite the reader into moments of complicated or revolutionary confrontation is by being willing to make ourselves vulnerable and true on the page.

It’s why I’ve always loved the essay form because I think one of the things that the essay allows a writer to do is make thinking visible on the page. So you’re not only writing about whatever idea or experience or trauma or revelation or encounter you’re writing about, but you’re also writing about the process of writing about that thing, and how that changes your thinking and requires you to take a different path.

Because the essay allows us to write about the process of working through difficult things, both as we live through them, but then also as we attempt to figure out how to make meaning out of them, how to make art out of them, that’s a really revelatory thing.

I think it can be easy, especially as writers of nonfiction, to be like, “Oh, my job is to, like, know things,” or “My job is to have an idea for you that I’ve completely worked out,” or “I have a conviction or I have a theology, I have a way of living, and I’m certain about it.” That’s so antithetical to what being alive is actually like. Living is a process of constant revision. If we remain curious people committed to connecting with others and bettering ourselves, then living is a process of constant revision. And I think that my favorite writing, the writing that means the most to me, is the writing that makes that transparent.