Paul J. Pastor

Poet, author and editor Paul J. Pastor uses his creativity to explore nature, literature and the rich tradition of Christian spirituality. When he’s not reading works by deep thinkers, writing his own or editing for two of Penguin Random House’s Christian imprints, you can find him wandering the woods near his home (perhaps hunting for mushrooms).

Join us for an eye-opening conversation as Paul shares his creative journey, his favorite ways to meet with God and the books that have inspired him along the way.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?

Among many memorable meals, I’ll never forget gathering with my three younger brothers for a last-minute bachelor thing for my brother Timothy before he eloped to Las Vegas. We had gathered earlier that day — just the four of us — at my house, which sits in the woods in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge. We had piled in a beater car, driven to soak in some mineral hot springs just upriver from us, then returned, right as the light was fading, to cook in my gravel driveway.

I am a pursuer of the unpretentious and the real. As we stood around a charcoal fire glowing in a Weber grill (one of those really good old enameled ones, which I had poached from beside a dumpster years back), we cooked rib steaks from beef my old Greek teacher had raised, and pork chops from pigs farmed by my kids’ godparents. We talked late into the night about life and love and the big hinge moments of life, and we watched the sun decline over the river and the stars prick little holes into the darkness, and it was all very real, and very right, a meal of smoke and laughter and people and place.

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activities do you love and help you find spiritual renewal?

I’m privileged to live in one of the world’s best locations for growing and hunting mushrooms. I have let this go slightly to my head. Besides growing my own shiitakes on local oak logs, I hunt a wide variety of mushrooms for the table, including morels, chanterelles and oysters along with others for medicinal purposes, such as Artist’s Conk and Turkey Tail.

The fungus kingdom is one of the great wonders of creation, yet most people nearly entirely overlook it. Here we have vast, mysterious colonies of living threads (mycelium), which are neither plant nor animal, exhibit remarkable signs of intelligence and response, and possess some of the most potent qualities of any organisms in nature, whether to nourish, to heal, to induce psychoactive states, or to poison. Wonders!

And through it all, the humble fungi (and their fruit, the mushrooms) show us the remarkably strange, beautiful and fertile world of decay. Far from being a domain of horror, the ability to take something that is dead or dying and convert its raw stuff into a gift and blessing for one’s neighbors is remarkable. In that process, which may be done on a scale as small as a log or as large as a culture, I hope that I have learned something from the lowly mushroom.

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness. Every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you hide it?

Oh, there are so many here! My relationship with work (not money-work, but Muse-work) often pushes the boundaries of my well-being. My creative work often comes from a place of fecund desperation, I’m afraid. There’s this sense each time I publish something that I can now die a little more un-haunted by the books that are within me.

But if I were to pick one quality to shed, one lie to be unburdened from, it would be my simple, peaceful, constant instinct (first learned as I watched my younger brother die) that one can depend on no one. Dice are being rolled around us every day over which we exert no control, any one of which may crush us. In me this creates a funny combination of gallows humor and survivor’s guilt which tends, if I’m honest, to haunt my relationships with everyone and everything. It may be true, but it’s not an ideal way to live. I am learning, in my way, to surrender it.

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your obsession? And why should it be ours?

All of my work — whether it be in my editorial role at Random House, my personal writing, or any of the many other endeavors that occupy my time — serves the same purpose. I want to help people name their worlds rightly and (this is very close to being the same thing) learn to love what is worth loving.

For me, the purest and most significant vector to achieve this is creative writing. I take my roles as editor and poet extremely seriously. In dealing with language, one deals with the closest thing to magic we can easily imagine. The contours of a story, the context of a fact, the curve of a rhyme — each of these can change the life paths of living, breathing human persons.

My work as a poet is intended to, obliquely, “sneakily” even, incline my readers to name the world in the way that I see it. That vision is of a numinous place, full of great beauty and great strangeness, horrors and wonders mingled in nearly equal measure to create conditions remarkably conducive to the growth of souls. In this way, I hope to (humbly) serve my Creator with the gifts and privileges and perspective I’ve been given. Through that discipline, I myself hope to grow and fully live in what the Christian tradition calls “the Light.”

Please consider reading some of my work. I recommend starting with “Bower Lodge: Poems” or “The Listening Day.”

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?

Around roughly 2015, I found myself walking aimlessly through the woods behind our house. It was raining. I had recently lost a job that I had liked very much, and under circumstances that had been (objectively) unjust and frustrating. I was reconciling that reality with the fact that I had felt that role, at a respected Christian magazine, had been not only a job but a career — potentially not even only a career but a calling.

I felt a question arise in me: “What do I do now?” And immediately, in that way some questions get answered, something spoke in my guts: “Become who you are.”

“Become who you are.” What a mysterious, loaded phrase. How wonderful! How maddening! But I can say with honesty that there was some sort of magnetism in those words. A vision of what the Christian tradition would call “sanctification.”

I feel a sense of creative flow and great energy — as if I am tapping a well deep underground that has enormous water pressure — when I create from a place of truly seeking this authenticity. The great paradox of it is that when I am most becoming what I am (in conversation, on the page, in a relationship) it becomes a state of absolute self-forgetfulness, of humility, of play. That is how I know that I am doing something worth doing, being something worth being. I am most present when I best disappear.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied actions that open our hearts to the presence of God. So spill it, which spiritual practice is workin’ best for you right now?

There are two places in which I meet God with predictability: in the liturgy of the church and in the woods.

The Anglican tradition has been a home for us for about 12 years. In the simplicity and regularity of our practices, including the Eucharist and the Daily Office, I find that I can gently and humbly “work” out my faith in a context that is deeply emotive but absolutely non-dependent on my emotion. This is a great gift because it removes elements of spiritual pressure, manipulation and expectation from my spiritual practice and allows me to focus on what is important: adoration of God, union with Christ and identification with the Church Universal, that great being larger than generation or geography of whom we may be a tiny part if we will allow it.

Then there are the woods. In the woods and on my daily walks there, I meet the wordless truth about the world. I witness the cycle of birth, consumption, fruiting and death. I see the endless relationship of all things. I witness, sometimes as the only witness, the care of the Creator for every living thing. I witness the wildness and ferocity of the world. I allow that wildness and ferocity into myself, to mix with the limitless grace of the Eucharist, and I feel, in some small way, my place in this place.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Our email subscribers get free ebooks featuring our favorite resources — lots of things that have truly impacted our faith lives. But you know about some really great stuff, too. What are three resources that have impacted you?

First, I am a great admirer of the aesthetic and iconography of an artist named Kreg Yingst. He works in linocut and woodcut. His visual project on the Psalms is simply excellent: surreal and worshipful and haunting. Do buy that book if you can. I am honored to have an original print of his in my office (a gift from my wife). His work will stay with you. I often say that it is by “a good strangeness” that one identifies the work of God. Yingst’s work gives visual language to that good strangeness.

Second, the work of Wendell Berry is extremely important to me. Among many resources, I recommend his collection of essays titled “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community.” He is one of the best spirits that our nation has produced in living memory. One of the great battles of our generation is against spiritual powers masked by economic and lifestyle policy that is completely legal and reputable and completely satanic (in the literal sense of that term). Berry speaks against the spirit of this age with wit and passion and grounded wisdom. Heed him!

Thirdly, I will recommend the work of one of my favorite contemporary writers, Marly Youmans. She is criminally under-read. Begin with “The Book of the Red King,” and follow that with “Charis in the World of Wonders.” Marly’s work is exceptional as literature but also has a spiritual core that is strong and yearning and wonderful. I do think that “The Book of the Red King” is one of the best works of poetry written in the last half-century, perhaps the last century. It is simply excellent.

We all have things we cling to to survive (or thrive) in tough times. Name one resource you’ve found indispensable in this current season — and tell us what it’s done for you.

I don’t know if this is helpful, but I will simply answer this way: “a typewriter.”

So much of my work is, necessarily, in front of a screen. It is exhausting. But a typewriter remains, for a writer like me at least, an exceedingly efficient and practical tool with which to create. I draft creative work and revise, very often, by means of a typewriter and I am routinely impressed with how simply wonderful it is to do so.

The principle that I’d point others to is this — if much of your life is digital, be intentional to find some analog way to do what you must really do (central life calling sort of stuff). This need not be expensive, photogenic or too clunky. But by grounding yourself in the world of things (real things, real things), you tether yourself in a small way to reality. Such tethers are more needed than we often realize and, for many of us, are fraying. Care for your tethers.

QUESTION #8: dream

God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

I am working on several significant creative projects. The largest of these is a cycle of cantos forming a large and very ambitious narrative poem comprised of 64 cantos, each composed of sixteen lines. I am writing in the tradition of (though not the style of) poets like Dante Aligheri and Ezra Pound. My themes are very spiritual and include the environment, redemption and resignation in the face of the certain collapse of our age under the weight of human folly.

It is dark and hopeful, funny and sad, and I am tremendously energized by writing it. I hope to have an announcement about publication plans for it in the next year or two.

Additionally, you are likely to see a book on writing, a book of short poems on the Anglican saints titled “The Lesser Feasts,” and in 2024, first views of my new translations of an unforgettable poet named Margit Kaffka from the original Hungarian. (Just to keep things interesting, you know.)

The average person spends 6 hours and 58 minutes per day on the internet, according to a report from DataReportal. (The average American uses it slightly more at 7 hours and 5 minutes per day.) This time is spent scrolling through social media, consuming digital news, listening to podcasts and messaging friends.

But that leaves little time to unplug, doesn’t it? As Paul put it, “If much of your life is digital, be intentional to find some analog way to do what you must really do … By grounding yourself in the world of things (real things), you tether yourself in a small way to reality.”

How can you “tether yourself in a small way to reality” this week? What steps will you take to enjoy life away from the screen?