The Books, with Vanessa Zoltan
About the Guest
Vanessa Zoltan is host of the award-winning podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text and author of the new book Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice. She earned a bachelor's in English Literature and Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis, a master's in Nonprofit Management from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Masters of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School. She is the CEO and Founder of Not Sorry Productions.
Best Books
Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice, by Vanessa Zoltan.
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine.
Ways of Seeing, by John Berger
THEME MUSIC: “Great Light,” by Deep Sea Diver.
Transcript
[Theme song: “Great Light,” by Deep Sea Diver]
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I actually think that there's something really special about old books. When you feel connected to them it feels like God's love. It's like Charlotte Brontë wrote this for me, even though she would never be able to imagine a Jewish atheist going to divinity school, like that would blow her mind.
BLAIR HODGES: When Vanessa Zoltan was a student at Harvard Divinity School, she was having a hard time connecting with scripture. But at the same time, she was fascinated by the ways religious communities connect with their sacred records. So she decided to try an experiment: what would happen if she approached some of her own favorite books with a similar kind of devotion and attentive reading. What she discovered can help breathe new life into our engagement with our favorite books—even the ones that don't hold up in the light of cultural changes regarding sexism, racism, and more.
In this episode of Fireside with Blair Hodges Vanessa Zoltan is here to talk about Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice.
Finding sacredness in literature – 01:18
BLAIR HODGES: Vanessa Zoltan, thanks for joining me here at Fireside today.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Thank you so much for having me.
BLAIR HODGES: And congratulations on this great book. In fact, I should say right at the outset, Terry Tempest Williams wrote the foreword to your book. That's amazing. How did that happen?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Terry was giving a talk at Harvard Divinity School where she's the writer in residence. And I just went, it was a free event open to the public. I don't even remember what she was talking about, but she was talking about the environment, obviously, because she's Terry.
BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yeah.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: And I asked her if she was prepared for the environmental Apocalypse, and to what extent she was prepared for that, and if she believed we should prepare for an environmental apocalypse, or we should just let ourselves die. And she sort of said, “See me after.” [laughter]
And I was like, okay, and so I stuck around after and then we got coffee, and then we became buddies. And I run these literary pilgrimages, and she's come on two of them with us.
BLAIR HODGES: That's fantastic.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: And now she's just the love of my life.
BLAIR HODGES: And she wrote this forward to your book Praying with Jane Eyre, a fantastic book, and she writes right at the beginning here—it had to feel good to see it—she calls you an “alchemist.” She says, “instead of taking base metals and turn them into gold,” she says that you take “any paragraph from a book that you love, and you reveal it as a sacred text.” But I also thought like, any paragraph? [laughter] What do you what do you say to that? Any? [laughter]
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Sorry, she says any paragraph from a book that I love, correct?
BLAIR HODGES: Yes, yes.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: So yes! I would say that you really can. You know, I've been doing Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, our podcast, for seven years now. And we pick our sentences to do sacred reading practices with at random, and I have been tested and—yeah, right, like sacred reading is about letting it speak to you in the moment that you're in, and you rarely do sacred reading alone. One of the components that I think is really important for sacred reading is community. And so two people together, I really think, can make meaning out of most anything. We are meaning making creatures. We love to make meaning.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, but we have these books of scriptures, right? The religious traditions—Christians have a Bible, Jews have the Hebrew Bible, and there are all sorts of other faiths—Muslims have the Qur’an and so on so forth. Why secular novels? Why take a novel that's not considered scripture and approach it in a scriptural type of way?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Well, first of all, I think that traditional sacred texts have wounded a lot of people, a lot of people have a lot of baggage around those texts. As someone who works with a lot of Harry Potter fans, we hear from people who grew up in evangelical churches a lot and are now out as queer, and they couldn't read the Harry Potter books as kids, and the Harry Potter books really spoke to them as they were growing up and sort of reading them, you know, under their bed covers and hiding them from people. And they get upset and wounded when we talk specifically about the Bible.
I worked at a secular congregation for a while, which was a space that I had a lot of mixed feelings about. But we did this Earth Day event and the person facilitating it had everybody come up, and you know, just put a stone in a bowl or something along those lines. And we had someone who had been abused in the Catholic Church as a child at the event. And he said, “This feels like communion. I can't believe that you all are doing this.”
And so I think that it's just really important to make sure that treating things as sacred is open to everyone, including people who have been traumatized by traditional religion. I also think there's something really beautiful about ubiquitous texts, like Pride and Prejudice or the Harry Potter books, that you can bond across religion, which I think is really a lovely thing.
I can keep justifying this forever. So I will give those two reasons for now.
Defining the sacred – 4:51
BLAIR HODGES: Oh yeah! And I see it throughout your introduction, where you talk about how you've long been drawn to the idea of sacredness, you really like being surprised. You mentioned you like to be connected with other people, which sacred texts give communities an opportunity to connect with. And we'll talk about—we'll kind of unpack these as we go throughout the discussion. But you do mention also in the outset that God language in the Bible, it hasn't been for you, but sacredness has, so how are you defining sacredness there?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah, that sacred is an act, and not a thing, that it is an orientation. And you can turn to Jewish theologians, Christian theologians for this idea, right? Augustine, Moses de León, right? That, as long as you're reading the Bible toward “God is love,” you are reading it correctly. And I just think that you can do that, not just with the Bible.
So anything, anything that gets you better at loving, anything that extends your idea of what your neighbor is, I think is sacred. And so it's about how, right? If you are a big sports fan, and that makes you hate other teams, I think you are not engaging with it as a sacred practice. But if it makes you value the community and the fandom that you're a part of and look at people from other cities and say, “Oh, we both love soccer. Isn't that beautiful?” Then I think you're treating it as sacred.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, well, that's probably why sports aren't sacred, then, because I just think that's umm—as a Utah Jazz fan, I have a very healthy loathing of other particular teams.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: As someone from L.A. I was—
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, no. [laughter]
VANESSA ZOLTAN: We can talk about John Stockton and Karl Malone another time.
Three factors to approaching a text as sacred – 6:29
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, no. Oh, no. Okay, so you and an advisor there at Harvard Divinity School, where you earned a Master of Divinity degree, kind of arrived at these different ways to approach it. Like, how are we going to approach this the question, and you both kicked it around, and you came up with these three main points of what it meant to address a text or to come to a text as a sacred text.
The first one, you say—well, I’ll just say all three of them. So faith, rigor, and community. Maybe take a second to unpack each of those—faith, rigor, and community are the three things you're bringing to a text in considering it to be sacred.
And by the way, again, we're talking about Jane Eyre in particular, with this latest book of yours.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah. So faith just means the belief that the more time you spend with it, the more gifts, or blessings it will give you, right? This is often how we feel about our children, or like being outside, that like it, in and of itself, is a good thing. And even when it's frustrating or hard, or you feel like you're taking steps backward, it is a gift that you get to spend time with this text and contemplate it.
BLAIR HODGES: And by the way, before you explain rigor I just want to add too, you also have a definition of faith here that doesn't expect perfection. I think sometimes faith is thought to be just intellectually agreeing with a set of religious propositions, right? I have faith, I believe, XYZ. But you're saying faith is a way of living, a way of hoping for goodness, a way of seeking good that doesn't also expect perfection, and in fact, kind of maybe expects imperfection.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Absolutely. I think to expect perfection is to just set yourself up for—not disappointment, but like a sense of like profound betrayal, right? Like, none of us are perfect. And as an atheist, I obviously have theological thoughts on that.
But yeah, we love our parents, we love our children, we do not think of them as perfect, right? And yet, we love them infinitely. And I actually think some of the gifts of a book like Jane Eyre is its imperfections. Is in the fact that, you know, from a hundred and fifty, a hundred and sixty years’ distance, I can see quite clearly the way that it's racist and imperialist, and sexist [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Which makes me wonder about my own time, because Charlotte Bronte was super progressive for her own age in a number of ways.
BLAIR HODGES: Right, and was heavily criticized for—[laughs]
VANESSA ZOLTAN: For her progressiveness, absolutely. And I think of myself as progressive and what are the ways that I'm failing? And, you know, thank goodness for those failures of Brontë's, so I can see myself in that way. So yeah, I absolutely think perfection has no place in sacredness.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so that’s faith. All right. Rigor is the next one.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: So rigor. I think that it can be done in any number of ways. Mary Gordon, who's one of my favorite novelists, reads Proust for five minutes every morning. And so she lives her life in conversation with Proust, at least she said this about fifteen years ago, I don't know whether or not she still does it.
But whatever that is, you know, we talk about these specific sacred reading practices of PaRDeS and Florilegium, you know, keeping quote journals, Lectio Divina, being part of a book club that meets every week, whatever that looks like. But making it a commitment in your life, I think is a key component. otherwise, it's too easy to drop off. You don't stay in constant conversation with it, which I think is, yeah, necessary.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Sometimes in the time when you didn't want to do it that day, and you still do, you might bump into something completely unexpected. And I like this idea of like a slow, deliberate, almost ritual—making it a part of your life. So that's another way.
And then you also mentioned community, which you talked about before a little bit.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I mean, community, I think there are two reasons. It's the buffer for rigor or ritual, which is that you're just more likely to do something with a gym buddy. I know that my partner and I do weight training three times a week, and we want to do it zero times a week, but we're gonna follow through because of the two of us.
And the other thing is, it keeps you from being a zealot in your own opinions.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: You know, diversity isn't important for tokenism. It's important because we need other points of view. And if there's a person of color, or a person who has sight impairment, or whatever it is, you are going to speak differently and challenge your words better and think with more intention. If you're only in a community that looks exactly like you, you can get away with a lot lazier thinking. And so I think having a wide community forces a sharpness that I think is really helpful,
BLAIR HODGES: And people that are interested in seeing how this plays out with Jane Eyre, when they read the book, they're going to see your meditations about it. They're going to see writings you put together. I didn't see as much of that give and take that you probably had with your reading group, but you also have a podcast On Eyre that you produced with Lauren Sandler, a friend of Fireside who was on last season, and there we really get to see two people kind of, you know—there are some parts where you guys completely disagree about something. [laughter] This is fascinating to see these challenging readings.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah. I mean, Lauren and I are both Jews. And I think that made that very easy for us. Talmud is studied in pairs.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: And you know, we don't talk about this on air On Eyre—we don't talk about this live on the podcast. But in our recording document, we always look closely at one quote, and we call it our Talmud moment, you know, where we're going to look very specifically about a text and argue about it. And so that was built in
It's the only way I know how to understand something, is to think out loud, have someone smart help me refine what I think about it. I find it a really helpful way to live.
The postures of fan, devotee, and scholar – 12:00
BLAIR HODGES: Another helpful thing, by the way, in the beginning of your book, you talk about the postures that a reader can have toward a text, this really turned a light bulb on for me, you talk about approaching a text as a fan, or as a scholar, or as a devotee. Maybe just spend a second kind of unpacking these different postures that we choose to take toward a text.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of variance in it. But you know, even if we just take “scholar,” right, the different scholarly approaches, you know, either you keep the author in mind or you don't keep the author in mind, right? You're doing the feminist theory reading or you're doing an egalitarian reading—there are a million different theories that you can apply to the way you read a text, but some historical research is going to be involved. Reading other critical readings of the text is going to be involved.
Whereas if you're a fan, you don't owe any of that, right? You can just go in for sheer enjoyment. And I actually think that is really important. I'm very anti the term “guilty pleasure” as it gets used. If you like to kick cats, I would say that you should feel guilty about that pleasure. But like, I don't think—
BLAIR HODGES: I don't, for the record. [laughter]
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I never would have thought you did! I didn't mean to accuse you. If one enjoyed kicking cats, I would say yes, feel guilty about that pleasure. But like romance novels, The Bachelor that like...
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you love that stuff.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I mean, I'm not—I don't watch reality TV, but I do love romance novels.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: And we all have—I don't know, I just think we can actually make a tremendous amount of meaning out of these things.
BLAIR HODGES: Where does the devotee come into it? Because the fans, just to me—also, I would say sometimes I think about Star Wars fans, where they almost get too—they're almost too obsessive. And anything that doesn't fit the vision that they wanted to have for it, there's a lot of—there can be anger, you know? What do you think about differences between fan and devotee?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I would say that for the Star Wars fans that you're talking about? I would say it is not their fandom that is getting in the way. I would say that there are other things that are often getting in the way of—often sexism, right?
BLAIR HODGES: Like prejudices that they're bringing to it. Like, why do we have this character? You know, yeah—
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Exactly, I don't think it's their fandom that is the problem.
BLAIR HODGES: But do you think there's a lack of openness there to it, then? It's like, they're not letting that canon—if we just thought of Star Wars as a sacred text, they're not letting the sacred texts question them. They're bringing what they already have to the text and just wanting it to say the things they've already got.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Right. Exactly. And I do, I think that there are better and worse versions of religion, and I can talk about my own religion in that way, Judaism. I think that there's a lot of beautiful, interesting things going on in Judaism nowadays. And I don't think that a lot of that is happening in Orthodox, Hasidic spaces, right? It's not good for women, those spaces. I grew up adjacent to the Orthodox world.
And, you know, I think that there are Star Wars fans who do that, there are people of every religion who do that. This is zealotry. I think what you're actually doing is treating the text as profane when you do that, you are limiting it. Sacredness should all be about openness and generativeness and reading towards love. And so yeah, I would argue that that is a profane way of looking at something
Reading towards love – 15:08
BLAIR HODGES: When you say reading towards love, there's this great quote here where you say your invitation of the book, of Praying with Jane Eyre, is “to love what you love unabashedly, and to do it with purpose. Love what you love well, to learn to love your neighbor well, to learn to love your enemy well.” And then you say, “The point of treating any text as sacred is to learn how to treat one another as sacred.”
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yes. So I'm a big believer in a low bar. I like “Couch to 5k” with like, you know, day one being “thinking about getting off the couch.” And so, right? It's really, really hard to love your neighbor, let alone to love your enemy.
BLAIR HODGES: It is, it is.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: My neighbor mows his lawn very early on Saturday morning. [laughter] And I don't understand that choice! And so it is hard for me to love him in that moment. But it is important for me to do it.
And so, hard things, you’ve got to practice with easy things. So practice with a book that you already love. It will disappoint you. It will frustrate you. J.K. Rowling is very disappointing, and even without J.K. Rowling coming out as transphobic and spreading misinformation about trans folks, right, her books are fat phobic, and super not inclusive all sorts of people.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, really. I'm in book four right now with my daughter who's nine and have been doing a lot of discussing about Dudley and how the Dursleys are talked about, and I try not to censor too much, but we definitely stop and talk about what's going on. It's not good.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: No! And then there are weird gender norms that I guess aren't surprising, right? Like Draco makes fun of Harry and it's like, “What are you, a ballerina?” And I'm like, “Are there no male ballet dancers?”
BLAIR HODGES: And Hermione is described as “shrill.” I don't see that word often being used for other male characters, stuff like that.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah, they're really problematic. So I think it's important to love them in a complicated way. And so I think loving something well is—is discussing it with your daughter, right? And being like, “Oh, this made me feel icky,” right? That's how we love each other well. If my partner says something, I'm like, “Oh, that won't make you proud. Say that better,” right.
So we can practice with these easier things. And therefore maybe one day, I will figure out a loving way to say to my neighbor, his name is Paul and is a wonderful person. Paul—
BLAIR HODGES: Shout out to Paul. I'm sure he listens.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I'm sure, he listens to everything I do. Paul, can you please wait until—or, right curiosity: Actually, is there a reason you mow your lawn at six on Saturday? Can we negotiate for a 7:30 start?
What is prayer – 17:36
BLAIR HODGES: That's beautiful. I'm glad we had that moment here. And I mean, it speaks to sacredness, we've just kind of unpacked that. But also another thing in this book is prayer. And so as you mentioned, you're an atheist—you're a Jew and you're an atheist. And you've written a book about praying. So I mean, what do you mean by that? What is praying to you?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Prayer in Judaism is all prewritten. There is no extemporaneous prayer in Judaism. It is something that I think is beautiful about Christianity. And it's also something that really freaks me out. Like, whenever I go to a church—I go to church a lot, because a lot of my friends are ministers and priests—
BLAIR HODGES: And you have a degree, a master’s of divinity! [laughter]
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I'm a master of divinity. And whenever—one of my best friends is an Episcopal priest, and I love him, and I would trust him with my life, I regularly trust him with my children. And when he says, “Let's spend our heads in prayer,” I'm like, no, I'm gonna wait till the end and make sure I agree with everything you say before I say amen. Right?
BLAIR HODGES: “Don't rope me into this.” [laughs]
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah! I'm like, I don't know what you're about to say. Maybe I don't agree with everything. And at the end, I'm usually like, “Yes, amen. That was great.” And so I'm just much more comfortable with these prewritten things and pre agreed upon.
And it's about living in conversation with these ideas, right? There are certain quotes from Jane Eyre that I've memorized that I don't go, certainly not 48 hours without thinking about them. And so, it’s writing them on your heart and having constant access to them as a way of seeing the world. That's what prayer is to me.
Extemporaneous prayer has meant a lot to me at certain times. I sort of lived at the center of the manhunt after the Boston Marathon bombing. And I went to temple and the rabbi said a prayer for the two boys, the bombers, and it meant it just meant a lot to me, right? I was like, these are scared young men, and what they did was horrible, but I don't think they're monsters.
And so I love it. I just am much better at agreeing to prewritten things.
Vanessa’s spiritual autobiography – 19:34
BLAIR HODGES: That's Vanessa Zoltan. We're talking about her new book, Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice.
Alright, Vanessa, so before you dive into Jane Eyre itself, you give readers a chapter called “A Spiritual Autobiography.” And in a way, you're kind of the Jane of this chapter, right? You're talking to us, like Jane is, you're inviting us into your thoughts and telling us your life story. Was it uncomfortable for you to write that way—to get personal like that in a book? Because it's pretty personal.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: It is personal. It was not uncomfortable for me, I would say. You get taught in Divinity School to “preach from your scars and not your wounds.” And, you know, I obviously don't share things that I didn't feel comfortable sharing. [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's selective, sure.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah. And so I sent it to my family, and friends and like, “Do you feel implicated in any of this in a bad way?” and they all signed off on it. I'm sure I'd take one or two things out. My editor was like, “I think [laughs] you shouldn't go after this family member quite so hard, as they're still alive.” And I was like, “mrrrreh.” But I listened to her—
BLAIR HODGES: Well, spill it all now, let's get into it!
VANESSA ZOLTAN: [laughter] Yeah, I know. I know. I took her advice to heart. Unfortunately.
BLAIR HODGES: There is a line in there, though, where you say, “Look, I recognize that some of my family members and stuff are probably going to see some of these things differently.” I noticed you did include kind of—you know, “Hey, sometimes people see things differently here.”
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah, I mean, my brothers and I—we were all raised by my parents who are refugees, and four Auschwitz survivors in my grandparents, and we have very different relationships to Judaism and the Holocaust. And you know. It’s—
BLAIR HODGES: Can I say, too, my jaw dropped when I saw that all four of your grandparents had been through Auschwitz and survived.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: I mean, what was it, like thirteen percent survival rate or something like that? You're directly connected to people who went through that trauma and came through it and then found each other.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah, well, one set of my grandparents met before, and were married before, which it's amazing that they both survived.
BLAIR HODGES: That's right, and you tell that story, I remember now. Yeah.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: My grandfather did not think his wife—my grandmother—had survived. She was a spoiled rich girl. And he was like, “There’s no way she got through this.” But she did! All four-feet-eleven of her. And my other two grandparents met in the camps, and then ran into each other in December of 1945, and they got married in January of 1946. So the odds go up if you meet after, you know, surviving.
BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. Interesting.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: But I grew up in a huge survivor community, like I did not realize—I thought all Jews of that generation went through the Holocaust. My worldview was skewed heavily. [laughs]
The problem of evil and belief in God – 22:13
BLAIR HODGES: And as we're reading this spiritual autobiography of yours, you're talking about your family, you're talking about your personal beliefs, and it really made sense to me—your being a Jew and being an atheist—you're talking about how that's really tied up in generational trauma.
It's almost a sense in which your parents emerged, you say, without a belief in God at that point, right? And it might even feel like turning your back on them and their experiences to say, “Well, actually, yeah, there is a God,” when they witness such horror, and in so many people in those camps had to say, “Well, if there is a God, then God hates us.” And so, you're inheriting some of that, but you still it seems to me like you still have this religious or spiritual core, or something, of godliness if not God, is that fair?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah. And I honestly, I like a lot of God language, right? What I can't do is when the Amidah is said in any service at Temple, and it talks about God's benevolence and God's all knowingness, I'm just like, “Nope. Can't. Sorry. Boo.” But—
BLAIR HODGES: Which could mean that God, for example, orchestrated the Holocaust—
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: —for some greater purpose or something.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: And I'm just like, I call BS on that, [laughs] right? And you know, looking at Ukraine, looking at any number of wars in the Congo, right, and you’re just like “No”—
BLAIR HODGES: The suffering of children, the suffering of animals, and yeah—
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I just can't. I'm like, God is bad at that. And the big thing for me is, I'm very skeptical of the afterlife, because I think it makes us not fight for heaven on earth.
BLAIR HODGES: This is one of the things Karl Marx got right. People think that when Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” they think he was just insulting religion. But I remember reading that—I didn't read that in context until I was in grad school, and what he was saying was, here we have all these people that are starving to death. And we have religious leaders and political leaders that are telling them, “You know what, you got a golden palace waiting for you. So nothing needs to change, you just enjoy your little starvation. And the other side of this, it's going to be rainbows and lollipops.”
That's a hard-hitting critique of how the afterlife, the idea of the afterlife, can be used to mute pain and suffering, or to justify pain and suffering.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: It drives me up the wall. Especially as Americans, we know that slaves were converted against their will to Christianity, and then told that there would be just desserts in heaven, and the crimes that have been done in the name of heaven, I would just think that Heaven itself would be like, “Do you know what? Don't do things in my name for two hundred years. I don't want it.”
BLAIR HODGES: As a religious person—these critiques are real to me. And I don't have answers for them, I have things I do to turn the tide back and say, well, that means that my religion needs to focus on now, my religion needs to be oriented toward justice, so on and so forth.
So anyway, it's interesting to read from—to feel a lot of resonance with someone who, you know, you're an atheist. I'm a Deist. But [laughs] one that can agree with a lot of the things you're talking about.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Well, that's the thing, right? I'm not arguing with what I think of as religion-done-well, and I sometimes worry that I'm arguing with a straw man version of religion. But I do think I'm arguing with an overly generalized concept of religion, at least how I was raised to think of religion.
BLAIR HODGES: I think you're doing it in a way that's generous, though, because here's a quote again. So this is from your spiritual autobiography. You say, “Like many people who've been disappointed, uninspired, or traumatized by religion, or who inherit that trauma, I had to find a way outside of its traditional mode to have my religious experience.”
So, you're actually still talking about religious experience, and seeking that, and nourishing it, and connecting with other people who do. So there's a generosity there. And I understand, there are some people who are traumatized to the point where that's just off the table altogether. They don't need to use any of the language, all of that is too triggering, which I understand. But I also think it's wonderful to have someone like you who can still connect with religious experience, and I think generous religious readers just have a lot to gain from a perspective you bring.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Thank you. And I just want to say, I agree with a lot of religious writers a lot more than I agree with a lot of atheist writers.
BLAIR HODGES: Especially the new atheists [laughs].
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I hate New Atheism [laughs]. I just—
BLAIR HODGES: It's shallow.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Part of why I wouldn’t want to call myself an atheist. I'm just like, “No, that is not—I do not think religious people are stupid at all.”
BLAIR HODGES: Or that like religion is fundamentally and only violent or like—
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Right. Yeah, I'm like Stalin was an atheist. Like what? You know, it’s nonsense.
Jane Eyre in thirty seconds or less – 26:33
BLAIR HODGES: You avoid the black and white. And let's dive into some examples here so that people can get a sense for what the books doing. So I like your very first one, “On Staying in Bed.”
But before we do that, too, I want to issue you a challenge. I want to see how you pull this off, okay?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Oh no!
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, and by the way, for people who haven't read Jane Eyre, and I read it in preparation for this interview, but I've never read it before. For people who haven't read it, go ahead and skip ahead about thirty seconds. Okay. I want to hear how you describe the plot of Jane Eyre in thirty seconds. Give us the whole thing. I want to hear what you hit. So go ahead! [laughter]
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Do you have a timer?
BLAIR HODGES: I got it going. I'm going to start it right now. Here we go. Okay? Ready, set, go.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Ah—Jane Eyre is an orphan who is hated by the family she is raised in. She gets sent to an orphanage that is doing the kind of religion that you and I were critiquing earlier, it is saying, “punish the body to save the soul.” She graduates from that school and becomes a governess to a little girl, falls in love with the—falls in love with the man of the house.
BLAIR HODGES: Her boss! [laughter]
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Her boss, who's twice her age—more than twice her age. And she finds out that he has a wife locked in the attic, she runs away, she gets taken in by a lovely family who, it somehow turns out, are her cousins. And she returns to the man she loves. And it turns out that his wife burnt down the house, he is free to marry, he has been injured in the fire, but they get married. “Reader, she marries him.”
BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] And that's really good. That's really good.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah, they live happily ever after.
BLAIR HODGES: They live happily ever after. And also a missionary guy goes off and dies.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yes, he does. But happily!
BLAIR HODGES: I'm also gonna go back in time and say skip ahead sixty seconds, just in case, because I would hate for people to hop in—
VANESSA ZOLTAN: [laughs] Sorry!
On staying in bed – 28:19
BLAIR HODGES: No, that was good! That was excellent!
But let's hop in, then. You start your first meditation, your first prayer here, it’s from the first line of Jane Eyre, and from its first paragraph. So I'm going to go ahead and have you read the first chunk of text that you do a “prayer” with. So go ahead and read that for us.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Sure. I feel like I could maybe do this by heart, but I'm gonna give myself a break.
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering indeed in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning. But since dinner, Mrs. Reid, when there was no company, dined early, the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so somber and a rain so penetrating that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question. I was glad of it.”
BLAIR HODGES: This is a brilliant opening paragraph. My goodness. And what about that first line? “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” What a first line!
VANESSA ZOLTAN: What a first line! So good, right? She's trapped. There is no freedom. She can't get out of this house.
BLAIR HODGES: And what you end up doing with this is, meditating on this text, thinking about it. And this turns into then a prayer about depression and guilt. So give us a sense of what you end up doing with this opening paragraph.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: So my grandmother had severe vertigo in, I believe, 1958? I would now have to go back and look, is that right? No, 1956.
BLAIR HODGES: Yes, you say “Starting in the spring of 1958 my grandmother spent eleven months in bed,” yes.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: There it is, yes. So, what happened was, she had a very traumatic sort of eighteen years. Her parents sent her away from Slovakia when it was clear that they were going to be arrested. And she hid as a maid in Budapest, but got arrested in 1941 and sent to Auschwitz. So she was in Auschwitz for four years. She was actually rescued by Russians on a death march, and then had to fend for herself, her whole family was killed, and then got married to my grandfather, where she assisted in his smuggling operation, like you do! And then they moved countries several times until they could get into the United States. Had to start a life here. And then my grandfather got a job where she could quit her job. And she went to bed and got vertigo and couldn't get up for eleven months.
And it just makes sense to me that once you lie down, after all that, you just can't get back up.
BLAIR HODGES: There is no possibility of taking a walk that day.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: There is no possibility, right? She didn't have an option for a really long time. And I'm not saying it was a blessing, right? Like it was not a blessing. She missed a year of her children's lives. What I wished for her is that she'd spent a year resting, not a year in pain from vertigo and therefore having to be in bed.
But I have chronic depression and—less so now because I'm pretty well medicated and know how to manage my symptoms, but when I was younger, I really, yeah, right? Like, I couldn't get out of bed sometimes. And it's a physical thing.
BLAIR HODGES: Are there any days in there where you are glad of it though? Like, this is this moment of—
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Right? That's the thing, that the last days of any depression—and I don't know if this resonates with you, but you're wondering if you're just enjoying it, right?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, which can turn into its own guilt spiral. [laughs]
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Totally.
BLAIR HODGES: I felt this way with COVID though, did COVID do this to you?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Totally.
BLAIR HODGES: Because at first, I was like, “Oh, a two-week quarantine at home?” We were thinking it was gonna be short. But I was also like, “Okay, I'm actually kind of down for this, like, I need a break. I need to do this.” And then, you know, time wore on and things changed. But there was a time when I indulgently look at that and say, ooh, that's terrible, because people are getting sick, and people are dying. But there was this thing in the back of my head that was like—
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Right, absolutely. If you think of depression, or vertigo—right?—as a broken ankle, and you take the cast off in that moment where you're afraid to put your foot down, but your ankle has been fine in the cast for a week, right? But you stay in the cast that extra week.
And I think there's always that moment with depression, which is the same, where you're probably fine to get out of bed, but you're not sure that you are, and you're scared, and you're a little indulgent. And so yeah, I would think about her and how she ended up in bed, and how if she had been depressed during those eighteen years, she could not have gotten to bed, right? Which just adds to this spiral of guilt.
But I think Jane feels trapped in this house. And it's horrible. But she's also relieved that she can't go on a walk, because she doesn't like it. [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, she wants to hide behind a curtain and read.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Exactly. And so, you can know something is bad, like COVID, or know something is good, like being out of bed, and still feel the opposite about it.
BLAIR HODGES: It's a fantastic meditation. And it's the kind of thing that I think—I don't know where I would go in scripture to find that kind of moment to meditate on. Some of the scriptural stories are a little bit more rudimentary.
Well, I mean, I take that back. Actually, there's some genius, especially in the Hebrew Bible, but there aren't some of these just more intricate—like this experience of staying in bed and feeling guilty, but also a little bit, okay, or dealing with depression, we don't see those in scripture. But here when we treat Jane Eyre scripturally that way, then you're able to create this beautiful prayer out of it that people, whether they're religious or not, can meditate with. And that's a powerful thing.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah, I mean, there are parts of the Bible that I'm like, “Oh, man, this is good.” Whenever I'm in church, and I don't like something that's happening—if it's a hymn that I'm like, “Oh, I don't like this,” I always read the opening couple chapters of the Bible. The creation story? And then the second creation story? I frickin’ love it!
BLAIR HODGES: It’s amazing. The whole book of Genesis, I think, is absolutely amazing.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: It's one of the best things ever written. I just love it. I just love it! And I even—I love the Gospels, right? Here's one story, but you're gonna hear a bunch of different versions of it? And the honesty of the epistles, that it's like, this is one guy writing letters [laughs]—
BLAIR HODGES: And he's having lots of problems! [laughter]
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah! And so, I don't know, I think the Bible is beautifully complicated book. I also just think there's something beautifully universal in the specifics, right? And so the fact that Charlotte Brontë is one woman writing about Jane Eyre, one woman, there's something very illuminative about being that specific.
On survival as a virtue – 34:50
BLAIR HODGES: In chapter three, you take a really great laugh line from Jane Eyre, and you turn it into kind of a grim frank discussion about your grandparents and the Holocaust. The line you use here—this chapter is called “On Commitment” is—This is so good. Just in fact, you go ahead and tell the story. So basically, Jane's meeting with this stuffy head of this girl’s school that she's about to get sent off to. He's this prototypical religious, self-righteous, threatening, dour kind of, blech. So what happens?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: He hands her a pamphlet on how kids die all the time! [laughter] And if they're not well behaved, they go to hell!
BLAIR HODGES: This is so good.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: He says something along the lines of like—
BLAIR HODGES: Do you know what happens—
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Oh, yes!
“Do you know what hell is?” And she says, “Yes, it is a pit full of fire.” And he says, “How are you going to avoid going to it?” Obviously expecting her to be like, “I will try to be a very good girl.” And instead she says, [laughs] “I must stay in good health and not die.” Which is just the greatest “screw you” ever! I love her. She's perfect.
BLAIR HODGES: But you take that—which, it's hilarious, we can laugh at that line—but it also becomes this meditation about some of the stuff that you've touched on here about the commitment to survive.
Like, you take this as kind of representative of Jane herself, that she's a person who is not going to give up. She's not going to give in. She's going to keep in good health and she's not going to die. She's going to keep going, despite what comes her way. And you see that also in your ancestors, in your grandparents.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yes, a friend of mine named Charlie, he's a loser [laughs], he only has one grandparent who's a Holocaust survivor—whatever. [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: That's the hierarchy, okay.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I know, I'm like, “One out of four?! Meh.” But he and I discussed it most explicitly, but I feel like this is a discussion amongst families of survivors a lot, that it isn't necessarily the best people who survived, right? And there's this concern, that it's somehow selfish people who survived?
BLAIR HODGES: Like “Oh, they were hoarding bread,” or “they found ways in the camps to like, send somebody else to the chamber” or things like that?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Right. And it's just like, not true. The data bears out that that it is not correct. That it's complete luck, and I can tell stories about, you know, moments that my grandparents happened to survive. But it's definitely a question that you think about. And I really had to reckon with that, and think “No. Wanting to survive is an act of hope,” right? It's saying, “I think we're gonna get out of this.”
And I actually think, you know, my grandmother, sort of famously in her tiny Hungarian community in Israel, would share soup with the dying. And she thought people should be able to die full as an anomaly. But she was constantly making sacrifices. And I actually think that gave her a lot of strength and hope—right?—to survive.
BLAIR HODGES: Like it’s its own kind of nourishment. Also, not to say that people who weren't doing that were somehow morally inferior.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Of course.
BLAIR HODGES: I mean, for some, that wouldn't even cross their mind to think to have that kind of thing.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: And, I mean, in defense of everybody else, she was only there for nine months. It's like—Anyway, right? I wonder if she would have done that, year two.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: But I really wanted to talk myself into survival being a virtue. And I just think it is, right? And I think I would probably talk about it differently after talking to Lauren Sandler about Jane Eyre for a year.
BLAIR HODGES: Interesting. What would you change?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Well, first of all, I think the key line—and this is from Joyce Carol Oates, I used to think that this was the most essential line in Jane Eyre, “I must keep in good health and not die.” And I now think it's the first line of chapter two, which is, “I resisted all the way.” And I think you can essentially map this book, plot point by plot point, about the moments that Jane resists.
There are a couple of moments in the book where like, eight years will pass. And you're like, why did she give eight years one paragraph? And I think it's because it's eight years where she didn't resist anything, she just went with the flow. And I really think this book is just a chronicle of her resistance.
But this is obviously a moment of resistance, where she's like, “Screw you, I'm gonna keep in good health and not die.” But I also think that, you know, Helen Burns' death, which is a really big thing in the novel—
BLAIR HODGES: Helen Burns dies pretty early on in the book, she's a young girl at the school where Jane is, the first person to really kind of treat Jane as a person, really, and she dies quickly.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: And she has this line about like, “It's better that I'm dying. I have no place in the world.”
And I—Helen is right, she doesn't have the constitution for hard work. And she's a poor girl with no family. She, the world has no place for her. And so, she's like, “It's better that I'm dying. I'll go to heaven, which has a place for me.”
And so, again, this idea—Survival is important. Because if you survive, you advocate for the world to have a place for you. Yeah. I just think survival should be tied to the idea of hope.
And choosing not to survive, right? Like, I absolutely have a tremendous amount of respect for people—I would not have had hope. I would have walked straight into the electric fences at Auschwitz. And I have a tremendous amount of respect for people who are like, “I'm not ‘fighting’ quote-unquote cancer anymore. I'm opting out.”
BLAIR HODGES: It strikes me how real it is for you, too. Like, my wife and I have had conversations on the same theme, like when we would watch The Walking Dead, for example, and she's the one who's like, “Okay, I'm opting out, right away!”
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yep!
BLAIR HODGES: And I'm like, “Well, I'm gonna like, kind of fight—“. But to actually have this—it’s family history for you. It's not really a hypothetical. These are circumstances that real people went through, and you say, “Survival is not a virtue,” but then you're trying to argue your way back into saying, “Well, through Jane's experience, we can see virtue in her efforts to do that.”
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Exactly. I mean, we see this now in Ukraine, acutely, right? We are watching people send off their families to safety.
BLAIR HODGES: In real time, I should say, this episode will come out later, but we're recording this and it's day eight or something of the siege right now.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah. And so we're watching people say goodbye to their families, sending them to safety and saying I'm gonna stay and fight, right? Choosing to risk their lives for something bigger. These are live choices, all the time. Going into the house that's flooding in New Orleans or Texas, right? Like these decisions are not just in the Holocaust.
Rather be happy than dignified – 40:56
BLAIR HODGES: And it's great, again, to see how you can take a text like Jane Eyre and have these kinds of meditative discussions. Like this text is rich enough to slow down with, and to just have some incredible discussion.
There's a theme that kind of comes up a few times I've noticed throughout. You have a chapter on destiny and in this one you're writing as a superfan. So that allows you also a moment to address a few pet peeves you have as a superfan in the book. So I'm thinking of one of the most quoted lines from the novel people might see on a wall hanging or on a t-shirt or something where Jane says, “I would always rather be happy than dignified,” and you've seen this [laughs], but it bugs you. Why does it bug you to see this quote around?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: It's a great quote, it just bugs me because she only thinks that after she's nearly starved to death! And she chose dignity a lot! And I think it depends on the situation.
BLAIR HODGES: It's weird that she said “always”—
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Always! [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: —because you've already read the book and seen like, “That's actually not true, Jane. You've made yourself pretty miserable in a few big ways throughout the book.”
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah. And so it's the use of the word “always,” which, I think, in the context of the book, a nineteen-year-old Jane, who's in the middle of being, I would argue, groomed by a creepy man, you know, saying “No, no, no, I'd always rather be happy and please him.” Like, I think that's an appropriate quote for the moment. But I think taken out of context, it fails.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. Well, you get to address it! [laughter] So that's one of the benefits of doing a book like this is, you know? I mean, I'm sure, given the legions of people who use the quote in other ways, I hate to break it to you, but you're fighting a losing battle.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Well and I think it's a lovely sentiment to have in the world, right? Like, “Go apologize first,” like, “Who cares who's right in the fight,” yes. Right—but only sometimes.
But does it hold up – 42:39
BLAIR HODGES: Alright, so that's Vanessa Zoltan. We're talking about her book Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice. Vanessa earned a bachelor's in English Lit and creative writing from Washington University in St. Louis and also a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School.
I also want to mention as well you're the CEO and founder of Not Sorry Productions where people can find some incredible podcasts—some, by the way, smash hit podcasts, including Harry Potter and The Sacred Text. When you agreed to do my show I was very excited and very honored because you are, to me, a podcast rock star who's been doing some fantastic stuff for years!
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Thank you! It does not—To be clear, I'm in my pajamas in a closet. [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: And I'm wearing my own merch right now! I have a Fireside hoodie on.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: [laughter] So am I! I have a Hot and Bothered t-shirt on!
BLAIR HODGES: Oh good! Yes! I feel good about it.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I am a rock star in a closet.
BLAIR HODGES: And in this podcast about Jane Eyre, you talk with another one of my favorites, Lauren Sandler, as we mentioned a little bit earlier. And you kick that show off by talking about whether we should have our fourteen-year-old girls or boys read Jane Eyre today. Because as we mentioned, with a book that was written so long ago—I recently re-watched Scrubs?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Oh my god, it doesn't hold up! Isn’t it horrible?
BLAIR HODGES: Which I love, and Oh! There's some things about it that I’m like “I love this!” Like I love the story arc of Brendan Fraser and there's some—
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yes!
BLAIR HODGES: —there are things about it that I'm like, “This is magnificent TV.” Some of the best arcs I've seen. But I'm like, the sexism, and the—I don't want my kids watching this, right?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I know! I loved Scrubs!
BLAIR HODGES: Me too. But this is Jane Eyre, and you're asking that question about this text and what do you think? What do we do with a text like Jane Eyre that as—you know, you've mentioned colonialism, sexism, now we would see the relationship between her and Rochester—her boss who she ends up being with in the end—as being hugely problematic.
So is it better to maybe just leave it in the past and say, “Maybe we can find some better books to read here”?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I mean, I do not think everyone should read Jane Eyre. If it doesn't interest you, I don't think you should read it. I think reading should be pleasurable. But I do think it should stay alive and be read. And we just need to read it critically, you know, in conversation with one another.
And that's not to say that we shouldn't tear through its pages and get swept up in it. And we should also wonder about it. You know, we were lucky enough to have the incredible author, Marlon James, on our podcast, and he is a Caribbean writer who—he's a Caribbean, queer, Black writer. So he would have every reason to be deeply offended by this novel. And he loves it. And what he said is, you know, “If I didn't read novels that offended me, I would have nothing left.”
And I actually think that there's something really special about old books. When you feel connected to them it feels like God's love. It's like Charlotte Brontë wrote this for me, even though she would never be able to imagine a Jewish atheist going to divinity school, like that would blow her mind. And yet there are moments where I feel so seen by the book, and the fact that it was two hundred years ago makes me feel less alone. And so, I think that the power of that is so important.
BLAIR HODGES: I think it also gives you the opportunity to propose oppositional readings to the text. I'm thinking of the character, Bertha. So here's another spoiler section people so go ahead and skip forward if you’re—
VANESSA ZOLTAN: It is an almost two-hundred-year-old book. So don’t feel bad about spoiling it.
BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yeah! So Bertha, she's the wife of Rochester who he married earlier on in life, and then she was called mad and crazy, and he ends up bringing her to different country, locking her up in the attic, and basically just keeping her alive, but trying to move on with his life. And then instead of seeing her get taken care of, we actually see her exact revenge and burn the whole house down. And you know, Rochester is injured by her because of her actions, but she's also just kind of a tool in the plot, to sort of maybe exact a little bit of vengeance on him, but she's a tool in that way, and is certainly erased.
You address this on a chapter on women's anger, and you say, “Jane Eyre, like all sacred things, does not sufficiently account for the suffering of the most marginalized and the most vulnerable among us. But maybe it's not up to the things we treat as sacred to do that work, but up to us to try to do it. Or maybe that is the purpose of sacred texts—to be insufficient and leave us to do our work in the real world.”
So you actually give us an oppositional reading in your book, where Bertha becomes a more fleshed out character, and you say “Well, what if it was this, what if it was this?” So you actually can play with the text a little bit, even, to redeem a character that was otherwise, frankly, abused and used as a tool.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah. First of all, I think there are a lot of hints within Jane Eyre that Bertha is more complicated than meets the eye.
Second of all, I will give Charlotte Brontë some credit. She was criticized for this in her lifetime, and she wrote a letter—kinda of apology—to a friend of hers being like, “Yeah, I went too far. I did not think enough about Bertha and I should have.”
But you know, Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, and it is Bertha's story. And that is a beautiful thing. And I think, part of why I think Jane Eyre should keep going is because if you measure something by what it generates—like people just keep writing brilliant and beautiful things, making this novel more and more complicated, you know? Re Jane by Patricia Park, and The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Lipsy, and Wide Sargasso Sea, right? Like, this just keeps getting retold in fascinating ways. And Bertha, I think, is getting her revenge for hundreds of years! Women keep talking about her.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, and there's a book called the Madwoman in the Attic—
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah, that's right! Gilbert and Gubar invented second wave literary feminism by talking about Bertha.
Regrets – 48:22
BLAIR HODGES: So we've touched on a few of the chapters here, but your book is full of these sort of meditations. Yu also include some things at the end with other texts—including Harry Potter—to kind of give people a sense of other books and how these reading techniques you’ve developed can work with them. And you also include actual tools—like there's a nice little thing at the end where it says, “Here's how to do it. Here's the religious thinkers that we're drawing from. And here's what the practices are.”
So people that are interested in the kind of discussions that we're having, I would really encourage them to check out the book, Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice, because the book itself exemplifies—I think—what you hope readers are going to do.
But I also wondered now that you're a little bit removed from having created this book, if there are any regrets about the project, or any changes you would have made to this project. It's pretty common to finish up something big like that, and then be like, “Oh, you know what? Maybe I could have done this.”
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yes! [laughs] Oh my God. I really think the worst part of the book release process was, I had the honor of reading my own audio book. And it was the most painful experience of my life! [laughter] I was like, can I rewrite this whole book, please? Anything I write the rest of my life, I will now read aloud to myself before I submit!
BLAIR HODGES: Wow!
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I mean, I was just—it was so painful. I do think I get petty a couple of times in the book that I'm really not proud of. Like I said, I think I picked the wrong thesis statement of Jane Eyre in picking “I will stay in good health and not die” instead of “I resisted all the way.”
Also—and I explain this, it’s something I gave a lot of thought to, I give an explanation for this, and it was a hard-won thought about—I picked only white authors in order to treat as sacred, as the four examples. I do The Great Gatsby, Harry Potter, and Little Women, and then obviously Jane Eyre. And I wondered about—you know, there are obviously authors of color that I treat as sacred. And I list them and say, “These are authors that inspire me,” I list some of them I should say. But I wish I was a little more courageous and had—Because by staying away so firmly from appropriation, you really risk erasure. And I think I should have taken the other risk. I think I should have. I was just, I was afraid of angering people. And honestly, I think I would have mostly angered white people. So that is my big regret. I should have done, you know, Paradise by Toni Morrison, which is one of my favorite novels.
BLAIR HODGES: That's a really interesting decision to make of like, “Do I reach out and include these voices that are absolutely amazing, or do I risk colonizing them and sort of bringing them into a white experience?” And that's a tough one. But I think, having published the book and reflecting on it, I mean, it sounds like that can inform your future projects.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: I hope so. We'll see.
BLAIR HODGES: That's Vanessa Zoltan. She's host of the award-winning smash-hit most wonderful podcast Harry Potter and The Sacred Text and also author of the book Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice.
Alright, so Vanessa, we're going to take a little break, and I gotta throw a couple logs on the fire, going to stir up the flames a little bit here. It's kind of you know, the fire is going down here. I'm gonna pass you the marshmallows, and we'll come back with the best book recommendation.
[BREAK]
Best Books – 52:49
BLAIR HODGES: We're back with Vanessa Zoltan. We're talking about her book Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice. This is a fantastic book. This is a book that can inform how you read other books. I really enjoyed this book.
There's so much more we could have talked about Vanessa, but you're a podcaster so you know, how do you think I did, did I choose some good questions? You can critique me too here.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: [laughs] I thought you did a beautiful job.
BLAIR HODGES: No notes?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: No notes.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay. That's great. Okay, let's talk best books though. I love this segment, because this is when my guests get to recommended book. Now I recognize, like your book is recommending a best book, Jane Eyre, right?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: [laughs] It is.
BLAIR HODGES: Like that's kind of what it does. In fact, I had a listener that reached out said, “You know, it'd be interesting is to interview authors about their best books and stuff.” And so I said, “Well, you know what, in season two, we have—” Yeah, but do you have another one? Like, what did you bring to talk about today?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Citizen by Claudia Rankine. One of the greatest books ever written.
BLAIR HODGES: This is one I read shortly after, I believe, Trayvon Martin was murdered.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yes, she wrote it—I mean, it has a black hood on the cover. So it is very much in conversation.
BLAIR HODGES: From a hoodie. Yeah. Why this book? What did this book—First of all, how did you encounter it? And what did it do for you?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: So I think that Citizen, and Ways of Seeing by John Berger, should be read in conversation with one another. They are just both books that will blow your mind and teach you how to see art differently.
So John Berger walks you through how to see traditional Renaissance paintings differently, and will really expand the way you look at the world. But Claudia Rankin brings that to Black bodies, mostly African American bodies. And she does a close reading, for example, of Serena Williams. And you just will not ever think about Black athletes the same. And the way labels get put on their bodies. And stereotypes too. And then obviously, you know, she talks about Trayvon Martin, and the different things that get put on Black boy's bodies. And these authors will literally change the way you see things.
BLAIR HODGES: I can't help but think about her list of names that ends with an ellipsis, and the power of just having that on the page. I mean, it blew me away.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: It's just incredible. And will gut you, and make you laugh. It comes with pictures, but it makes great use of pictures. It's also fearless. It calls out specific people, just with such clarity that it's kind of dishy and gossipy in that way that I find really fun.
BLAIR HODGES: And it's poetic. That's a great recommendation. I add my own. I'm right there with you. That is a fantastic book. So thanks for that recommendation.
Before we go, now that you finished this book, I know you have some walking tours and some other things planned. You're doing the podcast. Do you see more “Praying With” books in the future? Or is this kind of a one-off? What are you looking at down the road?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: So, I hope my next book will be about treating women's memoirs as sacred, women's stories as sacred. I think two of the kinds of books that sort of support the publishing industry are romance novels and women's memoirs, and they sort of fund literary fiction. They are two of the most successful genres. And I think women's memoirs are just fascinating places—it's like open secrets are shared. And I think these stories need to be taken seriously in a different way. You know, we laugh at Eat, Pray Love, and I don't think it's a laughing matter. I think some really beautiful things are shared. So I hope that will be my next project. We will see.
BLAIR HODGES: I can't help but ask if you've heard of Nora Krug's book Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home. Have you heard of that?
VANESSA ZOLTAN: No.
BLAIR HODGES: If not, I'm going to recommend it to you. So on Season One of Fireside, Nora joined us, she's an illustrator, a fantastic illustrator, and she put a book together—She's a German emigre and she takes an interest when she's young, she asks her mom if her grandpa was a Nazi, basically like “What was going on in our family?” And her mom's answer is very unsatisfying. It's basically non-committal. And so she goes on a quest to find out the truth. And it's her memoir, it's an illustrated memoir, it's called Belonging.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Oh that’s awesome.
BLAIR HODGES: So that's a best book recommendation for you.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Thank you!
BLAIR HODGES: This is one of the top five books I've ever read, in part because of what she's able to do with illustration, and with artifacts that she's found, and I think—I would be fascinated to hear your response to it. Because this is the other side—I've read Elie Wiesel, and I've read other memoirs of Jewish people in World War II—obviously Anne Frank. But I'd never read one by a German person that's trying to figure out what it means to be German in the wake of that atrocity. And
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Yeah. That’s fascinating.
BLAIR HODGES: That's highly recommended. Yeah, I'd be interested—So anyway.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: Bernhard Schlink—I love The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, but I've only read fictional versions of that story. Yeah, so that's fascinating. Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Great. Vanessa, thanks so much. This was so much fun. I'm really thrilled.
VANESSA ZOLTAN: It was an honor and a pleasure. Truly.
BLAIR HODGES: Thank you so much.
Outro – 57:42
BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.
Alright, another episode is in the books, the fire has dimmed, but the discussion continues. Join me on Twitter and Instagram, I’m at @podfireside. And I’m on Facebook as well. You can leave a comment at firesidepod.org. You can also email me questions, comments, or suggestions directly to blair@firesidepod.org. And please don’t forget to rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts if you haven’t already.
Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistants, Kate Davis and Camille Messick, and also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges.
Our theme music is “Great Light” by Deep Sea Diver, check out that excellent band at thisisdeepseadiver.com.
Fireside with Blair Hodges is the place to fan the flames of your curiosity about life, faith, culture, and more. See you next time.
[End]
NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.