Sugar-Water Religion
by Callie Rowland
Spalding University
Callie Rowland (she/her/hers) is a Creative Writing major at Spalding University, where she serves as Co-Founder and Editor of the undergraduate literary magazine, The Opal. Her writing has been featured in a number of literary magazines, including Angel City Review, and she is an SFF editor at the independent press Hydra Publications. Currently, she is seeking representation for her debut novel. For more information, you can visit her website callierowland.blogspot.com. For vintage fashion, reading updates, and occasional screeching into the void, you can follow her on Twitter & Instagram @_callierowland.
At one of my first sleepovers, I slept on my friend’s bathroom floor. Unable to abide her wet staccato snores, I couldn’t sleep in her bed, but terrified her parents would want to watch television before church the next morning, I couldn’t sleep on the couch. So like a Dickensian orphan, I eventually fell asleep atop the cold stone floor, using the hot pink shag rug as a blanket. The next morning, I awoke to my friend’s father standing in the doorway. When he saw me, his bowl-shaped body froze and his tired eyes widened, and in what my approximately nine-year-old mind determined equal parts amusement and disgust said, “What are you doing?”
I still don’t know. Over the past few years I’ve plumbed the depths of my mind, turning over memories like stones at the bottom of a lake, but instead of finding some monstrous trauma lurking in the shadows, I’m afraid all I’ve done is aggravate the silt, obscuring my view of not only the stones but also the sun. Over the past two weeks, for example, I have baked three kinds of bread, read four books, planned two vacations, plotted a novel, purged my belongings of all unnecessary mementos, and reorganized my collection of 600+ books, but I feel lumpy and dull as a bottomfeeder, as though I have accomplished nothing.
If I am to be at the bottom, though, I might as well examine the stones I have found. The morning after I slept in my friend’s bathroom, I dressed in a skirt firmly below the knee and a loose shirt with long sleeves. My friend’s mother braided my hair down my back like a second spine, then we all climbed into the blue-green minivan and drove to church, where I remained in service for roughly three and a half hours, lining my Littlest Pet Shops along the dark blue pew, the rows of plastic animals so neat they resembled Roman phalanxes.
I don’t remember which men preached that day, nor do I remember what was said, but my mind is filled with men waving King James Bibles over their heads, pounding the pulpit as spittle and sweat fly from their bright red faces, as though even they are asphyxiating on their doctrine of perfection. For despite the Christian creed that no human being can earn salvation, the attendees of the non-denominational, tongue-speaking church in which I grew up were obsessed with reserving their place as members of Christ’s Bride. These steadfast 6,000 individuals allegedly enter heaven immediately following their deaths, while all Christians who do not attain perfection during their lives remain dead in their graves until the End of Days.
I rarely listened in church until I was a teenager, when I realized how easy it was to punch holes in logic so gossamer-thin, but even as a child, the demands for long skirts and long sleeves and long hair were impossible to ignore. I don’t know how the boys reacted to their own rules, but if a girl failed to meet hers, it would result in raised eyebrows, whispers, and what I now believe was an often unconscious decision that she had leapt off the boat and thus deserved to drown in the lake. While seldom malicious, the women around me were exacting, and compounded by my eldest child status, the expectation of not only perfection but also constantly beating my own best was planted deep, like a mangrove tree in the center of a lake.
Over the past twenty years, that tree has spread its roots across the lake floor of my mind. Memories of screaming matches with my parents over cutting my hair, sobbing into my pillow after receiving a B on a high school math test, maintaining living spaces as orderly as my childhood phalanxes of Littlest Pet Shops… These stones clack against many others as I swim over them, simultaneously eroded and sharpened by the force of their collisions, caged by roots of fear, judgment, and egoism, all situated around the taproot of perfection.
On the surface, the mangrove’s canopy forms a shadow of anxiety across the lake. It thrives no matter the season, but over the past four months of querying my first novel to literary agents, the leaves have grown particularly thick and lush. While writing my novel, I held to my usual exacting standards, and while I told myself it would never be perfect, receiving dozens of rejections has caused me to fear that competing with myself all those years served not to strengthen my abilities but to blind me to the superior accomplishments of others.
My productivity over the past two weeks, then, has not been the Olympian lap across the lake it may seem, but a desperate thrashing against body-wide muscle cramps, churning silt and clacking stones as mangrove roots drown me in their embrace. When I blame the mangrove tree, though, I really acknowledge the truth that there is no monster lurking in these waters other than myself. For while the sugar-water religion of my childhood helped my mangrove tree grow tall and strong, I cannot blame it for germinating the seed.
I believe this because unlike my younger sisters, who after rejecting the church of our childhood embarked on the typical bildungsroman of alcohol, sex, and the occasional drug, I have swallowed enough of the perceived perceptions of others to drown. Because of this, I think my fatal flaw was always going to be a commitment to a religious lack of flaws, which invites an eternal fight against my humanity and therefore an endless deluge of disappointment.
There is light, though, even beneath the churning waters of the lake. There are my morning drives to school, in which I listen to audiobooks and stop for coffee and wonder after the families living in the Victorian mansions lining the oak-dappled streets. There is writing this essay, which has caused the blanket of silt to settle atop the cold stone floor, the process of putting words on a page at once my menace and my muse. What I am doing, I may never know, but I do it because—for better or worse—I am afraid of what will happen if I don’t.
Interview with the Author
1. What do you want readers to take away from your writing?
I want readers to leave my writing feeling less alone. When I see my own fears reflected in what I read, I feel validated and relieved. Even if just one person leaves my writing and thinks, "Thank God, it's not just me," I'm happy.
2. Is there an emotion that you feel when you write your pieces?
Of course! But that emotion varies. "Sugar-Water Religion" was actually a reflection essay for one of my classes, so once I started writing it and it went...deeper than expected...I was shaking my head at myself, exasperated that I couldn't just do the assignment. But that's the exciting thing about writing: if you let it, it'll take you places you never expected. My writing tends toward darker themes, which means I tend to feel angry or sad or nostalgic during the first draft, but when I go back to revise with a clear head, I always feel a bubble of excitement when I find some as-yet-unforeseen insight into myself, a character, or the world.
3. What is your creative process when you write? Is there a mood you set? A mindset you focus on?
My creative process involves opening a blank document, staring at it hunched over and terrifying myself that I'm ruining my posture. After checking my posture in the mirror, I type a sentence then delete it, then I repeat this process a few times. I sigh. I go watch a YouTube video (usually of someone baking a cake). Then I stare at the blank page some more and pull at my hair and worry my hair is going to fall out and I'll have to buy a cheap wig and it'll fall off and everyone will know that I'm secretly bald. Finally, when I get so angry at myself that I can't waste time anymore, I narrow my eyes and say, "Callie, if you don't do it, it won't get done, so you might as well do it now." Then, at long last, I start typing and disappear into the work.
4. What is your creative process when you write? Is there a mood you set? A mindset you focus on?
As you've probably gathered, writing is hard. For everyone. I know there are some people who say, "Writing is always fun," and I hope they're lying because if they're telling the truth I might have to kill them out of jealousy. (I'm kidding.) (But am I?) My point is, writing is work, but it's worth it. It's like finding a chunk of gold in a mine: you're going to get really dirty, and it might take so long you cry, but eventually you'll be able to take your prize out of the darkness and show it off in the light.