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In my early days of rampant bookstore-browsing, I was often drawn to the section called “Belles Lettres.” Not all bookstores had such a section, but the ones that did were among the most interesting. In that section a browser might find the nonfiction of Annie Dillard or the letters of Flannery O’Connor or essays by T. S. Eliot. There might be the memoir of a forgotten early feminist or the spirited reflections of a person of science. It was an adventurous section that the word “eclectic” only begins to describe.
With its remarkable and enticing mix of writing styles and subject matters, as well as its difficult pronunciation (some clerks conscientiously kept the “s’s” silent and the “r” throaty, while others gave in to the easier “Belle’s Letters” pronunciation), it was perhaps inevitable that the Belles Lettres section could not survive. It lacked the strong sense of “category” that publishers and booksellers were depending on more and more to help them sell books. The books of the former Belles Lettres sections were increasingly confined to places in the store like biography and religion and inspiration and science and, in some cases, that mother of all pointless categories, nonfiction. I was sorry to see its contents ferreted away to remote and separate corners of the stores. Browsing has not been the same since.
One of the things I liked about those Belles Lettres books was that many of them had, whether acknowledged or tacit, a sense of the spiritual. Perhaps not a denominational, sectarian, or even “religious” sort of spirituality, but a recognition of values toward which human beings of any background could strive. And these books were, for the most part, of high literary quality. The writers engaged the human spirit through beautiful prose that often kept the pages turning late into the night and caused the synapses of one’s brain to continue clicking and connecting long after the book had been closed. It is for books of that character that I continue to search and browse in bookstore after bookstore still, after all these years.
Despite my general distaste for categorization and its tendency to oversimplify and misrepresent, I have come to think of these books as falling into the broad, unruly, and tolerant category of “Literary Spirituality.” This category is a nightmare for writers of mission statements and catalog copy. It contains multiple genres: memoir, biography, essay, fiction, poetry. Within these genres, works of literary spirituality take on the challenges of living a spiritual life with all its ups and downs and warts and blemishes, as well as its shining epiphanies and moments of quiet grace. They range in style and approach from Annie Dillard’s essay on teaching a stone to talk to Wendell Berry’s sabbath poems to David James Duncan’s sprawling, rambunctious The Brothers K, a novel of baseball, religion, and coming of age. On the other hand, literary spirituality does not include “how-to” spirituality, theology, or apologetics, just as it does not include shabbily written work that might otherwise meet the category’s content criteria.
Nimble Spirit: The Literary Spirituality Review is an online review of publications in literary spirituality. In this space we intend to recognize works that might otherwise fall through the old belles lettres cracks and get lost on bookstore shelves. We intend to review new books that strike us as literary spirituality and bring renewed attention to classics and old favorites. We hope to bring authors to this site, in interviews and conversations. We hope that publishers will come to see Nimble Spirit as an avenue for reaching readers who seek both spiritual and literary value in the books they read.
At Nimble Spirit we believe that the spiritual life and the arts are intimately connected and in many ways one and the same. We value resources that offer practical and sectarian approaches to spirituality, but we focus on spiritual literature that transcends boundaries and reaches toward the deepest level of our being. We seek literature that challenges and delights us from our edges to our center, both in terms of what is said and how it is communicated. It is important to admit up front that, like a child at play who gives joy to one person and annoys another, whether a work is one of literary spirituality may very often be in the eye of the beholder -- one person's spiritual resource (e.g. the Bible?) is another's merely fanciful story. In Nimble Spirit we will call it as we see it, report on what has struck and changed and moved us, and invite our visitors to dive into the mystery along with us.
--- Michael Wilt, editor
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