Author Archives: Jessica Lynne Henkle

“If you can possibly become anything else, don’t become a writer.” I read this line in an article a couple weeks ago (or something close to it), but of course, I’ve been hearing it my entire life. If you are also a writer, you’ve heard it, too: it’s the opening line to the speech that goes on to tell you how very difficult it is to be a writer.

For the past few months, I’ve been working on a book of essays: a collection mined from a pile of drafts I wrote four and five years ago, which has had me combing through a lot of personal archives.

The other day, a friend sent me a link to an episode of Radiolab called “In the Running.” It’s about Diane Van Deren, an ultra-runner who began running as a way to stave off seizures caused by epilepsy.

Ten years ago this week, I went to a cabin on Whidbey Island to finish the novel-in-stories that had begun as my master’s thesis. I went, and I finished, and I promptly had a nervous breakdown.

I could say any number of things about this last week. How when the power went out on Sunday night, just as I’d started to wash dishes, I let myself believe what, if anything, this past year should’ve taught me not to believe: maybe it won’t last long.

The Wieliczka Salt Mine in southern Poland was in operation for eight hundred years. It has nine levels, goes 1,000 feet deep, and has over 100 miles of tunnels. Over time, miners began to make carvings in the walls, and when they wanted places to pray, they began to carve chapels.

I have always considered myself to be a careful reader, and so, I cannot explain why it has taken me nearly twenty-five years of reading the Bible to notice that the tree of life was also in the Garden.

When I think of Easter Sunday, I inevitably think of Croatia, of myself running on wet cobblestone along the Adriatic, running in a wind-swept storm while the clang of church bells sailed into my ears from the ancient town along my left.

“How are you adjusting to the new normal?” This is the question I keep running into, and at every encounter, it sends a wave of alarm coursing through me. I will admit to something of a personal aversion to the phrase.

At the start of last year, God gave me a word, which was to be my touchstone in the year to come: joy. It was the kind of thing, if I did not know Him better, I would’ve taken as mockery.