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Acknowledgments

First, I offer thanks to the editors of four online publications where the following essays, their material reworked for this book, first appeared in 2017: Los Angeles Review of Books, “Leo Tolstoy and the Origins of Spiritual Memoir”; Berfrois UK, “Thomas Merton and the Language of Spirituality”; Pacifica Literary Review, “The Reliably Spiritual Author”; and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, “What I Am Not Yet, I Am.”

Next, I salute those who joined me for an AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) panel “Writing the Spiritual Memoir” in Los Angeles in 2016: Kathryn Winograd, Janice Gary, Shann Ray, and Beverly Donofrio. I also acknowledge my coparticipants on the panel “The Faithful and the Faithless” at the NonfictioNOW conference in Phoenix in 2018: Jessie van Eerden, Jenna McGuiggan, Sarah Beth Childers, and D. Gilson. I appreciate those friends and colleagues who listened to my evolving ideas, especially about the spiritual memoir, and thereby helped me clarify my often-unruly thoughts: Richard Buch, John Christianson, Linda Haas, Rosanna Hardin Hall, Steve Harvey, Richard Keith, Jane Lipman, Joe Mackall, Joan Mangan, Donald Morrill, Suzanna Neal, Jo Scott-Coe, Michael Steinberg, Sandi Wisenberg, and several MFA students at Ashland University who struggled valiantly with their own enigmas while trying to write about religious and spiritual experience.

Last, my deep regard for the crew at Ohio University Press / Swallow Press: director Gillian Berchowitz for wanting the book and wisely suggesting the final chapter; managing editor Nancy Basmajian for taking on more editorial worries about my prose than she deserved; and John Morris for his good-humored and unerring copy editing.