Jennifer Kavanagh. Photo: Courtesy of Jennifer Kavanagh.
Interview: Jennifer Kavanagh - Finding oneness
Jennifer Kavanagh talks to Ian Kirk-Smith about her life, work and faith
Jennifer Kavanagh has written eight non-fiction books and a novel, The Emancipation of B, having turned to writing after a career of nearly thirty years in publishing. She became a Quaker in 1996 and is an active member of Westminster Meeting in London.
She has always balanced a deep concern for contemplation and the mystical with action. Faith has prompted practice. She is a practical mystic: thoughtful, wise, perceptive, looking for opportunities to serve and always seeking to find a balance between inward experience and outward witness, and, in her words, ‘plenitude and the void’.
She has been involved with homeless projects; microcredit programmes in Africa; in facilitating conflict resolution workshops for the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), both in prison and the community; and in 2012 set up a charitable trust – Open Wing Trust. She has also studied singing for much of her life. An important interest in recent years has been the art of clowning – not clowning around, though she is blessed with a highly developed sense of humour and an infectious laugh.
What was your religious background?
My mother was a non-practising Jew. My brother was an atheist. I was baptised an Anglican and then my father became a Catholic, so at the age of five I was the only Anglican in the family. I was quite religious until I was eighteen. I read English at Leeds University – it was hard to choose between music college or studying English. My grandmother and two of my cousins were or are opera singers. My other grandmother, my Russian grandmother, was a concert pianist and my daughter is a composer.
After university I went to Penguin Books, where I learnt a huge amount about publishing. I was in charge of processing books from manuscript to finished book. I had, at twenty-one, a lot of responsibility and loved it.
When I became pregnant I did not want anyone else bringing up my children so I stayed at home with my daughter and son for seven years, working freelance. I did copy editing and reading for publishers. I did reviewing for the BBC World Service, wrote a bit for Woman’s Hour and then got a job with Woman magazine. I had never read romantic fiction but I learnt not to be so snobby about it. There is a huge spectrum, from Mills and Boon at one end to feminist literature at the other. I bought the serial rights to books and learned to cut them to about one-eighth of their length, which is an interesting exercise that teaches you a lot about structure.
Getting at the essence?
Yes, that has always mattered to me. I loved the challenge. It really exercised my mind and that sense of what mattered. I also bought short stories for the magazine and was able to buy the occasional piece of fine writing that worked for a mass readership.
You later became an agent?
Because I realised what I loved was talent spotting – being the first person to see something. That moment when you first read something and the hairs go up on the back of your neck – that feeling that ‘this is a real writer’. It is wonderful.
When I became an agent it felt as if everything I had done until then had fallen into place. I spent a few years in an agency learning the trade and then I started my own agency, where I was for fourteen years. I loved it. I really loved it. Making my own decisions. And then I got to a point when I did not love it any more – the celebrity culture, the bottom line mentality – the fact that it was harder to sell first-rate writers.
How did you come to Quakerism?
My marriage broke up when I was forty, in 1987, and some years later my life changed. I do not say ‘I came to faith’ because I feel it came to me. It was in the wake of trauma, as it is for many people.
The way I came to Quakerism was all rather unconscious. I found myself bursting into tears every time I went into a church. I wondered what was going on. I went to different churches – Catholic, Anglican, Methodist – but did not feel comfortable. I remember seeing a sign outside a Quaker Meeting house and went in and found peace. At the time I thought Quakerism had come out of nowhere but there had been a lot of signposts along the way that I had not been ready to see. I was very nervous. It was like new shoots. I did not want to trample on them. I crept in without talking to anyone.
But I picked books up from the library and could not believe what I was reading. I could not believe that religion could be like this. I thought religion was about saying what you were supposed to say – sitting down and standing up and so on – and this was just telling me to be myself, in fact, requiring me to be myself. I was looking for an answer to what was going on inside me. I was not looking for a community, but found one. I found one that was very empowering. In Quakers I found people who were ‘making a difference’ in small, local, ways maybe, but I thought maybe it was possible for me. So, I jumped in with both feet.
With faith came a need to do something and a recognition that I could leave my agency without knowing what I was going to do. I knew I would be guided. It was a huge moment. I stood up at my first Yearly Meeting and said: ‘I have been called but I have no idea what I have been called to. I just know I have got to leave what I am doing now.’
Could you talk about your experience of Meeting for Worship?
The fact that it is communal is hugely important. I can have spiritual practice at home. I can have silence and stillness there, and I do, but in Meeting there is the discipline of sitting, with others, for an hour, not knowing what is going to happen, which is also what I like about it. The fact that we are doing it together is so important. Someone quite new to Quakers said to me that the more they were aware of the other people in the room the deeper their worship was. I have made an effort to concentrate more on others in the room; not with my eyes open, but engaging, spiritually, with the sense of others being there.
I like to describe Meeting for Worship as a triangle – the self, the Spirit and the others in the room – and that is something we take out into the world. It is not just sitting on a meditation cushion to please myself. It is not just about reaching a state of peace, although it very often is. It is also about being guided and being moved out into the world – taking that triangle out into the world, and it is very often through others that I have been led to do the things that I have done. I think it is really important to engage in the discipline and to be faithful. Faithful is a good word.
What did you most enjoy about working with writers?
I was eliciting from them what they had to offer. That is what I liked. I tried not to meet the author before I read the work. It is the work that matters and the job is not just about an individual piece. It is also about guiding a career – finding a gift and affirming it. I think if you have a gift you have a duty to exercise it.
You started writing for yourself in 2002. What do you feel, now, being on the other side?
All I can say… it is completely addictive. Once I started I could not stop.
The one thing I am very clear about is that I must let the creative spirit emerge – not sit down every morning at eight and work until twelve and set a word count target. I have to allow things to unfold, particularly fiction, and I write best when doing things like walking in the park. Sometimes I wake up at four in the morning and scribble.
What draws you to the subjects you write about?
I travelled around the world and wrote a book about it – The Call of the Bell Bird: A Quaker Travels the World – and my book The World is our Cloister came out of the people I met on that journey and realising that with people of other faiths, at a mystic level, there was no difference. My mother, after being non-practising became involved in the Kabbala, and my father was very involved in the mystic end of Catholicism. I found myself reading the same books. Despite our different labels, we were in the same place. This universalist background has influenced my Quakerism hugely. In workshops I have given I have read mystic writings from different religious traditions and asked people if they could ‘place’ a reading in a tradition – it might be Hindu, Quaker, Eastern Orthodox – and they could not do it. The World is our Cloister was about what the Quaker life can be, living a contemplative life in the world, not behind monastic walls.
My book Journey Home came from working with street homeless people and prisoners, and because I have refugees on both sides of my family. Home, for me, did not seem to be geographical. When I asked people a question – ‘What is home to you?’ – and got their gut reactions, I was surprised so many people talked about their experience of childhood. The same was true of my book on success and failure. It was all about parental expectations and disapproval. People self-defined as failures but not as successes.
My favourite definition of simplicity is getting rid of the clutter between God and the self. It is always, for me, about the essence, all kinds of clutter, not necessarily material. When the clutter, for me, did turn out to be material, getting rid of it was an absolute joy. It had become a burden.
In your new book heart of oneness you return to that theme of unity.
Yes, I do. When I came to Quakers the first thing I was asked to do was to coordinate soup/tea runs for homeless people in the streets. I knew nothing about homelessness then and felt the usual helplessness and guilt passing a bundle in the doorway. It was in taking someone a cup of tea and saying ‘would you like some sugar’ that it became the beginning of a human relationship, and realising that bundle could be me, and that there is no such thing as ‘the other’. It was an epiphany. It led to everything else. That moment. That sense of oneness came from there.
We are all unique, precious, children of God – our fingerprints, each snowflake is unique – but all around us there is this extraordinary pattern in the universe – a oneness: how trees connect, how a salmon spreads nutrients in the water. It’s a web of connection. The more we mistreat it or destroy any bit of it we affect the whole. My experience of the Divine is about God as the life force, the connecting power between all things. Any kind of definition is ridiculous but my experience is of recognising that connection – whether it is seeing someone’s eyes or a woodpecker at a tree – that joy.
You are the European clerk of Quakers Uniting in Publishing (QUIP). Could you talk about QUIP?
QUIP is a network of writers, publishers, editors and librarians – people involved in the ministry of the written word. In the past there were a lot more publishers. Now publishing has changed. More writers are getting involved. There is publishing going on in Russia and active Quaker magazines in Europe. We are hosting the annual conference in Glenthorne in the Lake District this year and looking at the subject of writing –‘Writing at the Edge’ [26-29 April].
What inspires you?
People. Extraordinary kindness – the natural world – the inner voice, when I can access it.
What angers you?
Unkindness. A lack of love. Injustice. I cannot understand the way some people behave towards others.
What are your thoughts about the state of the Religious Society of Friends today?
I find it very difficult to think about entities like that. The corporate. Quakerism is more than just the Local Meeting. Friends who just go to their Meeting get a narrow view of what it is. I also think we are hung up on buildings. We spend a vast amount of time and money… that could be spent helping people who are in need. There is also a problem in a ‘Them and Us’ culture between Friends House and the rest of the country. It is sad because some wonderful stuff goes on at Friends House. We do need somehow to connect better.
I am tired of people harping on about belief. I don’t understand nontheism, because I do not know what worship would be. I say to an atheist: ‘What is this God you do not believe in… for I probably do not believe in him either!’ The wonderful thing about Meeting for Worship is that there is this sense that there is a presence, something beyond, and we do not know what it is. We cannot know what it is. It is beyond us. Our great richness, our great strength, is our diversity. Faith unites. Belief divides.
I once met a woman in a taxi and she said to me: ‘Have you heard the word of the Lord?’ I was quite taken aback but I looked her in the eyes and said: ‘Yes.’ We probably had completely different ideas about what we meant but, for both of us, the answer was true.
heart of oneness: a little book of connection by Jennifer Kavanagh is published by Christian Alternative at £6.99. ISBN: 9781785356858.
