Swinging on the Garden Gate

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is a Minneapolis-based writer, teacher, and writing coach. She has authored five books, including Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art & Practice of Spiritual Memoir and Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice. She attended Kathleen Norris’s workshop at the Collegeville Institute in 2012.

In this fall 2022 interview, Elizabeth spoke with fellow Collegeville Institute alumnae Rhonda Miska about the republication of her memoir Swinging On the Garden Gate: a Memoir of Bisexuality and Spirit 22 years after initial publication. 

The subtitle of your book is “a memoir of bisexuality and spirit.” And yet in the book there’s a bike trip through Wales, work at a retreat center that catches on fire…there’s so much there. How did you choose the moments to explore through a particular lens of bisexuality and spirit?

Memoirists must ask:  Where does my memoir begin and end? Because life continues! This book emerged as my coming out to myself and, secondarily, coming out to my family. I was exploring, “Who am I? What is this body?” I had to revisit my whole upbringing and ask, “What were my impulses? What were my longings? What was my body saying?” That took deep listening. Rewriting my narrative for myself was the seed of this book. Only later did I begin to think about readers.

Initially, I thought it was going to be a book about biking in Wales. That pilgrimage led me into listening to my own life and body. It was my first experience of deep solitude and doing something very physical. I wrestled out my story on the landscape. The deeper I got into my coming out story, the more I wondered, “What is this spirit in my body? What is my life source, my sense of connection to creation and to meaning? How is it manifested in these cells and organs?” Writing became this exploration of incarnation, deeply related to the faith of my upbringing. The writing naturally took me beyond sexual identity to the question of death in part because my nephew died during the time I was coming out. So, what does it mean to be mortal? What does it mean to love other mortals? How do we weather loss? All of those reckon with incarnation—with my particular incarnation. The book is really about how we are embodied spirit.

I was exploring, “Who am I? What is this body?”

It’s a unique thing to have a book come out twice. How did this come to be?

It had been out of print for a while when we were approaching the twentieth anniversary of publication. Of all the books I’ve written, Swinging is the one that feels closest to my heart. It’s also done the most good in the world in terms of accompanying young people in their coming out process and in wrestling with the Church. On a whim I wrote to the editor at Skinner House and said, “This is an important book to me. I’m going to reprint it myself unless you are interested in doing it.” They were interested!

A lot has changed since the book was first released; in some ways we’ve gone backwards. Obviously, queer couples can get married and people are much more accepted and integrated into society. Yet at the same time, the queer community has been so alienated from the Church; there is so much hurt there and resistance to faith. The Christianity that popular culture knows denegrates homosexuality—and then of course nobody understands bisexuality! Right before the pandemic I did a series of readings in Wisconsin at two-year colleges. A number of young people at those readings asked, “Is it even possible to be queer and spiritual? How does that work?” Their  assumption that living in a queer body means you can’t be spiritual made me profoundly sad. This book is my witness otherwise.

Is it even possible to be queer and spiritual? How does that work?

How was it to revisit the words you wrote twenty years ago? Are there places that were particularly poignant or ways you’d tell the story differently now?

Some of the language I use around God has changed—today I’m less apt to use the word “God” and prefer to talk about a divine source. I’ve grown theologically. When I wrote this book I was newly claiming feminine images of God.

But what I gleaned from my experience is still precious to me. First books have a fire that all following books lack. 

It’s a paradox—you’ve said that much of this writing was for yourself and you weren’t thinking about an audience. And yet now you’re very aware of how it speaks to young people wrestling with questions of sexuality and spirituality. What was the transition from writing for your own soul to really being other-focused, writing for a particular audience?

The first draft was definitely private. My first readers were my MFA professors. Another early audience was my parents. The night I came out to them, I handed them an early draft of this manuscript. Then I spent eight years writing and revising. Only during the revision process did I begin thinking about an audience. I believe that the private, exploratory, honest, vulnerable place that a writer creates for herself when she writes something pressing and personal is a portal into our common humanity. If we don’t allow ourselves that privacy, we can’t enter that portal. If we’re always thinking about the audience, we disallow that deep connection. No memoir worth its salt is really about the author. It’s always about something beyond the author. That’s what I hope happens in this book. I hope my story is in service of this exploration about being embodied spirit, specifically in a bisexual body.

Something you did beautifully was writing about the church of your childhood. You have vivid memories of Sundays there—people in the congregation, you as this child and youth with this active inner life engaging there. Given what you’ve described about where churches are with queer people, how is it to have church as such a central part of your own narrative?

In memoir, we all have to reckon with our family of origin. If you were raised in a church, you have your blood family of origin and your faith family of origin. My church had all the gifts and curses of any family. I had to wrestle with a patriarchal God, an institution that historically has oppressed women and the GLBTQA community, and a tradition that at times has been violent and misogynistic. Queer people have good reasons for leaving the Church. But my church never rejected me.  Even though both my family and church were flawed, they were loving. 

In your preface to the second edition, you close with an image of playing cat’s cradle with your sister on family road trips. Your book is a feast of sensory details, so of all the images you explore, why cat’s cradle to frame the book for the reader?

In the game cat’s cradle, you create a web. Your partner dips her hands into the strings and creates a new sculpture. It’s this evolving creative process that is also dialectical. Each sculpture that forms is unique. Our stories are like that—they evolve, they’re participatory. When you’re working with your own story, you dip into the tangled strings of memory and make something of it, then present it to the world. That’s exactly what memoir is: an opportunity to make something of my experience. I participate in making sense of my story, and then I share it with you.

I participate in making sense of my story, and then I share it with you.

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