Community in slipstream
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| Community coming into view. Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash |
For a full year after the worst of pandemic restrictions eased, I was an extrovert unmoored.
My social skills, put on ice thanks to social distancing, remote work, and the all-consuming duties of parenting a toddler and infant in "unprecedented times," went into overdrive. Except they didn't reemerge as "skills" necessarily. They were more like retrainings, a reversal of atrophy, and as a result I was awkward AF.
Whenever I was in a social setting of more than three people, no matter the gathering's tone or context, I could feel a maniacal grin plastered on my face. I shoved past small talk and went right to Big Feelings and Vulnerable Moments. I was so desperate to hold hands, touch shoulders, and hug people that I had to constantly remind myself how, Covid notwithstanding, polite society requests I respect people's personal space.
The weirdest part of this moment in time was that I knew I was unhinged. I could feel my instinctual body wrestling with my rational brain, yet my body won more times than I care to count, so great was my desire to connect human to human again.
Eventually I regained (some) chill and remembered how to act within expected social parameters. But that period left raised emotional scars, and every so often something moving unexpectedly presses them to reactivate Unmoored Overemotional Ninny Julia™. The most recent occasion: helping staff the Exhibit Hall table for Lake Drive Books (my publisher) at the Festival of Faith & Writing 2026.
I knew I was eager to put myself at the center of the action in the Exhibit Hall, but I didn't anticipate how much the immediate warmth and engagement of other festival attendees would bowl me over. Look at all these people! every nerve in my body shouted as I stood behind the table, making sincere eye contact with anyone who passed. We are in the same room! Breathing the same air! Asking the same questions about faith and purpose and art! Why are we handing out bookmarks? We should be on our knees praising God for the opportunity to be alive at this moment, with these people, in pursuit of love and meaning! (Like I said ... unhinged.)
Deepening this feeling was the slipstream quality of meeting and interacting with many people I really only know virtually. After I attended the biannual festival in 2024 for the first time, I became more connected with other spiritual writers and continued to follow their work online. But through those same channels, not to mention through their writing itself, these folks have shared a good bit about their personal lives too, creating a sense of intimacy that I have to constantly remind myself is more parasocial than not.
Let me go back to the word "slipstream" for a moment. In fiction, slipstream is a "purgatorial genre, a between place" as Lyndsie Manusos evocatively puts it. Slipstream worlds are off kilter and strange; in a word, weird. That fantastical feeling can unsettle us, and it's in the unsettling that we might discover how we really feel about something.
In the case of my festival experience, feeling caught in a relational slipstream prompted me to wonder, why am I having such a strong reaction to gathering with this particular community? What are we gaining or growing by being together in person?
For those people I'm close to, like my publisher, editor, or writing friends, being in person nurtured the intimacy we've already established through our shared creative efforts.
For people I have befriended and interact with mostly online, I had the opportunity to peek beyond their public personas and learn what's not shared online, adding dimension and nuance to my understanding of their lives.
For the people I know only from afar through their work, I experienced firsthand how they use or take up or move through space, demonstrating how they embody what up until now I had only received as their thoughts.
For the people I met once and maybe never will again—like the college student studying youth ministry who beelined for my book on the Lake Drive table because she saw the question mark in the title and exclaimed, "This is exactly what we need to be doing ... asking more questions!"—they gave the gift of seeing, really seeing, for a brief shining moment what I am trying to contribute to the world.
And for the people who joined me in the slipstream at the festival, where we felt those first mutual sparks of friendship, vulnerability, and support—what of them? It's perhaps this group that most strongly summons Unmoored Overemotional Ninny Julia™, because they move me to ask: When we see the potential for intimate rootedness, how do we move forward together?
Because I don't want to reduce those encounters to transactions—you follow me, I follow you, and we don't bother connecting again until the 2028 festival. I see the possibility and want to make good on it. As my body shouted at me in the Exhibit Hall, let's breathe the same air. Let's make eye contact. Let's fan the spark we felt and see what warmth we can coax from it.
What a gift to connect in this distracted, attention-starved world. Let's grab that opportunity with two hands and never let go.
Prayer #420: "The Condition of Things Being So Held"
"The ways we commune around mystery are the ways we give our lives meaning."
—Ross Gay, Festival of Faith and Writing 2026
No rapport,
no accord,
no sharing,
no holding,
no union
can occur
without another.
Who are my anothers?
With whom am I building a body?
What mystery do we share? Invite? Engage?
And what meaning are we making
through such intimacy?
God of mutual participation,
join us to one another
and in our holy communion
reveal your beating heart.
Amen.
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Looking to grow your own heart three sizes? Check out the chapter titled "What About Love?" in my book, Amen? Questions for a God I Hope Exists, for more prayerful and poetic inspiration.