Playwright Janielle Kastner on the Embracing Doubt

Will Schwalbe: Hi. I’m Will Schwalbe and you’re listening to But That’s Another Story. Last weekend was a scorcher—the kind of broiling hot New York City day that makes you gasp the minute you step outside. So, I did what I always do in that situation—stayed inside, made a pitcher of iced tea, and stretched out on the sofa with a book. As it happened I was about two-thirds of the way through a modern classic that I was just loving. So the hot weather gave me the perfect excuse to finish. The characters, the setting, the prose. I was loving everything about this book. And I particularly admired how ingeniously the author had set into motion all sorts of subplots. I couldn’t wait to see how they all resolved. But here’s the thing. They didn’t. Or rather, some did. Others did in a contrived and annoying manner. I sweated my way to the end of the book and then put it down, hot and bothered. So, I wasn’t crazy about the ending. But then, I started to think about how much I’d loved everything that led up to it. And recently I got to talking about focusing on journeys, instead of endings, with today’s guest.

Janielle Kastner: I’m Janielle Kastner. I am a playwright, a writer, now a podcaster. And my medium is anything with words.

WS: In Janielle Kastner’s podcast, the Untitled Dad Project, she narrates her quest to come to terms with the untimely death of her father, whom she never knew. She is also now at work on a sixth play. And she’s a founding member of The Tribe, a theater incubator that supports artists making new works in her hometown of Dallas, Texas.

JK: So I grew up just me and my mom. We lived in the suburbs around Dallas, Texas, and I grew up in an incredibly tight-knit religious community. We were nondenominational and the church basically raised me. My mom, we were there every night of the week, basically like Sunday morning for service and then Sunday for lunch and sometimes Sunday night for like an extra worship service. And Monday night was choir and Tuesday was our night off. We’d watch Gilmore Girls. Wednesday night was another service. Thursday was like the puppet ministry and Friday night was the singles ministry and sometimes there was care group on Saturdays. So I was completely immersed in this church family that raised me. 

WS: Despite all the structure, Janielle always found ways to spark her imagination. 

JK: Some of my earliest memories of being in church services was getting bored and not having anything I could do about it. So I would open up my Bible to any book of the Bible that had a woman’s name in the title. So I would just reread Esther and Ruth over and over again.

WS: Soon, Janielle discovered other books.  

JK: The Boxcar Kids! The coolest. I wanted so badly to be one of the Boxcar kids. They made homelessness and orphans seem so innovative and fun, like a big challenge. I loved those books. I read the Three Investigators books. The Babysitter’s Club. All the series where you got to know characters over hundreds and hundreds of books and you got to watch them change over time. I loved that. 

WS: Reading created a particularly strong bond between Janielle and her mother. 

JK: My mom is a school teacher and so she was always reading to me constantly. When she would put me to bed, there was a rocking chair that she would rock me in and she would read a book and then I’d ask for another book and then I would ask for another book. And then she would start falling asleep. And then my like little three year old elbow, I would elbow her until she woke back up and then she would keep reading me books. We didn’t have very much time together during the days, so nighttime before bed was sort of our quality time and I wanted to spend it reading constantly. She read me like 11 books a night. In hindsight, I think that’s so rude of me. My mom was a hardworking, single mom. She deserved to go to bed. But I just wanted her to read the world to me. And she did. She really did. 

WS: Eventually, Janielle began to put her own observations to paper.   

JK: I started writing because I would—they were initially like prayer journals—I would write down my thoughts and a lot of them were prayers because of my foundation and my church. I felt like I noticed a bunch of sadness that no one else noticed. And so initially it manifested as prayers that I would write for those people describing their experiences, what I noticed about them, what I thought maybe they wanted and a prayer and a hope that they would get that. 

WS: There was one author that was particularly big within her religious community. 

JK: C. S. Lewis was everywhere when I was growing up. I’m the exact same age as Harry Potter was at various life stages, but I was in a very religious environment where I wasn’t allowed to read Harry Potter. So everyone gives you C. S. Lewis and Tolkien as the alternative. And so a lot of the boys in my life turned to Tolkien and I turned straight to C. S. Lewis. But we only read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. That was like the greatest hit. And so I read all the other Narnia books at the end of high school and I loved them, especially The Silver Chair.

WS: The Silver Chair is the fourth of seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia, a series rich with Christian themes and symbols.      

JK: My favorite passage of the book, the one that floored me and, is still . . . that I think ultimately really changed me, was Puddleglum, who’s this marshwampul character. He’s this frog-like, pessimistic, really pretty unlovable character. But he and the kids find themselves in the Underworld, which is this alternate world where the prince is trapped and they have to save him. And there’s this evil queen who is so disorienting and is enchanting them and is playing this music, and there’s a smell that infiltrates the air.

It gave me a new access to what I think faith can be, which was that profound doubt that can hold hands with a profound faith.

And she starts questioning, or asking them to question sort of everything they know about where they’ve come from, or everything that’s real. Like, “Oh, a sun, what’s a sun?” And then they start describing it, and of course when you describe a sun, they’re like, “You know, like a light bulb, but like really big.” It sounds so absurd to her and to them. “And Aslan, a giant lion? What’s that?” “It’s a giant cat.” That seems absurd to them, too. As they start being asked questions about everything that they value and everything they love. It all seems so silly and dumb and they start questioning whether anything that they know is real is actually real. And then Puddleglum stands up and says, “Okay, maybe this isn’t real. Maybe all this isn’t real. Like maybe what we came from isn’t real. Our mission isn’t real. Like Aslan, who we’ve come to trust isn’t real. Maybe it isn’t. But we imagined it and our imaginations came up with something that’s actually quite better than this world that you have under here. So I’m going to live as a Narnian, even if there is no Narnia.” And I was floored by that because it was such a deeply agnostic realization inside these very religious books that say, “Well even if this isn’t real, it makes me better. There’s something in it that I love and if it’s not real, I’m still going to live as though it’s real.” 

WS: Janielle’s experience of faith was very different from what she was reading in C. S. Lewis, and this had left her conflicted.

JK: When I grew up in the very religious tradition, the church I grew up in was in the middle of the charismatic movement. So it was all about passion. Being very passionate about your faith. You gotta be passionate about it all the time. On “fire” was the word we used. And then I found myself at this crossroads at the end of high school going into college—where I’m not supposed to be losing my faith or whatever—where I didn’t feel that passion nonstop that I was taught about at my church.

And to be left with this ugly little frog creature saying, “Okay, what if it isn’t real? I’m still gonna live it because I love it. Because it makes me better to live it, even if the math doesn’t check out or even if it doesn’t feel, I don’t feel very passionate about it right now here in this different world.” It meant a lot to me. It gave me a new access to what I think faith can be, which wasn’t anything I had been handed. It was like finding a new tool, which was this profound doubt that can hold hands with a profound faith. 

I think I needed to be looked at a little less and I wanted it to be heard a lot more.

WS: When we come back from the break, Janielle prepares to head off to college, where she’ll come to rely upon The Silver Chair to guide her through questions about faith, heartbreak and her absent father.

*

WS: Janielle didn’t travel far away from home for college. She enrolled at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.    

JK: And so I thought I wanted to be an actor and so I went to acting school and I liked acting a lot, but then I hated the monologues for young women. They were all like: you got to go be sexy, or you got to go be traumatized and cry, or you got to come in and correct the boy—who’s the actual protagonist who has like rich inner life with a lot of conflicting decisions—and you have to tell him like, “Craig, this is why you shouldn’t have dumped me.” And read him the Riot Act, and then storm out, and that’s your one monologue. I hated all the monologues. And so I decided to write my own and that’s where I think my writing went from sort of a private exercise of processing the world around me, to envisioning a character and what they might think, might say when they spoke for themselves. And that’s when I started writing and I realized, “Oh, I’m actually a much better writer than I am an actor.” Because soon the stuff that I was writing, I wasn’t a good enough actor to perform. My writing, outpaced my acting. I had to find other people who had different experiences or different ages or different races to read what I had written and I realized, “Oh, I think I’m a writer. I think I like this so much more.” I think I needed to be looked at a little less and I wanted it to be heard a lot more. 

WS: She found herself increasingly drawn to writing and other writers.

JK: My friend, Katherine Bourne Taylor, started this thing called the Winter is for Literature party and everyone brings a book that they love, the one that makes your eyes light up, that makes you lean forward and start talking faster. And we wrap up a copy of that book and we bring it to her house and then we would each get a different book and open it and then have to go find whoever had brought that book and ask them why they love it. And it’s, it’s like an introvert’s favorite party cause they, you have something to talk about and it’s not small talk. It is in fact, it’s like maybe the deepest talk you can have, which is why do you love this book so much? Why did you pick it and why do you want me to have it? 

WS: Janielle knew exactly which book to bring.

JK: And so I gifted The Silver Chair, and the guy who unwrapped it ended up being a guy that I dated for three or four weeks, which is lovely, right? Like that’s, that’s so cute. It didn’t end up going very far. But, while I was sitting there talking to that guy about that book, this other guy walks by and looks at the book and says, “Oh, The Silver Chair, that’s like the best, most underrated book in the Narnia series.” And walks out. And I was like, “Oh my God, he’s so right.” I felt so understood. And that guy I ended up dating for three years and thought for a while might be my soulmate, so it feels like the book is doing all kinds of mischievous things.

WS: The end of that relationship would teach her an unexpected lesson. 

Before I could send him anything while I was just drafting and redrafting in my mind, my dad was declared dead on my birthday.

JK: He liked creating a wonderful relationship with me and I learned that there were things he had a hard time telling me that would’ve made things seem less wonderful. For instance, The Silver Chair actually isn’t his favorite Narnia book and he doesn’t think it’s the most underrated. A different Narnia book is his favorite! Right?! And so I found myself wondering like, “Okay, so had the Narnia book been his favorite book, would he have then been my actual soulmate? Or actually, more to the point, if he had been a little braver and been able to say, “Oh, The Silver Chair, that’s a good book, but my favorite is this other one.” Would we have had a relationship that could have been a little more authentic where he could have let me in on some of the not wonderful stuff and we could’ve shared that? 

WS: Janielle tried to make sense of the break up. 

JK: I think a thing we do with breakups is we like to tie it in a bow, tie it in the happy ending, which I’m usually pretty good at, and say things like, “Well, good riddance. You dodged a bullet there. It was better off this way.” And with that relationship I very much so felt like, “No, it wasn’t. We actually could have had a shot together and I made some choices and he made some choices and now we won’t be together.” What do you do with that version of the story? It’s a lot harder than, well, “You know, it’s probably better this way,” which we tell ourselves over ice cream. What if it wasn’t? What if that love was real? 

WS: This wasn’t the first time she’d found herself struggling to find the right words for loss.  

JK: My father died and I’ve never known the story of why my father wasn’t in my life, or I hadn’t felt like I knew it. Some of the details are that I had gotten his email address and started drafting a message to reach out to him. And then before I could send him anything while I was just drafting and redrafting in my mind, he was declared dead on my birthday. And then I found out that none of his friends knew that I existed. People would say, “We’re so sorry for your loss.” And it’s like, well, did I lose him if I didn’t really have him? And it was so invalidating and so illegitimized to not have my own story, that I decided I was going to figure it out and the thing I wanted was to do something with the gaping hole that was opening, had opened up inside me of just not knowing this or not knowing who I was anymore. So I decided to make sense of it narratively. 

WS: Janielle set out to talk to people who had known her father; she hoped to find her story in their words. She documented the journey in her podcast, Untitled Dad Project.

JK: I made a marker in my mind that how I will know that I have arrived is if I feel the feeling that you feel at the end of a good story, which is, “Ah, of course,” either like a positive one, which is like, “Ah, of course that’s how it ends.” Like he comes back and he remembers that thing about her and they’re gonna kiss in the rain, of course. Or like, “Oh, of course.” Like, “Of course Anna Karenina has to die. Of course.” It’s that feeling that you get and it feels very intangible and it feels very intangible to me. But I know when I feel it, and I call it the meaningful narrative resolution. 

WS: Janielle spent four years searching for her ending before reaching a surprising conclusion.

JK: I have come around to realizing that maybe closure is a myth. And that resolution can look a lot more like acceptance. That’s been sort of the confusing, maybe sort of agnostic ending to my story in the same way that when I read The Silver Chair that it wasn’t such a tidy moment. Like Puddleglum didn’t have such a tidy moment of saying, “No, Aslan is real,” and he whistles and then in come reinforcements and they triumph. That win that he has there is such a win of honesty and also sadness and also awareness and also great grief. And there’s no triumph. And yet even still, they make it out with their belief intact. And I think that’s where I am. There’s no triumph. There’s been no triumph waiting for me at the end of this story. There’s only been awareness that multiple things can be true at once.

I think what it is is I’m rethinking what endings have to be. The God that I think I inherited was this God that was like always trying to work things towards you’re good, which made it really hard and confusing of how to deal with suffering and pain because how is this good? How was losing a child good? How has losing your father good? It was so confusing, this God that was supposed to be like sewing together happy endings. And instead what I think I have a faith in is the God who’s bearing witness.

WS: The lessons she took from The Silver Chair have led her to a far more satisfying storyline    

JK: I think there are greater miracles than a happy ending. The miracle of letting yourself have an extraordinary amount of pain and reaching out to other people with that vulnerability and them responding with vulnerability, too, and finding way more human connection than you’ve ever experienced before. I have less of a tidy narrative and I have less of a forced happy ending, but I’m far less lonely than I’ve ever been in my life.

__________________________________

But That’s Another Story is produced by Kristy Westgard. Thanks to Janielle Kastner. If you’d like to learn more about the books we’ve mentioned in this week’s episode, you can find out more in our show notes. You can also find a transcript of this episode and past ones on LitHub. If you’ve been enjoying the show, please be sure to rate and review on iTunes—it really helps others discover the program. And subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen. If there’s a book that changed your life, we want to hear about it. Send us an email at anotherstory@macmillan.com. I’m Will Schwalbe, thanks so much for listening.