The Wonder Report: April 17, 2026

Culture Making as a Conversation

Apr 17, 2026

Happy Friday!

In Bozeman, Mont., where my brother and his family live, they woke up to about five inches of snow yesterday, the most they’ve gotten at one time all winter. Not that it’s winter anymore, thankfully, and today here in central Indiana, I’ve enjoyed a sunny, 79 degree day off by visiting a local art museum with a friend and strolling through the gardens. The only word I can think of to adequately describe today is “delight.” I hope wherever you are, even if it’s in snowy Montana, that you have experienced some degree of delight today.

In this issue of The Wonder Report, I’m continuing a short series on culture creation. The world often feels upside down these days, and since culture creation at its simplest is really just about making sense of the world, then this seems like an important way for all of us to forge ahead during some steep uncertainty. Thank you for thinking about these things along with me.

Let’s get back to it!

The Courage to Jump In

When I was a young writer, I would take assignments from any source I could get: a church’s newsletter, a guest post on an individual’s blog, an online magazine. Sometimes, the recipient of my work would take it as it came, publish it, and give me credit. But increasingly, I sought out places where my work would be reviewed, edited, and made better by the input of others. Despite my desire for such input, in those early days I was still tender to the suggestions of editors, even the kind ones. (Perhaps I still am?) And as a personal essayist, my work was so, well, personal. Critique of the work felt like a criticism of my life, my choices, me.

That’s exactly how it felt when I wrote a very personal story about our family’s decision to move to a new house about a year and a half after my husband and I were married, a heart-wrenching decision to uproot him and his boys (now our boys) so I could feel more at home in a place of our own. In those paragraphs, I had revealed weaknesses, desires, even flaws which I had never told anyone. Essentially, I had shed the blood of my soul onto the page. Nevertheless, the editor, though sympathetic to my sacrifice, came back with a comment akin to this: the story is too small, unrelatable. “It’s just about you and your family,” he said. “Try connecting it to some artifact. I think that will break it open, make it more universal.”

At first I reeled at the suggestion. Of course it’s about me and my family, that’s what I write. But with a little time and a little reasonableness, I went back to the work. I thought about a collection of essays I had read recently by Rebecca Solnit called Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, and particularly the one about how our homemaking efforts often reveal our desire to be in control, or to at least control our own lives if not the lives of others. I waded into her words like an explorer mining for something valuable, something that would imbue greater meaning into my own words. Eventually, I struck gold. I wove Solnit’s bigger, more universal thoughts into the small story of my family and me. And after a few more rounds with a copy editor to finesse the prose, I found myself with something good and true: a new artifact I had made to help me make sense of the world.

I had created culture.

This is the beauty of creating culture: it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Culture creation contributes to a conversation, an ongoing exchange that happens over time and space. In that way, it’s “cumulative: our cultural products become part of the world that a future generation must make something of,” both literally, as in repurposing the resources and artifacts of others, and figuratively, as we seek to understand how the work of others helps us find our place in the world (Crouch, p. 26).

It’s this conversation with both living and dead culture creators that pushes us toward something beyond the small and personal. It invites us into a developing story, mutual meaning making, and maybe most importantly, a shared language.

In his 1979 essay, “The Specialization of Poetry,” farmer, poet, and philosopher Wendell Berry unpacks this concept even further. Culture making is not just aided by a connection with the work of others; it’s dependent on it. “Remove this sense of continuity,” he writes, “and we are left with the thoughtless present tense of machines” (p. 20) (A prescient comment in light of the present phenomenon of “AI slop.”) In this way, the past—even the recent past of contemporary artists, writers, and creators whose artifacts we engage with—”is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it” (Berry, p. 20).

Culture not only connects us to the past through this kind of cumulative conversation. To be part of a culture, artifacts need an audience, or other participants who will engage in the conversation. “Culture making requires shared goods,” writes Andy Crouch. “Only artifacts that leave the solitude of their inventors’ studios and imaginations can move the horizons of possibility and become the raw material of culture making” (Crouch, p. 40).

I can spend hours critiquing a play in my journal or perfecting an invention in my garage, and while both of those activities might satisfy my curiosity and contribute to my own well-being, they are not culture-making activities. And that’s okay. In his advice to young authors, poet and priest Malcolm Guite says that the unprocessed stuff of our lives might be important for us to write about, but it’s more the stuff of a journal rather than a cultural artifact.

But when an idea is ready to share, “I have to go from this particular to the universal,” Guite says. “There has to be something in me, which I’ve noticed because of a depth in me, which is then communicable to the other person, and I don’t have to explain it to them.” He goes on to say that the way this happens is through engaging with the artifacts of the past: In his case as a poet, “by loving and reading lots of poetry” and “by following Shakespeare’s advice where he says [in A Midsummer Night’s Dream] ‘Imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown. The poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy a local habitation and a name.’”

This is why a person may be a consumer of culture and not a creator, but the opposite is not true. It’s also why those who only consume and never create risk stunting or diminishing the cultures they are part of. They let the conversation falter.

I don’t know about you, but for me there’s a degree of comfort in knowing we never have to start from scratch when we are creating.

“There’s a sense in which all English literature is a reply to earlier English literature,” Guite says. We could say the same about music, film, art, even science and technology. He goes on: “People say, ‘Are you afraid of the blank page,’ and I say, ‘What blank page?’ There’s just a long conversation. And I listen to it long enough to have the temerity to jump in.”

As we consider our own call to culture creation, Guite has offered a two-pronged approach for us: listening first, then jumping in. The first seems to require discipline, patience, and humility: when our desire is to create, taking the time to first encounter the work of others can feel like shackles on our process. But I know this from its opposite, too. When I was in graduate school to become a librarian, all I had time to read were the articles and textbooks for my courses and research projects. My response to those artifacts was rich and detailed, but the writing I do here and in other places, writing that’s more personal and spiritual, dried up. Why? I was no longer listening in on the conversations that fed my writing. Without hearing what others were saying, I had little to offer from myself.

But culture creation doesn’t require only the discipline, patience and humility of listening. Eventually, it requires the courage, the temerity as Guite calls it, to jump in ourselves. To add to the conversation in whatever ways we can. As a writer, I related deeply to his idea that there is no “blank page.” I almost never begin drafting on a blank page (or blank screen). Instead, I start with the quotes, the anecdotes, the metaphors I’ve heard and connected with, and I type or paste them onto the page. This is what I’m responding to and exploring when it’s my turn to speak.

It shouldn’t go without saying that we won’t all contribute to the conversation of culture in the same way or to the same degree, of course. Just like any conversation in person, some will speak more and others less. Just like in those conversations, though, the volume or amount of someone’s contribution does not measure its worth.

Also, so that my examples as a writer don’t overshadow this discussion and make it seem that culture creation is just what one does with words, I look across the height and breadth of our culture and find musicians, engineers, chefs, programmers, biologists, sculptors, politicians, podcasters, knitters, video game designers, and so many other makers who have listened and jumped in to the ongoing conversations in their own fields and in the wider cultures they are part of.

At its core, there’s a certain hopefulness about being invited into culture creation. While our contributions may or may not contribute to potential cultural changes (hopefully for the good and possibly for the long-term), we ourselves are regularly shaped and formed and even transformed by the cultural work we do, and as a result, so are our families and our communities. That’s how the conversation continues.

I wonder … how are you contributing to the cultural conversation going on around you? In the culture of your family or your workplace? What about your community or even your state? In what ways do you listen first before you step in and create? How are you “adding something better to” the cultures you are part of?

Playing Bach on the Mandolin

Last Friday, my husband and I had the pleasure of attending a concert by Chris Thile, arguably the best mandolin player in the world. I knew just a little about him before the concert, mostly that he is one of the founding members of the band Nickel Creek. But from our second row seats, even a newcomer to the mandolin could see that Thile was doing something very special with it. What I particularly wanted to highlight here is Thile’s work on interpreting Bach for the mandolin (Bach seems to be an emerging theme in this series!). In other words, Thile is joining the cultural conversation Bach was part of 400 years earlier and is creating new artifacts and making new meaning of the world in the meantime.

Here are two videos you might enjoy. The first is an interview with Thile upon his acceptance as a MacArthur Fellow in 2012. The second is his arrangement of Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in G Minor, BWV 1001 on the mandolin.

Standing By Words

“My standpoint here is defined by the assumption that no statement is complete or comprehensible in itself, that in order for a statement to be complete and comprehensible three conditions are required: 1. It must designate its object precisely. 2. its speaker must stand by it: must believe it, be accountable for it, be willing to act on it. 3. This relation of speaker, word, and object must be conventional; the community must know what it is.” – Wendell Berry in “Standing by Words”

In an age where words seem to function either as weapon or deception, either powerful or meaningless (and sometimes both at the same time), I deeply appreciate Wendell Berry’s essay, “Standing by Words” (from his book, also called Standing by Words*) and this quote particularly. He goes on to say that when we talk to people we encounter “in our ordinary dealings with each other, we take for granted that we cannot understand what is said if we cannot assume the accountability of the speaker, the accuracy of his speech, and mutual agreement on the structures of language and the meanings of words.” He believes, however, that we can no longer hold such basic expectations for language in the larger culture.

In his 1979 essay, Berry’s essay was primarily calling out the “specialized” language of academics and other institutional agents that he saw as “fundamentally impractical,” that did “not propose as an outcome any fidelity between words and speakers or words and things or words and acts.” In our day, I see two areas where the “fidelity” of language is equally at stake: the doublespeak of political, religious, and corporate leaders to justify actions that are otherwise unpopular and unthinkable, along with AI slop that produces language that is incoherent, decontextualized, and completely meaningless.

As we contemplate jumping into the ongoing conversation of culture creation, one of the first things we must do is rehabilitate language so that it can once again both carry meaning and be meaningful to those who use it.

I wonder … what do you think of Berry’s assumption about language? How much do you value precision, accountability, and agreed-upon definitions when you are communicating with others? How do you think these criteria would contribute to you joining the conversation of culture creation?

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. You can also leave a comment on the Substack app. I can’t always respond quickly, but I try to always respond.

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