Meet Me at the Edge of the World: the 2025 Nowhere Else Festival keynote address

“What would it mean for us to meet each other ‘at the edge of the world’ in Ohio?”

I meant to start with this question.

I intended to begin my keynote address for the 2025 Nowhere Else festival — these three days of music and community and dogs and coffee and pulled pork and big skies and wild edges — with an invitation to play with a line from the last song of on Over the Rhine’s magnificent double-album Meet Me at the Edge of the World. I wanted to encourage us all to join Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler, those self-described “skeptical dreamers” in dreaming of “an ocean in Ohio.” What kind of ocean can exist in a landbound state?

The idea can sound like wishful thining or, worse, like folly to a child of the Pacific Northwest like myself, one who habitually — religiously — goes down to the water's edge and stares across Puget Sound, out past the peninsula and the islands to the Pacific and the far horizon. How can I explain that almost-daily ritual to those who rarely, if ever, see an ocean?

But then, when Linford introduced me to the assembly in that hallowed hall they call “The Barn,” he said something that sparked a creative impulse in me— something about my preoccupation with art that speaks to the head and the heart, if I recall correctly. So, I indulged the kind of improvisation that can totally disrupt a carefully organized and rehearsed presentation. I changed my plans.

Introduction (and the First Ad-Lib)

I decided to open my prologue to the music festival with a poem by the renowned poet and spiritual writer Scott Cairns: “Adventures in New Testament Greek: Nous.”

And that was when I realized that we really are off the grid, gathered on that grassy Martinsville, Ohio property. I couldn’t get an internet connection. Thus, I had just promised my listeners a poem I could not pull up. I lost a minute of my brief time at the microphone fumbling to find it. I’m grateful to my friend Mark Mayhle, who found a signal, found the poem, and handed me his phone.

Cairns’s poem helps me understand what makes Linford and Karin, their fans, and the majority of their attentive listeners at the Nowhere Else Festival distinct. These are listeners who concentrate with the attention of the mind and of the heart — that is to say, they attend with the nous, a concept we cannot express in English because there are no words for it. To understand what the Greeks understood, we have to go to the edges of our language and reach out with the imagination. The Greeks have given the concept a name. To them, the nous is that curious capacity, physically located in the back of the throat, where our thoughts and feelings, intellect and intuitions, meet and work things out. To attend too much or too little with either the mind or the heart leads to unhealthy conclusions: cold, unmerciful rationality, or reckless surges of emotion. We need to a reconciling agent. We need to recover the knowledge of that nexus of intellect and intuition: the nous.

Hoping that, by reading Cairns's poem, I had awakened my new community to their capacity for deep listening, tuning their instruments to receive and savor the feast of music to come, I then returned to my notes, now five full minutes behind schedule.

Before you read what follows, I recommend that you spend some time meditating on Scott Cairns’s poem as well. It’s published here, at The Poetry Foundation.

Okay — now, back to what I had meant to share with them all along: “Meet Me at the Edge of the World,” my challenge to the assembly at Nowhere Else Festival 2025 . . .

[What follows is a substantially revised and expanded version of the address. No, I did not speak for an hour. I spoke for about 40 minutes. If I’d gone on, I suspect the Barn would have emptied out and I’d have been staring at empty chairs.]

Part One: A Spirit of Discovery at the Edges of Things

On Wednesday morning, before flying from Seattle to Cincinnati, I took a walk at Richmond Beach, where the Puget Sound tide clatters over a rocky shore, just a few minutes’ drive from my house.

The edge of the water, the edge of a mystery. It’s not a limitation or a barrier. I can walk into the water; I often see people swim. (One guy wades into the shallows, and then swims into the deep, with an inflatable great white shark tethered to him so it looks like he’s swimming for his life.) The water gives things up to the shore: driftwood, kelp, crab shells. Plastic bottles with labels that boast of how pure and wholesome their contents are. The shoreline and the tide blur, so that there is no clear dileneation between them.

No, this is not where the land stops. That’s an illusion. The land continues, of course, underneath the seawater, and rises again over there, on the “thumb” of my home state — the Washington peninsula.

Gazing across to that strand of land, we can then lift our gaze to another edge — the jagged line of the Olympic mountains. They sometimes look like a barrier, an unbreakable wall. But in the sideways rays of this morning light, we see gradations of mountains; that border is revealed as porous. There are ways through the wall. And when I can see that, I enjoy the view more fully. I see Possibility. Nuance. Whispers of worlds beyond what I can see with my eyes.

All of my favorite borders are broken. “There is a crack in everything,” Leonard Coen so famously sings in “Anthem.” “That's how the light gets in. (It wouldn't be an arts festival if that line wasn’t quoted up front, right?)

I have lived my life in the Pacific Northwest, at the edges of things. That may have something to do with why I write — or, at least, why I write the way that I write. I write in anticipation of something. I write for discovery, for possibility. When I put pen to paper, I have only the vaguest notions of where I am going, what I will find there. I write fiction — fantasy, to be specific — casting nets of words and images in hopes of capturing and expressing things that more practical, familiar vocabulary cannot express. I also write reviews of movies and of music, offering critical reflections on what I’ve already experienced. But even there, I make new discoveries in the act of writing.

The poet Cecil Day-Lewis (yes, the father of Daniel) writes,

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Along the same lines, Scott Cairns once told an interviewer for Image,

I think writers with actual intentions generally end up saying things they already thought they knew, and I’m not much interested in reducing my vocation as a poet to something like propagandist. I write poems to find things out, not to communicate some previously ossified conclusion.

That is where and how I want to live each day: in the essential ambiguities and uncertainties of faith. I want to live in a mode of questions, of discovery, of the everpresent possibility of learning and growing.

I know that I’m nourished most by the kind of writing that gives me the sense that the author is caught up in discovery. I find illumination in movies that suggest to me that the filmmakers are inspired and making discoveries. I’m captivated by music that doesn’t feel too controlled, too produced, too automated. I want a sense of risk, of stakes. Of human nature. I want to feel the questions, experience and keep the faith.

If you have a pen and something to take notes on, take a moment and think about this: What’s a song that gives you a sense that we are a part of something bigger than ourselves, more glorious than what our senses can perceive? What’s a song that brings you to the edge of what you know and gives you a new insight, a new idea? Maybe it’s an Over the Rhine song, or one by Joe Henry or Allison Russell, Joy Clark or Anna Tivel, Jeffrey Martin or John Paul White, Patty Griffin or Amy Helm, or anyone else who has played here at the Nowhere Else Festival. Write it down. And then reach out beyond music: What’s a novel, a film, a painting, a dance — a work of art that reveals something to you about the world, about yourself, that expands your horizons, enriches your experience?

Maybe you need to write about that. Maybe you’re on the edge of an epiphany. That’s what often happens to me when I’m making something in response to something somebody else has made. Maybe there’s more for you to discover there, as you gaze into the mystery that has seized you by the throat, by — if you will — the nous. You might find a connection to the artist, to the artist’s inspiration. You might find yourself meeting others on a bridge across the waters that separate you, halfway into the music, all of you drawn into the same discovery from different starting points, and with different experiences to share.

This weekend, we will share an experience of deep waters. And if we share our impressions and discoveries with one another, we may find that the distance between us can be crossed. Art can reveal, in the space between us, common ground.

Part Two: Signposts in a Strange Land — My Journey to Over the Rhine

I know that many of us are here at the festival because we have been listening to Over the Rhine for a long, long time. Twenty-five years ago, we were already accustomed to the ways in which Linford and Karin pursue, in lyrics and music, the transcendent.

I radio heaven,
I get mixed signals
I move the antenna,
I switch the channels
I lie in this bed,
my satellite dish
Is there room in the universe
for one last wish?

And just a few lines later, “This secret religion is / The best that I've found...”

That’s what gets and holds my attention — this focus on faith: a faith that brings us to the edges of what we know; a faith that prompts us to reach beyond the familiar; a faith that will not allow us to get too comfortable. Those are the songs I love best, the songs that move me to the horizon, where my heart is set on what Saint Bob Dylan calls “the highlands.” Nothing wrong with playing your favorites because you know you like what you hear. It’s good to have meaningful, lasting relationships with songs, so long as you go on listening closely, ready to find out what you’ve missed. “Nostalgia,” says Dylan, “is death.” When you stop discovering, stop exploring, you stop growing. Faith, the book of Hebrews tells us, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.

That is, in fact, how Films for Radio opens: with a conviction of things not see. This may be my favorite verse in any song I know —

I want to feel and then some
I have five senses
I need thousands more at least

Every day a page of paper
Every night a photograph
A moveable feast

So fade to black and white now
Roll the movie of my life
Inside of my head

’Cause like all true believers
I am truly skeptical
Of all that I have said . . .

That is where we are most alive: On the edge of what we know, humble enough to be skeptical of our own assumptions, and leaning into mystery for revelation.

This takes me back to my childhood years, a Baptist church in Northeast Portland, where the hymns we sang often stood in sharp contrast with the culture to which we were expected to conform. How could that congregation, so fearful of the world outside, so eager to ensure that I learned all of their “right answers,” and so determined to make sure I stayed “safely” inside the forbidding walls of evangelical culture, worship with these words?

O Lord my God,
When I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds thy hands have made

I see the stars
I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed

Then sings my soul....

And so I sat through hundreds and hundreds of dry, conventional church services — the obligatory hymns, the condemnations of the “secular” world (the same world that God calls us to love), the affirmations that this church is where God is. Stay here. Give your money to our programs here. Bow under the pressure of the threat of hell, and confine yourself to all that is familiar within the walls of this community.

And as soon as the last chord rang out from the last hymn on the church organ, I would bolt to the car and turn on Rick Dees’ Weekly Top 40 countdown on 103.7. I would turn my radar dish to signals from outside the walls, and I would sing along with new favorites and root for those artists led by imagination and courage — by an invigorating faith.

Sometimes, those Top 40 hits made faith sound visceral, courageous, and necessary. Take these lines, for example, about lovers leaping into the unknown:

Tommy used to work on the docks, union's been on strike
He's down on his luck, it's tough, so tough
Gina works the diner all day, working for her man
She brings home her pay, for love . . . for love

She says, "We've gotta hold on to what we've got
It doesn't make a difference if we make it or not
We've got each other and that's a lot for love
We'll give it a shot"

Whoa, we're halfway there
Whoa-oh, livin' on a prayer
Take my hand, we'll make it, I swear. . .

And when it wasn’t faith-related lines from an unlikely source like Bon Jovi, it might’ve been faith-related lines from a very familiar figure. I didn’t expect to hear Amy Grant, a Christian pop star that my community had cautiously accepted as “safe” and “one of us,” on the “worldly” Top 40. But there she was one Sunday, all of a sudden, breaking through on the strength of her talent, her vision, the business savvy of her collaborators, and — yes, for a lot of teenagers like me — her sex appeal. “Leave behind the doubt,” she sang. “Love’s the only out / Love will surely find a way . . .”

That was a message I could embrace: Love, not legalism, is the way. She was singing to — and with — those outside the borders of my culture. She was giving me permission to step out into the unfamiliar and find a blessing there. She kindled in me the courage to question what I’d been conditioned to believe. Love would help me find a way forward.

On another Top 40 occasion, I heard Amy Grant singing not about the Gospel directly, but about finding joy in her own marriage. And those in the church who wanted an artist to give them what they wanted, what was familiar, what was safe — sure enough, they rejected her. They called her self-indulgent for singing about the meaningfulness of anything other than their own familiar hymns, their own brand of religiosity. They wanted her to repeat what they’d already decided was enough, to praise a God they’d already defined, and to lecture those beyond the borders of their own cultural island.

It’s a scary feeling, to be drawn to the edge of what’s comfortable. But that’s where we learn if we are, indeed, capable of faith. That’s where Amy Grant still lives, still sings.

About a year after Amy Grant stepped beyond the edges of that insulated industry, I noticed another Christian pop-music artist named Leslie Phillips. Phillips was making waves on Christian radio as a sort of praise-chorus cheerleader — “the Christian Stevie Nicks,” they called her — but there was something else about her records, especially the songs that didn’t get airtime. She was, if you will, edgy. What we didn’t yet know was this: Phillips was filling her journals with the things she wasn’t permitted to sing for Christian audiences, the questions that others didn’t want to hear her asking, doubts she wasn’t supposed to be entertaining, disillusionment with the church that she wasn't supposed to be feeling. A producer named T Bone Burnett heard something in her songs, investigated, and discovered those lyrics. He convinced her that these were her most important work. She started collaborating with him.

The result was an album called The Turning, one that blazed with experimental sound and discovery. It was, for me, appropriately, a turning point. I found more life, more authenticity, more revelation in the questions. Burnett brought Phillips — and, to some extent, me — out of the insulated sphere of evangelical culture, and up to a platform where souls can sing their thoughts and feelings, their doubts and questions, freely, honestly, truthfully. And as I found inspiration in hearing such expressions, I grew in my confidence to express myself honestly, and to ask unpopular questions.

Singing along to a drum machine’s counterintuitive beat, one that kept me slightly on edge, Phillips sang,

Tell me what to do with this beating heart
While I bleed alone tonight
And it’s alright if you don’t say a word
Or make it all work right

Oh well, I can wait
It’s enough to know you can hear me now
I can wait
It’s enough to feel so near you now
The answers don’t come easy
I can wait...

She changed her name from Leslie Phillips to Sam Phillips. And the records that followed captured the minds and hearts — the nous, I suppose — of a global audience, winning her critical claim and a pop-culture spotlight. Later, she would sing,

I wanted to get lost
and love the questions there
Beauty and the truth
I could breathe like air
Then I finally found
the signposts in a strange land.

Her adventure was just beginning, and her long list of albums since then have become guiding lights for me and many others.

As if he was thinking of Sam’s breakaway from the confinement and control of the Christian music industry, David Bowie, in a 1997 documentary by Michael Apted called Inspirations, said this about creativity:

Never play to the gallery . . . . Never work for other people in what you do. Always remember that the reason you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations. I think they generally produce their worst work when they do that. The other thing I would say is if you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.

Singing “Under Pressure” with Freddy Mercury, he had already challenged us to move out to the edges, beyond our comfort zones, for the purposes of generosity:

Because love's such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care
For the people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves.

While many today know her primarily as the musical muse of Gilmore Girls, Sam Phillips’s music in the 1990s met me in my first days away from home, in the new independence of my college life, at the edge of what was for me the known world. Influenced by the poetry and wisdom of the Scriptures, reflecting the light of Jesus’s teaching, and yet avoiding even a hint of pious religiosity, Sam’s radar was open to so many strong signals of truth and beauty. She was reading and writing about authors I would come to love and embrace as mentors: G.K. Chesterton, Thomas Merton, and even Henry Miller. She, too, expanded my horizons. I began a rigorous pursuit of music that was not bound by the conventionality of the Christian music industry, music that was more about the faith of fearless questions rather than the certainty of simplistic answers. The love in Sam’s songwriting dared me to change my way of caring — caring about others, and caring about myself.

Thanks to an invitation from my friend Martin Stillion, a brilliant multi-instrumentalist fluent in a wide range of musical languages, and a writer for our university newspaper, I had the privilege of accompanying him on his assignment to interview T Bone Burnett. We met the rock-and-roll legend in downtown Seattle, and he gave us hours of his time for wide-ranging conversation. This was, I would realize later, what gave me the courage to start pursuing other musicians I admired for ambitious interviews, like my first meeting with Linford Detweiler just a few years later.

I remember asking Burnett about why, with his Christian faith so publicly evident, he did not market his work as Christian music. He looked very, very tired in that moment. And then he said, “Why do we have to be Christian? Why can’t we just be people?”

The greatest artists are not content to just keep repeating what they know. Nor are they guided by what their audiences cheer for. T Bone Burnett would not let vocabulary pin him to a place, a category, a tribe. He still doesn’t. He is free to walk after, and with, the Spirit beyond the edges of any establishment. Though he and Sam Phillips parted ways, they continue, on adjacent paths, following that Spirit of courageous love and curiosity, careful to ensure that we do not mistake that animating Spirit for one that lures followers into enclosures, into conformity, into separatism and self-righteousness.

And through their eyes and testimonies, I now find Jesus at play everywhere — in all kinds of genres and media. I heard him in the music of Dylan, Prince, U2, Bruce Cockburn, and The Innocence Mission. I even believed I might someday see Jesus “in a barroom in New Orleans,” when Karin and Linford proposed the possibility. (But now I’m getting ahead of myself.)

And then, suddenly, in 1991, there was a CD in my collection with a title that matched a C.S. Lewis novel I had only just discovered: Til We Have Faces. This promising, poetic new band called Over the Rhine had my attention. In 1992, they released Patience, with a song taken from a Madeleine L’Engle book: “A Circle of Quiet.” Were they spying on my reading habits?

In 1992, when I took a summer job at the Camp Casey Conference Center on Whidbey Island, spending my days on a wooded coastline and staring northwest across the waters of the Pacific, I began listening to their loudest, most exciting record yet: Eve.

I could not have imagined that, in this listening, I was on the edge of an experience that would change my life.

Part Three: Private Oceans, Haunted Deserts, Secret Societies

The summer of 1992 — that was a season of firsts...

Working at Camp Casey with a team of students — some of them camp counselors, some groundskeepers, some maintenance workers — I lived along a stretch of rocky shoreline, with a deep woods along the property’s north border, and another to its south. It seeed too good to be true, a wilderness full of pathways for deer, owls, rabbits, raccoons, foxes, and eagles. My new friends and I climbed around on giant concrete fortifications and gunports installed on the cliffs above the ocean. The place had been designed for violence, for defense of the mainland. And we turned it into a playground.

We transformed one of its bunkers — an underground chamber named for Lieutenant Thomas Parker, a Union soldier — into a sacred secret, a clubhouse for discovery. On Wednesdays, after dark, we’d hike by flashlight into the woods and descend into the bunker, bringing our discoveries in poetry and prose, eager to read aloud our literary discoveries, venturing beyond the edges of our indivdual experiences. The art that we shared wove us together. The oceans between us proved crossable. In fact, there was no divide at all — it just took some effort to find and claim the ground that already connected us. We called ourselves The Thomas Parker Society, inspired by a Peter Weir movie that I’ve made the focus of a chapter in my upcoming memoir.

This not-so-secret Society as continued to gather and to grow, as hundreds have shared their discoveries in writing, music, and art, over three decades. I opened my home, one apartment after another, and others opened theirs.

And one day, a friend of mine who knew goodness when he found it brought his friend Anne to the Society. That is how Anne and I met. She began to share her poems. I will never forget the first one where the title alone enchanted me and made me want to know more and more: “She Loves the Edges of Things.”

An ear’s rim, the hem of rain preceding a storm,
the cavity carved by a mouth’s embrace
of apple meat, she loves it all—the sharp,

the keen. A green-broke horse under the saddle,
the crooked wound of a lover’s kiss,
a granite bluff dropping away beneath dirty feet,

even the cheek laid open with surgical precision,
the fist cleaving the space between them.
There’s the barred shade left by the venetian blinds,

the intersection between Christ the Redeemer
and Girls Girls Girls, the impossible silhouette
of the Bitterroot Range strung like barbed wire

across Montana. And some days all she wants to be
is a county road arcing away from electricity, past
fallow hay fields, on the brink of the blind curve.

Anne and I were from different worlds, it seemed. We found each other by first being drawn to one another’s writing, to a sense that there was more there we wanted to know. We found joys we had not found before: someone with whom we were comfortable in silence, moving about unknown territories — in the woods, on Pacific coastlines, and, most of all, in the high plains of New Mexico, where we sensed that we had come to the threshold of a possibility we did not yet have words for.

“Have you ever noticed,” Anne said on one of those hikes, “how most people reach an age where they just fold up their imaginations, put them in a closet, and stop playing, stop asking ‘what if’?”

And that gave me an image — a young woman discovering and collecting colors in a forest, colors no one has ever seen before. She seeks to share them with people, and this brings her to a troubled city where people have turned colors into a code by which some can weild power over the vulnerable, over the poor, over the unfamiliar. Her colors become a revelation that upsets the cruel hierarchies, that invites people into a revolution of the imagination.

We are drawn to such thresholds, where we discover the ends of what we know, the limits of our vocabulary, the essential uncertainties of faith. We need what we take risks to find. To stand at the edge of the ocean — oceans like the one Anne and I visit almost every day just north of Seattle, or like those on the rocky Oregon Coast. Oceans of new light, new sound, where we might meet God in new guises.

In the 23^rd Psalm, our souls are restored when we are led along the edge of quiet waters. I was raised to think that this means somewhere peaceful, a Thomas Kinkade covered bridge over a trouble-free place. “Lead me beside quiet waters.” The author and spiritual director Tara Owens reminded me that the verse was written by a shepherd who would have known that to lead sheep beside quiet waters is to take them right to the place where predators would be lying in wait.

One of Anne’s best poems invites you to step into an experience, a discovery we made alongside Salt Creek, not far from the Pecos, in the desert outside of Roswell, New Mexico. No, not aliens. But a spirit. A haunting at the site of stark white bones.

After Ezekiel

Coming around a bend of the path, we stumble
upon a fox skeleton just this side of the salt cedars,
bullet casings—just two—and the Pecos beyond.

The burr and scratch of sun, the mean catch of wind,
fingers my spine. I try to move peacefully, hands
empty. And here we pause at the world’s dead end

where all hours bide, present in the arrested
bolt of fox toward cover. The bones await
their quickening, flagrant white, beyond the gun.

The body is no longer too hungry to part with.
The river slips past toward the border
of state park land, leaving us behind.

When the wind finds a grass note, what is left
of the animal hisses and crouches for rabbits,
flows after the hot smell of blood. The past

comes back, inspiring the structure of fox.
Both of us face north beside a Russian Olive tree,
a scrim of willow. Relics, we hesitate by the spent

shells and imagine. It is later than when we set out.
I cannot help myself. When we turn to leave I run ahead,
something taking shape at my back, filling with breath

Anne and I first saw Over the Rhine at a café in West Seattle, and heard them perform their new material — songs from Good Dog Bad Dog. We immediately bought tickets to go right back for more the next night. There was something in their lyrics, something in their sound, something in their unapologetic plunge into deep waters. We felt a deep and personal connection to what they were doing.

Since then, we’ve seen what we estimate to be about sixty Over the Rhine concerts — catching them many times when they reach Seattle’s The Triple Door at the edge of the world, or at Anne’s edge of the world in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

These worlds — our marriage, the Thomas Parker Society, and the music of Over the Rhine — they merged in 2004 at the Glen Workshop, the summertime arts retreat hosted by the literary arts journal Image. For sixteen consecutive summers, Anne and I joined a community of adventurers, striving to become better artists and better audiences. There, we assembled the largest, most diverse, most beautiful version of the Society yet, with assemblies of more than fifty gathering to read, recite, and sing to each other at night. And sometimes, we would get quiet, distracted by a distant melody drifting in through the windows: Karin and Linford’s voices and guitars, as they rehearsed for their songwriting workshop or their concert the next day.

And sometimes, we were interrupted by sudden monsoons, a hot day in the high plains suddenly broken open by thunder, lightning, and flash floods.

Just telling you about this, I feel a familiar ache.

I’m craving the edge of the world.

Part Four: A Reconciling Thread of Inspiration

Of course, I’m borrowing this title of this address from Over the Rhine’s generous double album Meet Me at the Edge of the World.

I borrowed it again as the title of a chapter for my upcoming memoir. Lost and Found in the Cathedral of Cinema is a book about how art — particularly movies — saved me from the briar patch of religious fundamentalism, and how they set me free for a fuller, richer experience of faith. The chapter “Meet Me at the Edge of the World” is an expansive meditation on Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, a movie that has helped me reconsider and understand that summer of rebellion and revelation on the edge of Whidbey Island.

If you know Moonrise Kingdom, you know it follows Sam Shakusky, a boy who has lost faith in the foster care system, who sets out to live according to the best ideals he has perceived in his studies, without interference from the adults who have so consistently failed to practice what they preach. He runs away to where the streets have no name, hand-in-hand with his beloved Suzy Bishop. Suzy’s a girl similarly disillusioned with her family, particularly her mother, a lawyer who is having an affair with a local police officer and thus exposing the failures of two essential institutions.

The two twelve-year-olds set up a campsite, a new Eden, on the shoreline of an island in the Atlantic. They’re looking forward to looking back, out on the world’s edge. They’re orphaned believers. They’re skeptical dreamers.

And so am I. So is Anne.

By the end of the film, Sam and Suzy’s community is reconciled by their vision. They find an extended family by opening up to one other and making new commitments.

That’s why so many of us feel that we’ve found a family here, in the Over the Rhine orchard, in a time when so many of the churches we grew up in “preach a subtle hatred, the Bible as their alibi.”

Like almost all of my favorite artists — Bowie, Cockburn, Coen, Dylan, R.E.M., Joe Henry, Allison Russell, Anais Mitchell, Jon Batiste, Rhiannon Giddens, Wilco, Jeffrey Martin, Anna Tivel, Big Thief — Over the Rhine lives at the edge of creativity where labels are insufficient. Are they folk? Rock? Pop? Americana? Gospel? If you think you know, just wait for the next record and experience what is, for me, the thrill of the unexpected.

Similarly, find that the Over the Rhine audience, this “found family,” is distinguished by its openness, its curiosity. We lean into hard questions, unafraid to welcome the unknown, embracing and longing for a fusion of voices and styles and sounds.

That’s why, when I began corresponding with the great American singer/songwriter/producer Joe Henry several years ago, I recommended that he look up Over the Rhine. He wasn’t familiar with them. That’s why he wrote back with enthusiasm — first, to tell me that he’d discovered that his mother was a fan; then, again, to tell me that he’d just received a package of new demos from the band and an inquiry about the possibility of working together; and then, once more to tell me that they were arriving in the recording studio of his home to record The Long Surrender. Visionaries are drawn to visionaries, and it has been a joy to watch these artists find each other and collaborate on some of their finest work.

I’ll explain why that title of their double album means so much to me, and why I’ve borrowed it for a chapter in my book. In borrowing it, I’m completing a circuit.

Back in 2012, I interviewed an accomplished sound designer, Pete Horner, about his work on films with Francis Ford Coppola, Sofia Coppola, and other great filmmakers. Having just wrapped work on the sound for the HBO series Hemingway and Gellhorn, which starred Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, work that would win him an Emmy, Horner described what he was learning in his practice of producing and mixing sound. He told a story about discovering that, during a scene in which Hemingway is fishing, he could apply the sound of a rattlesnake, and it would work beautifully as the sound of the fishing line unspooling. The sound enhanced the scene with an almost subliminal element of misogynistic menace. Pete says that this improvisational flourish occasioned an epiphany: what had been a science was becoming an art. The library of sound effects at his fingertips was suddenly a world of poetry.

“I realized," he said, “that all of it was music.”

I loved that line so much, I made it the title of the interview, which was published on the Image website.

Many months later, I was working at my job in higher-ed marketing, with a Twitter feed open in the margin of my laptop screen. And I was distracted to see my Glen Workshop friend Thomas Bona live-tweeting an Over the Rhine concert. He was at Nowhere Farm for the festival. And he suddenly posted these words: “Pete Horner and Jeffrey Overstreet get shout-outs from the stage.”

What? I replied immediately: “What are you talking about?” And I learned that Karin and Linford had performed a new song: “All of It Was Music.”

It was a clear demonstration of what is possible when we live with our eyes and ears open to possibility. And the song would become a fan favorite on Meet Me at the Edge of the World. Listen to the lyrics, and you can see how they’ve taken Pete Horner’s filmmaking epiphany and invited all of us to share in it. It’s a song about how even the most incidental sounds of our lives can become a vital part of the “music” of our lives.

These edges, these threshholds of revelation, they are always right there — in art, in nature, in relationship — waiting for us to make new discoveries, capture them in new expressions, and reveal the connectedness of all things and all people. In this, we can make all things new.

This idea — all of it is music — blesses Anne and me. She’s a poet, so incidental sights and sounds are a direct line into her art. At night, for us, the passing traffic is the sound of a surging tide. Anne is particularly fond of the sound of the street sweeper — she’s written a poem about that figure, who has taken on mythic significance for us, “out there tracing the bones of the city,” moving along the edges of our attention.

Similarly, we have learned to pay attention to seemingly incidental light. In the morning, as we linger on our pillows in half-sleep, we watch rays of morning sunlight glance off passing car windows in rush-hour on the four-lane avenue outside, shine through a fence-line bramble, and splash intricate designs across our bedroom wall, a dazzling calligraphy, as if across a movie screen. It’s our favorite time of light.

Learn to pay attention like this, and you start discovering just how porous are the borders of our worlds, just how much we have in common with even the most apparently dissimilar neighbor.

It happened last night, as we arrived here at the Nowhere Else Festival: I met Jerry, Dorothy, Robin. Megan. Sharon. Joyce. All for the first time. All of them fast friends. All of them family now.

Introducing herself to a stranger at a writer’s retreat, Anne met a woman who would become the publisher of her poetry collection. Emailing me out of the blue after reading one of my film reviews, a flight attendant from Atlanta expressed an interest in my work. I shared with her a chapter of a novel-in-progress. She called a friend and told him about it. And he called me the next morning. He was the head of a division of Random House. And that’s how I became a published novelist. So many life-changing possibilities, right there, in front of us, all the time, waiting to be discovered. Maybe we could bless others as those strangers blessed us.

Some would call it foolishness, that kind of reckless openness to strangers. But oh, the wonders that Anne and I have experienced when others have modeled that curiosity for us.

Oh, how we have been blessed by cultivating that curiosity in ourselves — our curiosity, today, about you.

On a balcony under a Santa Fe sunset, talking with another married couple we were only just getting to know, Anne and I heard them praising the beauty of New Mexico sunsets, and we responded, “You should be here in October. We come here for our anniversary sometimes, and it’s arguably even more beautiful.” They answered, “We should do that too! We were married in October.” And we said, “Really? What day?” “The fifth,” they said, and we were amazed. “That’s our anniversary too.” We began to talk about how much fun it might be someday to celebrate there together. And then, on a hunch, I asked, “What year?”

And that’s how we learned that Karin and Linford were married on the very same day that we were, in 1996, under the same sun — their ceremony at the edge of an ocean of possibility in Ohio, and ours out on the edge of the Pacific Northwest. That intuition I had felt listening to them perform “All I Need is Everything” at Madison’s Cafe in West Seattle — that we had much in common — had proven true. The oceans between us were all that was, as yet, unspoken. We decided then and there that we would try, annually if possible, to meet for dinner and talk about our marriages. “How are you really doing? What are you learning?” And we did that, for many summers to come, in Santa Fe, by their generosity. Those were formative conversations for us.

I suspect that, in a community like this, many of you are carrying journals. If you aren’t, well — you have a phone. And you have things that can easily become the tools for noticing things and making something of them: noticing people, noticing connections, noticing light, noticing lyrics. Maybe the name of a stranger you write down will show up someday when you open those pages and say, “That’s where we first met so-and-so.” And the rest will be history. The rest will be art. All of it is music.

There will be time to share these with your neighbors later. For you stand here at the edges of 700 worlds — the mystery of these friends and strangers. Most of them seem separate from you, disconnected. Oceans between you. But the land that you know continues through that space, across that water, connecting you to them. All of us. Every single one. All of those in Ohio. All of those you look up to. Linford and Karin — although we might not know it to look at them (I mean, let’s face it, have rock stars ever been more beautiful?) — they’re not so different from the rest of us. They don’t exist on another plane from you.

And we all share the same ground as those in jeopardy all around us. Those without homes. Those being hauled away and imprisoned in camps. Those being deported. Those being condemned as people of “low IQ,” as “criminals,” as “animals.” Our neighbors. Those we are called to love. Those in whose eyes Jesus says we must see him looking back at us.

Let’s practice, this weekend, in acts of listening and sharing, the redeeming work of crossing borders, stepping over those volatile edges, to love our neighbors.

Conclusion: Rewards of Receptivity

C.S. Lewis described storytelling as casting “a net whereby to catch something else.” I see this as the work of all artists, sifting experience and imagination for “something that has no sequence in it, something … much more like a state or quality.”

That’s what I felt last night, as Emmylou, Linda, and Dolly — for those who missed it, those are the nicknames we gave Karin, Linford, and Josh — gave us harmonies we’d never heard before. What a communion of the saints. When I listen to their work, I also hear Dylan, Coen, Adam Zagajewski (who first wrote the words “We must praise the mutilated world”).

I wanted to record it. To film it. To take it home and declare, “We found it! This is where it happened! You missed it!”

Similarly, when Jesus’s disciples witnessed him on the mountainside suddenly transfigured in a ray of otherworldly light, in revelatory conversation with Moses and Elijah, they wanted to build a tent around that moment, to enclose it and contain it and stay there forever. Jesus rebuked them. That’s not how it works. The Truth is never owned or bound by one camp, one way of thinking, one language or tribe.

Lewis, in a passage I have never heard preached from a pulpit, says, “God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.” The Spirit is always in motion, drawing us onward to new discoveries, turning us into open radar dishes. Out here in Ohio . . .

We don’t need a lot of money
We’ll be sleeping on the beach
Keeping oceans within reach
Whatever private oceans we can conjure up for free

We radio heaven. We move the antenna. We switch the channels. And sometimes, that signal comes through loud, clear, and making all things new. As a childhood hero of mine likes to sing, “I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it / It’s something that I’m supposed to be...”

This weekend, I hope that you will talk with people you don’t know. Take risks. Demonstrate patience and grace, in the belief that they might have treasure for you. You might not even know what you, in your own experience, have to offer them. Cast your nets — of cameras, of words, of music — to capture wonders before they fade.

And then I hope you’ll share what you’ve discovered with the rest of us: poems, journal entries, pictures.

So add this to your list of simple beauties
I know we’re gonna miss it when we go
While barren fields undress their gentle mysteries
We dream an ocean in Ohio

Closing Prayer: An Accidental Benediction

This email that I sent as a prayer for Joe Henry, Linford Detweiler, and Karin Bergquist on the occasion of their double-album recording sessions ended up — to my astonishment, and by their generosity — in the album’s liner notes. I offer it again here as a prayer for the festival:

Let the guitars remember their roots
Let the piano dream of Chagall
Let the drums get tipsy and tumble
Let the song suspend the singer from the floor of all reason
Let the bass knit dry bones together
Let the lyrics riddle and play
Let the pauses be great with child
Let the producer be surprised by what his nets bring in
Let them be hungry and thirsty,
Let them all lean in to the edge of "too far"
And let a little go a long, long way.

Damn all their distractions
Shrug off all their comparisons
Surpass their expectations and
Silence the clamor of fools.

Set ice in their glasses
And fire in their horns.

Give them laughter
Give them secrets
Give them health
Give them time enough,
A feast of new language and
A deep drink of glory.

Let not the apprehension of Easter be lost
And let songs rush in like a Pentecost.