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Alarms & Discursions |
An Interview with the Petite Powerhouse, Dawn Eden
by Dale Ahlquist
Editor's note: Dawn Eden is a copy editor and headline-writer for the New York Post whose passions include faith, G.K. Chesterton, and Sixties pop music. Before joining the Post, she worked in the recording industry and is the most prolific female liner-note writer in compact-disc history. She is the author of the book The Thrill of Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes on.
GM: First of all, give us a headline for this interview!
DE: Mmmmm....how about"The Girl Who Was Thirsty: Dawn Eden's True Tabloid Tale of Chesterton-Sparked Salvation?"
GM: You have a gift for headlines. Without giving away any of your secrets, what are your secrets?
DE: Thank you for that compliment! I usually take a key word from the story and find a common phrase that uses a word which rhymes with or sounds similar to that key word. For example, for a story about Bob Dylan's commercials for Victoria's Secret, I wrote,"Dylan sells out for a thong."
GM: More, please.
DE: “Military academies get ‘plebe' bargain as admissions soar.""Faux Bordeaux maker gets grape-big sentence." Or how about this for a story on a strike at two four-star restaurants:"Jobs at steak." Or this for a story about moviemaking in New York:"City Flickers."
GM: Do you have any favorite bad headlines?
DE: For me, a bad headline is one that my editor chooses not to use. I was very disappointed recently when he didn't use one I'd written for a story about the Sopranos actress who signed a contract to star in the new Friends spin-off Joey: "Soprano's Owed to Joey."
GM: Okay, we've heard some good ones and some bad ones, how about the best ones?
DE: I save my best headlines, but I write so many of them that it's hard for me to remember them offhand. I like the puns I've written on book, film, and song titles, like the one for the story about the day of citywide readings ofLysistrata:"My Big Fat Greek Reading". Or the one about the woman who was ticketed for having a stoop sale (the New York City version of a garage sale):"Brooklyn woman has stoops to conquer." Or the one about the day the Roosevelt Island tram switched from accepting tokens to only Metrocards: "The ride not token." Or the one about Martha Stewart's broker spending a weekend at a luxury spa while awaiting his sentencing:"‘Felon' Groovy." Or the one about The Passion of the Christ returning to No. 1 at the box office:"Amazing Gross." >
GM: There is no stopping us now. We have to know: what are some of your favorite headlines that you'll obviously never be able to use?
DE: I always wanted there to be a vox-pop story of consumers giving their opinion on some bakery's new low-fat pastries, so I could write,"New Yorkers debate torte reform."
GM: Your lovely name is about the two great beginnings: the beginning of the day, and the beginning of the world. Tell us about your own beginning.
DE: I was brought up as a Reform Jew and have lived most of my life near New York City, save for nine lost years in Galveston, Texas, as an elementary-schooler. There were always books around the house when I was growing up and I became an early reader. I was reading Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop before I was 4, and Roald Dahl's children's novels when I was 6.
GM: But I understand there was a dark side to the Dawn?
DE: Unfortunately. I first started to understand depression, loneliness, and isolation when I hit the Galveston public schools and learned that I had to read at the same mind-numbingly simple level as other kids my age—and socialize with them when I'd rather hang out at the library. My parents divorced when I was six, and I was brought up by my mom. I associate the divorce with my mother's becoming a belated hippie. On the one hand, she was always a dedicated provider and instilled in me and my sister a strong sense of right and wrong. On the other, she associated with a lot of artists, actors, and others who lived more itinerant lifestyles. My mother's bohemian friends had a wide variety of creeds, none of which were orthodox. When I was a child, we had the Bible in the house—the Hebrew Bible as well as the New Testament—but we also had the sayings of Guru Nanak, the sayings of Yogi "G," the Book of Mormon, "Desiderata,""The Little Prince," the Bhagavad-Gita, "The Impersonal Life," and so on. The word "spiritual," in fact, was the highest adjective that my mother's crowd could apply to any work of art.
GM: So you didn't practice Judaism?
DE: Sort of. Despite my mother's New Age interests, she felt that it was important we belong to a temple, so that my sister and I could each have a bat mitzvah—meaning that, at age 13, we would lead a temple ceremony to show we had reached maturity in the faith. It's a Jewish rite of passage. I did learn to read Hebrew and had a lovely bat mitzvah, but soon after fell from nominal Judaism to outright agnosticism. The odd thing was that, even with the New Age books all around me and no personal sense of orthodoxy, I always liked the Bible. I first got to know it at age six when a Christian family who attended my sister's bat mitzvah gave me Barbara Taylor Bradford's book of children's stories from the Bible (this was before Bradford became known for her romance novels). I remember thinking it odd that the family would give me a book that included stories from the"other" part of the Bible—didn't they know I was Jewish? Still, I read it all the way through—from "our" Bible to"their" Bible—and didn't really notice a break. It made sense to me that if there were such a thing as a Jewish messiah—and I didn't really know what a messiah was, other than a good man sent by God—he would be Jesus.
GM: Tell us about the Rising of the Dawn, the Return to Eden.
DE: At about the time that my agnosticism was melding into an angsty depression, my mother took me to visit the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick. At the student union, a Christian group had a table with free New Testaments. Mom picked one up out of curiosity. It was the paperback with all those corny 1970s photos of people from all different countries on the cover. (One of them is a dead ringer for the British pop singer Engelbert Humperdinck.)"What do you think?" Mom asked me as she held the book."Should I read it?"
Mom says that I not only told her she should read it—which I remember—but that I also told her that I'd read it in school and it was good. That school course was three years earlier, when my eighth-grade social studies teacher, Owen M. Snyder, had us read it for a perspective on history. If I dug up that memory as evidence of the Gospel's value—and I don't doubt that I did—I must have been grasping for any reason to get Mom to read it. Something inside me wanted desperately for her to receive a certain faith, even if that faith included Jesus.
She took the book home, started at the beginning, and when she got to the Beatitudes, she burst into tears. Soon after, she joined a charismatic Catholic Church—St. Antoninus, in Newark, took instruction from noted Jewish convert and Holocaust survivor Msgr. John M. Oesterreicher and, in October 1986, was accepted into the Roman Catholic Church. (She has since moved away from Catholicism to an evangelical faith that's closer to what's called Messianic Judaism, and has been married for several years to a man who shares her faith.)
GM: And how did you feel about this?
DE: Although I was very happy with my mother, her conversion didn't change my feeling that Christianity was for conformists. I looked upon her as an exception, not the rule. My own agnosticism was reinforced by the depression that I suffered from my mid-teens all the way until I became a Christian at age 31. It was a feeling of being without a net. I felt that I lacked the emotional foundations that others had, and I blamed this on not having had a stable family environment growing up. I was jealous of people from two-parent, stable families. More than that, I envied anyone who was able to avoid looking inward, be it through a hobby like playing music or a distracting behavior like sleeping around (I never envied drug addicts or alcoholics, though). My depression ran in cycles, with each cycle seeming worse than the last. Eventually, once I discovered that periods of relief were always followed by periods of black depression, my emotions spiraled downwards so that a small event could spark suicidal thoughts in me. After all, I thought, if I'm feeling pain, I'm only going to feel pain again, right? What's it worth the normal times in between if it's always going to end like this?
Those emotions were like a cancer. If I could bring them out, even at the price of some physical pain, I could rest for a while until they troubled me again. My self-destructive thoughts were linked to a feeling that, at base, I had no real value as a person, and deserved to be punished in some way. This could be seen in some sense to reflect the Christian worldview that we are all sinners.
GM: So you discovered what G.K. Chesterton calls, the"Good News of Original Sin."
DE: Yes, it was sin that made me realize that what I was missing was God. But I still needed a push from outside to realize it was good news.
GM: Is it true that Chesterton also brought some light into your darkness?
DE: Oh yes. My mother, stepfather, and others were praying for me, plus my sister, father, and stepmother made a concerted effort to reach out to me during my darkest hours. But when it came to making me understand the reality of Christian faith, Chesterton had a decisive impact. I first heard of him in the spring of 1996, when I was interviewing Ben Eshbach, the lead singer of a rock band called the Sugarplastic. Ben was known for being a literate songwriter, so I asked him what he'd been reading. As I think about it now, the fact that I thought of asking him that shows that, even though I would try to make it in the music business for a few years after that, I was already growing frustrated with that world on some level. I was bored by people whose entire lives were music and nothing else, and I lived in fear of becoming like them. Ben mentioned that he was reading The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton and that he would recommend it. I had never heard of Chesterton—the name sounded quaint and British to me, like P.G. Wodehouse.
Soon after, I bought a copy of Thursday at a bookstore. I really didn't know what to expect. Chesterton's story unfolds in such a way to create an intense sense of wonder. Being a fan of"The Fugitive," the plot of one man working undercover to root out evil had great appeal for me. As the story progressed and its philosophical essence became more apparent, the fascination grew greater. I'd always loved C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, like The Snow Queen, but I'd never understood much of the Christian allegory behind them—they were just great stories. Here was a book with a similarly great story, but where the allegory was much more clear.
Paradoxically, even though Thursday was clearly from a Christian worldview, it had no Christ figure that I could make out. It was amazing to see how Chesterton could make Christ such a large presence by his very absence. I was also stunned by the book's modernity, considering it was written nearly 100 years earlier. I was familiar with the concept of relativism as being a new idea I'd learned in graduate school where, much to my chagrin, it was taught as the egalitarian answer to oppressive and bourgeois "Judeo-Christianity." Now, in Chesterton's prose, I learned that relativism was in fact an old idea—and that Christians were on the front line of the assault against it.
GM: What else did you glean from Thursday?
DE: It made sense to me that Christians wouldn't like relativism, but the kind of ideological assault that Chesterton described made Christians sound much more ideologically proactive than I'd imagined. I thought of Christian culture as just this side of the Stepford Wives—drab and sheep-like. I thought the world was Christian and that to be different, I had to be something other. The Man Who Was Thursday depicted Christianity as oppositional, something that was shocking to me—and very exciting.
GM: Then what?
DE: It was about three more years after picking up The Man Who Was Thursday that I became a Christian. In between, I just fell in love with Chesterton, perusing the American Chesterton Society Web site—writing to you, Dale, and your answers to my questions about GKC—
GM: Well, okay. You're welcome.
DE: —and reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Flying Inn, Orthodoxy, Heretics, Volume 1 of the Illustrated London News essays, and my favorite work after Thursday, The Ball and the Cross. All of these gave me the impression that here was a man of great wit, great intellect, great faith, and great love of the world. If a Christian other than my decidedly quirky mother could encompass all those things, then clearly there was something magical about the faith that made it worth serious exploration.
GM: Perhaps you could tell us about the event that brought you to the Christian faith.
DE: It's something that I have difficulty describing. It was a supernatural experience, not as dramatic as experiences some have had, and yet I don't like to put too much focus on it. But I will tell you about the message that changed me, because it's in many ways a Chestertonian message as well as a Godly one.
In October 1999, I had reached a point where I desperately knew that I needed the Lord. I was aware that in some way I was drawing nearer to faith, and I had a feeling that God was answering prayers in different areas of my life. But I still lived in fear of my next cycle of depression, and I expended a great deal of mental energy trying not to think self-destructive thoughts. I still felt that faith was for others, but it had somehow not been given to me. Then, one night as I was sleeping in the early morning hours, I had what's called a hypnagogic experience. I was conscious, but my brain hadn't given the order to let me move, so I was frozen in bed. I felt the presence of something in the room. All this was familiar to me from similar experiences I'd had in the past, which I'd chalked up to being on antidepressants. But this time, there was something different—a voice. At first, I could only hear the blood rushing in my ears. But then came the voice of a woman saying clearly, crisply, and authoritatively:"Some things are not meant to be known. Some things are meant to be understood."
I woke up feeling scared to the point of being physically ill—remembering the hypnagogic experience, the feeling as though something were in the room. But I didn't recall the voice. It wasn't until later that evening, when I was visiting my mother and stepfather, that I remembered it. I blurted it out at the dinner table. And I was convinced that it was in the Bible. In fact, I knew just where it was in the Bible, or so I thought. In my mind, not in a voice but in a feeling, I was directed to read Romans 5:1. I had no idea what that would be, but I was convinced it would explain the mysterious message.
The verse, which I now know is one of the most important passages of the New Testament, is, "Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (KJV).
I realized that the connection between that and the message I'd heard was that I'd been trying to attain faith through"knowing"—through picking up bits and bytes of information. What was necessary was for me to understand God, and the only way to do this was through faith. If I took the leap and believed, then knowledge of God would be added to me."The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge" (Proverbs 1:7).
I got down on my knees that night—even though it felt kind of corny—and gave my heart to the Lord. From then on, my depression was healed. I've had my ups and downs since then, but the cycle of morbid pain and self-destructive thoughts was broken. I've changed from the inside out. My official psychiatric diagnosis has changed, in the wonderful pragmatic lingo of psychiatrists, from"Major Depression" to, for the past four and a half years,"Major Depression—In Remission."
That's one long remission. And it's all because I have a reason to live.
GM: In Maisie Ward's biography of Chesterton, she quotes a famous psychologist who, when asked to define sanity, replied: "Read Chesterton." It sounds like Chesterton helped rescue you from the same madness and self-destruction he describes in the book Orthodoxy. The solution is the same: Christianity. But I have to ask you about that voice you heard. You said it was a woman's voice?
DE: The fact that it was female helped convince me that I couldn't have made it up. I have always strongly believed that if God existed, he would speak as a male. I would have none of this goddess stuff. So for me to hear a voice—a voice which I realize is not God himself, but a messenger—and for that voice to be female, the idea's just so outrageous to me that it must be the real thing.
That too strikes me as Chestertonian, because Chesterton had such an understanding of God's unwillingness to be limited to our mental conceptions of him—like the character Sunday in The Man Who Was Thursday, escaping in a balloon.
GM: And of course Sunday also escapes on an elephant in a busy city street, which reminds me for some reason of New York. You work about a block from Times Square, a place which is nothing if not overdone. You see that world every day. What are your thoughts about the endless parade?
DE: I can't tell you much about my current feelings on Times Square because I avoid it whenever possible. But I will tell you how I felt about it one day nearly three years ago. During the summer of 2001, I did publicity for oldies concerts at the World Trade Center. The Sept. 11 attacks occurred two weeks to the day after the last concert I worked. I was blessed to get an"in" at the Red Cross as a volunteer in the days after Sept. 11. There were thousands more people who wanted to volunteer then and couldn't. I actually worked the Red Cross headquarters volunteer sign-up table a few days after the attacks and saw for myself the lines of people who wanted to help. One man I remember because he had the saddest face. He wrote on the sign-up sheet that he wanted to volunteer at children's hospitals. His occupation was "clown." That broke my heart.
When I would leave the Red Cross after my volunteer shift, a line of taxis would be waiting outside the headquarters to give volunteers and employees rides—for free. It was their way of doing something to help. For the first week after the attacks, they wouldn't even accept tips. Also, the drivers were mostly Arabs or Sikhs (who were often mistaken for Arabs due to their headgear), and they wanted to show people that they loved America. One night, a few days after the attacks, I took a taxi ride from the Red Cross down to my train station, and the ride took me through Times Square. For the first time since the attacks, I saw the blinding bright lights, the distracting video screens, all the colors and life of the"Crossroads of the World." The sight gave me a euphoric feeling."They didn't get Times Square," I thought."It's still here." All those annoying, yet bizarrely beautiful signs combined to make a powerful and reassuring reminder that even with the huge towers unthinkably reduced to ashes, America was still alive and well.
GM: Chesterton, as we know, described New York as hell, and then added: "Pleasantly, of course." I've been to New York recently for the first time in my life. There is of course this heavy sense that something important is always happening, but with all the rush and constant activity, there is very little joy and even less peace. In other words, it's like the rest of the world, only more so. So, Dawn, how are you planning on fixing that?
DE: I'm glad you asked! I recently started a discussion group, The Salonica, which meets the third Sunday afternoon of each month at a famous Irish pub, O'Lunney's, which happens to be just off Times Square. We talk about literature, current events, faith, and anything that falls into the category "higher things." The name comes from Thessalonica, as in First Thessalonians:"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good."
I call The Salonica "Christian-friendly" because, while non-Christians are welcome, it's different from other New York City social groups that meet outside of church, in that we don't argue first principles. Instead of proceeding from a secular perspective, we assume faith as the most natural perspective. So the conversation, instead of asking,"Is there a God," asks,"Having faith, how then should we live?"
As one sees in the pages of Gilbert Magazine, it's possible for people who have faith to have radically different opinions on other things in life, such as politics. I like bringing together people at The Salonica who may have different opinions, but who share a desire to enjoy fellowship with other people of faith who are interested in books and in the world around them. This group is my attempt, after many years of trying, to find intellectual Christians in New York City, to make the mountain come to Mohammed—if you'll pardon the mixed analogy.
I also try to bring the mountain to Mohammed through cyberspace. I have a very active Weblog, "The Dawn Patrol" (www.dawneden.com/blogger.html). I write an ongoing series,"The Truth in Small Things," where I aim to bring to blogging the same "all is grist" sensibility that Chesterton brought to his Illustrated London News essays.
GM: Dawn, thanks for helping people have a better perspective of the world, which in turn, makes the world a better place. I'm reminded of Chesterton's very early line:"Perhaps we are in Eden still; only our eyes have changed."