biographical
my full name is Benjamin Jay DeVries. I'm 28, 6'6", 235 lbs, and I look more like a small forward than a writer, but I gave up basketball halfway through my senior year in high school.
my parents were until just a few years ago protestant evangelical missionaries in the Netherlands. I grew up in South Holland, IL and then in Zion, IL, until we moved to Holland in 1990, along with my younger brother and sister. I had just turned eleven, and had to give up baseball soon after that, among other things. I never really adjusted to our new home, in fact I probably would have been diagnosed with depression if any of us knew to recognize it at the time.
I left Holland five years later, sooner than expected, to finish high school in Lynchburg, Virginia with my grandparents, and then moved back to Illinois for college at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. I had a hard time adjusting to these environments too, and halfway through college I almost left because I was more lonely and depressed than I'd ever been, about myself, my nonexistent social and relational life, and my failure to measure up to what I thought the Christian faith expected of me. I had to get extensions on most of my final projects, and spent the rest of the summer working as a janitor at an elementary school, dinking around on the piano once in a while. I thought about moving on to music school, but my dad encouraged me to go back to Moody for one more semester, which I reluctantly did.
that year at school I started recording and performing some, on my own and with other musicians on campus. I put together a modern rock/industrial demo the next summer, uncannily influenced by Nine Inch Nails, which I posted on MP3.com. I recorded a few more songs during my senior year, incorporating a broader palette of influences from Radiohead to Donna Lewis. but another botched attempt at a relationship and accompanying hysterics sidelined me again, along with a computer crash, and kept me from finishing a second demo, which I had hoped would get my creative career off the ground once I left school.
everything came to an ugly head during spring break of that senior year. that's when the scene in the bookstore took place (described in ch. 3), which salvaged hope for me personally. the cumulative effect of endless thinking and processing, some good literature and media, and my professor Dr. Pate's teaching allowed me to finally see some beauty in my sadness and dignity in replace of everything that had supposedly been taken away from me. in general, it was like beginning to find balance somewhere between opposite and mutually-contradicting poles.
I graduated two months later with a degree in biblical studies and began working on a memoir to describe the process of building up to my newly established hope in an abtsract-narrative way. I finished it a few months later and sent it off to a couple of literary friends, who kindly responded that they admired the effort I put forward but that the manuscript was too awkward and vague to be published. I was crushed, envisioning a life dominated by retail. but a week later I decided they were right, collected myself and started working on a delicate fade, a project I thought about just before leaving school. I hadn't anticipated taking it up until later in life when I was older and wiser, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
Dr. Pate had introduced me to the theological premise of the already/not yet (originally Oscar Cullman's): the idea that God’s kingdom dawned in the world with Christ's coming, but that it won't be complete until he returns, and that all of life experiences tension in between these events. I promised myself during one of my last classes that I would study and write about this tension someday on a more emotional and practical level, mostly because I found myself very intimately in the tension, but also because it seemed to be something my heritage of faith largely ignored.
I started reading and taking notes across the surface of theology, philosophy and psychology which touched on the previous themes (see bibliography) during my first fall out of college, and began writing seriously at the turn of 2002. I must have written the preface and first chapter ten times when a coffee-house friend of mine, Dave, encouraged me to send a draft in to a publisher. he had a shoestring contact at Zondervan, who turned out to be the editor-in-chief, who in turn passed my proposal on to a younger editor who he thought might connect with the project.
a week after receiving a generic rejection letter to a faxed proposal I'd sent in personally, the afore-mentioned editor wrote in early summer to tell me he was interested in the project and asked if he could see the rest of it. I was blown away. I didn’t have more than an additional chapter or two, so I nervously asked for some time to send a few chapters in, revised yet again. I decided to stop screwing around a few weeks later when I finished the rest of the manuscript in just over a month of intense writing and editing. I sent my final draft off at the end of the summer, and was offered a contract the following spring after eight months of awkward waiting and harassing my editor. and, come April 2004, a delicate fade finally arrived in limited quantities at a bookstore near you.
not long after the release of a delicate fade, I wasn't entirely sure what to make of the experience, or the book itself. I came to not want to define myself to the world at large (or small, as it's proven to be) by one book. life moves on, awkwardly but surely, and I realized it inevitably builds off of previous installments, for better and worse. but I wasn't able to let go of the ultimate, and surprisingly quick, disappointment of publishing and publicizing a delicate fade, which included its limited reception and circulation, and removal from "in print" status only a year and a half into its existence. the amount of apathy and frustration I experienced in simply trying to connect with others about the book, especially among my home communities of faith, was hard to process, and remains so. I had to, by trial and error, become careful who I mentioned a delicate fade to at all. at this point, four years removed from the release, I'm a bit more at peace with letting the book, and to a lesser extent the experience, be what it was, and making an effort to hold my head as high as I can about it all.
as far as life outside of a delicate fade goes, I was married three months after the book came out to my best friend and fellow songwriter from college, Cheryl. I was in the middle of working on a project about isolation, which I began a week after I finished a delicate fade, when we started dating. she's been consistently better to me and for me than I could have hoped for or deserved, and I've often felt like she got the raw end of the deal. we're still hoping to get back to music together someday, maybe play a few acoustic sets locally and record a few songs, if we can get past the business of life. it's funny, or tragic, how quickly some passions go by wayside simply in growing up and dealing with adult life.
the few years following a delicate fade's demise were in general a very dry and frustrating time creatively. I felt like I was up against a wall I couldn't get past in a number of ways, and one I didn't expect to be up against after working so hard to get over it the first time. even my initial foray into blogging in 2006 was far from consistent, as good as an outlet as it was at times. writing in general became a very frustrating experience, often like pulling teeth, and being in grad school and slogging through academic papers for two and a half years didn't help the process.
but as dry and frustrating as that period was, I had a lot of time to interact with different subjects and causes, extending some of the interests I developed while working on a delicate fade and taking on some new ones as well, especially in the area of social ethics. but my creative paralysis had gotten to the point where I didn't think I had the focus or confidence to take up any one issue long enough to channel it into anything creative or productive in any sense.
capstone project at school (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) and stick with it, after one ditched thesis on institutions as principalities and powers. my final project ended up being on a Christian foundation for animal welfare, a subject I found myself growing increasingly attached to, and a reclaimed fascination from my childhood. the capstone ended up developing into a website and small advocacy effort called not one sparrow, a Christian voice for animals, which launched in May of '08 and which I've been administrating as best I can since. if you have a heart for creation care and for God's creatures in particular, I hope you'll check it out sometime (not one sparrow is also on Facebook and Twitter).
ast year I also started a blog which was initially called with those who, a journal of empathy, a subject I've wanted to devote more time to for several years. Just recently I changed the name to already, empathy to more intentionally incorporate an awareness of wrestling with empathy and generally living in the already, not yet of God's kingdom. I can't seem to get away from that theme either, but I'm glad for that in a way. You can read a bit more about the blog here (already, empathy is also on Facebook and Twitter).as for other news, my wife and I saw our family expand two summers ago with the birth of our little guy Jadon, named partly after my grandfather Jay Omar Brubaker. having our lives completely overhauled has definitely been an adjustment, and one which I haven't always responded very well to, especially with so many other persistent points of uncertainty which we've faced career-wise and financially. but having him around is a unique gift and source of enthrallment at the same time.
please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments, related to a delicate fade or otherwise, I always try to send a response. regardless, thank you very much for taking the time to read this rather extended bio.
sincerely, ben
(updated November 2011)
