Alison Umminger, Spiritual Director and Retreat Facilitator

 

106. Alison Umminger Mattison

SPEAKERS

Alison Umminger Mattison, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:03

Will Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Allison Umminger, Mattison. You may have known her in colleges. Alison Umminger, Alison, welcome to the show.

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  00:21

Thank you,

 

Will Bachman  00:22

Allison. So tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard. Okay,

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  00:27

I’ll give you my sort of capsule journey after graduation. I hopped the pond over to England, and then I came back with the desire to be a writer. Like a lot of people, I think graduate college have these artistic dreams, and that started a long journey through grad school. I did 10 years of graduate work, and then I have since then, done 20 years as an English professor, which is a long time to do the same thing in the in that time, I’ve gotten married, have a wonderful 13-year-old daughter, keeps me very busy, and published a book. And for the past seven years, sort of did a pivot, did a master’s in Christian spirituality and spiritual direction certification, and went into spiritual direction, work and retreat, ministry and facilitating, designing retreats that people go to, silent retreats with themed content. So that’s why, like, super brief, I would say, capsule of what life has looked like. And I’ve moved around in that time, from Boston to London to DC to Missouri to Indiana to Atlanta, and now I’m in Carrollton, Georgia.

 

Will Bachman  01:55

Okay, wow. As a lot to cover, I would love if you could expand a bit on the master’s degree that you’ve obtained and about that whole piece, the spiritual, you know, guidance and retreat ministries and a silent retreat with themed content. I want to hear about that that sounds almost a contradiction if you’re silent. So I just dive into that piece. Yeah,

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  02:21

it is, it is a contradiction. I think, um, well, it’s funny. I wrote a little bit about this; I think in one of our class reports. Um, after I left our 25th reunion, I think I had my full-on midlife meltdown where I was just like I published a book, and, you know, I’d done all these things that were markers for me of accomplishment or what I thought I wanted to do, and I was just profoundly unhappy. I found myself walking around listening to people talk about their lives, and just thinking, oh, I’m so bored with my life, you know, which you know, in a way, it’s, it sounds ungrateful. I have nice tenured job and nice family, but I knew that what I was doing was not fulfilling what I really needed. And so that summer, I went on retreat. There’s a Trappist monastery in Georgia that’s about an hour and 10 minutes from me, called the monastery of the Holy Spirit. And they were facilitating a retreat called the monk within. And this very nice, 70 something monk named Michael lautieri, who became my first spiritual director, was facilitating it, and it had sessions. So we met, I would say, for an hour, hour and a half, like a couple of times during the weekend, but the rest of the time was silent, and that was and there were prayer times too, where you could, you know, get up at four in the morning and listen to the monks pray the divine offices, and then you’d sort of go to a corner of the church, and they turn all the lights off, and you just sit there in silence for an hour, and you either pray or meditate or whatever. And that sort of intentional silence was really life giving, like I really had never experienced that. And I loved it, and I loved the retreat. And at the end of it, I went up to this monk, and I was like, at the time, I really wanted to do the Spiritual Exercises of st Ignatius. And so I was like, will you do this? And he was like, You need to find a Jesuit. But I was like, I really wanted to meet with him and work with him. And so within a couple months of meeting with him, I just knew instantly. I was like, I want to do what you do. Like I want to do these retreats. I want to be people’s spiritual companion. And so then I looked online, there was one program I found, Loyola Chicago that had an online master’s degree and spiritual direction certification. And I there was the only program I applied to, and I was going there. You know, between August of the retreat, January, I started my studies, and it took me three and a half years while still parenting full time and teaching full time, going in the evenings to get this degree. And I just really, really loved it, like I loved the people I met. I loved the whole art of spiritual companioning and listening to people’s stories. And it just felt like what I really. I wanted to keep doing with this second half of my life.

 

Will Bachman  05:03

Wow. Okay, so what is spiritual companioning?

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  05:10

I know it sounds kind of, it sounds really like, you know, I don’t know, like odd, but I think to me, it is sitting with someone who is presumably in a pretty healthy space, I think spiritual direction. Sometimes people think it’s like therapy or it’s like coaching. It’s similar in that it’s a listening vocation, and that you spend a lot of time listening to people’s stories, listening to people’s hearts desires, listening to where people are without judgment. Sometimes people come in a faith crisis, or because their religion is not working for them, maybe the way it used to, or they’ve had a great loss, or they just sense something more, or they just want to pray differently, and you listen with them for and this is where the language kind of can avoid it. Where is maybe God calling them to the greater good in their life? Where? Where are they being led next? It presumes that that person spends time, I think, in prayer, which involves silence and solitude, but you’re really a companion like we’re not supposed to journey alone in any part of our lives, and I think we get used to that with mental health therapy so normalized now, or coaching where it’s like, Oh, I’ve got to get this goal or I’ve got to break through to this next thing. But I think spiritual companioning is a little different in that it’s not goal oriented. It’s really you’re just going to walk with people and walk them as far as they need to go with you and listen for, you know, what is that greater good they’re being called to? Or, you know, how can what is coming up in their prayer? If it’s a dry season or people really feel nothing’s going on, to just keep walking with them through that. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a accompaniment, I would say, vocation.

 

Will Bachman  06:57

How is it different than being a priest or a rabbi or a minister or pastor.

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  07:04

It’s that’s a great question. We Well, we accompany all kinds of people. So it’s like, I, although I’m trained in Ignatian spirituality, which is Catholic and Christian, I walk with people who are, you know, spiritual, but not religious, or people who are questioning, or even people who’ve really been harmed by their faith or really hurt by it along their journey. And I it’s not like you’re running an organization, it’s, it’s for the most part, small groups. You meet with someone, say, once a month, that’s that’s the more common paradigm, I would say, for spiritual direction, as you meet with people monthly just to check in and listen to what’s going on in their faith life, that’s also like, it’s weird to say it’s a really personal part of most people’s lives, like it’s a very private part, and so it’s just not if there’s nothing public about it, I think of like Being a priest or being a rabbi or being it’s kind of forward facing, whereas spiritual direction, it’s more like now that you some people, is probably the first they’ve heard of it. Now that you hear about it, you’ll probably see it more notice someone who does it, or maybe go to the spiritual directors International website. But it’s, it’s almost an invisible vocation, like you’re not really supposed to advertise yourself too much, or, you know, which is weird, I’m on a podcast, but it’s, it’s, I it’s not a leadership role in that sense, it’s a listening with, like, I would say, there is also a leadership component, I think, to being a pastor or a rabbi or someone who is, you know, also running a small organization and managing groups of people, which is a little different.

 

Will Bachman  08:45

So if you don’t, if you’re not supposed to advertise or promote your service, how do people find you? Well,

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  08:52

a lot of it’s word of mouth and retreat work. And I mean, it’s not that I don’t advertise. I do have a website, but, you know, there’s not, maybe not the same level of like, hey, look what I have. You know, I think, I really do think people find you it’s weird. You know, there are, there are websites like spiritual directors International has a database of spiritual directors, and I’m affiliated with Ignatius house in Atlanta, which is a Jesuit retreat center. And so I’m on their website, and you know, people find me through that, or if I’m facilitating retreats, like I just did a retreat. I just did two retreats this summer. One was on the art and spirituality of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which was super fun and really cool to do with a group of people. And you know, sometimes someone will come up to you after that, or sometimes you’re not the right person for them. I mean, it’s like, kind of a very non possessive thing, like someone came to me during that and was like, I need a spiritual director, but not you. And I was like, totally fine, you know, I didn’t think it was a gender thing, not a, you know, not I offended them or anything. And so then I’m like, Okay, let me help you find someone. Let me point you in the direction of some. Their people. So a lot of times you get people through referral or just word of mouth, I guess, more than anything.

 

Will Bachman  10:09

Wow. Okay, talk to me about these retreats. So you went through one kind of quickly earlier, but give me a little bit more detail. What would one of these retreats look like, and what what happens? And sort of give me a sort of an hour by hour agenda of what’s going on, okay, I’ll

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  10:28

give you an hour by hour agenda of one that I did. I’ll give you the one I did most recently. This was at Ignatius house in June, and the that was a themed retreat. The theme was befriending hope. So it was really about hope. And, you know, hope can be hard to come by for people, or sometimes people are going through a time where they’re looking for greater hope. So that retreat, the first evening, I usually walk people through a guided meditation with a lot of questions about, you know, slowing down, you know, not trying to run around doing things, but to just be in the silence. And then in that retreat, after leading this meditation, I asked people to really, you know, think, like, what word or phrase is coming up for you? Like, to really trust, like, what do you need right now? And so sometimes people will get, like, peace or direction or let go, something like that. And so I gave each person, like, one of those little candles that you met, a little votive case. And so people could, you know, they’re artistic, I do artistic retreat. So everybody could write on their candles, bottom or around it, like what the word was, and they had a little light to take back to their room. So that’s their little, you know, light. And the next morning, we came in and talked a little bit about befriending darkness, like the idea of, what do we do these times in our life when all the lights go out and it’s hard to see, and how do we find you know what we need to go on? And the idea that, you know a director, I don’t have any of the answers, but we get hope from being with others in the same situation. So we’re not hoping for something, but we’re hoping with other people. And then I gave everyone that kind of, I don’t know if you remember it from when you were a kid, that paper that is colored underneath, but it has just black over it, and you can scrape it. So, yeah, so everybody did a mandala with those, so people could do these designs. And it was beautiful. What people came up with just really looking at, okay, what’s underneath that, and what can we find, even in the places that seem like there’s not a lot there? And that took about, you know, an hour, and then I left a lot of artistic materials out, but also just encourage people to spend time in silence, and that’s what they do. It’s silent outside of those sessions. And then people came back around one and we did another artistic technique called Soul collage, which is such a goofy name, I can’t believe I’m someone who facilitates soul collage, because I think it’s, it’s a great, great intuitive tool, though. So people pick different images intuitively, and they design these cards, and then they journal from the cards, like, what is the card saying? If the card could speak? And that excavates a lot of, where are people right now? And so we did that in the afternoon, and then people have a break. And then I take about two hours in the afternoon to meet with people for 20 minutes, people who want sort of a micro spiritual direction in that time of what’s coming up for them. So I would meet with people in these 20 minute segments for two hours. So it’s a long day for me on that day. And then in the evening, we did an imaginative prayer. And that is a very Ignatian technique, where you read scripture, but you imagine yourself in the scripture, and you really trust where your imagination is taking you. So you read the Scripture, say three or four times, and each time you let people involve the senses more, or try to think, you know, I think the one I did there, for anyone who’s familiar with any of the Scriptures, the Christian scripture of Jesus, like calming the storm. So really, you know what, imagining you’re on the boat, imagining the storm, like really seeing the people, and then leaving people space to really be in that scene and let something come up. So it’s, it sounds really weird if you’ve never done it, and I think for a lot of people, it’s a big it’s a big imaginative leap. But we closed with that, and then the next morning, we just met and did a visual meditation, something called Vizio Divina, and where a friend of mine, who I do retreats with, Jackie Sullivan had written this one up, and we put up a picture. And so people look at the picture and you think, like, what am I attracted to in this picture? Like, where does my eye rest? What do I resist in this picture, I’m looking at what, what might this picture be trying to tell me, what’s. Missing from this picture. And then you give people a chance to journal from that sort of what have they noticed as they’ve done this visual reflection. And then we close by letting people just share what’s happened for them during this retreat. So it’s like five sessions, usually when I do a retreat with a lot of silence in between for people to go out and just be with whatever’s coming up for them, and that is often both unique to each person and something where they realize they share a lot in common. Like one of the neatest things is to see people really connect with someone they may have never met outside a retreat setting, because, because you never know who will come to retreat, people occasionally come with someone they know, but often they come by themselves, and so people make really neat connections over these I think

 

Will Bachman  15:46

you mentioned both meditation and prayer. How would in your practice? How are those things different?

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  15:57

I think, Well, I would say meditation is a form of prayer like, I think prayer is like a big umbrella. I would just put that as one of the, the many, many places that, and I, of course, some people meditate, and would not call it prayer, maybe would not consider it, but I think of it just as like another, another manifestation of prayer that works for some people and doesn’t work for others.

 

Will Bachman  16:17

So interesting. Oh, okay, I guess I had maybe more of a intuition that prayer would be if you are kind of addressing the Almighty, you know, having a like supplication, kind of discussion. But give me an expanded definition of prayer. It sounds it’s more inclusive.

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  16:36

Oh, yeah,

 

Will Bachman  16:36

so yeah, that’s, I

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  16:38

love that you’re asking that. Because I think so many people think that they think prayer is just like I’m chatting with God, right and or I’m talking or I or the sort of like I need this, I want this, or help me with this, that help. Thanks. Wow, whatever, like the Ann Lamott, but our sense of prayer, I think, as spiritual directors, is of listening, of creating open spaces, of creating spaces where we sit in silence. Or one really great technique that you know that the way the monks pray is Lectio Divina, which is, you might take one verse. Let’s say, like, say you take a verse. A lot of people know this is the example I was given when I was learning about it, like something like, love is patient, love is kind, love is generous. So if you were going to pray with that, you would read the verse and you would pick the first word or phrase that grabs you. So you might think, love is patient. So that’s, that’s you start. And then the second time you read the verse, you might again meditate. You might meditate on it. You might be like, Okay, what does that mean for me? Like, what does patient mean? Am I patient? Am I do I rush through things? Do I get mad in traffic? Raise his hand, patience. I personally struggle with so you would think about that, and then you would be in a conversational mode. You would talk to God about that. You might be like, Okay, I need a little help with this, or this is hard for me, or help me practice patience. Or may I have the strength to be take a deep breath, and then you open up a space of silence in prayer, to just sit with that word, to just sort of be like patience, and just try to let everything else go out and see what comes up. And for most, for like this might be a 20 minute period you’re just working with this one word. And then during the day, you carry that word with you. You keep you know you might return to that you might and then you’d spend as long with patience as you need. You might keep on with patience the next day if it comes up. But in theory, like if you were reading like a monk when you felt like you’d exhausted patience, you might get to love is kind, right? And then you do the same thing with kindness. So it’s a very different way of thinking about prayer, I think, than what a lot of people have in their heads. And that’s just one way, like, that’s Lectio, that’s a technique. So if someone came for spiritual direction, they might be looking for new ways to pray. And you might say, here’s a way that that you might think about praying. And for some people, that’ll work really well, and for some people, it doesn’t like, I mean, that’s the other great thing, because you get this big toolkit to let people explore. And my spiritual director, and many people say, Pray as you can, not as you can’t like things don’t work for everyone. And so if something stops working, you move on. You try a different mode of prayer. For some people, walking in the woods, this prayer you know, or you know, doing the dishes can be prayer, right? So it’s whatever you’re doing in this way that’s sort of mindful and open and creating that space.

 

Will Bachman  19:29

You mentioned a couple times that you will walk with people as now, was that a metaphor? Or do you literally go and walk with some of the people that you’re counseling.

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  19:41

That’s, that’s probably metaphor. Occasionally I’ll walk with someone, but accompany them. I should say, Yeah, accompany them. Interesting.

 

Will Bachman  19:47

Okay, um, so what are I’m curious when you’re working with someone, what are some of your go to questions that you. You do a lot of listening. What are some of your go to questions to to get people to open up. As a spiritual director,

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  20:08

um, initially, we often start with, you know, what is prayer for you? You know, where are you in your spiritual life? What is your spiritual journey been like? People often come with a pretty strong sense of where they are and and what’s missing. And a lot of times we really listen for you, sort of you start to trust your intuition a lot. There’s a there’s a great training that I did at Shalem, which is a spirituality center, I think it’s in Maryland, and it was on small group spiritual direction, and that’s where you might have four, three or four people that do spiritual direction together, and one person talks for like five minutes, and then you open this space of silence. And one of the things that they taught us in that is to really trust like as the person’s talking. Is there a word, phrase or image that comes up? So you might someone might be talking, and you might even just have a word that comes up, or you might say, Oh, I just when you talked, I saw this. And if you’re if it really comes up a couple times, if you really have that sense that, okay, this is a word or a phrase I’m getting, you might bring that up with them, or you might say, Oh, the image I got was this. And sometimes you that really resonates with the person. They’re like, Oh, well, this is that some you know, it’s so you sort of trust that part you also really listen for is this person in consolation or desolation? Is this person in a state where they’re hurting, or, you know, they’re moving away desolation. I would say a shorthand definition would be moving away from faith, hope and love, which is not, you know, not our desired direction, consolation, towards greater faith, hope and love and not it doesn’t mean you’re, you know, in a bad place that that you’re in a space of desolation. We all have times of consolation and desolation in our lives. So you listen a lot for that, like, where is this person now? What might they not be noticing about where they are? And you ask a lot of open ended questions. Like, one thing we never do is like, Oh, it sounds like this. Like you really don’t want to do that, unless you’re naming maybe a feeling, you know, sort of like it sounds like that’s a really hopeless space for you, or it sounds like that’s not very fulfilling, maybe, but you’re really giving the person space to go deeper with where they are. Okay, I answered your question. Sorry. I think I went off on a tangent, no

 

Will Bachman  22:41

answer, and then so are there some questions that you find that you return again and again to to help open up, and

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  22:56

that’s a good Question. Sometimes you might even think, like, what’s underneath that? Like, that is a question one might ask. Like, if someone’s like, Oh, I really want this thing you might look at, well, what’s the desire under the thing you want? Like, if someone’s like, I mean, just a shorthand, like, if someone’s like, oh, let’s say I wanted to publish a book, right? Well, what’s the desire under that? Is it? For some one person, it might be to be really good at something. For another, it might be to feel seen. For another, it might be to heal, right? So sometimes you might have the same thing that someone’s talking about, and you’re trying to figure out what’s under that, like, what’s the thing beneath that? And you are trying to create a space where the person can can figure that out, can sort of mine down to that and name it, and then maybe work from that space,

 

Will Bachman  23:46

okay, and you mentioned, I mean, the whole, our whole conversation here has been about spiritual, spirituality, how, how? What does that term mean in in your in your lexicon,

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  24:06

um I think that that part that gives life, that which calls us to our greater good, that which you know is, is life giving our greatest joy? That sort of Joseph Campbell follow your bliss, that sort of God given spark that each person has to what, what they’re called to do, what, what really, what really is their purpose, and what takes them in that direction.

 

Will Bachman  24:29

Is spiritual director a sort of new thing? Or did it always used to be done by like, a minister or rabbi or priest or or is this something that’s been around for a while, like, separate from the kind of formal ministry it’s

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  24:44

been now, it’s been around a long, long time, right? So, you know, if you go back to monks, have spiritual directors, like people have had spiritual directors for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, right? It’s an ancient practice. I think it’s become more. Are popular now it’s become, definitely something that’s moved from something that say people in clergy did more to toward laity, like doing that. And if you go to like, spiritual directors International, like all kinds of like, they have a really broad tent for that. Like, I mean, so you might have people who are shamans, people who are practitioners of different art, or forest bathing, or you have, like, Zen spiritual directors, like, it’s not just I have, everybody has their little group. I think that they speak to and service. And it might mean different things in different different sort of religious traditions, but I would say, I think it is definitely become more common now or or more. I don’t know what the word I’m looking for is more broad, like more people can do it. Can go to school for it. Can find a school that works with them, you know, for their tradition. It’s not new. It sounds

 

Will Bachman  26:01

like in the past, this role may have been filled by someone who is more like a formal clergy member, but now it’s becoming more of a thing where someone could be a lay person, not in the clergy, and fulfill this function,

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  26:16

right, right? Wow. Okay,

 

Will Bachman  26:19

pretty neat. So your ambition is, your your aspiration is to spend more time and to kind of, kind of expand this aspect of your life.

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  26:32

It’s, it is partially, I mean, I really love doing it. It’s not a, as you’ve probably discerned, not a great money maker. You know, you’re not supposed to be it’s something we do mostly out of love for it, but I do think, and I’ll get out of just so we don’t spend the whole hour talking about spiritual direction, because I also teach, you know? I mean, I’m an English professor, right? And if you know anything about academia now, the English major is not doing super well, nor are many of the humanities and I think a lot of it is we live in a very noisy world. We live in a world where people have decreased attention spans. And so one of the things that I’ve done is one of my colleagues and I taught a class together called how to tame your brain, where there’s a really cool organization, and I think they might have kind of disbanded recently, but it was the center for the contemplative mind. And they have this really cool thing called the tree of contemplative practice. And it has all these different practices. It has like silence, stillness, like pilgrimage to different places, yoga, tai chi, like all the different things people can do that are different contemplative practices, and we built a class around this, like trying to get students to explore different the tree has like different limbs the way that they’ve created it. So it has like a storytelling limb or a social justice kind of limb, or a movement limb or a creativity limb. And we would have them make their own tree and pick different practices. So they just got used to, um, this more contemplative mode of being in this very, you know, academic space. And so some of that would be like, say, take them to a piece of art and have them sit in front of it in silence for 10 minutes and just meditate on it, just be there in the quiet, you know, or it sounds like a little goofy, but even, you know, take a walk for 10 minutes in silence, like put your phone down, sometimes, just giving that space and getting students to, I think, moderate their tech use a little, because I do think it has been proven to hurt our Attention spans, which if you’re teaching big, thick Victorian novels, ask any of my colleagues you need that. So that’s a way that it’s not just, I’m not just interested, I guess, in spiritual direction. I’m really interested in tending that contemplative side of our lives that I think often gets left by the wayside in the world we’re living in right now, and it may have always been that way, like it’s not just new. One of my favorite I have a really funny book, which it’s not, it’s not actually a funny book, but there’s a funny moment in it where it talks about this guy, and I think he’s like, leaving the Coliseum, like, after watching these gladiators. And he’s like, has this moment in the Coliseum where he closes his eyes and he hears what’s going on, and it’s like he hears it for the first time, just the madness of what it is, and he sort of leaves and is seeking silence. And I’m like, It’s not new to seek silence, right? It’s not new to want quiet spaces. But I think, I feel like that’s part of what I love to do, is let people find these spaces, and then what comes out of those spaces, like, maybe what you really want to do or something you haven’t been addressing that, once you address it, your life can be better. So I think a lot of good comes out of attending these contemplative spaces.

 

Will Bachman  29:52

Talk to me a bit about your whole academia career and what you’re focused on as an English. Professor, what kind of classes you teach beyond the one that you mentioned? Yeah,

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  30:04

I mean, I’m still in it, because I still teach. I teach 20th century lit. I have a PhD in 20th century literature, 20th Century American I have an MFA in creative writing. So I obviously teach a lot of I taught a lot of fiction writing. Now I do a lot of screenwriting actually, which is ironic, because I’ve written screenplays, but it’s not something I really I do it more. I tell my students, I do this more from a narrative perspective than I’m going to help you get your screenplay made perspective. I teach a lot of film is lit right now. Film is literature because, again, we have a lot of students who storytelling for them is games or it’s even movies can feel like too long and too boring. I mean, it’s weird to say, but the way they experience a narrative is something we’re always sort of playing catch up with. So I would say that’s kind of a sampling of the sorts of classes I teach

 

Will Bachman  31:00

screenwriting. So tell me about, you know, how you evolved from PhD and the MFA and screenwriting. Were you doing that for a while? Did you go to, you know, LA, and were you working to sell screenplays there? Tell us about that part of your life.

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  31:17

I didn’t do any of those things. I took some classes in my MFA, and then, like, I think many people who are writers, like the first novel that I wrote that I loved and got, like, 8 million rejections, like I was just really blocked. And so I started taking screenwriting classes in Atlanta, just because it felt fun, and it kind of put joy back into writing for me. I think this was like, gosh, this was when I was around, you know, late 30s. This was some time ago, and I just really liked it, like, I’ve never been great with plot, and I felt like screenwriting really helped me think about plotting differently, because it’s so structured, and you have to have a plot or it’s going to fail. Whereas that person who will start a novel and realize, oh, this has no plot, it’s going to fail, you know, I mean, it was kind of good to get ahead of that. And I think that it’s really good for students because it is structured so they don’t, they can’t, you know, it’s not about your feelings so much, or it’s not going to, you know, wander off in nebulous spaces. A screenplay is a pretty clear thing. The other thing I found I really, really liked about screenwriting is so much of it was very social, like people would do table reads and you chat about things that got past that isolating feel of writing. And I think that’s really great in classrooms, that students read through their work, and they get to know each other, and it creates community. And that’s something I think about a lot when I teach now, is like, how am I building community in this classroom? How am I helping you know, friendships form, and people get to know each other and have greater comfort, you know, with sharing their work.

 

Will Bachman  32:57

Talk to me about kind of the evolution that you’ve seen or the changes that you’ve seen in the students that you’ve taught over your teaching career, it sounds like you’re seeing kind of less ability to stay with a longer narrative, Perhaps with attention spans decreasing. Have you experienced that yourself in terms of your students? And tell us a bit more about what you’ve seen.

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  33:27

I mean, I experience it with my students. I’ve experienced it with myself. Like, there’s a really great book by this woman, and I’m completely forgetting what her name was, but she was like, I think she’s like a Proust scholar. And she was reading, I think was the glass bead game. And she was like, she’d read it a million times. She went back to it, she opened it. She was like, Oh, I can’t follow this. It’s boring. Like, I can’t and she was like, what has happened to my brain? And so she started doing all of this research around it, and that sort of deep versus shallow learning and reading and experiencing of text. And, you know, I don’t think you have to be a genius at all to look around and see how much attention span. I mean Tiktok and, and I do it for myself too. Like I’m not above any of this, like I have timers on my phone that are like, you’re done for today, you know, because I have the same struggles, I think sometimes with, you know, saying, Okay, I’m putting my phone away, I’m putting the computer away, I’m going to try to do other things. But in classrooms, it can be that you have distractions there, because they have a built in distraction. A lot of them have their phone or their computer, and, you know, they need it for some things, but sometimes they’re doing 10 other things. But really, I think for me, it’s the lost art of reading books. That’s, that’s, I mean, not that people don’t read, but I think if you talk across the board to people who teach in the humanities in 2004 like, I mean, I teach at the University of West Georgia, I would always teach a novel a week. Like it was just assumed, you can read a novel a week, you know. And I think a lot of us now think. You might want to break that up. Or, you know, you might need two weeks for that novel this time. Or, you know, you it’s just where, even if we can get them to all take the novel classes, they want the film as lit classes, you know. So it’s, it’s, and our numbers are way down, you know, I mean, and I think that’s a combination of this sort of national idea that the liberal arts are maybe not that important, which, of course, I disagree with. Um, but I think it’s also i What’s it’s it’s a little harder in some ways, to keep that attention span up.

 

Will Bachman  35:35

What do you think are your main competitors? Where are you losing your customers too. Are they? Are the former English majors now majoring in Computer Science? Or what are they doing instead?

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  35:46

A lot of, a lot of them do Mass Comm, mass communication, like they go over and and do that. That’s huge. They’re, they’re thriving. I mean, computer science is thriving, but who knows what AI will do to disrupt that? You know? I mean, I think, I think, yeah. I think this idea, and it’s very strong in academia right now, that sort of your degree must have an equal sign to the job you get outside of school. Like, that’s never going to line up in a in a clear way. I think for an English major, a history major, a sociology major, right? You kind of a lot of us who majored in these things in college, like I was a history major that doesn’t really have much of anything to do with I’m doing right now, but I trusted the process. And I think that maybe that old school idea that we’re teaching people to think, and we’re teaching people to sort of engage and dive into things and see what they can get out of it. And what’s come before? It’s not super Yeah, it’s not super trendy right now,

 

Will Bachman  36:49

how are your peers in your own department or at other schools responding to this? I mean, to this, to this threat to your, you know, market. It sounds like your market is shrinking in, you know, a economist terms, people responding and trying to capture back those students. I think

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  37:09

we’re doing everything we can. I mean, I think it’s, it becomes interesting because we, you know, we always look, what are other English departments doing, you know, and there’s, there was an interesting article, I think was like, the death of the English major. And it was about, it even had Harvard in it, kind of talking about, like English majors at Harvard. But I think everybody’s scrambling. Everybody’s trying to think, how do we pitch classes that sound really interesting? Like, I have a friend who’s a medievalist, you know, and making sure that, you know, you pitch it with some Harry Potter, some Tolkien, like, some, you know, bring in the other the stuff that they know. Or how do you mix kind of the old with the new? In a way, it’s good, because you have to stay contemporary. You have to pay attention to who your students are. But, you know, I think that it it. I think when we went to school, maybe there was a presumption that, like Helen fendler knows so much about poetry or whatever, like, I’m just gonna listen whatever she says. I’m gonna learn it right? Or, you know, Marjorie Garber, I just want her version of Shakespeare is that she didn’t really have to make it like, you know, super current for us, you know, whereas now, I think a lot of us really feel that need to. How can I make this interesting? And in some ways it creates great classes. Like I did a class last year because I asked my students, I was like, What class do you want to teach? I’m doing film. Is like, what do you want? And they were like, we want to do female directors. And that was so much fun to have to go create that class, to go watch all these movies by women and learn about all these female directors who were huge in the silent film era, right before, before movies started making money, like they were dominated, there were tons of women in it, which I didn’t know at all. So I saw all these movies that I’d never seen, and got to teach them back to students. So it can be really, really good, but in other ways, it’s, it’s hard, it’s, I think it’s hard for anyone to watch their discipline constrict.

 

Will Bachman  38:58

Yeah, outside of your foray and your growing experience in the area being a spiritual director and being an English professor, what else is going on in your life that you want to share with us?

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  39:13

Oh, I mean, I have a great you know, I’m married to Mike Madison, who is a musician who was class of 89 I guess I think he’s, no, he’s not. He’s 91 I’m sorry I’m going the wrong direction. And we have a lovely child. I love my daughter. I spend large amounts of my life in the non contemplative spaces of watching, you know, club volleyball and dance class and things like that. You know, I do all the regular driving people all over creation, part of life. And have a nice dog. I take walks. You know, I think I live a pretty simple life in a lot of ways, but it’s really it’s really fun, it’s a good life. You

 

Will Bachman  39:55

mentioned that you wrote a book we should talk about that. What tell us about. Your book?

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  40:00

Oh, well, I wrote a young adult novel. I didn’t know I was writing an adult novel. I thought I was just writing a novel, but it was called American girls, and it came out in 2016 I think. And, yeah, it was sort of about, I mean, that was pre me too. I think I was really meditating a lot on, like, girlhood, having a young daughter, and thinking about, like, Okay, what does it mean to be a girl in 20 I think I wrote in 2014 published in 2016 and connected, I ended up thinking a lot about the Manson murders So, and did a lot of research on those. And sort of thinking about, you know, girlhood in America and ways in which it’s changed, in ways in which it hasn’t. And it was, it was a fun book to write. You know, went to a lot of dark spaces, but it was a, it was fun

 

Will Bachman  40:47

tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way. Sure.

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  40:54

Well, the class I come back to again and again with the myth of America class, berkovich’s class, and even this semester for my film is lit class I’m teaching LA and the American dream. So I really have found I love that class just because I love the novels. And it really made me think about writing differently, and it made me think about America differently. And that one I come back to a lot, because that concept of the American dream, I think, is still really rich and sort of diving into it with students. I’ve used different iterations of it for different classes throughout my time here,

 

Will Bachman  41:32

for student, for our classmates that did not take that course. Can you kind of summarize for us, what is the myth of America, or what was the that? What was the theme of that? Course, that has stuck with you, that has been valuable? Oh, I

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  41:48

think, I mean, I think there are a lot of threads that he followed through. One, obviously the frontier, sort of western expansion, and what does it mean when that expansion runs out? I mean, we’re certainly spatially there now, and even thinking now about all the different like, what are the frontiers we’ve expanded into American individualism, obviously, like, I mean, the sort of pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I think we read Franklin for that class, and I can’t remember if we did. I’m trying to think and again, like the individual versus, you know, sort of the individual and culture, if someone moves ahead who’s left behind. Those are just a couple of the things that I think are still, again, really interesting for students to explore and think about.

 

Will Bachman  42:35

Do other countries also have their own myth? Is there like a myth of France, a myth of Germany and myth of China. I mean,

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  42:41

that’s a great question. Um, I couldn’t I would be guessing if I said, but I think, um, we, we really love the individual and the individual success. I mean, you even think about the the world we’re in with social media and everybody’s a brand, or everybody’s, uh, you know, what am I? How am I cultivating my whatever I am. I mean, we’ve gone so far in that direction, it’s almost a little silly. You know, I wonder if we’ve just infected the rest of the planet or they’re better off, kind of staving this off. I don’t know.

 

Will Bachman  43:14

Allison, for listeners who want to follow up track what you’re working on, where you know, find out about your spiritual director practice. What? What websites would you like to share?

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  43:27

Sure I Well, I’m on LinkedIn, so that’s the best place to find me. That’s my lone social media outpost now, and I have a website with a group of spiritual directors that’s sacred listening.net, and I’m also, if you go to the Ignatius House website in Atlanta, you can find me there. And in the upcoming year, I’m leading retreats, two retreats at Ignatius house and one at mepkin Abbey in South Carolina. And so I’d love to see anyone, if anyone wants to come, they’re really, really mepkin Abbey in particular in South Carolina is completely beautiful, and Ignatius house is right in the heart of Atlanta, and it’s just wonderful. And they’re very affordable, really nice places to come. So open invitation to anyone who wants to come to a retreat.

 

Will Bachman  44:12

Amazing. Allison, thank you so much for joining today.

 

Alison Umminger Mattison  44:15

Thank you Will I appreciate it. You.