Soul Garden is a beautiful book. The clay color cover with an inset black and white drawing of a mother and child calls to mind something earthy, luminous, reassuring. Subtitled A Catholic Mothers’ Collective, the book brings together the work of over 60 contributors and is edited by two mothers, writers, and friends, Hope Schneir and Sia Hoyt.
An impressive anthology of reflections, recipes, poems, and artwork by women from across the United States, Soul Garden presents gems of womanly wisdom, real-world advice, and unobtrusive spirituality.
"Threads of womanly insight used to be passed on organically in small communities." - Hope Schneir
Aleteia chats with the authors
While chatting with Hope for our online interview, I caught glimpses of her lovely mountain home. The wooden beams, a hand-made garland strung below the ceiling, and Hope’s own face framed by strands of blonde hair escaping from a hastily pinned bun spoke of the rich and busy life she and Sia explore in the book. I asked Hope to describe the genesis of Soul Garden.
Please tell us how the book came about.
Soul Garden commemorates the 10th anniversary of Soul Gardening Journal, which we started to publish around 2010. Both newly married and even newer to motherhood, we needed encouragement but also wanted to share the wisdom we’d learned from our own mothers. As much as we drew on their practical skills, even more valuable was the vision of home they’d transmitted: a respect for the beauty of domesticity, love of the Church, appreciation of nature, and commitment to motherhood. Many of our friends had never experienced an authentic home culture, that subtle and purposeful array of attitudes, activities, and crafts that express our fundamental values in the ways we care for our children, cook, budget, decorate, tend to our marriages, work, and pray.
Threads of womanly insight used to be passed on organically in small communities. With increased atomization of society and the advent of technology, those threads have thinned substantially. So with a couple of other Catholic moms we started a blog. We quickly realized, however, that by asking people to read online, we were promoting the same dependence on screens we tried to get away from in our own lives. The print journal offered a middle ground between personal encounter and a digital forum.
The journal eventually broke open the possibility of including perspectives and ideas beyond what we wrote. Readers began to submit articles, poems, and artwork, some of them polished and confident, some of them raw and humble, unveiling the glories and struggles of motherhood. Through lavish graphics and eye-catching personal posts, so many journals and social media generate envy about what other people do with their lives, their homes, their children. We wanted to create something that wouldn’t invite comparisons but would speak to our readers in their deeply individual journeys. The journal was Sia’s brainchild. I put forth the idea for the book. My desire was to memorialize the many articles and art the journal has featured over the years. We were blessed to collaborate with other friends, especially Mary Pemberton who, together with Sia, drew most of the illustrations, and with Margaret Ryland, who created the layout and design for the book.
What sets Soul Garden apart from so many other books about home and motherhood?
The book showcases the work of many women who speak in a variety of voices. Most of the pieces tend to ask questions instead of supplying answers. They suggest ideas and eschew ready-made formulas. Our hope has been to awaken in the readers their own reflections, not to proffer fixed truths or promises of stability, but to shine lights on the very wide road women travel. Soul Garden is not a ‘how to’ book, or a self-help manual, or a spiritual treatise. Rather, it’s something a person can put on her coffee table or nightstand and return to in brief moments of quiet or the frequent moments of frustration in a mother’s life when we yearn to feel understood and accompanied.
"The book showcases the work of many women who speak in a variety of voices. Most of the pieces tend to ask questions instead of supplying answers." - Hope Schneir
What criteria guided the arrangement of the book?
Some of the divisions are self-evident. There are book reviews and a reading list. There is a vast collection of recipes with vivid background stories that give each recipe a context in the authors’ lives. There is a section on prayer. Other chapter titles are deliberately more mysterious. We felt that subheadings would pigeonhole the pieces and prescribe how we wanted them to be read. So we let the chapters elicit their own associations instead. Broadly speaking, “Nurture” deals with the many dimensions of caring for those around us. “Ponder” compiles reflections on a variety of topics, not necessarily religious. “Dwell” focuses on making the spaces around us beautiful in a distinctive way, allowing us to express and live our life, not someone else’s life. “Woman” explores femininity, while “Journey” weaves motifs of hardship and loss. There is also “Fiat,” which highlights Our Lady to whom we have dedicated the journal and this project. We invoke Our Lady in the many ways her children relate to her, for instance, as the Undoer of Knots, but also as Our Lady of the Broom or Mary, the Three Handed Virgin. Mary is spectacular, you know, and one of her beauties is that she makes herself familiar to each of us in our circumstances, temperaments, and seasons of life.
Some of the pieces are old, culled from the early issues of the journal. Some are recent. Both old and new continue to speak to us, whether to the idealistic heart of a young mother or the weathered heart of the experienced mother. We felt privileged to receive other people’s words and affirm their relevance across a decade.
How did you pull it off? I mean, between you and Sia, you have a schoolhouse full of children to look after, your marriages, yourselves?
The project took years. Sometimes one of us did the heavy lifting, sometimes the other. We’ve grown to respect each other even more as friends, writers, co-workers. We plan to continue with the journal and each of us entertains ideas for future books. For me, those are movements of the heart, really. With another baby soon to come, my focus will be again on infant care. Sia’s pouring energy into her pottery studio, kitchen table art with her children, and gardening. Once she has a quieter house, perhaps she’ll be able to more fully embrace the writer’s life.
