What’s often overlooked can be so beautiful, but it takes a particular kind of attention

An interview with writer Jeff Chu on who owns a story, the job of a writer, plain old compost, and the unexpected places we find hope

Hi friends,

Today is a big day, folks: it’s the book birthday for our beloved friend

Jeff Chu 朱天慧

’s Good Soil: The Education of An Accidental Farmhand. So to celebrate, we have an incredible interview with Jeff here at Field Notes today as well as a giveaway(!) and a community conversation that I think will bring a lot of goodness to us all.

Good Soil is such a beautiful and wise book about belonging, identity, work, and the mysteries of God in the midst of our ordinary lives. I read it in a day (because Jeff is such an incredible writer that pages simply fly by) but then I found myself returning to it to savour and enjoy each chapter, taking my time through the book for a second, even a third, read. It’s going to be a favourite this year, I already know.

Now I could tell you a dozen stories about Jeff - and most of them would get us both cancelled immediately but here’s one good thing to know about him: he is faithful, you know? to God, to his friends, to his parents, to his husband, to his calling, to his vocation, to what he most believes is true. In the best sense of the word, he is a man of honour. “Loyal” doesn’t even begin to explain it. Not many friendships these days can encounter the demands that ours has had to face, especially in our early days, and yet been able to extend grace, to keep holding onto each other, to keep laughing, to keep forgiving.

I’m so grateful for him, not only as a friend who is always just a text away, but as a truth-teller, a companion, a co-conspirator, and one of my best teachers. He helps me to ask better questions. He helps me to see the real geography of God. He only gloats a bit when I confess that maybe there is something to the whole human depravity thing after all (it’s been a rough decade for those of us who do not subscribe to that particular theological belief, folks). He makes me laugh. He lets me be imperfect. He trusts me with his real self, too. Plus he’s one of the rare people I know who genuinely seems to believe what he says and writes in these beautiful pages. Jeff helps me know, love, and follow Jesus better.

Maybe this is part of it, too: Jeff also helps me believe that I’m worthy of love, just as I am.

I think that’s one of his sneaky gifts for a lot of us, actually.

Now, there are few things I enjoy like putting my friends in the hot seat so rather than simply share an excerpt of the book with you, I dared to send a list of questions to one of the best question-askers I know. 🫠

Speaking of asking questions: if you’re in Houston or Austin area next weekend, I hope you’ve picked up your tickets for our leg of the book tour. You can witness my joy in tormenting Jeff in person because we’ll be together at two events celebrating the book’s release and I have EVEN MORE questions for him. All the details are here. I do hope to see a few of your faces there but if you can’t attend our two events, there are a dozen others with special guests well worth your time.

So let’s get to it!

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The Good Soil Interview

Sarah: The first time I heard you preach was at Evolving Faith’s inaugural gathering (October 2018) in North Carolina. You preached a sermon that people still talk about today and it was all about…compost.¹ It’s such an unlikely thing to talk about compost for spiritual inspiration or finding hope - people tend to want soaring mountain vistas and gorgeous views when they think of their spiritual journey but you found such life and resurrection in worms, in soil, in compost. Can you share a bit of that with us?

Jeff: The contemporary appetite for the spectacular and the extraordinary is so striking to me. I think, for instance, about the trend of altering the traditional Ash Wednesday liturgy. “From dust you came and to dust you shall return,” it says in Genesis. But now people are tweaking that to “from stardust you came and to stardust you shall return.” I wonder what that says, that dust—in other words, soil—is not good enough, but we crave the sparkle of the stars instead.

For me, learning to find the extraordinary in ordinary things like compost was life-changing. There is such wonder in how dead things, rotting things—moldy fruit, disintegrating vegetables, last season’s fallen leaves—can be transformed, with the help of microbes and worms, into fertile soil. There is such magic in how the next generation of life is written into the death of a flower, which produces seeds. I learned how to adjust my perception. What’s often overlooked can be so beautiful, but it takes a particular kind of attention.

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Sarah: I once heard the novelist Ali Smith say in an interview that we live time dimensionally and the seasons remind us of that. She said, "Proust knew exactly how to describe the seasons, which pass through us feelingly in memory and form, and at the same time, the future. So the seasons act as a kind of cyclic movement of time rather than a linear shift of time — from the beginning of life to the end of it." How did the use of seasons and time shape the writing of this memoir? For instance, you made the decision to begin the book in Autumn. Most folks consider the rhythm to begin in Spring. What made you decide to begin there?

Jeff: I love this question so much.

What comes to mind is how so many of my Farminary classmates wanted to focus only on spring and summer, when things are obviously growing—flowers to pick and tomatoes to taste and leaves on the trees. Maybe it’s the curmudgeon in me that wants to push back against that. Fact is, on the farm as everywhere else, life and death and resurrection are happening all the time, throughout all the seasons, and I’d love for us to recognize that.

I began my story in autumn because I ended up at the farm because of loss: loss of illusions about my career, loss of value in things I once treasured, loss of confidence in what really didn’t deserve my confidence. Something was dying inside me, but it wasn’t until I got to the farm that I began exploring and then understanding it—and in that understanding, in that intentional examination of what was happening, in that conscientious study of death, I started also to see what might be coming to life.

What I claim to believe in is not immortality; it’s resurrection—and to get to resurrection, you have to go through death.

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Sarah: Writers of memoirs are often asked: how honest is too honest? What stories are mine to tell when they often intersect with other people’s stories - especially people who perhaps have a different take on the situation. Anne Lamott famously once said, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” (We both know I have a few thoughts on that take.) But I’m wondering how you would respond to that perspective on storytelling?

Jeff: Anne Lamott is obviously not Chinese. She has a much more individualistic way of thinking about story.

A few opinions about honesty, ownership, and storytelling: 

First, honesty doesn’t require full disclosure. Something can be honest and true without being a comprehensive chronicle of everything that happened. 

Second, a story exists in relationship. In other words, it’s an organism that lives in the space between the teller and the recipient—and this is true even when we tell ourselves stories, which we all do. Every one of us both tells and receives stories in the context of our biases, our life experiences, and even our immediate mood. We omit details, we embellish others, we emphasize different aspects, we hear different things. The way one tells a story, the way one receives a story—these change depending on the circumstances. So that raises the question: Who *owns* it? What does it mean to own it? 

Third, let’s play with this idea of ownership. For instance, am I willing to own the possibility that I might not be a reliable narrator? If there’s anything I’d like to own, it’s not the story itself; it’s my responsibility to act in love. I believe I have some responsibility toward people who might appear in my stories. That’s why some stories are published, others really ought to remain in the text messages with close friends, and perhaps others should never be told at all.

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Sarah: In our conversations, both privately and publicly on our former podcast, we’ve often talked about the difference in Chinese storytelling (as cyclical) vs the more Western style (as linear) story telling. The former reads to the uninitiated as more meandering and exploratory, even seasonal, circling back again and again to the heart of what you’re telling so that seemingly-disparate stories or even musings show up again and again as you keep going, while that Western version tends to be more systematic and linear (i.e. this and then this and then this).

Professors and readers and editors have all tried to make your work “fit” into that more western style and you reclaim your own voice in this book so beautifully. Can you share why it was important to you to embrace that type of storytelling in this book and what you hope the reader gains from that perspective?

Jeff: I don’t want to give any spoilers, but there’s death in this book, both at the beginning and toward the end. One agent asked me whether I could move a death that happens toward the end more toward the middle, so things could “resolve” by the end. Besides that being problematic from a truth perspective—that’s actually when and how the events happened, sir!—how exactly does one “resolve” death? 

I suppose that notion speaks to the discomfort that we can have with death. Life and death are messy. We don’t usually choose when we say goodbye. And we don’t get to say, Well, now I’m done with that bad memory. We don’t have such control—and the book’s structure is one attempt to reflect that reality. The more-cyclical Chinese style of storytelling, which I think comes from the experience of a people who have been through some stuff, gave me freedom to let things be ambiguous and complicated. That felt true not just to history but also to our current reality.

I’ve been told my writing can be demanding, because it doesn’t tie things up neatly and because I don’t give clear takeaways. I don’t think that’s my job as a writer. My job is to tell a story, and the readers will do with that what they will, letting the story ricochet against their own perspectives, their own life experiences, their own joys and sorrows. 

And obviously I ended up not working with that agent. (Editor’s Note: Good.)

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Sarah: At one point in the book, when you had shared something particularly painful with your professor and friend Nate, he sat with you in the moment for a while and then said, “I don’t want to prematurely take a redemptive turn.” I felt my toes getting stomped! You know how often I take a redemptive turn too quickly: I’m quick to say, “well, at least…” or “here’s the lesson or the testimony!” when it isn’t time for that yet. Shakespeare’s King Lear spoke of ‘learning to obey the sadness.” What have you learned about obeying the sadness and avoiding that premature turn into redemption? Why does it matter so much that we let grief be grief, let loss be loss?

Jeff: I don’t think rushing past pain ever really addresses it. That’s not to say we wallow in it either. But there’s a way to say: “This is real. This is hard. And also….” I want to live in that space between “this is hard” and the “also.”

I want to be a full human, which is to say someone who can be sad and hopeful simultaneously. To let grief be grief is to name what is at the heart of life itself: We have loved, and we have lost what (and who) we love—and still, we believe in the promise of resurrection.

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Jeff Chu is an award-winning journalist and editor-at-large at Travel+Leisure. He is the author of Does Jesus Really Love Me? and the co-author, with the late Rachel Held Evans, of the New York Times bestseller Wholehearted Faith. Chu is a former Time staff writer and Fast Company editor whose work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Modern Farmer. In his weekly newsletter,

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

, Chu writes about spirituality, gardening, food, travel, and culture. He lives with his husband, Tristan, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.You can find him online here.

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Giveaway + Community Conversation

I’ve got 5 copies of Good Soil to giveaway here in our community!

Just as Jeff was surprised to find so much godliness and goodness in the compost pile at The Farminary, what is an unexpected or under-appreciated or even undesirable place where you have experienced hope? I would love to hear about the moments or even the physical places or sites that surprised you with all that was revealed about yourself or even about God.

Come tell us: What’s your own “compost pile” (or somewhere equally unexpected) where you discovered hope?

I’ll randomly choose 5 commenters to receive a copy of Jeff’s new book. I’m afraid we can only manage USA and Canadian addresses though due to postage costs, so keep that in mind. We’ll pull the winners and update this post in a week with those. Winners will be contacted using the email you used to sign up here. Comments are open so everyone can join in today.

If you want to buy the book - and I think you do! - here’s a link to Penguin Random House (Jeff and I share not only a publisher but an editor!). Here is a Bookshop.org for our American friends and for us Canadians, here’s the link to the Indie Bookstores and at Chapters Indigo.

Okay, I can’t wait to read your answers and to see a few of your friendly faces in Texas next weekend.²

EDITED TO ADD: Contest is now closed. Winners have been notified. Thank you to everyone for such lovely comments!

Love S.

P.S. One great way to support an author is to request a new title at your local library for purchase by the system: not only do you get to read it for free yourself, but then it’s available to your whole community, too.

My Books | Field Notes | Instagram | Facebook | SarahBessey.com

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1. You can listen to that sermon in this episode of The Evolving Faith Podcast still along with our discussion about it, a year afterwards.

2. I cancelled all my other USA-based travel for 2025 so this is it! My only foray south for the foreseeable future and I’m so glad it will be based in local bookstores, supporting one of my dearest friends, and seeing your lovely faces.