Essay writer and illustrator Martha Park considers faith, family, climate change, and community in her debut collection.
Debut writer Martha Park is stirring a pot of rice in Roanoke, Va., when her father tells her over the phone that he is retiring as pastor of a United Methodist church in Memphis, Tenn.
“I couldn’t have imagined, then, the way his exit from the church would lead me on a quest of my own: to return home, to reexamine my own relationship with faith,” she writes in the opening essay of World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After.
Park’s journey to discover what she believes is the driving force behind this collection of 12 essays, many previously published in magazines such as The Bitter Southerner, Orion, and Guernica. But it’s the actual travels she takes — to Kentucky to visit a larger-than-life replica of Noah’s Ark, to a reenactment of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn., to natural burial cemeteries in South Carolina and beyond — that create space for readers to explore their own beliefs — about God, climate change, today’s divisive political culture, familial roles, and community.
Park is ever asking: Who am I? Who are my neighbors? How do I want to show up in the world? What is true? The places she takes us invite us to soul search too.
“Lately, something about the elegiac tone with which we increasingly hear and speak and write of the natural world — in this era of mass extinction, biodiversity loss, and increasingly frequent and extreme natural disasters — has driven the resurrection to the front of my mind,” Park writes in “The Life Everlasting,” an essay on one level about the suspected sighting of the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker and on another level about existence itself. “It seems possible that our concepts of conservation and preservation — of ‘saving’ the world from the myriad catastrophes it faces and ‘restoring’ the places we’ve lost — rely in part on the narrative of resurrection, of bringing a dead thing back to life, and with it, saving ourselves.”
A graduate of Hollins University’s MFA program, Park is also an illustrator, who has published comics, drawings, and graphic essays in a number of publications, including Grist and The Guardian. She illustrates each of the essays in her collection, adding another point of connection for readers.
Park’s particular genius lies in the deft way she weaves threads from her own life — growing up as a preacher’s kid, striving to understand her in-laws’ faith, saying goodbye to beloved relatives, finding herself pregnant during Covid, surviving the traumatic birth of her son — with today’s thorniest questions. She considers: How can groups of people interpret our shared world so differently? Does belief in an afterlife lead some to abandon care for this world? Is it better to prepare for disaster in isolation or community? Are there ways in which even our disparate beliefs can come together?
Perhaps the essay that encapsulates the interconnected subjects of the book best is “World Without End,” where Martha explores evangelicalism, climate change, and faith in a swirl of ponderings that lead to a truth she finds she can almost hold onto.
“Removing the promise of another world, the challenge of faith shifts: rather than waiting for some unseen world to take this one’s place, faith becomes about seeing this world as singular and sacred,” she writes. “This kind of faith mirrors the uncertain world in which we live, the one that never really ends but keeps on changing.”
Not every essay is as contemplative. “Arkansas Prophecy” will be laugh-out-loud funny to anyone who has spent time with an elderly relative.
But the most memorable essays invite us to go deep.
“He instructed us to come forward holding our hands cupped in front of us,” she writes about receiving communion from her father on his last Sunday in the pulpit. “The communion bread would be placed in our hands as a reminder that we can’t take sustenance from God — it can only be given. This seems to describe something about the way faith arrives, if it ever does — as something that cannot be achieved, only received.
“There is no earning this, he seemed to say. But you can keep your hands open.”
To me, the collection’s most powerful essay is the final piece in the book, “Wound Care.” It is intensely personal. In places, it’s hard to read. Tears sprang to my eyes more than once as I read. Also, it is beautiful.
Park finishes the book where she began, wishing to find an answer to her heart’s most burning question: What do I believe?
She tells us that what she’s discovered through her explorations is that truth is as simple as embracing ambiguity, uncertainty, curiosity.
“So when I think about my earlier metaphor, of doubt as an open wound,” she writes in the book’s final pages, “it seems more accurate, now, to describe faith that way.”
Readers ready to explore will find World Without End a guide — and a balm.
“World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After” will be published May 6, 2025 by Hub City Press. You can purchase it here or most places where books are sold.
This review is based on a complimentary pre-release copy.