Summer Reading

A Q&A with Lindsey Krinks on ‘Praying With Our Feet,’ a memoir of her call to community and justice in the streets

BY AMANDA HAGGARD

For Lindsey Krinks, the arc of her work has gone from global to local, first working on global hunger issues and working her way toward issues of collective liberation in Nashville.

“Our work, this book, is hopefully speaking toward that liberation in a local context,” Krinks says.

Krinks, the co-founder of the nonprofit Open Table Nashville, is also a wellknown name at The Contributor. Much of her work is in the paper’s orbit, and her beginnings in the local activist world congealed around the start of the paper, where her husband Andrew was an editor and where she met and formed many relationship’s with the paper’s earliest vendors like Ray Ponce De Leon. Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets, which was released on Feb. 2 via Baker Publishing Group, presents Krinks’ story of building community in the context of these kinds of relationships.

There’s a thread of vulnerability throughout the book and a sense of being gently guided through some of the most pressing issues in the city. It’s a story of neighbors and friends and what Nashville is up against in the fight for affordable housing. Krinks book centers people experiencing poverty and homelessness — it doesn’t shy away from the harsh truths of living on the streets.

“I hope it shows the dignity and agency and incredible spirits of the people that I've come to love over the years,” Krinks says. “I am just so in awe of the stories of people that have allowed me to accompany them over the years and have taught me so much in the process. I definitely want it to come across that they are the heroes of my story.”

The book came out right on the heels of this large-scale traumatic event. Talk a little bit about planning the release during this past year.

I actually finished the first draft of the book two days before the tornado hit. And then, of course, like the next week was the safer at home order — safer at home for all those with homes. So I had finished it largely before the pandemic hit, but was doing the editing work and kind of revision work with the editors through all of this. Basically homelessness is one long endless cycle of and crisis. And so people on the streets have already lived through so many terrible tragedies and crisis situations. This was just another one and it was just another huge one, you know, that was global in scale. It was just a really difficult year for everybody.

It made me think about the crisis situations that were unfolding. Definitely made me more convinced than ever that housing is a human right, and that everybody deserves to have safe, dignified housing, that all of us are interconnected. And especially that our health and wellbeing [are] all interconnected together. It just made me feel even fiercer about it. It was also exhausting because we also had a baby and we lost our home in the tornado — just a really intense experience.

When you're putting something together that's partially memoir and then also kind of a history of an area of sorts, you get into places where you're showing a certain level of vulnerability where you really have to put yourself out there. Did you struggle with that?

In preparation for writing this I actually read a lot of Mary Karr and other books about writing, but one of the things Karr says about writing a memoir is that you have to be able to tell the stories you're scared to tell. If you're really going to connect and be vulnerable and kind of take off your armor and let people see for who you are. And so I kind of had some trepidation about some of that. I didn't know until I was actually writing the vulnerable stories how vulnerable I would be, but it was liberating to be able to be vulnerable and real and, and say, you know, this is really hard and, and these are the ways that anxiety and trauma manifested themselves.

The thing about doing homeless outreach is that we enter into people's lives in incredibly vulnerable states and to not be able to share our own vulnerability kind of isn't fair, you know, that's what makes us human. That's what helps us connect on a deeper level together. And, and I just, I really believe that there is healing when we can be vulnerable and can open ourselves up. I knew that I would need to be vulnerable, but I wasn't sure what that would look like until I was actually writing it.

It was also really interesting to read about a budding romance between you and your now-husband Andrew, which obviously must’ve been really different than the vulnerability you show when writing about more traumatic parts of your experience.

I always want to show that being human is being a whole person. Most of us have experiences of love and so to be able — to not deny those places of my humanity was really cool too. I realized when I was writing the book and I say this in the prologue, I think that the story really is a love story. And it's not just a love story between me and Andrew, but it's also between me and me falling in love with the people we work with and the work of homeless outreach in the streets and the struggle for justice. That kind of love is what drives me in the work. It's why I've lasted for 14 years in this work. It’s that love for people and that community and those connections. And so I definitely knew that I couldn't write my own story and about the work for me without, including those things. So it was really cool to get to. I don't know how to get to process that and write about it and share it because we had been doing this work for so long together and then really started doing it together. So that was fun and felt cool.

You write a lot about Father Charlie Stroble’s mentorship and how forming that relationship that helped you build community. Can you talk about the continuity of movements and leaning on folks like Charlie?

When we're doing this kind of work movement work, when we're doing social justice work, we forget how much we need the wisdom of our elders and of generations that have gone before us and that the intergenerational movements and the intergenerational wisdom and relationships are what gives depth to the current struggles and to the current movement. Charlie is such a special person and a gentle soul and a wise soul. His friendship over the last 14 years and mentorship has just been so transformative. It’s really helped me deepen my roots. Good mentors don't tell you what to do. They help you awaken to your own agency and strengths and build a kind of discernment for what's needed.

Did you have any moments that really surprised you while writing this?

Flannery O'Connor is the one who said writing is an act of discovery. And that was so true for me in this process. Of course, you know, I had experienced what I lived through, but going back through it a decade later and really trying to be present to it, going back through journals and news articles, trying to think about the smells and what was blooming at the time, things like that — that kind of presence to those stories was really enriching. It had this cumulative effect of connecting me to my roots and helping me to remember that I am always supposed to be on the ground.

I love working at Open Table Nashville, but whatever I do, I need to stay grounded, but also stay connected to the community. That kind of spirituality that's fed me over the years, going back and writing the book reminded me of how important that stretch of valley had been to me in the early days, the early years and through cycles, seasons of burnout and everything. So it was really grounding. I think a lot of us process through writing. Some of us are external processors, others are internal. I'm an external processor. So writing helps me make sense of things and experiences and traumas. And so it was healing grounding to be able to do that on a larger scale than just journaling, which I've done since that was in elementary school, journaling about crushes, which was also really important.

I wanted to ask about the more religious aspects of the book. Obviously the title is rooted in a Christian concept and you weave that throughout the book, but talk a little bit about your experience in religious communities in Nashville.

We always try to meet people where they are at Open Table Nashville and doing the education work I do with Open Table, I always try to meet people where they are and spirituality has been something that's been really important to me. Certainly not everybody has that experience, but for people who identify in the Christian tradition, but aren't living in such a way that is good news to the poor, it’s easy to start with that. Basically saying, ‘hey the gospel is supposed to be good news to the poor, it’s literally that.’ In that tradition, in the life of Jesus, he is a God that stands on the side of the oppressed, a God that chooses to work through outcasts and a God that was crucified by the state and by people in power.

I tried to write through stories and I think somebody can’t argue with an experience as much as you can argue with an idea. So I definitely tried to write the book in such a way that it would hopefully meet readers where they were, even if they were coming from a more conservative context to kind of introduce them to a different way of thinking. As a chaplain, I work in an interfaith context, but I have no interest in converting anyone to Christianity other than Christians, if that makes sense.

But there’s a lot of work to do because a lot of folks in the church have gotten really comfortable and the church has come to uphold the status quo, whether that's capitalism or racism or white supremacy, or just a kind of complacency that is a violent complacency. We forget that complacency in a time of injustice and silence is violent. It's part of our mission is to kind of meet those folks where they are and kind of help them take the next step toward openness and toward compassion for justice. And that's long-term work.