Two soon-to-be interviewees, Mary Biddinger (this Wednesday!) and Luke Johnson (March), have new books forthcoming soon AND will be reading/presenting at the Associated Writing Programs annual conference in Washington DC later this week.
Mary's panel looks fantastic. Here's a description from the AWP site:
Thursday, 2/3
3:00 p.m.-4:15 p.m.
Empire Ballroom
Omni Shoreham Hotel, West Lobby
Two Jews, a Catholic, a Buddhist, a Mennonite Sufi Shaman, and a ________ walk into an AWP Panel: Geography’s Influence on Writers Writing Religion and Culture. (Eric Wasserman, Ira Sukrungruang, Heather Derr-Smith, Bich Minh Nguyen, Mary Biddinger) Geography has emerged as a vital component for writers exploring the culture of religion in the post 9/11 literary landscape. The place the writer hails from is now just as important to depicting the culture of religion as the faith the writer is steeped in. A cross-genre cross-country panel of not-so-nice Jewish boys, Catholic schoolgirl transgressors, superhero emulating Buddhists, and more, take a special look at how place fuels how writers approach the culture of religion in their work.
And Luke will be signing copies of his debut, After the Ark:
Friday Feb. 4
2-3 pm
Booth 208, AWP Boofair, Marriott Wardman Park
2660 Woodley Road NW
Washington, DC
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And look at this!
Thursday 12:00 to 1:15
Nathan Hale Room
Marriott Wardman Park, Lobby Level
The Rosary Effect: The Challenges of Writing from a Catholic Perspective. (Haley Lasche, Luisa Igloria, Linda Norton, Ruben Quesada, John Reimringer) Five writers of poetry and prose discuss how practicing Catholicism has influenced their writing. Coming from diverse geographies, sexualities, racial perspectives, and spiritual awakenings, these writers delve into the ways their works are influenced by the current Catholic paradigm. The panelists discuss how they negotiate what parts of the Catholic religion and ritual they consciously and subconsciously include in their writings regardless of their approval of papal comments and doctrines.
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Oh.
If you're a lurker of The Fine Delight, and you need proof that a real live human being is running this show, come to my event on Friday the 4th from 12:00 to 1:15. I'll be reading as part of The Kenyon Review's Short Fiction Contest Winners event. Here are the complete details:
Virginia C Room
Marriott Wardman Park, Lobby Level
Get Shorty: Readings from the Kenyon Review’s Short Fiction Contest. (Cara Blue Adams, Megan Anderegg Malone, Christopher Feliciano Arnold, Mika Taylor, Nick Ripatrazone, Megan Mayhew Bergman) The KR Short Fiction Contest for Writers Under Thirty is entering its fourth year. This reading is an opportunity to hear work from younger writers recognized as winners or runners-up by judges Alice Hoffman, Richard Ford, and Louise Erdrich from the first three years of the contest. Submission to this contest must be 1,200 words or fewer.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Interview with C. Dale Young
C. Dale Young is the fifth interview at The Fine Delight; be sure to check yesterday's profile for some great commentary on the genesis of several of his poems. This interview was conducted through email. A bio note, as well as links to C. Dale's books, follow the interview. Thanks, and looking forward to your new book, C. Dale!
1. In "Sepsis," your narrator asks "Dear God, how does a sinner outlast the sin." In "Paying Attention," we see "What can I say / to explain my God?" Do other poems in Torn contain such conversations with, or considerations of, the divine? And do you have a consistent characterization/identity for this God figure or concept?
When I first put together the first draft of the manuscript for Torn, I ran it through one of those word cloud gadgets. I was stunned to find that one of the most common words in the manuscript was the word "God." It was right up there with my all-time favorite word "dark" (which appears with a sickening regularity in all of my books, despite having the word with a line through it posted above my desk!). At first, I sat in disbelief as I looked at the word cloud. How on earth could God be such a common word in the manuscript? But when I went back and read through the poems, sure enough I found God made many appearances.
I wouldn't say that all of the appearances are in "conversations," but many of them are. I guess I blame this on having re-read a lot of my favorite poems by Donne over the time many of these poems were written. But then I would have to also ask myself why I was so attracted to Donne that I was systematically re-reading his poems. And this is a question I am not sure I want to pose. I guess I have always loved the metaphysical and devotional poets. I guess I wanted to take part in that larger conversation.
2. Do you think this desire to participate in the "larger conversation" is endemic to poetry? Does the nature of poetry make such considerations more appropriate or necessary than prose writing?
I don't think it is endemic to poetry. I suspect it is endemic to Art. I don't think poetry is more appropriate or more necessary than prose writing. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
3. I profiled "Paying Attention" at The Fine Delight, but almost selected another wonderful poem of yours, "Or Something Like That," which contains the following stanza:
Easy to doubt. Always easy. And the old Jesuit
who lectured me on this? Well, he doubted, too.
But I am not quite ready to be broken just yet.
Do you find such doubt essential to Catholicism?
I don't know if I am by any means the right person to answer such a question. I don't feel as if I am in any way an authority on Catholicism. I know for myself doubt is essential, but I also know I am probably not the typical Catholic.
4. "Stitch after stitch, the slender exactness of my fingers / attempted perfection." "Torn" is a powerful, passionate poem, so grounded in one night at the ER. What led you to choose Torn as the title of the entire collection?
"Torn" is a poem that for me is filled with contradictions and doubt about humanity. That human beings are capable of tenderness and the ability to heal while at the same time being capable of incomprehensible brutality is something I have always found compelling and powerful. Many of the poems in the book deal with these dualities and doubts. I also realized that in many ways I am torn in that I work both as a physician and as a poet. I am also torn as a man who is part Caucasian, part Asian and part Latino. When I first assembled the first draft of the manuscript and read through it, the title Torn seemed inevitable.
5. Have you found a way to mitigate this sense of tearing/separation; say, between your identities as physician and poet? Are there common humanistic approaches in the treatment of patients as a physician and the usage of language as a poet?
It isn't so much that I have a sense of separation. It is just that as a physician, the great majority of my time is consumed by medicine. It makes creating time to write and do other things difficult. But this is nothing new. All physicians experience this. I do not believe there are common humanistic approaches to practicing medicine and writing poetry.
6. In your insightful interview with The Collagist, you note that you "rely less and less on metrically-informed lines and more and more on the sentence" since your first book, The Day Underneath The Day. Later in the interview you offer a wonderful insight: "The tension between line and syntax is what has always made a poem a flexible and sometimes violent machine." Was the shift from metrically-aware lines to sentences a conscious one for you? As someone who also writes prose (you had a fine story recently in Guernica), do you carry conceptions of poetry across when writing sentences within that other genre?
I believed, falsely, when I finished graduate school that I knew a lot about poetry and the making of poetry. I have very few metrical poems, but my knowledge of and belief in meter was the primary influence on how I made lines, how I wrote poems. I believed in the line without really understanding the crucial fact that line is always in relation to the syntax of a sentence. Line can either support the normal syntax of a sentence or oppose it. That support or opposition is what harnesses the energy in a poem. In prose, we do not have the line to support or oppose standard syntax. The more I became aware of syntax and line in this way, the more I began to vary how I used line, the more I began to use it to establish my own rhythms and cadences. I suspect many poets know this, even if instinctively.
In prose, despite being without line, there are rhythms as well. Well-written fiction has a distinct rhythm to it and varies the rhythm based on the kinds of work being done at that point in the story or novel. The rhythm varies based on the kinds of information being deployed. I don't know that I have carried the things I have learned in poetry to my fiction, but I know I am deeply aware of cadence and rhythm when writing fiction. I just don't have the awesome ability to tweak that with line the way I do in poems.
7. Speaking of graduate school--you teach in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Does teaching--lecturing, workshopping, and responding to the work of students--affect your approach toward the reading and writing of poetry?
Yes and no. Teaching does not directly affect my writing, but it reinvigorates my brain and makes me revisit works I love and makes me consider poems I had not remembered or had not considered. I joke that I am on the poetry faculty at Warren Wilson but am also a fiction student. The writers who teach at Warren Wilson are rigorous, challenging and truly intelligent and humane people. They challenge me to be better. They remind me I am not completely crazy in my love of Literature. I also realize that I love poetry so much that if I help even one of my students to write the next “Ode on a Grecian Urn” then I have done a great service to poetry. In the end I want great poems to be written and appreciated, and that is what has kept me teaching.
8. Torn is scheduled for full release later in February, but copies will be available for purchase during the AWP Bookfair (at the table for Four Way Books). How have you approached the collection of your poems into manuscripts? Do you write individual poems with a complete book or project in mind? When did Torn feel finished and ready for presentation as a book?
Torn comes out in full release in early March, but yes, there will be roughly 50 copies for sale at the Four Way Books Table at AWP. As for manuscripts and book projects, I just write individual poems. I am fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it) to be rather obsessive-compulsive. I return to many of the same ideas and things over and over again. Eventually, when I have about 40-50 poems, I print them all out and look to see if anything coheres. If I find convergences, then I begin putting together a manuscript. But I never have a clue what a book ms. will look like as I am writing my poems. I suspect if I did know, I would have trouble writing the poems. I have quite a number of poems that have never been collected. But that is okay. A book is different than just putting together a bunch of poems, and not all of the poems I write will cohere. Sometimes, a poem I wrote 15-20 years ago fits with poems written in the past few years. In both my second book and third book manuscripts, I found that a poem or two written back when I wrote most of the poems for my first book fit better with these newer manuscripts. It is almost as if they were written before their times.
I had the fortune to secure a residency at Yaddo in the fall of 2007. There, I wrote 16 poems in two weeks and assembled the first draft of Torn. It was a very fruitful two weeks considering I typically write roughly 4 poems per year!
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C. Dale Young is the author of three collections of poetry: The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern 2001); The Second Person and Torn (Four Way Books 2007 and 2011). He practices medicine full-time, edits poetry for New England Review, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo, he lives with his life partner, the classical music composer Jacob Bertrand, in San Francisco.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
3 Poems by C. Dale Young
Dr. C. Dale Young creates inspired, beautifully crafted poems, likely enhanced by his full and diverse life: he practices full-time as a Radiation Oncologist at Sequoia Hospital, teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and edits poetry for the New England Review. His poetry certainly carries the weight and intelligence of a multifaceted approach to living. I'll be profiling a triptych of poems (based on observed theme--not necessarily offered as such by Young): "Paying Attention," "Or Something Like That," and "Sepsis." In addition to tomorrow's interview, Young has generously offered commentary on the genesis and composition of these poems in particular; his words are embedded in bold.
"Paying Attention," originally published in Poetry International and forthcoming in Torn (Young's newest book), is my favorite of Young's work. Wound tightly through seven quatrains, the poem proceeds as a focused first person narrative. The poem begins with rain--the self-reflective narrator offers a rhetorical wonder--but the movement is toward ownership of a personal sense of God.
The second stanza is a visceral presentation of God's hypothetical power: it's a bodily disruption, a shock to the corporeal. In fact, this entire poem is about suffering in a very physical fashion: in a way, Job with tangible pain. This feels like the archetypal God of the Old Testament, and yet this poem is deeper than a complaint and lament. Here are the final 5 lines:
He leaves the large red
imprints of his fist against my back,
sometimes flowering on my face. He showers
me with expectations. He lifts me up
to remind of my foolish fear of heights.
"Flowering" is the perfect choice, and raises the stakes of the line. The enjambment of "showers" is equally reverential, and "expectations" reminds the reader that this poem lives within the Kierkegaardian schema. And I love Young's careful control of the masculine pronoun within this poem: rarely has "He" taken on such grandness in narrative verse, and the final sentence of the poem reaches another level. Such ambiguity exists in this final sentence: Young engages the traditional symbols of ascension and Godly fear, but this narrator has more agency than usual, and his usage of "foolish" is more complicated than some innocent misunderstanding.
It's a fantastic poem about the divine, at a time when typically the craft-level of poems about divinity are low. In my original "manifesto" for The Fine Delight, I tried to differentiate between purely devotional and imaginative Catholic literature, and was entirely willing to accept the complications within all of those modifiers. Young's work is imaginative in the best of senses, and his treatment of God in this poem (and in others) arrives with fully realized and complex meditation on that complicated subject. Young's work is alive, never the "dead language" so lamented by Paul Lisicky during the first interview at this site.
Young carries and controls these final lines, infusing such personality into the God of this text that I feel as if I'm reading a modern apocryphal work. It's also quite circular, as the complaint of this God--inattention--is satiated by the extreme attention and care of the narrator/poet (I'm reminded of the self-awareness of Hopkins's "To R.B.").
C. Dale Young on "Paying Attention":
On a train trip from New York City to Saratoga Springs, I overheard a woman talking to another woman. I was struck when she blurted out the two sentences that make up the epigraph to the poem. As I sat on the train, I kept going back to this snippet of conversation and the truly odd nature of that question. I wanted to respond. I guess this need to respond germinated in me for days because when I eventually sat down to work on the draft, it came very quickly. I wanted to write that God is different to each and every person, but this is what came out instead. In many ways, the God in my poem is a disturbing amalgam of my desire to know God and odd details about myself.
I'm equally attracted to the second poem, "Or Something Like That," originally published in Linebreak.
As I intimated above, Young has such a clear control over the line as a metric unit: there are no cheap tricks and breaks here. Instead, Young moves across lines, allowing the line space to breathe and maintain a certain integrity. The first two stanzas of the poem include deliberate usage of commas, both to give form to these lines but to also control the pace of the work--and in doing so give the narrator a particular agency and importance.
The narrator admits "dark thoughts" here, and in the same way Young was able to demand my attention toward the divine in the prior poem, I'm fully aware of the "darkness" here. By establishing setting in the early lines (pine needles, light, leaves), Young locates and grounds the reader, holding that reader attentive to the importance of the conversation.
This is a poem about doubt, and yet doubt's existence is necessary in that it forwards conversation with, and contemplation about, the divine. If I accept God's existence with the same ease that I accept the table and computer in front of me, am I not defining and deflating God in the same swift motion? Young's poetry--I'd venture--almost reestablishes the currency and complexity of God, and this is a God worth noticing and embracing.
And as in "Paying Attention," I remain with the narrator until the end, with the conclusion enveloped in this beautiful final stanza:
I know what they mean. I get what You are trying
to get at. I am here, God, I am here. I am waiting
for You to blind me with a sunstorm of stars.
This narrator is calling for God--he has his doubts, and he bases them on personal experience and the reference to the "counselor." What a human poem!
C. Dale Young on "Something Like That":
I was troubled by a newspaper article I saw about a 14 year old boy who, worried he was gay, went to speak with the guidance counselor at his Catholic Prep School to only then be raped by the guidance counselor. Stories like these always bother me. I turn them over and over in my head, and I return to them as if they were wounds slow to heal. The poem came as a prayer would, slowly and surely in its voice but utterly confused in what it wanted to say, what it wanted to ask. If "Paying Attention" is an imagined conversation with that woman on the train, then "Or Something Like That" is definitely a conversation with the Divine and with the self.
"Sepsis" is the final in my self-defined triptych of Young's poems. God is mentioned twice within the first stanza, and I am not surprised, based on the location: we are placed firmly in the ER. I love each of these poems, but on a re-re-read, this might be my favorite. Look at this sentence:
I have coveted sleep, God,
and the toxins I studied in Bacteriology took hold
of Your servant.
The poem is as much a lament as it is a tightly viewed narrative. The phrase "I have coveted sleep" earns the repetition, and we can feel the sadness here. "Servant" is implicitly repeated, and the collective of the poem speaks to the duality of doctor: the power of healing and the converse, the humility necessary to admit the weakness of great powers (of body, perhaps, and even more).
There is a passing here, and yet Young shows us that the world moves and moves. Here is the final line:
Dear God, how does a sinner outlast the sin?
I, for one, would like to know that answer.
C. Dale Young on "Sepsis":
This poem is a difficult poem for me. It is one of two poems I have written that are incredibly difficult because I see the events behind the poems. Although "Sepsis" represents an amalgam (there is that word again!) of experiences from my Medical Internship, it also is a dangerous glimpse into my personal life in that I do wake sometimes early in the morning in sweats reliving some of the more awful moments I have witnessed as a physician. Always I have the same question: "Could I have done more?" It is an unanswerable question. I hoped by writing this poem I would find some respite or some semblance or relief, but in that I was wrong. I was terribly wrong.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Interview with Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle is the fourth interview at The Fine Delight--so excited to share his ideas. This interview was conducted via e-mail: back and forth, morning and night, Oregon to New Jersey. Photo credit goes to Jerry Hart. A bio note, as well as links to Brian's books, follow the interview. A pleasure, Brian!
1. "Joyas Voladoras" made me cry at a public library, and each time I read the essay to my students I have to fight back tears. You're able to create such authentic sentiment in the piece. Could you discuss the genesis and composition of this essay?
Waaaal – it’s part of a book called The Wet Engine, about hearts, and how they work and don’t work, and how our species began fiddling with them with knives and medicines and such, written out of roaring terror for one of my sons, who was born missing a chamber in his heart (bit of a logistical problem that), and who was saved by many people especially a terrific cardiologist whom I came to greatly admire, and the book is also very much a celebration of him and his quiet wife, brave and gracious and complex souls. So ‘Joyas’ started as my maniacal notes about all sorts and sizes and shapes of hearts – I don’t know about other writers, but I tend to collect lots of pieces and stories and facts and shreds and tales and bits and then sort of mill them with my fingers and heart to see what might happen – and what happened was a sudden burst of an essay. I mean, that’s how I appear to write nonfiction books, essay by essay, almost – brief passages that tend to be essayshapely because I think I am an essayist in my bones – but ‘Joyas’ spun up and away from the facts into something else. I well remember sitting here at my desk sobbing as I was typing the end of it – the end coming as a great heaving surprise to me. One of the sweetest hardest things about being a writer, I think, is that you are often startled at what comes gushing out of you, given the chance, given the channel, given the craft preparation to give it a chance – sometimes hilarious and odd, but also sometimes painful and bruising….
2. I like your idea of the surprising in writing occurring "given the craft preparation." In terms of essay craft, what do you think is more essential: drafting or revision?
O, drafting, by a mile. If you never start you never get to tinker. Starting is the thing – seeds, shreds, notes, first lines – “taking a line out for a walk,” as essayists say, quoting the painter Paul Klee. To begin is everything. That first burst – after that you can revise and tinker and add and cut and move around and graft – after the start you get the carpenter’s joy of editing and tinkering and tuning, listening for music, making sure there’s bone and joy and snarling…
3. You seem to really appreciate language: words, phrases, sentences, sounds, and more. Your essays refresh and revive English. Do you think there is a connection between your Catholicism and how you approach language?
Lovely question. That’s never occurred to me – I have always thought that my addiction to cadence and swing and rhythm and alliteration and long sprinting runs of words and sounds like arrows of flashing trout in a river were probably more due to being American of Irish descent – a certain predilection to music and tall tale and humor and fast sliding joyous language – Gaelic, you know, is a very musical language spoken, I think, and I love the American language, its blunt laughter and bony wit and slangish ease. But to have been so soaked in Catholicism maybe played, come to think of it – chant and the rhythms of ritual language – one of the subtle pleasures of the Mass and much Catholic sacramental language is the rising and falling repetition of it – to say the rosary for example with others in concert is really to fall into a meditative call and response thing ancient beyond imagination. So yes, I suppose that’s true about Catholicism and language. I have always thought, as Bruce Springsteen has said (good Catholic boy as a youth, you know, Saint Rose of Lima Parish in New Jersey) that to grow up Catholic is to be especially lucky as an artist, because you are soaked in miracle and mystery and symbol and smoke and the confident assertion that every moment is pregnant with miracle and possibility and stuffed with holiness like a turducken; but I suppose it’s true of language also. I dearly love playing with the linguistic tools we are given, and love wrenching it this way and that, seeing what it might do if you let it loose – I am sure, as I have often been accused, that sometimes I can be so headlong and thrilled by the racing horse that it’s hard to read my pieces, but I can also say with high glee that I bet no one ever had as much sheer fun writing prose as me. To slam a sentence into ninth gear and hold on for the ride, your spectacles rattling on the fist of your face… and sometimes when you let your mind and your fingers loose a little more than usual, the prose punches down deeper than you knew you could go.
4. Although so many elements of Catholicism can appear in literature, many of your essays feel concerned with representing a sense of "grace" in a tangible way. One such essay is "The Meteorites" (which was, in fact, one of your essays I first read, enjoyed, and taught). What do you think about grace in the faith, and in your writing?
[Check-out "Grace Notes" at the above tab!] Ah, now, that’s such a huuuuge question, and idea, and mystery, that I cannot easily answer it, and can only come sideways at it with, of course, an essay. Attached. Good thing you are running this as a site so you can let people hit it. This was one of the first times I was forced to write a mosaic piece, by the way, because I realized that I couldn’t write a regular essay – the topic was too vast and labyrinthine, and I could only chase it glancingly, you know? Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, as that great insurance agent Wallace Stevens says.
5. Early in "Grace Notes" you briefly dramatize the powerful character of a selfless priest. What led to that representation? What, for you, are the roles and traits of a "great" priest?
Being a good priest, let alone a great one – what a tough job. And for all that everyone immediately thinks of celibacy, my friends who are priests tell me it’s more the weight of receiving pain and being wary of loneliness; good priests, I notice, have lots of friends, so many that they really create clans of cousins, nieces, nephews. Hard job – like being a doctor for ills and diseases that are very hard to see and mostly impossible to heal, I bet. And you never get an off-day. In a sense a priest, nun, brother is like a walking antennae for pain and troubles, you know? Rather Christ-like, the way we load our troubles on the professionals, and God forbid if they betray the slightest weakness or loneliness or lack of faith. Tough job – part performance, part deliberate act of crazy faith in something that can never be proved. Brave job. I admire the great ones, and the ones who raped children, who protected the rapists, I’d hang them by their nuts from a tall tree. Bernard Law, for example: criminal. To answer the question, great priests seem to me to be humble and liable to humor. They are alert to everything except their own egos, seems to me. I have met a lot of good priests (more good nuns, interestingly, who don’t seem as susceptible to pomp and power) and I really admire them and am awfully glad they have the courage and grace to be who they are.
6. I love that you mention humor as an essential trait for the best religious. I agree with that observation. Your work feels suffused with humor--and that humor creates energetic prose. What makes humor so essential to writing (and, perhaps, to being Catholic)?
O, lovely question. More and more as the years pass I think that spiritual substance and honesty and egolessness and real vision is flagged by humor – it’s no accident, seems to me, that the Dalai Lama, and Desmond Tutu, and Flannery O’Connor, and Thomas Merton, and John Paul II, for examples, are all liable to humor, whereas all of your most foul vile twisted squirming murderers and evil agents are the most grim stuff-shirt humorless bastards imaginable – can you conceive bin Laden, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot ever laughing? All they ever managed was a cackle over a particularly devious murder, I bet. And humor, in both the spiritual and literary arenas, seems freeing to me, a sign of wonder and humility somehow – everything’s so muddled and difficult that you have to laugh. It’s also a great disarming tool; the best way to get a message across, to say something real, is to use yourself as the resident doofus; and as I learned from the great spiritual writer (and hilarious dude) David James Duncan, humor relaxes readers and listeners – if you get everyone laughing, you can more easily slip in the poignant dagger. Plus humor is a lovely tool for writers because it traffics in odd juxtaposition of image, you know? We laugh because we are startled, sort of – and what a great way to dream and imagine things that might be. Such an endless sea, what might be. For example I wrote a poem recently in which all the owls in the world are W.H. Auden nuts, mumbling Auden to themselves all day long. It could be.
7. We have a mutual appreciation for basketball. I loved your musings on the (literary) element of the game at Oregon Live. Other writers have lamented the lack of more great imaginative writing about basketball; Edward Hirsch has pointed toward the more pastoral nature of football and baseball as being a possible reason. What do you love about the game? Could you point us toward any of your own writing about basketball?
[Check-out "An Exquisite Geometry" at the above tab!] O dear yes. Here’s a piece I did for a book of lots of writers celebrating the 1977 Portland Trailblazers NBA title, in which I tried to get at the speed and joy and flow and fluidity and generosity of the game, the sinuous quicksilver riverine webbed creativity of it – I do think it’s the greatest game, because while it is stylized war, like all sports, it pushes toward the most creativity, I think – you sprint and cut, use your hands, invent new angles, share the ball, need teammates, never get rained out, are penalized for violence and temper (unlike in football where you get paid more for inflicting injury); you are not disguised like robots as in hockey and football; there’s an ocean of points, unlike soccer; and everyone gets the ball, unlike baseball. The only game I have seen that comes close to basketball for these virtues is Australian football, which I have come to love. It does sadden me a little that hoop hasn’t produced great writing, like cricket and baseball and golf has – does make you wonder if grass is necessary for good ink, eh?
8. I needed little prompting to order Mink River (my copy is on its way right now). Your novel was released last year by Oregon State University Press, and the synopsis is so appealing: "In a small town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There’s a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime committed, and there’s an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it’s thinking. . ."
Could you discuss your approach toward writing the book? Its history as an idea or story, how you tackled the novel as a form, any potential novels as influences, etc.
O, that could take a week. The short version is that it started as a story, many years ago, which I published, and thought that was the end of things. But the characters kept talking, really and truly – I could hear and see them, especially hear them, their salty amused voices, the strain of their courage under duress; I tried to write the novel but skewed all over the road and gave up; and then finally went back to it, over the last five years, and went wild, slowly. I’d write every day, a piece a day, sometimes earning a paragraph, sometimes a page. I probably cut 100 pages too; the great lesson I learned was that something has to happen, and it was a great pleasure for me to discover with my fingers what was going to happen next. In a sense I think I couldn’t have written a novel that was any good until I had learned my craft as an essayist, much of which is what to leave out, and how to be free and open and wild and passionate while remaining clear and communicative; art that does not connect is terrible art, I think, which is why I think books like Naked Lunch and Finnegan’s Wake are awful, not to mention a lot of elusive allusive poetry, which should generally be slid cheerfully under the parakeet, or used in the mudroom so boots can dry properly. It was a huge pleasure to just finish the novel, partly to see what was going to happen to the characters, for whom I have a lot of affection and respect, even while they often did things I disapprove of. I felt very paternal. And now to see the book traveling out there on its own, hitting hearts in ways that my essays do not; sweeeeeeet. The letters I got as an essayist – the ones that didn’t begin Dear Idiot – were generally ‘your arrow landed’ letters; with the novel though the letters are more like ‘I lived in that world, thank you for opening the door to that world,’ which is really cool. I cannot call myself a Novelist, partly because I love the phrase Essayist so, but writing a novel was very freeing and fun and interesting as education and avocation. I used to think everyone should commit one, like a venial sin, but now I think maybe I will commit more. Such a sinner am I.
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Brian Doyle … is a hirsute shambling shuffling mumbling grumbling muttering muddled maundering meandering male being who edits Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon – the best university magazine in America, according to Newsweek, and “the best spiritual magazine in the country,” according to author Annie Dillard, clearly a woman of surpassing taste and discernment.
Doyle is the author of ten books: five collections of essays, two nonfiction books (The Grail, about a year in an Oregon vineyard, and The Wet Engine, about the “muddles & musics of the heart”), two collections of “proems,” most recently Thirsty for the Joy: Australian & American Voices (published in Australia); and the sprawling novel Mink River, just published by Oregon State University Press.
Doyle’s books have four times been finalists for the Oregon Book Award, and his essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion, The American Scholar, and in newspapers and magazines around the world. His essays have also been reprinted in the annual Best American Essays, Best American Science & Nature Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. Among various honors for his work is a Catholic Book Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and, mysteriously, a 2008 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, this last particularly amazing, because previous recipients include Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O’Connor, and Mary Oliver, and wouldn’t that be a great dinner table, you know?
His greatest accomplishments are that a riveting woman said yup when he mumbled a marriage proposal, that the Coherent Mercy then sent them three lanky snotty sneery testy sweet brilliant nutty muttering children in skin boats from the sea of the stars, and that he once made the all-star team in a Boston men’s basketball league that was a really tough league, guys drove the lane in that league they lost fingers, man, one time a guy drove to the basket and got hit so hard his right arm fell off but he was lefty and hit both free throws, so there you go.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
"Joyas Voladoras" by Brian Doyle
"Joyas Voladoras" was originally published in The American Scholar and later reprinted in Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize.
I teach "Joyas Voladoras" each year as an example of one of the few--1 or 2--pieces of imaginative literature that brings me to tears. That I should feel such an emotion each time I read the work is a testament to Doyle's ability to craft a self-contained, polished, and permanent piece of work. Doyle's essay is the perfect work to example and dramatize the difference between sentimentality (unearned emotion in fiction--to paraphrase John Gardner) and sentiment (earned, authentic emotion--Gardner again).
Doyle's tendency toward flowing, organic, and recursive sentences, not to mention his willingness to reinvent and make complex words, position him firmly in the lineage of Irish writers from Yeats/Joyce forward. He's a living Gael poet, in a way, and "Joyas" is a sequence of paragraphs that feel like prose poems with a point.
Doyle begins by asking us to "consider the hummingbird." I like the word "consider," and not think, or ponder, or reflect, or imagine. Consider is more caring, and its Ignatian in the way Father Martin explicated that term: Doyle wants us to really understand and discover a minute animal, and to be open-minded about the process and the potential results.
Doyle's narrative starts with, and returns to, the hummingbird's heart. Small and fragile as it is, it's powerful, complex, and exactly the type of natural object we need to fully consider. Doyle focuses on the paradox of the heart, of the bird: small, powerful, able and dynamic, they also are fragile: "when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be."
So close to death are those fully in life, it seems. Doyle follows with a litany of hummingbirds. From a craft perspective, this is smart writing, a sure way to avoid the sentimentality of lesser pieces. Doyle is direct, and he's honest: we've got this life, so what are we going to do with it?
"Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old."
There are so many ways to consider aging: moving forward, notching away the days left. A set amount of heartbeats is frightening, and yet, in a way, comforting: we sort-of know where we're going. We've got a finite time here and, like the hummingbird, we live a much shorter life than those redwoods near Doyle's neck of the forest. It's sad to think about, certainly--there's so much to love in the here and now, and a writer like Doyle exists to give us a nudge (or a punch in the face, perhaps) to open our eyes, notice, record, and reflect.
Doyle moves from hummingbird (really, really small) to blue whale (huge), and this sentence is killer:"the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles."
The first time I cried reading this was in the Clarence Dillon Public Library in Bedminster, NJ. I was 26 (3 years ago). The above line primed me for it, and trust me, I wasn't in the crying mood. I wasn't sad, I wasn't particularly nostalgic for anything, and I'd just gotten back from an hour or so of basketball in the late-spring heat.
It's the final paragraph that always wins me over:
"So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end — not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children."
That paragraph has been read hundreds of times and not once lost its luster. The cadence and syntax are perfect, and it rises to eternal truths, each one registering with me in absolute and deliberate succession. This is the best essay I've ever read. I'm confident in making that statment.
During tomorrow's interview Brian will speak to the origins of this essay, so I'll leave them unspoken for now. Check-in tomorrow!
I teach "Joyas Voladoras" each year as an example of one of the few--1 or 2--pieces of imaginative literature that brings me to tears. That I should feel such an emotion each time I read the work is a testament to Doyle's ability to craft a self-contained, polished, and permanent piece of work. Doyle's essay is the perfect work to example and dramatize the difference between sentimentality (unearned emotion in fiction--to paraphrase John Gardner) and sentiment (earned, authentic emotion--Gardner again).
Doyle's tendency toward flowing, organic, and recursive sentences, not to mention his willingness to reinvent and make complex words, position him firmly in the lineage of Irish writers from Yeats/Joyce forward. He's a living Gael poet, in a way, and "Joyas" is a sequence of paragraphs that feel like prose poems with a point.
Doyle begins by asking us to "consider the hummingbird." I like the word "consider," and not think, or ponder, or reflect, or imagine. Consider is more caring, and its Ignatian in the way Father Martin explicated that term: Doyle wants us to really understand and discover a minute animal, and to be open-minded about the process and the potential results.
Doyle's narrative starts with, and returns to, the hummingbird's heart. Small and fragile as it is, it's powerful, complex, and exactly the type of natural object we need to fully consider. Doyle focuses on the paradox of the heart, of the bird: small, powerful, able and dynamic, they also are fragile: "when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be."
So close to death are those fully in life, it seems. Doyle follows with a litany of hummingbirds. From a craft perspective, this is smart writing, a sure way to avoid the sentimentality of lesser pieces. Doyle is direct, and he's honest: we've got this life, so what are we going to do with it?
"Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old."
There are so many ways to consider aging: moving forward, notching away the days left. A set amount of heartbeats is frightening, and yet, in a way, comforting: we sort-of know where we're going. We've got a finite time here and, like the hummingbird, we live a much shorter life than those redwoods near Doyle's neck of the forest. It's sad to think about, certainly--there's so much to love in the here and now, and a writer like Doyle exists to give us a nudge (or a punch in the face, perhaps) to open our eyes, notice, record, and reflect.
Doyle moves from hummingbird (really, really small) to blue whale (huge), and this sentence is killer:"the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles."
The first time I cried reading this was in the Clarence Dillon Public Library in Bedminster, NJ. I was 26 (3 years ago). The above line primed me for it, and trust me, I wasn't in the crying mood. I wasn't sad, I wasn't particularly nostalgic for anything, and I'd just gotten back from an hour or so of basketball in the late-spring heat.
It's the final paragraph that always wins me over:
"So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end — not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children."
That paragraph has been read hundreds of times and not once lost its luster. The cadence and syntax are perfect, and it rises to eternal truths, each one registering with me in absolute and deliberate succession. This is the best essay I've ever read. I'm confident in making that statment.
During tomorrow's interview Brian will speak to the origins of this essay, so I'll leave them unspoken for now. Check-in tomorrow!
Friday, January 14, 2011
Rewind (Best Of, Vol. 1)
3 interviews thus far, 3 wonderful sets of insights--about Catholicism, but also about the construction of stories and the creation of art.
*
Here are some of my favorite lines from each:
Paul Lisicky
It's a beautiful thing when an assembly is singing together, without fear, their breaths practically in sync. The experience is physical, it takes us out of ourselves; we're part of the larger body. Something extraordinary about interconnectedness is enacted rather than just instructed. At the same time, it's very intimate. We get to meet our own bodies again, as well as the bodies of the people to our right and our left.
It's funny--I didn't go to church for decades after having been so involved in liturgical music as a young person. As writing took over my imagination, art became my church, and that other world fell away, gently. The church doesn't often look so good from outside, when you're not in it. That's not exactly news to us. I couldn't help but think, well, the church of my childhood, the church interested in social justice and transformation of self and culture--well, that's just dead. I felt sad about it for a long time. It's been reassuring to learn that the story's more complicated than that, at least on the parish level. I think the parish is where grace is actually transacted, especially in the liturgy. There are good people out there, very quietly, very humbly, doing their part to change things.
I'm also interested in the relationship between irreverence and reverence in her [Flannery O'Connor's] stories. You can't have reverence without the other, you know?
All I know is that for the years I didn't go to mass, I felt a terrible pang whenever I walked by a church and heard singing coming from inside. It's home to me, even if I'm troubled by the conservative turn the (larger) church has taken in the last twenty-some years. The rhythm of the liturgy is really intrinsic to how I think, to how I make art. I miss it when I'm away from it for too long. It's exile.
That's what makes us cringe: when we hear people talking too easily, too certainly, about the divine. It's embarrassing. Empty, overworked phrases that are expected to stand in for the hard work of seeing, naming.
Rev. James Martin, SJ
Ignatian spirituality encourages believers to look for God not simply within the walls of the church, or in the pages of Scripture, but in their everyday lives. God can be found in the midst of relationships, work, nature, family, play, music--pretty much anything.
Other instances [of anti-Catholicism] are even more subtler, as when a journalist talks about a political figure as a “devout Catholic,” as if that's supposed to explain everything about his political beliefs.
Also, the Catholic Church is not fundamentalist when it comes to Scripture.
The church, I think, which often suffers from a certain joylessness, could certainly learn from their joie de vivre.
What would I say to someone who struggles with their faith? First of all, it's natural. Doubts are a natural and human part of the spiritual life. You can’t be human and not doubt. The saints struggled with it, and I would venture to say that perhaps even Jesus does in his final moments on the cross. (This is a reflection of his humanity.) So doubts are a given.
Jesus was very disturbing in his time. It's one of the reasons that he was crucified. And he is disturbing to us today. There's a terrible tendency to want to cordon off Jesus into a particular political sphere, and make it seem that Jesus is simply supporting what we believe politically. But Jesus is much bigger than any set political platform. For one thing, I think we've almost completely lost sight of the absolute requirement to care for the poor, which is clearly and repeatedly outlined in the Gospels.
Joe Bonomo
I think, that solemn space for reflection and, again, muttering, of finding the right words through trial and error, coming in prepared but also being open to digression and, ideally, for epiphany of a sort.
In another essay, “The God-Blurred World,” I write that attending church, and specifically being an altar boy for several years, really immersed me in the wonder of art, being in the presence of huge stained-glass narrative windows and sitting and worshiping under the intense images and story of the Stations of the Cross, leaving church moved, when I was, not only by mass but by the artful renderings all around me, and by the pleasures of storytelling, and by the art of metaphor, which in my young cynicism and rebellion I was already using to replace transubstantiation. Erotics of art.
I recommend that all Catholics listen to Highway to Hell very loud, and then go from there.
I always say that writing an essay is like building a house without knowing in advance how many rooms or floors you’ll put in. The house builds itself. I like what Edward Hoagland said about the essay, that it doesn’t boil down to a summary the way an article does. If I find that I’m starting an essay with a summary in mind, then I might be in trouble. It’s best to go in to the dark room, stub your toes on the furniture, let your eyes adjust.
And the essential tenets of Catholicism—I’m referring not to the engine of the church here, its very human and sometimes reprehensible machinations, official decisions, behavior—but the tenets of the faith—of sin, and forgiveness, and benevolent treatment of fellow humans, of compassion and, maybe above all, of humility—these are bedrocks upon which a writer can create, engage, and essay his or her self and place. That’s crucial stuff.
Attending church taught me a crucial thing for a kid to learn, that to be serious was OK, that it was OK to be contemplative, even if it at the time it was dull and you wanted to be somewhere else or doing something else. I carry inside me the high seriousness of mass, for which I’m grateful.
So I might say to the church, listen to Jesus’ teachings closely, be skeptical but always open, ignore agenda and love tradition but decry unfortunate, mean-spirited history, and act within a fully humane impulse consistently. Listen to differences and love and accept them. Or maybe just reflect on what O’Connor said: “Ideal Christianity doesn't exist, because anything the human being touches, even Christian truth, he deforms slightly in his own image.”
*
Here are some of my favorite lines from each:
Paul Lisicky
It's a beautiful thing when an assembly is singing together, without fear, their breaths practically in sync. The experience is physical, it takes us out of ourselves; we're part of the larger body. Something extraordinary about interconnectedness is enacted rather than just instructed. At the same time, it's very intimate. We get to meet our own bodies again, as well as the bodies of the people to our right and our left.
It's funny--I didn't go to church for decades after having been so involved in liturgical music as a young person. As writing took over my imagination, art became my church, and that other world fell away, gently. The church doesn't often look so good from outside, when you're not in it. That's not exactly news to us. I couldn't help but think, well, the church of my childhood, the church interested in social justice and transformation of self and culture--well, that's just dead. I felt sad about it for a long time. It's been reassuring to learn that the story's more complicated than that, at least on the parish level. I think the parish is where grace is actually transacted, especially in the liturgy. There are good people out there, very quietly, very humbly, doing their part to change things.
I'm also interested in the relationship between irreverence and reverence in her [Flannery O'Connor's] stories. You can't have reverence without the other, you know?
All I know is that for the years I didn't go to mass, I felt a terrible pang whenever I walked by a church and heard singing coming from inside. It's home to me, even if I'm troubled by the conservative turn the (larger) church has taken in the last twenty-some years. The rhythm of the liturgy is really intrinsic to how I think, to how I make art. I miss it when I'm away from it for too long. It's exile.
That's what makes us cringe: when we hear people talking too easily, too certainly, about the divine. It's embarrassing. Empty, overworked phrases that are expected to stand in for the hard work of seeing, naming.
Rev. James Martin, SJ
Ignatian spirituality encourages believers to look for God not simply within the walls of the church, or in the pages of Scripture, but in their everyday lives. God can be found in the midst of relationships, work, nature, family, play, music--pretty much anything.
Other instances [of anti-Catholicism] are even more subtler, as when a journalist talks about a political figure as a “devout Catholic,” as if that's supposed to explain everything about his political beliefs.
Also, the Catholic Church is not fundamentalist when it comes to Scripture.
The church, I think, which often suffers from a certain joylessness, could certainly learn from their joie de vivre.
What would I say to someone who struggles with their faith? First of all, it's natural. Doubts are a natural and human part of the spiritual life. You can’t be human and not doubt. The saints struggled with it, and I would venture to say that perhaps even Jesus does in his final moments on the cross. (This is a reflection of his humanity.) So doubts are a given.
Jesus was very disturbing in his time. It's one of the reasons that he was crucified. And he is disturbing to us today. There's a terrible tendency to want to cordon off Jesus into a particular political sphere, and make it seem that Jesus is simply supporting what we believe politically. But Jesus is much bigger than any set political platform. For one thing, I think we've almost completely lost sight of the absolute requirement to care for the poor, which is clearly and repeatedly outlined in the Gospels.
Joe Bonomo
I think, that solemn space for reflection and, again, muttering, of finding the right words through trial and error, coming in prepared but also being open to digression and, ideally, for epiphany of a sort.
In another essay, “The God-Blurred World,” I write that attending church, and specifically being an altar boy for several years, really immersed me in the wonder of art, being in the presence of huge stained-glass narrative windows and sitting and worshiping under the intense images and story of the Stations of the Cross, leaving church moved, when I was, not only by mass but by the artful renderings all around me, and by the pleasures of storytelling, and by the art of metaphor, which in my young cynicism and rebellion I was already using to replace transubstantiation. Erotics of art.
I recommend that all Catholics listen to Highway to Hell very loud, and then go from there.
I always say that writing an essay is like building a house without knowing in advance how many rooms or floors you’ll put in. The house builds itself. I like what Edward Hoagland said about the essay, that it doesn’t boil down to a summary the way an article does. If I find that I’m starting an essay with a summary in mind, then I might be in trouble. It’s best to go in to the dark room, stub your toes on the furniture, let your eyes adjust.
And the essential tenets of Catholicism—I’m referring not to the engine of the church here, its very human and sometimes reprehensible machinations, official decisions, behavior—but the tenets of the faith—of sin, and forgiveness, and benevolent treatment of fellow humans, of compassion and, maybe above all, of humility—these are bedrocks upon which a writer can create, engage, and essay his or her self and place. That’s crucial stuff.
Attending church taught me a crucial thing for a kid to learn, that to be serious was OK, that it was OK to be contemplative, even if it at the time it was dull and you wanted to be somewhere else or doing something else. I carry inside me the high seriousness of mass, for which I’m grateful.
So I might say to the church, listen to Jesus’ teachings closely, be skeptical but always open, ignore agenda and love tradition but decry unfortunate, mean-spirited history, and act within a fully humane impulse consistently. Listen to differences and love and accept them. Or maybe just reflect on what O’Connor said: “Ideal Christianity doesn't exist, because anything the human being touches, even Christian truth, he deforms slightly in his own image.”
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Interview with Joe Bonomo
Joe Bonomo is the third interview at The Fine Delight, and I'm pleased to share his words. This interview was conducted via e-mail. A bio note, as well as links to Joe's books, follow the interview. Thanks so much for speaking with us, Joe!
1. "After Cornell" is a wonderful essay about the sacrament of confession. Does writing ever feel like a form of confession to you?
It’s interesting that you ask if writing ever feels like confession to me, as opposed to being confessional (i.e., confessing in writing). That’s a cool distinction, because my memories of confessing when I was young involve the process of talking, of sharing, more than the specifics of what I confessed. I remember the standard disclosures: I swore; I told on my little brother, etc. But mostly I remember talking toward a silhouette. And that process of conversation, of muttering toward a vaguely recognizable human figure, is a crucial connection to writing personally. There’s an implicit, sometimes explicit connection between me and a future reader. That relationship is obviously the crux of the sacrament of confession, the priest being the spiritual representative, the penitent being the talker essaying his near and far past for transgressions. The quiet in the confessional box is another connection, I think, that solemn space for reflection and, again, muttering, of finding the right words through trial and error, coming in prepared but also being open to digression and, ideally, for epiphany of a sort. And listening, to yourself and to another.
Now, the priest absolves the penitent’s sins, provided the penitent is contrite and does penance, makes amends. And there the connection to writing weakens a bit, or becomes entirely metaphorical, however you want to look at it. The essay doesn’t require forgiveness! In Catholic dogma, no one can forgive me my sins except God through the sacrament; in the secular sense, I wouldn’t consider forgiveness a part or a product of the writing process. I often encourage my students to avoid writing as therapy or as an act through which one might forgive oneself some transgression, or to right a wrong, because that kind of essay leads by agenda, a sense of purpose that might be too rigid to allow for surprise and discovery.
As I write about in “After Cornell,” sometime when I was 12 or 13 the sacrament at Saint Andrew’s moved to an open, face-to-face encounter in an office near the church’s main doors. That changed everything, for me anyway. It was all very seventies—thought I didn’t use that expression at the time. Very in-touch-with-your-feelings, raising awareness in a public way. I didn’t like it. Folk mass started around this time, too, “Up With People,” acoustic guitars. Even at that age I intuited that contemporary doesn’t always equal quality. I think that there might be a kind of parallel metaphor to the rise of the confessional essay/memoir in the 80s and 90s, the comfort with which many writers felt confessing to a visible audience. But I can’t take that connection too far, as it implies a Catholic past for writers who may not have had one. In moving to a face-to-face confession something essential was lost for me, a perceived lowering of hierarchy, maybe? Something solemn disappeared.
2. Your poetry collection, Installations (a National Poetry Series selection), feels metaphorically connected to "After Cornell" (the sense of rooms as boxes, the performance of art vs. the ritual of Catholicism and mass). Even the prose poem form feels like prayer. Do you find Catholicism implicitly influencing your non-Catholic content?
Yes, many times, implicitly usually. It seems to me that the sense of the confession—in terms of finding the right words, offering them toward a human shape, and then reflecting—is a very real aspect in my personal writing. And as so many Catholic writers, devout or not, have said, being raised Catholic tattoos you. In another essay, “The God-Blurred World,” I write that attending church, and specifically being an altar boy for several years, really immersed me in the wonder of art, being in the presence of huge stained-glass narrative windows and sitting and worshiping under the intense images and story of the Stations of the Cross, leaving church moved, when I was, not only by mass but by the artful renderings all around me, and by the pleasures of storytelling, and by the art of metaphor, which in my young cynicism and rebellion I was already using to replace transubstantiation. Erotics of art.
And it gets into my non-Catholic content, as well. With Installations, in the way you point out. The rooms in that imagined museum become sacramental places, places where mystery and the mystifying occur, or can occur. And the spectator is changed by the end of the book, moved, the world appearing new and maybe strange to him, similar to the way one can feel both enlarged and humbled at mass, or at any spiritual service or ritual. In writing Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found I was as interested in Lewis’ epic battles among wine, women, song, and a fierce Pentecostal God as I was his amazing night at the Star-Club, in Hamburg. His struggle with faith and sinning is classic, of course, and has come to define Lewis nearly as much as his music; he might say that his belief defines him entirely. And in my 33 1/3 book on AC/DC’s Highway to Hell, I was writing, in part, as someone brought up Catholic who listened to and loved that album in complicated ways. The album came out as I was graduating from Saint Andrew’s, on my way to a private Catholic high school, hitting puberty hard, and beginning, mildly, to question the church and my role as a practicing Catholic. I really resist analyzing rock & roll too closely—as Keith Richards said, it’s music for the neck down—but it’s pretty clear to me now that I was loving the album in a secular, I-love-rock-and-roll way but also as a kind of key that opened a door onto feared sinning—exciting and urgent excesses of all kinds—that I was warned against in church, taught against in school, and for which I hungered. For the final third of the book I got in touch with several of the kids at Saint A’s who graduated with me, and I asked them what it felt like to listen to the album then, and what it felt like now. Let me tell you, the scrim that’s dropped between Catholicism and AC/DC is hard to pull away completely. I got some interesting responses, especially from kids who I remembered as the bad kids, the sinners. I recommend that all Catholics listen to Highway to Hell very loud, and then go from there.
3. Your essays have an associative, and yet focused, structure that feels both carefully planned and yet also natural. What's your process when writing non-fiction?
Very roughly speaking, with essays I lead with intuition, with the full-length books I lead with a firm sense of subject. Two different roads that can intersect in some interesting places. I usually have at least a vague idea of subject when I start an essay. I might begin with a memory, a shard, an idea, an image, maybe even just tone. But it’s always (hopefully) only a door. If I open that door and there’s a room there, with hallways that branch off with more doors that I didn’t know were there let alone closed, then I’ve got something. If not, then maybe it’ll have life as a prose poem, or maybe I can salvage a line or two or an image or idea, or maybe I’ll have to scrap the whole thing. I always say that writing an essay is like building a house without knowing in advance how many rooms or floors you’ll put in. The house builds itself. I like what Edward Hoagland said about the essay, that it doesn’t boil down to a summary the way an article does. If I find that I’m starting an essay with a summary in mind, then I might be in trouble. It’s best to go in to the dark room, stub your toes on the furniture, let your eyes adjust.
With my music books, it was much different. There, the story was already laid out for me. So I worked from outlines. I didn’t want to leave anything out. That was especially helpful when writing Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, because that story covered three decades and the intersecting lives of half a dozen men, plus many tangential figures. I needed a clear outline or I would have lost my mind over the five-plus years it took to write. It was the same with the Killer and AC/DC books. I started with outlines—a sense of the book’s shape, the number of chapters, a rough idea of the narrative arc, the historical context—and then added and moved things around as the books took shape. It was important for me to leave some room for surprise and discovery, less in an essayistic sense—what Patricia Hampl means when she says that she writes in order to find out what she knows—than in the biographical sense. Halfway through writing I discover some great, salient event or quote that I was unaware of and know that it’s got to get in the book somewhere.
4. Your writing about childhood Catholicism is some of the best I've read, and your essays have appeared in great magazines (Fourth Genre, River Teeth, New Ohio Review, Quarter After Eight)--any plans to collect these into a book?
Thanks. I’ve collected them in a manuscript titled This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began.
5. What are the elements or traits of Catholicism that make it so appealing to writers?
The ritualistic aspect, and the immersion in mystery and doubt. That very sentence could be plucked and dropped into a lay, writerly context, and make sense. There’s a real connection between the sacramental and the urge to write, in my experience, anyway. And of course the notion of being born sinning, being expelled from the Garden, of wrestling with faith, what Hebrews call the evidence of things unseen—this is great content for being human, let alone for being a writer. A writer is charged with documenting or dramatizing the world in artful ways, to present the world new again. And the essential tenets of Catholicism—I’m referring not to the engine of the church here, its very human and sometimes reprehensible machinations, official decisions, behavior—but the tenets of the faith—of sin, and forgiveness, and benevolent treatment of fellow humans, of compassion and, maybe above all, of humility—these are bedrocks upon which a writer can create, engage, and essay his or her self and place. That’s crucial stuff.
6. Any Catholic literary influences?
Sure. The first three that come to mind are Flannery O’Connor, Andre Dubus, and Patricia Hampl. Maybe they’re a “Holy Trinity” for Catholic writers. I love O’Connor’s marginalized, unsympathetic characters, many of whom are surprisingly, movingly close to a grace that is often preceded by violence, in O’Connor’s view, which mirrored her century interestingly. And I love that she detested the idea of Christian fiction, fiction led by agenda and full of allegory and abstraction. For her, the real world is fallen, full of grays, not black and white. Hampl is, I think, one of the great Catholic writers out there. Virgin Time’s a great book, as is I Could Tell You Stories. She essays her past with diligence and seriousness, but she never loses sight of the majesty of mass, and of being raised Catholic, and how it imprinted in her a lifelong quest for meaning. Dubus is one of my favorite writers, period, and his wrestling with the Catholic dilemmas of the modern world is brilliant and profound. His characters are real, they’re ordinary people struggling with what it means to live in a moral universe, to be able to choose to do the right things, and what the implications are in those choices. This isn’t religious fiction either; it’s uncompromising, humane, complex renderings of ordinary people. Everyone should read “A Father’s Story,” a great story of Catholic dilemma and maybe one of the great stories of the Twentieth century.
The poet Tom Andrews was another influence on me, and he was also a dear friend. He wrote about what he called his “awkward faith,” and about being born a hemophiliac, what it means to be grateful to, and for, God and for being born into and living as a flawed body and into a world where language of devotion and gratitude often fail us. He gave great thanks in his work, but never failed to ask important questions too, about belief in a fallen, increasingly secular world. I miss him a lot.
7. Michael Leach has written that "If Catholicism can enchant and enthrall your imagination in the early years of your life, you will always be haunted by it. As novelist Alice McDermott said, with considerable pride, we are forever doomed to be Catholic." What is about Catholicism that has once (or continues to) fascinate/enlighten/help you?
Hampl writes in Virgin Time, “Nobody says, ‘I’m Catholic.’ It’s always, ‘Yes, I was brought up Catholic.’ Anything to put it at a distance, to diminish the presence of that heritage which is not racial but acts as it were.” She herself denies sharing that same “hopeless congenital condition,” but she recognizes it. And I’m somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, between believer and non-. I no longer attend mass, but often feel the gravity of the church’s teachings, and especially the mystery and loftiness of the mass and of the Eucharist. Attending church taught me a crucial thing for a kid to learn, that to be serious was OK, that it was OK to be contemplative, even if it at the time it was dull and you wanted to be somewhere else or doing something else. I carry inside me the high seriousness of mass, for which I’m grateful. And Catholicism also gave me a good education, I must say, a fact for which I’m grateful to my parents. My Ethics class in high school made a great impression on me; I was encouraged to write psalms and personal reflections, so I was encouraged to believe that self-interrogation and writing were noble pursuits, not to be scoffed at, though they were by my peers and sometimes by myself, of course.
8. One of my theology professors, Rev. Patrick Madden, has discussed how the Church can benefit (and has benefited) from the scholarship of independent Catholic theologians. What could the Catholic Church learn from writing and writers? Do you have advice for the Church?
I’m not sure. Catholicism as represented by the Vatican is pretty self-sealed. I was fortunate to grow up within a fairly progressive family and in progressive Catholic schools. My younger brother is gay. He came out in high school, the same Catholic school my brothers and I attended, a school where a kid had killed himself amidst queer and fag rumors. Coming out was a brave and humane thing for my brother to do, and the only thing he could do, of course. To the church, my brother is a flaw, and this is unacceptable to me. And, frankly speaking, this was one of the major issues I had, and still have, with the Catholic church. Many gay Catholics, among them Andrew Sullivan, have written movingly about the profound contradiction of worshiping in a faith and endeavoring to serve within and love an institution that condemns you. It’s a disconnect that I find insufferable. And I understand that some priests, some parishes, fight this, and that’s good. So I might say to the church, listen to Jesus’ teachings closely, be skeptical but always open, ignore agenda and love tradition but decry unfortunate, mean-spirited history, and act within a fully humane impulse consistently. Listen to differences and love and accept them. Or maybe just reflect on what O’Connor said: “Ideal Christianity doesn't exist, because anything the human being touches, even Christian truth, he deforms slightly in his own image.”
9. What project(s) are you working on now?
I’m writing essays, and blogging. I’m choosing among book projects. I’m not sure which direction I’ll go in yet.
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Joe Bonomo is the author of Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Installations (National Poetry Series), and Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band. His essays and prose poems appear widely, most recently in Quarter After Eight, Hotel Amerika, The Normal School, Fourth Genre, Brevity, and New Ohio Review, and his work has twice been cited in “Notable Essays” in Best American Essays. The recipient of fellowship awards in both prose and poetry from the Illinois Arts Council, Bonomo teaches at Northern Illinois University, where he was awarded the Excellence in Undergraduate Instruction Award. He appears online at No Such Thing As Was.
Joe’s Amazon Page
Joe's Essays at Scribd
"After Cornell" by Joe Bonomo
Joe Bonomo's "After Cornell", originally published in Quarter After Eight, is an example of the type of writing that led me to create this site.
Bonomo's essays document childhood Catholicism--and how the culture of those experiences leave a constant watermark on one's adult life. One can certainly become lapsed Catholic, but it is nearly impossible to be a whitewashed Catholic. Bonomo is able to capture nostalgia without sentimentality, and to allow his readers to redefine Catholic schooling.
"After Cornell" is written in the associate, sectional structure so well-suited to creative non-fiction (a style used so well by Brian Doyle, Patrick Madden, and Gary Fincke). Bonomo's recollections focus on the traditional style of the confessional box: darkness and silence. Bonomo writes:
"To intellectually comprehend moral and ethical transgressions--regardless of how domestically petty they might feel to the confessor (last night I bit my little brother)--the confessor must shed anatomy's garment and step in unencumbered. The fragmented reminder that we are always flesh filtered through the shadowy screen between priest and penitent, and such a reminder could not have been allowed to distract."
Bonomo investigates the duality of the corporeal in this piece: "And yet, always we returned to the world with the body intact. And yet, always we returned to the confessional with the body in disarray." In the traditional confessional the penitent is an invisible flesh, flashes of body in shadow, and the power resides in the words offered. Such an intimate emotional encounter occurs within this box (and Bonomo makes the connection with Joseph Cornell's allegedly "random chance" boxes).
Bonomo laments the shift to face-to-face confessions, though he has prepared himself for the change, and the previous box felt "akin to stepping into the Old Age, of black, black, black." Bonomo's words bring me back to the confessions of my past: I made the same shift from darkness to (uncomfortable) light. Now my parish opts for the face to sheet to face confession in a lighted room, and we are given printed Acts of Contrition, columned in the center on a pink sheet. I agree with Bonomo, that something has been lost, or at least transferred, in this coming to light.
I've said it before, and it bears repeating: the Church has undergone a curious shift. Why can't the solemn coexist with progressive? Wouldn't an authentic sense of the former lead to a practical sense of the latter?
I love Bonomo's description of this face-to-face confession experience:
"Something was strangely off, and I was unprepared for how deflating the experience would be. I was not conceding my sins on my knees as had been the custom; rather, I was a casual supplicant, sitting with my legs crossed, as was the Father. We chatted; there was back-and-forth conversing, actual dialogue, none of the weighted, speak-and-hush murmuring of the box. There was direct eye contact, there were mild moments of levity. There was no mystery."
Bonomo returns to the concept of mystery in the final paragraph of the essay. It's beautifully written, and it's a nice example of everything right (or potentially right) about Catholic-influenced literature: the work becomes, to steal/shift Cardinal Newman, something more than Literature:
"The language of boxes might always be foreign, but a lifting of the lid and a cocking of the ear to odd, fearful music--however unphraseable--protects and enriches more of the soul than does an emptying of the contents into rational light."
Somebody needs to publish Bonomo's essays into a book. How this hasn't happened yet I don't understand. Anybody whose experienced a moment of Catholic schooling would find so much to appreciate here.
Coming tomorrow: Joe Bonomo's interview with The Fine Delight.
Bonomo's essays document childhood Catholicism--and how the culture of those experiences leave a constant watermark on one's adult life. One can certainly become lapsed Catholic, but it is nearly impossible to be a whitewashed Catholic. Bonomo is able to capture nostalgia without sentimentality, and to allow his readers to redefine Catholic schooling.
"After Cornell" is written in the associate, sectional structure so well-suited to creative non-fiction (a style used so well by Brian Doyle, Patrick Madden, and Gary Fincke). Bonomo's recollections focus on the traditional style of the confessional box: darkness and silence. Bonomo writes:
"To intellectually comprehend moral and ethical transgressions--regardless of how domestically petty they might feel to the confessor (last night I bit my little brother)--the confessor must shed anatomy's garment and step in unencumbered. The fragmented reminder that we are always flesh filtered through the shadowy screen between priest and penitent, and such a reminder could not have been allowed to distract."
Bonomo investigates the duality of the corporeal in this piece: "And yet, always we returned to the world with the body intact. And yet, always we returned to the confessional with the body in disarray." In the traditional confessional the penitent is an invisible flesh, flashes of body in shadow, and the power resides in the words offered. Such an intimate emotional encounter occurs within this box (and Bonomo makes the connection with Joseph Cornell's allegedly "random chance" boxes).
Bonomo laments the shift to face-to-face confessions, though he has prepared himself for the change, and the previous box felt "akin to stepping into the Old Age, of black, black, black." Bonomo's words bring me back to the confessions of my past: I made the same shift from darkness to (uncomfortable) light. Now my parish opts for the face to sheet to face confession in a lighted room, and we are given printed Acts of Contrition, columned in the center on a pink sheet. I agree with Bonomo, that something has been lost, or at least transferred, in this coming to light.
I've said it before, and it bears repeating: the Church has undergone a curious shift. Why can't the solemn coexist with progressive? Wouldn't an authentic sense of the former lead to a practical sense of the latter?
I love Bonomo's description of this face-to-face confession experience:
"Something was strangely off, and I was unprepared for how deflating the experience would be. I was not conceding my sins on my knees as had been the custom; rather, I was a casual supplicant, sitting with my legs crossed, as was the Father. We chatted; there was back-and-forth conversing, actual dialogue, none of the weighted, speak-and-hush murmuring of the box. There was direct eye contact, there were mild moments of levity. There was no mystery."
Bonomo returns to the concept of mystery in the final paragraph of the essay. It's beautifully written, and it's a nice example of everything right (or potentially right) about Catholic-influenced literature: the work becomes, to steal/shift Cardinal Newman, something more than Literature:
"The language of boxes might always be foreign, but a lifting of the lid and a cocking of the ear to odd, fearful music--however unphraseable--protects and enriches more of the soul than does an emptying of the contents into rational light."
Somebody needs to publish Bonomo's essays into a book. How this hasn't happened yet I don't understand. Anybody whose experienced a moment of Catholic schooling would find so much to appreciate here.
Coming tomorrow: Joe Bonomo's interview with The Fine Delight.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Misc.
Scroll down to read my recent interview with Rev. James Martin SJ. His words are worth considering.
Father Martin has also begun a new series at The Huffington Post: How to Find God.
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Our next interview--going live later this week--is with Joe Bonomo. Joe's one of the best at representing the elements and peculiarities of childhood Catholicism.
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I'm also pleased to announce that we'll soon be running an interview with Luke Timothy Johnson. Dr. Johnson is an incredibly dynamic scholar of both Scripture and theology. His perspectives are fresh, and his voice is a necessary one.
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I also want to share the identity of a future interview...but won't just yet. I'll keep it a secret for now.
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Vox Nova always has wonderful content, and a recent post--actually, a guest post by Professor Tim Muldoon of Boston College--really got me thinking.
Muldoon's post is light-hearted but wide-reaching, and he posits a necessary question: what is so intriguing about demons/the devil? Much of Hollywood's preoccupation with Catholicism is its mystery, its willingness to accept the "supernatural," as well as its priest-warriors who fell demons that have inhabited innocent people. It all makes for wonderful theater, of course, and I must admit The Exorcist is one of my favorite films. But is it healthy, in the sense of perspective, for non-Catholics to conceive of Catholicism as that-grand-devil-fighting religion?
I'm not sure. Certainly Father Martin, Mark Massa SJ (who has also been added to the forthcoming interview list!), Philip Jenkins, and others have loosely (and not so loosely) yoked mainstream anti-Catholic sentiment to the religion's "other" status, which makes it, like so many "foreign" representations, ripe for Hollywood.
Muldoon's essay makes me wonder, though, if I've become a bit too anthropological where I should be theological. The element of "demons" that turns off many Catholics is likely the oft-parodied, red-horned, Baltimore Catechism edition, and not the conception of demons offered by Ignatius:
"To be clear: Hollywood demons are pretty much nothing like the ones that exorcists and spiritual directors deal with. Ignatius, for example, living in the 16th century–really the tail end of the Medieval world–did not describe demons in a Dante-like way. In Ignatius’ mind, demons weren’t hopping around with pitchforks or melting people’s faces. They were real, but their work was not one of terror but of constant temptation, and they could be overcome through lives of virtue and prayer. Indeed, the spiritual life as a whole, he wrote, was an ongoing practice of discernment so that one could learn which desires were rooted in God and which were rooted in the demonic."
Check-out Muldoon's entire post for more curious commentary.
Father Martin has also begun a new series at The Huffington Post: How to Find God.
*
Our next interview--going live later this week--is with Joe Bonomo. Joe's one of the best at representing the elements and peculiarities of childhood Catholicism.
*
I'm also pleased to announce that we'll soon be running an interview with Luke Timothy Johnson. Dr. Johnson is an incredibly dynamic scholar of both Scripture and theology. His perspectives are fresh, and his voice is a necessary one.
*
I also want to share the identity of a future interview...but won't just yet. I'll keep it a secret for now.
*
Vox Nova always has wonderful content, and a recent post--actually, a guest post by Professor Tim Muldoon of Boston College--really got me thinking.
Muldoon's post is light-hearted but wide-reaching, and he posits a necessary question: what is so intriguing about demons/the devil? Much of Hollywood's preoccupation with Catholicism is its mystery, its willingness to accept the "supernatural," as well as its priest-warriors who fell demons that have inhabited innocent people. It all makes for wonderful theater, of course, and I must admit The Exorcist is one of my favorite films. But is it healthy, in the sense of perspective, for non-Catholics to conceive of Catholicism as that-grand-devil-fighting religion?
I'm not sure. Certainly Father Martin, Mark Massa SJ (who has also been added to the forthcoming interview list!), Philip Jenkins, and others have loosely (and not so loosely) yoked mainstream anti-Catholic sentiment to the religion's "other" status, which makes it, like so many "foreign" representations, ripe for Hollywood.
Muldoon's essay makes me wonder, though, if I've become a bit too anthropological where I should be theological. The element of "demons" that turns off many Catholics is likely the oft-parodied, red-horned, Baltimore Catechism edition, and not the conception of demons offered by Ignatius:
"To be clear: Hollywood demons are pretty much nothing like the ones that exorcists and spiritual directors deal with. Ignatius, for example, living in the 16th century–really the tail end of the Medieval world–did not describe demons in a Dante-like way. In Ignatius’ mind, demons weren’t hopping around with pitchforks or melting people’s faces. They were real, but their work was not one of terror but of constant temptation, and they could be overcome through lives of virtue and prayer. Indeed, the spiritual life as a whole, he wrote, was an ongoing practice of discernment so that one could learn which desires were rooted in God and which were rooted in the demonic."
Check-out Muldoon's entire post for more curious commentary.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Interview with Rev. James Martin, SJ
Rev. James Martin, SJ is the second interview at The Fine Delight, and I'm thrilled to share his wonderful thoughts. This interview was conducted via e-mail. A bio note, as well as links to Father Martin's books, follow the interview. Thanks so much for speaking with us, Fr. Jim!
1. The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, is, like the best sermons, both accessible and layered. How did you come to, in the Ignatian sense, "find God in all things?"
Thanks for the compliment! The easiest way to answer that question is to say that it took me quite a few years of listening to Jesuits who were much more experienced, and it took quite a few retreats, before I began to understand what that meant. Essentially, all you need to do is to be aware, awake and attentive to what's going on around you. Ignatian spirituality encourages believers to look for God not simply within the walls of the church, or in the pages of Scripture, but in their everyday lives. God can be found in the midst of relationships, work, nature, family, play, music--pretty much anything.
One of the best ways of inviting people to see this is with the practice called the “examination of conscience,” which was popularized by St. Ignatius Loyola. Essentially, it's a review of the day that takes the form of prayer. And it only takes 15 minutes a day (most people do it at the close of the day) to help yourself to see God more clearly. The steps are as follows: First, gratitude: you remember things are grateful for, you “savor” them (that is, you spend time thinking about them) and you thank God for that. Second, you review the day, from start to finish, noticing all the times when you noticed God’s presence. Third, you call to mind anything sinful that you’ve done. Fourth, you ask God for forgiveness and perhaps decide to apologize to someone you offended. Fifth, you ask God for the grace to see God in the next day.
Eventually it becomes easy to see where God has been. And as you notice where God was, it becomes easier to see where God is. In other words, looking for God “backwards" makes it easier to look for God "forwards."
2. I first learned of the Jesuits from my father, who attended Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. He characterized them as worldly and intelligent, and yet also caring. What truly makes the Jesuits unique among the Catholic orders?
Well, depends who you ask! Many American Catholics might point to all of our high schools and colleges and universities. Overseas, people might point to things like the Jesuit Refugee Service.
Most Jesuits, though, would say that it's our distinctive spirituality. Each religious order (like the Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans) has a kind of tradition of accents, highlights, emphases in the Christian life that come to them from their founder. That leads to a distinctive spirituality, or way to God. For Jesuits, it's the way of approaching things according to the life, the writings and the activities of St. Ignatius Loyola, our founder, and the early Jesuits. So the idea of being a "contemplative in action," which is something that comes from Ignatius, is very important for us, as is the idea of, as I mentioned, "finding God in all things."
But another very important source is the Spiritual Exercises, the classic text written by St. Ignatius Loyola in the 16th century. In essence, it's a four-week manual for prayer that invites the believer to imagine himself or herself following the life of Christ as presented in the Gospels. Overall, and while it’s hard to summarize, the Spiritual Exercises brings one closer to God in prayer, frees one up to make healthier decisions, and gives you a deeper understanding of the New Testament.
It also invites you into that particular kind of prayer that goes by the name "Ignatian contemplation," which, as I said, is a way of imagining yourself within the scene from Scripture. You use all your “imaginative senses,” trying to say, “If I were in this scene, what would I see? Hear? Feel? Smell? Taste?” As Ignatius said, you try to “compose” the scene, and then observe what happens and notice what happens within you. That form of prayer really changes the way many people look at familiar Bible passages.
3. Your March 2000 essay, "The Last Acceptable Prejudice," was my introduction to the complicated tendency toward anti-Catholicism in America. Do you think Catholicism is still portrayed and rendered as an "other" in our country?
At times it is. But I think it's important to distinguish between the more virulent kinds of bigotry--like racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia—and anti-Catholicism. On the one hand, anti-Catholicism is simply not as virulent as those other prejudices. On the other hand, when we look at American history we see things like the burning of convents, the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party and many vicious (and I mean vicious) anti-Catholic tracts. The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. once called anti-Catholicism "the deepest-held prejudice in the history of the American people,” primarily because Catholics were living in a largely Protestant culture that was deeply suspicious of the Catholic Church. It’s also sometimes called “the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.” It’s rather accepted to think that the Catholic church is a malign force, particularly in the wake of the sex abuse crisis, and that priests are all pedophiles, and so on.
Today, though, anti-Catholicism is much subtler. For example, whenever you see a Catholic priest on TV they're sure to be presented as a pedophile, an idiot or a tyrant. Catholic sisters are portrayed as complete idiots (see “Sister Act,” for a relatively benign example) incapable of driving a car or even tying their shoes, when these are the women who built the American Catholic hospital network, founded and ran high schools and colleges, cared for the poor for years and years.
Now, some things that are labeled “anti-Catholic” may actually be more a result of ignorance (for example, when a newspaper editor doesn’t know even the most basic terminology and labels things incorrectly.) Other instances are even more subtler, as when a journalist talks about a political figure as a “devout Catholic,” as if that's supposed to explain everything about his political beliefs. I encounter anti-Catholicism quite frequently on a personal basis, too, as when otherwise intelligent people say absolutely ridiculous things to me about the church. It comes with the territory, though.
The best test of whether something is “anti-Catholic” is to insert another religion and ask yourself if that religion would be treated, or spoken about, the same way. (As in “All Jewish people are…” Or “All Muslims are…”) So I don't agree with those who say it's rabid and a threat to the church; on the other hand, I don’t agree with those who say it doesn't exist.
4. One of my favorite actors, Sam Rockwell, contacted you regarding his role as Judas in the play The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Your experiences with Rockwell and the rest of the cast were documented in the acclaimed A Jesuit Off-Broadway. What could actors learn from the Catholic faith (and what could the church, perhaps, gain from the theater)?
What could actors learn from the Catholic faith? Well, I would say puckishly, what everybody else could! So the essentials, as I presented them to the actors, are the essentials that I would present to anybody: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, and so on.
But more specifically, in the case of the The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, we spoke a great deal about the history of the saints. One of the things the actors found most interesting of the saints was that they were, as one said, "real people." And in the play, in which Judas was put on trial for the death of Jesus, a number of saints are called upon as "expert witnesses." And for the actors to understand their parts (and for Sam Rockwell to understand Judas), the actors needed to approach the apostles and saints as real people, which of course they were. So we studied the traditions surrounding the lives of St. Peter, St. Thomas, St. Monica, Mother Teresa, and in the process look at the notion of holiness making its home in humanity. This was, as they told me, a revelation for many of the actors.
Also, the Catholic Church is not fundamentalist when it comes to Scripture. So we used the modern tools of the historical scholarship to understand the Gospels more fully. I think this was also a surprise for the actors, who may have expected me to say that every single word of the Bible needed be taken literally. Of course I believe in the truth of the Bible, and not just some metaphorical truth, but the truth of what's being told in the narratives (for example, Jesus truly rose from the dead), but you cannot take every word literally because they're clearly some contradictions among the Gospels. These are the kinds of things we spoke about.
What could the church learn from the theater? Well, one of the things that struck me most about working with the actors was their spontaneity, fearlessness, and liveliness. They were always ready to try something new, particularly when it came to the interpretation of the part, always ready to learn, and always lively and energetic about their roles. The church, I think, which often suffers from a certain joylessness, could certainly learn from their joie de vivre.
5. As an editor of America, you're a part of a magazine that's essential to the Catholic literary culture of America. Are there Catholic writers--past and present--who have influenced you?
That's an easy question. My favorites would start with Thomas Merton, whose autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, helped to move me from my former life at General Electric into life in religious community, specifically the Jesuits. I’ve often said that the four people most responsible for my vocation are the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and Thomas Merton. I've also quite enjoyed reading the works of Henri Nouwen, the Dutch priest died in the 1980s. His way of combining his personal experience with Christian spirituality has spoken to me, and it influences the way that I write about my life and my beliefs. Ron Hansen is perhaps my favorite contemporary Catholic writer, though he doesn't always write about overtly Catholic things. His novel Mariette in Ecstasy is, I think, the great Catholic novel of the last 25 years. Finally, Kathleen Norris, who writes about things Catholic, is actually Presbyterian herself, but I’ll place her in that group. Her book The Cloister Walk is superb.
6. I wish that lapsed Catholics--those who have stopped attending Mass for a variety of reasons, or who have strayed from the faith--would read your enlightening writings, which truly reveal the energy of Catholicism. What would you say to those who have struggled with their faith?
Well, I wish they would read them, too! And actually some of the most gratifying letters and emails and messages I’ve gotten have been from people who have been struggling with their faith and who tell me that my writing has helped them. That’s wonderful to hear.
What would I say to someone who struggles with their faith? First of all, it's natural. Doubts are a natural and human part of the spiritual life. You can’t be human and not doubt. The saints struggled with it, and I would venture to say that perhaps even Jesus does in his final moments on the cross. (This is a reflection of his humanity.) So doubts are a given.
For someone truly struggling, I would ask him or her to start looking for signs of God in their everyday lives. The “examination of conscience,” as I said is an excellent tool to jumpstart your spiritual life and start looking for signs of God's presence. So it's not so much a question of looking for where God will be, as much as it is of looking for where God already is.
Sometimes those struggling with “faith” are struggling more with organized religion. And that’s quite a different matter. To these people I say that from the time of the early Christian church, there've been debates, struggles, challenges, craziness and sinfulness, and so it is impossible to expect a perfect religious organization to suddenly materialize. That doesn’t excuse the sins. By no means, as St. Paul would say. But part of being in any human organization is a certain admission of imperfection.
But really I would ask those struggling with their faith to just remember that God is always inviting you to experience the transcendent in your everyday life. It's mainly a question of being aware, awake, and attentive.
7. In a great interview with Big Think, you noted the gospel "is supposed to disturb you." Why do you think many Catholics and Christians want their religion to be easy?
Well, because they’re human! Who doesn’t want something easy? Who wants life to be hard? Who wants to be challenged? But Jesus came to, as the wonderful formulation has it, "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable." Jesus was very disturbing in his time. It's one of the reasons that he was crucified. And he is disturbing to us today. There's a terrible tendency to want to cordon off Jesus into a particular political sphere, and make it seem that Jesus is simply supporting what we believe politically. But Jesus is much bigger than any set political platform. For one thing, I think we've almost completely lost sight of the absolute requirement to care for the poor, which is clearly and repeatedly outlined in the Gospels. Jesus talked a lot more about that than about sexual morality, which we’ve forgotten.
But even more basically, the whole Christian message of love and forgiveness is difficult. It's hard to love someone who doesn't love you. To forgive someone who has hurt you. But that's essential! To paraphrase Dostoevsky, love in novels and plays is sweet and beautiful and easy; love in real life is a "harsh and dreadful thing."
8. I'm a big fan of your appearances on The Colbert Report: you're able to be both funny and articulate. How did you connect with Stephen Colbert, and why do you enjoy appearing on his show?
I had written an article on Mother Teresa for the New York Times after her book Come be my Light came out, which detailed her spiritual doubts. The people at the show read the article and invited me on to talk about Mother Teresa, which I was happy to do. I've long been a fan of the show and I'm also very much in favor of taking religion to places where it may not normally be expected to be found. So we had a lot of fun during a conversation; I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Stephen Colbert is a faithful Catholic, an intelligent guy, and of course very funny. Since then, I've been on three or four times and they even refer to me as the "Colbert Report chaplain," which delighted me. Frankly, when I speak on college campuses I get more questions about Stephen Colbert than I do about Jesus!
9. Are you working on any new writing projects?
Yes, always! Besides my work in America magazine I just a finished a book on joy, humor, and laughter in the spiritual life for HarperCollins, to be published in October this year. We're still noodling around with the title, but it’s pretty much finished. As I mentioned, I think there is a certain grim aspect to religion that needs to be challenged. The good news should put a smile on your face. And, after all, Christ is risen.
The next book I'm working on, which I’ve already started, is on Jesus. It’s a series of meditations on his life, death, and resurrection, using some of the imaginative techniques of the Spiritual Exercises. My joke to my friends is that I'm writing about Jesus because not enough has been written about him!
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James Martin SJ is a Jesuit priest, culture editor of America magazine, and author of the New York Times bestseller The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything and My Life with the Saints, which has sold over 100,000 copies and was named by Publishers Weekly as a "Best Book" of the Year. Father Martin, who has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe, among other publications, and blogs for HuffingtonPost, is a frequent commentator in the national and international media. He has appeared on all the major networks, and in venues as diverse as NPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," Fox TV's "The O'Reilly Factor" and Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."
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