Interview with Paul Mariani

Paul Mariani is the ninth interview at The Fine Delight. This interview was conducted through e-mail. A bio note, as well as links to Paul's books, follow the interview. Thanks for your heartfelt and insightful responses, Paul!


1.I first learned of Gerard Manley Hopkins as an undergraduate--from a poet more interested in Hopkins's language than his Catholicism. I think the two are inseparable. Do you view Hopkins's language as idiosyncratically Catholic?

You touch on a profound subject here, which is at the core of my own understanding and love of Hopkins’s work. Many poets and critics and teachers have been touched by the beauty and force of Hopkins’s poems, especially those he wrote as a Jesuit. And many of these have come away from the experience by loading what they could of Hopkins’s charged language into their cars or trucks and taking it back to their own houses, in a way analogous, say, to someone who comes across the ruins of an ancient church and chisels away this fresco or that painted tile or mosaic fragment for their mantel piece or local museum.

But what Hopkins discovered came through long reflection on the nature and evolution of language structures, especially Greek and Latin and the Anglo-Saxon roots of English. What was at the heart of an English sentence, at the heart of poetry written in English—the calculus of it, the essential music of it. If words rhymed or chimed, why did they? Was this a random occurrence, or were there deeper connections among like-sounding words: skip, scope, scape, landscape, seascape, inscape, stress, instress. Were these fragments of the Word, tints of a rainbow, a Covenant? And if the Word spoke, how did we hear it? Were we prepared to hear it given our imperfect, fallen natures? And if the Word became incarnate, enfleshed itself in the matter of the world, in the matter of humankind, how could we find it? How witness to it? The world is charged with the grandeur of God, Hopkins wrote in February 1877, but so might words themselves be charged with that grandeur. But it would have to be instressed on the poet as witness, who in turn would witness for us. His language is deeply sacramental and—like Shakespeare’s, like any very good poet—speaks to us on many levels simultaneously—to our intellects, our hearts, our very selves—and we catch of it what we can. But some see oil or fresh water and think: how much can I get for this? What’s its market value? Not what is its value, but what is its value in dollars or pounds or francs or Euros. And meanwhile the God of nature gives it away abundantly, freely, with open arms—as on the cross.


2. In Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, you write that Hopkins's conversion to Catholicism "meant going counter to the secular and agnostic cutting-edge thinking of his own day." Do you find contemporary Catholic writing operating also within a subculture? What living Catholic writers especially interest you?

Who was it who said, “Be as cunning as serpents, yet as innocent as doves”? You try—try—to remain faithful to the felt experience of your faith—not merely the doctrinal, but the sense of the living Christ within and around you—and you learn to negotiate with whatever forces are out there. Flannery O’Connor called it a kind of Catholic skepticism. To be wary of the voices out there promising this or that lie, sugar-coated, ah so sweet, but so poisonous in the long run, which—after all—isn’t so very long in the great scheme of things. I no longer care very much if it’s a sub-culture or not. If you have something of value to give, people will listen up and even try it on. I’m seventy now, and I’ve been on the road a long time, so I’m closer to home (whatever that turns out to be) than I ever was. Writers who interested me once have been replaced by others, who have something to say about the road I’m on. I’m Catholic in my tastes, have always tried to be. So I read Hemingway again and say he spoke to me back when I was twenty, even thirty, John Wayne, Bogart model, say. But the model of Christ on the road—to Cana or Capernaum or Jericho or Jerusalem or Emmaus—that is what I am looking for. Who helps me there in terms of Catholic writers? Ron Hansen, Mary Gordon, Alice McDermott, Mary Karr, Franz Wright, Jody Bottum, Fr. Jim Martin. But we’re talking about the Communion of Saints here, finally, and there the company moves from the antechamber into the great hall to include so many more—Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen, Dante, Dame Julian of Norwich, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Dryden, Pope, Hopkins, and—if the truth be told—figures as diverse as Homer and Aeschylus, Virgil, the Hebrew prophets, Keats, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Whitman, Auden, Joyce, Sigrid Undset, Peguy, Philip Levine, Mark Jarman, Merton, Denise Levertov, and Anonymous. And I will keep looking. Right now a young brilliant Catholic playwright named Rajiv Joseph, whose work is appearing off and on Broadway this season.


3. Your son, Paul, is a Jesuit. How has his faith experience affected yours?

So profoundly, I can only guess, really. How could I, his father, not follow where he went, as he followed me where I went when he was a boy? His commitment has certainly deepened my own, or so I believe. I also believe it’s one of the main reasons I left the University of Massachusetts at Amherst after 32 years and went to Boston College, following a Jesuit retreat experience back in the spring of ’99. It’s why I did the Thirty-Day Long Retreat with the Jesuits at Eastern Point in January 2000. It’s why we keep in touch about the mission. But the electric moment came for me when he lay supine on the church floor in Los Angeles, arms outspread in the shape of a cross, along with four other men, and offered himself freely to the Lord. That was a three-handkerchief affair for me and my father-in-law, standing next to me, and something happened—something of a very serious nature—which meant a renewed sense of surrender for me as well. The rest is history.


4. One of my favorite excerpts from Thirty Days occurs during your meditation on Matthew 28:16-20 as part of your retreat:

And once He is lifted from our sight altogether, how will He touch us down the long corridors of history. With the physicality of the sacraments: with the water of Baptism, with the bread and wine of the Eucharist, with the tears that come from forgiveness, with the coming of the Holy Spirit in fire and wind and oil, in our lives together as husband and wife, with the priests and religious--the anointed ones--who serve as witnesses with lives of service, with the Lord for company on the last lonely leg of the journey through death, whether in a bed, on a road, at sea, in the air.

Have you adopted elements of the Spiritual Exercises in your daily life (beyond attending retreats)?

I think of the Jesuit way of life every day—how could I not, with my own son on the front line now? I think they got two or three (my wife) for the price of the one. And this means a new sense of freedom, a new sense of purpose, a new sense of seriousness, of joy, of laughter, of expectation. I’ll be 71 at the end of this month, and I’m still teaching, because Jesuits don’t retire until they have to. I find myself in my petitions going first to the Blessed Mother, and then to her Son, and then to His father, up the Jacob’s ladder as it were. I keep the examination of conscience each night and read a section of the Sacred Scriptures each morning with my wife, within the context of the Lectio Divina. I go around the country giving talks on aspects of God & the Imagination, and in that sense preach, and even use words when I have to, as St. Francis—so dear to Fr. Hopkins—recommended. And I’ve found it a lot less lonely than I had supposed it would be with the Master at my side.


5.
How does one bargain
with a God like this, who, quid pro quo, ups
the ante each time He answers one sign with another?

I love the above ending to "Quid Pro Quo" from The Great Wheel; it's such a complicated poem about the relationship between God and man. How do you conceive of God within your poetry? Do you have a consistent image of the divine throughout all your work?

Another big question. But here’s what I imagine. We’re talking here about a great immensity—the Creator of the Universe and of everything good in it. We’re a speck, a dust mote, in all of this from one perspective. And yet from another perspective, there’s this great Lover out there, in here, everywhere, this Father who we have been told on good authority is also our Father. A real Father, with all the attributes of a Father, including the maternal. It’s something I’ve had to learn by stages, and something I’m still learning, and He constantly surprises and shelters me, as the Psalmist sang. Of course there’s evil in the world, enough to erase me like a bug. But then there’s this sense of safety, of the one Voice I have learned the hard way to trust and to follow. Nothing else works for me, nor has it for untold millions of others, all those faces where Christ shines out in ten thousand places.


6. So much of your work (I'm thinking "Shadow of the Father," for example) mediates between Catholic/Christian past and present; in a way, continuing the conversation of tradition. What does poetry have to offer the canon of literature influenced by Christ's message?

One thinks of those poets who have written in the Christian tradition—some of whom I mentioned earlier, a list to which I could include many more. Add to them those poets who have borrowed from the Christian tradition—from Chaucer and Marlowe and Shakespeare and Spencer and Milton to Thomas Hardy and Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens and Theodore Roethke and Marianne Moore and on and on and on. Then subtract all of these and tell me, really, what’s left of lasting value? Nihilism gives me the creeps. I’ll look at it, consider it, but the fires there are too forbidding, especially when the serpent’s voice hisses, here, try this one. How can it hurt, really? And then you find out it does, and the poison sinks in, unless that other figure spread-eagled on the cross draws the poison out.


7. You teach at a wonderful Jesuit university--Boston College. Any favorite courses/ works that you have taught?

I love teaching at Boston College, and being part of the diverse community there. And I’ve been fortunate to have had three chairpersons, so different in themselves, who have allowed me to experiment with various courses in which I can try out new ideas. Among my favorites over the past dozen years have been seminars in Hopkins and his Legacy, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, Yeats and Heaney, Bishop, Berryman & Lowell, American Poetry & High Modernism, 1914—1930, as well as workshops in Poetry and Writing the Other/Writing the Self. More recently, there’s a course for undergraduates and graduates I’m still inventing called God & the Imagination, and it includes Dante’s Commedia, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Merton’s Journals, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, William Kennedy’s Ironweed, Anthony Hecht, Denise Levertov, my friend Ron Hansen’s novels, Lowell’s "Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," John Berryman’s Dream Songs and Eleven Addresses to the Lord, Mary Karr, Franz Wright, and others.

*

Paul Mariani is the author of over 200 essays and reviews, as well as sixteen books, six of them volumes of poetry. He is also the author of five biographies of poets, including William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane and—most recently--Gerard Manley Hopkins. All have been listed as Notable Books by the New York Times; his biography of Williams was short-listed for the American Book Award. He has also written four critical studies, including God & the Imagination, as well as a spiritual memoir, Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius. He has been awarded fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, two from The National Endowment for the Humanities and another from The National Endowment for the Arts. From 1968 until 2000, he taught at the University of Massachusetts, where he served as Distinguished University Professor of English. Since 2000, he has held a Chair in English at Boston College. In 2009 he was presented with the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. His current projects include a book of essays, another of poetry, a memoir, and a life of Wallace Stevens. The Broken Tower, his life of Hart Crane, has been made into a film, directed by and starring James Franco, and is scheduled to be released later this year.

Prose and Poetry: Paul Mariani

[Etching credit goes to Barry Moser]

Gerard Manley Hopkins? He's one of the driving reasons behind creating The Fine Delight; he's a poet and priest who revealed the beauty in the idiosyncrasies of the faith. And Paul Mariani has done so much to maintain Hopkins's standing as a poet of importance, but also introduce a new generation of writers and readers to the particularly Jesuit identity of the man.

Mariani's sweeping biography of Hopkins--Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life--is a must-read for students of the poet, as well as those hoping for further insight into the pleasant quirk of 19th century literary conversion. And his memoir, Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius, breathes life into the storied Jesuit tradition, and does so with a constant sense of self-reflection (after all, is this not one of the essential elements of the Exercises?).

Our previous interview with Fr. James Martin revealed some of the clear benefits of the Jesuit approach toward faith--and, in particular, the regimented, revealing actions of the Exercises--and Mariani's perspective is unique and useful. Mariani is a lay person, a poet and scholar of poetry, whose son, Paul, is a Jesuit. Mariani is certainly aware of the Exercises from an outside point of view, and the book is especially useful for lay persons because he is not a Jesuit reflecting on a constant practice. The beauty of the "retreat" is the movement from the normal, the relocation of oneself, the shock to the system of faith that forces (or enables, perhaps) the participant to redefine the world on the outside. The essential element of the retreat is that, though it is intense and all-encompassing, it is temporary, and the participant will return to the outside world. It is this return that reveals the success or failure of the endeavor.

Mariani leaves in a day of rain and fog, apprehensive about leaving his wife, unsure of his spiritual director. Mariani notes that he's long lived in the Jesuit literary tradition: Hopkins, Brian Moore, John Donne, Flannery O'Connor, and others who implicitly or explicitly represented the Order. He's also aware of the structure of the retreat, at least in a practical sense, with the "thirty days of silence" as the ambiguous, yet essential, core of the experience.

Mariani firmly places the reader in the world of the retreat. We see the spiritual director, the room, the offices, and the overwhelming silence of reflection. All throughout, Mariani shares the realities of his own backstory and life, including his decision to teach at Boston College after years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Everything, though, is filtered through the silence and Scriptural reflection inherent in the exercises, where the Word is made real through extreme focus. This is not the focus of analysis, and not the sometimes dry deconstruction of theology, but instead the lived understanding of Christ (writers like Luke Timothy Johnson and John Meier are able to still maintain such life in erudite theology!).

Exercises, Mariani's life, physical setting, Scripture. The book, in a recursive fashion, moves between these four modes, and the effect may not be explicitly noticeable in the first half of the book, but as the reader moves toward the conclusion it becomes clear: Mariani's prose reveals that the retreat allows him to see the connections without the seams. To realize that his life as poet/writer/teacher/father/husband is one so grounded in belief that the doubts, the reconsideration, and ruminations are the natural result of a life lived with God on the mind.

*

Mariani has written much in the sacramental tradition, but one poem in particular, "Quid Pro Quo," captures the essence of his tonal relationship between God and man.

The poem is direct, and, though narrative in form, deeply considered. The setting is "an empty classroom," and the close context is the narrator's "wife's miscarriage." The impetus is a question from a colleague, who asked

what I thought now
of God's ways toward man.

The colleague is described as lapsed, but his identity is less important than the world of the question: how can the believer explain his belief when it has done little to really help him? Little, at least, in the world sense. The colleague obviously expects at downward gaze, a smirk. Instead, this happens:

I surprised not only myself but my colleague

by raising my middle finger up to heaven, quid
pro quo, the hardly grand defiant gesture a variant
on Vanni Fucci's figs, shocking not only my friend
but in truth the gesture's perpetrator too.

It's a rejection of the moment, a posture toward God (as we've seen powerfully done in the work of C. Dale Young). It's done for many reasons, not the least of which anger. Why hasn't God responded to this narrator? Shouldn't faith guarantee the individual some attention?

The narrator and his wife have a successful birth; it's no small feat, this miracle, and the narrator is aware. It leads the reader toward a reasoned, heavy final stanza that leaves me aware of Mariani's awe:

Worst,
best, just last year, this same son, grown
to manhood now, knelt before a marble altar to vow
everything he had to the same God I had had my own
erstwhile dealings with. How does one bargain
with a God like this, who, quid pro quo, ups
the ante each time He answers one sign with another?

I love the movement here. The narrator's son is a priest; he's a man who's made his own contract with God, one that resides clearly within humility and service. The poem circles, but does not simply end with an admonishment of earlier selfishness and pride (what God, really, is worth believing in if He merely lives to judge in the ways of our petty world?). The narrator is grown, and he's smarter, and the word "sign" is perfect here: reason alone is insufficient when dealing with divinity. The narrator's attempts at bargaining have been replaced with an acknowledgment that his relationship with God is far more complex.

New Humor from Brian Doyle

[Thanks, Brian, for sending this our way!]

The True Story of Catholic Golf Digest


My friend Pete, who is such an entrepreneur that he actually no kidding sold bandaids at inflated prices to kids he tripped deliberately in the playground when he was in kindergarten, had a brainstorm recently and invented Catholic Golf Digest magazine, which led, in rapid succession, to The Catholic Plumber, The Catholic Florist, jazzwithjesus.com, and the short-lived but enormously famous Jesus is Back Pop-Up Books For Children!, which is a great Easter gift but there were some unfortunate design and manufacturing problems such that when a kid opened the book Jesus shot across the room like a bearded arrow, and there was that unfortunate incident when a kid in Michigan opened a book and Jesus leaped out and got so mangled by the ceiling fan that the kid became a Hindu and the lawsuit is still in arbitration. But this note is about Catholic Golf Digest, which has become such a cultural phenomenon that the need arises for some factual machete-work through the thicket of rumor surrounding the magazine.

It is not true, for example, that the only recent pope with a decent iron game was the late great John Paul II, nor is it true that JPII grimly lashed three-irons at the office windows of the Polish Communist government before he celebrated his famous 1979 Mass in Warsaw, the one where he shouted I cry from all the depths of this millennium, let your Spirit descend! which still gives me the happy shivers; it was a wedge, chosen because he had to play off cobblestones. Nor is it true that His Holiness Benedict XVI carries a brassie with him to discipline wayward theologians. It is true that Bernard Cardinal Law, formerly of the Archdiocese of Boston, was the worst golfer in the history of the universe, and birds and caddies quailed when His Eminence hoisted his bag for a pastoral afternoon on the links, for the man couldn’t hit the broad side of an ocean liner if it was docked four feet away, plus he fudged his score, and claimed he carried no cash when he lost a bet, slapping his purple robes melodramatically for effect. We have all met such men, and there is a special place in New Jersey for them.

As regards the controversy about Jesus and his short game, no, the magazine did not claim that He was lefty and had a feathery touch around the greens, for the simple reason that there were no golf courses in Judea at the time, and no one but His entourage knows if He indeed, as rumored, spent an hour every morning before office hours hitting flop shots with a huge cigar clenched in the divine grillwork, although that rumor did eventually lead my friend Pete to start The Catholic Dentist, which has done well, and spawned a whole subseries of e-newsletters for devout orthodontists and anesthesiologists and suchlike. I confess that the immediate popularity of niche periodicals for Catholic professionals came as a surprise to me, but it wasn’t to Pete, who has pointed out again and again that people who love their work, who really savor the creative use of skills and tools and talents for the direct benefit of others, are almost always wonderfully receptive to the idea that their work is, as Saint Benedict observed, prayer. Benedict himself is a good case study; note the success of the organization he founded, and the ways it has continued to grow and change while adhering to its original marketing mission, morphing even unto colleges and universities, which are, when you think about it, essentially factories for creating Benedictine salespeople.

Why, in the end, is Catholic Golf Digest such a successful entrepreneurial adventure? Beyond all the obvious reasons like superb target research and ad recruitment, I think the answer is that both Catholicism and golf are ultimately about crazy hope. Neither makes complete sense, which may be the secret to both: the religion insists on the miracle of every moment, the imminence of immanence, the irrepressible resurrection; the sport is similar, in that every shot might be the perfect one, every round a miracle, the worst flub followed immediately by extraordinary resurrection. That mostly we bumble and snarl, whiff and shank, fail and wail, is immaterial; it is the substance of things hoped for on which we set our hearts, according to Saint Paul, and who could argue with a man who drove for such distance?

*

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, and the author most recently of Mink River.

Debate: Who Are The Greatest Catholic Writers?

[Pleased to present the transcript of a debate between Brian Doyle and Father Charlie Gordon from February 24, 2010 at the University of Portland].

WRITERS OF GRACED MOMENTS

A conversation between a learned erudite reasonable informed reverend professor of Catholic literature, Father Charlie Gordon, C.S.C., and a wildly opinionated headlong Catholic writer (Brian Doyle).

BD: Thesis: Most of the writing that has ascended into The Canon of Great Catholic Writing actually isn’t great Catholic writing at all, and in fact is often, for all we bow and scrape, incredibly dull. Yes, I am talking about Augustine and Aquinas and Georges Bernanos and Dorothy Day. To me they seem very much like Montaigne and Emerson – wise, foundational, great if you want to dip in for a page or two, but so incredibly dull as storytellers, as riveting writers, as commanding and salty narrative makers, that I cannot believe even such an honest and forthright priest as you, Charlie, could argue the point that they could not hold the hems of the cloaks of such masterful Catholic writers as, say, Flannery O’Connor and Andre Dubus and Bruce Springsteen.

CG: If there were no Augustine and Aquinas there would be no Flannery O’Connor. Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism inspired O’Connor’s vocation as a writer. Art and Scholasticism is rooted in Aquinas. Augustine taught us that the human heart is restless until it rests in God – that there is an infinite, God-shaped emptiness in each of us that nothing finite can ever fill. It’s impossible to imagine O’Connor’s writing apart from this fundamental insight. Similar arguments could be made about the other writers you mention. Nevertheless, I take your point. Beer is made of water, malt, hops, and yeast. You can’t make beer without them. Yet few of the people who love beer feel as strongly about its ingredients. The same seems true of your love of stories. You reserve your passion for the finished product.

BD: Point taken, I say, grinning. Notes: Of course you are right, but if we extend the logic there, the greatest Catholic writer is the gaunt young Jewish rabboni who wandered around Judea some years ago, telling gnomic stories, and the next greatest are the anonymous souls or gaggles of inspired scribblers and editors who composed what we now call the Gospels – all of these men (and perhaps women) thinking of themselves not as Catholics, yet, but as fundamentalist Jews, or, in a label dewy-new then, and probably uncomfortable to wear, “Christians.” Somehow it’s utterly apt and funny that the greatest Catholic writers would be Jewish, or believers in the miraculous divinity of a Jewish man; paradox and mystery being at the very heart of the Catholic genius, and the best Catholic writing.

But maybe we are sprinting ahead of ourselves, Charles m’lad. Let’s back up. What is Catholic writing? What does that phrase mean?

CG: Definitions are notoriously difficult, but for me a Catholic writer is someone whose mind and heart and pen are soaked, marinated, in Catholicism. Ideally, he or she should be the product of a place that has a culture (like Ireland) or a sub-culture (like the Catholic part of Minnesota) that is as deeply imbued with the faith as the individual is. Catholic writing happens when a writer like that sets out to do justice in words to what is – to things the way they are, particularly at a moment of individual or cultural crisis.

BD: Well said, Charlie. “Sets out to do justice to what is,” I like that. I suppose that I think “Catholic writing” is, in the easiest definition, that having to do with Catholic matters, milieus, characters, situations, concerns – easiest seen in J.F. Powers’ stories of monks and priests and rectory life, for example. The next larger circle would be writing having to do with Catholic convictions – work in which “the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation,” as the greatest of American Catholic writers says – work in which the imminence and immanence of miracle is patent, against all sense and reason; work in which characters steer by a certain rudder of wild hope in the storms of the quotidian – Alice McDermott’s novels, say, or Andre Dubus’s glorious late essays. And perhaps the very widest definition of “Catholic writing” is hinted at by another Flannery O’Connor remark: “There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment.” This last circle is so huge that we could, as you have noted, grinning, call Shakespeare a Catholic writer, yes? But maybe the deep secret of great Catholic writing is that all great writing is Catholic. Maybe even though Catholics don’t own the world, like we did many centuries ago, we can still claim all the best writing, eh?

CG: I say, “sets out to do justice to what is,” to try to head off those whose instinct is to use story writing in an explicit attempt to illustrate or defend a particular Catholic dogma or moral teaching. While the latter tactic can produce good literary “comfort food” for their co-religionists, it is not conducive to the creation of great art. Most of the best Catholic literature, at least in English, has been written with non-Catholic readers in mind, presumably because in the U.S and the U.K. that is the greater part of the potential audience. The works of Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene are the first examples that come to mind in this regard. Much of this wider audience, and particularly the “cultured despisers of religion” among them, dismisses stories with an explicitly apologetic intent as second-rate propaganda. You can’t engage an audience that won’t give you a hearing. On the other hand, when a Catholic writer sets out “to do justice to what is,” by which I mean to convey the truth of the human situation, no reader can reasonably object. And because our writer is “soaked in Catholicism,” Catholic teaching will inevitably be an integral part of the fabric of the story. This will especially be true, as you suggest, of the deeply held Catholic instinct that everything ultimately comes down to the Incarnation, and the belief that there are graced moments in which our destiny depends on how we choose.

BD: Maybe that’s the secret right there to great “Catholic writing,” yes? Graced moments. And they are rife throughout not only what we could with easy confidence call Catholic writing, but maybe in all of most great writing. So I might posit, if we were in a pub with excellent ales between us, that all really fine writing, all writing that is bony honest about human flaw and frailty and the shimmer of hope and sliver of crazy courage, is Catholic – which case we can cheerfully claim Shakespeare, for example, as a great Catholic writer. Which he was secretly anyway.

CG: Whether or not Shakespeare was literally a Catholic, he was literarily a Catholic. He certainly tried to do justice to what is. His characters feel like real people. He was soaked in an understanding of the world that was the product of a thousand years of English Catholicism. His works are in sympathy with that tradition at a moment when it was in crisis. His characters find coherence in terms of the tradition amidst the onslaught of the cultural forces that were destroying it. He apparently stopped writing years before he died. Maybe that was because his society had arrived at a point from which he was no longer able to guide his characters to “happy” endings by light of the old worldview. Shakespeare’s use of language is analogical and allusive in the best Catholic manner, showing little sympathy for the new ideal of single, exhaustive definitions of things. And his stories are characterized by graced or dis-graced moments in which destiny hangs upon a choice. Will Macbeth murder his houseguest? Will Hamlet be or not be? But the graced moments in literature that interest me most happen not to the characters in the stories but to the reader.

BD: O, that is beautifully and powerfully said, Charlie. And I think maybe you are utterly right in that last remark – maybe it’s the case that the very greatest literature of all is that which changes, elevates, opens, cracks, enlightens the reader – that which forces open a door in the reader’s heart – maybe even that which shivers and shakes and rattles the reader such that his mask and disguise cracks enough to let light, however unwelcome that may be, get in. How very often priests have said this to me of their vocational road, that they ran from the hound of heaven, that they fled Him down the ways and paths, and finally turned and could run no more from what they knew to be true, and what they knew they were called to do. And many of the books and writers I admire the most as great Catholic literature are unsettling, shivering, rattling, aimed at deeper water than the usual entertainment or confirmation of what we all assume to be true. Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, for example, which is searing and horrifying right from the start, forcing the reader to immediately confront the roil of evil and injustice and cruelty that squirms in human beings, from which only our courage and grace and love can free us. Sometimes I think the only way we really are changed, really are awakened, is by the effect of story. I doubt any lecture has ever caused someone’s persona to crack and allow the truer being inside to emerge, shyly, scared, shining; but I’d guess that happens every eleven seconds through story. Somehow we can digest a story and the best ones stay in us as seeds. We can ignore a great deal, but great stories have an eerie and, dare we say it, miraculous power, don’t they?

CG: I agree that the best kind of story stays in us like a seed, but for me it is often like a seed stuck in my teeth. It pesters and annoys and prevents me from being comfortable. It makes it difficult for me to chew the cud of self-serving platitudes that would sustain a placid bovine existence. Or the story is like a wedge with a dual function. It both cracks open the reader’s heart, and stops it from closing up again. In ordinary circumstances we cultivate the illusion that we are self-sufficient. We think and act as if we were capable of getting what we want from life by our own unaided efforts. I suspect we adopt this stance as a way to cope with our fear of change, suffering, and death. We pretend we are invulnerable to stop ourselves from trembling. The tactic is self-defeating. The protective shell into which we retreat ends up impoverishing our life by repelling love and grace. And sooner or later death comes anyway. It is this illusion of invulnerable self-sufficiency that a story cracks open, so that love and grace can pour in.

BD: Amen and then again amen. I heard a brilliant teacher recently characterize her life’s work as “making her students beautifully and productively uncomfortable,” a phrase that seemed not only wonderfully salty and wise in the ways of education as epiphany, cracking open, awakening, startling, forcing people to confront and challenge old ideas and new ones – all this in service to subtle illumination -- but also salty and wise in the ways of living and loving and insistently trying to celebrate the holy while being inundated by tumult and travail. Disturb us, Lord, when we are pleased with ourselves, said the noted pirate and slaver Francis Drake, when we have dreamed too little, when we sailed too close to the shore, when we cease to try to build a new earth, and I think maybe old Sir Francis was being perceptive about the greatest Catholic literature without knowing it, quite. So, to circle around, and maybe get close to the end of this riveting discussion, the greatest Catholic writers seem to me the ones who ripple and riffle us and make us startle and jump by the eerie depth of their knowledge of us (boy, that’s uncomfortable), by luring us into confrontations with immensely uncomfortable moments of teetering grace (Flannery O’Connor the master there), by wheedling us into staring uncomfortably at paradox, the first law of this particular universe (Andre Dubus the master there, seems to me, and for proof see his extraordinary “A Father’s Story”), by making us stare evil in the eye in such a way that we cannot weasel or sidle away like we usually do (see Annie Dillard’s stunning For The Time Being, or Primo Levi), or by gently leading us into Catholic milieus, and then sweetly and deviously showing us that religious context confers zero when it comes to courage grappling with cupidity – see Muriel Spark, or Morris West, or that unfairly-being-forgotten quiet genius James Farl Powers, or those most wonderful of Irish writers Mary Lavin and Frank O’Connor. I mean, Powers’ brilliance was in part showing that even being a priest was not guarantee whatsoever of any kind of peace or wisdom. Present company excepted, of course, Charlie.

CG: And the next island over from Ireland gave us, in the twentieth century, a remarkable cadre of writers who were converts to Catholicism. A few of them, like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, were, while they breathed, contenders for the title “greatest living writer of English.” Waugh’s faith sustained him in existence. Without the meaning and purpose it afforded, he would probably have descended into self-destructive despair. Greene seemed to use Catholicism as a source of seemingly insuperable obstacles he could surmount in his stories; it was as if he were saying, “Few writers would dare to make a heroine of a casual serial adulteress, but I, Graham Greene, will make you acknowledge that Sarah in The End of the Affair is a saint!” Or “Who but I, Graham Greene, could make a holy martyr of a whisky priest with an illegitimate child?” And in The Power and the Glory he makes it happen. But Waugh and Greene matter to us primarily because their stories are the occasion of innumerable graced moments of the kind we’ve been talking about. Perhaps with writers of their stature we would expect no less. It is more surprising that less-lauded literary converts have provided the same experience for so many readers. I’m thinking, for example, of G. K. Chesterton, who was a kind of mystic of everyday experience, and of the eschatological novels of Robert Hugh Benson, and of Baron Corvo’s wish-fulfillment fantasy, Hadrian VII. Authors like these show it is not only the greatest Catholic writers ever who have the greatest possible effect on their readers.

BD: Aw, well said, Charlie. That sends me off on a mental sprint through the hardly-known but glorious writers of graced moments, that’s a great phrase – the extraordinarily named Breece D’J Pancake, for example, whose one book of short stories is astounding; or Paul Wilkes, whose The Death and Life of a Parish Priest is one of the great American Catholic texts, I think; or the great poet Marie Ponsot, whose work is very often quietly and deftly about resurrection in every sort of way. But the evening draws nigh, Charles, and there is laundry to be done and ale to be savored, so we had better close up shop, and offer farewell, and bow in appreciation of each other’s nutty verve, amen. And then again amen.

--

Father Charlie Gordon, C.S.C., is a professor of theology and literature at the University of Portland, Oregon’s Catholic university. Brian Doyle is the author of nine books of essays, nonfiction, and “proems”; his novel Mink River was published in October by Oregon State University Press.

Interview with Patrick Madden

Pat Madden is the eighth interview at The Fine Delight. This interview was conducted through e-mail. A bio note, as well as a link to Pat's book, follow the interview. As always, wise words here, Pat: thank you!

1. "Remember Death" is a great example of your tendency toward the associative (and how the associative deepens independent elements within an essay). What's your process of composition with a piece like "Remember Death"?

That essay talks a bit about how it came to pass: I heard the phrase “memento mori” at a reading by Brenda Miller, which was a phrase I knew from an old Rush tour book, so I started jotting down a bunch of associations I had with that phrase. Then I began unpacking (or unraveling) a few of them (researching, finding words to give them form), which led to memories in graveyards and high school, then researches to track down more on this “vanitas” style of painting, which led to the Danse Macabre and Kevin Bacon and Jesus’ hard sayings and Morse code and so many other tangents, and then the strange convergence of spending a day with my best friend, Vin, on the anniversary of our schoolmate’s death, exactly double our lives later. Meanwhile, as I was reading other things, I was finding resonant quotations written long ago by others. Essays and essayists have always been concerned with death. The death of his father and best friend led Montaigne to retire and begin his writing. Speaking of Montaigne, my essay’s epigraph, for instance, didn’t start me writing but, when I found it later, seemed to be an affirmation from the universe that I was on the right track. I tacked it on after much of the essay was written. Similarly, I found the ending before some of the middle was done. This was one of the first really long essays I ever wrote, and when I began I had a sense that it could extend infinitely in all directions, but that I could corral some subset of “death” into a literary form that would read linearly but exist spatially. It sprawls rather wildly, but I tried to contain it with subtitles and clever transitions and repetitions and resonances of symbol or idea. And in any case, I believe that, punning on Paul, “All things work to the good of them that love essays.” When I’m writing, it seems that my whole life aligns with my project. That happened with this essay, for sure.


2. I always leave your essays feeling a bit smarter (in "Remember Death," about the tradition of vanitas). Is there an essayist who accomplishes the same for you?

Thanks! Certainly in writing them I feel like I get a bit smarter (I do a lot of research as I write). Most essayists accomplish this for me, really, or at least the essayists I like to read do. That’s because they never limit themselves to writing about what happened to them. They marshal history and philosophy and science to dance with their experiences. Two writers who especially fill me with knowledge are W. G. Sebald and Ian Frazier, who personalize vast quantities of stuff and write it literarily/artfully. I should also mention a kind of radio essay in the shows produced by RadioLab (Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich), which you can hear on NPR or download from www.radiolab.org. These guys are so entertaining in that intellectual way, and their subjects (shows on “time” and “chance” and “identity,” etc.) are absolutely fascinating.


3. You give glimpses of your Catholic upbringing in Quotidiana. How did those past experiences compare with, and perhaps inform, your current thoughts on faith and divinity?

I joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at age 20 (when I was a junior at Notre Dame), but I see this as a direct result of my upbringing, not really a rejection of Catholicism or its fundamental tenets. My formative years have certainly been profoundly influential on my current beliefs, likely beyond my ability to comprehend. I like to think that I have an appropriately nuanced and complex belief in God, driven by a humble awe at confronting the miraculousness of everyday life as well as the terrible sufferings that rarely touch me but which besiege my brothers and sisters elsewhere. The deep truths of divinity and humanity seem mysterious and wonderful to me, yet not entirely inaccessible. I try to find spirit in everyone and everything. I’m never successful, but I try. I also try to recognize how I am a product of my past and an individual member of many overlapping communities and traditions. I think it’s likely that the Catholic tradition is more deeply engrained in me than the Mormon tradition, which I’ve adopted and which I believe firmly, but not blindly. When you ask about my “thoughts on faith,” I’m inclined to say that I wish we were all a bit more faith-filled, by which I essentially mean humbled (by the world, by life, by love, by God) and open to wonder.


4. Any Catholic (or, in the wider sense, Christian) literary influences?

Are you kidding? The first and greatest essayist was a Catholic! The essay is a Catholic literary form! (All joking aside, it seems to me the most catholic of all the literary forms.) Here’s Montaigne professing his faith, so to speak:

"I propose formless and undetermined fancies, like those who publish doubtful questions, to be after disputed upon in the schools, not to establish truth but to seek it; and I submit them to the judgments of those whose office it is to regulate, not my writings and actions only, but moreover my very thoughts. Let what I here set down meet with correction or applause, it shall be of equal welcome and utility to me, myself beforehand condemning as absurd and impious, if anything shall be found, through ignorance or inadvertency, couched in this rhapsody, contrary to the holy resolutions and prescriptions of the Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church, into which I was born and in which I will die. And yet, always submitting to the authority of their censure, which has an absolute power over me, I thus rashly venture at everything, as in treating upon this present subject."

This section, which begins the essay “Of Prayers,” was written after the Essays were censored by Catholic authorities in Rome, thus its deferential tone (note, too, how he offers advice for essaying: “formless, undetermined fancies,” etc.). But Montaigne really was a staunch Catholic despite religious turmoil during his lifetime and many family members converting to one form of Protestantism or another. And while he may have been a bit “wayward” in the eyes of the Church of his time, his heart seems to have been sincere. He was a believer who was unafraid of doubt. He could entertain contrary notions without losing his core faith. He was above all an essayist. And he did die in the Church, with a priest saying Mass in his room as he expired. There’s something fundamental about his Catholicism (including his resistances to dogma or to official pressure) that infuses the essays with a sense of holiness.

I’ve been deeply influenced by so many writers, most of them Christian, many of them Catholic, but I’ll mention here four recent influences who’ve probably not yet left a deep mark on me but who are exciting for their ruminative essays. I’ve been overjoyed to discover in the past few years Alice Meynell, Agnes Repplier, Louise Imogen Guiney, and Vernon Lee (pen name for Violet Paget), and it’s really only just now, as I double check their biographies, that I have become fully aware that these four, my favorite among the many women essayists I’ve discovered, were all Catholic. They’re very little known or read these days, so I’d like to recommend them (you can find work by all four at www.quotidiana.org). You might begin with Lee’s “About Leisure,” which begins Catholic-like, calling St. Jerome (ironically?) “the patron saint of leisure.” From there it’s quite pleasant and surprising.

And I’ll end with a special mention of a contemporary writer who has done more for me than almost anybody, in terms of influence and kindness both. Brian Doyle, whom you’ve just interviewed here on site, first came to my attention in the Best American Essays in 1998, with “Altar Boy,” then again in 1999, with “The Meteorites,” still two of my favorite essays. I loved his lilting sentence rhythms and tight attention to the beauty of words as reflection or conveyor of the beauty of life, which seems always beautiful (sometimes painfully so) when filtered through Brian Doyle’s brain. When I found a third Doyle essay, “Grace Notes,” in Notre Dame Magazine and realized that we were both alumni, I shot him a quick fan email, to which he graciously responded, and we’ve been in touch ever since then. I’ve read all of his books and have consciously sought to understand syntax the way he does (I’m not there yet, but the process has improved me). He’s been a tremendous ally, too, publishing a couple of my sorry attempts at poetry and three of my (not-so-sorry) essays in Portland Magazine. The first essay he published, “Laughter,” was selected for the Best American Spiritual Writing. I’m certain it was noticed because of its location in that well-known spiritual magazine. In any case, since then I’ve invited him to read at Brigham Young University three times, and he always packs the auditorium. It’s standing room only. As an essayist, he’ll likely never achieve much renown, but I want the world to know more about this humble man who’s in love with the world and shares his sharp observations and insights through his essays.


5. I think the essays in Quotidiana speak to two major concepts: a sense of awe at the complexity of the world, and a desire to catalog those complexities. Are essays better suited to revealing those concepts than fiction or poetry?

Absolutely. No doubt about it. OK, I’m just pushing buttons, and I’m reluctant to make such a bold declaration, but I do believe that essays, by their tradition and their form, offer writers (and readers) a way in which to more fully explore the mental processes involved in confronting complexity. Other literary forms are more overtly filtered, but essays, even if they’re necessarily subjective and incomplete and all that, give a fuller picture of a writer’s mind. I’ve often thought that while we may gain a lot by reading the great novelists and poets of the past, we can never quite regain them. Their writing presents their ideas at a distance. Essays get us closer to the naked individual spinning through the dizzying world, naked and honest, trying to make sense of things. I like to say that essays more fully resurrect their writers, which in turn makes us readers feel more accompanied in our own trials and tribulations or celebrations. So, in short—don’t hate me, novelists and poets—but yeah, I think essays are more suited to revealing and expressing awe at complexity.


6. As a professor at BYU, you must read many creative pieces by students. What are their preconceptions of the essay genre? What are some of your favorite essays to teach?

I think we human beings have a natural tendency to tell stories, which is good, and to think that our stories are unique and inherently important, which is not so good. When most of us begin writing, we retread a lot of the ground that’s been tread before, and our small variances on familiar themes are insufficient to make literature. I’m talking about trite and true stories in which we play victims or conquerors. Early on in my teaching, I learned that I should do some heavy instructing about the history of the essay before I assigned students to write. This tends to help young writers push past their first-level thoughts, to subvert or complicate their default viewpoints, to question themselves, to “interrogate their ignorances” as Phillip Lopate says. I’ve been really happy with the results: students utilize their experiences to drive their minds into interesting thoughts, making new connections between things that don’t often come in close contact. Many of them write “On _____” type essays. They seem to be happy with the freedom/encouragement to think instead of just recount.

I do have a core set of essays that I love and that seem to exert a good influence on students. In addition to the essays I’ve already mentioned, I’ll list a few indispensible ones (in no particular order): “New Year’s Eve” Charles Lamb, “On the Pleasure of Hating” William Hazlitt, “Relief” Kim Dana Kupperman, “Final: Comprehensive, Roughly” Desirae Matherly, “Red” Michael Danko, “A Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket” Louise Imogen Guiney, “Of Practice” or “Use Makes Perfect” (variant title translations) Michel de Montaigne, “Words” Agnes Repplier, “Shadows” Alice Meynell, “Auscultation” Steven Church, “On Running after One’s Hat” G. K. Chesterton, “Savannah la Mar” Thomas De Quincey, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackboard” Roger Schmidt, “Seeing” Annie Dillard, “Beauty” Scott Russell Sanders. I could keep going, but I’ll stop.


7. 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?

His name is really Patrick Madden? I’d like to meet him. I suspect that the Catholic Church already does benefit from the work of Catholic scholars and writers, even if there’s no official conduit for such influence to make its way into doctrine or practice other than by contagion, a kind of humble (and slow) fellow-infection. Theologian A publishes her ideas or shares them in a classroom or in a conversation after a Mass; reader or parishioner or student B finds in these ideas some value and changes his life subtly, which, in turn, affect others in similar ways. The molecules in a gas gain energy by catching momentum from their fellow molecules, no? I don’t see writers as inherently prophetic, though they do tend to pause and think about life, and to gather a wide body of influences through their research, so their ideas can often be more ecumenical than the general populace’s, and they tend to have a facility with language, which can make for a rhetorically pleasing packaging around difficult or deep ideas. Going back to Montaigne: here was a man who stayed quite firm in his Catholic beliefs, yet allowed himself to think about the inherent complexities of life in ways that undermined simplistic dogma. Maybe we should all do that. It’s a firmer faith that’s weathered some resistance, I think.


8. I love your mentions of non-literary culture within Quotidiana. If someone has never listened to Rush, what track should introduce them to the group?

“If someone has never listened to Rush”? Do such people exist? I like a lot of Rush songs, but I can’t really beat conventional wisdom. I have to go with the obvious: “Tom Sawyer.” This was the first Rush song I ever heard, and it hooked me! (Note: I find Rush’s lyrics to be superintelligent, a cut above typical rock fare, but “Tom Sawyer” was co-written with another guy, outside the band, who was a bit surreal, so its lyrics are a bit cryptic). It’s on the Moving Pictures album, which is full of great songs and is probably better than any “greatest hits” package anyway. Other favorite songs: “Subdivisions,” “The Spirit of Radio,” “Natural Science,” “Limelight,” “YYZ.” I could get quite esoteric on this topic, but I’ll stick with the “gateway” songs for now.


9. What project(s) are you working on now?

I’m writing a second collection of essays, similar to the first, but ranging over different subjects in different ways. Just this week I finished an essay called “Fixity,” which begins in Greenwich, the earth’s Prime Meridian, from which we measure out longitude and our time. From the narrative of my visit there, the essay examines the human mania for a fixed point of reference, including moments of birth, the Genesis account of creation, an eternal, immutable God, and even the Big Bang Theory. It’s a kind of dizzying tour of history and thought wondering why we feel such a need. My other recent or current essays think on originality, middles, coincidence, and, you’ll be happy to know, Nick, that I’ve got a big essay inspired by the Pentecost stained glass window in Our Lady of Mercy Church, which is dedicated to the memory of “Ralph Scott’s mother and father” and which depicts the apostle John with a right hand on his left arm. There’s a lot of traipsing about Whippany in that piece.

*

Patrick Madden is the author of Quotidiana (Nebraska 2010), a collection of personal essays, some of which have appeared in The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Fourth Genre, and the Best American Spiritual Writing and Best Creative Nonfiction anthologies. He teaches at Brigham Young University and curates www.quotidiana.org, an anthology of classical essays and essay resources. Like your host, Nick Ripatrazone, he grew up in Whippany, New Jersey, a wonderful, lovely place. Though he lives now in Utah, with his wife, Karina, and their six children, he remains a New Jerseyan at heart.

"Remember Death" by Patrick Madden

"Remember Death" appears in Madden's debut essay collection, Quotidiana. I reviewed the book for The Southeast Review, and my feelings are pretty clear: I loved it from start to finish, and hope more university presses (and other publishers!) give such insightful non-fiction collections a chance.

"Remember Death," like many of Madden's other essays, is lyric, encyclopedic, associative, and enlightening. I first read these pieces during long NJ Transit rides from Far Hills to Newark, and my copy of his book is literally riddled with notes. Everything in Madden's work refracts and moves, so that while this essay begins with Rush, we move between Montaigne, Mr. Lamb ("my eleventh-grade language arts teacher"), and elsewhere. Certainly quite the "literary" band, Rush "became my sounding board, my trolling net, my filter for apprehending the world."

Madden, in the self-awareness that makes the essay form so useful, notes that it is time to move from Rush (though they will return) to the "genesis of this essay:" a 2004 reading at the University of Utah by essayist Brenda Miller, who discussed memento mori (which sends Madden back to Rush, to Neal Peart, to more). Through them, Madden mentions that the Latin motto was imbued on many a vanitas to remind the faithful of the inevitability of death:

"vanitas is a hodgepodge, a collection of disparate objects hinting toward a mysterious meaning, relying on interesting and incongruous interconnections and allusions; a vanitas is a sort of painted essay."

Madden moves forward: death (the death of Christ) is a perpetually essential concept and symbol for Christians and Catholics:

"Crucifixes and crosses adorn churches and necklaces, relief carvings or stained glass windows or oil paintings represent the fourteen Stations of the Cross, readings and homilies and preachings remind and remonish. At Mass on Good Friday when I was growing up, Father John, along with two lectors perched on either side of the alter, read from John's gospel, acted out the reading in parts, and we, too, the congregation, chimed in, playing the part of the crowd."

Madden transitions to Sts. Jerome and Anthony, all the while refreshing the concept of remembering death. It's not possible for me to do justice to all the literary dynamics of Madden's prose within this form of a review/profile (he's sprinting and leaping, and right now I'm jogging). My favorite excerpt is this gem about the center of all that matters:

"Jesus is most famous for his parables about loving one's neighbor and doing good, but every now and then he saddled his hearers with a paradox so lively, so enigmatic, that they, and now we, look the other way. We pretend he never said it. One of these sayings, which has bothered me from the first time I heard it, is "let the dead bury their dead." Jesus has just delivered his greatest hits, the beatitudes, from high on a mountain to a throng of people below. He has just taught his disciples how to pray with the "Our Father." "No man can serve two masters," he instructed. "Consider the lilies of the field," he directed. "Take no thought for the morrow," he challenged. And there are people wanting to hear more, wanting to follow this eloquent dusty man, to get what he's saying, to walk the walk like he does. Great multitudes are chasing after him . . . another man comes, hoping not to miss the boat, explaining that he'll be right back, he just has to bury his father. And Jesus will have none of it: "Follow me and let the dead bury their dead."

These are the paradoxes, the mysteries, of the faith. What Quotidiana does is remind the reader of the particular power of the essay form in the most capable hands.

*

Wait a minute. Before you go, please read "On Laughter." I heard Madden read this in the quaint Whippany Library. It's a bit of an idyllic place, really.

Placed next to "Remember Death," "On Laughter" really shows Madden's range. It's an essay written by a father (and, to be honest, one of my favorite essays on the act of parenting ever); a bibliophile; an observer. The essay circles back to the laughter of his daughter--like all his work, it moves so many places--and in this return it speaks to one of Madden's aesthetic points: as beautiful and complicated this world might be, it is the world right in front of us that is most pristine, most demanding of our attention. That an essay can accomplish this--to convince the reader the world is worth watching with eyes wide open--is something to be thankful for.

Interview with Ron Hansen

Ron Hansen is the seventh interview at The Fine Delight. He continues to be a huge influence on my work, so I'm quite pleased to share his words. This interview was conducted via email. A bio note, as well as links to Ron's books, follow the interview. Thanks for your great responses, Ron!

1. If I could choose only one novel to represent the best of literary Catholicism, my choice would be, hands down, Mariette in Ecstasy. Could you discuss your experience writing the book?

Thanks. I found a book of stunning photographs of the convent in Lisieux where Saint Therese and her sisters were cloistered. We read about saints all the time, but here was one of my favorites smiling at the camera as she did laundry, performing in a convent play with her veil off and her long hair loose. I felt privileged to have such an intimate glimpse of that secret life and found myself thinking, Why aren’t there novels like that? And almost instantly I heard myself say, If you don’t write it, who will?

I began writing the book with the first pages you see, intending to finally add other opening pages about her childhood. But when I got to the end of the novel, I felt that earlier life was either hinted at or unnecessary. I was surprised in the opening pages when after going along in a rather procedural way the voice of a priest asking a question suddenly interrupted the parade of events. I knew it as a cinematic device to make narratives more economical, but I had no intention of using it until it just sort of happened on the page.

As John Updike once said, it’s in the nature of novels to have problems at their core. I chose the problem of having a girl as ardently in love with Christ as Saint Therese of Lisieux be vexed by the injuries of stigmata in questionable circumstances and therefore be investigated as the sisters in that limited society took sides. My research included reading on all the most famous stigmatics, and I finally settled on a number of biographical details and letters of Saint Gemma Galgani, a beautiful, young, very pious Italian whose seemingly neurotic behavior caused her to be removed from several convents. She died in 1903 at age twenty-five.

Early on, I simply wrote brief scenes of the cloistered life I’d seen in that French book of photographs and experienced on my own in my Catholic grade school. I laid each scene on the floor until I found a rhythm, and then I developed a chronology based on the pre-Vatican II feast days. Sometimes the scenes actually comment on the saint for the day, and sometimes they present a somewhat contrary view. But I liked the idea of liturgical timelessness and the dreaminess of the present tense.

Like Gemma Galgani, Mariette, I knew, ultimately would be kicked out of the convent for a variety of good and bad reasons, and I wanted to imitate Thomas Merton’s gorgeous epilogue to The Sign of Jonas, entitled “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,” and so I wrote Mariette’s letter to Sister Philomene. In a Christology class I was taking, the professor, Fr. Fran Smith S.J., mentioned counseling a young woman about a religious vocation, but though she’d been praying continually about it, she’d gotten no clear sign about what she should do. And Fran told her, “Maybe God is saying, ‘Surprise me.’” Instantly upon hearing that, I recognized it as the final line of the book. I just had to write to that point.
 

2. The language of Mariette in Ecstasy is so rich. The novel reads as being consciously poetic and structured; how deliberate was your attention to language in the work?

William Carlos Williams is often quoted for his comment on his poetic method: “no ideas but in things.” I sought to honestly present the world in both its grandeur and ugliness and often just name what I imagined in a simple yet unfamiliar way, such as from the first page, “Half-moon, and a wrack of gray clouds.” Or, “Cattails sway and unsway.” Or, “Wooden reaper. Walking plow. Hayrick.” I was aiming for some of the qualities of prose poetry with an impressionistic, cinematic approach that edits a lot out that the reader is forced to fill in, thereby becoming a co-creator. Each sentence was very consciously worked on, and the vocabulary was always deliberate.

 
3. I have shared Mariette in Ecstasy with Catholics and non-believers, and everyone finds something to appreciate in the novel. Do you think "Catholic" novels need such wide appeal to be truly successful and representative of the faith? 
 
Oh, no. You can say that all true storytellers want to be popular and hence they take pains to be accessible, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for Catholic fiction intended for smaller audiences. I remember talking to William Kennedy about the audacity of the ghostly narrative of Ironweed, and he said, “But that’s the only way I knew how to write it.” Each book teaches its writer how it ought to be written, and that may leave some worthy manuscripts hunting in vain for an audience, but it doesn’t necessarily diminish their worth. Hopkins wasn’t fully appreciated until a hundred years after his death.


4. Your essay collection, A Stay Against Confusion, contains, among other gems, essays about John Gardner and Gerard Manley Hopkins (the great 19th century Jesuit poet). How did both Gardner and Hopkins serves as types of mentors to you and your writing?

John was a hard-working, vigorous, larger-than-life, immensely productive writer who was also off-the-wall, reckless, brilliant, learned, fun-loving, charismatic, and terrifically generous to young writers, lavishing fulsome praise on them even as he was wagging a disapproving finger at his peers. At a critical period in my life, he had faith not just in what I’d done but what I would do and his friendship and esteem made me feel I’d been accepted into a highly selective fraternity.

Hopkins was almost his opposite in having chosen a very ascetic life, and while John noted that a great influence on his own writing was Walt Disney, Hopkins was influenced by Catholic sacramentality, Greek and Latin poetry, Shakespeare, the Bible, and the acute observations of nature – as God’s holy book – that were encouraged by John Ruskin. It was Hopkins’s love of language and the exactly right word that first attracted me to him, and I liked him more the more I read about him. My friend the fine poet and biographer Paul Mariani refers to him as Father Hopkins and often thinks of him as a spiritual director. I have prayed to him, too, and been answered.

 
5. Several years ago you were ordained a deacon in the Catholic Church. You mentioned that "Being a deacon shouldn't have any effect on the readers if I do the fiction properly." How has the diaconate changed your life?

There’s an old saying that one should “Beware of any occupation that requires new clothes.” What I like about the diaconate is that it is an extension of the things I was already doing, as a lector, Eucharistic minister, and spiritual director, while giving me more opportunities to accompany the people of God at high points in their lives, whether it be their wedding, the baptism of a child, or the final committal of a loved one. An outsider would probably suspect that being “clergy” would cramp a fiction writer’s style or imprison him within a limited scope of pious subjects, but I have found the calling to be liberating because it intimately presents to me the lives of so many striving, ordinary, crazy, hopeful, sinful, fractured people who are, even at their worst, deeply loved by God. And if they are loved by God, I need to honor them with my writing. Church ministry often intensely acquaints one with the lines from John Donne’s poem: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”


6. Such an impressive range exists within your published books, and your forthcoming novel, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, even furthers your breadth. The book is based on the true crime of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray; what about that real event needed to be given life in fiction?

Richard Walter, the famous screenwriting professor at UCLA film school insists that people go to movies to figure out just what and who they are. Readers seek out fiction, and writers write it, for the same reason. A subject grabs you and half the time you’re working on it you’re trying to find out why it had such a powerful attraction to your psyche. What initially captivated me about Ruth and Judd was that they were demonstrably good people who little by little began to go wrong because of frustration and sexual yearnings and the dullness of their lives, until it began to seem logical that they should murder Ruth’s husband. The psychology of that fascinated me. Perhaps it comes from the quizzical part of me that wondered, in Hitler’s Niece, how Adolf Hitler could convince the otherwise sensible citizens of Germany to wage a world war and try to exterminate the Jews.

 
7. My favorite essay from A Stay Against Confusion is "Eucharist," which contains the following powerful paragraph about being a Eucharistic minister: "I realized there was an important theological point in that: I am, as we all are, a sinner; but in Christ I am loved and forgiven as the good thief on the cross; in him my faith and worthiness are sufficient." What, for you, is the single most essential element of your Catholicism?

The Eucharist is my food for the journey, and prayer is my rest, but if I have learned anything in my life as a Catholic it’s that it need not be so hard as some would make it. We can be confident that God knows everything about us and in spite of our faults and flaws we still are loved. Are accepted. Any religion can seem just a burdensome collection of dogmas and prohibitions, but in fact Christianity simply tells over and over again the amazing story of God so loving the world that he became flesh and lived and died just as we do and somehow he redeemed us. We can be at ease. One of my favorite Psalms is 131 and its lines, in the Jerusalem Bible: “My heart has no lofty ambitions, my eyes do not look too high. I am not concerned with great affairs or marvels beyond my scope. Enough for me to keep my soul tranquil and quiet like a child in its mother’s arms.”

 
*


Ron Hansen was educated in English literature at Creighton University, then studied fiction writing at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, and at Stanford University, where he held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. His novels include Desperadoes, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Mariette in Ecstasy, Hitler’s Niece, and Exiles, as well as a children's book, The Shadowmaker, a book of stories, Nebraska, and A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith & Fiction. He has twice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships in literature from the John Simon Guggenheim, Lyndhurst, and Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest foundations. Twice nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award, he was a finalist for the National Book Award for his novel Atticus, and is a recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Scribner will publish his novel A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion in June, and a collection of stories, She Loves Me Not, in 2012. Married to the writer Bo Caldwell, Mr. Hansen is the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University and a Permanent Deacon in the Diocese of San Jose.
 

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

Ron Hansen responded to an email I’d written as an undergraduate at Susquehanna. We had never met, but he answered a question I posed: how was he able to achieve such success in the literary world as an admitted Catholic? The question was framed with 20 year-old naiveté; as Rev. James Martin has noted during an earlier interview at this site, anti-Catholicism pales to other prejudices in this country. And I was just beginning to discover the incredibly rich and diverse Catholic tradition in American literature, a tradition that continues to evolve in contemporary letters.

Hansen responded quickly, and graciously, noting that he had to first write The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford—a “western,” and certainly mainstream literary fare—before he could publish Mariette in Ecstasy. Hansen needed to establish publishing credibility before he could release a book saturated in deep and complex Catholicism. But the attentive reader of Hansen knows that all of his texts are tempered with a Catholic worldview, even if that touch is implicit and careful.

His next note was even more interesting: that more writers than he could mention came to him on the sly, “like Nicodemus,” and wanted to talk about Catholicism. At this point Hansen was not yet a deacon; merely a writer who happened to be Catholic. The Fine Delight was created in part to communicate with such “seekers”. Hansen was clear (and I join him) that attempts to proselytize and convert are misguided and not the point; rather, the dramatization of the Catholic worldview made readers pause and reconsider the world (and the Word). RCIA didn’t need to be in their future; the Catholic sense, as Flannery O’Connor has intimated, is one of awe and grace, and it sometimes only speaks in whispers.

Mariette in Ecstasy is the most important Catholic work in recent memory. I am biased, since the book was an incredible influence on my own writing (and on my first book of prose poems, Oblations), but I have had many like-minded supporters. It is a condensed novel in length, but the concepts and characters and milieu are frighteningly real and powerful. I recommend it to everyone I meet that has even the faintest interest in literature, fiction, Catholicism, faith, stigmata, or language in its purest form. Mariette in Ecstasy works so wonderfully well for Catholics, and it also works so well for non-Catholics, or non-believers; the text is innately Catholic but an example of great art that is also catholic with the lowercase “c.”

The novel begins with two lists; first, the members of the convent, with Mariette being the only postulant (and immediately establishing the locus of the text in femininity, as the list is obviously devoid of men). The second list is titled “The Winter Life of the Sisters of the Crucifixion,” a daily schedule where the collective pronoun is valorized: “We rise in silence, go to choir, recite Matins.”

Hansen does not compose the novel in lists, but a central characteristic of litanies is the delineation of an idea into both part and progression, and Hansen recreates such specificity throughout the book. Prose often fills the typical novel’s page, and rhythm tends to disappear as text reaches the margin; not so in this work. The first section (and much of the book) occurs in individual, well-drawn lines, so that the work is close to prose poetry. The world, the setting of Du Couvent de Notre-Dame des Afflictions arrives in palpable snapshots, hued to perfection:

“Workhorses sleeping in horse manes of pasture.”

“Wooden reaper. Walking plow. Hayrick.”

“White hallway and dark mahogany joists. Wide plank floors walked soft and smooth as soap.”

“Wings batter and bluster. Tree branches nod and subside.”

These poetic lines frame the turn-of-the-century, cloistered milieu: a world of wonder. Setting transitions into ritual: prayer for the arrival of Mariette occur concurrent with (but dislocated from) her final nights at home, where her staid, doctor father stares out “at his hate” while she disrobes upstairs. The paragraph is the first clue that Hansen is doing something progressive here: Mariette “skeins her chocolate-brown hair . . . She haunts her milk-white skin with her hands.” The section concludes with the pointed pronouncement: “Even this I give You.”

Readers unfamiliar with the mystical tradition might be confused here. Isn’t this a postulant, a young woman ready to enter a celibate community of religious? Why is she standing in front of a mirror, naked, offering herself to someone?

These are necessary questions to ask. The novel provides not answers, but possibilities, and in doing so subverts and redefines our traditional conceptions of sexuality and ecstasy, blurring the lines between heresy and honor. Consider that Mariette’s entry into the convent is advertised as “the Spiritual Wedding of Their Son JESUS Our Lord and Redeemer to MARIETTE BAPTISTE.” Is not the religious existence a marriage to Christ? Hansen pushes the concept: later Mariette is not only “wedded” to Christ, she becomes Christ-like: “Mariette is kneeling on the floor, unclothed and seemingly unconscious as she yields up one hand and then the other just as if she were being nailed like Christ to a tree.”

Mariette is, at times, pure sexuality; she is envied by the other Sisters, she is reminded “to not tempt the holy priest with pretty wiles and movements and flattery as Satan may invite a young woman to do.” She is asked to revise herself, to, perhaps, reject and hate sections of herself. The Reverend Mother continues:

“She should expect loneliness and sadness and illness and hard use. She should expect, too, that she will be tempted to have particular affection for some of her sisters. Such affections are not permitted. For Jesus Christ ought to be their grandest passion, just as la sainte volonte de Dieu, God’s holy will, ought to be their only desire.”

That is Mariette’s only desire. Her connection to Christ is deeper than anyone else can imagine; deeper than her father’s skeptical admonitions, and perhaps even deeper than the old priest who considers her stigmata cases. Yes--now people might recognize this book as that book from 1991 that even wowed The Village Voice, The New Yorker, and The Nation. It should be no surprise that such a corporeal miracle occurs in one subsumed with Christ. Everyone wants Mariette to be a quiets postulant, but true prophets cannot exist in silence. Mariette’s palms begin to sting “like hate inked on a page.” Later more blood arrives, and notice Hansen’s nod, again, toward the Word:

“Blood scribbles down her wrists and ankles and scrawls like red handwriting on the floor.”

She begins to have Marian dreams: she is transforming. She is living testament, and an already unique book reaches new levels of oddity and beauty:

“Each foot is torn with injury. Each leaves a red print of blood on the floor. . . She holds out her blood-painted hands like a present and she smiles crazily as she says, “Oh, look at what Jesus has done to me!”

I know. Some might think this an idiosyncratic form of Catholicism, but I find it refreshing. If you really, really consider the tenants, the elements, the complexity, and the beauty of the faith, you must engage and accept the honest oddities that make it so permanent and powerful. Hansen, through some grace, captured this better than any writer I have ever read.

The final third of the novel reaches a fever pitch as Mariette’s stigmata comes under heavy institutional and social inquiry, and her status as a prophet, martyr, or mystery will have to stay secret until readers find this book. It’s an absolutely necessary read for Catholics, but for anyone interested in original fiction, or the power possible in a compressed novel, it is a blessed find.

One other thing--the final two words of this book will haunt me forever.

Tomorrow: an interview with Ron Hansen.

Interview with Mary Biddinger

Mary Biddinger is the sixth interview at The Fine Delight. This interview was conducted through e-mail. A bio note, as well as links to Mary's books, follow the interview. Thanks for your thoughtful responses, Mary!

1. "Saint Monica Burns It Down" is a poem that made me smirk, nod my head, and think. The poem was published back in 2008, but could you speak about its composition?

This poem is a departure from others in the chapbook because its central “her” is a bit ambiguous. Is the she Monica, or is Monica the other woman? Is the he one of the male characters appearing elsewhere, such as Monica’s beloved Kevin McMillan, or her not-so-beloved husband Jason? The ambiguity allowed me to incorporate an element of deception into the poem itself, since the poem is about infidelity, subterfuge, and revenge.

Like many of my poems, “Saint Monica Burns It Down” started with a collection of images bumping against each other in my head. I was probably handling some hot peppers and wondering if a vengeful spouse or lover might ever consider using them as a weapon. Peppers like that can certainly help deter wildlife from windowsills and gardens. I also wanted this poem to create an unsettling domestic sphere, with limited comforts and the potential for danger around every corner. Saint Monica is as much about unmaking a home as making one, and I hoped that the scene itself reflected the emotions of the poem, or even better, managed to convey them to the reader.


2. I'm really looking forward to your forthcoming chapbook, Saint Monica. Could you tell us more about this project (how it started, the process, etc.).

The first Saint Monica poem was “Saint Monica of the Gauze.” I wrote it on sort of a whim, without contemplating who Saint Monica was. I’m sure her hagiographic background was somewhere in my subconscious, but I wasn’t looking for a new patron saint, and I definitely wasn’t scouting for the protagonist of a project book. I was just writing a poem and I gave it a title. I didn’t give it any thought until I was at a funeral and looked over to see a stained glass window with Saint Monica’s likeness on it. The funeral was incredibly heartbreaking—a young wife and mother who had lost her life to cancer—and the church was packed with mourners. I’m an emotional person, and somehow at that moment I realized that Saint Monica had found me for a reason. Yeah, it sounds cheesy, but I refuse to deny the serendipitous beginnings of the book. Poetry itself is already mystifying enough.

Soon I realized that the persona of a new Saint Monica was an ideal figure for articulating some of my thoughts about coming of age in the rust belt Midwest. There are references to the hagiography throughout the book, but my Monica is a reinvention of the saint as an ordinary girl. Amazingly, people liked reading the Monica poems as much as I enjoyed writing them. I had fun with Monica because she was a version of myself, which enabled her to be both authentic and fictional. I wanted the chapbook to tell her story in vignettes, rather than in a linear narrative. I wanted the chapbook to have a message, without being sanctimonious. Catholicism is part of my culture, and it was my intention for the book to be an ethnography of sorts.


3. You edit Barn Owl Review; in your experiences at BOR (or elsewhere), have you encountered many poems that engage faith? What are some of the successes/mistakes you've seen in those poetic attempts?

Readers of BOR may notice that we have quite a few poems that reference religion in some way. I co-founded the magazine with poet Jay Robinson, who is a graduate of Calvin College and was raised Presbyterian. Religion is an interest for both of us. We are churchgoing folks, albeit with different churches. Our magazine is by no means a religious publication, but we are open to publishing poems about religion. Now that Mike Krutel has joined the editorial staff, we have another former Catholic school kid on board, so if we ever have a Protestants-versus-Catholics BOR basketball game, at least I have some backup on the court.

As editors, we tend to be impressed with faith-oriented poems that incorporate humor, or mysticism, or both. The new issue of BOR, which will be hot off the press in February, features the poem “Why God is a Woman” by Nin Andrews, as well as “Jesus, My Suitor” by Liz Robbins. Maybe someday we’ll do a special web feature collecting all of the religion-oriented BOR poems from past issues. In terms of missteps, we’ll likely pass on any poem that’s hateful regarding someone’s religion, or that promotes degrading caricatures. We also prefer poems with an element of surprise, and freshness.


4. Any Catholic literary influences?

I am wowed and energized by a number of younger contemporary poets who have a Catholic background, or who write about related subjects. Anna Leahy comes to mind right away, with her marvelous saint poems. Steve Kistulentz, my favorite former altar boy, also writes poems that delve into notions of Catholicism. And Phil Metres has some incredible poems that are actually prayers. I had no idea that poets could write poems that are prayers. I’m not sure I would ever want to, since Phil already does such a beautiful job of it. My dream reading would have all four of us reading poems that relate to faith in some way.

I should also note that there’s a beautiful essay by Elizabeth Robinson in the book I recently edited, The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics, which addresses in a secular way the use of persona and the mystical poem. This is not a Catholic literary influence, because the essay discusses a “transcendent mystical experience” that is not linked to a particular religion, but I found it related quite directly to my work with Saint Monica.


5. What are the elements or traits of Catholicism that make it so appealing to writers?

I’d have to say that the element of tradition is appealing to writers. Even if writers themselves aren’t Catholic, their neighbors growing up were, or their friends from school were. Unfortunately, I also believe that controversy attracts writers, some of whom choose to resort to stereotypes of Catholic characters, or to who write inaccurately about the Church. I admire writers such as Rachel Dilworth who are able to approach potentially sensational topics with great care and reverence (yet with bravery, too).


6. 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?

Every day I aspire to help people, whether it’s letting someone merge into traffic in front of me, or lending an ear to a student who needs encouragement. Of course, this approach isn’t exclusive to Catholicism, but my religion is what taught me to be a good citizen of this world. I feel tremendously grateful for the gifts I’ve received in life. I get to do what I love for a living, and I am thankful every day. I also appreciate the fact that being Catholic makes me part of a large and diverse community. When my family lived overseas, or even when we traveled in the states, we always visited new churches and went to Mass there. And finally, I feel that being Catholic taught me how to leave myself in a way, how to step outside as part of the ritual of the Mass. The Mass itself—the language and music of it—has certainly had an influence on the cadence of my work, the music of it. I love listening to my four year old son because he understands the Apostles’ Creed to be a series of sounds, not necessarily words. He’s too young to read them on paper, but he can repeat those words, and feel the way they speak to each other, and to the worshipers.


7. 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?

So many writers, myself included, wish to make a statement about the human condition. I would love for the Church to further explore the role of the arts in promoting social justice, and representing the lives of people far removed from the relative comforts that many of us enjoy.


8. You have another full-length collection forthcoming (with a great title), O Holy Insurgency. What should we expect with that collection?

Thanks for asking, Nick. As the title might suggest, this is a book that’s not afraid of hyperbole. O Holy Insurgency is a collection of epic love poems. Quite a departure from Saint Monica’s world of forbidden longing and unhappy homes, I know. I had originally planned to make Monica into a book-length collection, perhaps with thematically-related non-Monica poems included. But after several incarnations of that manuscript, I ultimately decided not to go there. In order to have a full arc, and a complete book, I would need more—for lack of better terminology—“bad marriage poems.” And I had reached a point in my life where bad marriage was no longer a concern. I was incredibly happy, and everything felt rather grand and epic. The Saint Monica poems were finding good homes in journals such as North American Review and Ninth Letter, which gave me the confidence to try something a little nervy.

O Holy Insurgency uses an abundance of religious imagery, but it’s more about a general sense of power (and oppression) than about Catholicism. In order to write an epic book I had to take all of my figurines out of the tidy dollhouse and build a jagged stone castle for them instead. In Saint Monica I felt somewhat restrained in terms of the erotic, and I was limited because the relationships were so troubled in the first place. Saint Monica is a cautionary tale about cautionary tales. I was ready to write a book that threw caution to the wind.

Of course, this created a unique dilemma in seeking a publisher. As a publisher myself, I have very strong preferences for certain presses, and I wanted this book to find a home that would let it be epic, and that would have epic feelings for the poems, a real passion. I can’t really describe the morning that I learned Black Lawrence Press loved the book as much as I love it. Let’s just say that I jumped up and down a few thousand times.


9. What project(s) are you working on now?

Finishing O Holy Insurgency was bittersweet. It felt like my magnum opus. So what was next? I don’t necessarily need a project in order to write, but I was feeling daunted without one. I wanted to write some silly poems, almost as a joke, since the last book had serious overtones. I had been thinking about how our world is going electronic, and how very few things are coin-operated anymore. You can swipe a card to purchase a subway ticket or a soda. Back in the day, we had to fill those machines with quarters. So I started thinking about machinery, and coin-operated things, and things that would be pretty hilarious or terrifying if they became coin operated (such as an apple pie, or a lung). I realized that what I was really trying to get at was a sense of nostalgia. The poems in this new collection often hearken back to a pre-gentrification sense of urbanity, the rowhouses when they were teeming with children, not high-end appliances and granite countertops.

I am hoping to recreate a lost city, or at least to testify on its behalf. The landscape is a not-so-veiled version of the west side of Chicago. The book is an elegy for the nickel, a love song to the washing machine that swallowed a handful of quarters in exchange for watery turbulence. And of course, anyone remotely familiar with Chicago knows that it is a city full of steeples.

*

Mary Biddinger is the author of three collections of poetry: Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), the chapbook Saint Monica (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), and O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), and co-editor of one volume of criticism: The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and Ploughshares. She edits Barn Owl Review, the Akron Series in Poetry, and the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Akron/NEOMFA.

LINKS:

http://www.marybiddinger.com/

http://wordcage.blogspot.com/

Mary Biddinger page on Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/6zsv8z3