Interview with Mark Bosco SJ

Mark Bosco SJ is the fourteenth interview at The Fine Delight. This interview was conducted through e-mail. A bio note follows the interview. I'm pleased to share such informed responses--thanks for your time, Mark!

1. Flannery O'Connor has such wide appeal: short-story writers claim her as one of the best practitioners of the form; historians of American creative writing programs cite her as possibly the most successful graduate of the collegiate "system"; and teachers and professors share her best known stories annually. That said, her Catholic identity is often ignored--or at least misinterpreted/misrepresented. Why so?

You ask a good question. One of the reasons that O'Connor's Catholic identity is often ignored is because she is such a good writer. In a culture where faith and art have had so little to do with each other in the last century, critical readers respond to her vision with a sense of awe but without a way to pursue the significance of that awe. As one of my students recently told me: "to read O'Connor without understanding her Catholic faith is like eating the cherry on a banana split sundae but ignoring the ice cream underneath." To appreciate the depths of O'Connor's vision, one must have some access to her Catholic faith. What to do with the mystery---the surplus of meaning--one feels after reading her stories, that is the question. For O'Connor, that surplus is best expressed in the drama of Christian salvation. It was only after the publication of her essays (Mystery and Manners) and her letters (The Habit of Being) that readers began to see how important her Catholic faith was in crafting her art. So the reader--and the critic--has to choose to pursue how this faith manifests itself in her work. That extra step is not often taken, leading to misinterpretation and, indeed, wholesale misrepresentation.


2. Is there a particular O'Connor story or novella that you think especially examples this "surplus of meaning"?

Just about every story does this, but take "Greenleaf" for example. The story works on so many levels--an exposé of the changing social and economic paradigms around class played out between Mrs. May and the Greenleaf family; a psychological portrait of a dysfunctional family--Mrs. May and her two rather despicable sons; but also a confrontation with a mysterious bull that is the metaphorical center of the story's action. The violent piercing of Mrs. May by the bull in the last page of the story leaves the reader in a sort of awe, but unsure what to make of it--one senses the aura of a sacred encounter but is disturbed by how it has occurred. But O'Connor has invited the reader from the very beginning of the story to see the bull in its relation to Christ, literally wooing the complacent Mrs. May out of her materialist obsessions. Within the logic of faith (a theo-logic) that surplus finds direction--both a deeper resonance and a transcendent horizon of meaning. Without understanding the drama of salvation, the story merely mystifies. Or take "Temple of the Holy Ghost" where O'Connor suggests that a hermaphrodite at a freak show is the clearest comparison to Jesus' predicament--the dual sex of the hermaphrodite echoed in the dual nature of Christ, echoed in the composite nature of the Eucharist at benediction. If there is a tour-de-force moment of what I mean by surplus of meaning, then my vote goes to "Temple."


3. I love "Greenleaf," though my favorite O'Connor story is "Parker's Back." I find it appealing for similar reasons as you mention within "Temple of the Holy Ghost"--the focus on duality of body (in Parker's case, the revision of skin and identity through tattooing). "Parker's Back" is a story that always appeals to my students--regardless of religious background. What do you think it is about "Parker's Back" (and/or other O'Connor works) that appeal to audiences even without the knowledge of Catholic faith or tradition?

"Parker's Back" is one of my favorites, too, and timely for a generation of students who see tattoos in terms of identity and self-expression. I think one reason that this story, among others, appeals to such a variety of readers is the way the story is structured to reverse our expectations. O'Connor always begins her stories in the almost clichéd stereotypes of the South. She meets our first expectation in offering us a satirical look at the foibles and fumblings of human characters, perhaps intensified through the grotesque, but nonetheless real to us. But instead of a simple indictment of their Southern manners, she moves to the realm of mystery by the story's end. One not steeped in Catholicism might find this mystery ambiguous and destabilizing, but is still caught up in the reversal of fortune, the unexpected that irrupts out of the expected forms of plot and character. I think knowing and living inside a faith tradition only deepens the religious element in this reversal, directing it toward a great horizon of meaning.


4. Speaking of O'Connor--could you talk about the upcoming conference at Loyola: "Revelation and Convergence: Flannery O'Connor Among the Philosophers and Theologians," scheduled for October 2011?

Loyola University is hosting the conference as a way to bring literary critics, philosophers, and theologians together in order to understand the depth and diversity in O'Connor studies. We want to focus on some of the thinkers upon whom O'Connor drew directly or of figures whose works help illuminate hers today. One need only see the list of books in O'Connor's personal library to realize how engaged she was in the intellectual currents of her time, as well as the developments in the Catholic theological world just after World War II. She read the giants of the Catholic intellectual heritage--from St. Thomas and St. Catherine, to Jacques Martian and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin--but also Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Martin Buber. So the conference's aim is to literally see the convergence of these thinkers in her intellectual and literary vision. We already have papers that look at O'Connor and Blessed John Henry Newman, Pope Benedict XVI, but also the theologian Karl Rahner and the philosopher Martin Buber. There will be some wonderful moments, too, during the proceedings. We will view a set of professionally produced documentary interviews done in the late 90s of friends of Flannery, including reminiscences by Erik Langkjaer, Sally Fitzgerald, and Robert Giroux. Our hope is to get an NEH grant next year and turn these interviews into a 2 hour documentary for public television. Added to all this, we will celebrate a Mass of Remembrance for O'Connor at the beautiful St. James Chapel in downtown Chicago, across the street from the conference building, and we will hear Bill Sessions read from his new biography of the writer scheduled to be published in October. It is shaping up to be an extraordinary event.


5. Sounds like a fantastic event--and O'Connor is certainly worthy of the attention. Another essential Catholic writer, of course, was Graham Greene. To start, did Greene view his Catholic identity differently than O'Connor viewed her own?

Yes, Greene's a convert, for one, so he comes to the faith almost haphazardly--because of his desire to marry a Catholic--and with a very different personality, not the least of which was a mild manic-depressive disorder that often affected his creativity. I think his Catholic identity is best understood as an artistic and faith journey much like John Henry Newman's.

Like many other British converts, his experience develops over time from merely a practical and intellectual conversion to a heart-felt experience of solidarity and identity. You might say O'Connor's artistic vision operated from the center of her faith, whereas Greene's was a life-long grappling at the borderlands of his faith. O'Connor read Greene and liked his writing, but was always suspicious of the dialectical tensions at the heart of his texts (what she called "Manichaean" tendencies), while Greene, in a letter to a friend, once mentioned how profoundly moved he was after finishing O'Connor's short stories and her collection of published letters.


6. You've identified Greene's "Catholic cycle" as including The Power and the Glory. In Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination you write "True to Greene's own thematic obsessions and borrowed heavily from his appreciation of the French Catholic novelists, the form of the Catholic priest expands into a lived identification with Christ." Could you discuss the whiskey priest as a character in the novel? Where does The Power and the Glory fit within Greene's canon (both "Catholic" and less Catholic works), and how does it compare with other novels populated by clergy as main characters?

Greene wrote over 25 novels, but most critics and fans would agree that The Power and the Glory is one of his best works. It is hard to categorize--a suspense novel, a political thriller, a theological drama of faith--all in the Modernist wasteland of revolutionary Mexico. We enter the novel in medias res, the whiskey priest already a hunted man for many years, trying to find an escape route out of the province of Chiapas. The reader travels with him through the terrain of his spiritual struggle to understand his vocation in light of his actions--drunkenness, fornication, and a waning pride in having outfoxed the police during the Church's persecution. The novel deconstructs his priesthood down to one essential mystery: that he is an alter Christus, an other Christ, not only in his cultic role in the Church, but for everyone, including the criminal gringo that he risks his life for. Like O'Connor's aesthetic of violence, this spiritual insight hits the whiskey priest almost unawares. He considers himself a great sinner who is confounded by the fact that he brings the presence of God (through the sacraments) to those he meets. I think readers are moved by the novel because we get to see this unfolding occur. Greene effects not a Catholic faith triumphant in its certitudes, but one humbled in its suffering. It is certainly one of the greatest stories ever written about a priest. You really do feel that surplus of meaning, for though it is constructed as a tragedy, one feels this exaltation won through the life and death of the priest. He literally "puts on Christ," makes the drama of Holy Week the only adequate way to understand his life. I often re-read the novel during Lent for this reason.


7. Besides Greene and O'Connor, what other writers in the Catholic tradition do you find most memorable? Any writers still publishing today?

In England, there is Evelyn Waugh (who was a close friend of Greene's) and Muriel Spark, both converts and both masters of British satire. I read everything by David Lodge, as well, who is still writing. Though he has an uneasy relationship with Catholicism, you can't help but see how that faith has colored everything he writes. His most "Catholic" novels are Souls and Bodies and Therapy. In the US, there is J.F. Powers and Walker Percy who coincide with O'Connor's work. Of writers today, Mary Gordon, Ron Hansen, Annie Dillard, and Louise Erdrich are still exploring the implications of Catholic culture and faith in their works. But probably the most intense novel of the Catholic imagination I've read is John L'Heureux's The Shrine at Altamira (1999), a devastating work of tragedy and redemption.


8. You teach in both the English and Theology departments at Loyola University, Chicago. What are the intersections between these disciplines? What particular course(s) do you most enjoy teaching?

There is a contingent of literary folks who see literature and faith--especially Catholic faith--as a viable discourse of culture, one that is necessary to understand if one wants to speak accurately and not reduce literature down to politics, psychology, or nihilism. I would call myself a theologian of culture, highlighting the various strategies writers use to approach questions of faith, love, and hope, that frames their religious imagination. I do most of my work on the Catholic literary imagination because I see it as a robust field. The intersection resides in the meeting place of poetry, narrative, and drama, and the aesthetics--really, the sacramental--vision that these works carry with them. To see behind, and within reality, as the poet Denise Levertov says. So I teach a course on Sacraments, but insist that we take a poem, a novel, a painting, or a film that illustrates the imaginative depths of each sacrament. I teach a course for literature called "Fiction on Faith," which looks at 20th century short stories and novels that embody this quest for some ultimacy in various ways, even if never named as God. But my favorite class to teach is the Catholic Literary Tradition. Students read and discuss 10 classic novels of the genre, recite poetry in class, and watch and evaluate films. We do a lot of Flannery O'Connor and Graham Greene, of course, for they are my 2 passions.


9. I've already interviewed one Jesuit priest for this site, Rev. James Martin. I find the work and intellectual breadth of the Jesuits continually inspiring. How has your life as a priest informed your scholarship?

Fr. Martin is a wonderful man, a very thoughtful--and witty--interlocutor with both Catholics and the larger American culture. I admire him greatly. My priesthood, too, is very important to my scholarship, and vice-versa. My first question of research was provoked by Greene's "Whiskey Priest"! And as a priest, I am so aware of the drama of Catholic faith, the movement of grace in particular lives and in communities. I see poetry, narrative, and drama, offering the possibility for us to sense, even participate in the stories that move our hearts.


10. What project(s) are you currently working on?

Right now I am working on a book called "Catholic Literary Modernism," trying to put into a single narrative the development of a Catholic literary aesthetic that often merges with but often times parallels Modernist aesthetics. After that, I want to write a book on Sacraments and the Imagination, as I find the need for a more compelling text to teach what I think is the Catholic Church's greatest gift to forming our world--the way God is mediated in the flesh of things, especially the Eucharist.


*

Mark Bosco is a Jesuit professor at Loyola University Chicago, teaching theology and literature, and running the Catholic Studies Program. He is at work on a book on Catholic Literary Modernism, and another work on Sacramental aesthetics.

Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination by Mark Bosco SJ

The sequence of interviews at The Fine Delight has convinced me that Catholicism and imaginative literature are inseparable. That might sound like an empty declaration--considering that I maintain this site and conduct the interviews--but I can assure you that my conceptions of this connection have only strengthened in the recent months. Surely Catholicism, its tenor and language, resides comfortably within the metaphorical, a world of "signs and wonders." The site has shown me that contemporary Catholic writers (of all varieties) are producing significant work: as Catholics, as doubters, during a conversation with tradition. For a Catholic audience, for a general audience.

I've been sharing the work of Catholic writers for some years now in the oral sense--but what I've learned is that such sharing is complicated, and not without the occasional problem. The world of Catholicism and literature is often connected by the world of scholarship--and that latter world is further split into the worlds of scriptural criticism and theology. One (of many) of many reasons for the existence of The Fine Delight is a desire to move reasoned discussions of Catholicism and literature into the mainstream, beyond solely the realm of quarterly journals of the discipline. The community and practice of peer-reviewed scholarship is essential, and yet it is dangerous when that world becomes insular, and the world of the Word is wrung. Certainly the work of those journals, that discipline, is good and necessary work--the type of work that trickles down to Mass--and invariably the best of such scholarship is passionate, organic, and world-aware, not merely academic.

Rev. James Martin is an example of a priest and writer who has done so much to broaden the scope of the intelligent Catholic cultural conversation. Here is another: Mark Bosco, also a Jesuit priest, is a savvy, brilliant commentator on the intersections between literature and the faith. Whereas Martin documents culture and Catholicism, and Mark Massa (another Jesuit!) investigates history and Catholicism, Bosco's particular talent is unpacking the Catholic identity of our greatest and best known Catholic writers. What I love about Bosco's work is that he is able to establish why, and how, the Catholicism of these writers is misunderstood--or perhaps even ignored.

How many teachers of Flannery O'Connor avoid discussions of her faith--or, to be less biographical, the violent and real faith within her fiction? A venial sin--yes, if ignorance of the faith is the reason. But a more common reason, perhaps, is the rejection of that faith as being provincial, or backward, or worse. Bosco's writing has shown that Catholicism IS the work and content of O'Connor, Greene, and others, and it would be nothing less than reductive to excise a discussion of faith from a discussion of their work.

In tomorrow's interview, Bosco will focus on why Greene's novel is a particularly apt Lenten choice for Catholic readers. For now, here are a few quotes from Bosco's essential Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination, in which Bosco establishes a schema, parameter, and context for a particularly "Catholic" fiction:

"[Greene] bemoaned the loss of the "religious sense" in the English novel . . . that sense became intimately tied to Catholicism, a faith tradition that could still evoke a metaphysical understanding of good and evil in the world and within an individual."

"The historical impact of endeavoring to read texts from such a "religious" perspective has meant that rarely if ever do the imaginative contours of Christian theology support or impinge upon literary interpretation."

"The Catholic novel in Europe originated in the neoromantic and decadent forms of French literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a reaction against the dominant discourse of Enlightenment philosophy and the antireligious doctrines of the French Revolution."

"Beginning with the novel Brideshead Revisited, published in 1944, [Waugh] attempted to use Catholicism not only to frame the issues and crises of modern society but also to offer Catholicism's vision and doctrine as an antidote to the present crisis in Western, and specifically English, civilization."

Interview with Andrew McNabb

Andrew McNabb is the thirteenth interview at The Fine Delight. This interview was conducted through e-mail. A bio note, as well as relevant links, follow the interview. Thanks for your responses, Andrew!

1. The Missouri Review is a very respected, and--I would argue--very 'mainstream' literary magazine. They were the first to publish "Their Bodies, Their Selves." I consider the story Catholic in the Flannery O'Connor sense rather than the devotional; have you experienced any hesitation on the part of magazine editors to publish works that intersect with the Catholic experience?

Tough question. I have my suspicions, but when it comes down to it, story rules. A superior story is going to find a home. You mentioned Flannery O’Connor. Her work was transcendent. Even if people found the Catholicity of her stories unappealing, you couldn’t keep those stories down. As far as stories that intersect with the Catholic faith, there are two distinct categories. One in which the characters are Catholic and the action happens, at least in part, in the context of the characters’ faith. If the story is well-done, few editors would object. The other category is one in which a more overt attempt is made to impart some specific Catholic ideal. I might be guilty of attempting a few of those. No apologies here. Those stories have to be expertly crafted, too, to make it past the gatekeepers. If they’re not well-done, they can be painful to read.


2. The Missouri Review tends to publish longer fiction ("Bearskin" by James McLaughlin was one of my favorites), although have recently begun including briefer pieces (see RT Smith's "First Meeting"). "Their Bodies, Their Selves" is a relatively short story, yet retains the power of a longer work. How did you approach the structuring and pacing of this story (and your other works of short fiction)?

I write short. I’m not a natural-born story-teller. I write, mostly, because I feel like I have something to say. Brevity and quickness are a by-product of having some place to go and wanting to get there before I go and mess something up.


3. "Their Bodies, Their Selves" begins with the line "They had lived a clothed life" and soon includes the sentence: "And speaking of physics, here the two of them sat, Drayton and Sarah Maguire, naked, wilted." Even the title alludes to "bodies." How did you approach the description and presentation of physical forms in the story?

It has been pointed out that I write about old folks a lot. It might be because I think a lot about what comes next. Diminishing physical capabilities and being forced to deal with an impending end (and new beginning!) are powerful topics. When writing about these topics, I simply try to imagine the depth of feeling and emotion and reflection those experiences must evoke. That’s what happened when I wrote “Their Bodies, Their Selves.” It worked. There have been very few stories that have naturally poured out of me and that was one. It’s probably my best.


4. The Body of This is your debut short story collection. Could you discuss the genesis of the book (did you publish all the individual stories, how did you make decisions about order, did you revise the story during the book process, etc.)?

About a dozen of the stories were published previously, mostly in good to very good “secular” literary journals, but also in a few Christian/Catholic outlets, most notably, “Not Safe, But Good,” (Best Christian Short Stories, 2007.) I first attempted to shop the collection to agents as part of a two book deal. The collection was really just an aside to a more saleable (if it was any good) memoir. The memoir was not, in fact, good (I can say, now, in hindsight.) Though the collection was well-received, few agents would take it on because few publishers want a stand-alone story collection from a little-known author. Story collections don’t sell. I was advised to seek out a small regional publisher or university press. I did and Warren Machine Books were excited about the book and agreed to take it on. With a small publisher there seems to be a lot more willingness to accept the author’s input. So I did have a say in the order of the stories, and in other editorial decisions. Having the book published was great fun and exciting and I learned a lot that will be helpful as future books come out.


5. What has been the reaction to The Body of This from Catholic-geared readers and audiences?

This has been the most interesting part of this whole process. Most Catholic readers warmly embraced the book, and a few outspoken Catholic readers have strenuously objected. As you mentioned, the body is a prominent theme in the book. In my mind, you can’t discuss the body at any great length without somehow hitting smack-dab into sexuality. There is a frankness and an honesty in the stories with regard to our sexuality and our bodies that has elicited strong reactions. Eliciting strong reactions has been gratifying, but one never likes to have one’s work compared to the awful and dissonant architecture of some of our modern churches. But ultimately, the controversy was good and led to great discussions; and it also helped to sell some books.


6. Graham Greene sometimes embraced, but more often lamented, the title of "Catholic" writer. How do you feel about the term? Is it useful or provincial?

I embrace it. It is an honor. Any time someone wants to refer to me as Catholic, I’ll take it. It can be useful, too. It’s hard to tell with any certainty, but by my estimation at least 50% of the sales of my book were to a “devout” Catholic audience. These folks bought the book because there was some part of it that was heralded, justifiably, as “Catholic.” As I mentioned above, short story collections don’t sell very well. That I had this additional audience to sell to was the envy of many purely literary writers.


7. Any Catholic literary influences (I get a hint of Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy in your palpable sense of description, but I might be wrong)?

Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ectsasy is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. I would put it in my top five favorites, and I think it probably did influence me. When I was just starting out though, Flannery O’Connor was an overt influence. I even wrote a story about a good-for-nothin’ southern preacher. The story got published on-line but has disappeared, mercifully, into the ether. WAIT, WAIT, no it hasn’t. I just googled it and here it is. Eesh, awkward, but not quite as bad as I remember. It is always surreal going back and reading early work.

Anyway, I think most young writers are heavily influenced by one or a few writers and as you are trying to find your voice you sort of borrow someone else’s for a while. But write long enough and you will become your own writer.


8. What are you currently writing/reading?

I have been reading mostly theology, papal encyclicals, classical devotional literature. I have also been re-reading spiritual books that I plowed through a decade or more ago and, unsurprisingly, the experience this time around is a lot different.

As for writing, in an unexpected departure from fiction, I am currently working on a book about virtue. You heard it here first! Prayers appreciated.

*

Andrew McNabb lives in Portland, Maine with his wife and four children. He is a full-time writer and full-time husband and dad. More about Andrew can be seen at http://www.andrew-mcnabb.com/

"Their Bodies, Their Selves "by Andrew McNabb

["Their Bodies, Their Selves" appears in McNabb's debut story collection, The Body of This.]

Early in the history of this site I lauded Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. Greene's novel is an example of honest literary Catholicism. I understand such honesty might not be appealing to all Catholics--I understand, but I will eternally remain confused. Ours is a religion where violence inhabits a central narrative--the Passion--and certainly Lent focuses the Catholic mind on the ephemeral nature of the body. Writers who remind Catholics that the religion is body-focused, sin-aware should be lauded for their necessary voices.

McNabb's story, "Their Bodies, Their Selves," begins with a curious line: "They had lived a clothed life." This story is a tight four pages, a form of flash fiction, so I'm drawn to the phrases contained within on the poetic level. "Clothed" is a heavy word in the center, heavy and yet soft, and I'm thought of others who have used the word, albeit in another phrase--"clothed in sin." I think of Saint Catherine of Siena, and of Leviticus 17:16.

The story is framed by "Drayton and Sarah Maguire, naked, wilted"--sitting under August dusk, "across from each other, just looking, and thinking." Their bodies are so central to this narrative--both their individual awareness of self, but of forms, and interpersonal reaction. McNabb directs us here with his diction--"flesh" and "natural state" but offers enough flexibility within the larger narrative (and the occasional authorial intrusion") to make the story wholly not didactic.

An accident occurs in this story: the husband, Drayton, falls in the bathroom. He is 84, but most importantly, he is embarrassed, although only his wife is in the house. McNabb uses a sound ("the unmistakable Smack! of the human skull on porcelain") to transition the narrative, offering the curious "maybe it was just life's gravity" to remind us of the larger forces at work here.

Drayton's sense of embarrassment is palpable, and saddening, though as a Catholic writer, McNabb has such control and concern for his characters within this narrative that we know the story never becomes exploitative. We learn the true dynamics of this relationship--and in one of the most successful twists I've seen in recent fiction, we truly understand why, at the end of this story, this elderly couple sits together nude. Sarah's actions upon entering the bathroom certainly have an initial oddness, but they become so realistic, so caring within such a brief narrative. Her actions are a sort-of offering, a revealing of self that is an action of love.

I immediately think of O'Connor--how the perceived "strangeness" of her fiction was really a hyper-attention to the real, a beautiful unfolding of honest emotions, so that the reader is forced to reevaluate the world. It's a wonderful story--and I hope to see more of the same from this talented writer.

Interview with Bernardo Aparicio García

Bernardo Aparicio García is the twelfth interview at The Fine Delight. This interview was conducted through e-mail. A bio note, as well as relevant links, follow the interview. Thanks for your insights into producing a Catholic-focused literary magazine, Bernardo!


1. Can you tell us about the origin of Dappled Things?

Well, perhaps as might be expected, it was one of those crazy ideas that can only grow out of having too much time on your hands. The summer after graduating from Penn, I was spending some months at home waiting for a job offer to come through, and that’s when the idea came to me.

My majors in college were economics and international relations—in fact, I only took two English classes while I was there—but my interest in literature and Catholicism had grown tremendously over the past four years and I found myself thinking that it was a pity that among so many Catholic publications, there were none whose primary focus was the arts. During college I had been privileged to meet many smart, talented Catholics, not only at Penn but in colleges across the country, and I thought, man, it’s really too bad that nothing exists where all that talent can be pooled together and showcased. At first I thought the idea of starting the magazine was pure pie-in-the-sky, but then I realized that since I did know all these great people, I might as well put them to work. So I sent some emails out and by December we had released our first edition online. Then a year and a half later, during the summer of 2007, we released our first printed edition.

I imagine most of your readers will recognize the title from the first line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty.” While the magazine was still in its pie-in-the-sky stages, I started looking for possible names and at first all that was coming to mind was some version of The [Something] Review, which I thought was terribly boring. So I began poring over the books in my library until I happened to run across “Pied Beauty.” As soon as I saw it, I thought, “that’s it.” The way Hopkins revels in that poem over “All things counter, original, spare, strange,” perfectly captures what we’re about. We want to publish work that gives glory to God by exploring a world that is “dappled,” irregular, surprising, that considers things that might be perplexing at times, yet all the more wonderful and satisfying for it. Mysterious, I guess, is the word, though I’m afraid it’s beginning to suffer through overuse.


2. What have been the successes and struggles of editing a literary magazine that "engage[s] the world from a Catholic perspective"?

On the success side, people really seem to want something like DT, so we’ve gotten overwhelmingly positive reactions from the start. I think many people today are frustrated with much of the literature being produced, either because it flattens and brutalizes human nature through reductionism, or because it fails to explore our spiritual dimension with seriousness and honesty. We try to fill that gap, and it’s something that readers and writers who hear about us appreciate.

The same goes for our team. All of us are volunteers and—believe me—I often wonder how we manage to have lives and keep this journal going at the same time. I, for one, have often daydreamed of chucking it. But I don’t because in my view the work is just too worthwhile. The same goes for the other editors. Not to get grandiose, but our mission is intensely motivating almost by necessity, since it brings together matters (art, God) that lie at the heart of what makes us human. That’s what gets so many of us—both editors and contributors—to give up our time, resources, and sanity to put together this journal. Unless so many people were willing to volunteer their work, DT could never exist, as we certainly don’t have the money. Our beautiful new website, for example, was coded by a brilliant high school student whom we had never met, who approached us online and offered her expertise.

With regards to struggles, the main challenge has been money. We are now a tax-exempt organization, so we’re hoping that this year we can succeed in getting some grants, which would be a huge help. The money problem is a bit of a vicious cycle, because the lack of money makes it more difficult to get the word out, which makes the number of subscriptions stagnate, which keeps ad revenues low. The new website has drawn lots of traffic, and that’s helping us break the cycle, but even just a few small grants would be tremendously helpful. We’ll see whether the Catholic angle is a help or hindrance in this respect. One worry we have is that arts foundations who might otherwise be well disposed will perceive us as “sectarian” and therefore ineligible for grants. My hope is that they will judge us on our artistic merits. We’ll see.


3. Are you ever surprised by how potential submitters self-define "Catholic" within their own writings?

That question touches on the much-debated, never-quite-resolved question of what “Catholic literature” is in the first place, if anything. We do think that is a meaningful term, or at least that there can be particularly Catholic approaches to literature—else I don’t think we would be in this business—but in many ways Dappled Things is an exercise in exploring that question. As editors we have our own ideas, of course, but we try to keep an open mind. Much of the material we receive is indeed explicitly religious and Catholic, but then again a lot of it deals with things that are very much of this world. We even get some submissions that, at least at the surface level, are concerned with other religions. To us everything is fair game because, well, we believe Catholicism is true. That means that it is one with reality, so insight into any part of reality can give us insight into the Catholic faith, and vice versa.

So yes, sometimes we get surprises. Some delight us; others, admittedly, leave us scratching our heads as to why the author thought we were an appropriate venue.


4. Your site has just undergone a beautiful redesign and relaunch in time for your 5th anniversary edition. What are some of your favorite selections from the new issue?

Most of the pieces in the new issue are actually selections from work published in the early online-only editions. Each editor got to select a couple of favorite pieces to republish, so I guess first of all I would have to recommend my own selections: “Refiner’s Fire” by Shannon Berry and “Light from the East” by Matthew Alderman. The former is a moving personal essay that deals with discernment, love, and the holiness of silence. It’s especially intriguing because it follows the author as her boyfriend drops her off at a contemplative convent to decide whether she should become a nun. The second piece is a very thorough essay on the question of orientation in the liturgy by one of our own editors, who also happens to be a brilliant architect and illustrator.

Other pieces in this issue that I’m particularly fond of are “Meat” by Matthew Lickona and “Carla” by Arthur Powers—both of them short stories—as well as the feature, “Sacred Places,” which is a collection of short essays by Joseph Bottum, Fr. James Schall, SJ, David Clayton, Joseph Pearce, and Duncan Stroik. Each essay considers a concrete location that has somehow enriched its author’s faith, a place in space and time that also points beyond either. Then there are several poems that really speak to me, but if I keep naming things I’ll just end up recommending the whole issue (which, in fact, I do!).


5. Do you think an active Catholic literary culture/subculture exists? What could be done to better sustain such a culture?

I guess that depends on how you define culture, and where it is that you’re looking. In any event I think it is undeniable that to the extent that there is such a culture, it is very weak. I think part of the reason is that we have gotten too accustomed to existing in the world according to the world’s own terms. When talking about Catholic culture, especially Catholic art and literature, the first thing people bring up is the “sacramental imagination.” That’s certainly true and important, but I think it is just as important to develop what we might call the “paradoxical imagination.” Perhaps I need a better term, but what I mean is that part of Christianity’s genius is getting at the truth of things by standing them on their heads. That’s how the most triumphant and hopeful image in our religion ends up being also the most humiliating and desperate: the crucifix. No Catholic literary culture or subculture is going to flourish until we can rediscover and internalize the paradoxes at the heart of life and reality, instead of just trying to create a sanctimonious or vaguely mystical version of what the secular world has to offer.

On a more practical level, I think it would be a huge step forward if we could turn our mega-parishes into actual communities rather than just centers where people gather once a week, like a movie theater. Others know better than I how we might achieve that, but here I just want to point out that to the extent that we do, we will see writers and artists who have actually developed the habit of understanding and experiencing the world through a Catholic frame of mind. Without community there is no culture, much less a specifically literary culture. One is built on the other. Aristotle said that we are political animals because it is only in a polis that we can exercise and develop the full array of the habits (virtues) that make us fully human. That’s exactly right, though I would add that at a deeper level we are ecclesiastical animals. In any case, if we want to develop the virtue of art in a way that is consistent with our nature as creatures created in God’s image, we need a community where that virtue can be fostered and actualized.


6. If you could publish one Catholic writer of the past in Dappled Things, who would it be and why?

Only one? I think in that case you’re basically forcing me to go with an obvious pick: Flannery O’Connor. Not only was she an amazing writer of fiction, but her essays and letters are required reading for anyone who wants to think about the relationship between Catholicism and literature. She’s been one of the strongest influences on our aesthetic and editorial philosophy, though through her we get a lot of Maritain and Thomas Aquinas, and a lot more besides. For more on that you can read an essay titled “Self-Gift and the Literary Vocation” by Katy Carl, our editor in chief, which was published in our SS. Peter & Paul 2007 edition.


7. What are your future plans for the magazine?

You mean beyond mere survival? Well, our immediate goals are to improve our budget situation through grants and sponsorships, and then to use the new resources to improve the journal’s visibility and expand our subscriber base. Part of the marketing push would include traditional ads in various outlets, but we’d also like to have a greater presence at conferences throughout the country. In fact, Eleanor Donlon, one of our editors, will be presenting at this year’s Chesterton Conference. She’s currently editing Stoker’s Dracula for the Ignatius Critical Editions series, so her talk will have a vampiric theme of some sort. Our long run goal is to get Dappled Things on a solid financial and institutional footing that can allow it to flourish for many years, hopefully long after the current team of editors has moved on. Then who knows what sort of projects we might take up.

That said, our main goal is always to keep improving the quality of the work we publish, and to share that work with as large a readership as we can manage.

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Bernardo Aparicio García is founder and president of Dappled Things. He grew up in Cali, Colombia, and then moved to the United States to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied economics and international relations. After deciding not to run for President of Colombia, he received his M.A. in liberal arts from the Great Books program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, and has since been teaching at the high school level. He lives with his wife and baby daughter in Arlington, VA.

Dappled Things

Dappled Things is that rarest of finds in the literary world: a magazine actively, and successfully, publishing works arising from the Catholic tradition. Certainly the interviews and profiles on this site should sway people who think Catholic-informed writing is absent from the general magazine and book culture, but Dappled Things is to be lauded for being open and consistent in its presentation of content informed by the faith.

My own poetry has appeared in Dappled Things: "Confessions" and "St. Luke's Church". I don't often write work that is explicitly Catholic (not that DT publishes devotional works), but it is nice to know that a market has existed and sustained with such a mission. I'm thankful that those poems appeared in such nice company.

The fifth anniversary edition is now available on their beautifully redesigned website. A healthy offering appears online, but you should purchase the issue. The editor, Katy Carl, notes that the issue contains "selections from among the Dappled Things editorial board’s favorite pieces published in our pre-print days."

The new site includes brief updates, as well as new material and reprints. One piece of particular interest is "Celibacy and the Eucharist" by Rev. Pang Joseph Shiu Tcheou. I've noticed the work of other priests appear in these pages (I'm actually surprised we don't see more such work in other journals. Mark Bosco, SJ, who I am currently interviewing for The Fine Delight, is a priest whose critical writing appeared in The Southern Review). Here Tcheou offers a condensed history of priestly celibacy, arguing that "clerical continence" was a practice that, though different than modern and contemporary celibacy, formed a reasonable ancestor. That Dappled Things will publishes such pieces speaks to the magazine's willingness to document the thought and experiences of the Catholic clergy--voices worth hearing.

Tomorrow: an interview with Bernardo Aparicio, President of Dappled Things.

Interview with Sarah Vap

Sarah Vap is the eleventh interview at The Fine Delight. This interview was conducted through e-mail. A bio note, as well as relevant links, follow the interview. Thanks for sharing your wonderful thoughts with us, Sarah!


1. Faulkner's Rosary is such a great title. Images of rosaries and litanies abound, such as in "Living Together": "Your capable, / ornamenting hands--. Adding / one to another -- stringing / over and over, your welcomes."

Could you discuss the origin/reason for the combination of Faulkner and rosary?

Well, Faulkner is one of my favorite writers. Faulkner was not Catholic. He did not, as far as I know, have a rosary. When I was pregnant, I imagined this creature either as a little bug, or as a string of beads, little DNA-rosaries getting longer and larger and thicker and twisting and untwisting. When I was pregnant, I immediately started some kind of humming, constant prayer in the back of my mind, and it lasted until his birth. And during my pregnancy, my sense of history collapsed, and generations collapsed, until women from long ago, and women of the future, and women around me, all felt very near to me. At the same time, time slowed to almost a stop, the world felt more still, I felt still. Details were exaggerated and slowed. At the same time again, I knew that this creature inside me was multiplying itself over and over and over at speeds I couldn’t understand. These collapses and stretches of time and distance were filtered, for me, through a biblical language or image or hum (for this is where my imagination goes, at bottom-- to the earth and to the Old Testament, New Testament, and the apocrypha).

The only other place this was familiar to me, in writing, was Faulkner. He did this collapsing and expanding of generations in a particularly masculine way. He thought through generations in terms of the men in them, primarily, though not exclusively. But to me, Faulkner seems like neither a man nor a woman. (Like Jesus seems like neither a man nor a woman. Or other huge human beings or spirits.)

The title was both an homage to, and also a break from, Faulkner.



2. In "Fallopian," you write "Something untouchable, we know, / is still voluble." This collection is suffused with a sense of mystery. How do you engage the mysterious and mystical in your poetry? Do you do so from a Catholic aesthetic?

You know, I must in many senses write mystery from a Catholic aesthetic, because within Catholicism is where my imagination was formed. It was within that context that I first understood, if one can, mystery. I understand it, that is, as something that remains unsolvable. Or somehow unapprehendable with the kinds of brains or bodies we happen to have. Or as something that we apprehend for exactly what it is: unapprehendable. I have (in the magical sense of the word) a childish relationship with mystery-- a swallowing-it-whole kind of relationship, a not needing to solve or resolve it relationship with mystery-- at least, that is, when I approach something that is truly mysterious, like the earth, meiosis, or mitosis, or childhood, or pregnancy, or time, or death, or or or….. It’s not, I hope, something I try to conjure, but instead, something I notice all the time.

I experience mystery, I suppose, as a living or humming presence. (There are, however, also those (human) parts of the world that attempt to conjure power through a cultivation of or manipulation of mystery--and I am dedicated to exposing that where I see it or abhor it.)

The mystical-- I think that everyone, whether they care or acknowledge it at all, is capable of and does have mystical experiences all the time. By which I mean gnostic. By which I mean animist. By which I mean psychic. Or etc. I mean that however we conceive of it, there is something outside of ourselves, and perhaps outside of our world, that we can’t understand, and that we have experiences with. I try to live closely with that, sometimes closer than at other times, and I generally feel very comfortable there.


3. Color peppers this collection, particularly pink and blue. How do you perceive the world of imagery in your poetry, especially color?

Let’s see. Pink and blue became powerful, inane, and actively absurd during the months I was pregnant. And during the first year of my son’s life. Those percocet-ish pastel girl/boy baby colors…they acted as some kind of reverberating and numbing cultural poles offered to me as I approached motherhood. They acted as the (surprising to me) exceedingly tender-- and (not surprising to me) confining and even nauseating-- twin poles within which our culture abstractly conceived of my “approaching” baby, right? They vied to set the emotional tone that our (commercial?) world wanted to create for this event called pregnancy, and for this event called baby. I found pink and blue to be simultaneously absurd, and stilting, and sickeningly sweet, and truly sweet, and even at times achingly, painfully tender.

But pastel pink and pastel blue have nothing to do with pregnancy, whose color is obviously blood-red. And the black of obscurity. And, in our age of sonograms, the pulsing, grayish, black-white light.

I think my meditations on those colors, and the focus on color in many of these poems was, in part, my hope to re-imbue those colors with more resonant perceptions and memories and associations. Recalibrate the colors. Rehabilitate them conceptually, even, because those colors in the actual world are perfect.

This is just a guess in retrospect, though: I’m not sure that any of this was conscious or a goal at the time of writing the poems.


4. Many of your poems have longer titles (my favorite is "A bear as big as an angus in my parents' backyard"). What's your approach toward titling? What is the function of a title in your poems?

Titling a poem…. let’s see. There are times I want to open up the reading a bit with the title, and times I want to direct it-- to assert a little bit of control, guidance, in the reading of the poem-- such as in the Sonogram poems. In those poems, I wanted to gain a momentum and a complexity for the space-age experience of see-hearing your baby, as if you are the whale you feel yourself to be, but the image, instead of residing inside your mind, is projected onto a television screen. Which is identical-- in spirit-- to the age-old experience of wanting to look inside yourself, looking inward, to feel, to want to be certain of, the wellness of our baby. To want to connect or communicate with the baby. (And yet, the baby is on the television?!)

But titling… the titles never come first for me. And in this manuscript, some of the titles shifted as the manuscript pulled together-- to help shape the movement through the poems and connect particular poems I wanted more connected. Titles come to me many ways, and some come right away and stay forever, and some shift and shift until the editor rips the manuscript from my hands the day before it goes to print.


5. One of your "Sonogram" poems has this beautiful phrase: "The baby / under my heart watches me". You're able to make pregnancy new in this collection. What was your process in writing about such a complicated, beautiful aspect of existence? Have you ever read successful work by other poets about this subject?

I wrote almost all the poems in Faulkner’s Rosary during my first pregnancy, with my son Oskar and with his twin, who we lost. I stopped writing for a while after he was born, then began revising this manuscript. Not long after that, I became pregnant with our second son, Mateo. I revised the manuscript through the second pregnancy, and in the two years after Mateo was born. I spent about 5 years and two pregnancies and some losses on this book, in other words. I wrote in the midst of the experiences and joys and losses and strangenesses, and as such, I suppose the instinct for the book was documentary. A kind of documentary.

(And supplication and humility and certainty and revelation.)

6. Although I'm intrigued by the theology and imagery within these poems, your work is so strong at the levels of craft and control. "To be breathed-in by a god" is an example. Do you remember anything about the composition and process of this particular poem (it feels so carefully crafted).

I don’t! I remember only the room that I first wrote it in, in Phoenix. It was filled with heat and with sunlight. The room was beautiful and bright and the opposite of how I felt.


7. Any Catholic literary influences? Why do you think Catholicism is so appealing to poets?

Yes, many. Many saints’ writings and hagiographies. The apocrypha, primarily, the old testament next, the new testament after that-- though I can’t claim those as Catholic, particularly. The psalms. I love the mystics, like Hildegard de Bingen, Saint Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Simone Weil. Dante. John Donne. ((Lots of visual art (churches, cathedral, architecture, painting, sculpture, texts-- across Europe, North America and South America.)) Lots of music (Ave Maria) and prayers. Less ancient: Flannery O’Connor, Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Joyce. Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Cather, I read every couple of years now. Madeleine L’Engle, J. K. Rowling, Tolkein. Thomas Mann. Denise Levertov. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Marilynne Robinson. Gabriela Mistral. Pablo Neruda. Federico Garcia Lorca. Kate Chopin. Anna Akhmatova. Frank Herbert. Luce Irigaray. Some of those might not be writers that the Catholic church would claim as Catholic, (or they might not identify themselves as such). But I respond to them catholically.

Frankly, it’s the same story here as it is everywhere-- my list might have a lot of women on it, but the men have the floor. I have had to search for the women over the years (and I’m still searching for them), and the bulk of them lived in Medieval Europe, and more or less embodied Catholic sexual fetishes, and so their work has survived.

In terms of very contemporary Catholic poets? It’s hard to know who they are. Not many self-identify as a Catholic poet (I wouldn’t).

Is Catholicism appealing to poets? As a poet, it both draws me deeply toward it, and simultaneously repels me. I think Catholicism is inherently poetic-- and the more pre-Vatican II, the more poetic. I lived in Italy for a year, which is quite pre-VII, (and the art, the architecture, the distancing of the Italian language, for me-- similar to how it might have been to have heard the mass in Latin-- heightened this feeling for me.) Catholicism is bloody, and full of ritual, and torture, and full of art and music and gesture, and the mass is a kind of group-poem with movement and music and pacing, and Catholicism is full of story and literature and complicated history and strife and cruelty and goodness-- all of which combine to create a cultural poetry, in my experience of it. Which is something that is starkly missing in this day and age, in a consumer culture, and so I can understand the appeal that any rich tradition or high ritual might offer someone with a poetic sensibility.


8. Have you encountered any non-Catholic writers or poets who appear to have a Catholic aesthetic to their work?

I don’t know…do you mean, who would I love to claim as part of my fantasy lineage? This morning: Faulkner, Shakespeare, Margaret Wise Brown, George Herbert, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Hayao Miyazaki and Charlotte Bronte. And David Simon.


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

I have been working on several things simultaneously for several years. I have a collection that is nearly completed called Take Us the Foxes, in which I consider, basically, the childbearing years-- the years of altered consciousness during which women give birth, raise very young children-- have babies live and die inside them and around them. The years when she is literally high on her own hormones and exhaustions, and lives without personal space and in extremely detailed and insular experiences with these tiny people.

I am also working on a collection of lyric essays, all of which circle poetry and poetics, called, I believe, Oskar’s Cars. I am working on a collection with the word “winter” somewhere in the title-- let’s call this a collection of feministamotheraphorisms. I am working on a series of books for young children about, actually, mystery.

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Sarah Vap grew up in Missoula, Montana. She attended Brown University, where she studied English and American Literature. She later received her M.F.A. from Arizona State University. She is the author of three collections of poetry. Her first book, Dummy Fire, was selected by Forrest Gander to receive the Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Her second, American Spikenard, was selected by Ira Sadoff to receive the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her third book, Faulkner’s Rosary, was published by Saturnalia Books in 2010. Sarah is editor of poetry for the online journal 42 Opus. She has taught poetry and literature at Arizona State University, Phoenix College, and Olympic College, and has taught several hundred hours of creative writing to kids in public schools. She currently teaches at the Salish Sea Workshop. Sarah is married to the poet Todd Fredson, and they live on the Olympic Peninsula with their children.

Faulkner's Rosary by Sarah Vap

It is entirely appropriate that I post this review on Ash Wednesday--a day most idiosyncratic, a day of ritual and bodily transformation (however brief). The acceptance of ash on the forehead--Catholics walking, working, thinking, living with that mark--must seem to non-Catholics a particularly archaic and confusing action. Lent is certainly of concern and practice to a wide variety of Christians, but I've always associated the season with the Catholic church, perhaps even a directly Jesuit or ascetic focus on the corporeal.

It's a beautiful tradition--5:30 mass at St. Joseph's in Newton was beyond packed, and there's a silence that follows the distribution of ashes, a wave of people moving in March quiet, resigned and reserved in the power of community. And, appropriate to my tastes in religion, it's Ash Wednesday's apparent oddity to others that makes it most appealing to me--and it's in that vein that I so enjoyed Sarah Vap's collection, Faulkner's Rosary.

This is a book about pregnancy, about the nearly incomprehensible beauty of the creation of life, and yet it is also a powerful argument for craft at the line level in poetry--an almost forgotten art of care with words. The book is individual without being obtuse, particular without being provincial--I'm reminded of my interest in Mary Biddinger's Saint Monica poems. Vap's central metaphors bubble and burn, and the image and concept of the rosary is unpacked as to renew the concept (and the rosary is such a rich concept, is it not? the tactile motion, bead to bead, moment to moment, prayers lifted beyond whispers).

"Children" contains the title of the book, but it's a poem about body and birth--certainly about children. The earliest poems in this collection establish Vap's schema of form--child/mother connection--color--sky and more. "Children" works within this schema, but extends it acoustically:

Link to link:
counting prayers to recall what their bodies should be.

We hear "chanting," and a "small hum", and the narrative of the book reflects back to the previous poem, "Eggtooth." I love the sounds there, the connection between childhood understanding of the rosary and later pregnancy:

My grandmother

making the braided bread. Singing
the leaping song of the gazelle in the marriage vow:

I wanted you, baby, braided

There's this sense of connectedness in the book--the narrator's mother's pregnancy is mentioned, as is a prefiguring of the future father of this child. The pastoral and temporal mold to create another world, a particularly surreal and yet tangible place, where the world of this book is wholly unique--I've never quite seen a poet be able to sustain such a narrative throughout an entire collection. Even the titles of the poems are so individual:

"A cradle of warmed oats for the chickens on the Epiphany"
"A bear as big as an angus in my parents' backyard"
"Fink, Punk, Nincompoop, Honky-Tonk, Sunlight, Sunnysideup..."

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"Spill" is a poem with a prosaic title, but it's such a wonderful Marian piece. In the center of the poem we find these lines:

When I think of children I think of us gathered

at the cement statue of Mary,
up in the tree in May. We'd dress her in white,

we'd crown her with flowers, and carry her
inside to chant mystery to mystery

along the church walls.

This Marian representation is bookended by a lake made malleable by weather. It's a poem suffused by mystery--and I think that's the essential word to describe this collection as a whole. It's a world, and a poet, quite aware of (and comfortable within) the mysterious. And what is more mysterious than pregnancy? And how wonderful that something so mysterious is so common (how many expectant mothers, now? nearly all of us knows at least one--a person so necessary to a new life, so ready and wondering). I love the irony--and I love that the narrator of Vap's book is so often awaiting the arrival of the child. Here, from "Inlaid":

The dying he is about to do--being born
out of me--I feel him fasten, and refuse it.

There is almost everything

in the world in him--he is ready.

Is this anticipation not faith? In this poem, it is:

It will
detonate our Lent--the waiting season

that will unhook us from each other.

And, later:

If I could name when

if we could name
exactly who, this baby, his pieces all together, his bits

strung together, he'd maneuver--
genuflect--

and appear, wouldn't he, something else

and unraveled of me.

Rosary--litany--becomes body. Possibility--through faith--becomes life. And the child of this narrator, this world, arrives with more than a healthy amount of hope. The book is so threaded with a Catholic aesthetic, and yet this aesthetic is deeper than dogma. It's a beautiful book.

Interview with Luke Johnson

Luke Johnson is the tenth interview at The Fine Delight. This interview was conducted through e-mail. A bio note, as well as relevant links, follow the interview. Thanks for your great responses, Luke!

1. “The Heart, Like a Bocce Ball” is such a tight poem that does justice to the tradition of sonnets. Why did you choose this particular form for the content? Do you often write in fixed forms?

Thanks for your words on the poem, Nick. Form is my most efficient starting point. More often than not, I draft with form in place, whether it’s received or arbitrary. I have a tendency to overstate the narrative in my early drafts. By working in form, I reassert language and music as my central priorities and allow the images to arrive a bit more organically. Even when the form doesn’t persist through revisions, boundaries push me towards leaps and images I might not be able to access otherwise.

When I wrote this poem, I’d just read Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle and Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets and was fixated on the sonnet: this limitless, yet rigid, road-map. I was in the thick of writing a sonnet sequence entitled Aerials, a ten-poem experiment with rhyme and point of view that eventually became the second-section of my book. I had a heroic couplet in my head, so the first drafts were simply trying to find a way to arrive at those last two lines in a way that allowed them to turn the poem while also giving it finality (or, at least, as much finality as one wants to find in a poem). It’s a reversal of the way I usually write. Generally, I’m writing toward a discovery of the ending. In the case of this poem, I was starting there and hoping to find my way back.


2. The final two lines of the poem are so wonderful, and remain with me. How did you manage to use the word/concept of “heart” in such a successful manner in the poem (when it so often can lead to sentimentality)?

I think the lines avoid sentimentality because of the narrative circumstances: the fact that the death in the poem is never directly iterated, only intimated. I was definitely conscious of the riskiness of featuring the ‘heart’ simile so prominently, but I hoped the sadness of the situation and the strangeness of the narrative action would cast a tired piece of language/imagery in a new-enough light. Plus, I really wanted to use that couplet. I’ll do most anything for a solid rhyming couplet.


3. Please talk about your debut collection After the Ark, just released by New York Quarterly Press. How did you select/collect/order these poems? Do connections or themes arise when looking at the poems as a whole?

After the Ark is, more or less, my MFA thesis from Hollins University. There are a few poems from the years before, and one or two from the year after. I think it came together in the relatively common way: poems strewn across the floor of my living room. I spent a few weeks walking among the poems I’d written during that three year period, moving them around, searching for connections in image and some sort of coherent narrative. Most of the poems deal heavily with my mother’s death and my own childhood, so it wasn’t difficult to find a narrative, but I struggled with putting it all together. After Hollins, I went through three or four overhauls before the book arrived at its current shape. There were about ten poems that I dropped from the manuscript as the work evolved from a thesis (a representative sample of a definitive time-frame) to something that may or may not resemble a collection of poetry.

The book, as it ended up, is organized seasonally, moving from winter to spring to summer. Previous versions of the book weren’t deliberate enough in their organization. I was afraid that to structure the book chronologically would be too simplistic. My experience with grief was never chronological. The book’s more circular than anything else, constantly returning to the same fixations and scenes, so the seasonal arrangement made sense to me. We’re bound to return to winter, to grief.


4. You’ve written about being the son of ministers. How did that experience impact your conceptions of faith and the church, both in practical and metaphorical ways?

To me, the church was an omnipresent and impenetrable thing. I understood it in the way that most children understand their parents’ occupations: vaguely. Faith paid the bills. My father was the chaplain at Cornell University and my mother at nearby Wells College. They both were fierce readers, and in their sermons borrowed just as heavily from William Faulkner and Annie Dillard as they did the Gospels. Good writing was good writing, and the best became scripture.

It wasn’t until recently that I began to understand the ways in which this upbringing molded my perception. The way in which I experience language is almost entirely grounded in the liturgy. The rhythms and music that are most organic in my writing echo the cadences of my parents’ pulpits. I think it was Flannery O’Connor who said that the cadence of Southern Literature is the cadence of the King James Bible. Despite being a Yankee by birth, I consider my literary heritage to be distinctly Southern.

I’m simply writing poems about my family—the religious background is just as circumstantial as the landscapes. That said, I’m aware of the larger metaphorical implications this background lends, and I like to explore that in the writing. The religious backdrop certainly widens the scope of many of my poems. Whenever I write, I wonder how the words would sound if delivered from one of my parents' pulpits. It’s a tad grandiose, for certain, but it allows me the necessary reverence, the sense of being at once elsewhere and at home. I am addicted to the space a poem creates. For me, it’s the same space a church provides: sanctuary and mystery, a place in which attentiveness and clarity mix with memory and belief. I don’t attend service very frequently, but when I write poems I’m searching for the same sort of faith, the same sort of silence.


5. As a high school teacher, I’m always fascinated to hear of other writers who have taught at the pre-college level. Any memorable experiences as a teacher? How did the act of teaching/mentoring inform or affect your writing?

I was fortunate to teach 10th and 12th grade at Oak Hill Academy, a Baptist boarding school in the rural Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The teaching, and the inherent first year workload, was rigorous and unfortunately didn’t leave much time for new writing. I love teaching—I could spend the rest of my life trying to convince young people to love books (not Kindles or Nooks or iPads, but books) and the way we experience them. The folks at Oak Hill were great because they allowed me to teach contemporary writing alongside the old guard—everything from White Teeth to Slaughterhouse Five to Beowulf. While I was returning to these books as a teacher, I was also toying with my own manuscript, chiseling poems and shifting their order. I think the confluence of these activities, close reading and fine-tuning, was important, if only because it reaffirmed my commitment to the book (not my book, but the institution of the book).

In the end, I left full-time teaching and those gorgeous old mountains in search of new poems. It bothered me that I wasn’t writing. But time spent in the classroom was just as important for my writing as time spent at my desk.


6. What are some of your main poetic and literary influences?

The first book I ever loved was To Kill A Mockingbird. I had a teacher, Mr. Bedore, who taught the hell out of that book. We read virtually the whole thing out-loud in class. It was the first time that I connected to the music of the language, rather than just reading to get to the end. After that, I was on a slippery slope: Whitman—and then Fred Chappell—and then Seamus Heaney—and then Elizabeth Bishop. More recent additions to my personal literary pantheon: A.R. Ammons, Junot Diaz, Adrienne Rich, and Anthony Doerr. Right now, I’m reading C.K. Williams’ Collected Poems and Patti Smith’s Just Kids.


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

This past summer, I moved from Virginia to Seattle, Washington. With a kayak strapped to my roof-rack, a u-haul hitched behind me, and my Redbone Coonhound in the backseat, I drove across the country to a place where I had no apartment, no job, and no discernable plan. After I figured those (important) things out, I spent the summer working on poems. Something about moving is generative, and I’ve been enjoying the new bits of language and landscape that are working their ways into my work. I’m currently trapped in rhyming couplets, and am doing my best to allow this impulse to run its course. I’ve never been one to work on a ‘project,’ as they scare me with their bigness. I’m just living from poem-to-poem as best I can, hoping eventually they coalesce into something larger.



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Luke Johnson is the author of After the Ark (NYQ Books, 2011). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Epoch, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. His work has twice appeared in the Best New Poets anthology and has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Atlantic Monthly. He currently lives in Seattle, Washington, where he is working on a second collection of poems. He blogs at http://proofofblog.blogspot.com

After the Ark by Luke Johnson

[Both of these poems appear in Johnson's newly released debut collection of poetry, After the Ark, published by New York Quarterly Press.]

"The Heart, Like a Bocce Ball" originally appeared in Rattle (Winter 2009; special sonnet issue).

Fixed forms are growing on me: the sonnet, I think, is the perfect box of a poem, and The Fine Delight owes its name to one of my favorite practitioners of the style, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I've sung the praises of his "To R.B." at Luna Park, and will certainly cover some of his other poems here on the site.

So Johnson, like others, enters this tradition, but in the poems I've read of Johnson he's quite aware how the mysteries of faith can inform and shift the presentation of everyday action. "The Heart, Like a Bocce Ball" is a tightly wound poem that moves with youthful action colored by the aftermath of a serious moment:

We’re dead drunk,
cannonballing across the lawn, gouging
handful divots, each of us still nursing
a tumbler of scotch brought home from the wake.

So much play with language here. "Dead drunk" compared to the "wake," but don't we revel in those moments after death (that celebration of life? what else can we do?). I also appreciate the subtle play on movement "cannonballing" vs. "tumbler." It's careful writing, and the internal connections, along with the subtle meter and conceptions of the sonnet, yoke together the concepts.

Although temporarily wasted, these "sons and brothers and cousins" aren't wasting away: they are players, certainly, in this simple game of bocce, but there's a real sense of connection here, the same passing-moments feeling of an intense game of backyard volleyball that fades without documentation. Some real nice description of the physical action here:

I bowl instead, slow-ride hidden ridges—
the swells buried beneath the grass—carving
a curve, a line from start to stop, finish.

As I've mentioned earlier at this site, Catholic literature does not need to include churches, priests, crosses, or other physical representations of the faith to count. Johnson's poetry feels "Catholic" to me in the holistic sense: there's a feeling of concern, of texture, of the willingness to accept ambiguity and paradox. Here are the concluding lines of this wonderful poem:

The heart, like a bocce ball, is fist-sized
and firm; ours clunk together, then divide.

Those lines are worth keeping and repeating. Do I really need to say anything else about them? A fine poem.

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"Corn Snake as Compass" originally appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Beloit Poetry Journal.

Back to that concept of the "Catholic" poet. Now, I know that Johnson's coming from the Episcopalian tradition, which has its own rich, particular representation of the faith. But even if I didn't know that, I read "Corn Snake as Compass" through a sort-of Catholic filter. Perhaps it's through a lowercase "C". I think--in the Flannery O'Connor sense--that the Catholic writer encounters the world with awe, and that finely crafted poetry is sometimes the best tool possible to enable others to experience that awe, that moment.

So "Corn Snake as Compass" is no dogmatic piece; in fact, I'd venture that the vast--vast!--majority of readers wouldn't think of God, or anything related, when reading and enjoying. But there's a care here with the words, an appreciation of the world observed, that speaks to a Catholic aesthetic.

Regardless of its origin, the poem is a fine example of control and craft. It's an arrangement of 9 sentences, parceled out with 8 compact phrasings, and one longer sentence that stretches across the final lines. The poem's ultimate strength is in the clarity and form of its imagery. The "elements" of the poem are simple: (an "overgrown" and "out of place" shrimp) boat, snake, water. But Johnson moves carefully and slowly; the first lines locate the boat, the bog, leading toward these lines:

Disembodied headlights
flicker through marsh grass like lanterns.
A corn snake, shedding, uncoils in the hull.

That's the only simile in the poem, and it's a perfect one. And the snake--smart to begin with that phrase, then tuck "shedding" between. Notice the usage of "l" in this stanza--numbered as it is, it remains a light consonant.

Wind "snaps" a tree onto the boat, leaving "the skeleton picked raw," but not before this snake might

trawl the tall stuff
away from this forgotten wood sinking, this shell.

I like the possibility of this poem--the lack of the concrete, the potential for survival; I like the absence of humans (save for the "hum" of traffic), and, most of all, the gently-placed metaphor of boat/shell/skin. This is wonderful writing. And from a first book? Quite rare and impressive.