The Fine Delight

An Update, and Good News

2012-02-18T05:23:00.000-08:00

This site has been static for some months, but I hope the interviews have continued to introduce readers to the impressive array of writers creating within the complicated Catholic tradition. My recent work has been more of the behind-the-scenes variety, leading to the...

GOOD NEWS: a publisher of theology will be releasing my full-book analysis of Post Second Vatican Council Catholic literature. My focus in the book will be on the writing of Ron Hansen, Paul Mariani, and Andre Dubus, but I will also be introducing readers to more contemporary masters.

The project has shifted from an anthology to a critical assessment, but the goal remains the same: stimulate the conversation about contemporary Catholic writing, and reveal its diversity and relevance.

I'll offer updates to the project via this blog, and, as always, welcome any inquiries to catholicliterature@gmail.com

Thanks for reading!

Interview with Jonathan Potter

2011-06-04T17:25:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Potter is the fifteenth interview at The Fine Delight. This interview was conducted through e-mail, from New Jersey to Washington state. A bio note follows the interview. Thanks for your great responses, Jonathan!

1. House of Words is an especially well-arranged first book. Can you discuss the composition of House of Words (did you envision these poems as part of a bigger project during the initial writing? how did you decide the ordering of the poems and sections?)

I put the earliest version of the manuscript together about ten years ago, but it was arranged very differently. The title and prologue piece ("Build me a house of words...") were the same, but that's about it. I gave that original manuscript to some friends of mine, Jon and Tiffany Webb, who were talking about starting up a small press. The manuscript sat in Mrs. Webb's desk drawer while she produced a succession of babies (with Mr. Webb's help, of course). We all sort of forgot about it. But when they inherited a little bit of money a couple of years ago, the Webbs revived their small press dream and dusted off House of Words. Webb and I had also started a blog together in 2004, so the small press idea and the book both sort of morphed with the blog, Korrektiv, which has now picked up several more great writers and has become Korrektiv Press. Anyway that's part of the background of the book.

The composition of the poems themselves spans a twenty-seven year period, and the earliest one in the book—"Wordsong"—dates back to when I was seventeen or eighteen. I'm almost embarrassed to admit that. But I I like the poem, and it serves the broader themes of the collection, so I don't mind owning it. And some of my favorite poems in the collection were written in my twenties. I suppose it's a fairly common phenomenon with first books of poetry to throw in assorted mongrel items from earlier phases of one's life, or to keep shuffling and reshuffling one's poems into different arrangements and notions of how they could form a book, with different poems dropping in and out of the mix. In my case, though, I'm forty-six and I've dabbled in writing poetry—not real productively, but steadily—since my late teens. So I've done a lot of shuffling and reshuffling over the years. And my worldview has undergone some major shifts, too, I guess, but one thing I discovered when I sat down to really boil them down into this book was that I am preoccupied with some core worries and tendencies that haven't changed much, deep down, even though at points along the way some major shifts occurred. I had several ultimately unhappy dealings with womankind and then became a Catholic and then a librarian and then a husband and then a father. So the collection follows that progression somewhat, but there is also a core coherency—I hope there is, anyway—and a freewheeling movement through time.

At one point, I had a bunch of limericks in the manuscript and several of those were written specifically with the book in mind. They sort of parodied the overarching house and word and faith and doubt motifs. I thought they scanned just fine, even though Matthew Lickona claimed otherwise, but I finally decided I wanted the book to maintain a slightly higher air of dignity. Just slightly. So I threw them out. The one poem that was written pretty late in the process, when the manuscript was on my mind a lot, was "Insomnia"— the last poem in the collection. Otherwise it was more a matter of reshuffling and selecting poems that weren't consciously written to be part of the collection as it now stands. As far as the overall arrangement, I will say I had some fun with that. The book as a whole plays off the sonnet form, where each poem could be counted as an iambic foot and the whole book can be viewed as a sort of big mystic sonnet. I like how I pulled that off.

2. One of the 5 epigraphs for the collection is a quotation from Walker Percy's incredible novel, The Moviegoer. Why Percy? And why Lonnie?

In addition to providing thematic and imagistic touchstones for the different sections of the book, I also wanted the epigraphs to hint at where I'm coming from with the poems, who my influences are, what sources are important to me, and what sort of context to place the poems in. I started reading Walker Percy in college, after stumbling across a review of Lost in the Cosmos while avoiding reading whatever it was I was supposed to be reading at the time. I found it on the shelf in the library and was immediately floored by it. Back then I considered myself to be a sort of zen-beatnik-Lutheran, and reading Percy definitely set me on a path, intellectually, that would lead to the Catholic Church. It took a long time, though. I kept returning to Percy along the way, and did a master's thesis on The Moviegoer and Lancelot in 1990. I finally got confirmed a Catholic in 1995, and, after the Holy Spirit, I mostly blame it on Percy.

I thought that passage from The Moviegoer was perfect for the first section of the book for several reasons. First of all, it's talking about how unadorned words and language can be fresh and new and full of wonder. That's one theme I tried to thread through the first section of House of Words. In the passage, the protagonist Binx Bolling is referring to his younger half-brother, Lonnie, who suffers from cerebral-palsy. Binx sees that Lonnie gains an advantage in certain subtle ways through his affliction, and one of those advantages is a paradoxical reversal that occurs with regard to language. The worn-outness that language is subject to is reversed and Lonnie's belabored speech somehow taps into the joy and wonder that is otherwise easily lost in what is referred to elsewhere in The Moviegoer as "everydayness." Secondly, Binx talks about Lonnie's speech as being "like a code tapped through a wall," which I thought in terms of imagery very neatly coincided with my book's central image of the house and its walls. Thirdly, there is the mention of love, and that is the transcending theme—I hope—of not only the first section but the entire collection. And of course Lonnie is the chief emblem in The Moviegoer of a simple but profound Catholic faith, a Christ-like and buoyant seriousness that culminates in redemptive suffering and death. So there's a lot packed into that epigraph and I couldn't believe my good luck when I located it and realized how perfect it was for what I was up to.

3. "Elementary Education" reads smoothly. The first stanza begins with an observation, but the majority of the poem is a conversation. Could you discuss the structure and composition of this poem and, possibly, how else your employment as a librarian has informed your sense of poetics and the written word.

I would consider this one of the lighter poems in the collection, both in tone and content. I like the poem because it does capture, in a not-too-serious way, one sort of reference desk interaction which I think would be immediately recognizable to any reference librarian. There's a wonderful library-themed comic strip called Unshelved that gets a lot of mileage out of this sort of thing. It is one of those poems that flowed fairly easily and naturally out of the real life event that it documents. "The First Sign of Spring," which comes right before it in the book, occurred in a similar fashion. They are both relatively lighthearted recountings of inauspicious real-life encounters, the humor of which buoyed my spirits at the time. They're almost like "found" poems, really, and my job was mainly to serve as the secretary recording the funny little epiphany that transpired. Easy work.

My employment as a librarian hasn't really directly informed my inner life as a poet, but I think it does provide good mental exercise and other subtle nourishments, in addition to a paycheck. As an academic librarian, I can sort of be in but not quite of Academia. I can tap into the riches of the scholarly world without getting too entangled in the politics of English departments and such. I work mostly with the health sciences departments at my institution, but I'm also lucky as a member of the faculty to get to serve as a third reader every year on a number of MFA theses in poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction. That's been a nice way to get to know some of the students and faculty that pursue creative writing seriously in an academic setting, and to get a glimpse of what's happening among that ilk without having to get my hands too dirty. Aside from that, there is a mystique about libraries—even as a health sciences librarian—that complements my identity as a writer such as it is. The mystique was stronger for me before I ruined it by becoming a librarian, but I can still recognize it, and there are fantastic depths to be plumbed there for sure.

4. "Self-Portrait with Truck" is a great narrative poem. A few other pieces in the book feel as if they could also exist as stories. Do you make a conscious decision or plan to choose poetry over prose, lines over sentences? Have you ever written fiction?

Maybe it's that I'm by nature a dabbler. And poetry lends itself to dabbling. Writing a novel doesn't, really. I would love to write fiction, and I've tried, but mostly I've failed at it. I get to about page ten and grow tired of the characters and their concerns and they of me and we part company. It's on my bucket list, though. I'll be very upset with myself if I find myself on my death bed, or free falling with a parachute that's not opening, or about to have a head-on with a semi, or choking on a big piece of steak I forgot to chew, and realize I never got that novel written. One of my prayers is that the Lord preserve my life long enough for me to write one, even if it's a very bad one, which it most likely will be. It could turn into a Wandering Jew sort of scenario, though, where the Lord answers my prayer by keeping me alive, but I'm just never able to get past page ten and so I'm cursed to wander the Earth until Judgement Day. Does that answer the question?

I guess I should add that my primary impulse in poetry is probably lyrical. Even with the free verse and more narrative oriented poems in the collection, I'm always concerned with the melody running through the lines. But it's a fascinating and nagging question for any writer as to what form to frame an idea in. I could see making the truck poem into a fictional or memoir piece in prose, and in a way maybe the poem could both stand on its own and serve as notes for something like that. The overlap in forms works the other way, too. Walker Percy wrote poetry in his youth and pretty much totally abandoned it as a mature writer, but his novels are infused with the most elegant sentences. Parts of The Moviegoer, especially, are just pure poetry. It really hits you if you listen to it read out loud. Likewise, Kierkegaard says somewhere that he considered himself "a sort of poet" and that his prose kicked the ass of many a poet's poetry for sheer loveliness. I'm paraphrasing, but he did say something along those lines. He said he would walk around rehearsing sentences out loud to himself sometimes, for flow and rhythm, before going back to his study and writing.

5. You've already mentioned Kierkegaard and Percy as writers whose work and thought have either influenced or interested you. Are there are other writers whose work you keep returning to--and any Catholic writers, in particular?

Wallace Stevens. I'll claim him for a Catholic, even though it was a death-bed conversion. To me he's the ultimate paradoxical poet-sage, existing on a higher poetic plane than anyone else while at the same time existing in reality as an insurance agent. There's something wonderfully Christ-like about that. I guess his insurance work was itself insurance against the inevitable failure of poetry. Before Stevens, but in a similar vein, it was E.E. Cummings who first blew my young mind. Reading Tulips and Chimneys—and everything else I could get my hands on by Cummings, when I was a teenager—turned me from thinking I wanted to be an aerospace engineer when I grew up to thinking I wanted to be a writer, or at least a reader. The liveliness of the language and the insistent individuality of his style are what appealed to me, at a time when I was attracted to punk rock and the beatniks for similar reasons. Then, of course, I went through a period of feeling embarrassed that I loved Cummings, because it dawned on me that he's a favorite of anemic adolescent girls. But now I'm happy to admit I can still pick him up and enjoy. He wasn't a Catholic but I think a case could be made that he had Catholic tendencies despite his Unitarian upbringing. (Can you tell that claiming all my favorite writers for Catholicism is a pastime I regularly engage in?) Then there's Hopkins! No trouble claiming him as Catholic. A splendid anomaly, right up there with Stevens and Cummings, probably on an even higher plane in fact.

Other writers that hit me like meteors and left craters in my psyche that I continue to revisit—in no particular order: T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dickinson, Yeats, Updike, Kesey, Greene, Dostoevsky, C.S. Lewis, Chesterton, Merton, Flannery O’Connor. Those last four, along with Percy, certainly helped grease my path of conversion. I also went through a time of thinking I'd become a Benedictine monk, so there are writers and writings in that sphere that impacted me and continue to shine in the back of my mind: St. Benedict's Rule, of course, but also Kathleen Norris and Esther de Waal—both non-Catholics but the best contemporary writers on Benedictine spirituality.

A few other contemporary writers I keep reading are Tom Robbins, Sherman Alexie, Jess Walter, Ron Hansen, and Mary Karr. They all write beautifully but of the bunch only Karr and Hansen are explicitly Catholic. Robbins is a marvelous heretic, Alexie has a big dose of Spokane reservation Catholicism in his blood (with reservations) and my best guess about Jess Walter is that he's a sympathetic agnostic—he has an essay somewhere about marrying a succession of Catholic women and contemplating getting baptized. I keep thinking of more writers to add to this chaotic compilation, but I guess I'll leave it at that.

6. What you been writing since the publication of House of Words?

Not much, I'm sorry to say—a handful of poems, a few blog entries. I wish I could say I had something in the hopper—and I do if by that you mean my brain—but not much on the page. I'm still recovering from the trauma of bringing House of Words into the world. Aside from that, I have a full time job and two little kids, and time management issues. I've been trying to promote House of Words, but I could be doing more as far as readings and such. And I've been trying to do my part for Korrektiv Press, lending my editorial ministrations to Brian Jobe's novel, Bird's Nest in Your Hair, which is due to come out in the next couple of months. And I imagine I'll do the same for Joseph O'Brien's collection of poems the press will be publishing later in the year. Jobe and O'Brien are both amazing writers and I'm excited about participating in the process of seeing their work into print. Hopefully Matthew Lickona will have a manuscript ready soon, too, and I'll get to help deliver that to his crowd of adoring and long-suffering fans who have been waiting for a follow-up to the elegant and fantastically hyper-Catholic Swimming with Scapulars.

The Korrektiv folks are also planning to put together a collection of essays celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of The Moviegoer, so I'm working on something to contribute to that. We've also talked about writing a bunch of short stories based on Walker Percy characters, a sort of fan fiction thing, and I have an idea for a story involving Binx Bolling coming to Spokane to visit Stanley Kunchen during the World's Fair of 1974. Kunchen is a minor minor character from Spokane that appears in The Moviegoer, one of Binx's colleagues at the conference he attends in Chicago late in the novel, and I think it would be fun to capitalize on that connection with my hometown. And then there's the above-noted desire to write a novel. I have about three that I've started and let shrivel on the vine. I may try to revive one of those or start a new one ... any day now.

*

Jonathan Potter lives in an old house in Spokane with his wife, children, and dog. He is the author of House of Words (Korrektiv Press 2011). His poetry has appeared in Z Miscellaneous, Christianity & Literature, and Poems Niederngasse.

House of Words by Jonathan Potter

2011-06-03T11:09:00.000-07:00

I admit an affinity for the cover of House of Words: Mr. Potter and I share the image of a rather ominous-looking barn cast in a field on our first books of poetry, and it makes me wonder about the significance of a first book, the expectations (mostly cast from the writer). First books are sometimes pegged as rushed, raw attempts: the shadow of talent rather than the gravity of learned experience. I've read several strong first books in the past year--Traci Brimhall's Rookery, Keith Montesano's Ghost Lights--and I'm looking forward to Eduardo Corral's forthcoming book from the Yale Series of Younger Poets series. First books carry the weight of possibility, and all too often they are seen as prescriptive of the poet's future career and content.

House of Words is a first book, but it is an especially well-arranged one. The architecture of the book defines our reading: we are given allusions to, and epigraphs from, Kierkegaard, Percy, and various Biblical excerpts. Each of the three main allusions moves the collection in a different direction, nudges the reader toward another focus. All are connected, of course, as Kierkegaard is one of our most important philosophers of the self, and his sometimes labyrinthine prose are some of the best attempts at locating the physical person with the indeterminate soul. Percy used Kierkegaard as a locus and axis point, a way to present Binx Bolling as a man representative of a moment and location, a wounded capitalist wavering between the free market and free will.

Potter's collection is certainly not bound by these three considerations; rather, they arrive in the text at certain moments, welcome reminders that he is dealing with a world bigger than the instants of his poems. House of Words, for me, is marked by two main themes: the (sometimes) inadequacy of words to represent the real and the spiritual (certainly a concern for Kierkegaard), and a focus on narrative. The first poem in the book, "Wordsong," ends with the lines "because / all words here lie." The duality works as an introduction: here is the house of words constructed by the poem, structured by the poet, and yet also these words lie as in created untruths. Can words lie, though? Of course in the practical sense words misdirect and can be misunderstood, but at the same time Potter is adept with description, and those sketches can be quite concrete. Are we to question that specificity? "River's Gift" is a good example: "And manmade things, / a music of manmade motors. / Cars caress the air. I wait / for what the river brings, stoop down / to its frothy shoreline and touch / my hand reflected and restored." Do those words lie? This brings up questions of connections between word and world (can a house be of words? certainly--if we adjust our definition of house, as well as our definition of word).

"Madonna of the Sirens" arrives like a prayer, a column of words, and its rhyme in-part works best because of the truncated nature of the lines--the aren't long enough to develop into the sing-song, and they remain at a high chord. "Thanksgiving 1987" is a great narrative elegy, and its proximity to "Madonna of the Sirens" speaks to the width of this book's range. The poem progresses with such a great sense of internal repetition, words like "season," "well," and "we" arrive with the newness usually reserved for sestinas.Potter is able to move from prayer to narrative to comedy with "The The," with some amusing consonance ("he could have been a pimp in primary colors"). The poem shifts from comedy to observation: "Anyway the The looked around and surveyed the scene: / people waiting, reading magazines, children / playing with broken toys, a lady knitting something red, / her fingers and the needles loopedly-looping so fast, / so fast, a fish tank embedded in the wall, / only a single fish to be seen, / and that one not looking well--is what the The was thinking."

I also loved two later narrative poems--"Under Chub's" and "Self-Portrait with Truck"--in part because I was reminded about Potter's ability to slow down in other poems. There is sometimes nothing worse than the vacuous comedic poem, and Potter's strength here is in specificity of moment, truly unfolding an action so that the reader believes in his integrity as a poet-observer.

The fourth and final section of the book is a collection of love poems, and they work quite well; again, besides the genuine nature of the works, their strength is in Potter's ability to inhabit a line. My favorite was "We bend each other to the point of laughter" from "Heart-Shaped Tin." A nice way to conclude a collection: this house of words ends, or perhaps is grounded in, that most eternal and complicated emotion.

Contributor Updates!

2011-04-16T10:19:00.000-07:00

I'm very pleased to report some great news from writers profiled and interviewed here at The Fine Delight.

Rev. James Martin SJ has been honored with a Christopher Award for his great book, A Jesuit Guide to (almost) Everything.

Paul Lisicky's new, novel, The Burning House, is now available.

The Broken Tower, a new film directed by James Franco, and based on the biography of Hart Crane by Paul Mariani, recently premiered at Boston College on April 15.

C. Dale Young's new book, Torn, received a nice nod from Publisher's Weekly.

Interview with Mark Bosco SJ

2011-03-30T00:24:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-29T00:23:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-24T00:00:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-23T00:11:00.000-07:00

["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

2011-03-17T00:16:00.000-07:00

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.

*

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

2011-03-16T12:26:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-10T00:15:00.000-08:00

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.

*

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

2011-03-09T00:04:00.000-08:00

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..."

*

"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

2011-03-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

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.

*

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

2011-03-01T00:20:00.000-08:00

[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.

*

"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.

Interview with Paul Mariani

2011-02-24T00:02:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-22T11:54:00.001-08:00

[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

2011-02-22T11:41:00.000-08:00

[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?

2011-02-19T15:19:00.000-08:00

[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

2011-02-17T00:05:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-16T00:02:00.000-08:00

"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

2011-02-10T00:05:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-09T00:10:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-02T00:08:00.000-08:00

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

Saint Monica by Mary Biddinger

2011-02-01T00:15:00.000-08:00

"Saint Monica Burns It Down" originally appeared in the Valparaiso Literary Review and is forthcoming in Biddinger's soon-to-be-released chapbook, Saint Monica.

I must admit: I love this poem. I'm such a fan of poets adapting, revising, and rediscovering saints, and who deserves this attention more than St. Monica?

Biddinger brings Monica to the present; to the present Midwest, to the life of a young woman now. Such fantastic images here: "a warm Budweiser in each pocket," two terriers "holed up / in ruts beneath the shed," "reflections / of his white undershirt illuminating / the window frame."

Although we are grounded and directed by Monica through the title, no specific names appear in the actual text. We move with the narrative, one guided by a relationship between "her" and "he." We know from the first lines that she's ready for action--revenge, perhaps, thought it's all offered here with a light-hearted tinge. This feels like a poem about adultery--or at least the whiffs of infidelity. We have the late-night leaving, the returning in attempted silence, the "other woman."

I like that the poem ends with her, appropriately in front of "a gas stove." The layers here are clever, I think (burned in/by love). It's a smart, sly poem, one that breathes a new life into Monica--what's amazing is that Monica isn't very active in the poem, but so perceptive (she hears, she plans, she wonders). I like that this project isn't allegorical--Monica is memory, she is/was bigger than life, and these poems can inhabit, play with that persona but can move elsewhere, places new and fresh.

*

Mary was kind enough to share an advanced copy of Saint Monica with me, and it becomes obvious that such a figure as Monica--even redefined and recasted--is worthy of more than just a singular poem.

The chapbook contains 18 Saint Monica poems, with the aforementioned piece arriving at number 15. Biddinger begins the chapbook with a brief historical note adapted from Patron Saints Online. What's interesting about the note is the focus on Monica's prior struggles (alcoholism), her lifelong desires and attempts to convert her family, and the fact that her son Augustine's writings are our prime source of information about her. The latter immediately creates a mythos for her: she longed for her son's conversion, and he was no ordinary Catholic: his Confessions are the silent words of the box spoken for all readers, and his sins are revealed, not the least of which is his earlier rejection of his mother.

Can we find the real Saint Monica? I'm not sure, which makes her such a malleable and appropriate persona for these poems.

"Saint Monica Stays the Course" is an early prose poem from the collection (the chapbook includes both lineated and prose forms). It's a beautiful piece that begins with the sentence:

"One year at Saint Joseph, the girls who had first names beginning with M were invited to walk in the May Crowning procession."

And, at any such event, the following is bound to happen:

"Sister Cathleen instructed the girls in the correct way to proceed."

Monica is part of this procession, and though the poem includes the practical instructions one would expect (look straight, not into the pews; do not become nervous and sick; clasp "your bunch of daffodils"), it is augmented by the imagined, yet probable later instructions of these young women as adults. The poem riffs on these, and some are hilarious, others are a bit more troubling, and though the piece doesn't necessarily try to do so, it opens up thought about the less than wonderful opportunities for women in the Church.

Monica exists in this poem and the others in the sequence without the "Saint" (at least in the body of the poems), and such omission is no sacrilege. Sainthood is a way of living; saint is a title. You don't need the latter, and how many have we experienced who could never achieve the popularity necessary for consideration?

Monica is a real person in this chapbook, and "Saint Monica and the Hate" is an example of how she's not only the target of gossip, but equal parts hate and reverence:

All parents loved her, dropped
her name when scolding about tangled hair,
crooked hems. No wonder her girlfriends
stabbed her in the back with knives, forks,
hairpins, chopsticks, whatever was handy

and sharp.

*

It's important to remember--in all the discussions of celibacy--that many of the most essential figures in Catholic history, tradition, and piety are people that married, who had children, who led lives fully in practice of sexuality. Saint Monica was one of them (and thank God for that...or there wouldn't have been Augustine!), and this Monica has Kevin McMillan, who spent time with her at "The Devil's Place." He winks; she ponders the domestics of later married life. "Saint Monica Gives It Up" is a quirky (albeit different) female-centered version of "The Dead": Kevin's body and shape will always stay in Mary's memories. The poem's columned form and compression of stanza speaks to Biddinger's range in this chapbook (chapbooks in general are interesting projects: smaller than a poetry book, and yet often more resonant as they are entrenched in a particular project or persona).

This chapbook moves into deep territory, and yet it also resides so comfortably within that wry Catholic sense of humor Brian Doyle represented during his recent interview. "Saint Monica Composes a Five-Paragraph Essay on Girard's Theory of Triangular Desire" is so good, and so funny, that I'd recommend the collection on that piece alone. Here's the first sentence:

"Two Dominican Sisters and a Schnauzer sit on the back patio in late June, eating deviled eggs and day-old Wonder bread."

I'm sold. Biddinger goes in so many different directions in this poem (and yet all roads seem to lead back to Kevin): you need to find and read this one.

I laughed my way through this entire chapbook, but it's a tempered sort of humor. I refuse to name names, but so many poetic humorists leave me feeling flat and empty--not because I don't have a sense of humor, or that Catholics are uptight and stodgy (please), but because the type of humor often makes me question the weight of the words. Biddinger manages to be hilarious and worthwhile, creating gems like "Saint Monica's Sweet Sixteen":

It begins with a fistfight:
her boyfriend and uncle Paul

shoving each other during
an episode of Punky Brewster

In this chapbook Monica wins and loses. But, no matter what, one thing is on her mind:

"For the rest of the day she had to hold that keyhole shut while balancing her lunch tray, scribbling notes to Kevin McMillan, writing poetry about Kevin McMillan, sketching the likeness of Kevin McMillan gently on her thigh, passing the spelling tests up to Sister Rita, scanning Kevin McMillan’s paper and recoiling at his butchery of the word jocular."

It's a youthful obsession, to be sure, but it's also telling that Biddinger repeats the full name: it's a litany that nears prayer. And why shouldn't Monica live and love in this way? She listens to "Freebird." She's young.

And yet, in the midst of the humor and the domesticity and the sexuality, there's a poem that packs a pretty heavy theological punch. "Saint Monica Takes Communion Twice" appears in the final quarter of the chapbook, and it's a piece I've long since that about. The poem is what happens in the title: "She just got back in line and did it all over again."

Monica takes communion twice, and yet nobody notices. I wonder: are they watching? After I receive I usually have two choices: pray, head down, or let my thoughts wander and watch the litany of people walk forward. People I know, and people I don't. People that look differently, speak differently, think differently. Catholicism is a patchwork, and these final (or near-final) moments of Mass speak to that more than anything else. We are moving, we are praying, but we are all doing our own thing, and yet it exists in a bigger sense, in service of the Word, and in service of more.

So what does it mean to accept twice? Canon Law does stipulate (and please, someone correct me if I'm wrong here) that receipt is acceptable twice in a day in certain circumstances, including grave possibility of death.

What's fascinating about this poem, and what makes it so damn good, is that the body of Jesus is yoked with the body of the recipient. But isn't that the way it is supposed to be? Isn't the Host--and the process leading up to receipt--a way for us to not only pay respect and reverence to Christ, but also to become fully aware that we have bodies, and that these bodies exist in many different forms?

Monica is two forms, one person here:

"The first time it was the girl with hair tucked behind her ears. The second time it was the girl with hair in her face, hands unfolded, bra strap peeking out from the neckline of her sweater."

The poem continues to show the two paths of those forms as Monica lives. It's not only clever, it's theologically appropriate. Catholicism is a religion of mystery, and for me the Trinity is the apex of necessary philosophical murkiness: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Separate forms, one body? It's a beautiful paradox. Biddinger allows Monica to sin in this chapbook, but to also set her sights on sainthood. Monica doesn't force that canonization: it's her destiny.

AWP Previews: Mary Biddinger and Luke Johnson

2011-01-30T15:42:00.000-08:00

Two soon-to-be interviewees, Mary Biddinger (this Wednesday!) and Luke Johnson (March), have new books forthcoming soon AND will be reading/presenting at the Associated Writing Programs annual conference in Washington DC later this week.

Mary's panel looks fantastic. Here's a description from the AWP site:

Thursday, 2/3
3:00 p.m.-4:15 p.m.
Empire Ballroom
Omni Shoreham Hotel, West Lobby

Two Jews, a Catholic, a Buddhist, a Mennonite Sufi Shaman, and a ________ walk into an AWP Panel: Geography’s Influence on Writers Writing Religion and Culture. (Eric Wasserman, Ira Sukrungruang, Heather Derr-Smith, Bich Minh Nguyen, Mary Biddinger) Geography has emerged as a vital component for writers exploring the culture of religion in the post 9/11 literary landscape. The place the writer hails from is now just as important to depicting the culture of religion as the faith the writer is steeped in. A cross-genre cross-country panel of not-so-nice Jewish boys, Catholic schoolgirl transgressors, superhero emulating Buddhists, and more, take a special look at how place fuels how writers approach the culture of religion in their work.

And Luke will be signing copies of his debut, After the Ark:

Friday Feb. 4
2-3 pm
Booth 208, AWP Boofair, Marriott Wardman Park
2660 Woodley Road NW
Washington, DC

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And look at this!

Thursday 12:00 to 1:15
Nathan Hale Room
Marriott Wardman Park, Lobby Level

The Rosary Effect: The Challenges of Writing from a Catholic Perspective. (Haley Lasche, Luisa Igloria, Linda Norton, Ruben Quesada, John Reimringer) Five writers of poetry and prose discuss how practicing Catholicism has influenced their writing. Coming from diverse geographies, sexualities, racial perspectives, and spiritual awakenings, these writers delve into the ways their works are influenced by the current Catholic paradigm. The panelists discuss how they negotiate what parts of the Catholic religion and ritual they consciously and subconsciously include in their writings regardless of their approval of papal comments and doctrines.

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Oh.

If you're a lurker of The Fine Delight, and you need proof that a real live human being is running this show, come to my event on Friday the 4th from 12:00 to 1:15. I'll be reading as part of The Kenyon Review's Short Fiction Contest Winners event. Here are the complete details:

Virginia C Room
Marriott Wardman Park, Lobby Level

Get Shorty: Readings from the Kenyon Review’s Short Fiction Contest. (Cara Blue Adams, Megan Anderegg Malone, Christopher Feliciano Arnold, Mika Taylor, Nick Ripatrazone, Megan Mayhew Bergman) The KR Short Fiction Contest for Writers Under Thirty is entering its fourth year. This reading is an opportunity to hear work from younger writers recognized as winners or runners-up by judges Alice Hoffman, Richard Ford, and Louise Erdrich from the first three years of the contest. Submission to this contest must be 1,200 words or fewer.

Interview with C. Dale Young

2011-01-26T00:05:00.000-08:00

C. Dale Young is the fifth interview at The Fine Delight; be sure to check yesterday's profile for some great commentary on the genesis of several of his poems. This interview was conducted through email. A bio note, as well as links to C. Dale's books, follow the interview. Thanks, and looking forward to your new book, C. Dale!

1. In "Sepsis," your narrator asks "Dear God, how does a sinner outlast the sin." In "Paying Attention," we see "What can I say / to explain my God?" Do other poems in Torn contain such conversations with, or considerations of, the divine? And do you have a consistent characterization/identity for this God figure or concept?

When I first put together the first draft of the manuscript for Torn, I ran it through one of those word cloud gadgets. I was stunned to find that one of the most common words in the manuscript was the word "God." It was right up there with my all-time favorite word "dark" (which appears with a sickening regularity in all of my books, despite having the word with a line through it posted above my desk!). At first, I sat in disbelief as I looked at the word cloud. How on earth could God be such a common word in the manuscript? But when I went back and read through the poems, sure enough I found God made many appearances.

I wouldn't say that all of the appearances are in "conversations," but many of them are. I guess I blame this on having re-read a lot of my favorite poems by Donne over the time many of these poems were written. But then I would have to also ask myself why I was so attracted to Donne that I was systematically re-reading his poems. And this is a question I am not sure I want to pose. I guess I have always loved the metaphysical and devotional poets. I guess I wanted to take part in that larger conversation.

2. Do you think this desire to participate in the "larger conversation" is endemic to poetry? Does the nature of poetry make such considerations more appropriate or necessary than prose writing?

I don't think it is endemic to poetry. I suspect it is endemic to Art. I don't think poetry is more appropriate or more necessary than prose writing. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

3. I profiled "Paying Attention" at The Fine Delight, but almost selected another wonderful poem of yours, "Or Something Like That," which contains the following stanza:

Easy to doubt. Always easy. And the old Jesuit
who lectured me on this? Well, he doubted, too.
But I am not quite ready to be broken just yet.

Do you find such doubt essential to Catholicism?

I don't know if I am by any means the right person to answer such a question. I don't feel as if I am in any way an authority on Catholicism. I know for myself doubt is essential, but I also know I am probably not the typical Catholic.

4. "Stitch after stitch, the slender exactness of my fingers / attempted perfection." "Torn" is a powerful, passionate poem, so grounded in one night at the ER. What led you to choose Torn as the title of the entire collection?

"Torn" is a poem that for me is filled with contradictions and doubt about humanity. That human beings are capable of tenderness and the ability to heal while at the same time being capable of incomprehensible brutality is something I have always found compelling and powerful. Many of the poems in the book deal with these dualities and doubts. I also realized that in many ways I am torn in that I work both as a physician and as a poet. I am also torn as a man who is part Caucasian, part Asian and part Latino. When I first assembled the first draft of the manuscript and read through it, the title Torn seemed inevitable.

5. Have you found a way to mitigate this sense of tearing/separation; say, between your identities as physician and poet? Are there common humanistic approaches in the treatment of patients as a physician and the usage of language as a poet?

It isn't so much that I have a sense of separation. It is just that as a physician, the great majority of my time is consumed by medicine. It makes creating time to write and do other things difficult. But this is nothing new. All physicians experience this. I do not believe there are common humanistic approaches to practicing medicine and writing poetry.

6. In your insightful interview with The Collagist, you note that you "rely less and less on metrically-informed lines and more and more on the sentence" since your first book, The Day Underneath The Day. Later in the interview you offer a wonderful insight: "The tension between line and syntax is what has always made a poem a flexible and sometimes violent machine." Was the shift from metrically-aware lines to sentences a conscious one for you? As someone who also writes prose (you had a fine story recently in Guernica), do you carry conceptions of poetry across when writing sentences within that other genre?

I believed, falsely, when I finished graduate school that I knew a lot about poetry and the making of poetry. I have very few metrical poems, but my knowledge of and belief in meter was the primary influence on how I made lines, how I wrote poems. I believed in the line without really understanding the crucial fact that line is always in relation to the syntax of a sentence. Line can either support the normal syntax of a sentence or oppose it. That support or opposition is what harnesses the energy in a poem. In prose, we do not have the line to support or oppose standard syntax. The more I became aware of syntax and line in this way, the more I began to vary how I used line, the more I began to use it to establish my own rhythms and cadences. I suspect many poets know this, even if instinctively.

In prose, despite being without line, there are rhythms as well. Well-written fiction has a distinct rhythm to it and varies the rhythm based on the kinds of work being done at that point in the story or novel. The rhythm varies based on the kinds of information being deployed. I don't know that I have carried the things I have learned in poetry to my fiction, but I know I am deeply aware of cadence and rhythm when writing fiction. I just don't have the awesome ability to tweak that with line the way I do in poems.

7. Speaking of graduate school--you teach in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Does teaching--lecturing, workshopping, and responding to the work of students--affect your approach toward the reading and writing of poetry?

Yes and no. Teaching does not directly affect my writing, but it reinvigorates my brain and makes me revisit works I love and makes me consider poems I had not remembered or had not considered. I joke that I am on the poetry faculty at Warren Wilson but am also a fiction student. The writers who teach at Warren Wilson are rigorous, challenging and truly intelligent and humane people. They challenge me to be better. They remind me I am not completely crazy in my love of Literature. I also realize that I love poetry so much that if I help even one of my students to write the next “Ode on a Grecian Urn” then I have done a great service to poetry. In the end I want great poems to be written and appreciated, and that is what has kept me teaching.

8. Torn is scheduled for full release later in February, but copies will be available for purchase during the AWP Bookfair (at the table for Four Way Books). How have you approached the collection of your poems into manuscripts? Do you write individual poems with a complete book or project in mind? When did Torn feel finished and ready for presentation as a book?

Torn comes out in full release in early March, but yes, there will be roughly 50 copies for sale at the Four Way Books Table at AWP. As for manuscripts and book projects, I just write individual poems. I am fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it) to be rather obsessive-compulsive. I return to many of the same ideas and things over and over again. Eventually, when I have about 40-50 poems, I print them all out and look to see if anything coheres. If I find convergences, then I begin putting together a manuscript. But I never have a clue what a book ms. will look like as I am writing my poems. I suspect if I did know, I would have trouble writing the poems. I have quite a number of poems that have never been collected. But that is okay. A book is different than just putting together a bunch of poems, and not all of the poems I write will cohere. Sometimes, a poem I wrote 15-20 years ago fits with poems written in the past few years. In both my second book and third book manuscripts, I found that a poem or two written back when I wrote most of the poems for my first book fit better with these newer manuscripts. It is almost as if they were written before their times.

I had the fortune to secure a residency at Yaddo in the fall of 2007. There, I wrote 16 poems in two weeks and assembled the first draft of Torn. It was a very fruitful two weeks considering I typically write roughly 4 poems per year!

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C. Dale Young is the author of three collections of poetry: The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern 2001); The Second Person and Torn (Four Way Books 2007 and 2011). He practices medicine full-time, edits poetry for New England Review, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo, he lives with his life partner, the classical music composer Jacob Bertrand, in San Francisco.

3 Poems by C. Dale Young

2011-01-25T02:34:00.000-08:00

Dr. C. Dale Young creates inspired, beautifully crafted poems, likely enhanced by his full and diverse life: he practices full-time as a Radiation Oncologist at Sequoia Hospital, teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and edits poetry for the New England Review. His poetry certainly carries the weight and intelligence of a multifaceted approach to living. I'll be profiling a triptych of poems (based on observed theme--not necessarily offered as such by Young): "Paying Attention," "Or Something Like That," and "Sepsis." In addition to tomorrow's interview, Young has generously offered commentary on the genesis and composition of these poems in particular; his words are embedded in bold.

"Paying Attention," originally published in Poetry International and forthcoming in Torn (Young's newest book), is my favorite of Young's work. Wound tightly through seven quatrains, the poem proceeds as a focused first person narrative. The poem begins with rain--the self-reflective narrator offers a rhetorical wonder--but the movement is toward ownership of a personal sense of God.

The second stanza is a visceral presentation of God's hypothetical power: it's a bodily disruption, a shock to the corporeal. In fact, this entire poem is about suffering in a very physical fashion: in a way, Job with tangible pain. This feels like the archetypal God of the Old Testament, and yet this poem is deeper than a complaint and lament. Here are the final 5 lines:

He leaves the large red

imprints of his fist against my back,
sometimes flowering on my face. He showers
me with expectations. He lifts me up
to remind of my foolish fear of heights.

"Flowering" is the perfect choice, and raises the stakes of the line. The enjambment of "showers" is equally reverential, and "expectations" reminds the reader that this poem lives within the Kierkegaardian schema. And I love Young's careful control of the masculine pronoun within this poem: rarely has "He" taken on such grandness in narrative verse, and the final sentence of the poem reaches another level. Such ambiguity exists in this final sentence: Young engages the traditional symbols of ascension and Godly fear, but this narrator has more agency than usual, and his usage of "foolish" is more complicated than some innocent misunderstanding.

It's a fantastic poem about the divine, at a time when typically the craft-level of poems about divinity are low. In my original "manifesto" for The Fine Delight, I tried to differentiate between purely devotional and imaginative Catholic literature, and was entirely willing to accept the complications within all of those modifiers. Young's work is imaginative in the best of senses, and his treatment of God in this poem (and in others) arrives with fully realized and complex meditation on that complicated subject. Young's work is alive, never the "dead language" so lamented by Paul Lisicky during the first interview at this site.

Young carries and controls these final lines, infusing such personality into the God of this text that I feel as if I'm reading a modern apocryphal work. It's also quite circular, as the complaint of this God--inattention--is satiated by the extreme attention and care of the narrator/poet (I'm reminded of the self-awareness of Hopkins's "To R.B.").

C. Dale Young on "Paying Attention":

On a train trip from New York City to Saratoga Springs, I overheard a woman talking to another woman. I was struck when she blurted out the two sentences that make up the epigraph to the poem. As I sat on the train, I kept going back to this snippet of conversation and the truly odd nature of that question. I wanted to respond. I guess this need to respond germinated in me for days because when I eventually sat down to work on the draft, it came very quickly. I wanted to write that God is different to each and every person, but this is what came out instead. In many ways, the God in my poem is a disturbing amalgam of my desire to know God and odd details about myself.

I'm equally attracted to the second poem, "Or Something Like That," originally published in Linebreak.

As I intimated above, Young has such a clear control over the line as a metric unit: there are no cheap tricks and breaks here. Instead, Young moves across lines, allowing the line space to breathe and maintain a certain integrity. The first two stanzas of the poem include deliberate usage of commas, both to give form to these lines but to also control the pace of the work--and in doing so give the narrator a particular agency and importance.

The narrator admits "dark thoughts" here, and in the same way Young was able to demand my attention toward the divine in the prior poem, I'm fully aware of the "darkness" here. By establishing setting in the early lines (pine needles, light, leaves), Young locates and grounds the reader, holding that reader attentive to the importance of the conversation.

This is a poem about doubt, and yet doubt's existence is necessary in that it forwards conversation with, and contemplation about, the divine. If I accept God's existence with the same ease that I accept the table and computer in front of me, am I not defining and deflating God in the same swift motion? Young's poetry--I'd venture--almost reestablishes the currency and complexity of God, and this is a God worth noticing and embracing.

And as in "Paying Attention," I remain with the narrator until the end, with the conclusion enveloped in this beautiful final stanza:

I know what they mean. I get what You are trying
to get at. I am here, God, I am here. I am waiting
for You to blind me with a sunstorm of stars.

This narrator is calling for God--he has his doubts, and he bases them on personal experience and the reference to the "counselor." What a human poem!

C. Dale Young on "Something Like That":

I was troubled by a newspaper article I saw about a 14 year old boy who, worried he was gay, went to speak with the guidance counselor at his Catholic Prep School to only then be raped by the guidance counselor. Stories like these always bother me. I turn them over and over in my head, and I return to them as if they were wounds slow to heal. The poem came as a prayer would, slowly and surely in its voice but utterly confused in what it wanted to say, what it wanted to ask. If "Paying Attention" is an imagined conversation with that woman on the train, then "Or Something Like That" is definitely a conversation with the Divine and with the self.

"Sepsis" is the final in my self-defined triptych of Young's poems. God is mentioned twice within the first stanza, and I am not surprised, based on the location: we are placed firmly in the ER. I love each of these poems, but on a re-re-read, this might be my favorite. Look at this sentence:

I have coveted sleep, God,
and the toxins I studied in Bacteriology took hold
of Your servant.

The poem is as much a lament as it is a tightly viewed narrative. The phrase "I have coveted sleep" earns the repetition, and we can feel the sadness here. "Servant" is implicitly repeated, and the collective of the poem speaks to the duality of doctor: the power of healing and the converse, the humility necessary to admit the weakness of great powers (of body, perhaps, and even more).

There is a passing here, and yet Young shows us that the world moves and moves. Here is the final line:

Dear God, how does a sinner outlast the sin?

I, for one, would like to know that answer.

C. Dale Young on "Sepsis":

This poem is a difficult poem for me. It is one of two poems I have written that are incredibly difficult because I see the events behind the poems. Although "Sepsis" represents an amalgam (there is that word again!) of experiences from my Medical Internship, it also is a dangerous glimpse into my personal life in that I do wake sometimes early in the morning in sweats reliving some of the more awful moments I have witnessed as a physician. Always I have the same question: "Could I have done more?" It is an unanswerable question. I hoped by writing this poem I would find some respite or some semblance or relief, but in that I was wrong. I was terribly wrong.

Interview with Brian Doyle

2011-01-20T01:00:00.000-08:00

Brian Doyle is the fourth interview at The Fine Delight--so excited to share his ideas. This interview was conducted via e-mail: back and forth, morning and night, Oregon to New Jersey. Photo credit goes to Jerry Hart. A bio note, as well as links to Brian's books, follow the interview. A pleasure, Brian!

1. "Joyas Voladoras" made me cry at a public library, and each time I read the essay to my students I have to fight back tears. You're able to create such authentic sentiment in the piece. Could you discuss the genesis and composition of this essay?

Waaaal – it’s part of a book called The Wet Engine, about hearts, and how they work and don’t work, and how our species began fiddling with them with knives and medicines and such, written out of roaring terror for one of my sons, who was born missing a chamber in his heart (bit of a logistical problem that), and who was saved by many people especially a terrific cardiologist whom I came to greatly admire, and the book is also very much a celebration of him and his quiet wife, brave and gracious and complex souls. So ‘Joyas’ started as my maniacal notes about all sorts and sizes and shapes of hearts – I don’t know about other writers, but I tend to collect lots of pieces and stories and facts and shreds and tales and bits and then sort of mill them with my fingers and heart to see what might happen – and what happened was a sudden burst of an essay. I mean, that’s how I appear to write nonfiction books, essay by essay, almost – brief passages that tend to be essayshapely because I think I am an essayist in my bones – but ‘Joyas’ spun up and away from the facts into something else. I well remember sitting here at my desk sobbing as I was typing the end of it – the end coming as a great heaving surprise to me. One of the sweetest hardest things about being a writer, I think, is that you are often startled at what comes gushing out of you, given the chance, given the channel, given the craft preparation to give it a chance – sometimes hilarious and odd, but also sometimes painful and bruising….

2. I like your idea of the surprising in writing occurring "given the craft preparation." In terms of essay craft, what do you think is more essential: drafting or revision?

O, drafting, by a mile. If you never start you never get to tinker. Starting is the thing – seeds, shreds, notes, first lines – “taking a line out for a walk,” as essayists say, quoting the painter Paul Klee. To begin is everything. That first burst – after that you can revise and tinker and add and cut and move around and graft – after the start you get the carpenter’s joy of editing and tinkering and tuning, listening for music, making sure there’s bone and joy and snarling…

3. You seem to really appreciate language: words, phrases, sentences, sounds, and more. Your essays refresh and revive English. Do you think there is a connection between your Catholicism and how you approach language?

Lovely question. That’s never occurred to me – I have always thought that my addiction to cadence and swing and rhythm and alliteration and long sprinting runs of words and sounds like arrows of flashing trout in a river were probably more due to being American of Irish descent – a certain predilection to music and tall tale and humor and fast sliding joyous language – Gaelic, you know, is a very musical language spoken, I think, and I love the American language, its blunt laughter and bony wit and slangish ease. But to have been so soaked in Catholicism maybe played, come to think of it – chant and the rhythms of ritual language – one of the subtle pleasures of the Mass and much Catholic sacramental language is the rising and falling repetition of it – to say the rosary for example with others in concert is really to fall into a meditative call and response thing ancient beyond imagination. So yes, I suppose that’s true about Catholicism and language. I have always thought, as Bruce Springsteen has said (good Catholic boy as a youth, you know, Saint Rose of Lima Parish in New Jersey) that to grow up Catholic is to be especially lucky as an artist, because you are soaked in miracle and mystery and symbol and smoke and the confident assertion that every moment is pregnant with miracle and possibility and stuffed with holiness like a turducken; but I suppose it’s true of language also. I dearly love playing with the linguistic tools we are given, and love wrenching it this way and that, seeing what it might do if you let it loose – I am sure, as I have often been accused, that sometimes I can be so headlong and thrilled by the racing horse that it’s hard to read my pieces, but I can also say with high glee that I bet no one ever had as much sheer fun writing prose as me. To slam a sentence into ninth gear and hold on for the ride, your spectacles rattling on the fist of your face… and sometimes when you let your mind and your fingers loose a little more than usual, the prose punches down deeper than you knew you could go.

4. Although so many elements of Catholicism can appear in literature, many of your essays feel concerned with representing a sense of "grace" in a tangible way. One such essay is "The Meteorites" (which was, in fact, one of your essays I first read, enjoyed, and taught). What do you think about grace in the faith, and in your writing?

[Check-out "Grace Notes" at the above tab!] Ah, now, that’s such a huuuuge question, and idea, and mystery, that I cannot easily answer it, and can only come sideways at it with, of course, an essay. Attached. Good thing you are running this as a site so you can let people hit it. This was one of the first times I was forced to write a mosaic piece, by the way, because I realized that I couldn’t write a regular essay – the topic was too vast and labyrinthine, and I could only chase it glancingly, you know? Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, as that great insurance agent Wallace Stevens says.

5. Early in "Grace Notes" you briefly dramatize the powerful character of a selfless priest. What led to that representation? What, for you, are the roles and traits of a "great" priest?

Being a good priest, let alone a great one – what a tough job. And for all that everyone immediately thinks of celibacy, my friends who are priests tell me it’s more the weight of receiving pain and being wary of loneliness; good priests, I notice, have lots of friends, so many that they really create clans of cousins, nieces, nephews. Hard job – like being a doctor for ills and diseases that are very hard to see and mostly impossible to heal, I bet. And you never get an off-day. In a sense a priest, nun, brother is like a walking antennae for pain and troubles, you know? Rather Christ-like, the way we load our troubles on the professionals, and God forbid if they betray the slightest weakness or loneliness or lack of faith. Tough job – part performance, part deliberate act of crazy faith in something that can never be proved. Brave job. I admire the great ones, and the ones who raped children, who protected the rapists, I’d hang them by their nuts from a tall tree. Bernard Law, for example: criminal. To answer the question, great priests seem to me to be humble and liable to humor. They are alert to everything except their own egos, seems to me. I have met a lot of good priests (more good nuns, interestingly, who don’t seem as susceptible to pomp and power) and I really admire them and am awfully glad they have the courage and grace to be who they are.

6. I love that you mention humor as an essential trait for the best religious. I agree with that observation. Your work feels suffused with humor--and that humor creates energetic prose. What makes humor so essential to writing (and, perhaps, to being Catholic)?

O, lovely question. More and more as the years pass I think that spiritual substance and honesty and egolessness and real vision is flagged by humor – it’s no accident, seems to me, that the Dalai Lama, and Desmond Tutu, and Flannery O’Connor, and Thomas Merton, and John Paul II, for examples, are all liable to humor, whereas all of your most foul vile twisted squirming murderers and evil agents are the most grim stuff-shirt humorless bastards imaginable – can you conceive bin Laden, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot ever laughing? All they ever managed was a cackle over a particularly devious murder, I bet. And humor, in both the spiritual and literary arenas, seems freeing to me, a sign of wonder and humility somehow – everything’s so muddled and difficult that you have to laugh. It’s also a great disarming tool; the best way to get a message across, to say something real, is to use yourself as the resident doofus; and as I learned from the great spiritual writer (and hilarious dude) David James Duncan, humor relaxes readers and listeners – if you get everyone laughing, you can more easily slip in the poignant dagger. Plus humor is a lovely tool for writers because it traffics in odd juxtaposition of image, you know? We laugh because we are startled, sort of – and what a great way to dream and imagine things that might be. Such an endless sea, what might be. For example I wrote a poem recently in which all the owls in the world are W.H. Auden nuts, mumbling Auden to themselves all day long. It could be.

7. We have a mutual appreciation for basketball. I loved your musings on the (literary) element of the game at Oregon Live. Other writers have lamented the lack of more great imaginative writing about basketball; Edward Hirsch has pointed toward the more pastoral nature of football and baseball as being a possible reason. What do you love about the game? Could you point us toward any of your own writing about basketball?

[Check-out "An Exquisite Geometry" at the above tab!] O dear yes. Here’s a piece I did for a book of lots of writers celebrating the 1977 Portland Trailblazers NBA title, in which I tried to get at the speed and joy and flow and fluidity and generosity of the game, the sinuous quicksilver riverine webbed creativity of it – I do think it’s the greatest game, because while it is stylized war, like all sports, it pushes toward the most creativity, I think – you sprint and cut, use your hands, invent new angles, share the ball, need teammates, never get rained out, are penalized for violence and temper (unlike in football where you get paid more for inflicting injury); you are not disguised like robots as in hockey and football; there’s an ocean of points, unlike soccer; and everyone gets the ball, unlike baseball. The only game I have seen that comes close to basketball for these virtues is Australian football, which I have come to love. It does sadden me a little that hoop hasn’t produced great writing, like cricket and baseball and golf has – does make you wonder if grass is necessary for good ink, eh?

8. I needed little prompting to order Mink River (my copy is on its way right now). Your novel was released last year by Oregon State University Press, and the synopsis is so appealing: "In a small town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There’s a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime committed, and there’s an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it’s thinking. . ."

Could you discuss your approach toward writing the book? Its history as an idea or story, how you tackled the novel as a form, any potential novels as influences, etc.

O, that could take a week. The short version is that it started as a story, many years ago, which I published, and thought that was the end of things. But the characters kept talking, really and truly – I could hear and see them, especially hear them, their salty amused voices, the strain of their courage under duress; I tried to write the novel but skewed all over the road and gave up; and then finally went back to it, over the last five years, and went wild, slowly. I’d write every day, a piece a day, sometimes earning a paragraph, sometimes a page. I probably cut 100 pages too; the great lesson I learned was that something has to happen, and it was a great pleasure for me to discover with my fingers what was going to happen next. In a sense I think I couldn’t have written a novel that was any good until I had learned my craft as an essayist, much of which is what to leave out, and how to be free and open and wild and passionate while remaining clear and communicative; art that does not connect is terrible art, I think, which is why I think books like Naked Lunch and Finnegan’s Wake are awful, not to mention a lot of elusive allusive poetry, which should generally be slid cheerfully under the parakeet, or used in the mudroom so boots can dry properly. It was a huge pleasure to just finish the novel, partly to see what was going to happen to the characters, for whom I have a lot of affection and respect, even while they often did things I disapprove of. I felt very paternal. And now to see the book traveling out there on its own, hitting hearts in ways that my essays do not; sweeeeeeet. The letters I got as an essayist – the ones that didn’t begin Dear Idiot – were generally ‘your arrow landed’ letters; with the novel though the letters are more like ‘I lived in that world, thank you for opening the door to that world,’ which is really cool. I cannot call myself a Novelist, partly because I love the phrase Essayist so, but writing a novel was very freeing and fun and interesting as education and avocation. I used to think everyone should commit one, like a venial sin, but now I think maybe I will commit more. Such a sinner am I.

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Brian Doyle … is a hirsute shambling shuffling mumbling grumbling muttering muddled maundering meandering male being who edits Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon – the best university magazine in America, according to Newsweek, and “the best spiritual magazine in the country,” according to author Annie Dillard, clearly a woman of surpassing taste and discernment.

Doyle is the author of ten books: five collections of essays, two nonfiction books (The Grail, about a year in an Oregon vineyard, and The Wet Engine, about the “muddles & musics of the heart”), two collections of “proems,” most recently Thirsty for the Joy: Australian & American Voices (published in Australia); and the sprawling novel Mink River, just published by Oregon State University Press.

Doyle’s books have four times been finalists for the Oregon Book Award, and his essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion, The American Scholar, and in newspapers and magazines around the world. His essays have also been reprinted in the annual Best American Essays, Best American Science & Nature Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. Among various honors for his work is a Catholic Book Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and, mysteriously, a 2008 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, this last particularly amazing, because previous recipients include Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O’Connor, and Mary Oliver, and wouldn’t that be a great dinner table, you know?

His greatest accomplishments are that a riveting woman said yup when he mumbled a marriage proposal, that the Coherent Mercy then sent them three lanky snotty sneery testy sweet brilliant nutty muttering children in skin boats from the sea of the stars, and that he once made the all-star team in a Boston men’s basketball league that was a really tough league, guys drove the lane in that league they lost fingers, man, one time a guy drove to the basket and got hit so hard his right arm fell off but he was lefty and hit both free throws, so there you go.

"Joyas Voladoras" by Brian Doyle

2011-01-19T01:23:00.000-08:00

"Joyas Voladoras" was originally published in The American Scholar and later reprinted in Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize.

I teach "Joyas Voladoras" each year as an example of one of the few--1 or 2--pieces of imaginative literature that brings me to tears. That I should feel such an emotion each time I read the work is a testament to Doyle's ability to craft a self-contained, polished, and permanent piece of work. Doyle's essay is the perfect work to example and dramatize the difference between sentimentality (unearned emotion in fiction--to paraphrase John Gardner) and sentiment (earned, authentic emotion--Gardner again).

Doyle's tendency toward flowing, organic, and recursive sentences, not to mention his willingness to reinvent and make complex words, position him firmly in the lineage of Irish writers from Yeats/Joyce forward. He's a living Gael poet, in a way, and "Joyas" is a sequence of paragraphs that feel like prose poems with a point.

Doyle begins by asking us to "consider the hummingbird." I like the word "consider," and not think, or ponder, or reflect, or imagine. Consider is more caring, and its Ignatian in the way Father Martin explicated that term: Doyle wants us to really understand and discover a minute animal, and to be open-minded about the process and the potential results.

Doyle's narrative starts with, and returns to, the hummingbird's heart. Small and fragile as it is, it's powerful, complex, and exactly the type of natural object we need to fully consider. Doyle focuses on the paradox of the heart, of the bird: small, powerful, able and dynamic, they also are fragile: "when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be."

So close to death are those fully in life, it seems. Doyle follows with a litany of hummingbirds. From a craft perspective, this is smart writing, a sure way to avoid the sentimentality of lesser pieces. Doyle is direct, and he's honest: we've got this life, so what are we going to do with it?

"Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old."

There are so many ways to consider aging: moving forward, notching away the days left. A set amount of heartbeats is frightening, and yet, in a way, comforting: we sort-of know where we're going. We've got a finite time here and, like the hummingbird, we live a much shorter life than those redwoods near Doyle's neck of the forest. It's sad to think about, certainly--there's so much to love in the here and now, and a writer like Doyle exists to give us a nudge (or a punch in the face, perhaps) to open our eyes, notice, record, and reflect.

Doyle moves from hummingbird (really, really small) to blue whale (huge), and this sentence is killer:"the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles."

The first time I cried reading this was in the Clarence Dillon Public Library in Bedminster, NJ. I was 26 (3 years ago). The above line primed me for it, and trust me, I wasn't in the crying mood. I wasn't sad, I wasn't particularly nostalgic for anything, and I'd just gotten back from an hour or so of basketball in the late-spring heat.

It's the final paragraph that always wins me over:

"So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end — not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children."

That paragraph has been read hundreds of times and not once lost its luster. The cadence and syntax are perfect, and it rises to eternal truths, each one registering with me in absolute and deliberate succession. This is the best essay I've ever read. I'm confident in making that statment.

During tomorrow's interview Brian will speak to the origins of this essay, so I'll leave them unspoken for now. Check-in tomorrow!

Rewind (Best Of, Vol. 1)

2011-01-14T17:39:00.001-08:00

3 interviews thus far, 3 wonderful sets of insights--about Catholicism, but also about the construction of stories and the creation of art.

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Here are some of my favorite lines from each:

Paul Lisicky

It's a beautiful thing when an assembly is singing together, without fear, their breaths practically in sync. The experience is physical, it takes us out of ourselves; we're part of the larger body. Something extraordinary about interconnectedness is enacted rather than just instructed. At the same time, it's very intimate. We get to meet our own bodies again, as well as the bodies of the people to our right and our left.

It's funny--I didn't go to church for decades after having been so involved in liturgical music as a young person. As writing took over my imagination, art became my church, and that other world fell away, gently. The church doesn't often look so good from outside, when you're not in it. That's not exactly news to us. I couldn't help but think, well, the church of my childhood, the church interested in social justice and transformation of self and culture--well, that's just dead. I felt sad about it for a long time. It's been reassuring to learn that the story's more complicated than that, at least on the parish level. I think the parish is where grace is actually transacted, especially in the liturgy. There are good people out there, very quietly, very humbly, doing their part to change things.

I'm also interested in the relationship between irreverence and reverence in her [Flannery O'Connor's] stories. You can't have reverence without the other, you know?

All I know is that for the years I didn't go to mass, I felt a terrible pang whenever I walked by a church and heard singing coming from inside. It's home to me, even if I'm troubled by the conservative turn the (larger) church has taken in the last twenty-some years. The rhythm of the liturgy is really intrinsic to how I think, to how I make art. I miss it when I'm away from it for too long. It's exile.

That's what makes us cringe: when we hear people talking too easily, too certainly, about the divine. It's embarrassing. Empty, overworked phrases that are expected to stand in for the hard work of seeing, naming.

Rev. James Martin, SJ

Ignatian spirituality encourages believers to look for God not simply within the walls of the church, or in the pages of Scripture, but in their everyday lives. God can be found in the midst of relationships, work, nature, family, play, music--pretty much anything.

Other instances [of anti-Catholicism] are even more subtler, as when a journalist talks about a political figure as a “devout Catholic,” as if that's supposed to explain everything about his political beliefs.

Also, the Catholic Church is not fundamentalist when it comes to Scripture.

The church, I think, which often suffers from a certain joylessness, could certainly learn from their joie de vivre.

What would I say to someone who struggles with their faith? First of all, it's natural. Doubts are a natural and human part of the spiritual life. You can’t be human and not doubt. The saints struggled with it, and I would venture to say that perhaps even Jesus does in his final moments on the cross. (This is a reflection of his humanity.) So doubts are a given.

Jesus was very disturbing in his time. It's one of the reasons that he was crucified. And he is disturbing to us today. There's a terrible tendency to want to cordon off Jesus into a particular political sphere, and make it seem that Jesus is simply supporting what we believe politically. But Jesus is much bigger than any set political platform. For one thing, I think we've almost completely lost sight of the absolute requirement to care for the poor, which is clearly and repeatedly outlined in the Gospels.

Joe Bonomo

I think, that solemn space for reflection and, again, muttering, of finding the right words through trial and error, coming in prepared but also being open to digression and, ideally, for epiphany of a sort.

In another essay, “The God-Blurred World,” I write that attending church, and specifically being an altar boy for several years, really immersed me in the wonder of art, being in the presence of huge stained-glass narrative windows and sitting and worshiping under the intense images and story of the Stations of the Cross, leaving church moved, when I was, not only by mass but by the artful renderings all around me, and by the pleasures of storytelling, and by the art of metaphor, which in my young cynicism and rebellion I was already using to replace transubstantiation. Erotics of art.

I recommend that all Catholics listen to Highway to Hell very loud, and then go from there.

I always say that writing an essay is like building a house without knowing in advance how many rooms or floors you’ll put in. The house builds itself. I like what Edward Hoagland said about the essay, that it doesn’t boil down to a summary the way an article does. If I find that I’m starting an essay with a summary in mind, then I might be in trouble. It’s best to go in to the dark room, stub your toes on the furniture, let your eyes adjust.

And the essential tenets of Catholicism—I’m referring not to the engine of the church here, its very human and sometimes reprehensible machinations, official decisions, behavior—but the tenets of the faith—of sin, and forgiveness, and benevolent treatment of fellow humans, of compassion and, maybe above all, of humility—these are bedrocks upon which a writer can create, engage, and essay his or her self and place. That’s crucial stuff.

Attending church taught me a crucial thing for a kid to learn, that to be serious was OK, that it was OK to be contemplative, even if it at the time it was dull and you wanted to be somewhere else or doing something else. I carry inside me the high seriousness of mass, for which I’m grateful.

So I might say to the church, listen to Jesus’ teachings closely, be skeptical but always open, ignore agenda and love tradition but decry unfortunate, mean-spirited history, and act within a fully humane impulse consistently. Listen to differences and love and accept them. Or maybe just reflect on what O’Connor said: “Ideal Christianity doesn't exist, because anything the human being touches, even Christian truth, he deforms slightly in his own image.”

Interview with Joe Bonomo

2011-01-11T18:11:00.001-08:00

Joe Bonomo is the third interview at The Fine Delight, and I'm pleased to share his words. This interview was conducted via e-mail. A bio note, as well as links to Joe's books, follow the interview. Thanks so much for speaking with us, Joe!

1. "After Cornell" is a wonderful essay about the sacrament of confession. Does writing ever feel like a form of confession to you?

It’s interesting that you ask if writing ever feels like confession to me, as opposed to being confessional (i.e., confessing in writing). That’s a cool distinction, because my memories of confessing when I was young involve the process of talking, of sharing, more than the specifics of what I confessed. I remember the standard disclosures: I swore; I told on my little brother, etc. But mostly I remember talking toward a silhouette. And that process of conversation, of muttering toward a vaguely recognizable human figure, is a crucial connection to writing personally. There’s an implicit, sometimes explicit connection between me and a future reader. That relationship is obviously the crux of the sacrament of confession, the priest being the spiritual representative, the penitent being the talker essaying his near and far past for transgressions. The quiet in the confessional box is another connection, I think, that solemn space for reflection and, again, muttering, of finding the right words through trial and error, coming in prepared but also being open to digression and, ideally, for epiphany of a sort. And listening, to yourself and to another.

Now, the priest absolves the penitent’s sins, provided the penitent is contrite and does penance, makes amends. And there the connection to writing weakens a bit, or becomes entirely metaphorical, however you want to look at it. The essay doesn’t require forgiveness! In Catholic dogma, no one can forgive me my sins except God through the sacrament; in the secular sense, I wouldn’t consider forgiveness a part or a product of the writing process. I often encourage my students to avoid writing as therapy or as an act through which one might forgive oneself some transgression, or to right a wrong, because that kind of essay leads by agenda, a sense of purpose that might be too rigid to allow for surprise and discovery.

As I write about in “After Cornell,” sometime when I was 12 or 13 the sacrament at Saint Andrew’s moved to an open, face-to-face encounter in an office near the church’s main doors. That changed everything, for me anyway. It was all very seventies—thought I didn’t use that expression at the time. Very in-touch-with-your-feelings, raising awareness in a public way. I didn’t like it. Folk mass started around this time, too, “Up With People,” acoustic guitars. Even at that age I intuited that contemporary doesn’t always equal quality. I think that there might be a kind of parallel metaphor to the rise of the confessional essay/memoir in the 80s and 90s, the comfort with which many writers felt confessing to a visible audience. But I can’t take that connection too far, as it implies a Catholic past for writers who may not have had one. In moving to a face-to-face confession something essential was lost for me, a perceived lowering of hierarchy, maybe? Something solemn disappeared.

2. Your poetry collection, Installations (a National Poetry Series selection), feels metaphorically connected to "After Cornell" (the sense of rooms as boxes, the performance of art vs. the ritual of Catholicism and mass). Even the prose poem form feels like prayer. Do you find Catholicism implicitly influencing your non-Catholic content?

Yes, many times, implicitly usually. It seems to me that the sense of the confession—in terms of finding the right words, offering them toward a human shape, and then reflecting—is a very real aspect in my personal writing. And as so many Catholic writers, devout or not, have said, being raised Catholic tattoos you. In another essay, “The God-Blurred World,” I write that attending church, and specifically being an altar boy for several years, really immersed me in the wonder of art, being in the presence of huge stained-glass narrative windows and sitting and worshiping under the intense images and story of the Stations of the Cross, leaving church moved, when I was, not only by mass but by the artful renderings all around me, and by the pleasures of storytelling, and by the art of metaphor, which in my young cynicism and rebellion I was already using to replace transubstantiation. Erotics of art.

And it gets into my non-Catholic content, as well. With Installations, in the way you point out. The rooms in that imagined museum become sacramental places, places where mystery and the mystifying occur, or can occur. And the spectator is changed by the end of the book, moved, the world appearing new and maybe strange to him, similar to the way one can feel both enlarged and humbled at mass, or at any spiritual service or ritual. In writing Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found I was as interested in Lewis’ epic battles among wine, women, song, and a fierce Pentecostal God as I was his amazing night at the Star-Club, in Hamburg. His struggle with faith and sinning is classic, of course, and has come to define Lewis nearly as much as his music; he might say that his belief defines him entirely. And in my 33 1/3 book on AC/DC’s Highway to Hell, I was writing, in part, as someone brought up Catholic who listened to and loved that album in complicated ways. The album came out as I was graduating from Saint Andrew’s, on my way to a private Catholic high school, hitting puberty hard, and beginning, mildly, to question the church and my role as a practicing Catholic. I really resist analyzing rock & roll too closely—as Keith Richards said, it’s music for the neck down—but it’s pretty clear to me now that I was loving the album in a secular, I-love-rock-and-roll way but also as a kind of key that opened a door onto feared sinning—exciting and urgent excesses of all kinds—that I was warned against in church, taught against in school, and for which I hungered. For the final third of the book I got in touch with several of the kids at Saint A’s who graduated with me, and I asked them what it felt like to listen to the album then, and what it felt like now. Let me tell you, the scrim that’s dropped between Catholicism and AC/DC is hard to pull away completely. I got some interesting responses, especially from kids who I remembered as the bad kids, the sinners. I recommend that all Catholics listen to Highway to Hell very loud, and then go from there.

3. Your essays have an associative, and yet focused, structure that feels both carefully planned and yet also natural. What's your process when writing non-fiction?

Very roughly speaking, with essays I lead with intuition, with the full-length books I lead with a firm sense of subject. Two different roads that can intersect in some interesting places. I usually have at least a vague idea of subject when I start an essay. I might begin with a memory, a shard, an idea, an image, maybe even just tone. But it’s always (hopefully) only a door. If I open that door and there’s a room there, with hallways that branch off with more doors that I didn’t know were there let alone closed, then I’ve got something. If not, then maybe it’ll have life as a prose poem, or maybe I can salvage a line or two or an image or idea, or maybe I’ll have to scrap the whole thing. I always say that writing an essay is like building a house without knowing in advance how many rooms or floors you’ll put in. The house builds itself. I like what Edward Hoagland said about the essay, that it doesn’t boil down to a summary the way an article does. If I find that I’m starting an essay with a summary in mind, then I might be in trouble. It’s best to go in to the dark room, stub your toes on the furniture, let your eyes adjust.

With my music books, it was much different. There, the story was already laid out for me. So I worked from outlines. I didn’t want to leave anything out. That was especially helpful when writing Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, because that story covered three decades and the intersecting lives of half a dozen men, plus many tangential figures. I needed a clear outline or I would have lost my mind over the five-plus years it took to write. It was the same with the Killer and AC/DC books. I started with outlines—a sense of the book’s shape, the number of chapters, a rough idea of the narrative arc, the historical context—and then added and moved things around as the books took shape. It was important for me to leave some room for surprise and discovery, less in an essayistic sense—what Patricia Hampl means when she says that she writes in order to find out what she knows—than in the biographical sense. Halfway through writing I discover some great, salient event or quote that I was unaware of and know that it’s got to get in the book somewhere.

4. Your writing about childhood Catholicism is some of the best I've read, and your essays have appeared in great magazines (Fourth Genre, River Teeth, New Ohio Review, Quarter After Eight)--any plans to collect these into a book?

Thanks. I’ve collected them in a manuscript titled This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began.

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

The ritualistic aspect, and the immersion in mystery and doubt. That very sentence could be plucked and dropped into a lay, writerly context, and make sense. There’s a real connection between the sacramental and the urge to write, in my experience, anyway. And of course the notion of being born sinning, being expelled from the Garden, of wrestling with faith, what Hebrews call the evidence of things unseen—this is great content for being human, let alone for being a writer. A writer is charged with documenting or dramatizing the world in artful ways, to present the world new again. And the essential tenets of Catholicism—I’m referring not to the engine of the church here, its very human and sometimes reprehensible machinations, official decisions, behavior—but the tenets of the faith—of sin, and forgiveness, and benevolent treatment of fellow humans, of compassion and, maybe above all, of humility—these are bedrocks upon which a writer can create, engage, and essay his or her self and place. That’s crucial stuff.

6. Any Catholic literary influences?

Sure. The first three that come to mind are Flannery O’Connor, Andre Dubus, and Patricia Hampl. Maybe they’re a “Holy Trinity” for Catholic writers. I love O’Connor’s marginalized, unsympathetic characters, many of whom are surprisingly, movingly close to a grace that is often preceded by violence, in O’Connor’s view, which mirrored her century interestingly. And I love that she detested the idea of Christian fiction, fiction led by agenda and full of allegory and abstraction. For her, the real world is fallen, full of grays, not black and white. Hampl is, I think, one of the great Catholic writers out there. Virgin Time’s a great book, as is I Could Tell You Stories. She essays her past with diligence and seriousness, but she never loses sight of the majesty of mass, and of being raised Catholic, and how it imprinted in her a lifelong quest for meaning. Dubus is one of my favorite writers, period, and his wrestling with the Catholic dilemmas of the modern world is brilliant and profound. His characters are real, they’re ordinary people struggling with what it means to live in a moral universe, to be able to choose to do the right things, and what the implications are in those choices. This isn’t religious fiction either; it’s uncompromising, humane, complex renderings of ordinary people. Everyone should read “A Father’s Story,” a great story of Catholic dilemma and maybe one of the great stories of the Twentieth century.

The poet Tom Andrews was another influence on me, and he was also a dear friend. He wrote about what he called his “awkward faith,” and about being born a hemophiliac, what it means to be grateful to, and for, God and for being born into and living as a flawed body and into a world where language of devotion and gratitude often fail us. He gave great thanks in his work, but never failed to ask important questions too, about belief in a fallen, increasingly secular world. I miss him a lot.

7. Michael Leach has written that "If Catholicism can enchant and enthrall your imagination in the early years of your life, you will always be haunted by it. As novelist Alice McDermott said, with considerable pride, we are forever doomed to be Catholic." What is about Catholicism that has once (or continues to) fascinate/enlighten/help you?

Hampl writes in Virgin Time, “Nobody says, ‘I’m Catholic.’ It’s always, ‘Yes, I was brought up Catholic.’ Anything to put it at a distance, to diminish the presence of that heritage which is not racial but acts as it were.” She herself denies sharing that same “hopeless congenital condition,” but she recognizes it. And I’m somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, between believer and non-. I no longer attend mass, but often feel the gravity of the church’s teachings, and especially the mystery and loftiness of the mass and of the Eucharist. Attending church taught me a crucial thing for a kid to learn, that to be serious was OK, that it was OK to be contemplative, even if it at the time it was dull and you wanted to be somewhere else or doing something else. I carry inside me the high seriousness of mass, for which I’m grateful. And Catholicism also gave me a good education, I must say, a fact for which I’m grateful to my parents. My Ethics class in high school made a great impression on me; I was encouraged to write psalms and personal reflections, so I was encouraged to believe that self-interrogation and writing were noble pursuits, not to be scoffed at, though they were by my peers and sometimes by myself, of course.

8. One of my theology professors, Rev. Patrick Madden, has discussed how the Church can benefit (and has benefited) from the scholarship of independent Catholic theologians. What could the Catholic Church learn from writing and writers? Do you have advice for the Church?

I’m not sure. Catholicism as represented by the Vatican is pretty self-sealed. I was fortunate to grow up within a fairly progressive family and in progressive Catholic schools. My younger brother is gay. He came out in high school, the same Catholic school my brothers and I attended, a school where a kid had killed himself amidst queer and fag rumors. Coming out was a brave and humane thing for my brother to do, and the only thing he could do, of course. To the church, my brother is a flaw, and this is unacceptable to me. And, frankly speaking, this was one of the major issues I had, and still have, with the Catholic church. Many gay Catholics, among them Andrew Sullivan, have written movingly about the profound contradiction of worshiping in a faith and endeavoring to serve within and love an institution that condemns you. It’s a disconnect that I find insufferable. And I understand that some priests, some parishes, fight this, and that’s good. So I might say to the church, listen to Jesus’ teachings closely, be skeptical but always open, ignore agenda and love tradition but decry unfortunate, mean-spirited history, and act within a fully humane impulse consistently. Listen to differences and love and accept them. Or maybe just reflect on what O’Connor said: “Ideal Christianity doesn't exist, because anything the human being touches, even Christian truth, he deforms slightly in his own image.”

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

I’m writing essays, and blogging. I’m choosing among book projects. I’m not sure which direction I’ll go in yet.

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Joe Bonomo is the author of Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Installations (National Poetry Series), and Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band. His essays and prose poems appear widely, most recently in Quarter After Eight, Hotel Amerika, The Normal School, Fourth Genre, Brevity, and New Ohio Review, and his work has twice been cited in “Notable Essays” in Best American Essays. The recipient of fellowship awards in both prose and poetry from the Illinois Arts Council, Bonomo teaches at Northern Illinois University, where he was awarded the Excellence in Undergraduate Instruction Award. He appears online at No Such Thing As Was.

Joe’s Amazon Page

Joe's Essays at Scribd

"After Cornell" by Joe Bonomo

2011-01-11T17:07:00.001-08:00

Joe Bonomo's "After Cornell", originally published in Quarter After Eight, is an example of the type of writing that led me to create this site.

Bonomo's essays document childhood Catholicism--and how the culture of those experiences leave a constant watermark on one's adult life. One can certainly become lapsed Catholic, but it is nearly impossible to be a whitewashed Catholic. Bonomo is able to capture nostalgia without sentimentality, and to allow his readers to redefine Catholic schooling.

"After Cornell" is written in the associate, sectional structure so well-suited to creative non-fiction (a style used so well by Brian Doyle, Patrick Madden, and Gary Fincke). Bonomo's recollections focus on the traditional style of the confessional box: darkness and silence. Bonomo writes:

"To intellectually comprehend moral and ethical transgressions--regardless of how domestically petty they might feel to the confessor (last night I bit my little brother)--the confessor must shed anatomy's garment and step in unencumbered. The fragmented reminder that we are always flesh filtered through the shadowy screen between priest and penitent, and such a reminder could not have been allowed to distract."

Bonomo investigates the duality of the corporeal in this piece: "And yet, always we returned to the world with the body intact. And yet, always we returned to the confessional with the body in disarray." In the traditional confessional the penitent is an invisible flesh, flashes of body in shadow, and the power resides in the words offered. Such an intimate emotional encounter occurs within this box (and Bonomo makes the connection with Joseph Cornell's allegedly "random chance" boxes).

Bonomo laments the shift to face-to-face confessions, though he has prepared himself for the change, and the previous box felt "akin to stepping into the Old Age, of black, black, black." Bonomo's words bring me back to the confessions of my past: I made the same shift from darkness to (uncomfortable) light. Now my parish opts for the face to sheet to face confession in a lighted room, and we are given printed Acts of Contrition, columned in the center on a pink sheet. I agree with Bonomo, that something has been lost, or at least transferred, in this coming to light.

I've said it before, and it bears repeating: the Church has undergone a curious shift. Why can't the solemn coexist with progressive? Wouldn't an authentic sense of the former lead to a practical sense of the latter?

I love Bonomo's description of this face-to-face confession experience:

"Something was strangely off, and I was unprepared for how deflating the experience would be. I was not conceding my sins on my knees as had been the custom; rather, I was a casual supplicant, sitting with my legs crossed, as was the Father. We chatted; there was back-and-forth conversing, actual dialogue, none of the weighted, speak-and-hush murmuring of the box. There was direct eye contact, there were mild moments of levity. There was no mystery."

Bonomo returns to the concept of mystery in the final paragraph of the essay. It's beautifully written, and it's a nice example of everything right (or potentially right) about Catholic-influenced literature: the work becomes, to steal/shift Cardinal Newman, something more than Literature:

"The language of boxes might always be foreign, but a lifting of the lid and a cocking of the ear to odd, fearful music--however unphraseable--protects and enriches more of the soul than does an emptying of the contents into rational light."

Somebody needs to publish Bonomo's essays into a book. How this hasn't happened yet I don't understand. Anybody whose experienced a moment of Catholic schooling would find so much to appreciate here.

Coming tomorrow: Joe Bonomo's interview with The Fine Delight.

Misc.

2011-01-09T17:04:00.000-08:00

Scroll down to read my recent interview with Rev. James Martin SJ. His words are worth considering.

Father Martin has also begun a new series at The Huffington Post: How to Find God.

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Our next interview--going live later this week--is with Joe Bonomo. Joe's one of the best at representing the elements and peculiarities of childhood Catholicism.

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I'm also pleased to announce that we'll soon be running an interview with Luke Timothy Johnson. Dr. Johnson is an incredibly dynamic scholar of both Scripture and theology. His perspectives are fresh, and his voice is a necessary one.

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I also want to share the identity of a future interview...but won't just yet. I'll keep it a secret for now.

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Vox Nova always has wonderful content, and a recent post--actually, a guest post by Professor Tim Muldoon of Boston College--really got me thinking.

Muldoon's post is light-hearted but wide-reaching, and he posits a necessary question: what is so intriguing about demons/the devil? Much of Hollywood's preoccupation with Catholicism is its mystery, its willingness to accept the "supernatural," as well as its priest-warriors who fell demons that have inhabited innocent people. It all makes for wonderful theater, of course, and I must admit The Exorcist is one of my favorite films. But is it healthy, in the sense of perspective, for non-Catholics to conceive of Catholicism as that-grand-devil-fighting religion?

I'm not sure. Certainly Father Martin, Mark Massa SJ (who has also been added to the forthcoming interview list!), Philip Jenkins, and others have loosely (and not so loosely) yoked mainstream anti-Catholic sentiment to the religion's "other" status, which makes it, like so many "foreign" representations, ripe for Hollywood.

Muldoon's essay makes me wonder, though, if I've become a bit too anthropological where I should be theological. The element of "demons" that turns off many Catholics is likely the oft-parodied, red-horned, Baltimore Catechism edition, and not the conception of demons offered by Ignatius:

"To be clear: Hollywood demons are pretty much nothing like the ones that exorcists and spiritual directors deal with. Ignatius, for example, living in the 16th century–really the tail end of the Medieval world–did not describe demons in a Dante-like way. In Ignatius’ mind, demons weren’t hopping around with pitchforks or melting people’s faces. They were real, but their work was not one of terror but of constant temptation, and they could be overcome through lives of virtue and prayer. Indeed, the spiritual life as a whole, he wrote, was an ongoing practice of discernment so that one could learn which desires were rooted in God and which were rooted in the demonic."

Check-out Muldoon's entire post for more curious commentary.

Interview with Rev. James Martin, SJ

2011-01-05T16:57:00.000-08:00

Rev. James Martin, SJ is the second interview at The Fine Delight, and I'm thrilled to share his wonderful thoughts. This interview was conducted via e-mail. A bio note, as well as links to Father Martin's books, follow the interview. Thanks so much for speaking with us, Fr. Jim!

1. The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, is, like the best sermons, both accessible and layered. How did you come to, in the Ignatian sense, "find God in all things?"

Thanks for the compliment! The easiest way to answer that question is to say that it took me quite a few years of listening to Jesuits who were much more experienced, and it took quite a few retreats, before I began to understand what that meant. Essentially, all you need to do is to be aware, awake and attentive to what's going on around you. Ignatian spirituality encourages believers to look for God not simply within the walls of the church, or in the pages of Scripture, but in their everyday lives. God can be found in the midst of relationships, work, nature, family, play, music--pretty much anything.

One of the best ways of inviting people to see this is with the practice called the “examination of conscience,” which was popularized by St. Ignatius Loyola. Essentially, it's a review of the day that takes the form of prayer. And it only takes 15 minutes a day (most people do it at the close of the day) to help yourself to see God more clearly. The steps are as follows: First, gratitude: you remember things are grateful for, you “savor” them (that is, you spend time thinking about them) and you thank God for that. Second, you review the day, from start to finish, noticing all the times when you noticed God’s presence. Third, you call to mind anything sinful that you’ve done. Fourth, you ask God for forgiveness and perhaps decide to apologize to someone you offended. Fifth, you ask God for the grace to see God in the next day.

Eventually it becomes easy to see where God has been. And as you notice where God was, it becomes easier to see where God is. In other words, looking for God “backwards" makes it easier to look for God "forwards."

2. I first learned of the Jesuits from my father, who attended Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. He characterized them as worldly and intelligent, and yet also caring. What truly makes the Jesuits unique among the Catholic orders?

Well, depends who you ask! Many American Catholics might point to all of our high schools and colleges and universities. Overseas, people might point to things like the Jesuit Refugee Service.

Most Jesuits, though, would say that it's our distinctive spirituality. Each religious order (like the Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans) has a kind of tradition of accents, highlights, emphases in the Christian life that come to them from their founder. That leads to a distinctive spirituality, or way to God. For Jesuits, it's the way of approaching things according to the life, the writings and the activities of St. Ignatius Loyola, our founder, and the early Jesuits. So the idea of being a "contemplative in action," which is something that comes from Ignatius, is very important for us, as is the idea of, as I mentioned, "finding God in all things."

But another very important source is the Spiritual Exercises, the classic text written by St. Ignatius Loyola in the 16th century. In essence, it's a four-week manual for prayer that invites the believer to imagine himself or herself following the life of Christ as presented in the Gospels. Overall, and while it’s hard to summarize, the Spiritual Exercises brings one closer to God in prayer, frees one up to make healthier decisions, and gives you a deeper understanding of the New Testament.

It also invites you into that particular kind of prayer that goes by the name "Ignatian contemplation," which, as I said, is a way of imagining yourself within the scene from Scripture. You use all your “imaginative senses,” trying to say, “If I were in this scene, what would I see? Hear? Feel? Smell? Taste?” As Ignatius said, you try to “compose” the scene, and then observe what happens and notice what happens within you. That form of prayer really changes the way many people look at familiar Bible passages.

3. Your March 2000 essay, "The Last Acceptable Prejudice," was my introduction to the complicated tendency toward anti-Catholicism in America. Do you think Catholicism is still portrayed and rendered as an "other" in our country?

At times it is. But I think it's important to distinguish between the more virulent kinds of bigotry--like racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia—and anti-Catholicism. On the one hand, anti-Catholicism is simply not as virulent as those other prejudices. On the other hand, when we look at American history we see things like the burning of convents, the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party and many vicious (and I mean vicious) anti-Catholic tracts. The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. once called anti-Catholicism "the deepest-held prejudice in the history of the American people,” primarily because Catholics were living in a largely Protestant culture that was deeply suspicious of the Catholic Church. It’s also sometimes called “the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.” It’s rather accepted to think that the Catholic church is a malign force, particularly in the wake of the sex abuse crisis, and that priests are all pedophiles, and so on.

Today, though, anti-Catholicism is much subtler. For example, whenever you see a Catholic priest on TV they're sure to be presented as a pedophile, an idiot or a tyrant. Catholic sisters are portrayed as complete idiots (see “Sister Act,” for a relatively benign example) incapable of driving a car or even tying their shoes, when these are the women who built the American Catholic hospital network, founded and ran high schools and colleges, cared for the poor for years and years.

Now, some things that are labeled “anti-Catholic” may actually be more a result of ignorance (for example, when a newspaper editor doesn’t know even the most basic terminology and labels things incorrectly.) Other instances are even more subtler, as when a journalist talks about a political figure as a “devout Catholic,” as if that's supposed to explain everything about his political beliefs. I encounter anti-Catholicism quite frequently on a personal basis, too, as when otherwise intelligent people say absolutely ridiculous things to me about the church. It comes with the territory, though.

The best test of whether something is “anti-Catholic” is to insert another religion and ask yourself if that religion would be treated, or spoken about, the same way. (As in “All Jewish people are…” Or “All Muslims are…”) So I don't agree with those who say it's rabid and a threat to the church; on the other hand, I don’t agree with those who say it doesn't exist.

4. One of my favorite actors, Sam Rockwell, contacted you regarding his role as Judas in the play The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Your experiences with Rockwell and the rest of the cast were documented in the acclaimed A Jesuit Off-Broadway. What could actors learn from the Catholic faith (and what could the church, perhaps, gain from the theater)?

What could actors learn from the Catholic faith? Well, I would say puckishly, what everybody else could! So the essentials, as I presented them to the actors, are the essentials that I would present to anybody: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, and so on.

But more specifically, in the case of the The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, we spoke a great deal about the history of the saints. One of the things the actors found most interesting of the saints was that they were, as one said, "real people." And in the play, in which Judas was put on trial for the death of Jesus, a number of saints are called upon as "expert witnesses." And for the actors to understand their parts (and for Sam Rockwell to understand Judas), the actors needed to approach the apostles and saints as real people, which of course they were. So we studied the traditions surrounding the lives of St. Peter, St. Thomas, St. Monica, Mother Teresa, and in the process look at the notion of holiness making its home in humanity. This was, as they told me, a revelation for many of the actors.

Also, the Catholic Church is not fundamentalist when it comes to Scripture. So we used the modern tools of the historical scholarship to understand the Gospels more fully. I think this was also a surprise for the actors, who may have expected me to say that every single word of the Bible needed be taken literally. Of course I believe in the truth of the Bible, and not just some metaphorical truth, but the truth of what's being told in the narratives (for example, Jesus truly rose from the dead), but you cannot take every word literally because they're clearly some contradictions among the Gospels. These are the kinds of things we spoke about.

What could the church learn from the theater? Well, one of the things that struck me most about working with the actors was their spontaneity, fearlessness, and liveliness. They were always ready to try something new, particularly when it came to the interpretation of the part, always ready to learn, and always lively and energetic about their roles. The church, I think, which often suffers from a certain joylessness, could certainly learn from their joie de vivre.

5. As an editor of America, you're a part of a magazine that's essential to the Catholic literary culture of America. Are there Catholic writers--past and present--who have influenced you?

That's an easy question. My favorites would start with Thomas Merton, whose autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, helped to move me from my former life at General Electric into life in religious community, specifically the Jesuits. I’ve often said that the four people most responsible for my vocation are the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and Thomas Merton. I've also quite enjoyed reading the works of Henri Nouwen, the Dutch priest died in the 1980s. His way of combining his personal experience with Christian spirituality has spoken to me, and it influences the way that I write about my life and my beliefs. Ron Hansen is perhaps my favorite contemporary Catholic writer, though he doesn't always write about overtly Catholic things. His novel Mariette in Ecstasy is, I think, the great Catholic novel of the last 25 years. Finally, Kathleen Norris, who writes about things Catholic, is actually Presbyterian herself, but I’ll place her in that group. Her book The Cloister Walk is superb.

6. I wish that lapsed Catholics--those who have stopped attending Mass for a variety of reasons, or who have strayed from the faith--would read your enlightening writings, which truly reveal the energy of Catholicism. What would you say to those who have struggled with their faith?

Well, I wish they would read them, too! And actually some of the most gratifying letters and emails and messages I’ve gotten have been from people who have been struggling with their faith and who tell me that my writing has helped them. That’s wonderful to hear.

What would I say to someone who struggles with their faith? First of all, it's natural. Doubts are a natural and human part of the spiritual life. You can’t be human and not doubt. The saints struggled with it, and I would venture to say that perhaps even Jesus does in his final moments on the cross. (This is a reflection of his humanity.) So doubts are a given.

For someone truly struggling, I would ask him or her to start looking for signs of God in their everyday lives. The “examination of conscience,” as I said is an excellent tool to jumpstart your spiritual life and start looking for signs of God's presence. So it's not so much a question of looking for where God will be, as much as it is of looking for where God already is.

Sometimes those struggling with “faith” are struggling more with organized religion. And that’s quite a different matter. To these people I say that from the time of the early Christian church, there've been debates, struggles, challenges, craziness and sinfulness, and so it is impossible to expect a perfect religious organization to suddenly materialize. That doesn’t excuse the sins. By no means, as St. Paul would say. But part of being in any human organization is a certain admission of imperfection.

But really I would ask those struggling with their faith to just remember that God is always inviting you to experience the transcendent in your everyday life. It's mainly a question of being aware, awake, and attentive.

7. In a great interview with Big Think, you noted the gospel "is supposed to disturb you." Why do you think many Catholics and Christians want their religion to be easy?

Well, because they’re human! Who doesn’t want something easy? Who wants life to be hard? Who wants to be challenged? But Jesus came to, as the wonderful formulation has it, "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable." Jesus was very disturbing in his time. It's one of the reasons that he was crucified. And he is disturbing to us today. There's a terrible tendency to want to cordon off Jesus into a particular political sphere, and make it seem that Jesus is simply supporting what we believe politically. But Jesus is much bigger than any set political platform. For one thing, I think we've almost completely lost sight of the absolute requirement to care for the poor, which is clearly and repeatedly outlined in the Gospels. Jesus talked a lot more about that than about sexual morality, which we’ve forgotten.

But even more basically, the whole Christian message of love and forgiveness is difficult. It's hard to love someone who doesn't love you. To forgive someone who has hurt you. But that's essential! To paraphrase Dostoevsky, love in novels and plays is sweet and beautiful and easy; love in real life is a "harsh and dreadful thing."

8. I'm a big fan of your appearances on The Colbert Report: you're able to be both funny and articulate. How did you connect with Stephen Colbert, and why do you enjoy appearing on his show?

I had written an article on Mother Teresa for the New York Times after her book Come be my Light came out, which detailed her spiritual doubts. The people at the show read the article and invited me on to talk about Mother Teresa, which I was happy to do. I've long been a fan of the show and I'm also very much in favor of taking religion to places where it may not normally be expected to be found. So we had a lot of fun during a conversation; I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Stephen Colbert is a faithful Catholic, an intelligent guy, and of course very funny. Since then, I've been on three or four times and they even refer to me as the "Colbert Report chaplain," which delighted me. Frankly, when I speak on college campuses I get more questions about Stephen Colbert than I do about Jesus!

9. Are you working on any new writing projects?

Yes, always! Besides my work in America magazine I just a finished a book on joy, humor, and laughter in the spiritual life for HarperCollins, to be published in October this year. We're still noodling around with the title, but it’s pretty much finished. As I mentioned, I think there is a certain grim aspect to religion that needs to be challenged. The good news should put a smile on your face. And, after all, Christ is risen.

The next book I'm working on, which I’ve already started, is on Jesus. It’s a series of meditations on his life, death, and resurrection, using some of the imaginative techniques of the Spiritual Exercises. My joke to my friends is that I'm writing about Jesus because not enough has been written about him!

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James Martin SJ is a Jesuit priest, culture editor of America magazine, and author of the New York Times bestseller The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything and My Life with the Saints, which has sold over 100,000 copies and was named by Publishers Weekly as a "Best Book" of the Year. Father Martin, who has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe, among other publications, and blogs for HuffingtonPost, is a frequent commentator in the national and international media. He has appeared on all the major networks, and in venues as diverse as NPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," Fox TV's "The O'Reilly Factor" and Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."

The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by Rev. James Martin, SJ

2011-01-05T13:21:00.000-08:00

Need an example of a great priest? Rev. James Martin, SJ.

Father Martin is everything I expected the ideal Jesuit to be: worldly and yet focused, intellectual and sensitive. I've always had a romanticized conception of the Jesuit order (beginning with my father's experiences as a student at Holy Cross, where he played football against Jim Brown and trudged through cracked snow to 6 am mass, to my own readings of the controversial Malachi Martin--no relation!).

This past summer I bought Father Martin's newest book, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, with intentions of reading it during my long train rides from Dover to Newark. It was early July, and I was teaching a course at Rutgers University: The Literature of Sport. We read Don DeLillo's End Zone and Leonard Gardner's Fat City; we watched LeBron James leave the Cavs and marvelled at how NFL Films marriaged the classical with the violent.

Yet all of our classroom conversations, inevitably, returned to the corporeal. The body as object, as artifice, as resource. Athletes understand mortality better than most: bodies wear down, break, and pass away. And I've always thought the Jesuits to be the most "athletic" of orders, and the credit goes to St. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, a regiment of prayer and life that forms the backbone of the order's sense of practical faith. I was thinking sport but, as usual, I was really thinking God, and how our bodies are gifts (even at their worst moments), and how faith is mental and emotional but so very physical. These bodies are what we have and what we own, and what we do to them matters.

I finished Father Martin's book during a ride and a half--it's so lucidly written, so smartly structured that I recommend it to those who normally hesitate to touch the literary (or equally so, the religious). I taught the course MTWTh, 8:15 to 10, but had Martin's words in the back of my mind. Body + Sport = Spiritual Exercises, it seemed. The summer is a good time for faith: between maniacal amounts of basketball and volleyball, I can attend morning or afternoon masses, 10 to 15 of us in the church, connected by (and sometimes without) words.

Martin's book, like the best sermons, like the best religious treatises, does not exist merely as a text, but informs and inspires. Martin's book, in a curious way, better allowed me to feel and be Catholic. It gave the connections of my faith form, and reminded me, in a way, that such belief was acceptable in the larger world. Perhaps that was what finalized my childhood conception of Jesuits: here were priests who were also teachers, lawyers, doctors, writers, counselors, psychologists, artists, and more. Priests who lived in and out of the parish, who could communicate as easily with a theologian as they could with a couple needing advice or comfort.

Father Martin is certainly visible. He's the culture editor of America and the "resident chaplain" on The Colbert Report. He writes, and writes, and writes, and gives the impression that he lives to not only spread the Word, but to give it the flesh of language and the applicability of experience. This book puts those words into motion. It begins with, appropriately enough, St. Ignatius, but elucidates why Ignatius was so essential and genius. Ignatian Spirituality, for Martin, is "finding God in all things." How simple, and yet how perfect? Martin often uses the word "freeing" in this book, and such a philosophy does wonders.

Martin was not always a priest, of course. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, had a successful corporate career at GE, and yet, with all that, needed another way to be "freed." Martin speaks of "detachment" in this book, and yet this sense of being detached doesn't mean locking yourself in a room: it means lifting away the inessential. Pausing. Reflecting. Here's Martin's complete list of the essentials of Ignatian Spirituality, distilled and focused:

1. Finding God in all things.
2. Becoming a contemplative in action.
3. Looking at the world in an incarnational way.
4. Seeking freedom and detachment.

I connect this collective sense of freedom with the fourth chapter of the book. Martin offers practical means toward "noticing" God within our daily existences. I want to laugh at how many people long for signs and wonders (I don't laugh, though, since I often want the same) as evidence of God's appearance within their lives. Mountains moved, seas parted. The Jesuit way--through the Examen--is to alter the externally-prescribed pace of your life and take ownership of your day. Beautifully simple, the examen contains 4 steps:

1. Gratitude.
2. Grace to know one's sins.
3. Recasting of the day--moment by moment.
4. A request for grace and forgiveness.
5. Resolution to change, and then the Our Father.

The safety in structure of the Examen and other exercises returns quite clearly in chapter twelve, where Martin explains a sort-of Ignatian step-by-step for decision making. It's one of my favorite sections of the book because it feels like Father Martin is talking to me. So often priests are seen as being distant theologians (and sometimes authoritarians). I've never experienced either possibility. I've encountered priests who, like Father Martin, are genuinely concerned with people. Spiritual psychologists, as it were, who have the grace and example of Christ as the ultimate sample. Read Martin's book for moments like this: profound advice and clarity of guidance.

Martin's later discussion of vocations is what brings me back yet again to the book. There are so many possible vocations of Catholics--both as religious and lay persons. Martin's a big fan of the Merton tendency toward self-discovery and revelation: I think I'm quoting Merton correctly in "what we have to be is what we are." Again, it's both freeing and empowering. It has me thinking about my own vocations. Teacher? Writer?

Will I become a deacon?

Maybe. We'll have to see. And wait (I'm only 29).

Tomorrow: I'm so thankful to share an interview with Father Martin!

All Things New

2011-01-02T09:49:00.001-08:00

So hesitant to make a new post, since the first thing you should read on this site is Paul Lisicky's incredible interview. Scroll below or click here!

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Added Ron Hansen, Brian Doyle, and Rev. James Martin, S.J. to the forthcoming interview list. That's a pretty amazing trifecta. Really looking forward to sharing their words with everbody.

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America magazine is always a great read, and a new article "On Their Way Out: What Exit Interviews Could Teach Us About Lapsed Catholics" is an informative piece.

I wholeheartedly agree with the concept, and I do think Paul's interview speaks to these concerns. Many people leave the church for good reasons, and yet the absence of faith is something that causes them regret. So many good people have been "lost" from the church in this manner that I hope the church could take notice. I'm sure the church has, but the exit interview concept is a tangible way to begin dialogue.

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Another curious thing I'm noticing: people seem to miss the pre-Vatican II sense of ritual and solemnity at mass, as well as the post-Vatican II sense of revolution and revision. It's an interesting paradox: the church has turned away some people who loved and supported its social justice arm (for lack of a better word, a 'liberal' element of the church) and also loved its sense of ritual and tradition (again, for lack of a better world, a 'conservative' element of the church).

Catholics are complex, our faith is complex, and it really resists any attempts at normalcy or definition. I'm thankful for that.

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I should give a shout to my parish, St. Joseph's in Newton, NJ. Father Brian Sullivan is the priest, and save for Father Joe Celia of St. Pius in Selinsgrove, PA (priest during my college years), I've never met a more caring, effusive pastor. Frs. Brian and Joe (may Fr. Joe rest in peace!) share the intangibles needed to lead a faith community, a parish, and a school. I can vouch for the fact that mass attendance is way up (and not only at Christmas!) and the services breathe with a shared energy, a common goal. Beautiful to see and experience.

Interview with Paul Lisicky

2010-12-31T11:15:00.000-08:00

So pleased to have Paul Lisicky as the first interview at The Fine Delight. This interview was conducted via e-mail. Photo credit goes to Star Black. A bio note, as well as links to Paul's books, follow the interview. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with us, Paul!

1. "The Didache" is a beautifully layered prose piece that engages the sacrament of the Eucharist, and the title refers to the non-canonical, yet essential document of the early Church. How do you envision the connection between the title and the narrative of the piece?

A little patch of the actual Didache has always stayed with me: "As this broken bread was scattered on the mountains and was gathered and made one, so may your church be gathered together to the ends of the earth." That translation probably comes from one of the liturgical songs I sang (or wrote?) during my teenage years. I know I was thinking a lot about brokenness at the time I wrote the piece. My late mother seemed pretty broken health-wise; she also seemed broken in terms of her identity. As her memory went, she had a range of selves that stood in for who she'd been. My father? Well, he was sometimes known to her as Bernice, the lady who ran the (non-existent) restaurant on the ground floor of their condo.

There was a day, on a family visit, when my mother insisted on making a sandwich for me, when I knew it was very hard for her to do that. I could see the concentration in her face, her attempt to steady her hands. That gesture seemed profound to me--can I say Eucharistic? I needed to let her make the sandwich, though I could have done it myself. I must have been wondering whether there was a beauty to brokenness, to all the selves we'd been (or almost been) over time. So the piece wants to gather all those selves together in a single gesture. In that way, the piece wants to echo the intent of the document it takes its name from.

2. Could you discuss how music (and your experiences as a composer) connect to, and enhance, Catholic mass and faith?

I can't imagine the Mass without music; most of those texts insist on being sung. Compare a sung Holy (Sanctus) to a spoken Holy. The latter thuds along and it's over before you know it. It's all murmured at the same pitch, no highs and lows, no contours. All monotone. So much of the mass is fragmentary. Responses and acclamations need the emphasis of melody and harmony or else they're swallowed up.

It's a beautiful thing when an assembly is singing together, without fear, their breaths practically in sync. The experience is physical, it takes us out of ourselves; we're part of the larger body. Something extraordinary about interconnectedness is enacted rather than just instructed. At the same time, it's very intimate. We get to meet our own bodies again, as well as the bodies of the people to our right and our left.

3. Famous Builder, your memoir-in-essays, contains some wonderful representations of post Vatican II Catholicism, especially the organic, "joyful" sense of celebration with mass. Has the Church gone in another direction since that post-conciliar optimism?

That's hard for me to talk to, as I go to Mass at an urban parish, where progressive politics and progressive theology are very much alive. Lay people of all colors, income levels, and sexual orientations, etc. are involved in the liturgy. They're lectors, Eucharistic ministers, cantors--all that. Interestingly, the assembly applauds at the end of the final hymn, and it never feels like self-congratulation, or simply about the good job the choir did. It's pure gratitude--or maybe awe that something meaningful, on a communal level, could take place in a hard and cynical world.

It's funny--I didn't go to church for decades after having been so involved in liturgical music as a young person. As writing took over my imagination, art became my church, and that other world fell away, gently. The church doesn't often look so good from outside, when you're not in it. That's not exactly news to us. I couldn't help but think, well, the church of my childhood, the church interested in social justice and transformation of self and culture--well, that's just dead. I felt sad about it for a long time. It's been reassuring to learn that the story's more complicated than that, at least on the parish level. I think the parish is where grace is actually transacted, especially in the liturgy. There are good people out there, very quietly, very humbly, doing their part to change things.

4. Could you discuss your appreciation for the writing (and ideas about writing) of Flannery O'Connor?

I've always been stirred by the relationship between disruption and growth in her work. Grace doesn't often happen without confrontation, especially confrontation between strangers. I'm also interested in the relationship between irreverence and reverence in her stories. You can't have reverence without the other, you know? The Grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" doesn't reach out to touch the Misfit's face until after she mumbles, "Maybe he didn't raise the dead." That's the first point in the piece where she actively doubts, the first time she asks a question. The religion of complacency and denial and reward for social achievement--gone up in a flare. I don't think that she would have come to that radical connection with the Misfit unless she'd opened herself up to doubt.

I also love what O'Connor does with tone--the almost slapstick, vaguely sitcom-y opening of "A Good Man" morphing into something so grave and pressurized that it's almost unbearable. Try reading that whole story aloud in a group setting: It's on fire. I'm always relieved by any piece of art that escapes its original terms, that's given permission to leap and stretch and go to strange, anarchic places. Of course there's still humor, dark humor, in the gravest parts of the story, but the story's become another animal in its final pages. There's such a lesson in that, not only in terms of content but form, too.

5. Any Catholic literary influences (besides O'Connor)?

Ah, definitely Denis Johnson. JESUS' SON is about as important to me as anything, not just its thinking, its accommodation of heightened perception, but its economy, its disjunctions, its room for inference. A beautiful, wounded mind that's always struggling toward clarity, grace--and what it means to recognize other human beings. It's music in language.

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

The grandeur and mystery alongside its down-to-earthness. I think the meeting up of those two points of view is a fertile place for art. And I've always been drawn to its space for questions, its room for contradiction. I mean, number the contradictions in any O'Connor story--it's instructive.

If we're talking about potent traits...How about the respect for fallibility, screwing up, the deep, shadowy side of any human character? I think that might be partly why I've never been able to bear the notion of "likable" characters in fiction. Who's interested in likable characters if redemption is a dynamic, ongoing thing? Likability always strikes me as being so externally determined, never organic to the character in question.

7. Michael Leach has written that "If Catholicism can enchant and enthrall your imagination in the early years of your life, you will always be haunted by it. As novelist Alice McDermott said, with considerable pride, we are forever doomed to be Catholic." What is about Catholicism that has once (or continues to) fascinate/enlighten/help you?

I might have already spoken to that, in different ways, in the questions above. All I know is that for the years I didn't go to mass, I felt a terrible pang whenever I walked by a church and heard singing coming from inside. It's home to me, even if I'm troubled by the conservative turn the (larger) church has taken in the last twenty-some years. The rhythm of the liturgy is really intrinsic to how I think, to how I make art. I miss it when I'm away from it for too long. It's exile.

8. One of my theology professors, Rev. Patrick Madden, has discussed how the Church can benefit (and has benefited) from the scholarship of independent Catholic theologians. What could the Catholic Church learn from writing and writers? Do you have advice for the Church?

To be open to theologians, writers, artists who might not be friends of Catholicism. To respect other points of view, not necessarily Christian points of view, but Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, agnostic, atheist points of view. I'm a great fan of the liberal Dutch church, the music and texts of Bernard Huijbers, Huub Oosterhuis, Antoine Oomen, and Tom Lowenthal. I've loved that work since I was a teenager, its dignity and common-sense, its lack of sentimentality, its respect for social justice. When I listen to that music, I can't help but think it could change the world if only we had it in ourselves to take it in.

As for what's hard to take? Dead language, mawkish language. I think all of that does more soul-damage than we know. That's what makes us cringe: when we hear people talking too easily, too certainly, about the divine. It's embarrassing. Empty, overworked phrases that are expected to stand in for the hard work of seeing, naming. Those Oosterhuis texts, even though they're decades old now, make an active effort to resist that.

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

I'm close to finishing the second draft of a nonfiction book called I'D SURE LIKE TO SEE YOU. It's a book about friendship, particularly about my friendship with the late writer Denise Gess, who was in many ways a mentor, a sister, my best friend. It wants to be part JUST KIDS, part THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, part something else. Passages about friendship are interspersed with scenes of the planet in trouble: the Deepwater Horizon spill, the wars, the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the costs of global warming. It might just be a big old mess, but people seem to be liking what they've heard.

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Paul Lisicky is the author of LAWNBOY, FAMOUS BUILDER, and two forthcoming books: THE BURNING HOUSE (novel, 2011) and UNBUILT PROJECTS (short prose pieces, 2012). His work has appeared in PLOUGHSHARES, THE IOWA REVIEW, FIVE POINTS, BLACK WARRIOR REVIEW, GULF COAST, THE SEATTLE REVIEW, and numerous anthologies. He has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Rutgers-Newark, Sarah Lawrence College, and Antioch Los Angeles. He currently teaches at NYU. In Spring 2011, he will be visiting writer in the MFA Program at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He lives in New York City. His blog, MYSTERY BEAST, can be found here.

"The Didache" by Paul Lisicky

2010-12-31T08:26:00.000-08:00

Paul Lisicky's memoir-in-essays, Famous Builder, is a must-read for representations of post-Vatican II Catholicism, as well as the complicated intersection between Catholic tradition and sexuality. "Wisdom Has Built Herself a House" is an essential essay in the collection.

His short prose piece, "The Didache," originally appeared in Subtropics (Winter/Spring 2008). It will also appear in his forthcoming collection of short prose, Unbuilt Projects.

I was first struck by the contrast between the title of the piece--a reference to the apocryphal, anonymous document of early Jewish-Christians--and the domestic content. The Didache is instructive, so there's certainly an implicit connection between the instruction we received from faith and that which we receive through a parent, but Lisicky's willingness to allow those elements to only coalesce in a symbolic manner makes this piece work so well. It becomes dramatic rather than didactic.

The narrative begins with a question: "What were you like the last time I saw you whole?" The piece follows with more questions and considerations, the wonderings of a son in relation to his mother (who exists in this piece with a touching, Marian care and concern), noting "It's funny how we end up where we do," and yet the narrator appears quite aware of how life moves.

The language of the final sentences moves comfortably into the Biblical-lyrical. I've seen Lisicky do this elsewhere in his prose, and it always occurs at the right moment:

"As the broken bread was scattered on the hillsides, and so was gathered and made one, so may the many of you be gathered and find favor with one another."

The lines are a lyrical refiguring of a Didache hymn, and the result is powerful. We follow toward the conclusion of Lisicky's piece:

"Take. Eat, says the mother, given up and broken, and pushes the sandwich into the lunch bag, and sends me on my way."

The Didache/Biblical suffuses into the domestic, the love of mother/son becomes eternal. The suffusion of the archetypal/Biblical into the domestic accomplishes several results: it re-establishes the "truths" inherent in these ancient actions and connections, and yet it also reminds us that our present, prosaic world is capable of being legendary and graceful. Lisicky's compressed piece feels like the best of sermons: life observed so carefully it becomes real in the re-telling. It's beautiful writing, a piece worthy of re-reading.

Coming tomorrow: An insightful interview with Paul Lisicky!

Dean Brackley, SJ: Upcoming Lecture

2010-12-30T10:39:00.000-08:00

Mark Radecke, Chaplain of Susquehanna University, has generously shared the info that Jesuit priest Dean Brackley will be delivering the 2011 Alice Pope Shade lecture on January 19th, at 7:30 pm in the Stretansky Concert Hall.

From SU's website:

Brackley is a Jesuit priest who writes and speaks passionately about the role of faith in addressing the social challenges facing the Central American nation of El Salvador and the global community. Brackley succeeded one of the six Salvadoran Jesuits who were assassinated by the Salvadoran military in 1989. He continues to uphold the memory of their lives through his pastoral work and teaching.

Chaplain Radecke also passed along a link to one of Father Brackley's essays on his pastoral experiences (goes to PDF).

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My favorite excerpt from Father Brackley's essay:

"By distancing the non-poor from the daily threat of death, the benefits of modernity have induced in us a kind of chronic lowgrade confusion about what is really important in life, namely life itself and love. Besides, superior technology and the communications media induce us to think of our culture and perspective on life as the norm, and basically on track. The encounter with the poor stops us short; it recollects us. When we come out on the other side, we realize that the marginalized are actually at the center of things. It is we, in Washington and Paris, who are on the fringe."

More Greene

2010-12-29T16:15:00.000-08:00

Rediscovered this today:

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition/2008/fall/greene.html

My favorite excerpt from this piece about Greene's revisions to The Power and the Glory:

"Near the end of the manuscript, Greene crossed out three lines in the elaborated scene of the execution of the "whisky priest." The episode is told by the only witness—a secondary character—who sees the execution from the window. He had first met the priest by pure chance at the beginning of the novel, thus bringing the novel full circle. This pattern is further enhanced by the inclusion of the buzzards already present on the first page (changed into vultures in the later editions).

The published text runs as follows:

"Then there was a single shot, and opening [his eyes] again he [Mr. Tench] saw the officer stuffing his gun back into his holster and the little man was a routine heap beside the wall—something unimportant that had to be cleared away. [added on the manuscript and published: Two knock-kneed men approached quickly]."

After "cleared away," Greene crossed out the following lines that were not included in the published version:

"But looking down Mr. Tench caught a look on the officer's face—an uneasy look, the look of a disappointed man and it suddenly sunk to him, as the buzzards flipped down again after the explosion's shot, as though the blood had been cleared away from a whole region of the world."

The erasure of this passage seems to underline Greene's intention to allow his readers a greater freedom of interpretation. Those suppressed lines, with the look of disappointment read on the lieutenant's face after the execution of the priest made the priest appear to be too much of a Christic figure, a martyr, possibly on the way to Sainthood at the moment when, following the explosion, "the blood had been cleared away from a whole region of the world.""

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This is a fantastic find by François Gallix.

Definitions, 2

2010-12-28T15:30:00.000-08:00

What is "Catholic"?

Roman Catholic. Anglo-Catholic. Episcopalian ("the bridge church").

I started this line of questions in a previous post; one (hopeful) result of this site is that we all can begin talking, refining, revising, and perhaps expanding the conception of what is defined as Catholic literature.

In moving forward with this site--and my future plans of a print anthology of contemporary Catholic writing--I am amazed at the amount of writers who have experienced the Catholic tradition, who have wrangled with the faith, left the faith, returned to the faith. It's a tradition that's endlessly complicated, that resists attempts at definition (like my own).

Perhaps we should defer to Flannery here:

"The Catholic novelist doesn't have to be a saint; he doesn't even have to be Catholic. He does, unfortunately, have to be a novelist. . . if I had to say what a Catholic novel is, I could only say that it is one that represents reality adequately as we see it manifested in this world of things and human relationships. Only in and by these relationships does the fiction writer approach a contemplative knowledge of the mystery they embody."

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Also, at Vox Nova a great start to the discussion from 2008.

Misc.

2010-12-27T21:39:00.000-08:00

Look for interviews with Paul Lisicky and Joe Bonomo here at The Fine Delight in the upcoming weeks!

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From Bernardo Aparicio García:

Dappled Things is undergoing a redesign, upgrade, and more.

PILGRIM: A Journal of Catholic Experience just released their inaugural issue.

Joseph Pearce relates that a new journal, The Roman Catholic Arts Review, is about to launch.

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NPR!

"For These Young Nuns, Habits Are The New Radical"

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As I said in the earlier post on Greene, art can be Catholic in spirit without being Catholic in name or content.

Another example is this amazing documentary:

The Philosopher Kings (2009)

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, 3 of 3

2010-12-26T10:17:00.002-08:00

Part 3: The Reaction

Greene once asked (through correspondence) Evelyn Waugh: "Must a Catholic be forbidden to paint the portrait of a lapsed Catholic?"

I hope the answer is NO, or Catholic literature is in trouble.

Later in that same letter, from January 1961:

"What I have disliked in some Catholic criticism of my work . . . is the confusion between the functions of a novelist and the functions of a moral teacher or theologian.

The Power and the Glory was condemned by Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo, from the Vatican's Holy Office, because it was "paradoxical"--in short, sympathetic to the whisky priest rather than condemning his sins (Literature Suppressed On Religious Grounds by Bald and Wachsberger). Pizzardo actually requested that Greene make alterations to the novel!

Bald and Wachsberger relate other gems: "In a 1948 essay "Why Do I Write?," Greene defended his right to be "disloyal" to the church . . . [Greene] thought he must be able to write "from the point of view of the black square as well as the white." Greene was well-aware that pedantic Catholic fiction would be disastrous: the work must be organic, dramatic, and honest to the realities of the Catholic world, a world in which evil exists in equal (or greater?) parts than good.

Bald and Wachsberger continue that Greene offered the character of the whisky priest in part as a reaction to the more superficial brand of Protestant criticism that the Catholics idolized the role/position of the priest. Greene states that "the man's office doesn't depend on the man. A priest in giving sacrament believes his giving the body and blood of Christ, and it doesn't matter whether he himself is a murderer, an adulterer, a drunkard." Fascinating stuff, and one can't help but read Greene himself into the statement: the imperfections of the Catholic writer enhance, and do not detract, from the "good work" of his/her writing.

Much has been made of Greene's "Marxist Catholicism," his material support of revolutionaries AND ministries. I am continually intrigued by his complexities, and will certainly revisit his other work on this site.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, 2 of 3

2010-12-26T10:17:00.001-08:00

Part 2: The Text

I think one element of truly successful Catholic literature is that the work can be read, appreciated, and discussed without being treated as a devotional text; in other words, its Catholicism is essential and yet one does not need to be Catholic (or Christian) to appreciate the work. Greene's novel fits.

The theology of the novel focuses on the character/concept of priest as father and representation of Christ. The whisky priest, Father Jose, and all other members of the clergy alluded to within the text are "officially" unacceptable, and yet the whisky priest's true theology is his personal suffering and self-doubt.

Greene is clever in avoiding polarization between the priest and the lieutenant, whose atheism is both pragmatic and reasonable in the context of this world: "There was something of a priest in his intent observant walk-a theologian going back over the errors of the past to destroy them again." Later the lieutenant claims "One day they'll forget there ever was a Church here," which of course is the fatal flaw of his philosophy. The text makes clear that the Mexican church was bloated, indulged, and overwrought, but the problem was the administration of that church, not the faith belief; the lieutenant has mistakenly yoked a disdain for certain clergy with a desire to whitewash belief systems.

The priest feels unworthy: he mangles sermons, mumbles confessions. He is truly aware of the inadequacy of his corporeal: this is a Mexico where insects "burst," where bodies are flaked by hunger. The layers of Greene's novel allow him to unfold this theological backdrop against a relatively standard chase-thriller, with a last act betrayal that has been sufficiently rehearsed.

My favorite quote from the novel is some third-person subjective thought of the whisky priest:

"How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt."

I say Amen, but this is what got Greene in trouble with the church.

Part 3: The Reaction

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, 1 of 3

2010-12-25T22:18:00.000-08:00

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene was first published in 1939. The book was a fictionalization of Greene's experiences in Mexico, and a non-fiction account of those events, The Lawless Roads, was later published.

1. Is the writer Catholic?

Greene remained slippery on this point. A convert to Catholicism for marriage, he later self-identified as "Catholic agnostic," though claimed to receive the Host in his own home. Greene's infidelities are legendary, though if sin demoted one's Catholicism none of us need apply. How did Greene contextualize adultery (his and others). Could The End of the Affair help us understand his opinions?

Regardless, Greene certainly counts as a Catholic writer.

2. Is the practical content Catholic?

Absolutely. An unnamed whisky priest is wanted by an atheist lieutenant during Canabal-like "fascist" control of Mexico. Greene slyly appropriates genre conventions here (beginning the novel with his useful "independent" British expatriate--this time a "Mr. Tench"; the mid-book political wrangle; the cross-country chase with final-act ambush), yet the novel reaches much, much higher. The whisky priest is no hero: he has fathered a daughter, who now hates him (along with the mother). He was an over-fed, proud clergyman whose penchant for liquor bleeds into his inability to resist other corporeal temptations. Self-doubt is his constant, and it is sometimes unclear whether he baptizes for the sacrament, the (previous) duty, or to make meager money. He is willing to have others be captured, and die, so that he is not caught by the "Red Shirts," and Greene is smart to present his actions as either cowardice or the fact that the priest's life and actions exist for the greater good of believers.

3. Is the thematic content Catholic?

Again, yes. The lieutenant, though, is perhaps the essential Catholic element in the text. Hard-nosed, (and in the sense of metonymy) presented as a gun-in-holster lawman in the archetypal sense, he's a sufficiently complex character: some incident in his childhood fed his distrust of the church, a church showed in the text as one that fattened its clergy while simultaneously thinning its parishioners. The lieutenant's perspective is jaded, of course, and the key philosophical consideration of the text is whether the lieutenant (or any government entity) has the right to dictate the faith beliefs of citizens. The whisky priest is dirty, shamed, a horrible role model. He has, in the dogmatic sense, erred in the essential tenets of the church. And yet he is loved by the faithful not for his sins, but for the representation of Christ he presents--this appears to be the fatal miscalculation of the lieutenant. The lieutenant's violence and rhetoric leave a much worse taste than the delinquencies of the priest. Children go from pining for the lieutenant's gun to spitting on his holster; the whisky priest is gone but Catholicism in Mexico is continuous.

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It is difficult to read Greene's novel and not appreciate the work as Catholic in the thematic sense: the "spirit" of the priest has endured suffering and rhetoric, and yet his enemy, the lieutenant, operates not without intellectual and emotional warrant. Greene portrays a damaged church in Mexico, one particularly susceptible to criticism and revision. Yet such an acknowledgment is only the first step.

Part 2: The Text

Part 3: The Reaction

Definitions?

2010-12-25T16:19:00.000-08:00

What makes a work of literature Catholic? Or is that an inappropriate question to ask? Can texts be Catholic (or Jewish or Norwegian), or are such adjectives only appropriate for writers?

Is a writer only a Catholic writer if he/she is practicing? How does one define a practicing Catholic? Practicing in thought or action? Intention or result?

Is a lapsed Catholic writer less Catholic in the literary designation than a practicing Catholic? Is the content of the work more essential than the producer of the work?

At least two commentators (Cornel West and Patrick Samway, SJ) have noted the Roman Catholic upbringing (practice?) of Toni Morrison. Is Beloved a Catholic novel?

Such questions are open to genre, form, origin, and more, and therefore certainly not limited to considerations of Catholicism. But I think the best consideration of Catholicism in literature operates from William Gass's favorite usage of the word: catholic as a general, encompassing term. Better to form definitions through examples than prescribe a forced set.

That said...I think 3 main elements can be considered when pursuing a identification of a text as "Catholic":

1. Is the writer, or has the writer ever identified as, "Catholic."

2. Is the practical content of the text (characters, setting, plot action, etc.) Catholic, either in the faith or cultural sense.

3. Is the thematic content of the text Catholic? This final element is, of course, the most subjective. Does the work operate within a Catholic worldview?

First up: The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.

Welcome

2010-12-25T16:03:00.000-08:00

The Fine Delight exists to document, not proselytize; to observe and not judge. Representations of any and all aspects of Catholicism (Roman, Anglo, and more) in imaginative literature (novels, short fiction, poetry, non-fiction) will be complimented by interviews and reviews, all intended to enhance the existing information on the topic.

Our name comes from the first line of Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins's final sonnet, "To R. B.":

"The fine delight that fathers thought."

Thanks for stopping by!