Karen Barbre Ullo, DT Managing Editor from 2017 to 2021 —and current Editor of Chrism Press—writes:”Readers of DT may recognize this one. (If you don’t know, it first appeared as a serial in DT.) And now it’s coming back into print as our first book from Chrism Press!”

Click the above image for the full Facebook announcement. For sample chapters and purchase links, visit here.

100 Catholic Writers & Artists 1921-2021

Katy Carl, DT Editor in Chief, shared the above link, “h/t the marvelous Rhonda Ortiz over at Chrism Press.”

Me: The list includes some Catholics who practiced their faith and many “who were raised in the faith, stopped practicing, and retained a Catholic sensibility within their storytelling.”

Art is a Jealous God | Dr. Margarita Mooney & Dr. James Matthew Wilson

James Matthew Wilson, whose poetry is frequently published in DT, writes, “My conversation with Margarita Mooney, of the Scala Foundation was, like all things these days, recorded. If you are curious about ‘Art Is a Jealous God: the Necessity of Beauty for Human Happiness,’ then I have good news for you. You can slake that curiosity below.”

The Wonder-Working Laurus

Katy Carl shared the above link to a review of The Wonder-Working Laurus, which she mentioned in the year-end round-up, Books We Loved in 2019, Part Three. She writes, “Michael Rennier, so happy to see this novel receiving wider attention .” Fr. Rennier, DT Web Editor, replies, “I’m using a scene from it in my Palm Sunday homily.”

Last night, after midnight, I read the last lines of Laurus, a newly translated Russian novel by Eugene Vodolazkin, and thought it surely must be the most perfect ending ever. There is no way it could have ended any more perfectly or profoundly. And then I did what I have done nearly every time I’ve put this astonishing novel down over the last few days: I picked up my chotki (prayer rope) and prayed, as I was first taught to do in an Orthodox parish in the Russian tradition.

“What kind of novel makes you want to enter into contemplative prayer after reading from its pages? I’ve never heard of one. But Laurus is that kind of novel.”—Rod Dreher at the American Conservative

Graham Green’s Dark Heart

Josh Nadeau, DT Associate Editor recommends this article, with the comment, “I try not to post things without reading them first, but I didn’t have the time and thought this would nevertheless be interesting.”

I relied, “Love it. I’ve been reading about Greene for years, and I learned many new things about him in this excellent article.” One of the things I love about it is that agrees with me that “‘Our Man in Havana’—a dazzling blend of menace, humor, and resignation—is one of the finest things he ever wrote.” I smile in admiration whenever I think of the book. And the movie with Alec Guiness, Maureen O’Hara, Ernie Kovacs, Noel Coward, and Ralph Richardson, oh my.

The next great American novel might be written by a Catholic

James Matthew Wilson recommends the above-lined article at Aleteia, written by John Burger, “Friends, I am pretty delighted with this article on the new University of St Thomas MFA program in Creative Writing. We have a strong first class recruited already, but there are available seats remaining. The enthusiasm with which the creation of this initiative has been greeted has been a reward in itself.”

The Great American Novel: We’ve been looking for one since the 1860s. Why?

While we are on the topic, the above-linked article about the GAN by Maria Konnikova at Slate is an interesting look at the history of the concept.

Fanaticism & Art: You Can’t Influence a Culture You’re Hiding From

Rhonda Ortiz, Dappled Things Webmaster, writer, and Chrism Press co-founder, recommends the above-linked article by Steve Skojec at The Skojec File.

Skojec, former writer for One Peter Five, quotes Eric Hofer, the atheist “longshoreman philosopher” (of all pundits to quote), about the dangers of fanaticism. “The true believer,” Hoffer wrote, is “the man of fanatical faith who is ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause.” If this is a condemnation, I and many other believing Catholics I know are guilty as charged. What does holding “fanatical faith” mean but that you have a sure belief that there is only One Truth? And that truth is the one that you are willing to die for?

It seems to me Skojec sees in Hofer’s description of “true believers” a just condemnation of his own former way of writing and that of other writers like him who don’t feel they are doing their jobs as Catholics if they are not moralizing. “The story could never be just a story. The characters couldn’t live the lives a character of that sort would naturally live. I had to shoehorn them into molds that made them moral examples for the benefit of my audience.” Haven’t we all read Flannery O’Connor, who tells us the duty of the Catholic fiction writer is to be true to the craft, and we have no business shoehorning pat morals into our fictions?

Katy Carl, DT Editor in Chief, sees Skojec’s essay differently, “He (and any other believer close to despondency over our plight, anyone who feels that simply telling stories might be a waste of precious, God-given time) absolutely needs Joshua Hren’s new book: How To Read (And Write) Like A Catholic.

“Other than that, all I can tell him (and would, if the comments weren’t subscriber-only) is that if God calls you to tell stories, you tell them: and to tell stories you have to get over yourself: alas that’s hard but it’s true, the storyteller must simply reject all self-pity and self-indulgence and get poor sorry Brother Ass out of the way of what God wants told. For as Skojec recognizes here, what people believe about the world, about the Good, about experience, is profoundly a function of the stories they tell themselves and the stories they allow themselves to be told by others. Yes, belief needs the clarity of the intellect, but without charity—genuine, palpable, ardent charity—that clarity is mere outline, without color. I wasted years being a Tarwater about this —”you caint just say NO, you got to do NO”—and in the end it was no use: it’s like fire in your bones, if you are called. If not, fine: find what you are called to: good luck and God bless you. But this reads to me like the yearnings of a budding fictionist who’s experiencing a blend of admiratio, helpless wonder in the face of a grand pursuit, and sloth, the sadness of soul over the difficulty of attaining the desired end. Naturally, I could be projecting what I’ve been through myself. But anyone reading this who feels any degree of what Skojec is describing or what I’ve posited about its roots: please, please read Joshua’s book: the small-v vocation you save may be your own.”

CHRIST AT THE CENTER: GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS’ “AS KINGFISHERS CATCH FIRE”

Katy Carl recommends this “Word on Fire” article by Dr. Holly Ordway on how poetry can “lead with beauty”— to draw people to the great wedding feast, the banquet of the Lord. For her example, she annotates the great Hopkin’s poem “As kingfishers catch fire.”

Christ at the Center: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “As kingfishers catch fire”

The Chinese emperor’s Catholic poetry

Emperor Kangxi (康熙帝) (4 May 1654 – 20 December 1722), the longest-reigning emperor in the history of China, was also a learned scholar who composed Catholic poetry—although he never converted. The link above takes you to some examples of his work.

Kangxi gave the Jesuits a house inside the Forbidden City – which was exclusive to the imperial family and its retinue – as well as land on which to build a church.

When the church was completed, the Emperor wrote an inscription for the lintel in his own hand:

To the true Principal of all things. He is infinitely good and is infinitely just, He illumines, He supports, He regulates all things with supreme authority and with a sovereign justice. He has no beginning and no end. It is He who rules and is the true master.”

Fabric by Daniel Mitsui

Katy Carl writes, “A little visual delight for your Friday: this makes me wish I were a sewing-type person. The names are such fun, too—’battle mammoths,’ ‘parliament of fowls,’  ‘temperamental green men . . .'”

Acts of the Apostles, Chap. 1:9-12:

“And when he had said these things, while they looked on, he was raised up: and a cloud received him out of their sight. And while they were beholding him going up to heaven, behold two men stood by them in white garments.

“Who also said: Ye men of Galilee, why stand you looking up to heaven? This Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come, as you have seen him going into heaven. Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount that is called Olivet, which is nigh Jerusalem, within a sabbath day’s journey.”

Tissot’s Commentary: “The Ascension is not merely the personal glorification of Jesus, it is also an event of the last importance to the human race. It is the completion of the Creation, interrupted by the fall of the first man. The design of God in creating man was to make of him the conscious and free agent of his own salvation, the sharer in the divine bliss and glory. Man by his sin had hindered the realization of this plan, but he could not frustrate it. By the Resurrection of Christ we see man set free from death and restored to his first hopes of eternal life, but his salvation is not yet completed. By the Ascension God permits man, redeemed through Christ, to share with Him in the divine glory, and thus realizes in Him the original idea of the Creation. Only thus can that idea achieve completion.

“Not yet, however, is the end of all things. The Ascension not only complete the work of our redemption through Christ, it lays the foundation of its realization in every one of us who is of Christ. In this consists its importance for the Church. There remains now but two promises to be fulfilled the sending of the Holy Spirit, which shall continuously supply the Church on earth with the grace of the risen Saviour, and that last prophecy uttered in the Judgement Hall of Caiaphas “Hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven”, a coming which will summon the elect to share the Ascension of the Master and to become partakers of His glory, even as Jesus prayed in the sublime petition offered up on the eve of His death, ”Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory which thou has given me; for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world”. It is not for us to dwell now on this last subject, these final chords of the divine symphony. We have been relating the life on earth of Jesus, that life ends for us in the apotheosis of the Ascension. The cloud which “received Christ from sight” is like the curtain which falls at the close of a drama. We will not attempt to raise it, but let us each and all withdraw to “ponder”, as the Virgin did, these things in our hearts.”

Image “The Ascension as seen from below” (1886-1894) by James Tissot. Illustration for The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, at the Brooklyn Museum.

Acts of the Apostles — Chap. I:9:
“And when he had said these things, while they looked on, he was raised up: and a cloud received him out of their sight.”

James Tissot: “The Resurrection of Jesus is to a certain extent incomplete as long as His glorious Ascension is still unaccomplished. He has resumed His body. He has still to take His own place again, and that He is about to do. After He had given His last instructions to His disciples, Saint Luke tells us that “he led them out as far as Bethany, and he lifted up his hands and blessed them. And it came to pass, while he blessed them he was parted from them and carried up to Heaven.”

“The same disciple in the Acts of the Apostles, adds a few characteristic details about the luminous cloud and the angles which appeared. It is evident that the cloud did not resemble a chariot destined to bear the glorified body of Jesus to Heaven, but was simply a veil hiding from the disciples what became of that body, endowed as it now was with special powers. It may perhaps have undergone a kind of dematerialization, fading away in the light to take form again where He was to reign eternally. Or perhaps He may have merely transported to Heaven in the twinkling of an eye, by virtue of His divinity.

“However that may have been, He suddenly faded from sight, and where He had been, a cloud stretched like a veil, hiding the mysteries of God. The apotheosis is complete. Jesus is gone to sit down at the right hand of His Father from whence He shall some day come, according to His promise, to judge the world.”

Image: The Ascension as seen from the Mount of Olives (1886-1894) by James Tissot at the Brooklyn Museum.

Brooklyn Museum description: “As Christ ascends to heaven, several witnesses shade their eyes from the blinding view overhead. According to Tissot, the Ascension completes the ‘original idea of Creation,’ which was ‘redemption through Christ’; now humanity, too, is permitted to share in divine glory. ‘The cloud which ‘received Christ from sight’ is like the curtain which falls at the close of a drama,’ he comments.

“In the foreground of the image, Christ’s two footprints remain pressed into the earth as proof of his presence on earth—and in heaven.”

The Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the University of St. Thomas

Katy Carl, Dappled Things Editor in Chief, tells us that Joshua Hren and James Matthew Wilson report that they still have some open seats for the new online MFA in Creative Writing they recently founded at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. The application deadline is July 15.

While there are more than two hundred MFA programs in the United States, the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of St. Thomas is the only one committed expressly to a renewal of the craft of literature within the cosmic scope, long memory, and expansive vision of the Catholic literary and intellectual tradition.  With Virgil, Dante, and Flannery O’Connor for guides, we aim to enter into that tradition and to shape its future.  Additionally, the MFA in Creative writing at UST is the most affordable program of its kind in the country.”—From the University of St. Thomas, Houston, MFA Creative Writing web page.

Joshua Hren and James Matthew Wilson

Literature for a Wounded World: Faith & Fiction in the 21st Century

Monday, May 24, 2021
7:00 PM—8:30 PM ET
4:00 PM—5:30 PM PT

Katy Carl also writes, “I am thrilled to be moderating this conversation on faith, fiction, wounded humanity, and healing—co-hosted by Dappled Things, America, Slant, and Image. Please consider joining us: it is free and open to the public, and promises to be illuminating.”

In this event, three prominent contemporary writers—Kirstin Valdez Quade, Randy Boyagoda, and Christopher Beha—reflect on their own novels, the role of a novelist in our time,  and the distinctive possibilities for engaging with the Catholic tradition in the late modern world.

After This Our Exile: Search & Diaspora in McKay’s Romance in Marseille

7:00 PM—8:30 PM ET
Saturdays, June 10, June 17, June 24, and July 1 (optional)

Katy Carl also recommends this seminar. It  comprises three discussions, each led by Chiyuma Elliott (UC Berkeley) and a special guest facilitator, as well as one optional concluding session led by Terence Sweeney (Theologian-in-Residence at Collegium Institute).

Session 1: June 10, featuring Jovan Scott Lewis (UC Berkeley)
Session 2: June 17, featuring F. Douglas Brown (Poet)
Session 3: June 24, featuring Katie Peterson (Poet)
Session 4: July 1 (optional), featuring Terence Sweeney (Theologian-in-Residence)

This seminar is the final installment in the series, Writing Between Cultures: A Virtual Campus Seminar hosted by Collegium Institute and Dappled Things, exploring how literature can help us understand Catholicism in global contexts.

The Catholic artist and the challenge of evangelizing modern culture

Katy Carl recommends this article by writer Thomas M. Doran at The Catholic World Report, with the comment, “Dappled Things magazine: practicing every item on the bulleted list since 2005.”

Rhonda Franklin Ortiz, in her illuminating CWR essay “Popular fiction and the Catholic Literary Renaissance” (April 25, 2021), describes how well-crafted popular/genre fiction can be a worthy endeavor for Catholic authors and worthy reads for readers. But she also speaks about ‘the closing of the secular market to positive portrayals of faith’ and ‘the fear of creating a Catholic (art) ghetto’.

“Is there anything practical to be done about these concerns, or must Catholic writers, and, for that matter, all Catholic artists—poets, playwrights, composers, visual artists, graphic novelists, screenwriters,  etc.—accept the lack of access to a modern society that has been steadily tacking pagan-ward?”

Catholic Answers Live #100077: Apologetics and Fiction – Mark Brumley

Katy Carl responds to the following announcement at Chrism Press of a Catholic Answers podcast that also mentions Rhona Ortiz’s article, “So cool! Go Rhonda! “—which was accompanied by a chorus of Likes.

The Catholic Answers podcast episode with Brumley is here.

I’m repeating myself, but Ortiz’s article can be found here: “Popular fiction and the Catholic Literary Renaissance.”

Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!
– William Butler Yeats

On a recent and very ordinary Tuesday evening I felt the magic that is fairyland breeze through my heart. I had not been among the fairies for a long, long while. This whimsical, little breeze came in the form of a young girl, not all of twelve, who slowly opened a tiny little purse and let fly one little felt fairy after another and laid them carefully in a row before me as she confessed with a shy smile, “I have grown quite attached to them. Funny how I will miss them when they go”. Her words revealed such an ingenuous charm that I was quite moved by the beauty of it. Captured in her eyes, for the briefest of moments, I witnessed that vulnerable flicker; the telltale sign of an artist. I carefully picked up each fairy and made sure to ask about the particulars. These were her creations. And it was clear that she wanted me to find them as unique and priceless as she did. With furtive eagerness, she waited for me to pronounce them good. I chose a little fairy family and a happy grandmama fairy with a gray yarn bun. Their maker was genuinely pleased with my choices and it was clear she was feeling the flush of accomplishment; the joy of her art being passed on to another. She crafted each fairy a beautiful little box before she placed them into my hands. Art had been entrusted to me. Bits of felt, string, stray silk flowers, and the heart of an innocent little girl. I felt peculiarly honored and humbled by this gift of self; this fragile yet beautiful unfolding of an artist.

In my less hopeful moments, I have wondered what is to be the fate of fairyland in our STEM laden world. Are children still wandering in the beautiful lands of their imagination now as much as we did back then? This little girl seemed to say yes, but I knew her for a year before I realized this was so. It struck me then that we don’t always look at children and see everything all at once; even more so is this the case for artistic children who unfold like proverbial rose buds, one slow, mysterious petal at a time. We need to make a greater effort to carefully open our adult hearts to that mystery underneath the seemingly ordinary. For, we talk about children, we defend their right to be born, there are endless books on how to deal with potty training or the teen years. But we don’t always take the time on a daily basis to simply look at them or hear what they are actually saying. If we did, we would be astounded by how much of Heaven is still left swirling within them. That is what motherhood is for; why fatherhood exists. That we be astounded by our children and learn to protect their Heaven.

True, it can be exasperating for a no-nonsense, list making, time-tabled mother to see her son staring out the window doing nothing but dreaming and forgetting quite where he put his shoes. It can be disconcerting for a dad who is one hundred percent goal oriented to wonder why his twelve year old daughter is up there making little houses filled with tiny people and dreaming her life away in that little world. It is easy to worry about these kind of children when we are in the thick of “real life”. But we must make a solemn pledge not to worry, and to find the patience to carve out and protect the quiet spaces that surround these little dreamers, because they are our future poets, painters, and writers. Art takes time. If we learn to watch carefully as parents, we may be privileged witnesses to the magical process of art unfolding before us – all those things that need to happen before the art is even created. When they are staring out the window they might be trying to eagerly experiment with the perfect words to express the delight they feel in seeing dappled light on the sidewalk, or trying to process in their child’s heart a new and overwhelming feeling; the luxurious sensation of awe. They are beginners at this dreaming, and beginners simply need time to slowly process who they are and what they are to do with the world that astounds them. It is a platitude, but a profoundly true one, that you can’t rush art. Letting them just BE in childhood is your gift to them. We see this in the childhoods of many artists that have dotted history. William Morris was left to tromp the fields of the verdant English countryside with his sister as a child day after summer day. He learned all the flowers intimately, knew the birds, clouds, and slowly over time began to internalize them and the feelings they produced in his soul. All of that seemingly ‘useless’ time spent in his childhood was to later reveal itself in the most exquisite wallpaper, furniture, and tapestries England had ever seen. Emily Dickinson carefully prepared and tended an herbarium as a young girl and read many books about nature in her long, quiet days at home. All this knowledge garnered over girlhood was to reveal itself in the brilliance of her poetry. If she had not wandered and ‘puttered’ in her garden; if she had not reveled late into the night reading the words of the best authors and experimenting with her own words, these poems would never have had their brilliance. Gerard Manley Hopkins could spend an hour or so just looking at raindrops on the blades of grass outside his door in wet knee’d wonder. If he had not, we might not now have the famous and exquisite words: “Glory be to God for dappled things…” Artists need time. This time most importantly begins in childhood. It is the unique gift we parents can give. Our budding artists will come to honor us as their champions in the end, and they will bring something so unique and beautiful to the world that awaits.

Giving them this gift of time ensures us a very unique gift in return. Artists, even budding artists, are a mystery that refuses to be boxed. They disrupt our efficient ways of doing things. Busy parents need everyone to tow the line, to get the dishes done, the beds made, the errands run, the schooling finished by dinner. These are practical realities. If, however, they have been entrusted with a little dreamer, he or she will definitely put a kink in the works of that efficiency. They will always be one step behind. They will be playing inexplicably with their fairy dolls when it is obvious that the car is running and waiting. They will open the dictionary to find out how to spell a word for their book report and can be found an hour later with their nose still buried in the O’s chirping out loud to no one in particular, “this word comes from the ancient French. Imagine that.” Sometimes they will start saying all the words aloud just to hear the glorious sound of them on the air. Then they will say them in different accents. The book report is completely forgotten. Some children will play the same piece of music over and over and sit in the dark listening in wonder as we try not to wonder if they are not altogether fey. They are simply listening to all the separate melodies they hear buried there. They will want you to sit and listen too. Another will climb high into a flowering tree and try to stand at the very end of the branch to be closer to the sky, while you run out to the yard with dishtowel in hand screaming for them to be careful up there. They are not listening. They are in fairyland. One will inexplicably be wearing her pointe shoes to load the dishwasher and we will need to dodge the suddenly inspired pirouettes coming and going past the stove as she hums the Nutcracker ad nauseum. It is not for the faint of heart to be the parent of a dreamer.

We will be tempted in our more frazzled moments to wonder why these children just don’t ‘fit’ into the efficient machine of life; why they are so eccentric and unaware that they are wasting precious time. We feel a sudden impulse to fill their days with practical things like sports, so they can be like everyone else. We find ourselves worrying because we know they must learn to navigate a world that waits for no one. We are gripped at times with the real fear that they will be lost. But God does not see as the world sees. He sends us the lovely irksomeness of Heaven intruding into our human control through these little dreamer children who remind us of what matters; that the world needs to be looked at, marveled at, luxuriated in. That God lifts the veil between earth and Heaven far more than we expect. If we slow down to watch and listen, to carefully look at all the fairies dancing on their desk when we go in to make their bed, listen patiently to words pronounced with wonder from a dictionary, marvel at the lithesome grace of a pointe-shoe’d dish washer, we may suddenly realize how truly beautiful the world is that we have spent so much time trying to hurriedly ‘get through’ and navigate instead of just sitting to marvel at. This is why we have dreamer children so filled with the poetry of His grace. They are the voice of God intruding into our busy days and asking us to see. We are the lucky ones to have been chosen by God to embrace them in their full, eccentric loveliness. It is His solemn request that we take care of them and protect their art. We will come to be acutely aware that it is God’s world that matters, not the world created by the fast paced, efficient humans, and that He who clothed the lilies of the field will not fail to take care of these artists in the future; these whimsical, eccentric, exasperating lovelies whom He knit with such special care in their mothers’ wombs. He only asks us to give them our time and our careful attention. To let them dwell for long swaths of their childhood in the innocent fairylands of their imagination.

As I open these little boxes and lift each little felt fairy out one by one, I rejoice that I have been entrusted with the art of a lovely young girl, whose parents have protected her imagination, an imagination that “rides upon the wind and dances upon the mountains like a flame”. That is no small thing, and I realize anew that all is grace. Even little felt fairies carry the news of His marvelous workings in the world. Praise Him!

Denise Trull lives in St. Louis, MO with her husband Tony.

+ Vermilion—a New Literary Magazine at Catholic University of America

+ Rod Dreher Interviews James Matthew Wilson on a New MFA in Creative Writing

+ Essay from Joshua Hren’s Hot Off the Press Book

+  Article about Visual Artist Anthony Santella’s Work

Vermilion Magazine of Literature and the Arts

Dappled Things Editor in Chief Katy Carl recommends the above link—an announcement in the Catholic University of America May 2021 Newsletter about the launch of Vermilion, a new online magazine of literature and the arts for university students, faculty, and alumni. They held a contest for a name for the new publication, and this is from the winning essay:

Vermilion is a deep shade of scarlet red. Used by Renaissance painters for dramatic effect, it is bold, beautiful, a tribute to life, ordinary and extraordinary. This hue of red is both the simple scarlet of a lover’s blush and the dramatic sign of sacrifice. ‘Vermilion’ is also the closing word of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem, ‘The Windhover.’ Like Hopkins’s falcon, literature seems to soar in celestial beauty while being rooted in the soil of everyday life. Creative writers seem tasked to unite vast imagination with concrete words. Their craft teems with the vibrancy of vermilion. This magazine seeks to share this beautiful craft, which shines like a color so fully alive.”

James Matthew Wilson Lights A Candle

Katy Carl shared this link to an interview by Rod Dreher of James Matthew Wilson at The American Conservative.  James Matthew Wilson and Joshua Hren are joining forces against the darkness facing writers who want to learn how to write like Catholics—by founding a new MFA program in Creative Writing at St. Thomas University.

Earlier this spring, the University of St. Thomas in Houston announced the founding of a Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. What sets it apart is that it will be thoroughly Catholic, and led by one of the most gifted poets alive today, James Matthew Wilson, who is leaving Villanova University to help run the program. . . . He is a deeply literate man, and a thoroughly orthodox Catholic. I sat in one of his Villanova undergraduate classes once, and saw that he is one of the most gifted teachers I’ve ever been around.”—Rod Dreher

Divine Ironies

Congratulations to Joshua Hren!  His How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic was just published this week by TAN Books (on Tuesday, May 4, 2021). The above link (another Katy Carl recommendation) brings you to an essay Hren adapted from his new book. You might want to read the essay to get the flavor of the book— before you buy it and thereby make your own contribution towards the resurgence of Catholic fiction and towards the education of the kind of discerning Catholic readers O’Connor wrote about needing.

Also, you might want to get a flavor of what one of Hren’s courses might be like in the new MFA program in Creative Writing  by signing up for one or more of his three remaining classes in the “Christ-Haunted Fiction” course sponsored by Catholic Literary Arts.

At least that’s what I’m doing. After taking this week’s class on Gustav Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, I’m hooked. The remaining class topics are as follows:

Class Two: Evelyn Waugh’s “Love Among the Ruins” on May 11

Class Three: Flannery O’Connor’s “The Lame Shall Enter First” on May 18

Class Four: Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” on May 25

Anthony Santella Article in Christians in Visual Arts

Katy Carl also writes, “Congrats to visual artist Anthony Santella (of the stunning blue seraphim from our SSPP 2020 issue)!” Natalie Morrill, DT Fiction Editor, and Karen Barbre Ullo, former DT Managing Editor, liked the idea.

Exciting to finally see my article for the @christiansinvisualarts journal #seen in print. It was a strange but good experience to write about some very personal pieces from (another) difficult time.”—Anthony Santella

When I read of the passing of Beverly Cleary at the age of 104 this past March, this was the scene that I immediately recalled: a forced, public apology for an act of justified anger. Indeed, after reading tribute after tribute to Cleary, I now understand why. This is a classic example of Beverly Cleary’s writing. In her own childhood, she often experienced literature for children as being extremely didactic. Beverly Cleary once said that she thought people loved Ramona because “she does not learn to be a better girl” — in other words, because it was the opposite of the didactic literature of her youth and instead often showed empathy for the emotions of children.

As I read through various obituaries and tributes to Cleary, it became obvious that commentators who loved her writing felt that it was necessary to point out that Cleary’s books were quite groundbreaking and even subversive when they arrived on the scene precisely because they broke from the moralistic tone of books written for children.

While I appreciate this point, as a Catholic interested in the ability of literature to form the moral imagination of children, I felt it necessary to state that I have other reasons for appreciating Beverly Cleary’s writing. First of all, Cleary’s books never go to extremes. Against the overly didactic world of pre-Cleary children’s literature, there often creeps another extreme in today’s culture. Kay Hymowitz, in her provocative book, Ready or Not: What Happens When We Treat Children As Small Adults calls it “naturalism,” and identifies it with ideas that came about at the beginning of the 20th century related to romanticism. Naturalists saw children as “naturally capable, fully conscious and intentional.” Adults just needed to get out of the way as children were basically their moral superiors.

Flannery O’Connor was arguing against naturalism when she once described the job of the high school English teacher, stating, “He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.” While Cleary does not write didactic literature, she does not go to the opposite extreme of romanticizing children or imagining them to be somehow the moral superiors of adults. Indeed, Ramona never does “learn to be a better child,” but she does become adept in dealing with the unexpected, eventually earning her the nickname “Ramona the Brave.”

In one of my childhood favorites, Muggie Maggie, a thoughtful teacher comes up with a gentle plot to entice third grader Maggie to learn to write in cursive. In classic Cleary fashion, the resistance of a third grader to learning cursive handwriting is dealt with realism and a good dose of humor. Maggie does learn to write cursive beautifully and more than that, she learns to want to learn, thanks to the quiet intervention of a wise teacher. In Cleary’s world, adults ought to be kind, they ought to be respectful of children and their emotions – but they remain adults, entrusted with the formation of children.

“Stories,” says Professor Vigen Guroian, “…are the most effective means of engendering a moral imagination that respects rules and obeys laws.” Cleary never mentions Original Sin, but it is clear that her characters inhabit a fallen world. Nobody is perfect – not even adults, Ramona’s dad poignantly tells her – life is not always fair and sometimes it can be dark. But by showing us reality as children see it, Beverly Cleary showed us that there is also grace. In her stories, grace and redemption usually take the form of humor, ingenuity and, most especially, the possibility of responding to these circumstances with bravery. For these reasons, those interested in the Catholic imagination should appreciate the contributions of Beverly Cleary to children’s literature.

Barbara Gonzalez is an Associate Editor for Dappled Things, a grant writer, and a mother, writing from Haymarket, Virginia.

Novelist Jim Shepard

After a long wait, I have now read the novel, Phase Six. As I indicated earlier, I am a Jim Shepard fanboy. I’ve loved his novels such as The Book of Aron, about a Jewish boy caught in the midst of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, and Paper Doll, about the crew of an American WWII B-17 Flying Fortress tasked with a catastrophic mission, as well as short stories like “The Zero Meter Diving Team,” about three brothers involved in the Chernobyl catastrophe. Come to think of it, Mr. Shepard writes a lot about catastrophes, and Phase Six is no exception.

One of the wonderful things about Phase Six is both its closeness to the past year, but also its distance. This is not a novel about COVID-19. But in reading about the lives impacted by a pandemic in Phase Six, from 11-year-old Aleq, who unwittingly unleashes the outbreak in a tiny settlement in Greenland by trespassing at a mining site that has exposed thawing permafrost, to Jeannine, an epidemiologist first dispatched by the CDC to investigate the outbreak and then dispatched to a remote, high-security facility in Montana to gather information from Aleq, one hopes that one’s own empathetic imagination might increase. That as a reader experiences individual suffering and guilt and fear and uncertainty, but also tenderness and mercy and heroism and bigness-of-spirit, one’s own capacity to love during the current pandemic might grow. What perhaps struck me most about Phase Six is that even in the midst of a worldwide catastrophe, where every government, and institution, and agency must get involved, the real drama of life is still the drama of individual human souls. The drama of individual choices; the drama of family loss and family love; the drama of finding connection and purpose and friendship in a sometimes-brutal world. And ultimately, the drama of discerning and attempting to do God’s will.

Mr. Shepard graciously agreed to a conversation about his new book, empathetic imagination, friendship, and a host of other topics. I hope you enjoy it.

I want to begin asking you about your latest novel, Phase Six. You are infamous for the intense amount of research you conduct for your fiction, both for your novels and your short stories. For example, the acknowledgements page of Phase Six takes up four pages. Do you remember what sparked your interest in writing about a worldwide pandemic, pre-COVID-19? Do you feel in some way vindicated and prophetic, or a little unnerved by your own clairvoyance?

JS: Four years ago I was jolted by a story out of Siberia of a 12 year-old boy killed by anthrax, with 20 others infected.  The Russians were panicked — anthrax hadn’t been seen there in over 75 years — and investigators were floored to discover that long-dormant spores of the bacteria frozen in a reindeer carcass had rejuvenated themselves to infect the boy.  I knew that the permafrost bordering the Arctic Ocean had long been stable but with the Arctic now warming so much faster than the rest of the globe, all of that biological material full of pathogens was re-emerging.  And both Russia and Greenland had announced extensive plans to mine all across their northern extremities, meaning millions of tons of permafrost excavated and mountains of pathogens thawing alongside new mining communities. And those miners from all over the world periodically flying home.  So this seemed to me, in terms of disaster, a matter of when and not if, and I thought: well, since I’m going to be obsessively unable to stop learning about all of this anyway, maybe I should write about it.   As for my clairvoyance, as I’ve noted elsewhere, the experience of watching a matrix of catastrophe unfold right after you’ve worked as comprehensively as you could to try to imagine it has a surreal edge to it, like an echo of deja vu, leavened with a superstitious sense on the one hand that maybe your imagination should have left well enough alone, and a chastened sense on the other that Cassandras are a dime a dozen, and by definition ignored.  But even so, the entire project of literature may be about trying to prevent ourselves from repeating our mistakes.

Let’s jump to the final paragraph of Phase Six. This passage had me spellbound. It is a summary of a minister’s sermon about a big storm that had caused some destruction in town. The sermon pre-dates the pandemic, but is clearly apropos. Here is the excerpt:

He said he wondered why they didn’t believe they’d been commanded by the shaking of the supposedly solid rock to heed the angry voice of God. He asked if they thought their God would tear up their houses from their foundations and bury them in the ruins for no reason. He asked if it had occurred to them that they might receive their summons to step into eternity without any warning. He said that some storms were so terrible that it was as if God had decided to punish the sins of many years in a single day. He warned that a storm like that was a challenge to their intelligence that they must accept. And he said that in a place called Lisbon, after one such storm, the king had cried out that he didn’t know what he should do next, and that one of his ministers had finally answered that before they could make whatever other changes they needed to make, they first had to bury the dead, and feed the living.

This passage beautifully evokes the mystery of the power and sovereignty of God, but also the challenge of theodicy. Would you agree that these final lines are a lens through which to read the whole novel? Are you also trying to say something about our present American moment, one that seems increasingly obsessed with D.C. and politics and people “out there,” but perhaps forgets about the neighbor next door, and about what the Church would call the corporal works of mercy?

JS: Yes. The passage is inspired by some of the famous and not-so-famous responses to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and of course those issues are exactly what the thinkers of the time had to confront. My novel certainly isn’t blind to the devastation our politics can wreak on our planet and our individual lives, but it’s also very much about that capacity each of us has to be each other’s rescue.

I read in a Ron Hansen interview where he said that you considered yourself a Catholic novelist, but that your Catholicism does not come out as obviously as does Hansen’s in his own fiction. Do you agree with those statements? Do you consider yourself a “Catholic novelist,” or novelist who happens to be Catholic, or who was raised Catholic, or who is tormented by Catholicism, etc. Have you seen Catholicism and faith shaping you as a writer?

JS: I do agree with Ron’s characterization of me in that case: given both my background and my worldview, I would consider myself a Catholic novelist. Which is not to claim either that I’m devout or that I’m unappalled by much of the Church’s history.

In his recent book The Decline of the Novel, Joseph Bottum argues that the novel is primarily a Protestant art form that focuses on “the salvation and sanctification of the individual soul.” Certainly your own fiction is concerned with strong individual characters and the possibility for grace and salvation (a child victim of the Holocaust; a tormented German silent-movie director; a single-mother who tries to cover up a hit-and-run accident). But it seems to me that at the heart of your fiction is also relationships. Family dynamics. Father-son relationships. Doomed friendships. The possibility of self-giving love. At the heart of the New Testament is not simply individual salvation, but the concept of the Kingdom of God (especially in Paul’s writing); the notion that somehow my salvation is bound up with the salvation of the community. Your fiction seems to me to be about more than just individual grace and salvation. How would you respond to Bottum? What does the Kingdom of God and community mean to your own fiction?

JS: I suppose I would amend Bottum’s formulation to add that the salvation of the individual soul for me always involves the individual’s relation to others. Without that concrete relation, notions like goodness and grace, it seems to me, remain unhelpfully abstract.

Friendship also seems so vital to your fiction. For instance, the friendship between Aleq and Malik, and also between Danice and Jeannine in Phase Six. But also in your other novels, like Nosferatu and The Book of Aron, and the tragic friendship between school shooters in Project X. You write about friendship in complex ways – the ways that a friend might lead us toward destruction (Project X). Or how a friend might betray or abandon us (Nosferatu). Could you talk about the power of friendship? What is it about friendship that keeps you coming back to the theme?

JS: For me the project of literature is also in crucial ways about the size of that gap that we perceive between who we wish to be and who we all too frequently are. And friendship feels to me an opportunity to enact versions of both that shortfall and those rare achievements in closing the gap.

Speaking of friendship, as a reader of both Ron Hansen and you, I’ve long been encouraged by your friendship. You often credit one another in your books, have collaborated on projects, and mention one another in interviews. What do you think is the role of literary friendship in a writer’s life?

JS: The sorts of sustenance that you might expect. Writing is an odd and solitary way of connecting with the world, and so finding something like an ideal reader is a marvelous and important thing. We also now have our whole histories, of a sort, in our heads, and so have a perspective that other readers and friends might not have. Ron and I are also frequently amused and pleased by how different we are: a notion that is perhaps additionally encouraging as well.

One of the things that I love about your fiction – both in the novels and short stories – is that they often deal with adolescent boys. I must admit, I am a sucker for coming-of-age boy stories. But you subvert that genre, working with deeply flawed, wounded souls. These boys are often fatherless or do not have a good relationship with their fathers. Unlike in the classic coming-of-age story, where the boy goes through some hardship and comes out a better, stronger, “man” in the end, the fate of your young males is often in doubt. One thinks of Aron, who is likely bound for the gas chamber. Or Edwin Hanratty, the would-be-school shooter who perhaps is saved by the fact he didn’t actually pull the trigger, but hates himself for failing to do it. Or Aleq, who appears destined to live as a bubble boy, with the knowledge that literally everyone he knew and loved has died. Why do you keep coming back to adolescent males as a subject? What do you think about the possibility of redemption (both on a human, but also divine plane) for these boys you write about?

JS: I’ve always been interested in the child’s radical vulnerability, for one thing.  That difficulty that children have in articulating the sophistication of their perceptions, for another: a difficulty with which most writers can sympathize. And I’m drawn to the intensity of a child’s (or especially an adolescent’s) world view: how apocalyptically they can see things. I’ve also always been moved by the demands the more heartless aspects of our societies routinely dump upon children.

I want to ask you about portraying goodness and sanctity. You as much as any contemporary fiction writer plumb the depths of evil, sin, and suffering. When I read Project X, it reminded me of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, really engaging with a depraved mind and broken soul. Of course, Dostoevsky also wrote about sanctity and goodness; both with Prince Myshkin (less successfully), but also with Alyosha (very successfully). In The Book of Aron, I also think you pull off one of the most beautiful and believable depictions of holiness in the character of Janusz Korczak, the renowned Polish doctor who runs a Jewish orphanage. One senses the cost of his love, and also his own battle with despair and exhaustion. Could you discuss how you approach writing about goodness and virtue and sanctity? Do you think as a writer you have some obligation to show both sin and suffering, but also goodness and at least the possibility for redemption?

JS: Good question. It’s not too hard to figure out why goodness is so hard to write about, since it tends to obliterate complexity as well as the kind of conflict on which literary fiction runs. In the case of Korczak, my way in was imagining a perceiving lens in the form of my narrator who A) wasn’t particularly focused on Korczak, and then B) approached him with skepticism. In some ways that allowed me to more easily access the agonized and hopelessly compromised aspects of Korczak’s position, even given what we’d have to call his incontestable saintliness.

I’ve often been struck by the phrase “empathetic imagination,” a concept that seems near and dear to your fiction. Could you discuss what an empathetic imagination means to you? I’m particularly interested in what the phrase ought to mean to a Catholic fiction writer who comes to their fiction from a particular Tradition and set of beliefs? How can one develop a stronger empathetic imagination?

JS: If, as I noted above, the project of literature in crucial ways is about the size of that gap that we perceive between who we wish to be and who we all too frequently are, one of the central ways we shrink that gap is by working more fully to imagine the other, to get outside the prison of our own agendas. I think it was Allen Gurganus who remarked that the favor of trying to imagine one another’s interiors might be the most profound thing we can do for one another, and one of the least profound things, as well. I do think that the entire project of the arts is about the development of the empathetic imagination: the development of that saving ability to really imagine ourselves in someone else’s position.

I consider you one of the living deans of American letters. If you could give some advice to young fiction writers in the current and coming generation(s), what would it be?

JS: One of the living deans! Now I feel both honored and old. On the one hand, I would encourage them, for all of their seriousness and ambition, to stay in contact with the spirit of play: with that passion that we all access in childhood that enables us to try what we might not try, to find joy in the process of what we’re doing, and to not find failure at something we’ve attempted to be devastating or defining. And on the other hand, I would wish them well as they head into a world in which reading itself – especially in any sustained and absorbed way – is becoming less and less common, and less and less valued.

Bonus question: Walker Percy once gave an interview to himself of questions interviewers never asked him. Is there a question you have never been asked, that you now wish to answer?

JS: Oh, maybe: what constellation of minor dysfunctions would have to come together to possess someone to become a lifelong Minnesota Vikings fan?

Jeffrey Wald writes from the Twin Cities.

In case you missed the event last night, you can now watch it on YouTube.

Rosemary Callenberg (Dappled Things Associate Editor): “This is also in Mystery and Manners. It’s a wonderful essay.”

Roseanne T. Sullivan: “I know. I think it’s interesting to see it in its original publication too. Right?”

Rosemary: “Very cool.”

Popular fiction and the Catholic Literary Renaissance

Karen Barbre Ullo, until recently Managing Editor of Dappled Things—and current Editor of nascent Chrism Press—recommends this essay by Rhonda Ortiz, who is co-founder with Ullo and fellow editor of Chrism Press.

Catholic Art Takes on New Forms During the Pandemic

Katy Carl, DT Editor in Chief, recommended this video report from Current News in January.

Three artists from different disciples have managed to keep hope and their careers alive despite their industries taking major hits during the pandemic. Tony Lipari a musician, Mindy Steffen a cartoonist and Jake Hart a filmmaker, have honed in on their skills and refined their focus during the pandemic and are now pumping out new material, ready to show the world what they’ve got.”

Mindy Seven, one of the artists interviewed, writes, “It was exciting & refreshing to go so public with my faith! I also realized that most people in the comic world don’t even know I’m Catholic. I guess it hasn’t come up in conversation much, but in the past few years I’ve been more open about it.”

 

This Is Not a Defense of the Power of Art

Web Editor Fr. Michael Rennier shared the above link to an essay by Joel Cuthbertson at The Millions. Fr. Rennier writes, “We’ll publish a piece by Joel soon. Not this one but I wish we could (the one we’re publishing is wonderful, too).” Katy Carl liked the suggestion.

The Remarkable Heritage Of Patrick Healy, S.J., One Of Its Georgetown’s Most Famous Presidents—Who Was Born A Slave

Patrick Francis Healy, S.J., the 29th president of the Georgetown and one of its most famous presidents, is especially remarkable because he was one of ten brothers and sisters who were all born slaves. It was not until the 1950s that Healy’s true racial identity became commonly known. After the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Fr. Patrick Healy was widely recognized as the first man of African ancestry to earn a Ph.D., first to become a Jesuit priest and first — and so far only — to serve as president of Georgetown University. . . .

Oddly enough, stories about the Healys who became priests show that they were more often insulted for being Irish than being black. In those days as in ours, there were prejudices of all kinds floating around.