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DappledThings.org

A quarterly journal of ideas, art, and faith

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Interview with Phil Klay

Dappled Things

Jessica Hooten Wilson

In April 2017, during the first day of The Future of the Catholic Imagination Conference at Fordham University, I chose to lunch outside on the squatty cement wall lining the Lowenstein Atrium on Fordham’s Manhattan campus. Already investigating the contents of his boxed lunch was a young man around my age, mid-thirties, looking approachable yet unengaged in any particular conversation with other mulling conference attendees. He had slightly wavy brown hair with a well-trimmed beard and mustache. He looked more like an actor than a writer. As I began to pepper him with questions about what he did for a living, another conference attendee jumped in—“He’s a National Book Award winner.” Without having realized it, I was lunching with Phil Klay, winner of the NBA in 2014 for his short story collection Redeployment. Writers—their names often become more famous than their faces.

Not only is Klay a writer, whose work can be found in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Newsweek, but he is also a veteran of Iraq. From January 2007 to February 2008, Klay served as a public affairs officer for the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq’s Anbar Province. His short story collection fictionalizes accounts of the Iraq war from various perspectives.

Later that afternoon, I sat in on a brief talk by Klay on religious literature. Klay countered his fellow vets’ lament that civilian life seems meaningless compared to their experiences in the war: “But,” Klay retorted, “I think it’s more like how if you over-salt the living hell out of your food all the time, I could take you to the best restaurant in the world and you could bite into some of the most fantastic dishes prepared by the greatest chefs, and all you’d say would be, ‘Needs more salt.’” The problem is not civilian life; rather, the palate has become too accustomed to life lived always facing one’s mortality. Klay claims that religious literature reorients our palate, so we can once again taste meaning.

After that initial meeting, I followed up with Klay and asked him to elaborate more on his thoughts about religious literature, literature in general, and about his life as a writer of faith.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: In your 2012 Image interview with Nick Ripatrazone, you said, “[A] story begins with questions far more than with answers.” When writing Redeployment, what questions did you begin with? Did you discover any answers?

Phil Klay: I started writing not long after I came back from Iraq, so my opening question wasn’t particularly sophisticated. It was more, “What the hell was that all about?” I wanted to think more deeply about what people I knew had been through, how it had affected them not only in the moment, but as they came home and tried to merge the person they were overseas with the person they were in their civilian or stateside life. In his poem “To World War Two,” Kenneth Koch wrote, “It felt unusual / Even if for a good cause / To be part of a destructive force / With my rifle in my hands / And in my head / My serial number / The entire object of my existence / To eliminate Japanese soldiers / By killing them / With a rifle or with a grenade / And then, many years after that, / I could write poetry / Fall in love / And have a daughter.” How much more unusual when the war is not World War II, but Iraq, when the day-to-day mission is often not so much about destruction, but when the overall mission can seem in doubt, especially once you get out and watch Iraq fall apart.

As for answers, sure, I found an answer or two here and there. But that only leads to more questions, doesn’t it? When it comes to something as massive, and as horrific, as a war that has shattered a country and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, I don’t really think you’re entitled to a comfortably settled opinion.

JHW: Follow-up question: Walker Percy was often asking himself, how does one make it through 2:00 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon without committing suicide? He returned to that question frequently in his novels. Are there questions in your writing that you find yourself returning to?

PK: Though Percy also said, “I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That’s despair?” Our moral relationship to violence and the institutions of the State is something I always return to.

JHW: Redeployment is a collection of stories from various soldiers or veterans. You explained elsewhere that you found it fascinating to step into these different perspectives. Were there any voices that you felt like you could not capture? Eyes from which you could not understand how they saw things? Perhaps points of view that you started but omitted, or others that you wish you could have included?

PK: Well, I’m the sort who, if there’s a perspective I think I cannot capture, that is precisely what will make me go and try to capture it. In some sense, the book is transgressing boundaries. War experience is often described as this almost sacred experience (or, more to the point, the photonegative of a sacred experience), which cannot be communicated and can only be felt. I knew early on I had no right to tell the stories I was telling, so there was only doing it well or doing it poorly. There wasn’t anything that I omitted or that I wish I could have included—had there been, I would have written them. The book is not meant to be an all-encompassing account of the Iraq War, representing every possible perspective. The characters serve to answer the questions I was asking myself—that’s why they were created. And so I wrote the book for them to fit together in a particular way, for there to be thematic resonances and restatements or new formulations of the same problems in the different stories and voices.

JHW: I love the symbology behind 12 stories, 12 voices, 12 perspectives. Did you have particular reasons for choosing this number of stories?

PK: Well, let’s just say it felt right.

JHW: You mentioned to me in a previous conversation that readers assumed these stories were all autobiographical, which is funny considering the impossibility of such a life. However, is there one story that is more autobiographical than the others? When Dostoevsky commented on The Brothers Karamazov, he said that he was all three brothers. Similarly, did you find pieces or yourself split among them?

PK: Of course I’m all of them. You’ve only got your own emotional palette to draw on. In an odd way, stories that draw on something that actually happened to me sometimes feel less personal than stories where there is nothing similar to what happened to me in real life, but where the emotional core of the experience feels like it strikes very close to the bone. I find that because you get to hide yourself in fiction, you oddly get to reveal yourself more.

JHW: The diversity of your reading is evident in your collection (Bernanos, Jones, Hemingway, Crane, Tolstoy, etc.). Do you have any fear of getting classified in a certain genre or labeled as a specific type of writer?

PK: No, not really. I’m writing about war, it’s a subject that fascinates me and troubles me, so you might as well call me a war writer. I don’t think it’s the only subject that I’ll ever write about, but even if I did, so what? My friend the writer Elliot Ackerman once pointed out to me: it’s not like anyone ever went up to James Joyce and said, “Hey, Jimmy, loved Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but could you try something a little less Irish next time?” People have subjects they return to. And war is a big enough subject for more than one book.

JHW: We attended The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination Conference at Fordham University this past April, so I assume you have a vested interest in Catholic literature. Other than the story of the chaplain—and I have at least one question regarding that!—where do you find resonances of the Catholic faith or aesthetic in your fiction?

PK: The moral and spiritual stakes of Catholic fiction are what concern me in fiction more generally, whether or not that work is explicitly religious. People often note the story of the chaplain as the most obviously Catholic story in the collection, but I also think about stories like “Bodies” or “In Vietnam They Had Whores” as being influenced heavily by my Catholic background. Catholic literature is deeply invested in questions of sin, in questions of evil, in questions about our fallen nature, about the possibilities for redemption, and about the choices we make to push those possibilities aside. A friend of mine once told me: “I don’t know if I’m religious, but I do suspect you can’t write great fiction if you don’t believe in the soul.”

JHW: My question about your chaplain: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that he may have been influenced by Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest. Yet, when Bernanos’ priest is confronted by the disillusioned soldier, he has no response. Was your priest’s story and sermon a way of filling in the silence?

PK: I think about that scene a lot. The soldier, M. Oliver, is not just disillusioned about war, but about society itself. “Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other,” he says. “Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation, and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for-the-making-of-rich men, without bursting the boiler.” So what do you do, if being a human being means not being some sort of atomized, non-social being making choices in a vacuum, but being part of a culture, society, nation, church, and a whole host of other institutions which we rely on to exist and which are also shot through with evidence of man’s corruption and weakness and evil? And my priest finds himself in a position where he finds it incredibly difficult to act in a way commensurate with the scale of what he knows is happening in this unit, and he tries to both fulfill his duties as a member of the military, as a man of God, and as someone concerned with Rodriguez, with one, specific person grappling with the same questions and finding no relief.

JHW: As a writer, did you learn anything about the craft of storytelling or the process of researching for your work from writing Redeployment? In what ways are you writing differently from how you approached the first book?

PK: I think the biggest thing is that you find how many cultural clichés litter your skull when you start writing. The early drafts were all just regurgitation of the broader culture. I ended up relying on research a lot to find the very specific, and the odd, the things that couldn’t be shoehorned into simple narratives. And then I would also rely on research to find out what sort of things I would avoid—if this is the way things are in this type of unit, can I write a character who doesn’t fit that mold, who has the opposite view or personality, and can I make it work? That’s when I’d find I would get some useful friction that could help generate something new.

JHW: If readers are anything like me, they’ll want to know, what are you currently reading? Everyone wants recommendations and book lists from the writers they admire.

PK: I just finished Grossman’s Life and Fate, which is unbelievably good. It’s his War and Peace for the 20th century, taking place around the Battle of Stalingrad, and it is a profound and profoundly moving look at war, at Stalinist Russia, at the German concentration camps, and where the individual human being fits in amidst all that.

JHW: Finally, I’d be negligent if I did not ask about your current work. What are you working on now? How is it going (whether high on the muse or overcome by acedia, I always think aspiring writers want to hear!)?

PK: I’m working on a book about U.S. involvement in Colombia post–9/11, a story which means also talking about Iraq and Afghanistan and the ways America projects power around the world. I’m enjoying it, so far. It’s a fascinating, rich subject; I’ve done a lot of research, both on the Colombian and U.S. sides, and trying to draw a narrative out of that has been very rewarding thus far. We’ll see whether it works out.

 

Phil Klay is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He served in Iraq’s Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a public affairs officer. After being discharged he received an MFA from Hunter College of The City University of New York. Klay’s New York Times–bestselling short story collection Redeployment won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014.

Jessica Hooten Wilson is an associate professor of literature at John Brown University and the author of Giving the Devil his Due: Flannery O’Connor and The Brothers Karamazov, Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence, and Reading Walker Percy’s Novels. Currently, she is preparing Flannery O’Connor’s unfinished novel Why Do the Heathen Rage? for publication.

Filed Under: Interviews, Mary Queen of Angels 2017 Leave a Comment

Hikers, Three Varieties

Dappled Things

David Denny

after Jeffrey Harrison

There are those for whom the mountain is just
one more fitness course made to work the quads
and boost the heart rate. Once they hit the peak,
they claim the view, comment on the weather,
compare pedometers. They can’t stand still
for long lest their muscles begin to cool and cramp.
They can’t wait to descend, to arrive at the coffee shop
in full regalia and check today’s trail off their list.
For them, one switch-backed, fat-burning ascent
may very well be mistaken for another.

And there are those for whom the hike is a social
outing—a chance to walk their dogs and complain
of their lot: their inattentive spouse, their burdensome
children. When they finally stumble across the bench
in the clearing, Fido straining at the leash, tongue
lolling, they sit just long enough to water the animal and
ready the plastic baggie for collection. They’ve missed
the quail and white-tailed deer, the rattlesnake and
painted ladies flittering among trailside thistles.
No wild thought has intruded upon their day.

And then there are those lonesome fools for whom
the trail is a listening post on the universe. Attuned to
the daily office of blossom and rot, their ears are pricked up
for mystery borne upon the liquid rustle of summer leaves.
Their eyes wander towards the shadowy undergrowth,
the wagging branch, the tremendous wings slicing
across the sky. They break through at the startling peak
just as the breeze’s lullaby chimes its final notes.
Stalked by some divine commotion, they gaze
over the fertile valley, speechless, attentive, still.

 

David Denny’s fiction has recently appeared in New Ohio Review, Stoneboat, and Catamaran. His first short story collection, The Gill Man in Purgatory, is now available from Shanti Arts. He is also the author of three poetry collections: Man Overboard, Fool in the Attic, and Plebeian on the Front Porch. Visit him online at www.daviddenny.net.

Filed Under: Mary Queen of Angels 2017, Poetry

Triolet Church Signs of Doubt

Dappled Things

L.N. Allen

 

1.
On my journey from knowing into unknowing and back
watching God write straight on crooked lines,
I’ve learned we know nothing. Think of that!
On my journey from knowing into unknowing and back,
from horned angel to feathered demoniac,
I’ve heard Earth saying Yes, yes, smiling.
On my journey from knowing into unknowing and back,
I’ve learned God writes straight on crooked lines.

2.
Since blind unbelief is sure to err,
I know I shall not know
and trust God to be his own interpreter.
Blind unbelief is sure to err
but most sermons are wind and bluster,
so how to resist doubt’s undertow?
Blind unbelief is sure to err.
I know I shall not know.

3.
Since all answers turn back into questions,
I try to love the questions themselves.
What color rooms have many mansions?
All answers turn back into questions—
Were they Commandments or Suggestions?
Why did He choose only twelve?
All answers turn back into questions.
I try to love the questions themselves.

 

L.N. Allen’s poems have previously appeared in journals including The Cream City Review, The Southern Review, Tundra, and Tar River Poetry. Her most recent poems are in Anglican Theological Review, Christianity and Literature, and Barbaric Yawp. She is currently preparing for publication a manuscript tentatively titled Be Always Coming Home.

Filed Under: Mary Queen of Angels 2017, Poetry

The Fletcher

Dappled Things

William Begley

 

Before the nock, the feathers narrow.
It takes me hours to finish sanding
The shaft to leave the balance standing
As it should. I make each arrow

Singly, from the bodkin-tip
All the way to the well-jigged fletching,
Which I rig to keep from catching
The bowstring if your fingers slip.

That one’s light, and if you loose
It right, it ought to move with your
Release. For moving targets, or
For bringing down a dinner-goose.

See how this one’s wires extend
From off the head? It’s worth the cost:
You miss, they catch in shrubs. No lost
Expensive darts for you, my friend.

And here’s for practice, not for show,
Although the plumes are rather striking
And beech shafts color to my liking,
If you’ll forgive my saying so.

Ah, yes, the broadhead. Takes your breath
Away, the blades. You’re dead before
You know it—cuts your veins. For war,
And stags, and those condemned to death.

In fact, you know the Praetorine
Who just the other day was caught
At preaching cult in secret? Not
To boast; the arrows used were mine.

 

Will Begley was raised in Vermont and now studies Classics in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Filed Under: Mary Queen of Angels 2017, Poetry

Antediluvian

Dappled Things

Fr. Anthony Lusvardi, SJ

The rains burst from an almost clear sky. The Director of the Clinic, irritated by the mistake, noted that the weather service had not predicted rain at all.

“Are they astrologers or scientists down there?” he said.

I found it rather amusing imagining the frenzy they must have been in, and it continued to be amusing for the first several weeks, when the rain was little more than a drizzle and the weather service, obviously adjusting its software in response to the error, churned out all sorts of strange and contradictory predictions. By the time the drizzle had turned to rain they were predicting cyclones, hail, straight-line winds, fog, inland hurricanes, balmy afternoons, blizzards, dust storms, darkness—everything but steady rain. Down in the capital, some poor schmuck was poring over computer code, trying to find the extra “1” or “0” that was causing their mistake.

The drizzle, however, was not limited to Bimini, nor even Padania, but seemed to be falling all over the world. Over dinner—escargot and kale and a nice dry champagne—I mentioned that I suspected whatever phenomenon we were witnessing had not been anticipated by the weather service’s programs. The woman I lived with shrugged and said she thought all the rainbows were pretty.

The Director seemed less upset by the increasing showers than he had been by the initial mistake. Bimini University Clinic would never have become what it was if the Director had been the sort of man who tolerated mistakes. Of course, he was not the man for groundbreaking research; the Clinic would never have produced the Breakthrough if he had been director all those years ago instead of me. In Bimini our research team—my research team—had produced the virus that could penetrate the cell’s nucleus and deliver the extra two dozen rungs on the DNA spiral to halt the aging process. Diseases had fallen one by one at the hands of researchers all over the world, but in Bimini we had won the war. We had bested death.

And we had almost put ourselves out of business doing so. Hospitals and research centers closed all over Europe, and while Bimini could live off the prestige of the Breakthrough for several years, our facilities were small and our location remote. When the Board of Trustees came to me with the new position—Chancellor—I knew I was being pushed aside, but what else could I do? The Director was Board Chairman at the time, had been on the Board throughout the years of research leading to the Breakthrough, and was several years younger. The coup was, I admit, a shrewd maneuver on his part, just the sort of shrewd maneuver that kept the Clinic afloat after he took over. We adapted, pioneering research in nutrition, safer recreational drugs, psychology, becoming Padania’s number-two center for plastic surgery. The physical plant itself grew, slowly but inexorably, taking over the halls and libraries of the university that had been its genesis and then rising higher still, all marble and reflective glass, its towers coming to dominate the whole countryside, a medical Neuschwanstein. The complex surmounted the entire peak of the mountain on which Bimini was perched, and its central tower, the Administrative Building, stood taller than any mountain within sight.

Our location was to prove significant once the drizzle became a downpour and the cities and the plains began to flood. The Director had begun to make contingency plans after the first month of rain, with an ad hoc committee of Clinic employees meeting to discuss our options. Researchers were quietly reassigned. Provisions were secretly amassed, the orders for them spread out among different vendors so that no one would know quite the scale of our preparations. A geological survey of the mountain was ordered, and at a few points on the western slope concrete pilings were sunk to provide redundancy. Fortunately, the core of the mountain on which Bimini sat was very old, very solid bedrock. And all this was done without the town’s mayor or the national and European authorities needing to know.

End of sample excerpt. To read more, please subscribe or purchase the Mary, Queen of Angels 2017 issue from our shop.

 

Anthony Lusvardi, SJ, earned his BA in English and philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Before entering the Society of Jesus, he taught English for the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan and served as a campus minister of Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. He was awarded the 2015 J.F. Powers Prize for fiction for his story “Ends of the Earth.” He has work forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly and in Ruminate this fall.

Filed Under: Fiction, Mary Queen of Angels 2017

Mary, Queen of Angels 2017 is Live

Dappled Things

Feature

Interview with Phil Klay Jessica Hooten Wilson

Fiction

Antediluvian Fr. Anthony Lusvardi, SJ
Into the Field Cathy Mellett
Service Emmett Collazo

Nonfiction

The Waves Elizabeth Oh
Fix Deep Within My Heart Steven DeLaney
Damned Beautiful Things: A Conversation Joshua Hren and Lee Oser
An Interview with Poet and Musician Kay Clarity Michael Rennier

Poetry

To Heaven by Water Stephanie Kraft
Fog Michael Cadnum
Suburban Scene David Denny
The Chief Gardener in Retirement David Denny
Getting the Moon Right David Denny
Hikers, Three Varieties David Denny
The Fletcher William Begley
Ten Souls Pete Beurskens
Mount Pleasant Cemetery Michael Lee Johnson
Believers in a Transcendent Order Daniel Rattelle
How to Paint a Human Soul Daniel Rattelle
Upon Hearing of the Destruction of the Basilica of St. Benedict Anonymous
Forest and Trees L.N. Allen
Triolet Church Signs of Doubt L.N. Allen

Book Reviews

Haec Est Porta Coeli: Ryan Wilson’s The Stranger World Daniel Rattelle
Sacrament of a Broken World: After So Many Fires by Jeremiah Webster Peter Hartwig
Something Like Love: Richard Bausch’s Living in the Weather of the World Katy Carl

Visual Art

Fr. Jacques Hamel, Martyr for Christ Neilson Carlin
St. Lucy Neilson Carlin
St. Peter Martyr Neilson Carlin

Fr. Jacques Hamel
St. Lucy
St. Peter Martyr

$13.00 – Purchase Checkout Added to cart

Filed Under: Deep Down Things, Mary Queen of Angels 2017

Mary, Queen of Angels 2017

Dappled Things

Feature

Interview with Phil Klay Jessica Hooten Wilson

Fiction

Antediluvian Fr. Anthony Lusvardi, SJ
Into the Field Cathy Mellett
Service Emmett Collazo

Nonfiction

The Waves Elizabeth Oh
Fix Deep Within My Heart Steven DeLaney
Damned Beautiful Things: A Conversation Joshua Hren and Lee Oser
An Interview with Poet and Musician Kay Clarity Michael Rennier

Poetry

To Heaven by Water Stephanie Kraft
Fog Michael Cadnum
Suburban Scene David Denny
The Chief Gardener in Retirement David Denny
Getting the Moon Right David Denny
Hikers, Three Varieties David Denny
The Fletcher William Begley
Ten Souls Pete Beurskens
Mount Pleasant Cemetery Michael Lee Johnson
Believers in a Transcendent Order Daniel Rattelle
How to Paint a Human Soul Daniel Rattelle
Upon Hearing of the Destruction of the Basilica of St. Benedict Anonymous
Forest and Trees L.N. Allen
Triolet Church Signs of Doubt L.N. Allen

Book Reviews

Haec Est Porta Coeli: Ryan Wilson’s The Stranger World Daniel Rattelle
Sacrament of a Broken World: After So Many Fires by Jeremiah Webster Peter Hartwig
Something Like Love: Richard Bausch’s Living in the Weather of the World Katy Carl

Visual Art

Fr. Jacques Hamel, Martyr for Christ Neilson Carlin
St. Lucy Neilson Carlin
St. Peter Martyr Neilson Carlin

Fr. Jacques Hamel
St. Lucy
St. Peter Martyr

$13.00 – Purchase Checkout Added to cart

Filed Under: Mary Queen of Angels 2017, Table of Contents

Damned Beautiful Things: A Conversation

Dappled Things

Joshua Hren and Lee Oser

Editor’s Note: Dappled Things is pleased to have the opportunity to share this wide-ranging dialogue between Joshua Hren, editor in chief of Wiseblood Books as well as an associate editor of Dappled Things, and Lee Oser, author of the novel Oregon Confetti, published by Wiseblood Books in November 2017.

Joshua Hren: In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s self-interview, he notes: “My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer, I think, writes for the youth of his own generation, the critic of the next and the schoolmasters of ever afterward. Granted the ability to improve what he imitates in the way of style, to choose from his own interpretation of the experiences around him what constitutes material, and we get the first-water genius.” Walter Ong argues that the writer’s audience is always a fiction. Still, it seems wise to give that fiction some criterion, some broad groupings. Would you say that you aim to write for the same three categories Fitzgerald identifies, or do you imagine your audience differently—and if so, why so?

Lee Oser: My situation is different, though. I was born in 1958, towards the end of the baby-boomer generation, and I had to learn to see through their ubiquitous “youth culture.” They had very good music, but almost nothing in literature. It was Tolkien who filled their literary void, and that void remains. So I write satire, and I write comically in exile, defiance, and bitterness of heart. My intended audience has always been my students who see through the generational fiasco that was and is the Boomers: how they have confused politics and civilization, how they never understood the nature of sex or children or family, their unwittingly hilarious claim to be rebels, their suburban experimentation with God, as if God were another drug or a visit to a fast-food restaurant. So I had to escape these eternal adolescents and look for grown-ups in the next generation. It is a sweeping condemnation, but a thinking person must deal in general truths, if only to stay sane. So I write for the grown-ups in the next generation. At least there are some.

By the way, do you know the Pat Hobby stories? It was Ralph McInerny’s staunch defense of those stories in particular and of Fitzgerald as a Catholic writer in general that clued me in.

JH: Claiming Fitzgerald as a “Catholic writer” in the sense that term is typically used is a tall task, no? In his Hemingway’s Dark Night: Catholic Influences and Intertextualities in the Work of Ernest Hemingway, Matthew Nickel has conducted an exhaustive defense of Hemingway as haunted by Catholicism. Some have made a similar argument concerning Jack Kerouac—especially his Visions of Gerard. In what sense is Fitzgerald’s work “Catholic,” and how is this different from and similar to other writers, such as Kerouac and Hemingway, who are haunted by Catholicism?

LO: Our larger picture of Catholic writers is changing as the written word cheapens in value, as art blurs into groupthink, sexuality withers into sterility, and as the soulful element of a Fitzgerald is eclipsed by materialism and the diabolic will to power. Catholic soulfulness is expressed in fiction through the force of conscience, not through the cooler, more existentially objective mode of writing that distinguishes Hemingway. I cannot speak for Kerouac. If pushed, I would say that Fitzgerald’s conscience was Catholic. So was his idea of the human person.

JH: You mention Fitzgerald’s Catholic conscience, which is to say that it was more than a nostalgia for incense and votive candles playing out like old reels in the back of his mind. What you are saying, it seems, is that this Catholic conscience was a sort of hard kneeler on which he reposed as his senses and mind reached out to capture the flappers and philosophers, the Stock Market Crash and the car crash—that all of this played out under more than the watchful eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. In the notes he left for the unfinished novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald wrote “action is character.” And yet if you are correct, might we say that character is driven by conscience, or that action is registered according to the lights of various characters’ consciences? If this is true, although his prose was beautiful, you seem to suggest that in fiction he was doing much more than telling moving stories that keep readers rapt to this day. Many cringe at the moral character of fiction. Consider, for instance, Sherwood Anderson, who said that “There was a notion that ran through all story-telling in America, that stories must be built about a plot and that absurd Anglo-Saxon notion that they must point a moral, uplift the people, make better citizens, etc.” In what sense is Anderson’s resistance to “morality tales” legitimate, and it what sense is the moral dimension part of the artistry of the story? How does conscience correlate with the cosmos of your fiction?

LO: You have to pay attention to the choices that confront a writer, especially when he or she takes on the subject of man and woman. Fitzgerald is always superbly tactful, and his tact is informed by a depth of morality that is Catholic. Sexuality is sacred to him. His cosmos is sexed. He has the right taboos. And he was chivalrous, even in Hollywood—all while avoiding cheap consolations, cheap nostalgia, and general phoniness. As for Anderson’s comment, I have always preferred stories with plots, and I became a novelist when I learned to write them. Moral uplift, on the other hand, is a great way to discourage boys from reading and very popular in education right now. Conscience for me is a kind of sulfur-detector, though usually I require a bit of hell to get the machine working. You will recall Nietzsche’s rather civilized laughter at the Kantian notion of the artist’s disinterested interestedness.

JH: In “Taking Things as They Are,” your review of Myles Connolly’s novel Mr. Blue, you argue that “it is really Newman who offers the most valuable philosophical remarks about Catholicism and literature: ‘We must take things as they are, if we take them at all . . . we Catholics, without consciousness and without offense, are ever repeating the half sentences of dissolute playwrights and heretical partisans and preachers. So tyrannous is the literature of a nation; it is too much for us.” There is no stronger warning voice against the tendency toward dual or double standards than Newman’s in his lecture “English Catholic Literature.” Newman grasped the crucial relation between history and consciousness. So too did Chesterton. Elsewhere in The Idea of a University, Newman warns us against taking man “for what he is not, for something more divine and sacred, for man regenerate.” He cautions us to “beware of showing God’s grace and its work at such disadvantage as to make the few whom it has thoroughly influenced compete in intellect with the vast multitude who either have it not, or use it ill.” But doesn’t Newman’s idea of literature as “Record of Man in Rebellion,” his insistence upon “taking things as they are,” inhibit us from literary representation of the actions of grace? Surely grace is not beyond literary representation? Doesn’t the record of man’s sinfulness, lest it remain a Hobbesian or Calvinistic documentation not merely of sinfulness but of an unreal, hyperbolic depravity, also beg to become the record of grace built upon that sinful being?

LO: As you say, grace is not beyond literary representation. But if you are not extremely wary as a writer, grace has the power of any great cliché to expose you as a fake. Christian critics fall into a similar trap, for instance, praising T.S. Eliot for his humility when they should be noticing how he avoids turning humility into a cliché, how he escapes the avalanche of clichés about humility. O’Connor handles the problem of grace miraculously well in “The Artificial Nigger.” You can see what a hard problem it is by reading that story, one of her best. Conversion stories pose similar difficulties: there’s nothing harder than to write a moving conversion story for grown-ups.

JH: Flannery O’Connor, whom I will try not to circle like a rhinoceros beetle around a Georgian porch light, noted that “The woods are full of regional writers and it is the horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one.” Still, in spite of her reservations, she said that the South had given her fiction “its idiom and its rich and strained social getup.” You are not a “regional writer,” unless we are going to consider that patch of land from sea to shining sea a “region.” The action of your last novel, The Oracles Fell Silent, mostly happens on Long Island. This time you’ve switched coasts. As the title of your latest novel signals, Oregon Confetti takes place in the Pacific Northwest, most of the action unfolding in or around Portland. Television shows like Portlandia have tried to capture the “idiom” of that place, and I suppose some count David James Duncan (author of The Brothers K) and Annie Dillard as regional writers probing the Pacific Northwest. In what sense is Oregon Confetti a “regional novel”? What idiom, and what rich and strained social getup does the story absorb from the peculiar character of Portland, and why would you set the novel amidst these particular realities?

LO: I arrived in Portland when I was twenty, a college drop-out, young enough that things still made a lasting impression. It is a beautiful part of the country. For a time, I drove a Pronto car and learned the town pretty much by heart. The bands I played in gigged all over the place. I met a lot of interesting, artsy people, including a self-possessed woman who owned a local gallery and a dark exotic woman who worked in one. All that gets into Oregon Confetti, whose main character is an art dealer of sorts. My Portland is more imaginative than regional, more emotional and associative than factual. I know “Portland writers,” career writers with local magazines and college jobs, but it was never my scene. Portland for me keeps shifting and layering, and I like how the present-day town arranges itself over the palimpsest. Right now, it seems a strain of secular political insanity is overrunning the streets, pushing out the civilized virtues, and that attracts me as a subject of satire.

JH: In Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch insists that we “prefer art that at least overtly imitates something other than its own processes,” that doesn’t constantly proclaim “Don’t forget I’m an artifice!” Lasch singles out the writing of John Barth, who in the course of writing his story “Chimera” notes that “Storytelling isn’t my cup of wine; isn’t somebody’s; my plot doesn’t rise and fall in meaningful stages but . . . digresses, retreats, hesitates, etc.” Morris Dickstein observes that the “emotional withdrawal” of such writing threatens to disintegrate into catatonia. Writers give up on the quest to master or imitate reality, and instead retreat into superficial self-analysis which smothers the deep subjectivity “that enables the imagination to take wing . . . His incursions into the self are as hollow as his excursus into the world.” Oregon Confetti could have fallen into the traps of metafiction, fiction about the fictionality of fiction, or the artificiality of art. And to some degree it does deal with these things. After all, the protagonist, Devin, is an art dealer. Further, a major subplot of the novel involves the bartender Clarence, who holds forth at Sibyl’s Chop House, working out his novels in part by trying them out on the pub’s patrons. We read that “He’d absorbed thousands of plots and sub-plots, he’d studied twists and turns beyond count, he’d hobnobbed and tippled with the best of them, but his work remained stubbornly his own. It was his own curious fusion, with its inviolable laws, its proportions and symmetries, its parts and its mystical unity, all of which was more important to him than what others had to say about it.” In addition, at one point Devin comes across a “a medieval suit of armor apparently airing itself on the sidewalk. It rose from a bronze plinth and its open visor accommodated a miniature TV screen.” I simply must quote the novel’s description at length:

Upon inspection, the screen was seen to display the fight scene between Iron Man and Ultron in a bit of Hollywood fluff called Avengers: Age of Ultron. A lithium battery, soldered onto the armor’s breastplate, ensured that the half-minute scene would repeat itself, electronic blink after blink, for a decade or more. I knew this vulgar contraption perfectly well because I’d paid for it. It was made by a follower of the late Nam June Paik, an art student at UCLA who in a fit of poetic inspiration had named it “Iron Man.” The armor came from a sale at the MGM lot in Hollywood. The whole shebang, or “video installation” as we say in the biz, cost me twenty-five hundred dollars and I was hoping to rake in 20K. Some elf or fairy seemed now to have transported it, possibly through a window, and placed a fanciful signboard in its glinting gauntlets. The sign announced FREE JUNK, and these words, meticulously drawn in golden uncials, were gloriously encircled by a shining silver laurel wreath. In the lower right, on a heraldic shield of checkerboard design, the initials OO appeared. I stood in awe, and then flew in a panic up the four flights of stairs to my shop.

In other words, you tackle the nature of storytelling and the distinction between art and trash directly in your novel. Why use literary art to critique or capture the nature of art, and how do you give these explorations breadth and depth, escaping the trappings of metafiction?

LO: The whole idea of metafiction is a very new name for a very old device. For instance, check out the description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, or look at the play within the play in Hamlet, or read Cervantes, or see Wordsworth’s dream of the Arab. Metafiction (if that’s the name we want) is central to The Thousand and One Nights. When metafiction passes into clever formalism and aesthetic pretension, then you get Dickstein’s “emotional withdrawal.” I am not emotionally withdrawn.

JH: In Luke Rhinehart’s novel The Dice Man, the protagonist is emblematic of a certain contemporary disillusionment with free will. He decides to renounce free choice with the same dramatic abandon that St. Francis denounced his clothmaker’s inheritance: “I established in my mind at that moment and for all time, the never-questioned principle that what the dice dictates, I will perform.” Of this capitulation Lasch writes, “Whereas earlier ages sought to substitute reason for arbitrary dictation both from without and within,” contemporary “man” seeks to “revive earlier forms of enslavement.” The problem of freedom is a major concern of Oregon Confetti. At least twice, characters address it explicitly, discursively. During a public lecture, as one of his Jesuit confreres snores so loudly that he almost drowns out the speaker’s points, the ancient priest Fr. Low responds to an attendee wondering whether man “is losing his free will in modernity.” Fr. Low replies with eminent judiciousness. “I see no reason,” he says, “why grace or freedom should be given equally to generations. But it’s not a matter of deduction. Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum! Now that I think of it, you also run into what we might call a self-fulfilling prophecy. Men and women who refuse grace deny their own freedom.” Later, at Sibyl’s Chop House, Clarence says that in terms of storytelling, “the main thing in my opinion is that a character make his or her choice freely, so as to reveal something of significance about his motives and how he thinks under certain circumstances, usually involving temptation.” A good story, he goes on, makes a number of very real prospects palatable, a number of scenarios which the character can choose. “Either way we learn something about him while having our own response tested.” To what extent do you think Lasch is right to see “contemporary man” as actively working to resuscitate earlier forms of enslavement in terms of fate and free will? Why is your novel preoccupied with freedom, and what did you find—any uncanny discoveries or epiphanies, for instance—as you probed the problem of free will through fiction? 

LO: Chesterton says somewhere that when Aquinas defended free will he invented the lending library. A character in a novel has to face choices, has to exercise a modicum of freedom, and free will is always an expression of grace. Characters can confuse freedom and bondage. They can become enslaved. But to become enslaved is implicitly to suggest an alternative. At bottom, novels are theological, or else they are nonsense.

JH: Fitzgerald opened our conversation; as it’s almost Closing Time, I’ll let him lead us out the door as well. In the very first line of Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned, we read that the protagonist was in his early twenties when “irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had theoretically at least descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual ‘There!’” The dominant cultural ethos of this world, in art as elsewhere, is irony, not Socratic irony, which aims to provoke the listener or dialogue partner toward truth, but cynical irony, a means of dealing with the dissolution and fragmentation of the world, of so many people’s disillusionment with the political, the religious, etc. through a wry grin that at best provides a momentary, and quite shallow, laugh. Again, instead of harnessing this irony in our favor, we should try to ask: what is behind the ironic impulse? I would suggest that at least part of what we will find behind the ironic impulse is a sort of self-protection against the hollowness of the world, against those that T.S. Eliot called “The Hollow Men”:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

David Foster Wallace saw irony as the zeitgeist of our times, arguing that pervasive irony marks a “weary cynicism” which is essentially a mask to cover “gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete,” further calling this the “last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America . . . what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human . . . is probably . . . to be in some basic interior way forever infantile.” Wallace, quoting Lewis Hyde, notes, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” This, Wallace notes, “is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an exclusively negative function.” Its critical gaze is ground-clearing, but, we must ask, what is left when the ground is all cleared? Two questions for you, then.

First: Wallace concludes that it is inaccurate to claim that we have rejected all religious and moral principles, as the more radical nihilists of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons espoused. In his essay on Dostoevsky, Wallace muses, “maybe it’s not true that we today are nihilists. At the very least we have devils we believe in. These include sentimentality, naivete, archaism, fanaticism. Maybe it’d be better to call our art’s culture one of congenital skepticism.” Do you share any of these “devils” as the targets of your own irony? Would you add any to the list, or take some off of it?

LO: I had a very interesting experience when I was a boy. I used to tell my little brother fairy tales that I made up in telling them. One story was about a castle haunted by the ghosts of whales. We loved these imaginative conceptions for their own sake. Now I see them in terms of sub-creation. But when I innovated, right about the time when puberty hit, and told a story about a soldier who struggles across a desert only to drop dead seconds before his would-be rescuers arrive, I thought I was discovering irony. I thought it was genius, but my brother hated it! Trying to define irony is a fool’s errand, if you ask me.

JH: Finally: You write satire, and you write comically. Does your selection of comedy have anything to do with the ironic spirit of our times? How do you reckon with the insufficiency of satire in and of itself, with the need to leave something good for the reader, to point somewhere after you have cleared
the ground? 

LO: I have tried to include what literary critics call the frame or standard of the satire. I’ve tried to do so in two ways: first, by writing a book that distinguishes between art and junk and does so as a work of art (a typical humanist approach, going back to Erasmus); and then, by telling a love story. I am with Fitzgerald in that. The stuff between Devin and Agatha in the novel was by far the hardest to write. I was trying to reclaim some territory that has been lost and to give it new life.

 

Joshua Hren teaches and writes at the intersection of political philosophy and literature and of Christianity and culture. He serves as associate editor of Dappled Things and as editor in chief of Wiseblood Books. His scholarly work appears in such journals as LOGOS, poems in such journals as First Things, and short stories in a number of literary magazines. His first academic book, Middle-earth and the Return of the Common Good: J.R.R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy, is forthcoming in 2018, and his first collection of short stories, This Our Exile, is forthcoming through Angelico Press in November of 2017.

Lee Oser earned his doctorate in English at Yale in 1995. He taught at Yale and at Connecticut College and then moved to Holy Cross in 1998. He has published three well-received books of literary criticism. He is known for his efforts on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), a literature-advocacy group based in Boston. He is the author of the novels Out of What Chaos, The Oracles Fell Silent, and Oregon Confetti.

Filed Under: Interviews, Mary Queen of Angels 2017

An Interview with Poet and Musician Kay Clarity

Dappled Things

Michael Rennier

In “An Epithalamion,” John Donne enthuses, “Call/Thy stars from out their several boxes, take/Thy rubies, pearls, and diamonds forth, and make/Thyself a constellation of them all.” The cosmos is full of treasure—buried pearls in seemingly exhausted fields, ruby-red wine from dying vineyards, and glittering new stars portending much wonder. As I listen my way through Kay Clarity’s ongoing project, The Jewel Collections, each EP stands alone as a miniature jewel. An emerald, an onyx, a pearl, and most recently, a collection of songs that are burnished a golden hue like light filtering through amber.

If you haven’t listened to the music of Kay Clarity yet, I cannot recommend it enough. Her work speaks for itself and is a carefully polished, almost entirely unaltered statement of craftsmanship and an enduring belief in beauty. I’m not alone in admiring her development as an artist. Poet Dana Gioia says, “I hear the voice of a genuine artist in Kay Clarity’s songs. Her evolving artistry shows how natural musical talent is deepened by solitude, contemplation, and suffering. It is immensely important to have a new generation of Catholic artists who bring such passion to their vocation.”

I was able to talk with Kay to get a deeper sense of what motivates her as an artist and why she keeps singing.

Michael Rennier: How did you get started with music? Were you a poet first or a musician first?

Kay Clarity: I began writing creatively around the age of seven or eight, and that is also when I became involved in music seriously. While I love music, I actually consider writing my primary focus, and as it relates to what I do now as a singer-songwriter, that aspect came first. I intentionally grew as a singer in the way I have in order to have a means to say what I wanted to say. Words have always been the driving force for me.

Growing up, I was exposed to many singer-songwriters of the ‘90s who were combining music and poetic lyrics in an incredible way, and I knew I wanted to do that. I started writing songs in earnest when I was thirteen or fourteen, and that became my total artistic focus until recently.

In the last couple of years, I have started adding pure poetry back in to my work alongside the songs, which has been wonderful. I’ve included some poems on my upcoming album.

MR: Why is it important to you to record live and leave your tracks with minimal digital alteration?

KC: With my current project, the best way to achieve the highest quality available to me was to keep the tracks stripped down. This simplicity also fits the focus I’ve always had on melody, vocals, and lyrics. That focus can easily be lost in over-production, which is not uncommon. It’s tempting because flashy sells.

Production is meant to bring a raw musical work to life. Too much production, however, can have the effect instead of distance between the artist and the listener, and can cheapen the art through distraction. Because this is common, it has been important to me to avoid any over-processing. My work calls for, I think, a certain level of intimacy and quiet, so less distraction is generally optimal. And, of course, no autotune is a given.

MR: You have a fairly natural, “live” sound on your EPs. Tell us about your recording process.

KC: I recorded all of the songs on my forthcoming album at home on my own with humble equipment. Everything on the tracks is me, except for some backing vocals done by a friend on one track. I’m not a tech person, so it was an uphill process, but also a new artistic experience from the production standpoint that I really enjoyed.

A tech friend is doing a little bit of polishing to the tracks, and they will also be mastered professionally before official release in November. It has been a simple project, but one I am very happy with.

MR: Being an artist these days can be a real challenge, especially with the pressure to create a “hit” and earn a living. How do you balance that struggle with the desire to craft art that grows and endures over time, even if it limits your initial audience?

KC: This is such a great question. It is, in fact, the question.

It’s unbelievably challenging. The artist’s call seems to be one of suffering as you continue to try to give beauty and stories to a world that is often not listening for myriad reasons. From a practical standpoint, there is utterly no reason I should still be pursuing my artistic work. I am simply convinced it’s what I’m here to do. I’ve gone all-in with my art.

What is crucial is that I fight daily to produce the most authentic art I possibly can. If that happens to resonate with many, as I believe it will one day, then so be it. A “hit” song that is also true to my craft would be an incredible blessing, though unlikely. But I won’t ever chase it or undercut my craft for the sake of that goal. That’s why artists like me very much depend on the strong support—patronage, really—of those who value what we do.

MR: You’re hesitant to be labeled a “singer/songwriter.” How do you see your larger role as an artist, and has your self-conception evolved over time?

KC: Rather than being a genre that focuses on lyrical brilliance and thoughtful melodies as I experienced it in the nineties, “singer/songwriter” as a genre often now encompasses just stripped-down hit songs with an acoustic sound. The poetic aspect seems to have been reduced, so I would like to clearly emphasize that element in my work, which is why I say I’m a poet as well as a singer/songwriter.

As for my larger role as an artist, I first want to create the best and most authentic work I can, so as to have it resonate effectively with my listeners. The world needs beauty and stories, and I want to be a voice that provides that. I also want to work to build a culture around my music that facilitates thoughtful appreciation of art, literature, stories, and beauty, and I will see where that takes me. Long-term, I would love to be able to support other artists through building a platform for the best, hidden artists to be shared because of the challenges artists face.

My self-conception has certainly evolved: only now can I say with clear confidence that I know who I am as an artist. After years of trying boxes where I didn’t fit, I’ve finally arrived at what I call a sort of poetic impressionism with a focus on stories and beauty. There is so much pressure on an artist to meet various expectations, and it is a crucial personal process to come to know what one’s true artistic identity really is. I am most content writing and sharing pieces that face and convey the paradox of mess and redemption in the human experience. Great literature exploring that paradox has been wonderful company in this regard in recent years!

MR: Where can we see you perform live? Buy your music?

KC: I have a new plan hatching for 2018, which will involve playing primarily for those most in need of beauty and stories—I’m thinking rehabilitation centers, homeless shelters, cancer wards, children’s hospitals, hospice care, victims of human trafficking. Information about other live shows will be available to the public on my website and on social media.

My full-length album, The Jewel Collections, will be available in digital and physical editions on November 13th. Audio samples are available for purchase on my website, and there will be more available in the coming months on YouTube as well, with some great videos planned. Those who sign up for my mailing list at any time via my website will also receive a free song download.

 

Kay Clarity writes and performs music and poetry. Her current project is The Jewel Collections. Visit her online at www.kayclarity.com.

Michael Rennier received a BA in New Testament Literature from Oral Roberts University in 2002 and a Master’s of Divinity from Yale Divinity School in 2006. He served the Anglican Church in North America as the rector of two parishes on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for five years. After discerning a call to conversion, Michael and his family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he is now a priest for the Archdiocese of St. Louis. He is a blogger for Aleteia’s Catholic channel and an associate editor of Dappled Things.

Filed Under: Interviews, Mary Queen of Angels 2017

Mary, Queen of Angels 2020

Purchase Featuring nonfiction from Joshua Hren, fiction from Jennifer Marie Donahue and Rob Davidson and the winners and honorees of the Bakhita Prize in Visual Arts.

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