An Invitation From Dappled Things Editor-In-Chief Katy Carl

The short story, friends, is this: Please join me and Wiseblood Books editor-in-chief Joshua Hren for a literary reading and author-and-publisher conversation around my debut novel, As Earth Without Water, the evening of Monday, December 13. The event is cosponsored by Dappled Things Magazine and our partners in the Ars Vivendi Initiative through the Collegium Institute at Penn. I’m incredibly grateful and honored to be invited and, in turn, would like to invite you into what has developed into one of the longest and most fruitful ongoing conversations of my life.

The long story, if you have time:

Way back in early 2007, still less than a year out of college, I did three new things whose ramifications have since transformed my world. First, I joined the editorial board of Dappled Things as an associate editor. Then, I struck up an email correspondence with a young writer named Joshua Hren, who’d sent us an astonishingly distinctive but unready short story that I nevertheless simply couldn’t stop thinking about. Finally—and not seeing these as at all connected—I started in earnest to try to turn the series of linked stories I’d been tinkering with for the last four years into something like a real novel.

I had a working title—Pilgrimage—hitched to two protagonists, loads of painterly descriptions, and the implied conflicts embedded in a young woman’s dissolving relationships with both her love and her art. At the outset, that was all. I knew it wasn’t enough. Not until I connected the story to my boundless fascination with the theme of religious conversion—how does it come about that someone’s whole vision of whole worlds, this and the next, can radically shift? What does that look and feel like in a life, and what kinds of actions might it lead someone to do?—did the characters wake up and start to breathe. That meant they also slipped out of my control. Productive days ensued. For a while I thought I had something. Then life intervened.

After becoming a first-time mother in 2009, I tucked the manuscript away. Time for all that later, I thought, as I’d been advised to think. (I thought that, anyway. I felt differently.) And anyway, what more can you do with a story after one of your central characters has run away and taken a vow of silence?

Still, the characters lived—and fought—in my head. For a long time I imagined them together in the New York apartment they’d once shared. They’d work and quarrel and canoodle, quarrel and then work again, while I nursed the baby or did the dishes. Later, I’d sneak off to scrawl down a few sentences or, when the chance didn’t come, refine a passage or two of prose in my head, sometimes for hours until I memorized it: repeating the line, repeating the line, repeating the line. It felt like a mental parallel to holding my breath. I couldn’t leave their story alone. I incarnated that dictum from the Jewish tradition, which artists so love to quote: “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

More to the point, I wasn’t free to abandon them. I’d made them, after all, and I felt a certain responsibility. Dylan Fielding, in particular, troubled and mystified me more after his conversion to Catholicism even than he had before it. He’d made far more sense to me as a Willoughbyesque rake than he did as a Mertonesque monk. Most converts—this, among the many lovable things about them—can’t stop telling you how a grace welcome as water to thirst has dazzled, seduced, ravished them. (See, primarily, Augustine’s Confessions for paradigm.) By contrast, Dylan after he became Br. Thomas Augustine seemed curled around his story like a hedgehog around its vulnerable core. Why wouldn’t he unfurl? Why wouldn’t he talk? Slowly it came to light that his faith was faltering—slowly it came to light that he’d been traumatized. But how, when, by whom? The monastery he’d fled to was supposed to have been a safe place, one of the good ones.

The novel alone can tell the story right. For years I lingered near despair of being able to tell it at all. But the news in the summer of 2018 only increased my sense of urgency. It couldn’t be done; it would have to be done. I didn’t know how; I would have to learn. Then life intervened. In September 2018, Joshua traveled to CUA where, as part of a shared reading with Wiseblood author Lee Oser, he previewed the short story “Work of Human Hands”—later published in his collection In the Wine Press. That story, like As Earth Without Water, depicts a case of clerical sexual abuse and its fallout in the survivor’s and the abuser’s divergent lives.

I barely made it to that reading. I was nine months and change pregnant with my fourth child; one sidestep, one held breath, would have sent me into labor. But I held out until the end, and afterward, we talked for just a moment about my novel in progress, in which I intended to deal with similar themes. A year later, at the 2019 Catholic Imagination Conference in Chicago, Joshua remembered that conversation and asked me if I’d like to apply to the nascent Wiseblood writer-in-residence program to finish the manuscript, with a possibility of publication. The result is as you see it. In short, my conversations about this book with Joshua Hren brought me the immeasurable grace of freedom to center this novel fully on Br. Thomas Augustine’s story as well as to give right proportion to the character of Angele Solomon, who started as a mere framing device only to become as much a part of Thomas Augustine’s picture as Charles Ryder is of Sebastian’s or Nick Carraway of Gatsby’s. The process as a whole has radically changed my sense of what is possible both in the form of the novel and in the writing life.

Much more remains to be said, but you can join us Monday evening, December 13, to hear some of it; I hope to see you there.

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