Friday Links
Feast of St. Helena
Our St. Peter and Paul 2023 issue is live!
Eric Cyr interviews Joshua Hren for Dappled Things
Incident and Significance: A Conversation with Christopher Beha
John-Paul Heil reviews Katy Carl’s short story collection, Fragile Objects, for Fare Forward
Patrick Kurp on Louis MacNiece
Tamara Nicholl-Smith on Dana Gioia’s Meet Me at the Lighthouse
Our St. Peter and Paul 2023 issue is live!
And it is lovely! Please do take a look. There’s so much goodness in there.
Eric Cyr interviews Joshua Hren for Dappled Things
An excellent interview about Hren’s novel, Infinite Regress. The conversation is, not surprisingly, wide-ranging and deep and touches on everything from poetry to poverty, Dostoevsky to student debt, David Foster Wallace to Stella (the woman at the heart of his next novel). Eric’s questions are all so thoughtful and Hren’s answers help broaden our understanding of both this particular novel, and the art of fiction in general.
EC: What draws you to write in a prose voice that is so attentive to the sound of words in a way more typical of poetry?
JH: Especially since writers like James Joyce and Faulkner cracked open the novel’s stylistic possibilities, we’ve seen less concern with the need for passports to cross over the border that divides poetry from prose. Often this leads to a kind of cataract of dense streams surging through the story with a sudden intensity that tries to approximate an emotional or spiritual or mental immediacy. Some readers and writers deplore this, considering such attention to sonorousness, cadence, and musicality self-indulgent. And it can become that; language can distractingly call attention to itself. But poetic prose can also advance and more fully articulate the scene, can more completely “say” the souls of the characters into the being of language.
Incident and Significance: A Conversation with Christopher Beha
Eric Cyr (thank you, Eric) reminded me of this conversation between James K.A. Smith and Christopher Beha that took place at the 2022 Catholic Imagination Conference and appeared in Image Magazine. It pairs well with the conversation between Joshua and Eric. Both interviews offer us ways to think about writing and reading the Catholic novel, in particular, though not exclusively as both Beha and Hren have thought deeply about literature and life.
When Smith asks for a definition of the novel as a form—“Is it plot architecture? Is it the deeper psychological exploration that’s possible in the roominess of a novel? What is the draw and the challenge?”—Beha responds:
Well, there are a lot of things. One is the way a novel tries to render both an objective external reality and an internal subjective reality. To bring this from the level of general craft talk to the particular context we’re in [at the Catholic Imagination Conference], the fact that both of those things are real is a central feature of what we believe as Catholics: That the material reality, including that of the body, is a real reality. That the spiritual, subjective reality of our consciousness embedded within our bodies is a real reality too. The novel is the best form we have for rendering both of those and the tension between them.
John-Paul Heil reviews Katy Carl’s short story collection, Fragile Objects, for Fare Forward
This is an insightful and attentive review of Katy’s collection of short stories and will help to broaden your understanding of her aims as a fiction writer.
Katy Carl sees and articulates the workings of grace in the body with an attentiveness that surpasses perhaps any other author writing today. Her new collection, Fragile Objects, explores this theme through Carl’s own twist on the Southern Gothic in short stories purposefully evocative of Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, and, of course, Flannery O’Connor. Though O’Connor’s influence could easily have threatened to overshadow a less adept writer (and the influence is present—unlike her novel, Carl’s short stories always leave room for eucatastrophe, but never conclude in it outright), Carl seems to have taken to heart Randy Boyagoda’s critiques of the Catholic literary tradition as too obsessed with writers like the hillbilly Thomist. Instead, Carl uses Southern Gothic to develop her distinctive contemplative realist style and explore more deeply central insights about the human person introduced in her 2021 debut novel, As Earth Without Water. In both, Carl takes particular interest in how violence done to the body—which always means treating the body as an object without dignity, a means to an end, something manipulable—profoundly wounds the soul yet can also, through grace, be transformed into a profound and deeply rich openness to relationality, even with others one has wounded.
Fragile Objects will be released on Tuesday, August 22 and is available for pre-order from Wiseblood Books.
Patrick Kurp on Louis MacNiece
Thanks to A.M. Juster for the link to this Anecdotal Evidence blog post from Patrick Kurp on how “startlingly prescient” Louis MacNiece was in “To Posterity.” The poem ends with these subtle, but searing questions:
And will your grass be green, your sky blue,
Or will your birds be always wingless birds?
Tamara Nicholl-Smith reviews Dana Gioia’s, Meet Me at the Lighthouse
A hot off the press review from Tamara about Dana Gioia’s wonderful new book, Meet Me at the Lighthouse. Tamara makes the connection not just between music and Gioia’s poetry, but also the connection between how to read and, importantly, how to listen to these poems—as we might listen to an album, all the way through, in one sitting, returning later to the songs we love the most. She recommends listening to videos of Gioia reciting some of his work to get his voice in your head (here, here, and here are a few). This should be done with any poet, if possible. And if not, then listen to someone else recite the poems or recite them yourself, record yourself reciting them, and then listen to the recording. Poetry, like music, is meant to be heard!
There was chat on Twitter/TwiX/whatever it’s called now about collections of poetry and albums being obsolete. One of the complaints was that people don’t read or listen to whole collections/albums in one sitting. I wonder if these complaints speak more about the modern person’s inability to sustain attention long enough to get through an album or a collection. Maybe we need to learn to do this, again or for the first time. Tamara gives a good tutorial on how. Equally as important, her review is a good reminder that our sustained attention is often rewarded. And Gioia’s poetry is rewarding. This collection is “rich with memory” and worth reading in one sitting, and its individual poems are worth reading, again, and again.
Have a wonderful week! Chat soon, as my mother used to say.
