Cosmic Scope and Expansive Vision: An Interview with Joshua Hren and James Matthew Wilson
An interview with Joshua Hren and James Matthew Wilson, founders of the new Master’s of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at the University of St. Thomas in Houston
“One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian,” Flannery O’Connor wrote to Betty Hester, “is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience.”
A unique, online Master’s of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing starting this Fall (2021)—dedicated to “a renewal of the craft of literature within the cosmic scope, long memory, and expansive vision of the Catholic literary and intellectual tradition”—promises to help bring that ultimate reality back into our literary experience.
Joshua Hren and James Matthew Wilson are the founders of this new program at St. Thomas University. They are two experienced professors and prolific Catholic writers who have thought long and deeply about how to write well-crafted stories and poems that take the reality of Christ’s Incarnation as essential for a complete understanding of the world. Joshua Hren is the founder of Wiseblood Books; he has published two collections of short stories, has a novel imminently forthcoming, and has recently published the book How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic. James Matthew Wilson has published six books and chapbooks of poetry; a major critical study, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking; and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry, and he is poet-in-residence with the Benedict XVI Institute of Sacred Music and Divine Liturgy.
Many writers, both aspiring and already published, are attracted to this unprecedented opportunity to study with two well-regarded faithful Catholic writing professors—who not only teach, but also do what they teach, and do it to high acclaim.
The following interview was conducted by email.
RTMS: Readers of Dappled Things magazine are probably familiar with your work. Joshua, before you founded and became editor-in-chief of Wiseblood Press, you were Dappled Things’ managing editor. James, you also have had a long connection with the magazine. Please tell us more.
JMW: I still recall seeing advertisements for Dappled Things when it began as an online magazine, and I was so pleased to see there were other Catholics aspiring to strengthen and even transform contemporary letters by bringing to it the distinctively—and distinctively comprehensive—Catholic voice. At the time, I was mired in writing a dissertation and had little time to write poems. It was only five or six years later that I thought to start sending my own work. I had just read the first print issue [and] was impressed. I wanted to participate in the tradition that was coming into being before my eyes. In my view, the magazine has been so consistently good and so consistent in its commitment to its mission that there is simply no other magazine of its kind. There will be others of its kind, however. Dappled Things must be counted as one of the first signs of a broader revival of letters, and many new fruits will be traceable back to its vine. It has been a particular delight to have had so much of my work published in the magazine, including some of my best essays, so far as I can judge. Further, I will be forever thankful to Dappled Things for being so obliging in the serial publication of my “Quarantine Notebook.” That was such an eccentric project, but the editors saw its merit immediately, and that inspired me to see it through.
JH: The Catholic imagination played a lead role in convincing me to return to the Faith I’d left at age thirteen (citing “Communion is cannibalism” and other felonies). Francois Mauriac and Dorothy Day, Leon Bloy and Francis Thompson—where would I be without these dead friends? The trouble was this: I knew not a few living Catholics, and I knew enough living friends who were not scared of poetry, but I couldn’t find a single faithful soul who, among the living, also loved fiction. I remember corresponding with Katy Carl, after she rejected my first submission (a wise decision, infinitely justified): “Have you heard of this book by Flannery O’Connor called Mystery and Manners?” The question I put to her, so pathetically unassuming, reveals how necessary the Dappled Things community was for me. Dana Gioia has often said that he spent over a decade traveling the country, hearing the same story from Catholic artists: “I’m all alone, lonely, isolated. I don’t know anyone seriously committed to both the writer’s craft and holiness.” I, and many others, can no longer file these complaints, thanks to Gioia, yes, to be sure, but also thanks to Dappled Things and the others who kept up the tradition before the last decade’s real blooms. The magazine has been a magnet for some serious talent over the years—both in terms of editors and in terms of submitters. During my time as editor, I helped launch the J.F. Powers Short Story Contest in hopes of attracting still more of that talent. It was also my editorial work with the magazine that led to my founding Wiseblood Books in 2013. I’d been combing through the slush pile of submissions, coming across truly well-made, beautiful, truthful stories that seemed to contain inklings of a new idiom in the Catholic literary tradition. When I corresponded with these authors, I came across a familiar refrain: we can’t find a publisher. I worried, at first that they might be making excuses, that their art was good but not good enough to find champions in the big leagues. In certain cases this was surely so, but in others the prose was to-die-for but the story found redemption in uncanny sources and the violence of the grace or the moral imagination would be a cause for scandal in the secular establishment.
I should also note that I first “met” James Matthew Wilson through reading his essays and poetry in Dappled Things. The journal has been more than a vehicle of good art. It has been what St. John Henry Newman called a “link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons”—a source of camaraderie, collegiality, and lifelong friendships. How can I make a return?
RTMS: What is the mission of your MFA program? What is unique about it?
JMW: Every MFA program aims to initiate writers into the discipline and possibilities of their craft. We aim to help writers produce work that lives up to the full historical vitality, variety, depth, and breadth of literature.
That’s what every program also should do, but MFAs often have a bad reputation because they tend to become minatory gatekeepers of a cramped and narrow set of conventions. Such programs often advance a narrow set of positive conventions, as if only one style of writing could permissibly be done now.
But MFA programs also often suffer the wider sense of disenchantment that crops up in nearly every aspect of modern life. Literature was once great, but now it simply cannot try to do the things it once did. Poets used to build great things; now they can only build small ones. Such a malaise we wish to combat. Nothing can forever dwell in the ruins of the past, and in part because the past is not itself a ruin. The greatest works of literature, however ancient, live on today precisely because of their greatness. We have a particular aspiration to draw deeply and broadly on the Catholic intellectual and literary tradition, which is of course the heir of the whole of the western tradition. That tradition is not a dead thing handed down, but a living thing with deep roots and a hope for renewal and ever-greater flourishing. If we maintain an open eye at once historically attuned but also attuned to the permanent things, there is no reason we cannot help new writers make new works that serve the great humanistic purposes that literature always has.
JH: This collapse into presentism is alien to our approach, which, in its Catholicity, is founded upon a hermeneutic of continuity: we read and teach Christopher Beha and Dana Gioia, but we also read and teach Pseudo-Dionysius, Saint Augustine, and Dante. Certain artistic devices can be hard to pull off outside of a particular period. Take the intrusive authorial pronouncements of not a few nineteenth-century novels, the narrators’ explicit commendation or condemnation. The turn toward subtlety that Henry James mastered has made it hard to return to outright moralizing. A contemporary author could try, but to do so might be ignoring a genuine development that is good for the art. Other contemporary conventions, though, might stifle approaches to fiction that are both humane and driven by a Catholic vision. And then: although Dante’s cosmos is foreign to our time, his narration of conversion is an enduring model for any novelist in any age. Besides, if Erich Auerbach is right, a strong sinew connects the Commedia to the modern novel. As he says in Dante: Poet of the Secular World, “In the Comedy . . . an awareness had been born that a man’s concrete earthly life is encompassed in his ultimate fate and that the event in its authentic, concrete, complete uniqueness is important for the part it plays in God’s judgment.” What a grace to be part of such a long tradition, where new things made hearken to the old, where innovation and imitation are not enemies but friends.
RTMS: How did this program come about?
JMW: Nothing could have come as more of a surprise to me than the conception of this program. It probably took someone with the naïve trust in God’s providence that Joshua [Hren] has to bring it about. He launched a press with no money and no prospects and grew it into one of the finest small presses in the country. He envisioned this program as a spring of new growth in our age. I responded appropriately by saying, good luck, and got on with my life. But, in a very short time, there were others, including the University of Saint Thomas, who said this could be a great development within contemporary literature and Catholic education—and then, all of a sudden, we were reviewing our first applicants.
JH: We’d be foolish not to thank the president of the University of St. Thomas, Richard Ludwick, as well as our Vice President for Academic Affairs, Chris Evans, and our Dean, George Harne, for so boldly and wholly welcoming this program. We all know the jokes about money and the arts. The fact that UST is giving full institutional support to a cow that can’t be milked for STEM cash should occasion a swell in the virtue of hope. Just before COVID, in February of 2020, I was delivering a series of fiction readings and lectures and seminars in Texas. While in Houston, at an amazing dinner hosted by Catholic Literary Arts’ Sarah Cortez, I proposed that what we really need, to give the gains of the Catholic literary renaissance an institutional rootedness and reach, is an MFA that is authentically and unabashedly Catholic—and catholic. Enough with the division between good believers and bad artists, bad Catholics and good craftsmen. To this day I lapse into some disbelief that this proposal received immediate enthusiasm from the University of St. Thomas and its Board of Directors. And then when COVID came, I was certain that the whole dream was dead on arrival: the center was falling apart. Things were not holding. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world. But the University said sed contra: it is precisely now that we should launch such a program. At a time when many Catholic colleges and universities are closing or capitulating commitments to theology and philosophy and literature, UST is signaling a radical devotion to a telos that honors its namesake. It has been and will be a real boon to work alongside James Matthew Wilson. The MFA is very fortunate to have him as our founding director.
JMW: Can I just add that the feeling is mutual? It’s been a blessing to have Joshua’s vision and determination bring this all into being.
RTMS: You already have accepted candidates for the program to start in the fall. You state that you welcome “applications from anyone and everyone, of every faith and background.” What kinds of students do you expect will apply to the program? What do you think non-Catholics can get out of a program with this emphasis?
JMW: I cannot stress this enough. The Catholic tradition is the great tradition, as all-encompassing in its grasp as it is ultimate and determinative in its scope. The suitable applicants to this program will be those who can say to themselves, first of all, “I want to make a good work, one that is at once excellent in detail and bold in conception. I want to make good things in some sense as the poets and writers of Shakespeare’s England, of Dante’s Florence, of Virgil’s Rome made good work: literature well-crafted and worthy of a serious person’s attention. Catholic literature is not a special niche; it is not a super-addition of devotion to plain old ordinary secular literature. It is our contention that there is no “plain old ordinary secular literature.” The arts, when they are true to themselves, manifest something particular that reveals the universal, they incarnate the eternal word. Anyone who thinks human beings have souls and a destiny—or who at least are worried about the implications if they did not—should seek a seat at the table in our program.
That said, of course, genuine beauty, hope, spiritual depth, and finally humble devotion are all aspects of human experience, but ones that are shunted to the side in most contemporary arts and letters. We hope therefore to be especially accommodating to helping writers on such themes, make of them the best possible work.
I’ve said this perhaps too often already, but the academy writ large has long since lost a sense of its purpose. Many universities do not consider the pursuit of truth among their primarily responsibilities. Many would respond with a knowing smile if you said that the encounter with beautiful things spiritualizes and, thus, humanizes. There was never any justification for such a broad disenchantment, reductivism, and impoverishment in the first place. But, since it has happened and spread far and wide, we aim to build up an alternative institution on the frontier and be the one certain place where everyone—with a love of wisdom, of truth, goodness, and beauty—can find a home.
JH: Contemporary Christian writers can learn much from “secular” MFAs—can grasp much about craft from any number of superb living writers who are running workshops and leading seminars. We will never sacrifice the natural habits, techniques, and elements that make for fully realizedpoetry and fiction. But, as Newman and O’Connor make plain, literature is a study of human nature, and the visions of nature and of humanity that are ascendant at many universities right now are so skewed that it could be difficult to study there. Art, Conrad argued, “may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe.” There is no question that a major part of art is rendering the visible—”in its colors, in its light, in its shadows” what is “fundamental, what is enduring and essential.” But, as the Christian vision is driven by unseen realities, and “secular” MFAs are not equipped to grapple directly with the question of how and why and when and whether we ought to try and make the unseen seen, it is essential that the landscape of contemporary higher education possess more programs whose participants and faculty are well-versed in such inquires—both as critics and as writers. This aspect of imitating the action of grace is one of the most interesting and the most difficult for any writer. Isn’t it presumptuous to try and put what we don’t see or grasp into words? What if we distort God’s grace through pathetic projections of our own wishful thinking? And yet, we must not throw out our real capacities out of fear. As St. Thomas puts it (in one of the Church’s most sublime songs):
Præstet fides supplementum
Sensuum defectui.
If we pray for wisdom and prudence to boot and we know the nature of a given character and if we know that God possesses certain perfections, then we can realistically work out stories that strive to show the likely way that grace would look. The aforementioned errors are a real risk, but a risk worth taking.
The lineup of students we have for our inaugural class is really impressive. They are joining us from all over the United States, from Canada and Ireland and other places I can’t recall: one of them, I think, put “the third heaven.” I think his name was Paul of Tarsus or something like that. Man, he wrote these long, convoluted sentences that stretch your soul and hang it out to dry. The only way I can describe his prose is: divine. Jest aside, these particular students are so promising, apart from one another, that, once they acquire an esprit de corps, their acuity of thought and seriousness of purpose will bring such a body of literature into being that it’s worth watching and waiting for what comes.
RTMS: Joshua, in your last answer, you noted that religious belief is almost a taboo subject in modern writing. Oddly this seems a bit similar to how references to sexual activity used to be literally banned in literature, at least in the U.S. until the time of the famous pornography trial of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Speaking of which, what are your thoughts about sexuality in works of literary art?
JH: Outside puritanical circles it wasn’t, in the past, totally taboo to write about sexuality. It was, rather, taboo to rival soft pornography. We must be on guard against puritanical guardians, but we Catholics are also concerned with the boundaries of imitating intimacy in a manner that serves the total effect. We can’t, reacting against puritanical scrupulosity, silence prudence and surrender to “all is permitted.” There are chaste muses who are worth invoking, and these are also things we artists need to talk through; these are conversations that we’ll surely have every semester in the MFA. They can’t be solved with a “manual of morals.” We’ll cultivate art—the practical intellect—but we’ll also rely on the prudent for wisdom to navigate an author’s particular dilemma.
Maybe Joseph Ratzinger is right when he worries that anyone who tries to give witness to the faith amidst the mores of “modern life” can “really feel like a clown, or rather perhaps like someone who, rising from an ancient sarcophagus, walks into the midst of the world of today dressed and thinking in the ancient fashion and can neither understand nor be understood by this world of ours.” Walker Percy transposed this concern into a literary key: “the so-called Catholic or Christian novelist nowadays has to be very indirect, if not downright deceitful, because all he has to do is say one word about salvation or redemption and the jig is up, you know.” But I’m not quite so sure that this is the whole picture. Ours is purportedly a secular age, but everywhere we find signs of spiritual yearning, of misguided appeals to dubious mysticisms. Faith and religion are the stuff of some well-established contemporary fictionists. To name just a few: Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, Christopher Beha and Phil Klay, George Saunders and Jonathan Franzen. It is not forbidden to represent belief. (Though it is more common for literature of our time to give us moving portraits of doubt.) The question of how religion can be portrayed is more complicated. A story that represented the Catholic vision as exclusively accurate, as absolute, would likely have a hard time finding reception with a broader readership. This is likely reflective of both the powers that run the publishing industry and the proclivities of most readers of fiction and poetry. In much contemporary fiction, religion is portrayed as a given character’s preference—equivalent, for instance, to a political party membership. Philip Rieff wrote that “Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.” Since the triumph of the therapeutic, literature has increasingly represented faith as a kind of “spiritual therapy” that is all-too-human, not transcendent. But the question is more complicated still: what if, as Christian Smith has demonstrated, many, many Christian folks in the States do treat religion as a kind of therapy? If we were to do justice to reality, wouldn’t contemporary literature about people living now, here—wouldn’t it have to represent not a few of its characters as reducing religion to a preferential psychological choice? At least, it is not as though a Catholic should not imitate a cast of such characters.
In his Problem of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin contends that through Dostoevsky’s dialogic imagination, what unfolds in his novels is not a single-voiced tract but “a world of consciousnesses mutually illuminating one another.” Many have taken this judgment to champion Dostoevsky’s “polyphonic” mode as a fictional equivalent of relativist liberalism: as if Dosty is channeling Voltaire’s famous saying: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The novel was born in a skeptical milieu, and it is an intrinsically secular art form, some say. More: it is innately relativistic. There is some measure of truth to these suppositions and conclusions. But they don’t tell the whole story, either. From outside the polyphony of characters, Bakhtin concludes, “Dostoevsky seeks the highest and most authoritative orientation, and . . . the image of Christ represents for him the resolution of ideological quests. This image or this highest voice must crown the world of voices, must organize and subdue it.” Such is the vision we’ll crown in the MFA: our stories will welcome all comers—a motley crew of characters. But at its highest, the stories our students will write will render Christ as the resolution of all the other incarnations.
RTMS: The COVID-19 epidemic and quarantine have brought about at least one benefit, in that many more people have become comfortable learning and interacting via Zoom. Previous MFA programs required residency. Yours is taught remotely. Is this online program partly made possible by new familiarity with online education?
JMW: There have been online, or low/no-residency, MFA programs for a long time now. There is even one other program, very successful and well established, that has some meaningful kinship with our mission and aspirations. So, in that respect, perhaps the transformation has not been as great as it seems. But for me, personally, yes, I appreciate how well teaching can be done, at least at the advanced level, through an online seminar. To lose the residential aspect of it could be a significant loss indeed, but we will give our students significant opportunities to come together, in person, and complement their virtual companionship with full companionship. But, more importantly, there are many talented writers who cannot drop their current responsibilities to move to a new city or state and spend two or three years writing. I would warrant most talented, unpublished writers cannot do this. These writers have a need, and we now know that Zoom and other technologies allow us to accommodate their circumstances while filling that need.
JH: During COVID-tide, I taught a series of seminars called “The Christ-Haunted Short Story.” A year prior, I wouldn’t have conceded to such an arrangement. It was one of the most rewarding and invigorating educational endeavors I’ve ever undertaken. In the main these were people for whom leisure was hard-won: construction workers and retired engineers, elementary school teachers and a Catholic priest, to name just a few of our crew. They brought a hunger for depth of discussion and delivered so many insights into Flaubert and Waugh and O’Connor and Hemingway, conversations spilled well over the allotted time, all throughout the week emails were exchanged, and they—we all—bonded so beautifully that I’ve gained good hope for our MFA’s mode.
I think it’s safe to say that the Zoom-classroom is bad for kindergartners—and maybe for most young people through undergraduate. During the pandemic, I was blessed to be able to lead Socratic seminars in a tent outside. Yes, it required that we shout about Aquinas or Homer or Dante or Pseudo-Dionysius, but those young people really had a hunger for the classroom—their anxious hearts needed in persona. I would imagine that many of our students, working parents and others, will spend much of their days in the flesh with others—children and family and co-workers. So I don’t think the loss of an actual table will be felt as keenly. I believe that the goods that will come from meeting two-dimensionally will outdistance the prospect of limiting this effort to those who could show up to a brick-and-mortar classroom.
RTMS: What courses are you offering to start?
JMW: We have so far mapped out two thirty-credit curricula, one for poetry and one for fiction. We will be adding additional curricula for writing essays and memoirs. Some students will be able to follow the curriculum in order, and I hope most will be able to do so, because the courses will build on one another nicely. In poetry, for instance, students will take a seminar on the craft of poetry their first semester and one on the philosophical and theological dimensions of the lyric poem in their third; in their second semester, they’ll study the Catholic literary revival, whether in America or in Europe, and then, in their fourth semester they’ll journey back to the longer tradition that grounds those works (writers usually have to work their way back through time, if they are to make use of the literary resources of the past, and so we sort of use a “reversed” chronology in the program). At the center of all these courses will be a seminar on the philosophy of art and beauty. It will be no dialectical hemming-and-hawing. We will simply read those works that offer the best accounts of what role beauty plays in reality and why literature works the way it does.
JH: James alluded to the residential component earlier. Between semesters, though, we’ll hold an optional residency in Houston. We’ll rally seminars around a marquee writer who will lead us in craft-talks and read from his novel or her poetry collection. These intensive weeks will be filled-to-the-brim with playful leisure that is also hefty enough to earn students three credits. It will be a time of festivity and cross-pollination. Students will have conversations until closing time. They’ll have the chance to ask direct questions to talented writers who’ve “made it” at various levels. James and I can’t wait to welcome them to UST, without whom none of this would be happening!
RTMS: I understand you are planning to expand the course offerings as time goes by. Any other thoughts about what other types of writing you will include?
JMW: We want this MFA program to be the great project of our careers. We also want it to be a vine that grows many branches, branches that reach not just students and aspiring writers, but every Catholic in our country and, indeed, every person in our country. Eventually the MFA will be housed in a center adequate to undertake such expansion. For the moment, we simply intend to add piece-by-piece so that memoirists and, eventually, dramatic and screen writers can find the kind of apprenticeship they require to flourish in their art.
JH: In the meantime, any memoirists are welcome to join us outside an official non-fiction track. Many of the best memoirs borrow techniques from fiction; students working on narrative non-fiction, something for instance like Wallace’s essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”: such a soul could perfect her working memoir by enrolling in a fiction workshop. Incidentally, her fictionist peers could learn a great deal from wrestling together with her through ethical questions: how much truth should I tell, about whom? Soon and very soon, though, we’ll have a creative non-fiction course on the books. Maybe it’ll be taught by Abby Favale, a capacious memoirist, with Sohrab Ahmari as a visiting lecturer. There are a handful of very fine Catholic essayists and memoirists living right now, but we need more. Too often essays on Catholic things are artless or dry or cliché variations of the same point recycled ad infinitum.
In addition, in the above-mentioned courses, we will veer away from assessments and assignments that would foster academic writing. Institutions of higher learning need to do more to foster a love of literature outside the ivory tower. In our own limited way, our MFA is organized to aspire after a more expansive audience: most course assignments will assume forms readable by everyone from the coffee-shop-dwelling literati to your aunts Lydwina and Dymphna: personal essays, appreciations, review essays, familiar essays—in other words, literary criticism that sees the specialized conversation of academe as too often tedious and boring, and so seeks instead to make an intervention in the public realm.
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To close, here are some of Flannery O’Connor’s thoughts about MFA programs, in an essay originally written for the alumni magazine of the Georgia College for Women and quoted as follows by Paul Elie on his website Everything That Rises:
What can a writing program do for a writer?
“It can put him in the way of experienced writers and literary critics, people who are usually able to tell him after not too long a time whether he should go on writing or enroll immediately in the school of Dentistry.”
What good is the MFA degree?
“It will be pronounced upon by his future employers should they chance to be of the academy. Because fine writing seldom pays, fine writers usually end up teaching, and the degree, however worthless to the spirit, can be expected to add something to the flesh.” …
“The only writing program I am familiar with—there are many considered to be adequate—is that at the University of Iowa. The program there is designed to cover the writer’s technical needs as mentioned above, and to provide him with a literary atmosphere which he would not be able to find elsewhere. The writer can expect very little else.”
The new MFA in Creative Writing at UST-Houston promises to satisfy more cosmic expectations.
