Gains, losses 📈
Dear ones, 🧚🏻
I've just had the most exhilarating conversation with Ben Palpant for Rabbit Room: it's part origin story and part advice for new writers. It's all good times.
Done reading that piece? Moving on then to a lament…
Image Journal was the first publication I loved. I must've found it in the English Department gathering space at Wheaton College while waiting for a professor. Immediately, I was struck by its quality, its seriousness of enterprise. Over the years, I'd attend conferences they put on, (poem reading by Li-Young Lee in Chicago stands out). During one of my drop-outs from undergrad, I drove up to Seattle to meet Greg Wolfe, hoping I might come on staff, thinking it would be the best sort of job someone like me could have (I went back to college instead of taking it). Just this summer I attended my first Glen Workshop, and this year I published my first piece for them. If you haven't heard, they announced this month that they're shuttering. Like many, I was crestfallen. My friend Jeffrey Overstreet said, "I feel like my house just burned down." It may sound funny to those not invested in such enterprises, but I feel that way too--there's nothing quite like Image, and it's doubtful whether there ever will be again.
That said, for those wandering around the ashes like some latter-day Anne Bradstreet wondering where they placed their wayward combs, we do have, happily, a number of other places of publication, of conversation and community that ought to be on your radar: Mockingbird, for one, and Rabbit Room. Ekstasis Magazine is more impressive all the time, like weekly. Anselm Society (even though they studiously ignore my solicitations 😤) and CS Lewis Foundation, plus the plethora of zines and journals that make up our bit of the literary ecosystem. So, I'm sad, but not bereft.
And speaking of silver linings, of sunshine, of Spring:
<<<<<<queue zithers>>>>> 🎉
📢 A new home has been found for our beloved MFA program!
Whitworth University (Spokane, WA) will be announcing the creation of a low-residency MFA program in Creative Writing in the next month or so. Scott Cairns will direct and I have agreed to come on as poetry faculty. We'll admit our first cohort in January 2025, so if you know interested parties, send them my way. It’s going to be epic.
Publications
Since we last spoke, I published a new poem called "Sustaineth" over at Ekstasis. In it, I’m thinking about the gifts of G-d to believers. Not only do we get the beauty and provision of the world, but the imago dei reflected in each of our fellows. Imagine! And then—impossibly—on top of all that: regeneration.
Also, I thought I'd flag it here since it never got to be a news item of its own and was instead smashed in with the deluge of reminiscing on my Year-end list, but: this podcast conversation I had with Matthew Wickman was delicious. It's about church.
Reading
60 Songs that Explain the 90's by Rob Harvilla
What a treat this book was. It's a bit talky in the Studs Terkel way because this is really a podcast turned into a book, but man, this guy has nailed the zeitgeist.
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution by Cat Bohannon
So engaging and interesting. This is how science writing for popular audiences should be done.
Listening
From Self, with Love by Lowland Hum
Bunny by Beach Fossils (thanks to my friend Traynor)
Shed by Title Fight (thanks, well of inexplicable anger)
Oddments
I loved this article about aesthetics and contemporary art.
My Victorian Literature course is finishing strong with Ruskin, Wilde, Pater here at the end. Phew!
Seattlites, stop by the Fathom Gallery to see these drawings by my friend Brian Barber that explore place-connection among the Pawnee.
Ok my dears, there's lots happening: new books, essays, poems, courses, readings all hopping around in the hopper. Stay tuned and take care.