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Want to Work for Image This Summer?
Are you an undergraduate or graduate student who'd like to work for Image this coming summer? Or do you know someone who might be interested? The purpose of the Luci Shaw Fellowship is to expose a promising student to the world of literary publishing and introduce him or her to the contemporary dialogue about art and faith that surrounds Image, its programs, its contributors, and its peer organizations. In short, we're looking for summer fellows who share our vision for the place art has in the life of faith, and who are also diligent, meticulous, and responsible about the daily details. There's grunt work galore in this job, but also plenty of opportunities to grasp the vision at the heart of a dynamic arts organization. The Shaw Fellow will also receive a scholarship to Image's Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
To learn more about the Luci Shaw Fellowship, and to download an application, click here.
The Kindlings Muse
In the frenetic world of instant messaging, blogs, and cable news, meaningful conversation in the media is rare indeed. More often, earnest exploration is sidelined by vitriol or celebrity scandal. For the fed-up and overloaded, The Kindlings Muse offers a refreshing change of pace. A podcasting hub and cultural salon made up of “thoughtful creatives and gadflies,” TKM has a laudable mission: “In a media age characterized by the confluence of polarization and trivialization, The Kindlings Muse is an intelligent, imaginative, hospitable exploration of ideas that matter most in contemporary life as sparked through our personal journeys and through our shared cultural experience in art, movies, books, music and events.” The execution of the concept is equally winning: TKM hosts conversations—whether one-on-one interviews or live panels at a local pub—that address meaty issues, then broadcasts them on the web for all to enjoy. It's just the thing for those who crave dialogue that tackles timely cultural topics with equal parts grit and grace. The Seattle-based “Live at Hales” has covered such themes as film and faith, consumerism, gospel music in secular culture, video games as storytelling, and an interfaith dialogue confronting the question “Where was God on 9-11?” Posted alongside host Dick Staub’s interviews with cultural movers and shakers such as Anne Rice and Image’s own Greg Wolfe, the podcasts uncover that hard-to-find strain of conviction and exploration that aims to draw together rather than drive apart. One could even call them redemptive.
Listen to The Kindlings Muse podcasts here.
 The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Nothing says “Merry Christmas” quite like Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road. And we mean that. The Road offers a dark, apocalyptic vision of the future, of a charred, useless land, wasted by an unnamed catastrophe and “peopled with refugees [in] masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators.” McCarthy’s characteristically spare dialogue forges a world that is chilling and austere. And into this “crushing black vacuum of the universe” he thrusts a frightened father and son. They push a battered shopping cart south through the ash-choked air, hoping to escape the winter cold, hoping to find food. In this desolation, language and meaning deteriorate, “the names of things slowly following those things into oblivion… the names of things one believed to be true.” The father walks the road with a pistol tucked in his belt—in this savage land, he is no longer free to do right, only to stay alive. But there may be hope in McCarthy’s darkness, perhaps even a sense of the Incarnation, an inkling of Advent. Despite the desperation of their journey, the son walks in empathy. With an innocence foreign to the blighted earth, this boy cares passionately about right and wrong. At times the father “raise[s] his weeping eyes” to see his son “standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle.” This child, born into a world gone mad, shines with some greater fire. And that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.
For more information on The Road, click here.
 Cariboo Magi
Written by award-winning actor and playwright, Lucia Frangione (Espresso, Holy Mo), Cariboo Magi is a witty play filled with history and humor. Madame Fanny Dubeau, owner of a saloon in 1870s San Diego, is down on her luck and desperate to save her business. Her chief patron, Reverend William Teller, is a drunken Anglican priest from England haunted by his failed attempts to make a single convert among California’s gold rush miners. Add to the mix Joe Mackey, a Chinese-Canadian miner who narrates the play with self-penned doggerel, and his love interest, the pregnant Marta Reddy, and the plot gets interesting. When Madame Dubeau receives a letter for an acting troupe that owes her rent, she decides to intercept the offer it contains—travel north to Barkersville, B.C. to perform theater for the miners. The payment for the task is enough to save her saloon, and she’s convinced the ragtag group of four can pull it off. Arriving in Barkersville, the troupe meets their greatest challenge—the plays they’ve rehearsed must be shelved in favor of the Nativity Story. Hilarity ensues as the biblical narrative of Christ’s birth is told primarily by means of lines from the only three plays the troupe knows—Hamlet, A Christmas Carol, and The Last of the Mohicans. Towards the end of the motley group’s wacky rendering of the narrative, a moment of grace occurs as Marta’s baby is born just off stage. In this newfound light, Cariboo Magi’s final minutes enact a gift of redemption in the lives of each character. Of the play, The Georgia Straight’s Colin Thomas says, “Devilish wit, deep religion, sheer audacity… I cried. I laughed. And I thought. Who could ask for more?” Directed by Kerry Van Der Griend, the play stars Lucia Frangione (Madame Dubeau), Dirk Van Stralen (Rev. Teller), Parnelli Parnes (Joe Mackey), and Donna Lee Ford (Marta). Among the crew are Jessie award-winning designers, including Nicole Bach, Spencer Capier, Lauchlin Johnston, and Kevin McAllister. A holiday favorite of audiences since its premiere in 2001, the play has recently been published by Talonbooks. Pacific Theatre’s run of Cariboo Magi will continue until December 30, 2006.
Visit Pacific Theatre online.
 Bone Strings by Anne Coray
Anne Coray is a passionate inhabitant of the natural world and as outdoorsy as they come, but her poems observe the landscape without disturbing the scene. She meets the grace and mystery of the surrounding wilderness like a sea otter: “I’d as soon leave a glaze or indentation." Bone Strings takes us to Coray’s homestead on Lake Clark, Alaska, accessible only by air. The traditional name for the lake, “Qizhjeh Vena,” means “many peoples gather,” and in that spirit her poems revere the depth of human relationship as well as the lessons of the wilderness. The opening poem bears witness to the plane crash that took her father’s life, and warns the reader that she will not be shying away from her imagination. “Common measures” notes the joy of having a husband nearby while one’s own mind wanders from dinner preparation to the meaning of language: “‘Some questions,’ / says my husband, ‘sure make a slow salad.’” Sometimes the poet longs for “a land so clean it exacts no witness.” Sometimes she’s restored to her own humanity. “The year I spent alone,” she writes in “Rythmics,” “I learned some things / of wind and the undulation of shadows… When I felt the low, periodic pull / for human company, I would go / Visit Charlie, my only neighbor. / His voice, like the river, would shift and flow.” Many of the poems start with an observed moment: mergansers on a patch of open water in winter, a dead moose calf one week old and small enough for her to carry off the beach, blossomy swirls of snow on the willow tips, the news that wolf-hunting is on the ballot. The poet plunges deep into the unknown, time after time, then seeks out the connection that draws her back to the surface. These poems are self-contained adventures, contemplative and sharp at once. In each one Coray invites us on a field trip—and it could get dangerous.
Buy Bone Strings here.
 Chameleon Days by Tim Bascom
When he was three years old, in 1964, Tim Bascom was thrust into a world of eucalyptus trees and stampeding baboons when his family moved from the Midwest to Ethiopia. Chameleon Days, narrated through the eyes of an unflinchingly observant boy, describes his missionary parents’ struggles in a sometimes hostile country. Reluctantly attending boarding school in the capital, he finds that beyond the gates enclosing that peculiar, isolated world, conflict roils Ethiopian society; as he grows older, the secret riot drills at school create in him a mounting unease. While visiting his parents’ home, to which another missionary family has fled after an attack by rampaging students, Tim witnesses the disintegration of his family’s African idyll as Haile Selassie’s empire begins to crumble. Like Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Chameleon Days chronicles social upheaval through the keen yet naive eyes of a child. The book was chosen by Edward Hoagland as winner of the Bakeless Prize at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Hoagland writes: “Not a book of war and pestilence, this is about childhood, much of which, for almost any of us, is going to be composed of ‘chameleon days.’” Image #19 featured one of Tim Bascom's earlier essays remembering Ethiopia.
Buy Chameleon Days here.
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