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 Register Now for the 2007 Glen Workshop!
“God of the Desert: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam through the Prism of Art”
July 29 – August 5, 2007
The Glen Workshop is an illuminating conference on the arts and religion, where participants practice and strengthen their craft and vision in community. This weeklong event combines the best elements of a workshop, an arts festival, and a symposium. By exploring this year’s theme, “God of the Desert: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam through the Prism of Art,” participants will share a common ground for discussion during the week. Morning workshops are small enough to allow the faculty to give close attention to each participant—to beginners as well as those advanced in their craft. This year’s faculty includes illustrator Barry Moser, playwright Mark St. Germain, poets Scott Cairns and Daniel Tobin, musicians Linford Detweiler and Karin Berquist of Over the Rhine, fiction writer Moira Crone, calligrapher Timothy Botts, ceramics artist Ginger Geyer, and spiritual writer Ann McCutchan. A seminar class, “Peoples of the Book,” will be led by Rodger Kamenetz. Afternoons and evenings at the Glen feature faculty readings, lectures, and presentations. Guest speakers Jamal Rahman, George Dardess, Rodger Kamenetz, and Scott Cairns will explore the relationships among the three Abrahamic traditions and the role art and story play in each during selected evening sessions. Each evening concludes with an ecumenical worship service that incorporates the arts. This year’s musician-in-residence, Pierce Pettis, will be giving a concert as well as playing during worship throughout the week. Free time offers participants opportunities for writing, conversation, hiking, and exploring the stunning scenery and cultural treasures in and around Santa Fe. Surrounded by the stark, dramatic beauty of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Glen is hosted at St. John’s College campus and is within easy reach of the rich cultural, artistic, and spiritual traditions of northern New Mexico. Please note that class sizes are limited: don’t wait too long to register!
To register for the Glen Workshop, or to find out more information, click here.
A brochure will be printed and mailed in early February. If you are on the Image subscriber list, you’ll automatically receive a brochure. If you’d like to have one mailed to you, send us an e-mail by clicking here.
 Artist of the Month: Martha Serpas
In her new book of poems about her native Cajun Louisiana, Martha Serpas describes a landscape and a culture both made and destroyed by water, a sliver of endlessly fertile, endlessly eroding earth. Her swamp is a borderland, a threshold between land and sea, always a breath or two from being dissolved. From within that moil, Serpas’s intelligence expresses itself in serene, effortless energy. In witty, precise language, she offers a picture of the south that avoids both sentimentality and ostentatious weirdness. Her imagination is rich and fluid, vivid and severe, and like the Celtic thin places, dense with the voices of the other side. The bayou muck, with its perilous, prolific life, is the perfect field for Serpas’s gift. Underpinning her meditations on place is a continual wrestling with the faith of her family and childhood—a faith that, fortunately for us, she makes all her own. There’s something peculiarly vivid about belief that grows in a garden where both life and death are so abundantly present. Harold Bloom writes: “She is something magnificently new in American poetry, a Cajun visionary who fuses the legacy of [Elizabeth] Bishop and [May] Swenson with her own rebel and poignant Catholicism.”
Visit the Artist of the Month page here.
 Two or Three Guitars: Selected Poems by John Terpstra
Although John Terpstra is an established poet, readers may be more familiar with his nonfiction— Falling into Place and The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electricians’s Daughter, which were both excerpted in Image (#35 and #47). Terpstra’s new book, Two or Three Guitars, brings together poetry from his seven previous collections: from 1982’s Scrabbling for Repose through to 2003’s Disarmament, which earned a nomination for Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award. Two or Three Guitars demonstrates that John Terpstra’s narrative strength has dominated his poetry right from the beginning. Most of his poems are two, three, or four pages long—some even longer—and possess a narrative fluency that makes his transition to creative nonfiction not such a leap after all. Each of his books has its own flavor. His second, for example, often addresses the immigrant experience: “It may as well have been for forty days / and nights that we were on the long Atlantic,” he says, launching into a tale that regularly dips into the story of the flood for imagery. His third book, Naked Trees, is his most lyrical. Its insights on the nature of trees come from observing nature and people, and from his work as a cabinetmaker. The book also includes the entire long poem “Captain Kintail,” which won the 1991 CBC Literary Competition. It tells of a rainy retreat weekend at a Lake Huron camp, drawing us into his experience of community through similar weekends of our own. Terpstra has a way of taking seemingly disconnected pieces, and bringing them together into an organic whole. In “Flames of Affection, Tongues of Flame” he’s climbing a wooden stairway up the Niagara Escarpment, where he lives in Hamilton, Ontario. He imagines himself traveling through geological time; from the top he watches the city lights coming on and flickering, “like lively little tongues of lovers / in the flame of affection, / and I thought, / this is like Pentecost, kind of.” His thoughts are then drawn to mundane conversation—“climbing / the endless staircase of our wooden / chit chat,” the distance between “us” and the vastness of time. Two or Three Guitars is an ideal introduction to John Terpstra’s poetry; it coaxes readers into the flow of his language, his story-telling, his humor, his incredible leaps.
Click here to buy Two or Three Guitars.
 In the Town of David
We know it's after Christmas but we could not resist getting this item out to you right now: it's that good. Recorded on October 23-24, 2006, In the Town of David possesses all the characteristics of a well-worn Christmas favorite: warmth, a sense of the holy, and an embodiment of tradition. Featuring Ben Keyes (banjo, guitar, mandolin, piano, vocals), Peter La Grand (banjo, guitar, vocals), and Jill Zimmerman (violin, vocals), the CD is an intimate, nearly hour-long session of songs for—though not limited to—the Christmas season. With consummate skill, Keyes, La Grand, and Zimmerman take turns on lead vocals, pass their instruments around, and create harmonies with a simple beauty one might expect of a fireside performance. Moving through such well-known classics as What Child is This? and Silent Night, the trio also introduces songs of lesser renown, such as A Cradle Hymn, Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming, and Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence. Musically, the album is recorded in a refreshingly stripped-down manner. A similar approach is evidenced in the lyrics, from the announcement of Christ’s birth, “Awake, awake, O Zion / Tonight, tonight, your savior is born” (Zion) to the words of Simeon: “Now You can dismiss Your servant in peace. / As You have promised, so You have done” (Simeon’s Song). One of the album’s greatest strengths is the timelessness of its lyrics and music; split evenly between original material and traditionals, the listener often needs the liner notes to tell the difference. In knowing the roots of their art—the tradition of sturdy songs built on the lineage of folk, Americana, and blues—the trio has created an album bearing an historical patina. This sense of timelessness, then, has about it something that connects present and past, thus enabling a future trajectory. One imagines a listener in 1930 would have enjoyed the songs as much as one in 2007. And one hopes listeners in years to come will feel the same. The album was produced by La Grand, mastered by Dwayne Harder, and recorded/mixed by Colin Stewart at The Hive in Vancouver, B.C. All songs are arranged by Keyes, La Grand, and Zimmerman. The CD is available by e-mailing peter@peterlagrand.com.
More information and audio samples are available here.
IAM Conference: “Redemptive Culture:
Creating the World that Ought to Be”
This February 22-24th, artists and creative professionals from around the world will gather at Manhattan’s Tribeca Performing Arts Center for the 2007 Annual International Arts Movement (IAM) Conference: “Redemptive Culture: Creating the World that Ought to Be.” This conference features a wonderfully eclectic mix of artistic disciplines. Presenters and attendees will explore ways in which art can both engage and transform the world. In addition to lectures and workshops, the conference will feature portfolio salons and even medieval mystery plays. The keynote speaker will be Jeremy Begbie of University of Cambridge, founder and director of the international research project, “Theology Through the Arts,” and author of Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts. Famed local New Yorker, Daniel Libeskind, master designer of Ground Zero and the first Cultural Ambassador for Architecture appointed by the U.S. Department of State will also present. Dick Staub, broadcaster, writer, and public speaker will moderate the conference. Also see Rob Mathes in concert, Susie Ibarra, and various other distinguished presenters and performing artists. IAM is a non-profit arts organization that fosters dialogue for cultural and spiritual renewal.
To register for the conference or learn more about IAM, click here.
Deadlines, Deadlines, Deadlines: MFA, Shaw & Milton Center Fellowships
Tis the season to be...filling out applications! Image has three wonderful programs for the literarily and artistically inclined, for the young—and the not-quite-as-young. A summer fellowship, a world-class MFA program, and a yearlong postgraduate writing fellowship. If none of these are right for you, pass the word along to anyone you know who might be interested!
The Luci Shaw Summer Fellowship Deadline: February 1
The purpose of the Luci Shaw Fellowship is to expose a promising undergraduate or graduate student to the world of literary publishing and the nonprofit arts organization, and to introduce fellows to the contemporary dialogue about art and faith that surrounds Image, its programs, its contributors, and its peer organizations.
Read more about the Fellowship and download the application here.
The Seattle Pacific University MFA in Creative Writing Deadline: February 15
Now in its second year, the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Seattle Pacific University is thriving under the direction of Image editor Greg Wolfe and the distinguished writers who make up the program faculty. The MFA at SPU is a creative writing program for apprentice writers—both Christians and those of other traditions—who not only want to pursue excellence in the craft of writing but also place their work within the larger context of the Judeo-Christian tradition of faith. Students work with faculty mentors during the year by exchanging manuscripts and critiques—and all come together for two intensive ten-day residencies each year, one alongside Image’s Glen Workshop and one on Whidbey Island, north of Seattle. This summer we will graduate our first cohort and admit a new batch of MFA students selected from a competitive pool of applications. The deadline to apply for summer 2007 admission is February 15.
Click here for a link to the online application.
The Milton Center Postgraduate Fellowship Deadline: March 15
The Milton Center postgraduate fellowship brings emerging writers of Christian commitment to Image, where their primary goal is to complete their first book-length manuscript in fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. During their time at the Center, fellows will have a rich experience of literary and spiritual community; they will interact with the editorial staff of Image and the English department at Seattle Pacific University, participate in the Friday writer's workshop, and enjoy the lively literary scene in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
For more information and to download an application, click here.
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Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai
