Former Milton Center Fellow Wins Edgar Award
Naomi Hirahara wrote Summer of the Big Bachi, her first novel in the Mas Arai mystery series, while participating in the Milton Center program as its 1996 fellow in creative writing. Her third book in the series, Snakeskin Shamisen, has just been awarded the Mystery Writers of America’s 2007 Edgar Allan Poe Award in the category of Best Paperback Original. In Snakeskin Shamisen, Hirahara’s Mas Arai, a Japanese-American gardener and atomic-bomb survivor, once again delves into criminal detection and the painful past of the Okinawan-American community in Southern California when a friend turns up dead. Publishers Weekly has this to say: "Highly enjoyable....Hirahara's sharp ear for dialogue and keen sense of place mark this as a superior read, but it's her intimate view of the Japanese-American community and her wry portrait of the endearing Mas, with his fondness for gambling and Spam, that really make this series stand out.” Hirahara, a former editor of The Rafu Shimpo newspaper, has produced more than six nonfiction books on the Asian-American experience. Her middle school book, 1001 Cranes, will be published by Random House’s Delacorte in the summer of 2008. Congratulations Naomi!  

For more information on Hirahara or her books, visit her website.

Announcing the 2007-8 Milton Center Fellow: Jessie van Eerden
The Milton Center @ Image is pleased to award its 2007-8 postgraduate fellowship in writing to Jessie van Eerden of West Virginia. We nearly hyperventilated at the quality of the applications we received this year, and are delighted to get our top pick. Van Eerden has been teaching and writing since she left her home state with a degree in English from West Virginia University. She spent two years in Washington D.C. living in intentional community with Mennonite Voluntary Service and working at Academy of Hope, an adult literacy center. She then lived in Philadelphia where she continued teaching adult literacy and GED prep courses until she started graduate school. Van Eerden holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa, where she also taught literature to college freshmen and sophomores. Her essays have appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing 2006, Geez Magazine, Portland, Bellingham Review, North Dakota Quarterly and Riverteeth. She and her husband Mike, who holds an MA in church history from Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, have spiritual roots in a tiny worshipping fellowship of Mennonite affiliation in Indiana, a group that sometimes practices Lectio Divina, sometimes sings from the Taize hymnbook, and always eats soup and bread together. We look forward to welcoming them to Seattle in the fall, where she'll work to complete her first short story collection.

For more information on the Milton Center and its postgraduate fellowship, click here.

How to Paint the Savior Dead by Jason Gray
In his fine second chapbook, How to Paint the Savior Dead, Jason Gray meditates on how art (both the great and not-so-great) works to knit together the beautiful and ordinary in us. These poems often begin with the viewer standing before a painting or relic, exposed and listening. It’s in that patient attention that the painted figure or anonymous Pietá stirs the imagination, reviving the ancient contentions of light and dark, ecstasy and pain. The sounds of St Cecelia’s organ lift off the canvas into “A sweetness suckling at your ear,” a call to ignore “what is heavenly for what is Heaven.” Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, “The slide from dark to light,” is an emblem of Christ’s pity for the criminals—us—who struggle to emerge into the sun. Even mediocrity has its own humble power. Nude statuary, covered up for decency’s sake at the local lawn ornament emporium, suggests a greater possibility. The sculptor who knows he cannot “exhume the same ferocity” from his medium as the Masters, nevertheless “hacked / Away at marble with all his might and stood / There weeping at its all too common beauty.” Gray articulates the moments that reach across a medium to shake us out of ourselves, toward something more glorious: the world as a bright and dark photograph, waiting to be exposed, “waiting for the light to burn / All the images / Of what it will be like henceforth, / And what it used to be.”

How to Paint the Savior Dead is the winner of the 2006 Wick Chapbook Award. One of the poems, “My Daughter as the Angel Gabriel in the Tableau Vivant of Van Grap's Anunciation,” was published in Image #45.

Click here to order a copy of How to Paint the Savior Dead.

The Roman Catholic Church: An Illustrated History by Edward Norman
Just out from University of California Press, The Roman Catholic Church is an illustrated short history of the Church “in human society.” It is not, in other words, a comprehensive history of the Roman Catholic Church, but an exploration of the many ways in which, historically, the Church has engaged, influenced, and tangled with the rest of the world. From Christianity’s first foundations in Rome, to the Reformation and Counter Reformation, to the development of modern missions and schools, this book guides readers through a multifaceted yet concise history of the Church. The germane illustrations—black and white photographs and color reproductions of religious art—do as much as the text itself to explore the growth and development of the Church over time. In fact, The Roman Catholic Church is so handsomely reproduced that it has all the visual appeal of a coffee table book. But the thorough and informative text, written by ecclesiastical historian Edward Norman, is sure to earn it a more substantive status. And yet, it doesn’t read like a textbook. It is engaging—even, at times provocative (as in its more-forgiving-than-usual take on the crusades and the Inquisition). But Norman manages, in the end, to provide a fairly well-balanced account, emphasizing the truly catholic nature of Roman Catholicism—it is a religion that lends itself to particular cultures and varying forms of popular devotion, but remains universal. Likewise, the picture of the Church that emerges from this account is of a dynamic institution, rooted in the material world and “always scooping up earthly ingredients,” yet perpetually grounded in tradition.

To purchase The Roman Catholic Church: An Illustrated History click here.

Image on Facebook
Committed as we are at Image to the notion that art and literature printed on paper can change the world, we’ve been slow to jump on internet trends. Image podcasting remains an elusive dream, for example. So imagine our shock and pleasure when we discovered that we have a page on Facebook, haunt of the under-thirty set—and especially the under-twenty subset. Most of the thanks goes to Artur Rosman, one of last summer’s Luci Shaw Fellows and intrepid cybernaut. (Actually, we’ve since learned that what Image has is a “group.” Only people have pages.) Editor Greg Wolfe has joined and now has a page of his own—though he’s been accused of doing this solely to spy on his children. Facebook is a fascinating universe. What have we learned there? We found out what a lot of our former interns are up to. And we found out that people love Image, even in the ether. So far we have almost a hundred friends, including John Henry Cardinal Newman, two cats, and many, many writers. What is Image’s Facebook group for? We’re not sure. But if it spreads the gospel of Image to the whippersnappers, can it be bad? If you are a Facebooker, we hope you’ll join our group. Or if you have kids, and you want to join Facebook in order to spy on them, we hope you will join our group, too, to give your page verisimilitude. And who knows, maybe if your kids do find your page, they will click on the link to Image, and find the magazine, and will experience the power of earthly beauty to make our souls more receptive to divine beauty. That is our hope for you and yours. So here it is: We invite you to be our friend. Please, join us. Let’s see what happens.

To visit us, go to www.facebook.com. If you don’t have an account, you need to create one to log in. Then search for “Image Journal” to find our group.

If you have information other ImageUpdate readers might find interesting, share it here! Do you have a question that you hope a member of the ImageUpdate community might have the answer to? Ask it here. Have your messages posted by sending an email to gwolfe@spu.edu.

Rock & Sling Poetry Contest
Rock & Sling: A Journal of Literature, Art and Faith is pleased to announce its annual Virginia Brendemuehl Poetry Prize for an unpublished poem, any style, 60 lines maximum. The winner will receive $1,000.00 plus publication, and finalists will also be published. To enter, send 1-3 poems, a $10.00 entry fee, payable to Rock & Sling, and a stamped, self-addressed envelope (SASE) for notification. Submissions should be addressed to The Virginia Brendemuehl Prize, Rock & Sling, P.O. Box 30865, Spokane, WA  99223. The contest deadline is July 31, 2007 with notification by early September. No simultaneous submissions, please. We look forward to reading your work!

The Ascending Voice Symposium
Hosted by Pepperdine University June 4-7, The Ascending Voice symposium will be a festival of scholarly lectures, workshops, and musical performances, which will bring together believers from a variety of Christian communions. The goal will be to foster a greater understanding of the theological, historical, and musical richness of various a cappella traditions—Eastern and Western, ancient and contemporary, popular and classical. The symposium will demonstrate, through scholarly reflection and musical demonstration, the extraordinary power of this religious expression and its continued relevance to our times. Distinguished guests include the widely-hailed Frederica Mathewes-Green, a prolific Christian intellectual, Alice Parker who arranged music with the late, famed spiritual composer Robert Shaw, and Robert Page a chaired professor of music at Carnegie Mellon and one of America’s most revered choral conductors. To register or find out more, go to the main website. To view the schedule, click here.

Call for Submissions: Body of Christ Exhibit
The Washington Theological Consortium is sending out a call for submissions. Its sponsored exhibit “Body of Christ,” running from late October through mid-December, 2007, is intended to foster experiences and conversations that will deepen our liturgical and devotional life, and perhaps even help us to bridge denominational divides. The contest is open to any artist 18 years or over residing in North America. Works in painting, printmaking, sculpture, and other media will be considered; entries should be received by July 30, 2007. For more information and the entry form, contact Deborah Sokolove, Curator, Dadian Gallery, 4500 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20016, 202-885-8674. Or email dsokolove@wesleyseminary.edu.

Schloss Mittersill Summer Arts Conference
This year, the Schloss Mittersill Arts Conference celebrates its 10th anniversary. The conference, held at a castle in Austria, has for its theme this year “A Thin Space: Conditions for Creativity,” referencing both the experience of creating out of a place of want (the painter whose family never acknowledged her gift, the violinist who plays a cheap instrument, the dancer with physical injuries, or the poet who lacks formal education), and the distance between the visible world and the invisible, between our earthly sphere and God's. Conference-goers will examine themselves and the consequences of living within these spaces—how working under adverse or '”thin” conditions is often the context from which the most powerful art emerges, or how at certain times the veil of separation between our reality and God’s has been thin enough that pilgrims, saints and artists have glanced through the veil and reported amazing discoveries. The conference will feature its standard mix of plenary talks, workshops, concerts and performances—Murray Watts is the featured speaker—with a few added surprises. If you have registration or travel questions, please contact Schloss Mittersill at info@schlossmittersill.org. For questions regarding the program, contact Steven Purcell at sd_Purcell@hotmail.com. And for more details, workshop information, and directions, please visit the Arts Conference page.

Erica Grimm-Vance’s series of 5' x 5' panels, incorporating such varied media as texts, gold, ECG readings, maps, and wax, will be at Bellevue Gallery in Vancouver, Canada through May 26.

The S-Word. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels presents The S-Word: The State of ‘Spirituality’ In Contemporary Art through August 24. For more information on the exhibition, contact info@olacathedral.org or (213) 680-5200, or visit www.olacathedral.org.

Christians in Theatre Arts Networking Conference takes place June 13-16, 2007 at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Join us for an extraordinary conference focused on excellence and aesthetics. Register at http://www.cita.org/chicago/Default.htm. Call 877.277.CITA or email admin@cita.org for more info.

Reading with Milton Center Fellow Jessica Murphy
May 23, 2007 at 7:30 p.m.
On Wednesday May 23 in the Library Seminar Room at Seattle Pacific University, the 2006-2007 Milton Fellow Jessica Murphy will give a debut reading from her novel-in-progress about a young woman forging her way in turn-of-the-century Boston. Jessica has spent the academic year in residence at the Milton Center at Image and Seattle Pacific University working on her first book-length manuscript and teaching creative writing classes. The Milton Center, based at Image journal, exists to nurture writers of Christian commitment and literary excellence. In addition to the fellowship, the Center also sponsors a weekly writer’s workshop. Jessica Murphy holds an MFA in fiction from Emerson College. Her fiction has been published in Memorious, her nonfiction has appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine and The New York Sun, and she regularly interviews authors for The Atlantic Online.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, call (206) 281-2988.

For directions to Seattle Pacific University, click here. For a map of Seattle Pacific University's campus, click here.

Glen Spaces Going Fast!
If you’ve been thinking about attending the Glen Workshop this summer, now is a good time to sign up. Spaces have been going quickly, so we recommend contacting us soon to guarantee you get your first choice. As of today, the Fiction Workshop with Moira Crone, Drawing from Life with Barry Moser, both Poetry classes, Mosaic, and Spiritual Writing with Ann McCutchan are full—however, we’ve opened up free waitlists for both classes, and there’s always a chance that a spot will open up. Give us a call at the number below or send us an e-mail with “waitlist” in the subject line. Include your name, address, phone number, and the course option you'd like to be waitlisted for. There are still slots open in Songwriting, Calligraphy, Playwriting, and the Seminar: Peoples of the Book. With Pierce Pettis as the musician-in-residence, and special appearances by the likes of Over the Rhine and Sandra Scofield, this is one Glen not to be missed!

To register, check online to see which classes are filled. Then, go here to register or call us at 206.281.2988.