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2007 Glen to be Featured on Public Television Program
The Image staff is still recuperating, happily if blearily, from the 2007 Glen Workshop. This year’s Glen hit another record high, with 225 people on campus, including 34 MFA students and faculty (and the first graduating class of the MFA program). Dana Gioia, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, made a surprise guest appearance to kick off the event, calling on the participants to work for excellence in their crafts. The theme—“God of the Desert: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam through the Prism of Art”—evoked intense discussion and, for many, new horizons. One exciting development that took place during the week was the arrival of a crew from the public television program “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.” Drawn by the theme and the success of the Glen, the crew filmed extensively in workshops and plenary sessions over a two-day period. The result will be a segment in an upcoming broadcast of this program. We will announce when it will be broadcast, but you might want to check your local listings to see when it is shown in your area. At a time when politics and celebrity dysfunctionality dominate the airwaves, we’re proud that a national television program sees what we’re doing as newsworthy. Plans for Glen 2008 are already under way.
To learn more about the Glen Workshop, click here.
 Dream Journal by Karen Halvorsen Schreck
Karen Halvorsen Schreck’s novel Dream Journal explores the pain and pleasure of being sixteen and the impossible situation of losing your mother at the same time. It is the summer before Livy’s junior year in high school. Her mother, before she was weakened by cancer, gave Livy a journal and exhorted her to write down her dreams. And so Livy writes her way through the summer, through her mother’s failing health and her father’s detachment, through her growing estrangement from her best friend, through her own reckless decisions and their painful consequences. As she writes, Livy emerges willful, witty, and perceptive. The prose is elegant, even poetic at times, but her voice is believably hers. Of her grieving father, she writes: “when he held up my birthday cake and the candles illuminated his face, he reminded me of a broken angel. His broad shoulders cast shadows like battered wings.” Dream Journal is sensitive and honest, exploring the delicate nuances of teenage relationships—friendships, family relationships, and young romances—without relying on too many clichés. What young readers will appreciate about this book is that, just as in real life, the characters don’t fit into typical molds. They surprise you. Popular, attention-thirsty girls you might write off as carelessly cruel in the first half of the book turn out to be capable of genuine compassion. And Livy’s best friend, Ruth, refuses to proffer the simple happy ending that would befit her as a delinquent pastor’s kid. Finally, Livy has to come to terms with her transition into independence and adulthood, and it’s in her writing that she confronts the idea of her mother’s mortality and explores the possibility of faith.
To purchase the book, click here.
 Mark Olson – The Salvation Blues
Arguably a founder of the alt-country movement, Mark Olson and his band, The Jayhawks, created many of the genre’s first well-known songs. In 1995, after learning that his wife—singer/songwriter Victoria Williams—had multiple sclerosis, Olson quit the band and moved to Joshua Tree, CA. The couple soon formed The Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers, a band that released seven albums filled with homespun harmony. Following a painful divorce in 2005, Olson reunited with friends in Wales and began recording new songs. The result is Olson’s first solo effort, The Salvation Blues, an album on par with—and perhaps surpassing—anything he has done. While exploring the deeper roots of folk, country, and rock, the album possesses many of Olson’s trademarks: lilting harmonies, catchy melodies, and thoughtful lyrics. As one might expect, the dissolution of Olson’s marriage looms large in the album’s lyrics. “Poor Michael’s Boat,” a revision of “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” is suggestive of trouble: “Poor Michael’s boat is taking in water / that won’t surprise some of you.” More directly, “My One Book Philosophy” concludes the album by stating: “I’ve become a hobo in a hobo camp / …My baby’s been crying, my baby’s been crying / … And I don’t have a home no more.” Olson’s album is more than a simple account of grief, however. As one critic notes: “in spite of darker themes, these songs ultimately give rise to deliverance and liberation, and in that context are as much about hope and optimism as they are about pain.” The closing words of the title track summarize: “There’s such joy and sweet moments / To be found in this world / We know they’ll come to an end / Just how makes our hearts hurt / Salvation Blues / And these blues will help us all.” Produced by Ben Vaughan, the album also features Tony Gilkyson (guitar), Greg Leisz (pedal steel, dobro, mandolin), and former Jayhawks collaborator, Gary Louris. Olson will be touring America, Canada, and Europe throughout the remainder of 2007.
Visit Mark Olson online.
 Song of the Drunkards by Brad Davis
Song of the Drunkards is the second book in Brad Davis’s four-part poetry collection, Opening King David, which meditates on the words of the troubled, rapturous psalmist. From one poet to another come words with haunting resonance in the 21st century, with new entrances into suffering, joy, and the desire to be swept away yet remain in the thick of the battered, beautiful world. Davis’s modern-day search for wisdom is a lesson in choosing perspectives. Nature can either be “the fractal hem of God’s outer garment,” or a bleakness clouded by “the heart / bearing only so much heaviness before it hardens.” Lacking a Jerusalem, the “city of our God” becomes the decentralized loveliness of trees and light “peeking over a Kmart façade / and slanting over parking lot puddles.” Davis embraces the revelatory in the midst of the horrific and humdrum. The nightly news “is my story, the thriller I’m in / – sad and wonderful. Sad and wonderful.” Death is a prophecy, exposing the “ancient rumor” that there is “comfort in safety.” It is also a crucible for close friends suffering through cancer treatment who learn to “deny themselves no good thing, not even praise.” Davis wonders at how loss cuts through the security of daily activity, “calling attention / to local beauty / and how, without ceasing / it speaks of that ethereal / elsewhere.” To find it, we are told by a man who has lost his wife, we must simply “Listen. / Listen.” These are poems to attune our ears.
Brad Davis’s poems have been featured in Image issues 23 and 44.
To buy a copy of Song of the Drunkards, click here.
 Doug Adams: RIP
It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Doug Adams, a professor of Christianity and the arts at Pacific School of Religion for thirty one years, and a contributor to Image. He did much to help forge the deepening links between religion and the arts over the past several decades. For one thing, Doug played an important role in the founding of Image. In the late 1980s, he and the Dillenbergers, John and Jane, had established an excellent arts and theology program at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Thanks to the support of these three individuals, Image held its first national conference, “Learning to Believe Again,” in Berkeley in 1992. Doug wrote an important early essay in Image #2 entitled “The Body, Relationships and Transcendence” that covered the work of visual artists Stephen De Staebler, Jasper Johns, and George Segal. That material would eventually make its way into Doug’s book Transcendence with the Body in Art. Passionate as he was for the visual arts, Doug was equally enthusiastic about dance, penning a book on the subject, Dance as Religious Studies, and supporting the Sacred Dance Guild in a number of ways. His wry sense of humor was evident to all who knew him, but also found its way into book form with his The Prostitute in the Family Tree: Discovering Humor and Irony in the Bible. In 1987 he founded the Center for the Arts, Religion, and Education (CARE) at Graduate Theological Union, which has grown to offer 30 courses on art and religion every year, serving over 400 GTU students. A lover of wine, Doug often made quiet donations to various dinners and occasions from his extensive cellar. Cheerful, outgoing, generous, and intellectually focused, Doug Adams helped bring art into worship and theology—and vice versa. He will be deeply missed.
To read an article with an overview of Doug Adams’s career, click here.
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