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Image is pleased to announce the winner of our 2008 Denise Levertov Award, Thomas Lynch, whose comic, touching, and profound poems and nonfiction draw on the deep springs of his boyhood faith, as well as on a lifelong engagement with great literature. The Levertov Award is presented annually in the spring to an artist or creative writer whose work exemplifies a serious and sustained engagement with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Thomas Lynch meets everyone in his home town of Milford, Michigan—at least once. That's because he's the town's undertaker. In his 1997 book, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, which won an American Book Award and was a finalist for a National Book Award, Lynch did much more, however, than merely provide titillating insights into the funeral home business (though he did provide a few). What this collection of linked essays revealed was a graceful and gifted writer, a master of the "familiar essay" in the tradition on Montaigne. Lynch, who is also a fine poet (but we know how well books of poetry sell), writes well about the spiritual and moral aspects of the ways we come to terms with death. He writes with hilarious, if painful, insight into the trivialization and avoidance of death in our culture. He also conveys the spirituality of poetry, the poetry of the Irish Catholic tradition he inherited, and much, much more. His latest book, Booking Passage, is another series of linked, lyrical meditations on his relationship to his ancestral home in Ireland. For Lynch, the faith of his altar boy youth has come to mean more and more to him; but in good Irish fashion, he can criticize priests and popes as well as revere them. Here is a writer who truly sees the transcendent in ordinary, human things. Past recipients of the Levertov Awward include poets Madeline DeFrees and Franz Wright, nonfiction writer Kathleen Norris, and fiction writer Bret Lott. The Denise Levertov Award is named for one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. Levertov, who spent her last years in Seattle, embraced the landscape and culture of the Pacific Northwest. Her identity as a Christian believer—a pilgrim whose faith was inextricably entwined with doubt—became another important facet of her work, particularly in her later poetry.

Lynch will read and lecture on April 22 in Seattle. The event is free and open to the public. Click here for details.

We’re thrilled to announce Madeleine Morgan Fentress as our Luci Shaw Fellow for summer of 2008. A native of Saint Louis, Missouri, Madeleine is studying English and art at Vanderbilt University. On campus, she is involved with Vanderbilt Catholic Community and is a writer, artist, and editor for a monthly campus magazine of political and social commentary. She also works with a new student-led program that facilitates creative writing workshops in public high schools around Nashville, culminating in a literary magazine of students’ work. Her interests include painting, bookmaking, and the Nashville music scene. Beginning in June, Madeleine will work alongside us in our Seattle office, where we’ll introduce her to the arcane mysteries of running a literary magazine and Image’s other programs. In July, she’ll join us in Santa Fe for the Glen Workshop, where she’ll take Barry Moser’s life drawing class, drive around in a golf cart, and be our gopher. Madeleine, we’re looking forward to having you aboard. Founded in 2005, the Shaw Fellowship is named for Image’s longtime friend and patron, poet Luci Shaw. It exists to introduce bright, talented undergrads like Madeleine to the world of literary publishing and arts events. Applications are due each February 1 for the following summer’s fellowship.

Click here for more on the fellowship.

Called a “powerhouse vocalist” by Paste magazine, Seattle-based singer/songwriter Rosie Thomas is serious about her friends and music—serious about humor, too. In fact, she moonlights as a standup comic under the name of Sheila Saputo. A sense of humor and close friendships have also accompanied her success as a musician. Soon after hearing her backing vocals on Damien Jurado’s Ghost of David, Sub Pop Records signed Thomas to a contract. In 2001, her debut album, When We Were Small, was released to critical and popular acclaim. Two albums followed, Only Laughter Can You Win (2003) and If Songs Could Be Held (2005), an album that moved beyond the personal to include a cast of characters dealing with Thomas’ familiar themes of friendship, introspection, and love. These subjects are carried forward on her latest album, These Friends of Mine. “Whether you are a musician, painter, or whatever,” she says, “there is a passion that sometimes gets lost because all of the sudden you have to clock-in or have deadlines. I sort of wanted to get back to that time when I played music for nothing.” The album was recorded casually over a two-year period in the living room of a Brooklyn apartment shared with fellow musicians and friends, Sufjan Stevens and Denison Witmer. Such a relaxed atmosphere is evidenced in the album’s stripped-down instrumentation and the banter between tracks. Singing beautiful harmony with Witmer on his own song, Thomas’s version of “Paper Doll” focuses on the album’s central themes of love and identity: “Flat and thin / Speechless within / You dress me up different ways / And I just can't be sure I'll ever change.” The album continues—with pensive tracks like “The Kite Song”—as an extended meditation on the free-floating states created by love gone awry. As such, the album fittingly concludes with “These Friends of Mine,” a song about what has always seemed to anchor Thomas to the earth—friendship. “And when the show is over,” Thomas sings, “I hope that they remember / This bond we have together / And how they love to sing.” As the song finishes, Thomas admits, “Maybe I needed this time / To be reminded for myself / How I love to sing.” Having toured with the likes of Iron & Wine and The Shins, Thomas will play solo shows throughout late March. Beginning in April, she will tour Europe with the "Sit Down and Sing Tour,” featuring Nicolai Dunger and Josh Ottum.

For more information: www.rosiethomas.com.

In Geoff Wyss’s debut novel, eight American ophthalmologists travel to India to perform cataract surgeries and teach local doctors in neighborhoods on the edges of Bombay. Congenital cataracts, we learn, are responsible for 8.4 million cases of blindness in India at the time of the story, or half the cases of cataract blindness worldwide. The condition can be corrected with a relatively simple surgery, if you are a person with access to good healthcare and if you know that the surgery exists—and thus the problem. This description might lead you to expect a morally earnest, slightly preachy but irreproachable novel about the consequences of social injustice and global poverty, the kind of novel Paul Farmer would write if he had time. (Farmer is the international health activist who was the subject of Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains.) What you get is something more like, as one of Wyss’s characters might put it, M*A*S*H meets The Canterbury Tales. Our pilgrims (there are five men and three women) are motivated by a mixed curry of factors: generosity and selfishness, love and lust, vanity and yearning, compassion and tax write-offs. Ensconced at the grand and sterile Taj Mahal Hotel between workdays at local clinics, they hang out at the bar, use the weight room, go to restaurants, argue, ogle, form cliques, and at all times crack wise. Moral at their core—they have traveled half way around the globe to give medical care to the poorest of the poor—they are skittish about their own goodness, unable to trust their own motives. Whereas Paul Farmer seems to deal with his unease by working even harder, these characters deal with it by joking. They are oppressed by a weary postmodern malaise, and their lazy gallows humor swipes in all directions. Unlike Hawkeye Pierce, who has specific military incompetences and the Korean War in general on which to focus his mordant wit, in Bombay these docs are confronted with an evil that seems somehow larger and more chaotic, more fully overwhelming, less directly attributable to human causes. But the novel does not get bogged down by the moral seriousness of this human misery to the point that it stops being a novel. It paints the social strata of the city, from film stars to pizza delivery boys, with Dickensian turns of comedy and pathos, and explores the themes of sight and blindness physiologically, geopolitically, and spiritually, its insight into human action and relationships touching and profound. Though not explicitly a religious book, the novel grapples with one of the ancient problems faith presents: how to do good in a world so thoroughly occupied by evil, where evil is so palpable and pervasive that it even takes root in us alongside our generous intentions. At the heart of the energetic book is Wyss’s prose style. There are some writers who, if they want to, can make even medical statistics sing, and Wyss is one. His story “Kids Make Their Own Houses” appeared in Image issue #46 and was later selected for the 2006 New Stories from the South. A new story will appear in Image soon.

Click here to buy.

Published in 2007 by Paraclete Press, Astonishments is the first English translation of the writings of the Polish poet Anna Kamienska. Having grown up during the Nazi occupation of Poland, Kamienska wrote prolifically, publishing notebooks, biblical commentaries, and twenty volumes of poetry. She often wrote in the wake of great pain, both her own and others’, investigating the meaning of loss with a Job-like persistence. The people who are missing in her life—her dead mother and grandmother and husband—wrestle their way into her poems, and even where they are not present, their lack is palpable. Absence, as she says in one of her notebooks (excerpted in Astonishments), “is a form of being too.” This is true for her faith, as well, which has doubt as its constant companion. In “Emmaus” Kamienska writes “We never come to know / completely / never for sure… The heart burned / but it grew chilly,” and the One who once appeared is now elusive as a distant memory: “There is just bread / hands and a gesture.” And yet, “arms heavy / with amazement,” the disciples are bound to “carry to the others / the certainty of doubt.” For Kamienska doubt is not easily teased from faith, and vice versa: “Even when I don’t believe / there is a place in me / inaccessible to unbelief / a patch of wild grace,” she writes in “Lack of Faith.” Another paradox that moves through her poems is that of suffering as a condition for hope, as in “Through the Body,” where she writes that the way to God is through weakness and pain. “You come through bodies not through sunsets / and the hard strong hand of blood and flesh / holds in the palm like a sparrow / the muscle of the human heart.” Her sense of hope is grounded not in certainty but in spontaneous and wild gratitude for the small things of this world: “a trampled daisy,” a “splash of light on a path, “quivering carrot leaves,” a series of what might be called small astonishments, which inevitably grow into gratitude.

Click here to buy the book.

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Are you a writer in need of a scholarship to make it possible for you to attend the 2008 Glen Workshop? In addition to the partial scholarships offered by Image, Writers’ Conferences & Centers is conducting its annual competition to provide scholarships for emerging writers who wish to attend a writers’ conference. Two winners will receive $500 each, which can be put towards the workshop of their choice. Please inquire, and send writing manuscripts directly to, the WC&C Scholarship Competition, Association of Writers & Writing Programs, MS1E3, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030 postmarked before or on March 30, 2008. Winners will be notified by May 15th.

For information about the guidelines click here. (WC&C currently lists the Glen under Type/Conferences)

Every year we’re staggered by the generosity of donors who help give a leg-up to Glen Workshop participants. This year, we have more scholarships to offer writers and artists than ever, thanks to CIVA, The Master’s Artist, friends of Don Murdock, singer-songwriter Kate Campbell, The Paul and Eileen Mariani Fellowship for Poets, and City in Focus of Vancouver B.C. Special Note: You do not need to send a $100 deposit to apply for a scholarship. You may apply to any class, even if it's closed for registration (see the course descriptions page). We’ve reserved a limited number of spaces in each class and some housing for scholarship winners, and will do our best to give recipients their first choices. However, If you wish to guarantee a spot in a workshop, even if you do not win a scholarship, you must register for an available workshop and pay the $100 deposit.

The final deadline for applications is April 1, and all applicants will be notified by April 15. For more details, go to the Glen Scholarships page. See you in Santa Fe!

To register for the Glen Workshop, or to find out more information, click here.

On September 14 -21, 2008, Image will gather a small group of inquirers in Florence, Italy, to explore what has been called “the first Renaissance,” a remarkable moment in the cultural history of the West. Together we will investigate the ways in which three great late-medieval figures—Dante Alighieri, Giotto, and Saint Francis of Assisi—renewed the culture of Europe and left a legacy of Christian Humanism that continues to nourish and inspire. And we will ask how their vision of art and faith can speak to the work of cultural transformation in our time. The seminar includes visits to the great churches and museums of Florence, lectures by some of the world’s leading authorities on the Renaissance, a field trip to Assisi where we will encounter the living spirit of St. Francis, wonderful meals, and time to enjoy each others’ company. If you’re interested, visit the Florence Seminar page, download the Florence Brochure PDF for more info, or contact Julie Mullins here.

If you like reading about great new art and writing inspired by faith in ImageUpdate, and you’re ready to get down to reading and seeing the stuff itself, it’s time to subscribe to Image. Each quarter our editors comb the world of art and letters to bring you our favorite new work—work that respects transcendent mystery as well as the gritty truth of the material world that bears the divine imprint. A one-year subscription gets you four beautifully produced issues delivered right to your door. Ninety percent of the journal’s content is not available on our website, but only through what we call “the sacrament of print.” Click here to get the magazine Terry Tempest Williams calls “evocative and inspiring” and Bret Lott calls “the most meaningful literary journal being produced today.”

Publisher: Gregory Wolfe
Managing Editor: Beth Bevis
Layout: David Rither
Contributors: Beth Bevis, Mary Kenagy, and Matt Malyon

ImageUpdate is the biweekly e-mail newsletter from Image, a quarterly print journal that explores the relationship between Judeo-Christian faith and art through contemporary fiction, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, music, and dance. Each issue also features interviews, memoirs, essays, and reviews.

ImageUpdate brings you news about books, CDs, organizations, websites, conferences, exhibitions, and tours—all of which inhabit the intersection between faith and imagination. ImageUpdate will also notify you whenever a new issue of Image is printed, an Image event is upcoming, or new content is posted to our website.

Copyright © 2007 Center for Religious Humanism. All rights reserved.