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Author Tom Noyes ContentsFeaturesImage Issue 58 Is HereAfter the First World by Christine Casson All That Road Going by A.G. Mojtabai A Jesuit Off-Broadway by James Martin, SJ Spooky Action at a Distance by Tom Noyes Gallery WatchYou Are The Landscape: Paintings by Christen MattixMessage BoardA Month With Margaret AvisonScott Cairns Reading July 29 in Vancouver, B.C. ImageNewsHear Poets Read at ImageJournal.orgThe 2008 Florence Seminar Subscribe to Image in Print |
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FeaturesImage Issue 58 Is Here
The summer issue of Image is in mailboxes now. This issue features the sculpture of Jeffrey Mongrain, whose work is often installed in old churches in a way that gets worshipers to experience the space anew. There’s more sculpture by Jim Zingarelli, whose tragicomic stone heads both satirize and lament the human condition. In his elegantly written essay “The Mass of Virtue,” A.G. Harmon investigates time, narrative, and how we judge the lives of others. We’re proud to include the first-ever published prose of Anne Welch, who reflects on a workplace murder at the hospital where she was an admin and what it says about how we make sense of the world. Singer-songwriter Claire Holley writes about the tension between motherhood and returning to the recording studio, and Jill Noel Kandel writes about her son’s difficulty learning to read and how it led her to writing. There’s also an interview with writer and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams, lyric short fiction by Melanie Rae Thon, poems by Stuart Dybek and Melissa Range, an omnibus review of new poetry, and more. And don’t miss our new web features: Visit ImageJournal.org for bonus materials from the issue: an interview with Holley on motherhood, American music, and the craft of songwriting; plus the full text of Kandel’s essay, along with a note from the editors on why this makes great nonfiction. View issue 58 here. After the First World by Christine Casson
Christine Casson’s debut collection, After the First World, reminds one that it is often the rhythm and music of a poem that hit the ear first, with its meaning flooding after. Opening with a woman standing at an ironing board, her chest swelled like a young robin ready to let loose a flurry of song, “each note freed to settle / in the world along with ordinary sounds,” Casson’s poems lift into moments of startled convergence, making sensual, immediate contact with the world. In “Learning Death,” a lifeless breakfast revolves into a syncopation of scenes that consider the oncoming of age--her father, near the end of his life, crawls from room to room, “hands and knees icy”; her niece with her “brightly stained” underwear, “scrubs them hard / to whiten them” while the girl’s mother, “face flushed, fiftyish / stands near an open window, flaps her skirts.” That drawing together of the disparate--held loosely for a moment, then let go--feels like a restrained act of love. And it is with the lightest of touches that these poems hint at a holy care guiding that restraint. One speaker draws back from plucking the hyacinths in a public garden and giving them to a homeless woman curled along her path, remembering the neck of the boy Apollo loved, snapped by the god’s exuberance. She reconsiders her “useless sympathy,” “the gods’ transformation” still “an open wound.” In another, an elderly woman reaching to clasp a bud is betrayed by her body, tripping and falling to the sidewalk, where she is again Eve in the garden who “forgot vigilance, / that stern voice, and time: the sword / that bars return.” When set against the cruelties of poverty and age, grace often feels unfinished and small. For Casson, it arrives unnamed and unannounced, but felt and attended to nonetheless. It is an evening spent in a garden with a loved one--in the “quieting street” and “murmured speech,” and in a cloud of gnats bustling like the “fuss of a human day,” but becoming, on closer look, “a fluid thrumming cell drawn back to the pattern / of a beat that sways and sings beyond our measure.” Click here for more. All That Road Going by A.G. Mojtabai
“Funny about life stories…how it was only a strand at a time that got teased out and told, never the full weave,” muses the driver of the Greyhound bus that transports an eclectic medley of characters in A.G. Mojtabai’s new novel All That Road Going. Mojtabai skillfully teases out these threads from the passengers and the driver, spinning them into the tale of a bus full of post-modern pilgrims, ordinary people without much direction but with a rich cross-section of backgrounds and experiences. Aboard are two children alone on a thousand-mile trip, several lonely men, a teenage mother who has given up her child for adoption just the day before hopping the bus, and an 85-year-old woman, among others. With an array of perspectives and a never-failing eye for heart-wrenching details, Mojtabai renders the individual pains and wonderings of tight-lipped travelers and a talkative driver, of fierce individualists and those dying for company. Deeply observant and always engaging, Mojtabai’s writing examines the honesty (and occasional dishonesty) of the passengers’ encounters with each other’s humanity and all the messiness contained therein. The title pays homage to On the Road and carries with it the baggage of an American road story, but All That Road Going bypasses the expected in favor of a fragmented, expertly crafted narrative--a story that gathers its characters’ sprawling lives into the narrow confines of a single vehicle, where they must learn to live with the questions, faults, and crises of those in the seats next to them and across the aisle, if only for the duration of an east-bound trip across the United States. Though the novel ends without many answers, one can find a resolution in the mystery of traveling with strangers: “the way they’d started out in a loose semicircle at first, then, as things started to jell... drew together, became, for the moment, one body.” And these--the moments of disparity and unity, portrayed in both gritty reality and lucid-dreamlike states--are what Mojtabai expertly gathers into the novel, making it worth the ride. Click here to buy the book. A Jesuit Off-Broadway by James Martin, SJ
Priests and actors don’t typically run in the same crowd, but in 2004 when actor Sam Rockwell made a phone call to the Jesuit priest James Martin, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Rockwell had recently been cast as Judas in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, an off-Broadway play written by Stephen Adly Guirgis. A self-described “confused, often irate and disconsolate lapsed Catholic,” Guirgis had been troubled by Judas since his Sunday school days. His play, set in modern times, follows the trial of Judas--a controversial and enigmatic (and therefore artistically compelling) figure. Guirgis and Rockwell asked the priest to serve as their theological consultant, and over the course of six months Father Martin became a collaborator with them, the rest of the cast, and director Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the making of the play. These unlikely friendships became the subject of Martin’s new book, A Jesuit Off-Broadway, which is largely devoted to recounting the many conversations they had about theology and “life’s big questions.” And if that sounds wearying or self-absorbed, it somehow manages not to be. Martin writes in a way that is honest, accessible, and thorough, and his book is a loving tribute to the relationships formed over those six months. He also bears witness to the cast’s fascinating artistic process, watching them as they attempt to understand their characters, and the Gospel itself, through art. At one point the cast even takes a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view paintings of Jesus, Judas, and the events of the Gospels. This process of encountering theology through a creative endeavor is what’s really at stake in the book: Martin realizes that after nearly 20 years as a Jesuit he has become overly familiar with the theology he’s explaining to his new friends. “Seeing the Gospel stories through the eyes of people like Sam reminded me of the inherent shock of the story,” he says. The experience, in short, became a way to rediscover the richness of his faith. And the feeling was mutual. In his foreword to the book, playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis writes, “I drown in doubt, and to the degree that that’s true, Father Jim, from our first meeting and right up to today, is slowly teaching me to swim.” Buy the book here. Spooky Action at a Distance by Tom Noyes
Tom Noyes’s nervy, charming stories have appeared several times in the pages of Image (see issues 25 and 44). He writes in graceful, crisp prose, with an instinct for physical gesture and timing and consummate skill at the pinball game of dialogue. His command of craft allows him to unfold characters in a way that moves past mere cleverness and down into the emotional tectonics of faith, affection, loyalty, and grief. The stories in his new collection show us everyday characters weighing the evidence of their circumstances and seeking ways to understand the mysteries that define their lives. The beauty of each story comes from the characters’ reckless hope, and their sometimes blind faith, in the possibilities of human connection. A man who has just lost his father is able for the first time to see his son as a man; a new mother sees her family’s fragility mirrored in the face of a neighbor’s illness; a boy who resists learning to read instinctively knows how to comfort his grandmother; a wife warily supports her husband’s dream to ride a barrel over Niagara Falls. In the title story, a wheelchair-bound man records his reaction to his brother’s suicide, creating a birth story that is a desperate attempt to connect with people he’s never met. The characters (some of whom we already know from Noyes’s earlier collection, Behold Faith) forge bonds with others, realize their own strengths, and work to break out of their self-imposed slavery of doubt and insecurity. The collection’s title comes from Einstein, who used the phrase to describe the mind-bending notions of entanglement and non-locality in quantum physics, specifically regarding the phenomenon by which particles separated by a great distance, particles that cannot even “see” each other, can have an instantaneous effect on each other. Click here for more. Gallery WatchYou Are The Landscape: Paintings by Christen Mattix
Shift Studio is pleased to present You Are The Landscape, an exhibition of work by Christen Mattix. Painting the "I" in the landscape, and the landscape in an eye, Mattix's compositions are an intuitive fusion of human and natural forms. Her spare, expansive paintings serve as breathing space. The mysterious content of the paintings is amplified by ambiguous expanses, suggesting a dream that cannot be fully unraveled. With a light touch and attention to detail, Mattix examines both the harmonies and the contradictions between void and form, fragmentation and wholeness, violence and healing. Mattix received a BFA from Western Washington University and an MFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and her work has been exhibited nationally. She currently teaches drawing and painting at Seattle Pacific University. Shift Studio is located at 306 S. Washington St. #105 in Seattle and is open Friday and Saturday 12-5 p.m. You Are The Landscape will be on display through July 26, 2008. For more information about the exhibit, click here. For more about the artist, click here. Message BoardIf 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 e-mail to gwolfe@spu.edu. A Month With Margaret AvisonPoet Sally Ito has created a blog on the late Canadian Christian poet Margaret Avison. (Avison's poetry was published in Image issue 30 and she was interviewed in issue 45.) The blog, A Month With Margaret Avison, was created as part of Ito’s preparation for moderating a panel about Avison’s work at the League of Canadian Poets Conference held in St. John's, Newfoundland in June. It contains many helpful links on Margaret's poetry, her archive, and her books. The blog can be accessed at monthwithmargaret.blogspot.com. Scott Cairns Reading July 29 in Vancouver, B.C.Poet Scott Cairns will give a reading (with Marilyn McEntyre) in Vancouver, B.C. as part of Regent College’s Summer School 2008. The reading will be held Tuesday, July 29, from 8:00 – 9:30 p.m. in the Regent College Chapel. The event is open to the public and free of charge. Regent College is located at 5800 University Blvd., Vancouver, B.C. V6T 2E4. For further details, click here or call 604.221.3378. ImageNews – The Scoop on Our Programs
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Image Readings: Jeanne Murray Walker 
