The Reason for Crows by Diane Glancy

Issue #170 | May 20, 2009

Features
Image Acquires ArtsandFaith.com
The Trinity Arts Conference: The Gift of the Unknown
Blind Rain by Bruce Bond
Pilgrim’s Progress: A Retelling
The Reason for Crows by Diane Glancy

Gallery Watch
Makoto Fujimura: Olana

Message Board
Ruminate Poetry Prize
See Rock City at Seattle Pacific Backstage Theatre
Eighth Annual His Gifts and Presence New England Arts Festival

ImageNews
Testimonies and Un-Testimonies: Rewriting Your Spiritual Story
Image Readings: Gina Ochsner
The 2009 Florence Seminar
Subscribe to Image in Print

Features

Image Acquires ArtsandFaith.com

We are delighted to announce that Image has acquired one of the liveliest and more comprehensive message boards on the web. Its name indicates just how closely it is aligned with Image’s own mission: ArtsandFaith.com. A&F has been around for a number of years and is particularly strong in the areas of film and music—which makes for an excellent complement to Image’s strengths in literature and visual art. For example, A&F’s Film forum contains over 5,000 posts with nearly 80,000 replies! The range of discussions is wide, from responses to recently released films, CDs, and books to conversations about issues like the shrinking of print criticism in magazines and newspapers. Current hot topics include Angels and Demons and Rachel Getting Married in film, mewithoutYou and “New Stuff Worth Hearing” in Music, and Columbine and the late David Foster Wallace in Literature and Creative Writing. A&F is also a great place to learn more about what’s out there and what’s soon to be released. For you writers out there, the section “Work in Progress” is a terrific place to share your work and get critiques from fellow writers. And there’s an announcement section where you can post information about your upcoming conferences, exhibitions, concerts, and more. We’re hoping that you will not only come on over to ArtsandFaith.com but register and post there, too. Don’t just be a lurker: dive on in and join the fun! Our existing Image Forum will be integrated into the A&F board shortly.

Register at ArtsandFaith.com and join the conversation now!

The Trinity Arts Conference: The Gift of the Unknown
June 11-14, 2009

There's still time to sign up for the Trinity Arts Conference in Dallas, held this June 11-14. TAC has always been one of our favorite Christian arts events of the year. It offers lovingly chosen themes, intimate community, provocative lectures, warm and useful workshops, and a challenging and supportive environment for Christian artists—a group that the conference organizers know can often feel doubly estranged, both from the church and art worlds. This year looks to be no exception to the rule of thoughtful excellence. The theme, “The Gift of the Unknown,” will explore the ways that art can expand our carefully ordered view of the world. Though the recognition that our boundaries are arbitrary can be deeply unsettling, the unknown can also be a blessing, as it keeps our curiosity alive and our purpose fresh. Art prevents us from being lulled by our own limited horizons, keeping us attentive to what lies beyond them: the enigma of others and the inscrutability of God. Speakers and performers will include: singer-songwriter Doug Burr, a Paste Magazine four-to-watch artist; Sedrick Huckaby, a Yale-trained painter whose work is in the Whitney Museum and Boston MFA; Image and Christianity Today film blogger Jeffrey Overstreet; fiction writer and Image managing editor Mary Kenagy Mitchell; and Image's own Greg Wolfe, a Trinity Arts Conference mainstay, who will offer the cultural long view. Says painter Ed Knippers, a past speaker: “Trinity Arts Conference is rich in thoughts and ideas. It explores and nourishes the life of the mind with care and enjoyment. It is like a happy family coming to an evening meal.”

Get a place at the table: book your calendar for June 11-14. For more information go to the conference website or write to info@trinityartsconference.com.

Bruce Bond’s Blind Rain is a poetry collection that explores the form of lamentation—the beauty and grief of the elegy, entrancing and cadenced as falling rain. Bond has a way of reconciling the impersonal with the personal, of linking Nerval’s surrealist and abstract harmony with the intimate tone of his aging father’s staccato breath. Bond writes of his father in “Wake”: “These months I have heard him steadily / fading in my telephone, his breath gone / short, just the occasional brush of wind / and language, here and there an angry stutter / and release.” Tragedy and death are present, but so is a sense of perpetual life that drums on through the return of music—music “that brings a child into the world,” or music as “the eros of equations / that erase themselves, that cannot make / a sound without asking a question.” Bond’s poetry evokes what Katie Kresser, in the most recent issue of Image, calls the “pre-conceptual” in art. Kresser claims that the true artist is “someone who responds to the pre-conceptual moment not by categorizing it, but by recreating its vectors...the artist bears direct, manufactured witness, and this is what sets her apart.” One of the ways Bond demonstrates the pre-conceptual is through the word “rain,” which he personifies as "the kind that sizzles on the naked pavement, or taps / in a drunken stagger on the step." The poems in this collection engage the paradoxical relationship between life and death, hinting at the hope of renewal. Bond writes in “The Quick”: “to practice / the art of the corpse, / how quietly it lies, descending, / even as the sea / of grass it enters / however slow, / appears to rise.”

Click here to buy the book.

Pilgrim’s Progress: A Retelling by Gary D. Schmidt and Barry Moser

Samuel Johnson once said of John Bunyan’s iconic work, “this is the great merit of the book, that the most cultivated man cannot find anything to praise more highly, and the child knows nothing more amusing." Gary D. Schmidt’s retelling of Pilgrim’s Progress, illustrated by the inimitable Barry Moser, proves exactly that point. Now in its second edition, Schmidt and Moser’s collaboration continues to engage modern audiences both young and old. Schmidt revisits the spiritual journey of Christian, an everyman character, employing contemporary language and thoughtful abridgements to make the book more accessible. Schmidt makes the conversation and surroundings more familiar to present-day readers, blending his own response to the story with Bunyan’s original vision and intention. At the end of chapter two, for example, Schmidt writes, “It was only the beginning of the journey, but it was a good beginning. For both of us.” Moser brings the allegory alive visually with wholly original watercolors of the various people and places Christian encounters. Moser also modernizes the story, depicting Christian’s development from the burdened traveler with a baseball cap to the pilgrim in a knightly suit of armor to the newly robed and crowned resident of the Celestial City. Moser paints the character Evangelist as a bearded African American man in an impeccable white suit, and he envisions the sister Discretion as a palace lady in a medieval dress with a train and cape. Perfect as an illustrated book for children or as a distinct edition of the classic Christian allegory for adults, Pilgrim’s Progress: A Retelling speaks to all audiences of the burdens we carry, the trials we encounter, and the hope that at the end of our journeys we, too, might hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

For more information on the book, click here.

The Reason for Crows by Diane Glancy

In her new novel, The Reason for Crows, Diane Glancy reconstructs the lost account of Kateri Tekakwitha, a seventeenth-century Mohawk woman who converted to Christianity and joined a Jesuit mission. All that remains of "The Lily of the Mohawks” are a few journals and a panel on the door of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, but Glancy draws a strong and certain voice from the crumbling pages of history—with the help of her imagination and her own studies of Native American culture. At a very young age, Tekakwitha, "she-who-walks-bumping-into-things," is left weakened and pockmarked by the smallpox that also took her family and most of her eyesight. Not likely to marry, she finds solace studying with the Jesuits as her mother, a Christian Algonquin, had once done. She is christened Katherine, or "Kateri," and what she lacks in body she makes up in spirit, quickly becoming the backbone of her disease-torn community. In Glancy’s unfettered prose, Kateri’s voice comes through with the clarity and bluntness of one unaccustomed to guile or rambling. Glancy writes in the afterword that she wanted to portray the primitiveness of a Christianity unencumbered by the “shrubbery” of religion, and that’s how Kateri’s faith comes across: infused with the natural world and embedded in her native culture. Glancy’s portrayal of the Jesuits is equally layered, not resorting to an easy vilification of the mission workers. These men struggle with doubt and arrogance and desire, believing God’s word to be true and the Mohawk to be in darkness, yet they are unsuccessful in “snatching the Indians to paradise.” Only Kateri Tekakwitha, a sickly, homely orphan, takes it upon herself to suffer on behalf of her people, recognizing that salvation, like sin, is shared. As Glancy notes in the afterword, all history is colored by the delivery of the one telling it, and her hoisting this story out of obscurity, as well as our reading it, becomes part of Kateri Tekakwitha’s history.

Click here to buy the book.

Gallery Watch

Makoto Fujimura: Olana

The White Stone Gallery proudly hosts Makoto Fujimura's newest exhibit, Olana: Psalms of Ascent. Crafted with the ancient Japanese technique and materials of Nihonga, the paintings in this exhibit are devotional imagery made in the last two years. Fujimura describes his latest work as “a personal devotional journey between art and faith,” as well as his homage to Hudson River painters. Makoto Fujimura's work has appeared in exhibits across the United States and Japan, as well as in the pages of Image. Click here to see his Artist of the Month page. Olana: Psalms of Ascent runs through June 21, with a cocktail reception on Friday, May 22 from 7-9 p.m. where Fujimura will read from his latest book. White Stone Gallery is located at 4219 Main Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

For more information, click here.

Message Board
Post here to reach thousands of readers interested in the intersection of art and faith. We welcome messages about job listings, local events, conferences, prizes, calls for papers, and more. Submit your messages by sending an e-mail here.

Ruminate Poetry Prize

See Rock City at Seattle Pacific Backstage Theatre, May 26-30, 2009

Eighth Annual His Gifts and Presence New England Arts Festival

The New England Christian Arts Council will hold its eighth annual arts festival this year on June 27 in Gorham, Maine. They are currently accepting submissions of original art work for the event, which is open to visual artists, musicians, singers, dancers, actors, and poets. The festival will be an international, inter-denominational event with featured artists such as Grammy nominated Margaret Becker, Maine’s current Poet Laureate Betsy Sholl, and New York Times best selling author Reverend Peter Panagore. Submissions must be received by May 29 and will be juried by a festival review committee. Lodging is available with a $30-50 dollar submission payment. Tickets to simply attend the show will be $10 for advance purchases and $15 at the door. The festival will take place this year at the McCormack Performing arts Center at 41 Morrill Ave in Gorham, ME. For more submission or ticket information, click here.

ImageNews — The Scoop on Our Programs

Testimonies and Un-Testimonies: Rewriting Your Spiritual Story
A Forum with Hannah Notess on May 21, 2009

Join Hannah Notess, Image’s 2008-09 Milton Fellow, for a University Ministries Forum and discussion about storytelling and “testimonies” on Thursday, May 21 at 1 p.m. in Demaray Hall 150 at Seattle Pacific University. If you’re raised as an evangelical Christian, you’re supposed to be an expert at telling your story. From an early age, you’re expected to have a testimony, a story of how God saved you from a life of sin and sadness, and gave you a new life of joy and gladness. But what happens if you don’t have a testimony? What if your story just doesn’t fit the before-and-after mold? Maybe it’s time to throw out the before-and-after testimony and look for new ways of telling our stories. Milton Fellow Hannah Notess’s writing has appeared in Image, The Christian Century, Slate, and Crab Orchard Review, among other journals. She will discuss her search for unconventional stories of faith as a writer and as editor of Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, a collection of essays forthcoming from Cascade Books in 2009. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, call (206) 281-2988, or click here. For directions to Seattle Pacific University, click here. For a map of Seattle Pacific University’s campus, click here.

Image Readings: Gina Ochsner

Set in far-flung locations, Gina Ochsner's stories make distant things present and real, never exotic or gimmicky. Hers are real stories about likeable, wounded, resilient people who feel as if they could live next door to you, though in fact they live in the Czech Republic, or Siberia, or Texas, or Alaska. In this month’s Image Readings, Gina reads a short story called “The City of Mausoleums.” Click here to listen.

The 2009 Florence Seminar
What a Thing is Man? The Christian Humanism of Michelangelo  

On September 13-20, 2009, Image will gather a small group of inquirers in Florence and Rome to explore the life and achievements of the sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, Michelangelo Buonarroti. In his works we see the dignity of humanity and its fall, the emergence of the individual and the dangers of individualism, and a fierce struggle to harmonize beauty with goodness and truth. Yet for all the conflict and tension in his work, Michelangelo left us with exquisite images of how God's grace can transform human experience. In Image's twentieth anniversary year, we'll return to Italy to explore how Michelangelo's incarnational vision can inform our own efforts to continue bringing about cultural transformation in our time. Our week together in Italy will begin with a couple days in Rome, where we will visit the Vatican and other sites associated with Michelangelo. The remainder of the week will be spent in Florence, where we will visit the great churches and museums featuring the artist and enjoy exquisite meals at restaurants in the city and the surrounding area. If you're interested, visit the Florence Seminar page or contact Julie Mullins here to request a PDF or hard copy of the brochure.

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