Novelist and short story writer Gina Ochsner

Issue #172 | June 17, 2009

Features
Up for Auction: Rare Copy of Image #1
The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight by Gina Ochsner
Gretel: The Dregs
Usher by B.H. Fairchild

Gallery Watch
Highly Favored: Contemporary Images of the Virgin Mary
Catherine Prescott Exhibit: The Quick and the Dead

Message Board
Saving the Planet: Saving our Souls—Call for Essays

ImageNews
Image Readings: Barry Moser
The 2009 Florence Seminar
Subscribe to Image in Print

Features

Up for Auction: Rare Copy of Image #1

As many of you know, the pilot issue of Image, which was printed just over twenty years ago, has long been out of print. In fact, we only have four copies in our office. We’ve received many wistful requests for that first issue and have felt bad that we couldn’t oblige. But now you can have this extremely rare item for your very own—and at the same time do something good for Image. To help our little enterprise in a tough economic time, we’ve decided to auction off a copy of issue #1. Though it was the very first issue, the pilot represented the literary and artistic quality that would come to be Image’s standard. The editorial statement, “Intruding Upon the Timeless,” provided a rationale for Image that remains fresh and valid today. The front cover featured the painting by Steve Hawley we recently revisited in a web-exclusive feature. The lead short story, “Confessionals,” is by Larry Woiwode, the distinguished writer of fiction (Beyond the Bedroom Wall). In his poem “A Toast for Little Iron Mike,” Paul Mariani writes movingly of his nephew’s premature birth and fragile first few weeks. Andrew Hudgins’s ekphrastic poem, “Botticelli: The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ,” unpacks the rich, tragic drama of the scene at the foot of the cross. James J. Thompson, Jr.’s essay examines the provocative question of whether John Updike wrote “dirty books.” Memoirs by Virginia Stem Owens and Shirley Nelson delve into the joys and terrors of family life. And there’s even more. Please consider bidding on this essential piece of Image’s history and helping us as we begin the next twenty years of bringing you outstanding literature and art that grapple with the mystery of faith.

Visit the online auction page here to bid. Bidding is now open and will close on the final day of Image's Glen Workshop—at 6:30 pm, Mountain Time, on Friday, July 31.

The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight by Gina Ochsner

In her debut novel, The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight, Gina Ochsner tells the tangled stories of a handful of unlikely neighbors who inhabit a condemned apartment building in post-Soviet Russia, in the city of Perm, Siberia. First we meet Olga, a Jewish woman and a lover of words who works as a “translation officer” for the Red Star newspaper, where her unfortunate job is to make the news more palatable for the public: military casualties must be rounded down to “acceptable figures,” and a horrific event must never make it to the public “in its raw and undiluted version.” Other tenants of the rundown apartment include Azade, who earns a little money by tending the building’s lone outdoor latrine, and Vitek, her criminal son, who teaches the orphans to pick pockets and lob garbage at people. Olga’s son, Yuri, is a kind of counterpoint to Vitek. A shell-shocked survivor of the battle of Grozny, Yuri lives mostly in his perpetually helmet-clad head and spends his days fishing, oblivious to the admiring gaze of Tanya, who is perhaps the real heart of the novel. Tanya shares one of the apartments with her unaffectionate, Orthodox Christian grandmother, and is Yuri’s coworker at the All-Russian, All-Cosmopolitan Museum of Art, Geology, and Anthropology—where the biggest perk is not the paychecks (they’re unreliable) and not the exhibits (none of which are authentic), but the unlimited use of the polished museum bathrooms. Winning, creative, affectionate Tanya dreams of getting into Aeroflot’s competitive flight attendant school (if only she can lose a little weight). But in the mean time she creates icons out of popsicle sticks and candy wrappers and scribbles luminescent prose in her journal. As with her short stories, Ochsner moves deftly between the real and the imagined, and between the absurd and the profound, the comical and the terrible. By introducing elements of the fantastic into this gritty world, and by weaving Tanya’s journal writings throughout, Ochsner manages to lift this story into a realm of, yes, color and flight.

Want to get your hands on The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight now? It hasn’t yet been published in the US, but it has been released in the UK, and you can get a copy now by ordering online.

Gretel: The Dregs

Rib-shaking in a good way may be the best description for Gretel’s rocking, soulful (occasionally rock-a-billy) album The Dregs. The lyrical urgency and rich, earthy vocals of Gretel’s front woman Reva Williams set out to wake our deadened hearts, half-feeling the edges and sharp corners of our own fears and mistakes. The album starts with a prelude “Turn the Lights Back On,” lamenting the “stories that never get told” that leave their mark on us nonetheless. Where there is a hurt there is something alive, and Williams and fellow musicians Melissa Myers and Phil DuPertuis track those unspoken wounds, playing as if their lives depended on it. The atmosphere they create in each song—banjos, guitars, and accordions punctuated with “the one at a time drumkit” and bursts of voices mounting into wailing choruses or quieting into meditative crooning—sometimes cleverly veils the immediacy of the words: “No, it’s not that bad / That’s what makes it so bad ‘cause it’s not bad / Do you know what I mean?” There is purging here, but also playfulness, a nudge of humor that lets in light. The jaunty “Jesus! (Where did you go?)” pleads: “I wanted to buy something at the end of your medicine show / What would it take Just to be taken / Just to be shaken up by your holy ghost contaminant glow.” Williams’s ear for words and how they twist and turn around each other gives The Dregs its real grip. In the bookended “Turn the Lights Back On, Pt 2,” joy floods back into the ravaged spaces in us: “Turn the lights back on / Maybe Melissa will sing us one of her songs / Fill our hearts until they burst out of our chests / And the holes they leave behind can be a place the birds will nest.” This is an album in which you know what is at stake. Its honesty and beauty make you believe in living as if you mean it.

Visit Gretel’s website and buy The Dregs here. Read Kelly Foster’s blog post about Gretel on the Image website here.

Usher by B.H. Fairchild

If you missed the chance to read B.H. Fairchild’s “Trilogy” in Image #56, you’re in luck, twice over. The three-poem work was just reprinted in the 2009 Pushcart Prize anthology, and it also appears as what Fairchild has called the centerpiece of his new poetry collection, Usher. The usher of the title is Nathan Gold, a theology student and movie-theater usher in 1950’s New York, who tries, in a dramatic monologue, to figure out what his theology professors Tillich and Niebuhr have to do with Katherine Hepburn and Marlon Brando. As with Fairchild’s previous collection, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, a tough-minded intellect and biting wit is on display. In one poem, an earnest philosophy student lines up beer bottles on a table to demonstrate infinite progression to his drinking buddies, while one of the buddies carves rude remarks about him on the tabletop. Yet the tough-mindedness and wit are tempered by a deep concern for what progress leaves behind, especially in the long prose-poem elegy “The Beauty of Abandoned Towns.” In Usher the headiest ideas of philosophers and theologians are never divorced from the reality of suffering. And this tension between ideas and suffering is embodied clearly—and hauntingly—by Frieda Pushnik, the armless, legless circus freak, who prays to God “who in love or rage or spasm / of inscrutable desire made that teeming, oozing, / devouring throng,” her “little prayer: let me be one of them.”

Click here to buy the book.

Gallery Watch

Highly Favored: Contemporary Images of the Virgin Mary

The Passion of Mary. Katherine Kenny Bayly. Collage on paper. 8" x 12".

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.

Saving the Planet: Saving our Souls—Call for Essays

ImageNews — The Scoop on Our Programs

Image Readings: Barry Moser

World class illustrator Barry Moser is this month’s featured artist on the Image Readings page. In his talk (given at the Glen Workshop in 2008), Moser—who considers himself an outsider to the faith traditions that revere the Bible as sacred—discusses how he went about designing and illustrating the King James Bible. The talk focuses on his attempt to make reverent and respectful images without stooping to the pious and obsequious. 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.

ImageUpdate

Copyright © 2009 Center for Religious Humanism. All rights reserved.