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Bruce Herman. Called (detail), 2008. Issue #174 | July 15, 2009 Features Gallery Watch Message Board ImageNews
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FeaturesAnnouncing the 2009-10 Milton Center Fellow: Agustín Maes
To learn more about the Milton Center Fellowship and how to apply, click here. Image Issue 62 Is in the Mail!
Click here for more. Doug Burr: The Shawl
For more, see www.DougBurr.com Satin Cash by Lisa Russ Spaar
Click here to buy the book. Last Minute Openings at the Glen Workshop
Click here to sign up. Gallery Watch Message Board Compostela: A Pilgrimage through Moving Images by Brett David Potter This 45-minute experimental video and installation blends "found-footage," words, and music into a poetic narrative inspired by the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Our pilgrim begins in an earthly city of doubt and televangelism but finds a path to a "more enduring city" through the stories of the saints. An Integrative Project in the Arts and Theology for Regent College in Vancouver, the screening and reception will take place at 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, July 21 at Tenth Church in Vancouver (11 West Tenth Ave., near Ontario St.). Click here for more information. Robert Deeble House Concert at Two Rocks and a Hubcap Join musician Robert Deeble in Cerrillos, NM for a house concert on Saturday, July 25, 2009 at Two Rocks and a Hubcap. Doors Open at 6:00 p.m. and music starts at 7:00 p.m. A house concert is an opportunity for unsigned and independent artists to entertain a group of friends in a home setting. It’s also a way for you to be exposed to great artists in an intimate environment without the bar or restaurant noise! You can bring food and drinks if you wish, but the main focus of the evening will be listening to Robert perform his original music. Suggested donation is $10, and be sure to bring some extra cash to buy a CD! Two Rocks and a Hubcap is located at 279 Goldmine Road, Cerrillos, NM. Call 505-474-6501 or email tworocks@wendyyoung.net to RSVP. For more info, click here. Photo Prayers by Danny Schweers Mixing the visual and the verbal is difficult. When it works, image and text resonate, offering new insights into each. When it doesn't work, the image becomes a narrow illustration of richer associations suggested by the text, or the text becomes a weak afterthought. Every week, Danny Schweers strives to find unexpected reverberations. The pairings of visual and verbal began as a way of adding specifically religious content to a church newsletter's dry list of upcoming events. That church continues to publish Schweers' work, sending it out each week via email to some 600 members. The collected photos and prayers are at www.photoprayer.com, where visitors can ask to receive each week’s creation via email, and churches can ask to include his work in their email newsletters. Schweers is a former president of the Texas Photographic Society and former managing editor of Image. Click here for more.ImageNews — The Scoop on Our Programs Image Readings: Madeline DeFrees Click here to listen. Up for Auction: Rare Copy of Image #1
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 Saturday, August 1. The 2009 Florence Seminar Subscribe to Image in Print and Get More Art, Fiction, Poetry, Essays, Interviews, and Every Good Thing 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." ImageUpdatePublisher: Gregory WolfeManaging Editor: Beth Bevis Layout: Anna Johnson Contributors: Mary Kenagy Mitchell, Julie Mullins, and Joanna Vance 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 © 2009 Center for Religious Humanism. All rights reserved. |
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The Milton Center at Image is pleased to award its 2009-10 postgraduate fellowship in writing to Agustín Maes. Born in New Mexico, where his family has lived for over three-and-a-half centuries, Agustín grew up thirty miles north of San Francisco in Novato, California. He holds an MFA from The New School writing program in New York City, and an MA in theology from the University of San Francisco. His stories have appeared in The Gallatin Review, Blue Mesa Review, Turnrow, and in Ontario Review, and his work was selected for inclusion in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2007. He has served as an assistant editor for Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives (McSweeney’s Books, 2008)—a collection of oral histories by undocumented immigrants in the United States—and worked as a coordinator for the Prison Writing Program at PEN American Center, as an assistant editor at publishing house Bloomsbury USA, and as a grant writer for St. Anthony Foundation, a Franciscan-run nonprofit charity for the hungry and homeless. A Roman Catholic, Agustín is a parishioner at St. Ignatius Church in San Francisco. We look forward to welcoming Agustín to Seattle in the fall, where he will work on a collection of thematically related stories—narratives concerning characters marked as social pariahs, people who are in some way rejected by their peers because of the grim burdens they must carry.
Image’s summer issue is arriving in mailboxes now. It includes an interview with Eugene Peterson on what his calling as a pastor owes to artists; Jeffrey Overstreet on how new Asian film directors have taught him a new way of seeing; and David Griffith on the battle for his soul between John Cheever and Flannery O’Connor, with a review of recent biographies of both writers. In a joint essay, Bruce Herman and Walter Hansen discuss Bruce’s latest project, a series of wall-sized paintings on the life of the Virgin Mary, and how their friendship and relationship as artist and patron influenced the work. In a mind-bending, poetic short essay, Anita Sullivan describes her vocation as a piano tuner, and the enduring mystery of Biber’s Rosary Sonatas, with their nonstandard tunings (read the essay online 
Over the past few years, young Dallas-based singer-songwriter Doug Burr has produced a trio of gracefully crafted albums at the intersection of roots rock and art music—and he’s gotten noticed. His work has been featured in Paste Magazine as a Four-to-Watch artist, on CMT.com, and on the TV shows Gossip Girl and The Secret Life of the American Teenager. He has won songwriting awards from Silent Planet’s Mark Heard Contest, the International Songwriting Competition, the Dallas Observer, and the Dallas Morning News. In 2007, his sophomore effort, On Promenade, was released to rave reviews. His newest release, The Shawl, takes its name from the prayer shawls Jews wear to remind them of the Lord’s commandments, and all nine songs are settings of ancient Psalms. The theme of memory is as central to the album as to the Psalms themselves, which again and again call the Israelites to remember God’s faithfulness, both as comfort and admonishment. Burr’s spare, evocative arrangements are a welcome reminder that the Psalms were meant to be sung—and that their images and emotions resonate in every century. Burr is a gifted songwriter, and these ambitious settings give a fair shake to the daunting material, sometimes making use of meditative repetition, sometimes irresistible melody, always giving due weight to the timeless and beloved language. Throughout, Burr’s voice and guitar convey a sense of focused passion, of emotion channeled into an ancient form. The album was recorded over twenty-seven hours in the hauntingly dilapidated, chapel-like Texas Hall at the Old Trinity University in Tehuacana (the liner notes include gorgeous photos), and the space sets a particular and pervasive tone that lends a consistent feel to all nine tracks. The setting usually remains a silent backdrop, except when birdsong filters onto certain tracks—a centuries-old image of our smallness before God, and his care for us. This February, Burr goes on tour with legendary alt-country band Son Volt.
Satin Cash, the newest offering from poet Lisa Russ Spaar, thrives in the tension between rapture and restraint. In their balance of contemplation and energy of feeling, these poems recall such poets as Emily Dickinson, whose influence plays no small role and whose presence is evoked as a guide in the title, drawn as it is from a Dickinson poem. Above all, Satin Cash is a collection that moves with an almost devotional language in intensity and with an undercurrent of sensual detail, often combining the two in unusual, electrifying ways. The collection’s imagery swells with the various powers of human longing—what it is to desire, fear, love, dream—and contemplates the fervency of these elemental drives within us. Spaar’s language is lustrous, as in the poem “Magnolia” when she writes of the “sky / still scored by night’s unleashings – / the slimly departed storm leaving / its silver, angina shiver of aftershocks,” and in another poem when she describes a cricket as an “apocalyptic knucklebone” whose “ceremonial frequencies / chafe what I might choose to forget.” And in “Stairwell, Rio Road,” she notes a “doomed house” visible now to the passing world, and arrests us with an image of vulnerability: within the rubble of facades and the house’s collapsing elements still stands its “aortic staircase / via negativa flanked by crimson panels / opening my chest each morning / as I drove past its futile climbing, // its bezeled taboo wound.” This vulnerability clutches at the rim of the image and startles the reader’s heart, waking one again to the limitless power of language. Each poem is suffused with a vital energy that is both cosmic and earthy, as each taps into the energy of her literary forebears—besides Emily Dickinson, poets such as Hart Crane, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and others make their presences known—and into the natural world surrounding her, with trees, species of birds, and other animals recurring as motifs throughout the book. Satin Cash shocks and rewards its readers with its meditations on humanness, intimacy, and the power of love to reach into our very cores and sear us with its yearning.
A few extra spots have opened up for this year's Glen Workshop, taking place in Santa Fe July 26-August 2. It's not too late to sign up! A limited number of places in the Poetry with Marilyn Nelson, Plein Air Painting, Sculpture, and Playwriting workshops are currently available. Some on-campus housing is also available in dorm singles, doubles, and women's triples. Go to the Image 
A Catholic nun for thirty-eight years, DeFrees ultimately found that the experience thwarted her true vocation as a poet, yet her life is like a diptych: inside the convent, she sought words that might reach out, beyond a moralistic legalism, to touch the world; outside the convent, her worldly words reach out for a contemplative stillness—if not the blinding light of epiphany, perhaps the equally valuable moment of slowly-dawning wisdom. Whether she is writing a poem about what she shares in common with Marilyn Monroe or about the experience of eye surgery, poet Madeline DeFrees leads us into a garden of green thoughts—still points where time and the timeless embrace. She is featured on Image Readings this month.
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 
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 
