Issue #179 | October 7, 2009

Features
Artist of the Month: Betsy Sholl
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Dave Perkins: Pistol City Holiness
The Dude Abides by Cathleen Falsani
Start with the Trouble by Daniel Donaghy

Gallery Watch
Ted Prescott Exhibit: Inscape
Craig Alan Huber: Elemental Cross
Kathy Thaden: The Visit

Message Board
Robert Clark at Seattle Pacific University
Ballard Art Walk: Red Girl by Christen Mattix
“Exposed on the Cliffs of the Heart”: A Benefit for the Ignatian Spirituality Center

ImageNews
Image Readings: B.H. Fairchild
Now Available: Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of IMAGE
Join Image and Kathleen Norris in Oahu, February 2010
Subscribe to Image in Print

Features

Artist of the Month: Betsy Sholl

The poems of Betsy Sholl reveal the habits and motions of an active human mind: the fluid unwinding of thought, the pushing forward into the space ahead, the dance of logic—sometimes stately, sometimes playful. Each measure of sound is delicately honed and flows purposefully into the next. Poems of intellect, history, and theology, her works nonetheless make their home in the natural world. Her canvas is the created order, with special attention to the small, overlooked things: dunes, weather, finches, the glint of mica in rock, rain dripping from trees, the actions of children, the movement of time. She inhabits the natural world fully, meeting it with graciousness, curiosity, and energy. And though she deals in the territory of ideas, she often takes us to the very edge of thought, where active cognition dissolves into a meditative stillness.

To read her poem “Gravity and Grace” from issue #63, click here.

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Winner of the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie follows two successful novels, Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, with a collection of twelve short stories that explore the alienation of the immigration experience and the importance of belonging. The title story refers to a Nigerian woman adjusting to her new American life who, despite relative comfort and a meaningful relationship, finds that “[a]t night, something would wrap itself around your neck, something that very nearly choked you before you fell asleep.” Adichie, one of Nigeria’s most promising new writers, writes in plain and sturdy language that is vivid and not weighed down by metaphors. Her strength lies in endowing her characters with deep feeling, individuality, and strong motivation. These men and women are immigrants accompanied by the weight of cultural belonging and a desire for geographical rootedness. They test the ground of colliding cultures between Adichie’s own “second home of convenience,” America, and her native home, Nigeria. The Thing Around Your Neck is a study in tension between the powerful and the powerless: between African and Westerner, prisoner and guard, man and woman. Though she is capable of investigating the sudden brutality of street riots, the actions of hostile governments, and the horrors of the penal system, Adichie’s stories are ultimately focused on domestic, personal dramas. Adichie’s imagination conjures up a wife living in America hearing news of her husband’s infidelity in faraway Lagos, a Nigerian immigrant struggling to adjust to her arranged marriage and adopted country, and two strangers drawn together to pray for a missing flight despite denominational differences. These short stories convey an Africa where religion remains an important and vital component of community. Adichie pursues the possibilities and difficulties of faith, and believers of all sorts make their appearance: Catholics, Muslims, Pentecostals, and villagers in the presence of gods and ancestors. Set in air-conditioned airports, Philadelphia homes, and Nigerian villages, Adichie’s stories are a passport for the reader to encounter his own foreignness. The continual contradiction between comfort and authenticity is indicative of the collection’s atmosphere, acknowledging the impossibility of forgetting family roots and the necessity of moving forward.

To purchase Adichie’s new book, click here.

Dave Perkins: Pistol City Holiness

Recently nominated for two Grammy awards, Dave Perkins’ Pistol City Holiness is a stirring collection of mournful Delta blues and gritty Southern rock featuring Perkins’ unnerving guitar and rugged, impolite vocals that plumb the unapologetic depths of old-fashioned blues despair. Perkins, a legendary producer and session musician, covers expected thematic ground—love, fights, failures, and plain bad luck—but his lyrics are vividly inventive. On “Preacher Blues,” a tale of unrequited love and spiritual struggle, Perkins blindsides the listener with the opening line: “She’s a helluva woman when she’s all dressed up for church,” the narrator promising that he’ll “hang with the Baptists if it could get that girl for me.” While lamenting the woman’s preference for a preacher, the narrator confesses, “Well I coulda been a preacher man / but there’s a hellhound on my trail.” On the raucous “Bottles and Knives,” a weary man out with his girl complains, “Girl you know I love you / I told you that it’s true / But you just won’t believe me / Til you make me fight for you / Bottles and knives / Flyin’ all around this place,” but the frolicking honky-tonk piano and tremulous guitar outpace his threats to “leave you darlin’ / Before I lose my pretty face.” On the timely “Long Eleven Road,” relative musical sparseness conveys a derelict factory town’s chilling emptiness with Perkins’ repetitive guitar line mirroring the narrator’s futile search for work. Looking at his anxious child, this despondent father moans: “Sometimes the only place hope lives is in a lie / So hush hush little child, we gonna be alright.” Pistol City Holiness is only Perkins’ second solo album, his first in over twenty years, and it proves to be worth the wait. In these twelve songs, Perkins has crafted concrete musical narratives so sharply focused that the particular overflows into the universal, prompting an empathy that reveals the paradoxical secret of the blues: sharing these tales of suffering forges solidarity, and in this solidarity is a hope that makes the blues bearable.

To listen and buy, click here.

The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers by Cathleen Falsani

Cathleen Falsani, award-winning religion columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of The God Factor, as well as the memoir Sin Boldly, has a new book out this fall: The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers. Falsani is known for her extensive profiles of religion in the lives of famous movers and shakers in today’s culture, but she transitions easily into film criticism, conversing with readers like an old friend. She begins by acknowledging that the Coen brothers, who earned their reputation as a seriously talented writer/director duo with wacky comedies like Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, don’t produce explicitly religious messages. Indeed some of their films, such as No Country for Old Men (winner of the 2008 Academy Award for Best Picture), are brutally honest in their depiction of a world without justice or even meaning. Falsani, however, pushes aside the curtain of nihilism to show that these Coen-created universes are deeply moral, and that the questions they ask are essential to knowing one’s own humanity. With a sharp eye, she examines every movie the Coens have produced, from 1984’s Blood Simple to their most recent A Serious Man, released only last week. Falsani reveals the Biblical imagery under the surface of these films, and explains how, from each, a viewer can glean rich commentary on the human condition. Amid the horrors of cattle guns and wood chippers, Falsani finds affirmations of life and argues that, like sunny police chief Marge Gunderson faced with chaos in Fargo, Coen films have a moral center that is not overcome by the darkness of their villains. Instead, they affirm that “love, even a deeply imperfect love, is good...even if it doesn’t conquer all.” She also reminds viewers, “There are always the obvious themes, but it’s usually what’s going on behind the obvious that’s powerful.” Ultimately, Falsani creates a compelling argument that even in the “resounding rush” of floodwaters in O Brother Where Art Thou, the baby-stealing “holy fool” Hi McDonnough in Raising Arizona, and the angelic “abiding” of the Dude in The Big Lebowski, God is manifest.

To buy the book, click here.

Start with the Trouble by Daniel Donaghy

“You’re on your way home,” begins the first line of the first poem in Daniel Donaghy’s new book Start with the Trouble, and suddenly the reader is not only being told a story, but is included in it. This immediacy is at times unsettling, as the Philadelphia home Donaghy describes is more a battleground than a refuge, his childhood less a nurturing foundation than something to survive. Survive he does, although many in his poems—neighborhood friends lost to drugs and knives, a poetry-writing prostitute disappeared from the streets, Donaghy’s alcoholic and chain-smoking father—do not. However, rather than obscure these losses behind a gloss of sentimentality, he examines them as closely and carefully as a child might a dead animal, creating a stark background against which moments of hope and youthful passion shimmer. In “The Kiss,” Donaghy recalls a tender memory of his fifth-grade dance with “Katie Hickerson... / bright red feathered hair, / black sequined dress, / green eyes staring up / with what I now see was love.” Under such strict attention and respect, common events rise beyond the trivial and into the sacramental, a Frosty from Wendy’s lifted to his dying father’s lips as holy as the communion wafer ingested at Sunday Mass. Through the lens of adulthood, Donaghy gains a deeper understanding of his past and links figures in it to larger frames of reference: Bruce Springsteen hypnotizing the crowd at a local concert becomes “Part Apollo, part Zeus, part Hephaestus.” The author’s father, making sandwiches, treats his children “as Laertes / would strangers from Crete, / giving gifts, but never himself,” while a dying boy in the arms of his father brings to mind Mary holding the body of Christ in Michelangelo’s Pieta. In the background, always, is the poet’s faith, explored in pieces about his Catholic school upbringing, and his parents’ fear of judgment as they faced death. Although Donaghy rarely comments directly on his own belief, it is evident in the answer he gives to his young daughter’s question “What is church?” and again it seems the address extends to the reader: “...church is a building, / or a service, / or a group of Christians. / It’s also something / you can give, so I’ll give it here: / a blessing to a young woman / at the start of something or, / like you, the start of everything.”

To buy the book, click here.

Gallery Watch

Kathy Thaden: The Visit

Ciel Gallery in Charlotte, NC presents the Contemporary Mosaic Art 2009 exhibition, open now until October 23 and featuring Kathy Thaden’s The Visit as Best in Show. As a mosaic artist, Kathy Thaden is inspired to work with Christian symbols, icons and other religious imagery. Thaden’s mosaics range from abstract sculptures and contemporary crosses to liturgical wall hangings and commissioned works. A member of the Society of American Mosaic Artists and the Episcopal Church & Visual Arts, Thaden is also a founding member of the Colorado Mosaic Artists. Read more about the exhibit here and here.

Ted Prescott Exhibit: Inscape

Inscape, an exhibition of sculptures by Ted Prescott, will be opening at Franklin and Marshall College on October 24th. Prescott sculpts with a variety of materials—from limestone to wood to found objects. Through the combination of such diverse mediums, he explores what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the “inscape," or specific nature, of particular things. While recognizing that inscape is both a source of and challenge to his art, Prescott seeks to find a balance between leaving objects in their original form and using artistic manipulation to create a renewed perspective and understanding of the subject. Preview the work of Ted Prescott here.

Craig Alan Huber: Elemental Cross

InscapeInscape Gallery, a project of Washington Seminary in Redmond, Washington, is currently hosting an exhibition of photography by Craig Alan Huber that will continue through November 13. This stunning collection depicts silver and platinum images of the cross. Huber has been inexplicably drawn to crosses for the past eleven years, and his fascination has taken him throughout America and Europe in search of them. Each photograph in this collection attempts to capture the universal inspiration of this ancient symbol, while moving the viewer away from worn clichés and into a world of beauty and mystery. View more of Huber’s work here.

Message Board
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Robert Clark at Seattle Pacific University

Seattle Pacific University’s Food for Thought, a series of events featuring faculty and staff authors, kicks off on October 15 with Robert Clark reading from his acclaimed new book Dark Water: Art, Disaster, and Redemption in Florence. Clark, an instructor in SPU’s MFA in Creative Writing, chronicles the 1966 flood in Florence, Italy, via both history and personal memoir. In exploring the international efforts of art lovers to save the Renaissance art threatened by the rising waters, Clark also examines how and why we value art both aesthetically and spiritually. Clark is also the author of three other books of nonfiction and four novels, including Lives of the Artists, Love Among the Ruins, Mr. White's Confession (which won the Edgar Award), and In the Deep Midwinter. A memoir, My Grandfather's House: A Geneology of Doubt and Faith, was published in 1999. He is a Guggenheim Fellow working on a collection of essays on art and belief. The reading will take place from 12:20-1:15 in the Library Reading Room, with a question and answer time following the reading.

Ballard Art Walk: Red Girl by Christen Mattix

Folktown Counseling presents an exhibition of mysterious and intimate portraits by Christen Mattix during the Ballard Art Walk in Seattle on Saturday October 10th from 7-9pm. Based on a snippet of found movie film whose colors had long ago migrated, leaving only magenta, Red Girl captures emotional intensity and rare, unguarded moments of being. Mattix has a BFA from Western Washington University, and an MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. A Seattle local, she has taught art classes at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle Pacific University, and Pratt Fine Art Center. She is represented by SAM Gallery and Shift Studio. This exhibition also provides the opportunity to contemplate new and old favorites from the Folktown archives. Folktown Counseling is the private practice of songwriter Robert Deeble and fellow therapist Cris Ramsdale. Located in the historic Seattle neighborhood of Ballard, Folktown serves their community through traditional psychotherapy and specializes in counseling artists.

“Exposed on the Cliffs of the Heart”: A Benefit for the Ignatian Spirituality Center

On Saturday, November 7th at 6.45 p.m., join us for an exploration of our relationship and responsibility to the earth through the perspectives of these four guest speakers: Sherman Alexie, David James Duncan, Dr. Terry McGonigal, and Dr. Mary Ruckelshaus. Dr. Terry McGonigal, Dean of Spiritual Life at Whitworth University, will invite us to re-consider the biblical call to be “stewards of the earth,” as found in Genesis. Mary Ruckelshaus, ecologist and lead of the Marine Natural Capital Project, will speak about environmental issues of the Puget Sound region in the context of what is occurring globally. David James Duncan, Montana novelist and salmon activist, and Sherman Alexie, Washington writer and National Book Award winner, will respond to the first two presentations by sharing selections from their works. Please join us for what promises to be a dynamic and moving evening. The event will be held at Town Hall, 1119 8th Ave (at Seneca) in Seattle. Advance tickets for $20 are available on the ISC website and will be $25 at the door. For more information contact info@ignatiancenter.org.

ImageNews — The Scoop on Our Programs

Image Readings: B.H. Fairchild

Fairchild's poetry, like the prairie, is deceptively simple and open, but the subtleties and variations are there for the attentive reader to savor and sift through. He is equally at home writing poems about the working class world of his youth (he's been compared to the painter Edward Hopper) and timeless philosophical and theological questions. Fairchild's faith is not something proclaimed; it is something inhabited. His poems have appeared in Southern Review, Poetry, Hudson Review, Yale Review, Paris Review, The New Yorker, Sewanee Review, and many other journals and in several anthologies, including The Best American Poems of 2000.

Click here to hear poems recorded at the 2009 Glen Workshop.

Now Available: Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of IMAGE

In the two decades since it began publication, Image journal has not only emerged as one of North America's leading quarterlies, but has also carved out a unique identity as the source for contemporary art and literature that grapple with the perennial questions of religious faith. We are thrilled to announce that Bearing the Mystery, a hardcover anthology of the best that has appeared in the pages of Image for the past 20 years, has just been published by Eerdmans. Bearing the Mystery brings together in one handsome volume the best fiction, poetry, essays, and visual art from Image's first twenty years - the work of nearly seventy writers and twenty visual artists (represented in sixteen glorious color plates). With contributions from the likes of Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Ron Hansen, Wim Wenders, and Denise Levertov, and with a special introduction by founder and editor Gregory Wolfe that meditates on the journal's mission, Bearing the Mystery is indeed a treasure-hoard. In fact, Jeremy Begbie, Thomas A. Langford Professor of Theology at Duke University, calls Image journal “one of the brightest beacons of hope among those who care about the intersection of art and faith,” and says “Bearing the Mystery offers us the cream of years of wisdom and witness: this is a volume to be treasured.” This book is a wonderful addition to the personal collection of any Image lover and is perfect as a gift. You can further support the journal by buying the book directly from our website.

To own your copy, click here.

Registration Is Open for Image Seminar in O'ahu with Kathleen Norris

You are cordially invited to spend a long weekend with poet and spiritual writer Kathleen Norris and the staff of Image in Honolulu, Hawaii, February 18-22, 2010. Registration is open now, and complete information and brochures are available at our website. Space is limited, so register early to ensure your spot. In the tradition of Image’s Florence Seminar, this event will bring a small group of inquirers together for a time of reflection, conversation, and personal enrichment. Our theme will be “The Habit of Attention: Renewing the Heart in an Age of Acedia.” Acedia is the ancient term for spiritual indifference and the subject of Kathleen’s latest book, Acedia & Me. In it, Kathleen, who grew up in Honolulu and returned with her ailing husband, David, chronicles her struggle with acedia after his death. As she began to investigate the meaning of her experience, going back to the works of the desert mothers and fathers and medieval monks, Kathleen realized how pervasive this malady is, and how deeply it permeates our culture of distraction. During our time together on O'ahu, we’ll take on the issue of acedia as both a personal and a cultural challenge. We will delve into the ways art and faith can move us beyond the distractions of media hype and pop culture and reawaken us to the world. In addition to Kathleen’s talks and readings, we’ll head out to explore the natural beauty of O'ahu and share a number of wonderful meals together.

To register, get more information, or request a brochure by mail, visit here. Find more on this special event here. Please contact Dyana Herron by email (dherron@imagejournal.org) or phone (206.281.2988).

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