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Issue #187 | February 3, 2010 Features
Gallery Watch Message Board ImageNews
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Features Image’s Newest Program: The Glen Online
Artist of the Month: Pattiann Rogers
David Åhlén: We Sprout in Thy Soil
To buy the album, click here. Rough Cradle by Betsy Sholl
Wise Blood on Criterion DVD
Click here to buy your copy. Gallery Watch Tangible Dreams of a Dying Explorer at Gordon College There will be a collaborative exhibition of paintings and photographs by Bradford Johnson and C.E. Courtney soon taking place at the Gallery at Barrington Center for the Arts of Gordon College. Photographer Nils Strindberg died in the Arctic in 1897 and, along with his remains, several rolls of exposed film were found. Over one hundred years later, artist Brad Johnson began creating a series of paintings inspired by Strindberg's recovered photos. Photographer C. E. Courtney, captivated by the narrative of a dead photographer who had never seen his own images, began documenting Johnson's work. From painting to photography, from film to digital, the resulting amalgam conjures the hypothermic dreams of a dying explorer. The exhibition will run from February 8th to April 2, and an opening reception will take place on February 13th from 4-6 p.m. For more information, go to: www.gordon.edu/gallery. Night Light by Kathleen Markowitz
Message Board The Other Journal Seeks Creative Writing Editor The Other Journal, an online journal at the intersection of theology and culture, seeks a creative writing editor. Past issues of The Other Journal have included original work by Scott Cairns, Luci Shaw, and up-and-coming writers such as Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz and Jessie van Eerden. The creative writing editor will solicit and edit poetry, short stories, personal essays, and interviews for the creative writing section of the journal. See here for examples of work that has previously been published in the creative writing section of The Other Journal and here for more information about the position. The creative writing editor will receive a small stipend for each issue. Please submit a resume/CV and a cover letter describing your interest to Chris Keller, editor-in-chief, at ckeller@theotherjournal.com. Summer Program at Regent College Come relax, connect and learn at Regent’s summer programs, combining study with a holiday in beautiful Vancouver. Connect with others who are hungry for God, who want solid scholarship and thoughtful answers. Learn in courses like: Maxine Hancock, Jesus in Literature; Alan Jacobs, Potter and Friends: Christianity and Contemporary Fantasy; Jeanne Murray Walker, Writing to Revive Broken Truth; Jeremy Begbie, Theology Transposed: Re-Discovering the Gospel through the Arts; Bruce Kuhn, Truth Telling by Story; Marilyn McEntyre, Poetry and Prose of Earthkeeping; James K.A. Smith, Christian Theology and Fin de siècle Literature; Mako Fujimura, The Art of Nihonga: Basic Technique and Theological Implications...and many more! Visit www.summer.regent-college.edu for more information. The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest The Kenyon Review will be accepting electronic submissions (no longer than 1200 words in length) through February 28th, 2010 for their third annual Short Fiction Contest. The winning story will be published in The Kenyon Review, and the author will receive a scholarship to the 2010 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, June 19-26th, in Gambier, Ohio. (Scholarship covers tuition, room and board expenses.) There is no entry fee for submission, but writers must be 30 or younger to apply. Click here for full contest details, or direct your questions to kenyonreview@kenyon.edu. Living Waters Summer Shakespeare Program Living Water College of the Arts announces its Summer Shakespeare Program 2010. This six-week intensive course will integrate liberal arts with concentrated theatre study, probing the works and faith of William Shakespeare. Students will be immersed in the author’s work while exploring many of his masterpieces, contemporary commentaries on his symbolism and craft, and historical insights into the committed faith that propelled him forward in his art. Participant’s skills will be refined through intensive training and the performance of The Merchant of Venice. The program will run from July 5 to August 17, and applications will be accepted through March 12. For more information, go to www.livingwatercollege.com. ImageNews — The Scoop on Our Programs Join Us in Charleston with Bret Lott
Application Deadlines for MFA and Milton Center
Seattle Pacific University MFA Program: February 15 The MFA at SPU is a creative writing program for apprentice writers—both Christians and those of other traditions—who not only want to pursue excellence in the craft of writing but also place their work within the larger context of the Judeo-Christian tradition of faith. Current faculty mentors include Robert Clark, Leslie Leyland Fields, Jeanine Hathaway, Bret Lott, Gina Ochsner, and Jeanne Murray Walker. Students work with faculty mentors during the year by exchanging manuscripts and critiques, and attend two intensive ten-day residencies each year, one in the summer alongside Image's Glen Workshop and one in March on Whidbey Island, north of Seattle. The deadline to apply for summer 2010 admission is February 15. Click here for more information, including a link to the online application. The Milton Center Postgraduate Fellowship Deadline: March 15 The Milton Center postgraduate fellowship brings emerging writers of Christian commitment to Image, where their primary goal is to complete their first book-length manuscript in fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. During their time at the Center, fellows will have a rich experience of literary and spiritual community; they will interact with the editorial staff of Image and the English department at Seattle Pacific University, participate in the Friday writer's workshop, and enjoy the lively literary scene in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. For more information and to download an application, click here.
Register Now for the 2010 Glen Workshop
To register for the Glen Workshop, or to find out more information, click here. Brochures are being mailed now to subscribers, and available in PDF format here. If you're not on our subscriber list and you'd like to have a brochure mailed to you, send us an e-mail by clicking here. 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: Dyana Herron Layout: Anna Johnson Contributors: Christy Edwall, Dyana Herron, Anna Johnson, Mary Kenagy Mitchell, Taylor Morris, Gregory Wolfe 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 © 2010 Center for Religious Humanism. All rights reserved. |
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We at Image are very excited to announce the launch of our newest program, The Glen Online. One of Image’s central missions is to emphasize the importance of craft, both as an end in itself and as a spiritual discipline—concerns that lie at the heart of our Glen Workshop program in Santa Fe. Every year nearly 200 people gather at the Glen to work with some of the world’s finest writers and artists to hone both craft and vision. Whether you can attend the Glen Workshop or not, now you can benefit from the tradition of great teaching at the Glen by pursuing excellence in your craft through the Glen Online. The classes offered through the Glen Online are one-on-one encounters that can be completed at your own pace, under the guidance of the talented writers featured in the pages of Image and at the Glen. Our outstanding Glen Online faculty includes Paula Huston, Gina Ochsner, Sara Zarr, Dan Bellm, Daniel Taylor, Nick Samaras, and Lindsey Crittenden. The program offers a variety of online writing classes including fiction, poetry, and non-fiction at the beginning, intermediate and advanced levels, as well as occasional special topics like “Writing and Midrash.” If you have a longer manuscript in the works we also offer a tutorial that enables you to tackle a bigger project. Admission is rolling, which means you can begin at the best time for your schedule. The Glen Online is a wonderful way to kick-start your writing without making the time and financial commitment required by an MFA program, to further enhance your study after completing an MFA, or just to grow by being part of a vital writing community.
To sign up for the Glen Online or to learn more, just go to 
Pattiann Rogers is a poet of nature—but also a profoundly theological poet. “Everything I see of heaven,” she writes, “I know by the earth.” Hers is a theology grounded in the hard particulars of the natural world, an anagogic way of knowing that, as she demonstrates in a poem called “Whence and the Keeper,” finds in the images of horses and rivers, glaciers and plankton, a vocabulary for understanding a thing as cosmic and distant as the Milky Way. With the power of sustained attention and persistent observation, she brings to her writing a field biologist’s eye for the details of species and phenomena. Alive to the earth’s scents, moods, and variety, her gaze reveals nature’s power and terror, but also its grace and comedy. Like God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind, Rogers’ work locates in the animal, vegetable, and mineral world a theology more profound than abstract systematics could ever offer. To read Pattiann Rogers' two poems from Image issue 
We Sprout in Thy Soil, the first full-length album from Swedish folk singer David Åhlén, features ten ethereally beautiful, stripped-down hymns. A Baptist pastor’s son based in the working-class Stockholm suburb of Bagarmossen, Åhlén describes his influences as “everything I listened to as a child,” which happens to range from the chorales of Palestrina to the shoegazer rock of My Bloody Valentine. The instrumentation is hushed, focusing mainly on Åhlén’s achingly sincere vocals and psalm-like lyrics. Åhlén’s voice can be ardently wide-ranging, dropping octaves then regaining height in repeated hallelujahs. He wrote every song on the album (except for “Arise,” which quotes Song of Songs), and his lyrics combine a world-weary yearning with quiet joy in God: “In His arms, yes in His arms I fell / Beauty and silence / Eyes of hope, those bleeding eyes / He brings me rest,” he sings in a strong falsetto reminiscent of Bon Iver on the track “Rose of Sharon.” The intimate sense of I and Thou is never interrupted by the subtle additions of a moody spinet, a cello, and backup vocals from the Uppsala Boys’ Choir and Emil Svanängen of Loney, Dear on various tracks. Åhlén’s music moves past both the relentless major-key positivity of mainstream CCM and the cryptic gestures towards God that occasionally crop up in the mainstream indie scene—it both worships and wonders, expressing the hope of faith in God without excluding its mystery. “Strange, this could be the answer / Beginning and ending, the essence of time,” he muses in “Ocean,” then follows this with instructive in “Whisper His Name”: “In the darkness / In your void and shame / Whisper His precious name... He will answer.” These are songs for the prayer closet, not the public square; but their intimacy and simplicity makes them both timely and timeless, modern psalms that the public should hear.
In “Lullaby in Blue,” a poem included in Betsy Sholl’s newest collection Rough Cradle, the speaker explains to a just-born infant, “Child, the world comes in twos, above and below, / visible and unseen.” This world of twos, of pairs that coexist but are difficult to reconcile, is what Sholl explores for the duration of the volume, bravely toeing the tightrope that spans the tense space between each side. Whether she is watching elephant seals on the beach while contemplating the self versus the “utterly other,” writing to Simone Weil about “Gravity and Grace” (first published in Image issue 
Released for the first time on DVD by the Criterion Collection in 2009, John Huston’s grim adaptation of the Flannery O’Connor masterpiece Wise Blood (1979) is an unearthed treasure. Criterion is renowned for their painstaking restoration of classic films to make them available to the wider public, and this gem is no exception. The story is timely even now, thirty years after the film and nearly sixty years after the book. Hazel Motes, a twisted, haunted wreck of an Army vet, blows into the southern town of Taulkinham with one thing on his mind: to convince everyone he sees, including himself, of the Gospel of Truth without Christ. What follows is extraordinary. Motes spends the entire film on the run from the voice of God, a Christian malgre lui, as the author herself once said—despite himself. Brad Dourif (known to a younger generation as Grima Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings) embodies Motes with a beady-eyed intensity that never quite strays into craziness, and Harry Dean Stanton is the sallow-cheeked “blind preacher” with a nymphomaniac daughter who spurs on a righteously indignant Motes. In an eerie example of life imitating art, director John Huston tried to rid the story of its Christian elements, but was thwarted by the hand of his writers, Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald, who were family friends of O’Connor. “I think I’ve been had,” he reportedly said as the credits rolled. Sporting terrific special features including recent interviews with Brad Dourif and the Fitzgerald brothers and a rare recording of O’Connor reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Wise Blood is a fascinating tale of accidental redemption, faithfully adapted from a masterpiece by one of Image's most beloved writers.
The Page Bond Gallery of Richmond, Virginia is pleased to present the latest exhibition of works on paper by Kathleen Markowitz. Light is her overarching subject, juxtaposing dark black and blue hues next to bright white, causing these works to emit an illusory glow. The series is divided by works on a deep blue ground with speckled clusters of light, and works on a multilayered black ground displaying boxy points of illumination. Although there are no definitive references to the source of this light, a conversation around natural and artificial is imminent. Markowitz studied art at Virginia Commonwealth University and the New School of Visual Arts program in Barcelona, Spain. She was the recipient of the Julia and David White Artist's Colony fellowship in Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica and shows her work internationally. Most recently, her work was represented at the Tashkent 5th International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Uzbekistan. Exhibit opens February 5th. For more information, go to, 
Next November, a group of inquirers will gather with bestselling novelist Bret Lott (Jewel, Ancient Highway) for a long weekend in Charleston, South Carolina. Our focus will be the power of storytelling – how well-told tales help us to change, grow, and understand our lives. Drawing on the narratives of scripture, we will explore how great literature is neither preachy nor ironic, but an opportunity for both writer and reader to risk their hearts for the sake of truth. Registration opens spring 2010. For more information or to request a save-the-date postcard, contact Dyana Herron by email at 
It's that time of year again. Deadlines are approaching for two of Image's programs: a world-class MFA program and a yearlong postgraduate writing fellowship. 
The Glen Workshop is an illuminating conference on the arts and religion, where participants practice and strengthen their craft and vision in community. This weeklong event, hosted at St. John’s College Santa Fe, combines the best elements of a workshop, an arts festival, and a symposium. Morning workshops are small, so faculty can provide ample attention to beginners as well as those advanced in their craft. This year’s theme is “Creativity from the Margins: Art as Witness,” which focuses on the challenges for artists of faith participating from a minority’s perspective in a world often unconcerned with engaging religious issues. This year’s celebrated faculty includes poets Marilyn Nelson and B.H Fairchild, fiction writer Melissa Pritchard, screenwriter Bradford Winters, painter Joel Sheesley, illustrator Barry Moser, musicians Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist of Over the Rhine, and spiritual writer Lauren Winner. Editor and author Rodney Clapp will lead a seminar exploring the week’s theme in greater depth through discussion and in-class creativity, and film critic Jeffrey Overstreet will lead a film seminar (new this year!) exploring contemplative cinema. In the afternoon, lectures, readings, and presentations enrich the Glen experience, as do the nightly ecumenical worship services incorporating the arts. Free time provides recreational and artistic opportunities within the rich culture and traditions of Santa Fe, including writing, conversation, hiking and exploring the glorious Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico. Please note that class sizes are limited, and several are already full: don't wait too long to register! 
