Issue #192 | April 14, 2010

Features
Artist of the Month: Jill Peláez Baumgaertner
Spotlight on the Glen Online: Magical Realism with Gina Ochsner
Eighth Day Books Launches Redesigned Website
Pieces of Someday by Jan Vallone
One Body by Margaret Gibson

Gallery Watch
George Rouault: Seeing Christ in the Darkness
Ginger Geyer: The Porcelain Reformation
Call for Submissions: Summer Biennial of the Americas

Message Board

ImageNews
The Arts & Faith Top 100 Films
Image’s Newest Program: The Glen Online
Subscribe to Image in Print

Features

Artist of the Month: Jill Peláez Baumgaertner

To adapt an old phrase to a new context: we have no hesitation in calling Jill Peláez Baumgaertner a “Renaissance woman.” Scholar, administrator, literary critic, and poet, Baumgaertner is a true servant of the word and the image. Whether she is penning a scholarly essay on the poetry of John Donne, or a feature article about the art of Rodin or Rogier van der Weyden, or a poem exploring her Cuban heritage in a literary quarterly, she helps us to see how words and images can become icons, at once gloriously material and yet windows to another world. Take, for example, Baumgaertner’s poem “Prodigal Ghazal,” published in Image #61. For the Prodigal Son, the memory of the “far country,” where he thought he could be free, is in the end only of “fists and sour apples.” But when he returns home and is met by his father, a feast begins with bread and wine, echoing the eucharistic: “Now comes the filling in of hunger, the bread hunks spilling crumbs. / The wine meant for throats dry with salt and dust. / Here is God, his strokes on our dead flesh / Filling capillaries, sparking nerves. We are fed with the crusts / And blood of forgiveness, with the thrill of its gentle float, its ripe music.” In “For a Birthday and Wedding Anniversary, Two Days Apart,” Baumgaertner contemplates the resonance between these special days. Here a marriage is perceived as the midway point between past and future generations. Even more important than a birthday or wedding anniversary are the sacraments themselves, such as baptism (“a scatter of water / on new flesh”) and the eucharist, which enables the couple to “join the narrative line / that stretches back before they were and reaches / forward, demanding blessing.” Baumgaertner’s words and images join each of our intimate stories to a larger narrative line, demanding--and delivering--a blessing. Read Jill Peláez Baumgaertner's "Prodigal Ghazal" and "For a Birthday and Wedding Anniversary, Two Days Apart" -- featured in Issue #61 -- here.

Spotlight on the Glen Online: Magical Realism with Gina Ochsner

Any aspiring writer with an interest in this broadly imaginative genre of fiction can now enroll in “Magical Realism: Where Heaven and Earth Collide,” through Image’s new online writing workshop program, The Glen Online, and receive one-on-one guidance from acclaimed magical realist Gina Ochsner. In last month’s rave review, The New York Times described Gina Ochsner’s debut novel, The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight, as a work of “startling, redemptive beauty.” Against the bleak setting of an impoverished apartment building in post-Soviet Perm, Ochsner “elevates the tenants’ struggles and makes sense of their confounding times.” Ochsner has long been exploring the magical realist form. When we asked her why she writes magical realism, Ochsner pointed towards the genre’s capacity to address mystery: “It is, essentially, a look at how people respond to the inexplicable and how mystery fundamentally shakes people up. While the magical phenomena in question certainly hold one’s attention, the reader’s gaze is redirected toward the characters and how the presence of the supernatural challenges their notion of what it means to be human or how to interpret the ‘natural.’ And I also like these stories because they reaffirm what I’ve always felt to be true: we see this world through a mirror dimly. And if my powers of observation are so diminished, what, I have to wonder, am I missing?” The observations in Ochsner’s own writing, however, are precise and authentic. Despite the fact that she is a native of a small town in Oregon, writing fiction set in Russia, Mongolia, and other far-flung locations, her cultural and geographic observations have both the spontaneity and depth of day-to-day knowledge. Ochsner attributes this sense of place to the careful stewardship of others’ experiences: “Many of the details I use in stories and novels have been lived by someone first and then shared as a gift, and I always try to remember this and take good care of those words.” Read more about Gina Ochsner’s Magical Realism course (and all the other courses offered through The Glen Online) here.

Eighth Day Books Launches Redesigned Website

Attention all lovers of theology, history, criticism, spirituality, liturgy, Biblical studies, patristics, Orthodox literature, children's literature, poetry, fiction, iconography, and much more: Eighth Day Books has a newly redesigned website! Until this spring, EighthDayBooks.com only featured a tenth of its stock online. Now, for the first time in 22 years, the website offers all 25,000 titles carried by Eighth Day, including a complete listing of new AND used books. If you’ve ever been to the Glen Workshop, you are well acquainted with what we call the “Bookstore of Heaven” and its proprietor, Warren Farha. Now the entire inventory is available at your fingertips year-round! And beyond stocking up on favorite titles, the Eighth Day Books website allows visitors to view new store arrivals and sale items, order mounted icons, and purchase gift certificates of any amount for family and friends--who can in turn redeem them by shopping online. "Eclectic but orthodox," Eighth Day's inventory is carefully selected to bring patrons books of timeless interest that shed light on ultimate questions. "Reality doesn't divide itself into 'religious' and 'literary' and 'secular' spheres,” says Farha, “so we don't either. We're convinced that all truths are related and every truth, if we pay attention rightly, directs our gaze toward God." If you can’t make your way to the home of Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas, or if you usually fill your Glen suitcase to capacity with books on the Desert Fathers, stop by EighthDayBooks.com, the next best thing.

Explore the new Eighth Day Books website for yourself here.

Pieces of Someday by Jan Vallone

Memoir is a literary form that is an endless source of controversy. Some consider it inherently narcissistic while others argue that it will replace the novel as the primary form of serious literary prose. But there is one point that many people can agree upon: the rise of memoir as an art form has demonstrated that it isn’t the fame of the author--or her wild adventures or bizarre life experiences--that makes for a good story. Rather, great memoirs are characterized by the quality of their attention to the universal, quotidian experiences of human life--and the honest, courageous exploration of the self, proverbial warts and all. By this measure, Jan Vallone’s memoir, Pieces of Someday, is a wonderful addition to the literature. A New York Italian-American with a complicated relationship to her father, Vallone ignores her early artistic impulses to adopt her father’s profession--the law. Marriage, a vintage house, and worldly success follow, but prove inadequate. Vallone’s struggles with infertility and her decision to adopt, her growing frustration with lawyering and her mid-life shift to teaching literature and creative writing in an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva, turn her world upside down. Teaching and children provide her with a deep sense of fulfillment but come with their own griefs, tensions, and uncertainties. And then faith makes an entrance, in the form of her return to the Catholic Church she has known and not-known throughout her life. As Vallone’s memoir opens, she’s sitting in church, wondering about her life. A childhood friend has told her that life is a circle; her father made her feel that it is a linear path. But sitting in the pew she decides that it is more like stained glass: “composed of bits of translucency and opacity--fragments of yesterday, chips of today, pieces of someday, soldered with time. Some jewel-like and whole. Some fractured by the weather.... Only fusion and repair complete the image and allow us to make out the picture.” Vallone’s narrative gift--by turns lyrical, funny, and raw--combined with her newfound awareness of grace provide the “fusion and repair” that renders a life whole and meaningful. Read about her life and gain new insight into yours.

Own your copy here.

One Body by Margaret Gibson

Margaret Gibson’s newest book of poems, One Body, is an illuminating volume--in more than one sense. In it, Gibson explores knowledge as light, experience as light, and God as light, a “gold wind.” Counterintuitively, she accomplishes this through an extensive, unflinching interrogation of the darkness of death, specifically the deaths of her loved ones: her closest friends, sister, and father. Pangs of grief and confusion are sharply exposed through juxtaposition with domestic details, such as in “Cooking Supper While My Sister Dies,” in which Gibson, with no answer for the questions plaguing her, can focus only on the physical, on what is actually within her grasp: “And I must… / I can only… / I am left with… / this tomato, sun-ripened and taut, tinged green / at the pock where it let go of the vine.” However, Gibson never shirks the invisible, metaphysical, or spiritual, but in fact seeks it out, questions it, and embraces both the answers and silence she finds. “Where are you now, old soul?” she asks a departed friend in “Iris.” The poem “Poetry Is the Spirit of the Dead, Watching,” (first published in Image Issue 52) closes with another deceptively simple query, “Who are you / I ask the acres of emptiness / into which everything is gathered / and is-- / turning the question / at last toward my own heart, / blind and stupefied--who?” This series of existential questioning culminates in the next-to-last poem in the book, “Air and Earth,” a title which describes the two realms between which we all exist, and all struggle. The speaker in the poem recalls standing in a field, attempting to summon a lost friend: “I called, my arms spread wide, wide / as I turned around in the field: you, Everett, / I know you’re out here….” Then comes ultimate question: “Why must you die--why must I?” Answered only by wind and light, Gibson concludes, in a posture of peace and acceptance, “Then, I stood in the quiet of your field. / Wiregrass bent its whole length along the earth, a flare of light unfolding--and the light / and garlands of wind, spread low, were enough.”

To add Margaret Gibson’s book to your collection, click here.

Gallery Watch

George Rouault: Seeing Christ in the Darkness

George Rouault’s Seeing Christ in the Darkness opened at the Lookout Gallery of Regent College this month and will be on display until May 7. The exhibition features over 30 prints by Georges Rouault, who was the pre-eminent Christian artist of the 20th century living in France (alongside friends like Matisse and other Fauvists). Influenced by his early apprenticeship working in stained and leaded glass, Rouault made significant contributions to the world art scene, as well as to Christian theological reflections on the World Wars he survived, the state of human suffering and Christ’s redemption. A Catholic, Rouault has given the world a true insight into how art engages contemporary culture. This show is perhaps the largest collection of Georges Rouault’s work ever exhibited in Canada. For more information about the exhibit, click here.

Ginger Geyer: The Porcelain Reformation

Ginger Geyer’s The Porcelain Reformation is currently on display at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (MAC) in Dallas, Texas. This survey of Geyer’s work includes her most recent pieces, plus several loans from private collections. The exhibition continues through May 15th, along with Art into Landscape by UT-Austin art professor Ken Hale. A second stop in Dallas is Valley House and Sculpture Garden, which now represents Geyer’s work. Join us the day after the MAC opening at Valley House for a Sunday garden party for Geyer and fellow artist Michael O’Keefe, from noon until 2 PM. After the April 10 and 11 openings, a day trip to Dallas from Austin is being organized for Saturday, May 1. Geyer will do a gallery talk at the MAC, along with Rick Brettel, as well as stopping at the Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden. If you are interested in the bus trip, go to www.artinsight.info. For more information about the exhibit, go to www.gingergeyer.com.

Call for Submissions: Summer Biennial of the Americas

Artist Sandra Jean Ceas is curating an exhibition at the Core Annex Gallery in the Santa Fe Art District of Denver during the 2010 Summer Biennial of the Americas. Local and international artists will exhibit their work from across the hemisphere inspired by the Americas. Community is one of the themes for the biennial, as Sandra pulls together art that explores this subject from a Christian perspective. The show is titled: "Collective Singular" such as a single seed represents a full manifestation of God’s vision for His people. All mediums will be considered to create a coherent and challenging display that evokes a Godly discourse within the walls of this small but highly visible space. Submission due date is May 16, 2010. For more information, or for a prospectus, e-mail sandraceas@art4him.net with "Collective Singular Prospectus" in the subject box, or visit Ceas’s website at www.sandrajeanceas.com.

Message Board

ImageNews -- The Scoop on Our Programs

The Arts & Faith Top 100 Films

Just in time for this year’s Oscar awards ceremony, Image has released its 2010 Arts & Faith Top 100 Films list. Showcasing top films and directors from around the world and spanning cinematic history from a 1927 silent film to films currently in theaters (the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-nominated A Serious Man), the list is the culmination of years of discussion and debate among the ArtsandFaith.com online community. Last published in 2008, previous incarnations of the Arts & Faith Top 100 List have been featured in the LA Times, VH1, Christianity Today, and on Jeffrey Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere blog. The list has been called "an incomparable resource for anyone interested in exploring transcendent themes in the movies." In his blog post accompanying the Arts & Faith Top 100 Films list, film critic Jeffrey Overstreet (Through a Screen Darkly) defines the list as being "characterized both by artistic excellence and a serious wrestling with questions that at the root might be called religious or spiritual." Overstreet notes that this list will come as a surprise to those who think they know what a religious community might select. Films like The Ten Commandments and The Passion of the Christ did not even make the list, while a host of foreign-language films with subtitles were selected. "Many Christians," Overstreet explains, "have become so concerned about the usefulness of art as a tool of ministry and evangelism, they’ve forgotten--or never known in the first place--what art really is, and how it works." We hope this list will remind you of the powerful and multifarious ways that film can convey matters of faith, and suspect you may find a new personal favorite among the 100 final selections. Click here to view the list, here to visit or join the Arts & Faith community, and here to read Jeffrey Overstreet’s Good Letters blog on the significance of this list.

Image’s Newest Program: The Glen Online

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 GlenOnline.org, or email us at admin@glenonline.org.

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