Don’t look for Luci Shaw lingering atop some contemplative mountaintop. She’s just as likely to be flinging herself off it. Poet, spiritual essayist, bungee jumper, world traveler, and photographer, she comes by her words of wisdom by pondering on the go. In short, she’s that rarest of rare birds, someone who finds a way to blend action and contemplation. Wherever she finds herself, Shaw keeps a sharp eye to the buzzing mystery at the edges of experience, her journal at the ready. Then she writes poetry and reflective prose, with a keenness and vigor that lovingly describes what Hopkins called the “inscape” of things. By turns sly and rowdy, earnest and perceptive, she tugs out the vital truth from under the appearance of things. Her mind is a joy to follow as it moves from the turning of a leaf into the turning of a thought. Whether she lingers over images of water, sky, and growing things in her poems—weaving them into startling, but mysterious associations—or burrows into the cavities of the soul to bring healing with exhortation, one can’t help but feel moved to answer to Shaw’s calling to a deeper sort of life. Now it’s just a matter of keeping up with her.
Some of Shaw’s work is featured in Image issue 41 and issue 75. Read an interview with Shaw here.
Biography
Luci Shaw was born in 1928 in London, England, and has lived in Canada, Australia, and the U.S.A. A 1953 high honors graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois, she became co-founder and later president of Harold Shaw Publishers, and since 1988 has been an adjunct faculty member and Writer in Residence at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.
Shaw is a frequent retreat facilitator and leads writing workshops in church and university settings. She has lectured in North America and abroad on topics such as art and spirituality, the Christian imagination, poetry-writing, and journal-writing as an aid to artistic and spiritual growth.
A charter member of the Chrysostom Society of Writers, Shaw is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including Polishing the Petoskey Stone (Shaw 1990, Regent 2003), Writing the River(Pinon Press 1994/Regent 1997), The Angles of Light (Shaw/Waterbrook 2000), The Green Earth, Poems of Creation (Eerdmans 2002), and Water Lines (Eerdmans 2004). She has edited three poetry anthologies and a festschrift, The Swiftly Tilting Worlds of Madeleine L’Engle (Shaw 1998), and her poems and essays have been widely anthologized. Shaw has authored several non-fiction prose books including God in the Dark (Zondervan 1986/Regent 1998), Water My Soul, Cultivating the Interior Life, (Zondervan 1998/Regent 2003), and The Crime of Living Cautiously, Hearing God’s Call to Adventure (InterVarsity 2005). She is co-author, with Madeleine L’Engle, of Winter Song (Shaw, Regent), Friends for the Journey (Servant/Vine, Regent), and A Prayerbook for Spiritual Friends (Augsburg/Fortress).
Shaw is poetry editor and a contributing editor of Radix, a quarterly journal published in Berkeley, CA, that celebrates art, literature, music, psychology, science and the media, featuring original poetry, reviews and interviews. She is also the poetry and fiction editor of Crux, an academic journal published quarterly by Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.
She and her husband John Hoyte live in Bellingham, Washington, and are members of St. Paul ‘s Episcopal Church. She loves sailing, tent camping, knitting, gardening, and wilderness photography.
Current Projects
January 2006
“I’m in process of completing a manuscript of my collected lectures and essays, all to do with imagination, faith and art, to be titled Breath for the Bones.
My friends know that I write and send out a new poem every Christmas. All of these poems have been published in various periodicals over the years. Now they’ll appear together in a volume titled Accompanied by Angels. This Incarnation poetry written over the last fifty-plus years is forthcoming from Eerdmans in 2006.
New poetry keeps coming and taking over my life. These new poems with the title What the Light Was Like will be released by WordFarm in April, 2006. A children’s book, The Genesis of It All (a re-telling of the Creation story that I wrote for a church festival), is in the illustration stage with Paraclete Press. Other children’s Scripture-based stories in a similar vein may follow.
I continue to write, teach, speak at writers’ conference, give readings, and lead retreats. My forward creative process has always unfolded organically with time and the process of living. That’s the pattern I continue to follow. I rarely set myself formal goals (except for fulfilling someone else’s deadline), but try to follow where the Spirit leads, and be attentive, always, to insights gained by wide reading, observation of the natural world and human relationships, and spiritual reflection. Serving on the Image board is also a high priority.
There are always more opportunities than the time and energy to fulfill them, and I like it that way! It’s a kind of life that never gets boring. The Creator is always there supplying hints and guesses that lead to more of the hints and guesses that make up poetry.”