Interview: Jamie Quatro, “The Body Believes”
Quatro describes her need for sensory experience in worship. In what sensory experiences do you find connection to the divine, inside or outside church?
Growing up in a family “looking for signs of the end,” Quatro says she was “primed for the visionary.” How has your upbringing influenced the way you think about sacred or ecstatic experience?
Quatro talks about the way her writing and her running have intertwined. Do you have physical practices or habits that feed your creative life?
Poem: Ae Hee Lee, “Mildang”
This poem’s title comes from a Korean word that means “push and pull” and describes a dynamic in romantic relationships. How does this influence your reading of the poem? Where does the narrator take “push and pull” beyond human relationships?
What images and words does the narrator use that indicate a connection to faith? What do you sense the narrator is communicating about faith?
Essay: Habiba Soliman, “Notes from Detention”
Soliman focuses more on the daily details of life in detention than the social forces or personal story that put her there. Why might she have chosen this? What is the effect of that choice on you as a reader?
The author was eighteen when she wrote this essay. At what moments does she think or speak like a teen? And what moments does she think or speak like someone older? Does knowing her age change how you read?
Culture: Yoni Gelerntner, “William Blake, AI, and the Inner Image”
Gelernter notes William Blake’s belief that an image “could not show in any final way how things were or how things are.” Do you agree?
Gelernter writes that the proliferation of AI-generated images has “cost us the ability to be struck by things we see, moved to real ethical action, because they can only reveal things we already know.” Where do you see this happening?
How do we practice the kind of looking that reminds us, as Gelernter puts it, “that there are inexhaustible infinities everywhere?”
Interested in joining or starting a local Image reading group? Visit www.imagejournal.org/reading-groups