More on: Gregory Wolfe

FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS I’ve been saving up the fiction of Anthony Trollope as a sort of mid-life treat. At least I hoped it would be a treat. Trollope is the kind of author who is often ridiculed as a literary lightweight: a Victorian lacking the range and energy of Dickens; a drawing-room chronicler…

HISTORY IS WRITTEN by the victors, so the saying goes. It would be pleasant to believe that the history of literature (or the arts in general) might prove an exception to this rule, that artistic merit will always be recognized in its own time, regardless of fashion or ideology. But we know that’s not true.…

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, I wanted to be Christopher Hitchens. In a manner of speaking. I didn’t, in fact, learn who he was until I was in my thirties, but I can see in retrospect that Hitchens was the epitome of everything I hoped to be as a writer. My passions were political, philosophical,…

The following is adapted from a commencement address given for the Seattle Pacific University master of fine arts in creative writing on August 6, 2011.   I’D LIKE TO SHARE a few thoughts with you that I hope are appropriate for the occasion, words derived from two texts we’ve studied together, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets…

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. —————————————John 3:8 THE SUMMER OF 1968, though it mourned the recent assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and shuddered at the murder…

The following is adapted from a commencement address given for the Seattle Pacific University master of fine arts in creative writing on August 3, 2013. OUR THEME FOR THIS residency has been comedy. As we’ve discovered, it’s a difficult topic precisely because we think we know all about it already. A number of truisms trip…

WHEN DANA GIOIA’S ESSAY “Can Poetry Matter?” appeared in The Atlantic in 1991, it galvanized a national conversation about the state of American literature and how creative writing was being taught, produced, and consumed by the reading public. That piece justly propelled Gioia to the front ranks of American letters, not only as a critic but as…

The following is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 9, 2014.   IN THE RAPIDLY CHANGING, cutthroat literary marketplace—where it’s easy to get published but harder to make any money or sustain a career—my usual commencement address, based as it…

There is nothing new under the sun.                                 —Ecclesiastes 1:9 Behold, I make all things new.                                 —Revelation 21:5   TO CELEBRATE OUR twenty-fifth anniversary this year we chose the theme “Making It New.” It seemed a simple enough decision. This journal exists to publish art and literature that engage the western faith traditions in…