“As we trundle through Nebraska, I watch each little town crop up, sharpen, and then disappear. And I feel what she means, the way the shifting light hits the eves of a barn and instantly throws into focus all the lives you could be living but aren’t. The luckier ones, and the less lucky, and the lives for which luck isn’t a useful metric at all. I look out the passenger window, and for a second all these other existences feel just as clear, sharp, and urgent as my own. This is the feeling I’ve learned to call grace. If I could just keep looking and looking, I think, I could fathom things, find my way back to wonder....

Really, this is why I’ve always loved and needed poems: they sustain the contemplative hours of the early, unbreeched morning, whenever you come to them. They both demand careful observation and carve the space for it. It’s also why the first thing that happens when I stop really looking around is that I stop writing. And why, when I stop writing, almost immediately belief begins to feel like something distant and ludicrous. The truth is, I frequently find faith difficult to sustain. So much is brutal. Being alive is loud, laborious, and painful. But the people and poems and prayers I love most teach me again and again that the cure for the estrangement from hope is not to look away from the world but toward it, and that this takes practice and strength. I hope I live here long enough to say something gracefully. I hope I can look long and hard enough to let the mess and the mystery break my heart. For now, we’re still driving through Nebraska. Around us, the grass grows steadily taller. Ahead of us, ‘the clouds become enormous & have names.’”

–Molly McCully Brown, “Nebraskan Mystery,” issue 122 editorial

Here at Image, we have room for quiet reverence, for the contemplative mode. We have room for humor. We have room for the formal and for the experimental. For figuration and abstraction. For long reads and (very occasionally) flash fiction. For bronze sculpture and video art, for oil painting and graffiti. We reject didactic and polemical art, but we also have room for anguish, rage, and thirst for justice. We have room for muddle and mess. We have room for wonder and awe. In each age, this needs to happen in new ways, which is why our focus is on contemporary work.

Our work depends on a small but dedicated group of people who “get it”: the importance of considering life’s big questions and grappling with faith and doubt isn’t something that everyone understands, but we believe this is critical work, exploring nuance in an age that encourages stark lines and black-and-white thinking.

Today, you can help Image continue to build a life-giving, art-filled, faith-fueled, boundary-bridging community that shapes our collective imagination.  Will you consider the ways that you can support our work?

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