Issue 63 | Fall 2009
Gregory Wolfe writes about Saint Irenaeus of Lyons and how “we are all thirty seconds away from salvation”; James MacMillans argues that sacred music still matters; and Gordon Fuglie explores Guy Kinnear’s paintings of men “on the verge.” Plus, in Nicole Miller’s fiction we find ourselves in the ruins of a church, desperately; and Santiago Ramos writes all about cinematic superheroes. With poems by Robert Cording, Nancy Willard, and Carrie Jerrell; and more.
Editorial Statement
Gregory Wolfe, Thirty Seconds Away
Fiction
Elizabeth Smither, Scottie
Nicole Miller, The Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Hope
Poetry
John F. Deane, Lives of the Minor Prophets
Music
Nancy Willard, Ian's Angels
Robert A. Fink, Peace, like a River
Carrie Jerrell, In an Indiana County Thick with Copperheads
The Fire Tower
Daniel Tobin, Rogue Madonna
Robert Cording, Reading George Herbert
In Between
Richard Jones, The Jewel
Visual Arts
Gordon Fuglie, Guy Kinnear: Male Call
Joanna Weber, The House that Agnes Martin Built
Music
Michael Symmons Roberts, A Private Letter: A Poet on Writing for Composers
James MacMillan, Why Sacred Music Endures
Film
Santiago Ramos, The Superhero and His People
Confessions
John Terpestra, Skin Boat: Acts of Faith and Other Navigations
Web Exclusive: A Conversation with John Terpestra
Book Review
Hannah Faith Notess, Donna Freitas's The Possibilities of Sainthood
Nikki Grimes's Dark Sons
Gary Schmidt's Trouble
Sarah Zarr's Once Was Lost
Robert Cording teaches English and creative writing at Holy Cross College. He is the author of six poetry collections, most recently including Against Consolation, Common Life, and the forthcoming Walking with Ruskin (all from CavanKerry). He has received fellowships from the NEA and Bread Loaf. His poems have appeared in the Nation, New Yorker, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, DoubleTake, Orion, and Paris Review.
John F. Deane’s recent books include the poetry collection A Little Book of Hours (Carcanet), the story collection The Heather Fields (Blackstaff), and the essay collection From the Marrow-bone (Columba). His honors include the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry and the French government’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Elected secretary general of the European Academy of Poetry in 1996, he was recently a scholar in the Burns Library of Boston College.
Robert A. Fink directs the creative writing program at Hardin-Simmons University. His poems have appeared in the Southern Review and are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review.
Gordon Fuglie is the curator of exhibitions and collections at the San Luis Obispo Art Center, and writes regularly for Image. One of his recent projects was Corpora in Extremis: Five California Artists Engage the Figure, an exhibition in which the human form is used to explore physicality, spirituality, and new modes of narration. It included the work of Guy Kinnear.
Rod Jellema, for twenty years the director of creative writing at the University of Maryland, is the author of four books of poetry. The latest, A Slender Grace (Eerdmans), won the Towson University Prize and was chosen as Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature. He is currently assembling Incarnality: The Collected Poems (forthcoming from Eerdmans).
Carrie Jerrell’s debut collection, After the Revival, received the 2008 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Waywiser Press. She is an assistant professor of English at Murray State University.
Richard Jones is the author of six books of poems, most recently Apropos of Nothing(Copper Canyon). His poems appear in Billy Collins’s anthology Poetry 180 (Random House) and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems (Viking). The Blessing (Copper Canyon) won the Society of Midland Authors Award. Editor of Poetry East, he is professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago.
James MacMillan is the preeminent Scottish composer of his generation. His work has been performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Welsh National Opera. The U.S. premiere of his Saint John Passion will be performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in January, conducted by Sir Colin Davis. He was profiled by Michael Capps in Image #54.
Nicole Miller received her MFA in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College. A native of Iowa, she now lives and writes in Yonkers, New York.
Hannah Faith Notess is the creative writing editor at The Other Journal and was the 2008-09 Milton Center Postgraduate Fellow at Image. Her poems have appeared in The Christian Century, Slate, and Crab Orchard Review, among other journals. She is the editor of Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical (Cascade), a collection of personal essays.
Santiago Ramos has written about art, fiction, and film for Commonweal, FirstThings.com,Traces, and Kansas City’s weekly paper, The Pitch. He is currently pursuing graduate studies in philosophy at Boston College and blogs for Image Journal’s Good Letters.
Michael Symmons Roberts has published five books of poems. He has received the Whitbread Poetry Prize, Forward Prize, and Griffin International Poetry Prize. His collaboration with composer James MacMillan has led to choral commissions, song cycles, music theater works, and a full-length opera for the Welsh National Opera, The Sacrifice, which won the Royal Philharmonic Society Award. For more, visit www.SymmonsRoberts.com.
Dayne Sherman is a librarian at Southeastern Louisiana University. His novel, Welcome to the Fallen Paradise (MacAdam/Cage), was named a Best Debut of the Year by the Times-Picayune and a Best Crime Novel Debut by Booklist. He and his family live in Ponchatoula, Louisiana.
Elizabeth Smither has published five collections of short stories as well as novels and poetry. Her most recent collection is The Girl who Proposed (Cape Catley), which was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. In 2008 she received the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry.
John Terpstra is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Two or Three Guitars: Selected Poems. His books of nonfiction include: Falling into Place; The Boys, or Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter; and the forthcoming Skin Boat: Acts of Faith and Other Navigations, from which the essay printed here was taken. All are published by Gaspereau Press. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where he works as a writer, carpenter, and cabinetmaker.
Daniel Tobin is the author of four books of poems: Where the World Is Made (Middlebury),Double Life (Louisiana State), The Narrows (Four Way), and Second Things (Four Way), as well as a critical study on Seamus Heaney. His honors include the Robert Penn Warren Award, Robert Frost Fellowship, Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and an NEA fellowship.
Joanna Weber has worked as a curator at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Ringling Museum of Art. She has organized exhibitions and published articles on Henri Matisse, Nancy Graves, Father Marie-Alain Couturier, Philip Guston, and Josef Albers. Her article on Simone Weil and Father Couturier will be published in December in the Paris quarterly Cahiers Simone Weil.
Nancy Willard has published two novels, Things Invisible to See and Sister Water (both from Knopf), two collections of essays, and eleven books of poetry. She has been awarded grants from the NEA in fiction and poetry. Her most recent books are the poetry collection In the Salt Marsh (Knopf) and The Left-handed Story, a collection of lectures on writing (Michigan). She teaches in the English department at Vassar College.
Read our interview with John Terpestra, only available online!