Issue 70 - Image Journal

Issue 70 | Summer 2011

Steven D. Greydanus looks at broken homes in fantasy films; Michael McGregor remembers his friend and mentor Robert Lax, the avant-garde poet; and Samuel Martin interviews one of Canada’s most prolific and powerful writers, David Adams Richards. With fiction by Rubén Degollado and Valerie Sayers; poems by Martha Serpas, Alison Pelegrin, and Ricardo Pau-Llosa; the artwork of Enrique Martínez Celaya; and more.

Table of Contents

Editorial Statement

Gregory Wolfe, The Operation of Grace

Fiction

Rubén Degollado, Padre Nuestro
Valerie Sayers, Interference

Web Exclusive: Valerie Sayers on Baseball and Fiction

Confessions

Bonita Friedman, The Watcher

Book Review

Lisa Russ Spaar, Stephen Cushman's Riffraff
Kate Daniels's A Walk in Victoria's Secret
Mark Jarman's Bone Fires
Christian Wiman's Every Riven Thing

Samuel Martin, David Adams Richards's Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

Contributors

Cindy Beebe has poems published or forthcoming in Southern Review, Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Evansville Review, Rock & Sling, and National Poetry Review, among others. She resides in Collierville, Tennessee.

Brad Davis has taught creative writing at the College of the Holy Cross, Eastern Connecticut State University, and Pomfret School. He has published a four-volume poetic sequence in conversation with the Psalms (Antrim House), and his sixth collection is Opening King David(Wipf & Stock). His honors include the IAM Poetry Prize.

Rubén Degollado’s fiction has appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Relief, and the anthologies Fantasmas andBearing the Mystery. Recently he was a finalist in American Short Fiction’s annual contest,Glimmer Train’s Family Matters Contest, and Bellingham Review’s 2010 Tobias Wolff Award. He has been a school administrator in Oregon and Texas for the last seven years.

Bonita Friedman is the author of the Village Voice bestseller Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life (HarperCollins) and The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy (Beacon). Her essays have been included in Best American Movie Writing, Best Writing on Writing, and Best Spiritual Writing. She teaches at the University of North Texas.

Steven D. Greydanus is film critic for the National Catholic Register and creator of DecentFilms.com. His work appears regularly in a number of print, online, and broadcast venues, including Christianity Today Movies & TV and EWTN Radio. He is a contributor to theNew Catholic Encyclopedia, having written a number of film-related articles.

Mark Jarman’s latest collection of poetry is Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems(Sarabande). He is Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and an elector of the Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York City.

Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s latest book of poems is Parable Hunter (Carnegie Mellon). Notre Dame’s Snite Museum of Art recently exhibited Parallel Currents: Highlights of the Ricardo Pau-Llosa Collection of Latin American Art and published a book-length catalogue on his collection.

Samuel Martin is the author of This Ramshackle Tabernacle (Breakwater), a collection of linked stories shortlisted for the 2010 Winterset Award. His first novel, Ash and Hoarfrost, will be published by Breakwater in 2012. His work has appeared in Comment, QWERTY, The Telegram, and Relief, and his story “Running the Whale’s Back” is forthcoming in Image.

Michael McGregor’s work has appeared in Seattle Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, StoryQuarterly, South Dakota Review, and Poets & Writers. His awards include an Oregon Literary Arts fellowship, an Illinois Arts Council literary grant, and the Daniel Curley Award for short fiction. He teaches nonfiction writing at Portland State University. This fall he will be a resident scholar at Saint John’s University’s Collegeville Institute, finishing a book on Robert Lax.

Alison Pelegrin is the author of Big Muddy River of Stars as well as the forthcomingHurricane Party (both from Akron). The recipient of a fellowship from the NEA, she has published work in Poetry, Ploughshares, and the Southern Review.

Lincoln Perry is a painter and sculptor. He graduated from Columbia University and Queens College and has taught in New Hampshire, Arkansas, New York, and Charlottesville, where he is currently completing a large mural cycle for the University of Virginia. He is married to the writer Ann Beattie, and they divide their time between Key West, Maine, and Virginia.

Bobby C. Rogers is professor of English at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. His poetry has appeared in Southern Review, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and many other magazines. New work is forthcoming in Southern Review, Southwest Review, Southern Humanities Review, Literary Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Epoch. He lives in Memphis.

Valerie Sayers, author of six novels, is professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her literary honors include a Pushcart Prize, an NEA fellowship, and inclusion on “Notable” and “Distinguished” lists at the New York Times Book Review, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Essays. A version of her story “Interference” will appear as part of The Powers, a novel forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.

Martha Serpas’s most recent poetry collection is The Dirty Side of the Storm (Norton). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker and Southwest Review and in the anthologies The Art of the Sonnet and American Religious Poems. A native of southern Louisiana, she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Houston and works as a hospital chaplain.

Daniel A. Siedell is an art historian, critic, and curator whose writing addresses the relationship of art, theology, and ethics. He has taught modern and contemporary art history, criticism, and theory at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and is the author of several books, including Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury (Nebraska), God in the Gallery (Baker Academic), and An Excavation of Tenth Street: Essays on Abstract Expressionism (Whale & Star, forthcoming).

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Satin Cash(Persea) and Vanitas, Rough (forthcoming from Persea). She is editor of Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems and All That Mighty Heart: London Poems, as well as of the “Arts & Academe” blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her prizes include a Rona Jaffe Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Library of Virginia Prize. She also teaches at the University of Virginia.

Will Wells is the author of two poetry collections, Conversing with the Light (Anhinga) andUnsettled Accounts (Ohio/Swallow). A 2010 Walter E. Dakin Fellow at Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a professor at Rhodes State College, he has published poems in Hudson Review, Field, Natural Bridge, Permafrost, Cimarron Review, and Roanoke Review. The 2006 NEH Summer Institute “Venice, the Jews and Italian Culture” provided inspiration for these particular poems.

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