Issue 76 | Winter 2012
A conversation with Christian Wiman; Patton Dodd on Hollywood’s Christian villains and the myth of religious violence; Spencer Reece on Emily Dickinson; and Paul Dannels on the ecosystem of abandoned buildings. With new fiction by Lucy Warner and Michael Morris; poetry by Amit Majmudar, Claude Wilkinson, Orlando Ricardo Menes, and John F. Deane; and more.
Editorial Statement
Gregory Wolfe, Courtyard of the Gentiles
Fiction
Lucy Warner, And Not as a Stranger
Michael Morris, Jesus Called
Poetry
John F. Deane, Yam Kinneret: The Harp Music
Carol Ann Davis, Ars Cantata
To Jenya on First Noticing the Dog's Bowl of My Imagination
Amit Majmudar, Pontius Pilate Fugue
The Shadow Cross
The Waltz of Descartes and Mohammed
Lisa Williams, Adjusting to Darkness
Kinds of Resistance
Becca J.R. Lachman, Sunday: Day of Rest
Monday: Peach
Tuesday: Rhubarb, Lattice Crust
Rumspringa
Robert Cording, Bede's Sparrow
A Christmas Story
Christopher Howell, Friend
Reflection Upon Psalm 121
Orlando Ricardo Menes, El Cristo de Piedra
Claude Wilkinson, Death Room, Fort Scott, 1949
Visual Arts
John A. Kohan, Peter Howson and the Harrowing of Hell
Interview
A Conversation with Christian Wiman
Essay
Gregory Orr, Naming the Beloved:
Ethics, Aesthetics, and Lyric Poetry
Bonnie Friedman, The Discipline of the Notebook
Spencer Reece, My Evangelist
Life In The Industry
Paul Dannels, Decay and Resurrection:
An Engineer on the Ecosystem of Abandoned Buildings
Film
Patton Dodd, Power in the Blood:
Hollywood and the Myth of Religious Violence
Web Exclusive: An Interview with Patton Dodd
Book Review
Kelly Foster on Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss
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 Walking with Ruskin (all from CavanKerry). He has received fellowships from the NEA and Bread Loaf. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Orion, and Paris Review.
Paul Dannels is an architect in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a fellow of the American Institute of Architects. He serves as a consultant to architects on structural engineering matters and teaches engineering to architecture students at Lawrence Technological University. His projects include the recently completed Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.
Carol Ann Davis is the author of Psalm and Atlas Hour, both from Tupelo Press. A recipient of an NEA Fellowship in poetry, she has recently published work in American Poetry Review, Agni, and Volt. After directing the undergraduate creative writing program at the College of Charleston and editing Crazyhorse there for many years, in 2012 she joined the faculty in writing at Fairfield University in Connecticut.
John F. Deane’s most recent poetry collections are Eye of the Hare and Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill: New & Selected Poems (Carcanet). His awards include the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, the Golden Key Award from Serbia, and the Laudomia Bonanni Prize from L’Aquila, Italy. He is the editor of Poetry Ireland Review, which he founded in 1979.
Patton Dodd is the executive editor of Bondfire Books and a contributing editor for Patheos.com. His writing on religion and culture has appeared in a range of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CNN.com, Newsweek, Slate, Christianity Today, and Books & Culture. He holds a PhD in religion and literature from Boston University.
Kelly Foster is currently the Milton Fellow at Image and teaches imaginative writing at Seattle Pacific University. For the last four years, she has been a regular contributor at Image’s blog, Good Letters. Her first collection of personal essays, Boystown Blues, is forthcoming from Antler in 2014.
Bonnie Friedman is the author of Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life (HarperCollins) and The Thief of Happiness (Beacon). Her work has been included in Best American Movie Writing, Best Writing on Writing, and Best Spiritual Writing. She teaches at the University of North Texas.
Christopher Howell’s most recent books are Dreamless and Possible: Poems New & Selected (Washington) and Gaze (Milkweed). Other recent work has appeared in Field, Crazyhorse, Pleiades, Gettysburg Review, and The Journal. He has been awarded two NEA fellowships and won a number of other prizes and awards. He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers.
John A. Kohan worked at Time magazine for twenty-two years as an associate editor and correspondent. He settled in Cyprus in 1996, where he began collecting and writing about contemporary sacred art. He now lives in the US and owns the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection. He is co-author of Beauty Given by Grace: The Biblical Prints of Sadao Watanabe (Square Halo).
Becca J.R. Lachman’s pie poems are based on the life of her Mennonite grandmother. Raised in Kidron, Ohio, Lachman has published a poetry collection, The Apple Speaks (Cascadia), and is currently editing A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford (forthcoming from Woodley Press). She teaches and tutors at Ohio University.
Amit Majmudar’s poetry collections are 0°, 0° (TriQuarterly) and Heaven and Earth (Story Line), winner of the 2011 Donald Justice Prize. His novels are Partitions and The Abundance (both from Holt/Metropolitan). His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Best American Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, and the Norton Introduction to Literature.
Orlando Ricardo Menes directs the creative writing program at Notre Dame. He is the author of the forthcoming collection Fetish (Nebraska), winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry; translator of My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni (Latin American Literary Review); and editor of The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991–2008 (Notre Dame). He received an NEA Fellowship in 2009.
Michael Morris is the author of the novels Man in the Blue Moon (Tyndale), named a best book of 2012 by Publishers Weekly; A Place Called Wiregrass; and Slow Way Home (both from HarperCollins). Slow Way Home was named a best novel of the year by the St. Louis Dispatch and Atlanta Journal Constitution. He has published essays in the Los Angeles Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Denver Post.
Gregory Orr’s most recent poetry collections are River inside the River (Norton) and How Beautiful the Beloved (Copper Canyon). His other books include a memoir, The Blessing (Council Oak), and a book of essays, Poetry as Survival (Georgia). He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA program in writing.
Spencer Reece is an Episcopal priest working in Honduras on a Fulbright grant to create an anthology of poetry by schoolchildren at the orphanage of Our Little Roses, a home for abandoned and abused girls. His book of poems, The Road to Emmaus, will be published in April 2014 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Jeanne Murray Walker’s seven poetry collections include A Deed to the Light (Illinois) and New Tracks, Night Falling (Eerdmans). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Atlantic Monthly. She is a professor at the University of Delaware and a mentor in the Seattle Pacific University MFA Program. Her memoir Geography of Memory (Hachette) is forthcoming.
Lucy Warner has published short stories in Tiferet, Georgetown Review, and Persimmon Tree. She published a story collection, Mirrors (Knopf), in 1969 and taught for many years in family shelters, a drug rehab facility, a preschool for homeless children, and an entrepreneurial program for homeless women. She divides her time between New York City and her hometown in Maine.
Claude Wilkinson is a critic, painter, and poet. His poetry collections include Reading the Earth (Michigan State), which won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, and Joy in the Morning (Louisiana State), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He currently lives in Nesbit, Mississippi.
Lisa Williams is the author of Woman Reading to the Sea (Norton) and The Hammered Dulcimer (Utah State). She has been the recipient of the Barnard Women Poets Prize and the Rome Prize. She teaches at Centre College.
Read our interview with Patton Dodd, only available online!