The Image Podcast

Writing and Womaning Online with Tara Isabella Burton, Kaya Oakes, and Natasha Oladokun Social media has given women writers more opportunities, more power, and more authority in the public sphere and also in the church. But there’s also enormous pressure from publishers to create your brand. To establish platforms of countless followers before you even publish a book. To live up to—or to live down—your social media persona. All three of these writers have significant social media presences, and we sat down at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to talk about about how their experiences online have affected their writing and their faith. Listen to our conversation to find out how we navigate the social media landscape as part of their daily work as writers, reporters, teachers, and women of faith.

Season 2, Episode 1: “In This Here Place, We Flesh: Black Bodies in Art and Church ” My guests for this episode are Jessica B. Davenport and Biko Mandela Gray. Jessica B. Davenport is a doctoral student in the department of religion at Rice University researching black religion, aesthetics, and visual culture. She also has an MDiv from the Candler School of Theology. Jessica is the associate director and editor at large at projectCURATE, a Houston-based organization that focuses on issues at the intersections of religion, race, and social equity. Biko Mandela Gray is assistant professor of religion at Syracuse University. His research interests are race, religion, philosophy of religion, and social justice. He’s currently working on a book on black lives matter and religion. I sat down with Jessica and Biko at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they offered a workshop on the blackness of art. They talked to me about how black theology, and especially what is known as Womanist theology, have always reached beyond traditional liturgical materials to music, art, dance and literature. The arts and theology are often one and the same. Black people are producing, have always produced, creative works of theology that must be taken seriously within the Christian tradition. Many times when I talk to white artists of faith, we’ll express how we are drawn to certain liturgical forms because they involve the body in worship. But the body is usually involved in prescribed forms—standing, sitting, kneeling, bowing, moving the hands in the sign of the cross or even moving fingers along beads. I was struck by Jessica’s and Biko’s description of worship in historically black churches as a completely different experience of embodiment, one that is one that is not about mastery and conformity but about liberation. Black churches have often been the only place it’s safe to live fully and freely in a black body—to celebrate the body as an instrument through which God moves. I spoke to Jessica and Biko just days before the death of writer Toni Morrison. The title of this episode comes from one of Biko’s favorite quotes from her novel, Beloved: “In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. “ We talked about art that explores what it means “to flesh”— to worship, to work, to live in a black body. Friendship Is More Than Coffee and Proximity The theme for this year’s Glen Workshop was “As Iron Sharpens Iron: The Promise & Peril of Friendship.” The talks the resident artists and scholars gave throughout the week focused on friendship and rivalry among artists. Biko spoke about the relationship between Andy Warhol and Jean Michel Basiquiat. Jessica’s lecture focused on historic images of black people with their white employers and art photography of black women together. You can listen to their talks on the Image website, and we explore both those topics in the next segment of my interview. But first, both Biko and Jessica talked frankly about their hesitancy in discussing friendship at all in a predominantly white space.

Malcolm Guite is a priest, poet, songwriter, and chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge. He’s also served as a chaplain at our Glen Workshops in Santa Fe. I came to know Guite’s work through the online community Sick Pilgrim, where his book, Sounding the Seasons, a collection of sonnets inspired by the liturgical year, is much beloved. The artists in Sick Pilgrim, many of whom are struggling to make sense of their Christian faith in the context of their work, also love the figure of Guite himself. To give you an idea of why, he’s been described as what you might get if John Donne journeyed to Middle Earth by way of San Francisco, took musical cues from Jerry Garcia and fashion tips from Bilbo Baggins, and rode back on a Harley. Guite is the author of five books of poetry, including two chapbooks and three full-length collections. His book Mariner is a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, shaped and structured around the story he told in his most famous poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The Tablet predicted it would become a classic of Christian spirituality. Scott Cairns has said that Coleridge is a poet he remains in conversation with when he writes. He’s one of the dead poets Cairns says he keeps on his desk. His eight books of poetry include Idiot Psalms and Slow Pilgrim. He’s an editorial advisor to Image and the director of the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University, and his poems and essays have appeared in many of our issues. He’s also the author of one of the books that stays on my own writing desk: The End of Suffering, Finding Purpose in Pain. Cairns said in an interview that he no longer looks at poetry as an expressive art, but more as a way of knowing. He puts words on the page, trusting the language will lead into seeing something he hadn’t anticipated. Both Guite and Cairns open up new ways of thinking about what it means to be an artist of faith. David Jennings brought them together in Santa Fe to read from their work, and to talk about the enduring influence of Coleridge, their mutual obsession with time, and how writing and reading poetry can help us to heal experiences of "bad church." Original music composed by Sister Sinjin Episode produced by Cassidy Hall and Roy Salmond. Don’t miss an episode: subscribe now on iTunes or Google Play. For exclusive content, updates, and sneak peeks at future episodes, become a Patreon supporter on Patreon.com/ImagePodcast.

Image is a religious journal, but maybe not in the way you'd expect. Our executive editor, Mary Kenagy Mitchell, says that "we give voice to writers who are devout, or full of doubt. The grapplers, the joyful, the angry, the bereaved, the confused. The connecting thread is the effort to get language and art to bear transcendent mystery. We aren’t interested in ideal faith but in faith as it actually is. A faith balanced against doubt." This, Mitchell says, is why we named our annual award after Denise Levertov. Levertov’s identity as a Christian believer—a pilgrim whose faith was inextricably entwined with doubt—was an important facet of her work. Forché is a poet, editor, translator, and activist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. Many readers will also know Forché through the anthologies she edited, Against Forgetting and Poetry of Witness. Her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, was published in 2019. Forché delivered the Levertov Award lecture at Hugo House, a center for Seattle writers offering readings, classes, and community events. She began by recalling a life-changing event in Michigan State’s writing program in 1968, when Dr. Linda Wagner Martin, who taught her poetry workshop, played a recording of Denise Levertov reading poetry. Both Forché and Levertov got into trouble with their poetry. Levertov wrote about the Vietnam War and Forché, in her 20s, wrote about El Salvador on the brink of civil war in The Country Between Us. Levertov, who was so influential on the younger Forché, became a colleague and a mentor. She expressed her admiration for Forché's work, calling it lyrical and engaged, saying it was the kind of work she wanted to do. In this episode, you'll hear Carolyn Forché pay tribute to Levertov, read her own work, and answer questions about how writers can both bear witness and sustain each other in times of political and personal upheaval. Every year, we present this award, in partnership with Seattle Pacific University’s Department of English and MFA in creative writing, and with Seattle’s Hugo House, to an artist, musician or writer whose work exemplifies a serious and sustained engagement with faith. Poet Marilyn Nelson will receive the 2019 Levertov Award in November. In 2018, Scott Cairns presented Carolyn Forché with the Levertov Award for her life’s work as a poet of witness, as an activist, and as a writer whose work reflects a long engagement with faith, justice and beauty.

“When you enter the world of art, like it or not, you are entering the realm of religion.” –Aaron Rosen Today's conversation is with Image’s new visual arts editor, Aaron Rosen. Aaron is Professor of Religion & Visual Culture and Director of the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary. But he also generates and participates in conversations about religion and the arts outside of academia. He’s spoken at universities, museums, and religious institutions around the world. He writes books about art for adults and children; he’s contributed to newspapers and magazines, and provided commentary for the BBC. He also enjoys working directly with artists and has co-curated exhibitions, including an international traveling Stations of the Cross. Aaron is Jewish, and his wife, Carolyn Rosen, is an Episcopal priest, so he has a special interest in thinking about and practicing inter-faith dialogue. He wants to bring an expansive, multi-faith element to Image’s art coverage while we remain fully engaged in the contemporary art world. He has what he calls an “old-fashioned commitment to really good art,” because the best art, he says, helps us think better theologically. I talked to Aaron about growing up with a Jewish father and Catholic mother; how religion is, for him, a creative experience; and why we need to have, literally, more faith in art. -- Jessica Mesman, June 2019

When my guest, poet Shane McCrae, was in high school, he made what he calls a “serious existential commitment” to quit life. The child of a black father and a white mother, has was raised in part by his maternal grandparents, who were white supremacists and denied that he was black. By the time he was in junior high, he was flunking out of school and didn’t care much for anything, he says, besides skateboarding and music. Then, in high school, he saw a cheesy movie that changed his life, because in it, a girl read a poem by Sylvia Plath. He “became profoundly obsessed.” He had an idea that “poetry was either going to be the key to the rest of my life, or there just wasn’t going to be a key.” He became a regular at the school library, poring over books about poets’ lives. Plath’s poetry struck him as sad, but the sadness, he said, somehow made him feel better. McCrae dropped out of high school. He was a dad by the age of 18. He got his GED and started community college, eventually transferring to the University of Oregon, where he discovered his favorite poetry, Elizabethan and Renaissance English poetry. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene became “necessary”, he says, to his conception of himself, his world, his art. He went on to get an MFA and a JD from Harvard Law. Since 2010, he’s written six books of poetry including his most recent, the Guilded Auction Block. He’s received numerous awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His is an extraordinary story, but McCrae often speaks of the details of his life with what the New Yorker described as “a judicial coolness that makes the details all the more devastating.” Maybe those details are so devastating because behind McCrae’s literary success is a story of the America we know exists but would prefer did not. His poems are written in meter,-- he says he wants to adhere to rules—and yet they approximate the sound of the subconscious, as Amelia Klein noted in her review of his book Mule for the Boston Review. Klein wrote that McCrae’s poems "do what the mind does with words when it isn’t using them intentionally but murmuring to itself consolingly and censoriously of its own imperfectly recorded history." For this episode I talked to Shane McCrae about his new role as poetry editor at Image. We also talked about depression, his love for Sylvia Plath, how the rules of poetry help him to engage the infinite (writing in free verse makes him anxious, he says), and how this connects to a spiritual path that led him from atheism to Islam to the Episcopal Church. -- Jessica Mesman, May 2019

Mourning Faith: A Conversation with R.O. Kwon and Jessica Mesman

A conversation with Chigozie Obioma.

A Conversation with Katie Kresser, Associate Professor of Art at Seattle Pacific University.

Jessica Mesman sits down for an interview with Image editor in chief, James K.A. Smith.

If you’ve been keeping up with us here at Image, you know that our fall issue featured the never-before-published college journal of Flannery O’Connor entitled “Higher Mathematics.” On a special episode of our podcast, Gregory Wolfe sits down with Mark Bosco, SJ, who was instrumental in the publication of “Higher Mathematics,”and is in the midst of producing a documentary about Flannery that is set to premiere in February. Sit back and enjoy this conversation with Mark, as well as a brief reading from the journal itself.

Today’s podcast guest has many titles: staff film critic at Vox.com, associate professor of English and Humanities at The King’s College in New York City, published co-author, with Robert Joustra, of How to Survive the Apocalypse (Eerdmans), and a 2013 graduate of the Seattle Pacific University MFA program. Most recently, Alissa taught “The Art of Criticism” at the 2017 Glen Workshop, where she and her students talked about criticism, wrote about criticism, and paid special attention to what makes great criticism. You can find her work on Vox’s website https://www.vox.com/authors/alissa-wilkinson, and keep up with her day-to-day on Twitter as @alissamarie. If you’re interested in the SPU MFA program, learn more at our revamped website: spu.edu/mfa.

“To be a poet, you have to write more than you know.” Scott Cairns engages with this idea throughout his interview with Image editor and founder Greg Wolfe, as the pair discuss language, meaning-making, and faith. A recipient of Image’s Denise Levertov award who has been published in our pages over and over again, Scott has been a friend of the journal for years. He currently teaches at the University of Missouri, and also serves as the director for the MFA in Creative Writing at Seattle Pacific University. He has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent being Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems in 2015. In this episode of our show, you’ll hear him read two of his poems, and explore how learning about language enables a richer, deeper sense of what one writes. For more on Scott, as well as more information about the the SPU MFA program, please visit spu.edu/mfa. Applications for the Winter 2018 residency close November 15, 2017.

“I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” These words from the Book of Matthew are quoted often, but it’s rare to see someone living them out, and inviting the rest of us to join him. This week on our show, we’re joined by friend of the journal Chris Hoke, who does both of these things. If you visit Chris’s website, you’ll see three titles under his name: Gang Pastor, Jail Chaplain, and Writer. He and his colleague Neaners Garcia, who is also a former inmate and gang leader, are the founders and Co-Executive Directors of Underground Ministries, a team that works to promote prisoner relationships and reentry after incarceration. Chris chronicles his experiences in his writing, which you can find in several journals, including Image Journal, and on our blog, Good Letters. In 2013, he graduated from the Seattle Pacific University MFA program, and in 2015 HarperCollins published his first book Wanted: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders. This year, Chris served as the chaplain at the MFA’s Whidbey residency, where Paul Anderson sat down with him to talk about his work. You are about to hear that conversation. Plus, stay tuned for a sneak peek of our next episode featuring poet Scott Cairns.

At the Glen Workshop in August, Image editor Greg Wolfe recorded a nearly hour-long conversation with poet and social activist, Carolyn Forché. Hailed not only for her exquisite poetry but also for her work in promoting greater awareness of “the poetry of witness,” Forché is at once gentle and passionate. Over the course of the conversation she ranges over a variety of topics, from her teaching style to the meaning of “presence” to memorable stories of her friendships with figures like poet Czeslaw Milosz and martyred El Salvadoran bishop, Oscar Romero—about whom she is writing in a new memoir.