More on Festival 2012: A Rookie’s Reflections

May 2, 2012 in Faith and Culture with 4 Comments

As I arrived at the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing, I expected the weekend to be filled with learning about reading and writing, and to leave the festival with more books than I knew what to do with. I hoped to learn about the Christian writing scene — something that was completely foreign to me until hours before I arrived in Grand Rapids — and what my role in that scene could possibly be in the future.

While I did learn about some of these things, and I did return to Chicago with my pack heavier than when I left, I ended up learning more about the current atmosphere of Christianity and, more importantly, my role in God’s kingdom as a writer.

In retrospect, the thing that I found unique about the festival was that it was essentially the hub of Christian culture. While there are other conferences around the world that also focus on Christianity, with dozens of speakers sharing God’s truth to audiences of thousands of people, it is at Calvin that these ideas all begin to emerge. The publishers who print the books that cause change across Christian culture were at Calvin, as were some authors and prominent thinkers in Christianity who all had stories to tell about faith and real life. It is from these publishers and speakers that the truth is conveyed to the general public.

Being at this center of Christian thought meant that I got to hear a lot of ideas that will soon start to take shape in the general Christian population. What I mainly saw was the beginning of a shift towards returning to basic Christian teachings, most prominently the idea of loving your neighbor regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or religious affiliation, for we are all made in God’s image.

This is something that we’re taught early in our Christian life, but do not always keep in mind as our focus drifts towards other things like repentance and personal conviction. I have seen too many Christians, including myself at times, who would rather condemn or ignore those whose ideologies do not align with Christian theology. We are too quick to tell people that they are wrong, when we should be showing them the love of Christ regardless of what they believe.

Thankfully, we are returning to an atmosphere of equality and acceptance in the Church, as was made evident by the passionate pleas of several speakers at the festival. I am proud to say that I had an opportunity to work with Relief, a publication that is especially pushing for this shift towards acceptance.

In light of all of this, I realized what my mission as a Christian writer is, and that is to share God’s truth with everyone without prejudice, while at the same time keeping in mind that life is never perfect or clean or clear-cut.

As a Christian, it is my duty to share the love and message of God with others, be it explicitly preaching it or by living my life as an example of Christ’s work during his time on earth. As a writer, I have a responsibility to try to make as much sense of life as I possibly can. The two are not mutually exclusive, as I have learned, and therefore, I believe it is my duty in life to try to help address the tough questions of the world, with Christ’s message as my guide.

I will not be able to answer every question or save every soul through my words, but I believe that as long as I stick to simply sharing God’s love through my work and my life, then my purpose will have been accomplished. The festival helped me realize that, and I returned to the daily grind of college with a renewed mindset that is especially important as I set foot on the path that will eventually lead me into the real world — a world which desperately needs the love of Christ.

Andrew Koenig is a guest contributor and served as a Relief intern during Festival 2012. He is a sophomore at Trinity International University pursuing a degree in English/Communications.

A Recap of the Festival of Faith & Writing 2012

April 28, 2012 in General with 0 Comments

Ian David Philpot

Web Editor Ian David Philpot shares his experience at the Festival of Faith and Writing.

Last weekend I attended Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, MI. This was my second time at the biannual conference. Both times I’ve attended I’ve been representing Relief, of which I am the web editor. This means that I spent a good amount of the conference at the Relief table in the exhibitor hall telling people about the journal and meeting people who we have published.

The sessions I saw were incredible! This is in stark contrast to my experience at AWP. Though I only went to four sessions (all on Friday), I couldn’t have been happier with them. The first session was called “The Word Needs Flesh: Sex and Faith in Contemporary Writing” with John Estes and Amy Frykholm (a Relief published author). The second session was “From Page to the Screen: Adapting Novels and Short Stories for Film” with Scott Teems. The third was an interview of one of my favorite authors: Craig Thompson. The fourth and final session was Craig going through his graphic novel writing process. I ended the day at Calvin’s art gallery where some of Craig’s drawings were on display.

Here are some of the snippets that I took away from the sessions:

  • “We’re uncomfortable with our needs and our wants because they’re selfish and we don’t want to be perceived as selfish.” —John Estes
  • “The church can’t make you holy any more a school can make you smart.” —John Estes on self motivation
  • “If you don’t really look at pleasure, you can’t have discipline over it.” —Amy Frykholm
  • “Our job as adapters is to attempt and theme—attempt to portray the author’s intentions and sort out the themes to display to keep the audience interested.” —Scott Teems
  • “Once you’ve done something autobiographical, you’ve burned all your bridges and you’re free to do whatever you want.” —Craig Thompson on the creative freedom that opened up after writing Blankets
  • “Because of the paper canvas, comics feel like a letter from the author.” —Craig Thompson

I also had the opportunity to meet some new people who were very kind, entertaining, and nice from Antler, Rock & Sling (here’s a picture a the awesome banner over their table), Word Farm, and many more. I also had a great time meeting some of the Relief staff I hadn’t met before, like Jake Slaughter, Lyle Enright, Andy Koenig, and Tania Runyan. Our evening shenanigans were the best I’ve ever had at a conference, and I was sad that they had to come to an end. Great people.

This blog post originally appeared on Ian’s blog. Ian writes fiction, poetry, and music. He prefers tea to coffee, Coca Cola to Pepsi, and only eats yellow cake.

Saying it New at the Festival: Art and the Christian

April 26, 2012 in Faith and Culture, General, Staff Posts with 0 Comments

Jake, Jesus, and the Bear

Jake at the Rock & Sling Table

Post-Festival Blog Post: In which Jake looks back on his experience, and likes what he sees.

  • Artists should seek to have the “courage of risking respect for all those who they encounter.” – Marilynne Robinson
  • Artists ought to “provoke the possibilities of how we live in the world.” – Shane Claiborne
  • Artists create stories. “Stories make you more humane, and more human.” – Gary Schmidt
  • “You will never love art well, until you love what it mirrors better” – Ruskin via Gary Schmidt

Do you sense a theme there? Throughout my time at Calvin’s Festival of Faith and Writing I sure did. What does it mean to be to be an artist? A Christian? A human?

I’m not going to claim to have a profound new insight from my time at the festival, but I am certainly feeling challenged, inspired, and eager as a result.

Tania’s previous post describes the atmosphere of the event well. In our daily lives it may be rare for us to find people excited about the same things we are. Our Christian friends may not care about our art, and our artistic friends may not care about our faith. It was different at this festival, though. I felt a strong connection with everyone I interacted with. Those people care about the things I care about. And if you’re reading this, odds are you care about many of those things too.

I’m still processing some of the things I heard from the sessions I attended, but there remains in me a general impression of two qualities: eager hope and earnest humility.

Art is not something we should use to impose our beliefs onto others. Rarely does that effectively communicate anything valuable and rarely does that us that allow us the opportunity to connect in a meaningful way.

Art is about connecting with people. Art is about challenging preconceptions of difference and allowing us the opportunity to love others unconditionally. Art spurs us on to action in a broken and frightened world. Art is about humbly suggesting an alternative to the way we currently live.

When you look at art this way, are we not simply saying that art is part of the function of our communicating the Gospel? Jesus, after all, spoke in brilliant little parables. In fact, in Matthew 13: 34 -35, it says that: “All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.’”

Jesus’ parables weren’t about saying something new, but about revealing those things that were established at the beginning of creation.

Similarly, our art should not be about saying something new for our advantage, but about somehow showing others that we care about those truths Jesus spoke about. We don’t have to do this explicitly (Jesus’ parables were often subtle, ambiguous, and misunderstood), but we do need to do this intentionally and graciously.

If all of us were willing to write with the kind of courage that allowed us to risk respecting all we encounter, as Marilynne Robinson describes, think of how effective could we be in our creation of connection to a desperate world.

Jake Slaughter is an editorial intern with Relief and will graduate from Trinity International University with a degree in English and English/Communications this spring.

This Ragged Band: Post-Festival Thoughts

April 24, 2012 in Faith and Culture, General, Staff Posts with 2 Comments

Tania Runyan

I know many of our readers have faced this dilemma: In the writing world, no one understands my faith. In fact, they often look down on people like me. At church, no one understands my art. In fact, they often look down on people like me.

Now, I am blessed to attend a church very supportive of my poetry career, a fellowship that buys my books and packs out local coffee houses at my readings. Also, other writers usually at least tolerate my faith. But not every artist is fortunate enough to feel accepted by both sides. And sometimes we need an experience much deeper than mere acceptance, more enthusiastic than a polite smile and nod.
Enter the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College. For four glorious days in Grand Rapids, I could be myself–my true messy, vulnerable, Jesus-obsessed, word-obsessed, praying self. Upon arrival, I embraced friends I had seen in person just once or twice or, in many cases, only on Facebook. We spoke effortlessly about poetry, church, parenting. We ambushed restuarants, sharing meals like extended families. We shared testimonies, confessed our darkest, ugliest writing jealousies and fears. (Okay, that was mostly me.) I even munched pretzels and hummus loudly at the Relief table while pitching the journal to potential subscribers, and Brad Fruhauff was totally cool with it.
Sure, maybe we’re just a bunch of nice people with exceptional interpersonal skills. But the weekend felt different than that. We had a spirit connection: a connection in Christ and a connection through our creative passions. As Dave Harrity, director of the Antler writing and teaching community wrote in a post-conference email, “Isn’t it wild what the incarnation has done to our relationships? Instant friends with like-minded people.”
Like-minded does not always mean like-aged, like-gendered, like-moneyed, like-denominationed, like-genred. But those characteristics slip to the margins when God takes the center. After the festival, Marci Johnson, poetry editor at WordFarm, posted this passage from Kathleen Norris’s Amazing Grace wherein Norris describes the worshipping body. I believe it describes how many of us writers felt this weekend:
I like to think that it resembles Christ’s ragged band of disciples in this manner, a diverse group with remarkable variance in personalities and attitudes toward Jesus. They were by no mean considered respectable by the religious establishment of their day, and they demonstrated many doubts and questions about this Jesus who has come into their lives.
We writers, ragged clothing and all, may not always earn the highest respect for our earning power and use of time. And yes, we have plenty of questions and doubts. But whatever we’re doing, we’re doing with this incarnation in our lives. And we’re doing it together.
Tania Runyan is guest poetry editor for Relief 6.1. Her book A Thousand Vessels is out now from WordFarm Press.

Too Busy Not to Attend Festival

April 18, 2012 in General, Relief News, Staff Posts with 0 Comments

If you’re going to Calvin’s Festival of Faith & Writing, you probably recognize this banner (which was the best I could do in a hurry from their site). We at Relief look forward to this event as one of the best times to be had in the world of Christian literary culture. We always hear from great favorite authors, discover new authors, and meet many of our own authors. Authors authors authors!

We also enjoy meeting readers and introducing ourselves to new readers. In general, people at the Festival are pretty open to what we do, but it’s interesting how quickly you find out if someone’s a Relief person or not. Use words like “edgy” and “raw”, reject what is safe, and say things like “We want Christian writing that doesn’t suck,” and most people will either light up or shut down. Well. We’re not here to offend, but we’re not afraid of doing it, either. As Wallace Stevens says of poetry (also mocking Christian uppity-ness),

This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

I am personally far too busy to even be going this year, but that’s almost a good reason to go. Festival is soul-enriching and inspiring. I’ll be looking forward to Marilynne Robinson, Scott Cairns, and Craig Thompson, among others. Relief authors Paul Willis, Amy Frykholm, Marjorie Maddox, Jeanne Murray Walker, and some others I’m not thinking of, will also be speaking.

We’ll do some blogging, of course, as we go, but we’re also interested in meeting you if you’re around. Stop by our table in the exhibitor hall and say hello.

Brad Fruhauff is Editor-in-Chief of Relief.

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