Archive - July, 2011

Paul’s Advice for Writers

July 22, 2011 in Faith and Culture, General, Staff Posts, Writing and Publishing with 1 Comment

Brad Fruhauff

Editor-in-Chief Brad Fruhauff was surprised to find advice on writing in the Epistle to the Romans.

As Relief starts considering an expansion to graphic narrative, I’ve been trolling the web to see what Christians are up to out there in the world of comics. Let’s just say that it’s not pretty.

Not unlike a lot of the standard fare in Christian fiction, graphic narrative under the banner of God Incarnate tends toward the didactic, polemic, reductive, simplistic, sappy, disingenuous, and even outright violent. My guess is there are Christian comic artists out there in desperate need of a journal like Relief. We just need to find one another.

What’s distressing is that there’s a lot of talent out there – people who can draw really well. The stories, however, are predictable, inane, or repugnantly self-righteous. An example comes to mind of a strip, admirably drawn in the super-hero style of DC Comics or Marvel, in which a hip-looking fellow in the company of an angel tries to convert a man in a suit he meets on the street. The suit, perhaps not surprisingly for someone approached in this guerrilla manner, rejects the curbside altar call and is spectacularly dragged to hell. One is reminded of William Blake’s claim that Milton was on the side of the devils, since it’s clear this comic is enamored with the representation of the demons and the man’s terror.

The audience for this kind of narrative is not Christ’s lost sheep but the elder sons who pass by the prodigals while they’re still working in the pig sties. It is the smug and self-satisfied Christian who will be offended with God when they learn the deathbed conversions will receive the same reward as they who stayed within the fold from early in the day. (Yes I will mix my metaphors and parables.)

This seems to be the kind of thinking Paul is trying to correct in Romans. In the first three chapters he gets quite exercised about the fact that God’s judgment covers all. This is where he says “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Thus none should become too proud nor too quick to judge others:

You are inexcusable, O man, whoever you are who judge, for in whatever you judge another you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. But we know that the judgment of God is according to truth against those who practice such things. And do you think this, O man, you who judge those practicing such things, and doing the same, that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?

The last bit there should give us all pause. To judge another who is under the same curse of sin as us  is to despise the riches of God, to forget that it was His goodness, not our own wisdom, that led us to Him.

Christian writers might keep this in mind when dealing with both believing and non-believing characters or when treating the things of this world. When Jesus said he brought a sword, he described the effect his salvific work would have on an egotistic human nature. He wasn’t giving us swords – in fact, he told Peter to put his sword down.

Paul reminds us that the consciousness of sin begins with oneself. In Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima identifies this sense of personal guilt as the beginning of universal love. How foreign such an idea seems to American Christianity! May we pray that we are not found inexcusable. May we rather love what Christ loves – the Creation, human beings – and do our part in remaking and re-presenting the world to ourselves to closer approximate that love.

That’s a Good One, Emily Dickinson

July 8, 2011 in General, Staff Posts with 3 Comments

Poetry Editor Brad Fruhauff, pictured with flower

Brad Fruhauff

Editor-in-Chief Brad Fruhauff just figured out that Emily Dickinson was a funny lady. Sometimes.

The Dover edition of Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems contains only 109 of her 1,700 known “poems.”1 The other night, I sat down to select those I thought my students should study for the first week of our American Lit class this August. Mind, 109 poems by Emily Dickinson only amount to 49 pages of poetry, all of which features her idiosyncratic style of deceptively simple diction warped into complex syntax within a simple song-like meter. That means you could read it in about an hour and feel pretty good about yourself.

But if poetry is good for anything these days, it teaches us to slow down. The condensation and ordering of language in poetry requires more thought and attention than reading a blog or watching most a film. My need to cull the collection for the “gems worth studying” was additional incentive to take my time and pay attention.

What I found was a new side of Emily Dickinson. I tend to think of her as the poet of death – “I heard a funeral in my brain,” “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” for instance. But she also writes on nature, love, and the spiritual life, and, most surprisingly, is occasionally even funny.

Granted, it’s often a Coen brothers kind of dark humor. Take this poem, for instance, in which a meditation on how death takes us beyond our decadent desires turns suddenly into a biting satire on our vanity:

The dying need but little, dear, –
A glass of water’s all,
A flower’s unobtrusive face
To punctuate the wall,

A fan, perhaps, a friend’s regret,
And certainly that one
No color in the rainbow
Perceives when you are gone.

Or, in another poem, the speaker imagines being carried through town in her coffin, thinking on all the things and people she’ll miss:

‘Twas just this time last year I died.
I know I heard the corn,
When I was carried by the farms,–
It had the tassels on.
……………………………………..
I wondered which would miss me least,
And when Thanksgiving came,
If father’d multiply the plates
To make an even sum.

But since that upsets her, she switches tactics and imagines those she’s leaving from another perspective:

But this sort grieved myself, and so
I thought how it would be
When just this time, some perfect year,
Themselves should come to me.

In yet another she apostrophizes the letter she is writing to a lover, asking it to tell him everything that went into the composition of the letter – or, almost everything:

“Tell him the night finished before we finished,
And the old clock kept neighing ‘day!’
And you got sleepy and begged to be ended–
What could it hinder so, to say?
Tell him just how she sealed you, cautious,
But if he ask where you are hid
Until to-morrow,–happy letter!
Gesture, coquette, and shake your head!”

For you good Christians out there, she’s implying the letter will be kept “next to her heart” (i.e., her breasts, if you’re still lost).

I was quite pleased to discover Dickinson’s playful side; it gave me license to imagine even the darker poems being written with a certain twinkle in her eye. This is the joy of really studying something–each new approach can reveal something new even in a poem you’ve read a dozen times.

Incidentally, I think I’ll assign the whole book to my students, in two chunks. I want them to look for the patterns and develop a more sophisticated picture of Dickinson than focusing on a few popular poems can accomplish. Plus, it will be a good introduction to the challenge of reading well while reading widely, a skill so hard to practice in our hypertext world.

I’ll end with one more poem that I haven’t decided whether it’s playful in this way or not. If it’s not, then it tends toward didacticism. If it is, then it’s in that human comedy way.

So proud she was to die
It made us all ashamed
That what we cherished, so unknown
To her desire seemed.

So satisfied to go
Where none of us should be,
Immediately, that anguish stooped
Almost to jealousy.

Brad Fruhauff is Interim Editor-in-Chief of Relief. He has published fiction in The Ankeny Briefcase, poetry in Relief, Salt, and catapult, and reviews in Burnside Writers’ Collective and The Englewood Review of Books. He teaches English at Trinity International University.

1. Many of her poems were actually lines from letters that editors extracted, lineated, and published as we now know them. Incidentally, the Dover edition is a great sampler, but if you’re more ambitious, the authoritative complete works is the one edited by Thomas H. Johnson.

Gathering the Kindling

July 5, 2011 in Faith and Culture, General, Staff Posts, Writing and Publishing with 1 Comment

David Holper

Guest Poetry Editor David Holper shares his experience reading and writing poetry and offers some insight into what he wants for our Fall 2011 issue.

As the guest poetry editor for the upcoming issue of Relief, I want to introduce writers and readers to my tastes and influences as a poet and as a reader of poetry.  Let me start where I typically start with people who ask me who my favorite poet is.  When W.H. Auden was asked this same question in an interview in 1971, he wisely responded, “it suggest[s] that poetry were a horse race where you could put people 1, 2, 3, 4. You can’t. If anyone is any good, he is unique and not replaceable by anybody else.”  That’s a good starting place because in reading a lot (and writing a lot), you move beyond gimmicks and you learn to write yourself out of the ruts that often occur in creative work.

As for me, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area (in a family of devout atheists, a dis-ease from which I eventually recovered as an adult) and was heavily influenced by the Beats (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginzberg, Gary Snyder), but I was lucky enough to have good writing teachers in high school, college, and graduate school, so all along I was exposed early on to an eclectic variety of styles, voices, and forms.

I began to write my own poetry in high school, but I would say that as important as practicing writing, I regularly attended open mics and poetry readings, put together my own poetry shows (with my other weird poet friends), and often read my work aloud.  That sense of the sound of a poem has been critical to my understanding and writing of poetry.  In college, I also wound up editing the campus literary magazine Toyon, which helped me recognize that quality poetry doesn’t come in just one form, particularly the one with my name on it.  Those habits of reading widely and reading aloud have definitely influenced my craft and my appreciation of other poets.

As an editor, I want a poem to offer me something that I wouldn’t otherwise notice.  I recall hearing a wonderful poem on the radio one day (a poem I’ve never been able to locate afterwards) in which a man describes flying on a plane with his wife who falls asleep next to him.  In staring at her, as well as the sunny space between them, he realizes that in the many years that they have been married, it’s as if a third presence has formed that binds them.  It’s altogether a lovely poem, but lovelier still because it reveals to us something we may have all intuited about couples who have been together for a lifetime and still find themselves in love—that together they seem to form something greater than themselves, and anyone who has basked in such a presence surely feels its blessing.

Then, too, a good poem often has a core: sometimes that core comes in the form of an idea.  Think of so many Wallace Stevens poems or William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow.  Yes, it’s a vivid image that he offers us, but it’s the line that “so much relies upon” that wheelbarrow that tells us what he’s driving at on a deeper level, i.e., the need to notice, to observe image carefully—and yet more carefully still.  But that core may also reside in the form of revelatory emotion, or as Billy Collins said in 2001, “Poetry is the history of the human heart, and it continues to record the history of human emotion, whether it’s celebration or grief or whatever it may be.”

Perhaps last of all, poetry for me has become a way to celebrate my faith.  In some way, it should make me sit up and pay attention to life and its sacred dance.  So many people around us go through life on auto pilot, and for me and for many others, poetry is a way to re-awaken us to the holiness that resides within us and all around us.  Whether it’s through picking up the thread of a Biblical narrative, observing life around us, delving into the natural world, or just contemplating Christ’s work in our own lives, a poem should gather the kindling and the wood to reignite that sacred connection that our culture so casually dampens through its superficial, banal concerns.  And when one finds a poem that sets that blaze alight, that poem becomes a treasure not easily set aside.

David Holper has worked as a taxi driver, fisherman, dishwasher, bus driver, soldier, house painter, bike mechanic, bike courier, and teacher. His poems appear in various literary journals and his book of poems, 64 Questions, is available from March Street Press. He teaches at College of the Redwoods and lives in Eureka, CA, far enough from the madness of civilization to get some writing done. He is Relief‘s guest poetry editor for Issue 5.2.

Freedom, Political and Otherwise

July 4, 2011 in Faith and Culture, Staff Posts with 1 Comment

Image linked from Lone Wolf Librarian

Somewhere in the USA

Editor-in-Chief Brad Fruhauff remarks on the present occasion.

Most churches I’ve attended have been diligently apolitical. My pastors may occasionally preach on values that a thinking person might rationally suppose should inform his or her political imagination, but they scrupulously avoid advocating specific positions or policies.

The logic seems to include the value of congregational unity over political unity — most of my congregations have been politically diverse. But there’s often also a sense that Christianity is somehow not connected to our political lives. It’s certainly true that God and the spiritual life are profoundly more mysterious than any political body or policy could embody, and it’s true that politics stands as a false idol for many atheists and believers alike, but certainly it’s also true that Christians have something to offer our polity. Christianity is a religion of the oppressed and enslaved, but the spiritual freedom it offers ought to flow outward and downward into the political.

Surely that’s why so many marry their Christianity to their American patriotism. While that often produces a co-dependency of religion upon politics (ideological nationalism), it is also, I think, a natural consequence of believing in a God who brings freedom.

That’s why I appreciated my pastor’s remarks yesterday about freedom. It is no small thing, she said, to be able to gather freely every Sunday and worship our God without fear of arrest, abuse, or worse. And it is no small thing to pass the Orthodox Jews and the Muslims and Hindus on the street en route to church, all of us freely pursuing our faiths.

And yet the complacency of American Christianity owes in large part to the comfort that our government and culture provides. It’s an irony of the Christian story that our faith’s commitment to the dignity of the individual before ultimate authority should have led to a secular authority displacing the ultimate.

Nonetheless, I find it personally valuable, come Independence Day, to reflect on not just the blessings of living in our democracy but also the great ideals enshrined at its heart. There’s surely more we could do as a nation to align ourselves with God’s will, but perhaps it’s more important that we as Christians are empowered to do more to transform ourselves and our culture with God’s love, mercy, peace, grace. The freedom we have transcends the social contract. Should all peoples someday become free, they will still long for the freedom offered by Christ, and that is a work we can begin in the present.