Only a few days after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary I sat down to watch the first episode of season two of The Walking Dead. The tragedy was not a relevant context in my mind when I began the episode, but by the end the two had nearly collapsed upon one another in a powerful way that, I think, is quite typical of fiction.

Without giving away too much for those who are even more behind than me, the episode ends with a shocking act of violence against a child. When it happened, my breath froze and my heart leapt and all the normal physiological responses to something truly horrible. I was in tears with something like real fear and distress for the child, and for the parents I felt something more like fellowship than the sympathy of the outsider.

As I decompressed during the credits, I thought, “Why—when real tragedies are happening to real children—why am I watching fictionalized versions of them?” The immediate possibilities were discomfiting. Am I simply that perverse? Am I so out of touch with my experience and my world that I don’t feel the contradiction? Am I seeking an escape from real pain in some aestheticized form?

No response to these questions can entirely escape the possibility of being mere rationalization, but the more I thought about it the more appropriate the whole thing seemed, and the reasons had a lot to do with how art works and what it does for us.

I have two small children at home, one of whom attends preschool twice a week. When the news from Newtown, CT, came across the radio that Friday morning, I reacted in disbelief and confusion like I imagine most people did, and I almost couldn’t think about it or my children at the same time. Later that morning, I scanned the Internet for more information, the kind of information that we need to construct a narrative that makes reality possible again. I realized it was not going to be available anytime soon, but I had to get to work, so I took a moment to meditate and live in the grief and despair, to offer my own helplessness up to God in prayer and to seek forgiveness for any lack of love in my own life that may be contributing to a world in which such grave sins befall us. And then I got to work.

My grief began to ebb from that point, as it must have done if I was going to go on living. My sympathy with the parents, families, friends, and citizens of Newtown, however, was necessarily distant. The only route from my experience to theirs is one of imagination—of moral imagination, even. A fictional narrative of the trauma of a child’s injury or death will never be identical to the actual experience (who would want it to be?). But it may have the power to bring one closer to that experience than any process of reflection could. I certainly felt the gravity of losing a child via the fiction much more powerfully than I did via the Internet.

The scandal of such a claim is actually that it seems so old, so dependent, apparently, on a mimetic theory that judges art by its consonance with some pre-existing reality and that comforts itself with the illusion that art provides real presence. This theory undergirds Aristotle’s account of catharsis, for instance. As Romantics like Coleridge realized, though, art need not imitate the reality of our senses so much as the reality of our human or moral nature, the kind of being all artists and audiences share by virtue of consciousness.

This is not, I think, the same as presence. I don’t know if Aristotle thought it was, but the Augustans of the 18^th century seemed to. They didn’t make strong distinctions between the sympathy you feel for a person and the emotions you experience in literature. But this is problematic, and not because it treats reality like fiction but because it treats fiction like reality. It’s actually quite important that fictions are not real and that we know they are not real. There are some realities that we cannot quite process—that’s why we have trauma and repression. One of literature’s powers is to create a play-space wherein we can actually begin to feel traumatic emotion and to work through it alongside characters, through a narrative, or through the accumulation of and relationships among tropes—those revealing “twists” of reality we sometimes call images. The whole point of this play-space is to shift the stakes to the level of moral imagination, away from the deadly seriousness of our everyday physical survival.

Aristotle had an insight like this when he compared the pleasure of imitation in theater to the pleasure children take in imitation. And, just like when children play, this kind of imaginative engagement is not escapism but something more like therapy, art’s way of helping reconcile us to our reality, and if it returns us to the high stakes of life a little sadder and wiser, it also helps us to get back on with the business of life.

This is Relief, however, not the Midnight Diner, so there won’t be any zombies or the like. The works in here all act more subtly, inviting you into another’s experience and offering the opportunity, for those who will let the words work on them, to have an experience, to be taken somewhere and to return to a point different from your departure. To approach the world of someone trying to find a normal life after breast cancer, to deal with a rape in a small town and a mother’s anxiety about her daughters, to see a biblical tale anew as a miracle of moral action.

In the wake of a national tragedy, when we are all vulnerable to the impulses born of shock and fear, literature becomes all the more important. When reality becomes unreality it is in fact most real, the veil of comfort is ripped away and the world appears as perverse and inverted as it actually is. Good literature serves as the survival guide for this post-apocalyptic unreality, from which it will not let us escape. Every time apocalypse fires a warning shot across the bow of our complacency, we can choose to respond with the violence of our illusions or with the ennobling force of visionary art. May this issue of Relief serve you well as the world marches on towards its end.

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He Could Not Count That High

The knife fresh off the whet-stone
reflected the sun above them.
Twigs cross-stacked,
bent under body-weight
and Issac’s throat was shaved.

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I’ve met two kinds of cowboys in my life, the quiet type, and the talkative type. Can’t say which I’ve enjoyed more. I do know both types have found their way into my short stories.

When I got the news that Relief accepted “Uncle G” for their 6.2 issue, I was surprised. I had submitted the short story fully expecting that Uncle G’s “Texisms” might be a little too much, especially for a journal focused on Christian literary expression. An author-friend of mine, who just happens to be from Boston, had read “Uncle G” in an earlier stage and asked, “Do people really talk like this in Texas?” My friend had thought Uncle G’s way of saying things and his frequent use of certain earthy words seemed altogether strange. I simply answered, “Yep.”

I admit, Texas is it’s own kind of place. My ancestors go back five generations and I was actually born right where cattle ranching began, where the last oil boom in America took place, and where things are so spread out, and the heat so harsh, and the people so scarce, only one born there would dare call it heaven. And, that is what I call South Texas, that place that extends from Bastrop and Austin, all the way down to Brownsville with the harsh Texas Brush Country in the middle of it all.

I should point out that as stereotypical as Uncle G may sound, he is not the composite cowboy/rancher of Texas. Texas cowboys come in all shapes and sizes, but their hearts are pretty much the same. And, you’ll find us all over Texas, even in the city, where those of us raised in those open spaces, now lean back in our office chairs and imagine a landscape that was once miles of swaying grass a century ago, and is now overgrown with prickly pear cactus and mesquite, where so many rugged adventures have taken place, and where Texas men and women still live the ranching life.

In many ways, Uncle G represents the men all across rural America who hold to a less-than-complicated view of life, carrying themselves forward without complaint or blame. I can’t say, just yet, that I’m completely given to letting go of my own deeper contemplations over life’s mysteries, for I am a writer, and I desperately need the angst to propel me forward. But I do admire the Uncle G types who pay little attention to falling prey to an American landscape bent on the emasculation of men. Uncle G, in some strange way, charms me because the deeper goodness of his heart won’t let go.

An excerpt from Shoemake’s “Uncle G,” appearing in Issue 6.2:

“Leave that fire set awhile. It’ll smoke up and the cinders’ll set in. You can stir it up if you want, but I kind of like the glow. Saves the wood.”
Uncle G looked at his nephew, Jimmy, and hoped he would take to his hint at keeping the fire low. His stockpile of mesquite logs was getting low.
“How are things in the big city of Bastrop, Texas?” Uncle G asked.
“Slow. Like always,” Jimmy said.
“Can’t be slower than out here.” Uncle G looked west, through the grove of Live Oaks, past the barbed-wire fence and out to the pasture where his cattle stood like statues. “But it sure is pretty.”
Jimmy stared at the red glow of the ashes. “I’m not supposed to mess with another man’s fire, right?”
Uncle G laughed. “I said that one time, didn’t I?”

Mike Shoemake is a regional author who writes short stories and novels about Texas-based characters. He recently departed the corporate world to begin doing what he’d been wanting to do for a long time: write. He focuses on fiction in order to avoid the nonsense of real life he saw too much of in the corporate world. Michael earned both his B.S. in Journalism and M.A. in Speech Communication from Oklahoma State University. He currently resides in Allen, Texas, just north of Dallas.

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Issue 6.2 poet Brett Foster thinks writing may be an act of devotion, but so can a lot of things if they’re done “to Godward.”

Is writing an act of devotion for a writer of faith? Sure it is, but then again, I have a pretty low bar for what can be done in a spirit of devotion if the mind, heart, and will are inclined “to Godward,” as certainly early religious poets put it. Buying groceries, fixing your son’s bicycle tire, showing kindness to a stranger, or if that last one seems too grand and saintly, maybe just being kind to your own family. These actions can be treated as devotions, in the sense of “doing devotions,” but they are both good in themselves and good in the right spirit they are capable of renewing in us.

I’ve been reading Thomas Wyatt’s poetry and about Wyatt’s life lately, and he speaks eloquently of reaching a repentant place. And Wyatt, a truly worldly and stubborn son of a gun at the court of Henry VIII, often had much of which to repent. He translated the Penitential Psalms at one point, during imprisonment or house arrest, I think, and I imagine him undertaking that task while sharing some of the above concerns for well-directed activity. So, sure, if waving someone ahead of you at a four-way stop can be an act of devotion, I imagine that writing poetry can be, too.

Maybe I should clarify that you don’t have to undertake versions of the penitential psalms to feel justified in your work, to feel assurance that it is devotionally driven and received as devotion. I don’t want to belabor this, and it is hard to find fresh words to say the thing, but there is such a wonderful feeling of spiritual attunement when you are engaging the genuine work (whatever it may be—poodle grooming, maybe, or writing villanelles) that you strongly feel is yours to do. Engaging it with concentration and hope and that proper type of exuberance or pride in the thing. I hope this makes it sufficiently clear that I’m not talking about—not at all—an aesthetic matter. Let writers write all sorts of different things, I say. Some writing is expressly devotional in its subject matter or themes or perspective, but much else can be exhibited or glimpsed through a devotional lens if we’re receptive, or maybe “reflective” (better to carry out the image metaphor here). It’s a matter of outlook. It’s wishing your work to be a gift offered, from somewhere better than your net worth. Something not necessary in one sense but essential in another—a gratuity that is far from gratuitous.

Brett Foster is the author of The Garbage Eater (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011). A second, smaller poetry collection, Fall Run Road, was awarded Finishing Line Press’s Open Chapbook Prize, and is forthcoming. His writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Books & Culture, Cellpoems, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Common, IMAGE, Kenyon Review,Measure, The New Criterion, Pleiades, and Shenandoah. He teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature at Wheaton College.

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A propos of the occasion, I also briefly discuss the relationship between the 9/11 attacks and the racialization of Bane and the League of Shadows, at least insofar as it concerns our current cultural context (and not the graphic novel mythology).

Brad Fruhauff is editor-in-chief of Relief. He also teaches English at Trinity International University.

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