Carey Wallace is the author of The Blind Contessa’s New Machine, which tells the story of the invention of the typewriter in 1808 by an Italian count for a blind woman so that she could write him letters. It’s a love story, but it’s also about the imagination and how it fails us. Patti Smith, one of Wallace’s heroes, called it “exquisitely written” and “a jewel.”

Now Wallace has trained her focus on artistic inspiration, both how it is historically discussed in relationship to artists, and how we as contemporary working artists might honor, cultivate, and capture it. She taught a workshop called “The Discipline of Inspiration” at the 2019 Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, and she’s working on a book of the same title. Wallace is particularly interested in how spiritual disciplines like silence, rest, and living in community map onto the artist’s life.

She wrote in an essay for Comment:

“All spiritual problems are creative problems, and all creative problems are spiritual problems . . . an artist’s failure to work is rarely mechanical—fingers that fail to curl around a pen or a brush—but spiritual: a fear that has rendered them artistically blind or deaf. The solution to them all is to draw closer to God, the source of all order, rest, and freedom, and of every image, sound, and word.”

Wallace sat down with Jessica Mesman at the Glen to talk about “catching” inspiration, cultivating community, and how our creative power grows when we discipline our artistic and spiritual lives—and begin to see them as one and the same.

Resources

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Lanecia Rouse Tinsley is an abstract artist based in Houston, Texas. She creates out of a desire to make the invisible landscapes within us known, using texture, form and color to speak to life in ways she feels words cannot. She says she is drawn to the “negative spaces” in life—times of ambiguity and uncertainty, silence and mystery.

A graduate of Duke University Divinity School, Tinsley was a pastor’s kid who became a pastor herself. (Her father was the first cross-racial appointment in South Carolina in the United Methodist Church.) She always found ways to bring the arts into her ministry, but she knew she wanted to be the one creating art that offered new ways of seeing. She also wanted to have children. But when her infant daughter, AJ, died shortly after her birth, Tinsley faced a turning point. How was she going to survive this grief? How could she imagine a life in which she wasn’t merely surviving, but thriving?

“I’d felt pain. My heart had been broken before, but this was a new kind of breaking.”

Tinsley left ministry to become a full-time visual artist. The journey through grief remains a daily experience for her, but in her art practice she’s found a way to express what she feels so that it doesn’t imprison her, but instead opens a door that others can enter.

“I always thought, there’s life in the boundaries. But now I realize that I want less and less of that. I want to figure out ways of creating more space for myself to be who I am to be in this world, to see the holy in me and the holy without me.”

Tinsley and I sat down at the Glen Workshop, where she teaches mixed media and painting, to talk about the creation and experience of art as ways to lean into prayer; the artists who minister to her pain and remind her to feel joy–including Rothko, Alma Thomas and poet Mary Oliver; and how the interdisciplinary collaboration that happens at the Glen Worksop inspires us.

Tinsley works to make that kind of communal experience more accessible to more artists and people in her own community. She works with projectCURATE in Houston as a Spiritual Director and Consultant for the Arts. She is also co-founder of the ImagiNoir Group, an international alliance and think-tank of black activists, artists, writers, scholars and educators.

“I can’t imagine going through what I went through without knowing love was real.”

Resources

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Halloween kicks off the Octave of the Dead, eight days when Christians traditionally prayed for the souls of the departed. For this episode of the podcast I talked to Elizabeth Harper, whose essay, “The Cult of the Beheaded,” in Image 102, explores one culture’s particular history of praying with the remains of the dead.

When she traveled to Palermo, Sicily, she found a story of popular piety subverting the intentions of the Spanish Inquisition—and of nationalism, racism, and the ever-shifting sands of who belongs in the church, in the canon of the saints, and in your neighborhood

Harper started out writing about relics for places like Atlas Obscura and her blog, All the Saints You Should Know. She imagined she’d be helping travelers interested in seeking out something off the official tour map and artists, like herself, who were drawn to religious sites. But as she wrote more about traditional Catholicism, she noticed that far-right, Nationalist, and anti-Semitic readers began to follow and retweet her. In “The Cult of the Beheaded,” she attempts to unravel the complicated appeal of folk practice as both capitulation to—and resistance to—Christianity as state religion.

“I believe Catholic churches are memory theaters where nature, science, arts, humanity, math, politics, and the divine mingle in miniature. There’s a wealth of knowledge locked inside sacred objects, though it’s often hidden in plain sight.”

She also talks in this episode about her favorite saints—official and not so official—and about her work in the “death positivity” movement, and why we, as Catholic memoirists, should anchor our personal stories in our collective history, approaching the real horrors in the church with humility and contrition.

“I’ve found that the Catholic comfort with death and death imagery is life-affirming. It offers believers and skeptics alike an important cultural reference that opposes modern death denial.”

At around the thirty-minute mark, we talk about Harper’s work with the Order of the Good Death. The practice of memento mori—meditating on one’s death—has a rich Christian history. The new “Death Positivity” movement is being led by secular champions like author and mortician Caitlin Doughty, who recognize that our cultural fear of death, and our resistance to talking openly about it, was killing us. We’ve lost important rituals and cultural frameworks—the ars moriendi, or art of dying—and that only makes coping with death more difficult and more dangerous. I ask Elizabeth Harper how her faith makes her approach to death positivity different.

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Jeffrey Overstreet wasn’t allowed to watch movies growing up, but his Christian parents did take him to the public library every Friday night. Intrigued by the ads he saw for movies in the daily paper, he started reading the reviews. He discovered film criticism before he discovered films themselves. Morgan Meis’s story is almost the mirror image of Jeff’s. He grew up with lapsed Catholic parents who were suspicious of religion; for them, art was where you went to find truth. But they both longed for deeper friendship. To cope with the loneliness of an isolated childhood, Jeff turned to writing, creating stories of a community of friends. Rather than being led away from Christianity, he found that the arts enhanced his faith. Today he’s an award-winning arts critic, memoirist and novelist.

Morgan found himself always looking for that something more within the artistic communities he participated in and created. In his 30s, he started going to Catholic Mass, and he found that religious practice enhanced, rather than limiting, his experience as an artist. In addition to writing about art for Image, the New Yorker, and Harpers, he’s a part of a group of urban Franciscans called the New Order of Saint Francis, who serve the poor on the streets of Detroit.

When you meet Jeffrey, in his Dr. Strange t-shirt and jeans, and Morgan, in his three piece suits, they may seem like an unlikely pair of friends. But a shared vision brings them together. They’re also both long-time writers for Good Letters, where Image publishes essays about the intersection of art, faith, and personal experience online. We sat down at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe to talk about the importance of artistic and spiritual friendships to our work and faith, how both church and friendship have served to break us down and put us back together, and how our favorite films do that too: from Mike Leigh’s Another Year and the documentaries of French filmmaker Agnès Varda to The Muppet Movie.  

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“Molly McCully Brown’s first book of poems, “The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded,” is part history lesson, part séance, part ode to dread…it is beautiful and devastating.”

Poet Molly McCully Brown’s prizewinning first collection, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, is about a real, state-run residential hospital for people with serious mental and physical disabilities that was the epicenter of the American eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century. All the poems are in the voices of imagined patients and staff on the Colony grounds in the 1930s. The result is a beautiful and excruciating consideration of the theological meaning of the human body in all its imperfection and suffering. The New York Times book critics named it a Top Book of 2017.  

If she’d been born in another time, Molly Brown might have been a patient at the Virginia Colony. She grew up just a short drive away from that facility, and she was born with cerebral palsy, severely physically disabled. Her twin sister, Frances, died 36 hours after their birth.

Brown’s essay, “Bent Body, Lamb”, originally published in Image 88 and our most-read essay of 2016, begins with the author and her mother lying in the dark heat of their Virginia home on a summer night, enduring, together, the physical torment of Molly’s post-op leg convulsions. In a moment of despair and adolescent bravado—she was about 14 at the time—Molly turns to her mother and snarls, “God isn’t real,” and adds, with deliberate cruelty, “this is all your fault.”

From the raw intimacy of that moment, the essay expands into a consideration of the meaning of bodily suffering and then to a comic, tender, and profound narration of how an intellectual “interest in religion” led, during her MFA program, to a sincere conversion to Catholicism.

Molly Brown has two more books forthcoming in 2020: In the Field Between Us, a collection of collaborative poems about living in disabled bodies, written with Susannah Nevison, and an essay collection called Places I’ve Taken My Body.

“The writing I love most is the writing where you can see thinking in evidence. You can see the ways in which the piece itself is alive.”

We sat down at the Catholic Imagination Conference at Loyola University in Chicago to talk about her childhood in Virginia, the unexpected gifts of artistic friendship and collaboration, and how Catholicism responds, and doesn’t, to the problem of the body.  

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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.

I’ve spent the last decade of my writing life working with online communities and publications. I’ve benefitted from the opportunities available online when I was at home with young children, living in rural towns that seemed far from the publishing and art worlds. I’ve seen social media make careers, and I’ve seen it destroy them. What can be a valuable tool for amplifying voices often becomes another way to silence them.  

Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the novel Social Creature and the forthcoming nonfiction book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. She writes a column on the same topic, “Religion Remixed,” for Religion News Service. Burton has written widely on religion, culture, and place, appearing in the The New York Times, National Geographic, The Washington Post,  Aeon, The BBC, and The Atlantic, among many others. She was a staff religion reporter for Vox.com. ​She received a doctorate in theology from Trinity College, Oxford, where she was a Clarendon Scholar, in 2017.

“Suddenly this thing I did for fun was part of an author persona that interfered with the seriousness of the book I wanted to write.”

Natasha Oladokun is a Cave Canem fellow, poet, and essayist featured in the American Poetry Review, Harvard Review Online, Pleiades, Indie Film Minute, Bearings Online, and elsewhere. She is currently a visiting assistant professor of English at Hollins University, her MFA alma mater.

“These are instruments, and like any instrument, you can play it badly or play it well.”

Kaya Oakes is the author of four books, including The Nones Are Alright and Radical Reinvention. Her essays have appeared in The New Republic, Slate, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, America, Commonweal, On Being, National Catholic Reporter, Religion Dispatches, Image’s Good Letters, The Washington Post, Sojourners, and many other publications. She teaches nonfiction writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and is also an affiliated faculty member at the Jesuit School of Theology in the Graduate Theological Union, where she teaches religion writing for a broader public to lay students and seminarians.  She’s also appeared on NPR and the CBC. She’s spoken and given workshops in spiritual writing and reporting at universities, worship spaces, seminaries and community centers across the United States, and was among a group of international journalists who participated in a two-week workshop at the Vatican in 2016 to study the role of religion writing in politically turbulent times.

“Women have seized social media as a tool to lift up each other’s work.”

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 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.

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Credits

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Jessica B. Davenport has a PhD in religion from Rice University and MDiv from the Candler School of Theology. Her research is in black religion, aesthetics, and visual culture. 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 led a seminar called “Choosing Creation: The Art of Blackness and the Blackness of Art.” They talked to me about how Black theology, and especially what is known as Womanist theology, has always reached beyond traditional liturgical materials to music, art, dance, and literature to create and express the distinctive experience of black Christianity. Black people are producing—have always produced—creative works of theology that must be seriously considered within the mainstream of Christian tradition if we are to dismantle white supremacy.

Many times when I’ve talked to other (mostly white, mostly North American) artists of faith, we’ve expressed how we are drawn to certain liturgical forms of worship because they involve the body. But the body is usually drawn into prescribed forms—standing, sitting, kneeling, bowing, moving the hands in the sign of the cross, moving fingers along beads. I was struck by Jessica’s and Biko’s description of worship in their historically black churches as a completely different experience of embodiment. Black churches have often been the only place it’s safe to live fully and freely in a black body—to celebrate the black body as an instrument through which God moves.

“I am interested in how black folks are making meaning in the world through their bodies.”

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.

The theme for the 2019 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 Basquiat and the history of white patronage of black art. Jessica’s lecture focused on historic images of black people with the white families who enslaved them and later art photography of black women in relationship with each other. You can listen to their talks on the Image website, and we explore both those topics in the final segment of the interview. 

Biko and Jessica also spoke frankly with me about their hesitancy to discuss friendship at all in a predominantly white space. 

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Theology and Literature

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Warhol and Basquiat:

Credits

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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.”

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