"Breaking Down the Walls of Time": A Chat with Christian MFA Directors
Part I
This is Part I of a two-part conversation that I was privileged to have with Joshua Hren, Mischa Willett, and James Matthew Wilson—three prominent Christian writers who are also leading MFA programs. I am delighted that wanted to collaborate on this project. You can read Part I here today and then Part II at Inkwell this Sunday.
“Can Christians Write?“ That is the question that
, poet, essayist, and editor posed a year ago. His response was effectively a manifesto for Christian writers: “Of course there is such a thing as Christian art. It represents the greatest single cultural contribution to humanity in history.”But writers are not made ex nihilo. How are Christian writers trained, mentored, and equipped for both artistic and practical side of their craft? The passive voice in my question, of course, obscures agency. The how, after all, is inseparable from the who. Three seasoned writers who have thought a great deal recently about the many aspects of training Christian writers are
and Joshua Hren of (co-founders of the MFA in Catholic Literary Imagination at St. Thomas Houston) and (director of the Whitworth Writers’ Workshop). As a new MFA director, I am eager to learn from those who have been doing this work longer—and have been doing it so well!In the first part of this interview, we consider the formation of Christian writers through their own stories. Then in Part II, we will turn more specifically to the vision for Christian MFA programs.
Nadya Williams: It seems appropriate for this conversation to begin by asking each of you to tell your genesis story as a writer. When did you know that you were called to craft beautiful things with words, and what was your path towards becoming a professional writer?
Mischa Willett: I must’ve had a sense of the musical possibility—the musical urgency—of language quite young, because I remember being small and listening to my mother read to us from the King James Bible.
I didn’t know what most of the words meant, nor had I any sense of the majestic realities beneath them, but the cadence lulled me like a song. Maybe I was just sleepy, but it was the first time I felt well and truly transported by reading. In fourth grade, I stayed in from recess to read my teacher’s poems, which suggests some kind of unusual propensity or interest, and by high school I was making little poem books to give to my friends, and, let’s be honest, to girls.
It was all earnest, but not serious until Wheaton College, where I took my first poetry class from Jill Peleaz Baungaertner, a fine poet and poetry editor at The Christian Century. That was an imaginative baptism for me. Dana Gioia came to give a reading; so did Li-Young Lee. I was sunk. I graduated and took the train to Flagstaff, AZ where I enrolled in a Creative Writing MA under the direction of Barbara Anderson and the Biblical poet Jim Simmerman. They had super different visions for my work, and I wonder sometimes if I’m not still trying to make peace between them.
I missed my childhood home—the Pacific Northwest—and I felt called to the MFA at the University of Washington to work with Linda Bierds and Richard Kenney. I did the Ph.D. there as well in Literature, having decided years prior that college campuses were where I’d make my life. To be fair, all that schooling taught me to be an artistic, or an informed sort of writer; the professionalization I had to learn on my own.
Joshua Hren: Once upon a time my folks found me in the basement, fourth-grade brow furrowed over a ninety-some-page imitation of Tolkien. “Get outside,” they said, worried I was retreating from reality.
The years passed. I resisted college for four years after high school in favor of waiting tables, working at a factory, and writing, writing, writing—mostly badly, surely—songs and especially poetry. Having fallen away from the faith, I spent Sundays at these knock-down-drag-out poetry readings held in a coffee shop on Milwaukee’s East Side—Rochambo, an old school coffee house (that was actually a house). There, on the second floor, a host of other Milwaukee poets and musicians held extended readings and performances for hours through the mist of chain-smoking incense. The best of these poets, who became mentors of a kind, did not suffer fools (though they were patient) and their earnest pursuit of art left a lifelong impression.
In my early twenties, my then girlfriend had to work one evening and asked if I could write a short story for her creative writing class at UW-Milwaukee. I hashed out the story that evening with great romantic flourish—wrote it on a napkin, candle burning on the table. She handed “A Raindrop Needs Rain” in to her professor, who said it was the best thing anyone had submitted for a long while and asked all sorts of follow up questions while she, I suppose, lied through her teeth. The professor’s response appealed to some combination of my pride and real recognition of innate gifts. I started taking classes, focusing on creative writing.
I tried to escape academia several times, serving as chaplain for the homeless at St. Ben’s community meal, and living among the Franciscans in several friaries. But eventually I earned a Ph.D. in English, focusing on Religion and Literature, Political Philosophy and Literature, Classical Rhetoric, and Creative Writing. But how much of my habituation into the art of fiction came through the formal study of literature versus the school of hard knocks—I can’t say!
James Matthew Wilson: Most writers will be able to list several germinal moments that led them toward writing. I recall lying in bed, sleepless, at night, my mind composing political speeches to unify the country; I thought I was interested in politics, but I was probably only interested in the way rhetoric can be formed.
So also, I first became conscious of a desire to write while looking over my brother Jason’s shoulder as he worked on a high school paper on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Still another such moment came much later, when a college professor and poet tried to explain what “iambic pentameter” was.
I do not recall the rest of the day’s lesson; I remember only struggling to write a single line of pentameter: “A sonnet every day for five long years.” I took that seed home with me and, over five hours during which I should have been studying, managed to cobble together thirteen more lines and a bad sonnet. The next night, I came home and did the same. And the night after. Language metered had an electric current running through it. I could feel it. I could feel the sculptor’s labor too and wanted to chisel at words to bring out their inner order the same way Claude McKay had done in his sonnets eight decades earlier.
By my mid-twenties I decided to be an amateur poet. In fact, the necessity of always remaining an amateur was itself a substantial appeal: there is no possible excuse for writing a poem but for the beauty of it. One certainly can’t be engaged in such a gratuitous action for the money.
I never cared about becoming a writer or a poet in that sense. What I cared about was the experience of writing a line in meter and, through that formal craft, participating in a tradition that goes back not only to our first English poets but to Homer and beyond. One of the great rewards for a writer is to sense oneself breaking bread with the dead. The act of writing is in that very private or subjective sense a way in which the walls of time break down, and we discourse among ourselves in eternity. It’s such a blessing to be able to participate in that conversation though the humble act of writing a single line of verse.
Nadya Williams: I think of each of you specifically as a Christian writer. Would you agree? In what ways does your faith inform your work? Did you always see your faith and your writing as connected, or did it take some time to arrive at a comfortable relationship between the two?
Mischa Willett: That’s a fair assessment. I used to feel tense about the term because I thought it would prejudice people against my work. I thought I should “make it” in the secular world while maintaining my faith as a private matter, but now I think I was being disingenuous. I love Jesus. I love his church. I love being around believers. How could my faith not spill over into my work?
Eventually, I started writing essays about miracles and about going to church and I just decided I wanted to write for Christians. There’s so much biblical and theological subtext and referentiality in my work anyway, that if you don’t have a Bible in your house, is going to be lost on you. Of course, anybody is welcome, but my hunch is that symbols function most powerfully within communities of use, and if an artwork is going to have any depth and lasting impact it’s probably trading on a symbolic index.
Joshua Hren: Good question, not least because confusions can proliferate over the distinctions between Christian or Catholic writers and, for instance, “the Catholic novel.” Writers who are not Christian can render reality in a way that resonates with the Christian vision. It seems that the imagination, when it obtains the depths of Catholicity, seeks to save. Good fiction cracks the glass ceilings of secularism and invites us into an expansive world alight with the transcendent.
As Christopher Beha contends, the novelist is a person “for whom secularism presents a problem.” Say we inhabit a mundane living room scene, in a secular age—in the Midwest, no less. Say that in this miniscule room, a couple is quarreling. Even here, however subtly, the Catholic imagination senses and suggests a vast and eternal stage that extends far beyond the seen scene. Like the protagonist of Goethe’s Faust, this couple tips the eternal scales, albeit by sometimes miniscule degrees. Their talk may be hot with petty frustrations over a grocery bill or cooled by a crippling disagreement, but never absent is the debt of love (Rom 13:18) both will—finally—fulfill or fail to pay. As St. Thomas says, “No deliberate act is morally indifferent.” Father Garrigou-Lagrange explains why: “Every deliberate act in a rational being should itself be . . . directed to a morally good end and in the Christian every deliberate act should be directed at least virtually to God.”
Good fiction helps us better grasp the fact that everything we deliberately do—from amusements to our acts of mercy—assumes moral and spiritual significance. St. John Henry Newman, though, warns us against taking man “for what he is not, for something more divine and sacred, for man regenerate.” He insists that literature is largely a record “of man in rebellion.” “You cannot have a sinless Literature of sinful man,” he adds.
Unwittingly, Newman makes it evident that to give an occasion for salvation or damnation, the literary imagination must depict characters in rebellion. This is one reason why many of us have a difficult time reading fiction; so much of it seems unedifying at best, at worst a minefield of occasions for sin.
But the Catholic writer often widens her work by narrowing the development of characters back to conversion in Christian sense. The stakes are high: though salvation and damnation are often merely hinted at as the final ends of a given work’s characters, this reenchanting reading of reality makes the canvas of Catholic art uncannily wide: to hell and back, the Hound of Heaven is always there, however subtly, charging the cosmos with grandeur. That, for me, is what characterizes Christian writing. That is what I’m after.
James Matthew Wilson: I’ve heard Joshua speak on this subject many times and I very much agree with him and with Christopher Beha, on the whole. To return to your question, my own gut reaction points in two directions—one a loud “no” and the other an even louder “yes.”
On the “no” side of things I find my basic aversion to identity politics and the language of “identity” more generally. Insofar as the language of Christian or Catholic writer involves a short of special pleading or overlooks the substance of the work of art to fixate upon the intentions of the author, I think we do harm to literature and harm to our culture. Also on the “no” side is the notion of a fixed or particularly defined account of what makes a writer or a work Christian.
Works of art are forms and so they have something in common with the eidos, the form of what is true, the true idea of things. But works of art are not “ideal”—that is to say, we shall never encounter a poem so great that we will say, “Ah, yes, this is what I was looking for, and now that I have found it, the quest is over.”
But on the “yes” side there is much to be said. From antiquity to the present, people have not always shared our concept of aesthetic experience. They have not always understood the fine arts as forms that are made for the sake of that peculiar radiance they give off. Still, people have always understood works of art as a way of knowing that is contemplative in nature. They have always understood this, because it is so obvious.
One consequence of this obviousness is that people over many different ages and cultures have appreciated the arts as a means of understanding reality as intrinsically transcendent. Art cannot just speak of what is immediate, sensibly present, and immanent. It speaks of the ground of reality and how we stand upon that ground. What is aberrant in the modern age is a turning away from art’s transcendent power. This truncated scope or narrowed horizon for literature and the arts is a weird and unusual thing, a perversion and a corruption, a sign of a good tradition fallen at last into decadence. The Catholic writer will stick out in such an environment, because the Catholic writer feels obliged to be open to the whole form of the real.
To put all this in a less haughty way, people look at works of art and read books because these things open the world up to us in all its mystery. Everyone has read a book and had it smack him in the head. Everyone has heard a good line and felt it change his life. Everyone has had that experience, because that’s just what art has always done. In an aberrant age, the Catholic artist will simply try to make sure art continues doing what it has always been called to do.
Nadya Williams: Who are the writers who have been the most influential for your craft?
Mischa Willett: I love this question, in part because I like saying “thank you,” and in part because–though I’m always trying to tell the truth–the answer keeps changing. Rainier Maria Rilke, for sure, and Eugenio Montale the Italian. Dylan Thomas for his music and Percy Shelley, not for his ethics, but for his belief in possibility. C.S. Lewis almost ruined me because he makes everything look easy and it isn’t. Gertrude Schnakenberg is big for me, and Mary Ruefle is the best poet living. I doubt I’d be at all the sort of poet I am without the voices of Richard Kenney and James Merrill in my ears. And whenever I begin to lose hope, Constantine Cavafy reminds me what poetry can do.
Joshua Hren: The mentors who have given me most over the long duration of the writing life are mainly dead—Dostoevsky and Kerouac, Joyce and Woolf, Tolstoy and Bernanos, David Foster Wallace and Flannery O’Connor, Conrad and Henry James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy to some degree, and Toni Morrison to some degree too, but mainly Dosty (as Kerouac called him), whom I love across the centuries, as he’s a true friend and I honestly don’t know how I would have navigated this world and all its abysses and elevations without his aid.
James Matthew Wilson: I appreciate the focus of this question. Great authors are so great in number, but to speak of the ones who most shaped my craft as a poet is a far easier task.
Dante, in his claim to be a craftsman, and then a philosopher, and then even a theologian, helped shape my vision. Eliot tells us Shakespeare and Dante divide the modern world between them. “There is no third.” He’s right about that. For Eliot and for me, Dante’s inheritance is the greater and the easier one, because he reveals that cosmic scope proper to the arts that will help us understand how later writers filled with anguish, like Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky, can communicate to us the destiny of the soul, mired though it be in the muck.
The greatest of the modern poets continue that instruction. Eliot’s poetry retraces the spiritual ascent of the soul, Yeats reminds us that we are called to vision even as we are also called to be austere and disciplined craftsmen, while Auden reminds us that our human responsibilities are genuine moral responsibilities—among them is to learn to speak the language of men and of everyday life.
Yvor Winters, with his effort to reground the poetic craft in the meditative life of the soul and in the intelligible form of verse, gave shape to my sense of what a poet and a critic could do. His student Helen Pinkerton helped clarify the connection between the writing of a poem and reflection on metaphysics, on the nature of being. The descendants of Auden and Wallace Stevens—Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, and even Thom Gunn have helped shape my sense of the good of poetic form and the shape of human speech.
Really, all I am doing is naming poets who were committed to making good poems for the good of the poems and the good of the readers who abide in them. That there could be other poets who are not committed to such a thing seems preposterous. Why would they even bother to write poems?
Parts of Joshua’s answers were previously published in his book How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic.
Thanks to all (Nadya very much included). Looking forward to the next part of the conversation.
Very well worded questions, Nadya. Thanks to all for the generous responses.