SPEAKER_01 0:00

From the McGrath Institute for Church Life and OSV podcast, this is Church Life Today. I'm Leonard DiLorenzo. There is a lot of animosity out there, a lot of distrust, and a lot of fear and persistent anxiety about so many things. Where in all that can we go to find words that bring life? In particular, where might we find books that rise above the morass of the day to show us art that builds on the foundations of truth, beauty, and goodness. Providing a place that does just this, where a community of thinkers, writers, and readers are engaged in the common mission of preserving literate culture for generations to come, is precisely the mission of the new imprint from Word on Fire called Luminore. By publishing novels, short stories, memoirs, poetry, and more, Luminour brings out buried riches from the treasury of Catholic literature and highlights fresh voices among writers formed by Catholicity in our time. Joining me today is Katie Carl, editor of Luminour, to share with us why this mission is so important today and what we can expect to find in this new imprint. Katie, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Thank you so much for having me on. It's such a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

So, Katie, you've set yourself about heralding a call for the revival of Christian arts, particularly the literary arts. So I thought a good place for us to start would be for me to ask you, in your judgment and understanding, what has been the state of the Christian literary arts in recent times? Or in other words, why is a revival called for?

SPEAKER_00 1:49

Sure. Well, when I was coming up, uh starting to study fiction and literature uh more than 20 years ago now, there was a narrative of decline very much in the air and in the water. Uh you were sort of told implicitly or explicitly, uh, I have memories of hearing this kind of thing from creative writing teachers along the way. I know that others have these kinds of memories as well. You know, when you come to the workshop, you leave your faith on the doorstep, you question everything, you don't allow anything to be a prior assumption. Uh, very similar, I think, to narratives that people hear in the sciences. And while I think there's actually something to the thought, and John Gardner, a beloved uh creative writing uh guide for many, uh suggests that there's something about the nature of the act of making art that you know invites questioning, invites uh people to put their most cherished beliefs, as he put it, to the test. Uh, I don't think it's necessarily the case that we have to assume that that's going to result in a destruction or a deconstruction. Uh you know, as Dostoevsky has put it, realists need not fear the results of their study. And as Jacques Marathon says in art and scholasticism, the virtue of art is integrated into the human person. So while you might have more difficulty exercising it as a person of faith because you're holding at the same time two different uh sets of considerations that might be orthogonal to one another, it's just not necessary to think that you know naively or simplistically you have to divest yourself somehow of your metaphysical belief as you try to create art, as if you could do that. It's actually a radical impossibility. But uh it became a common thread uh and much farther back than 20 years ago. As I've kind of investigated these questions, uh I tend to lay some of this, uh maybe a lot of this, at least for us in America, at the door of one Ernest Hemingway, uh who was baptized on the field in World War I after a terrible accident where he thought he might lose his life. He was rescued, brought to the hospital, you know, given the last rites, uh, and then recovered. And he remained a believer for the entirety of his life. But you know, his his life and his art often diverged from what he himself believed would have been the ideal. Uh so he took up a posture in public as you know, uh not necessarily even a person of faith, let alone a writer of faith. And so it the way that his legacy has been received is as this sort of very separated, uh, very modernist, very uh materialist kind of writer, where that there is kind of a throbbing spiritual concern at the heart of a lot of what he's making. It's just it isn't given presence in the way that we're taught to look for that kind of thing. So um, you know, and I think too, some of the reason why Hemingway got afield from wanting to be considered a Catholic writer had to do with you know his own views on politics diverging with some folks in his place and time, uh thinking that you know the the Catholic way to believe and think and vote is you know is different from what he thought it was. Uh and this had a lot to do with European politics as well, not just American, um, because uh Hemingway spent so much time out of America. Uh all of that to say, uh, we have a sort of very complicated relationship between faith and art throughout the 20th century in um both America and Europe. And that all comes out in the way that these things get taught and the way that these things get given presence. Um Dana Joya describes this extremely well in his 2014 essay, The Catholic Writer Today, where he talks about the fact that Catholics at one time had a noticeable, distinctive, uh, creative minority kind of presence in the American arts and letters. Uh, and he's saying that at the time he's writing in 2014, uh, it's barely noticeable. And those figures that are there uh are kind of exceptions that prove the rule. Uh, I tend to want to say that we're moving back toward a situation that's more parallel, although it's distinct in other ways now, uh, from the situation that we had at mid-century that a lot of people look to as a kind of high water mark, where there are a noticeable distinctive set of figures again, where we can say, yes, there are serious artists, serious writers uh thinking through the lens of their faith about their art. And they're doing so in a way that's a model for others who will come along after them and try to carry on and take up that tradition.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

So as you were saying even from the beginning, like the assumption would be that you come to the workshop, or you know, to be a serious artist here, right? You come to the workshop, you come to your craft without bringing this other set of assumptions with you, it'd be seen as other. And yet, I think you were uh also intimating that that's a sort of false assumption in and of itself, that you could separate yourself from uh what you're standing on, or uh sort of the presupposition that you bring to it, even under the guise that you're coming with no presuppositions. What is the I suppose I'm I'm curious to hear from you, and uh having you know done this serious art yourself and been involved with others who are in the literary arts and and seek to do this seriously. Who are the gatekeepers for what counts as uh serious art, art that's to be taken seriously and evaluated on its own merits? And what are they looking for?

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Yeah, gatekeeper's a tricky term.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

Okay, maybe it's the wrong term.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

Uh gatekeeper, I think, is often taken to be someone standing there keeping you from doing the thing or from having access to the thing or calling your thing what you want to call your thing. I prefer the term curator because curators do perform similar functions. Uh curators do have to say no, curators do turn things down, curators do say yes to this and no to that, but at the same time, uh they're doing so out of service to focus rather than out of some sense of exclusion, right? Uh of course, uh we live in a time where access to the tools of creative production is actually pretty unprecedented. You can you know do whatever you want in terms of creating a book and creating a manuscript, uh creating your own cultural estuary, uh, you know, all of these things are available to people. I think um, you know, where where we get a sense of gatekeeping from people sometimes is that you you can't, you know, I can't just stand up and declare myself the new editor of the New Yorker, right? Of course I can't do that. And I don't want to do that, right? Um but I think, yeah, I think that if we think about it that way, we're we're kind of putting ourselves in a mindset where you know there are these other people outside of my world who get to define whether I get to have a world or not. And I just don't think that's I don't think that's the case at all. I think you can you create what you want to create and call it what you want to call it, and you might have to meet the critical pressure from without that says, okay, but have you considered this? And here are other intelligent objections that you might not have considered. Uh, that's all part of the fun.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

I like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Yeah, that that's yeah, that that's not some kind of imposition, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:28

Well, I really no, I really appreciate that redirection. I I like the way you've put that very much, and I I take the correction well. I like that. So thinking then about what you were mentioning from Dana Doya and noting that previously there had been um this sort of distinctive Catholic minority of literary artists, and that had, at least by 2014, as he was observing it, sort of gone away. Um what would you say then is the importance of having um a strong cohort or cadre of fellow Catholic literary artists who maybe have some kind of role here in curation for one another or curation for a larger audience? Um, could you speak to that a little bit?

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Yeah, and again, that's a world that's growing by the moment as you know, the University of St. Thomas uh Houston Master of Fine Arts program grows and begins to turn out more and more graduates. These graduates are founding more and more publications. Uh yeah, I think that's one epicenter, but there are many. Um, and it's I got in on the ground floor of one. Uh again, about 20 years ago now, when uh Dabbled Things magazine was just getting off the ground. Uh, I came on the editorial board of that magazine in the year 2007. Here we are in 2026. The magazine just celebrated its 20th anniversary. Um, you know, uh and of course there are Catholics who are not operating within that estuary, but are just operating within the mainstream, as indeed we've always done. Um you you've got uh folks coming up and you know doing good things in that world. Um, you know, and again, creating their own kinds of conversations. I think about uh Phil Kai at um the Fairfield MFA program at uh I think that's in Connecticut, and he has a podcast called Manifesto, and they have guests on, and they you know again, he's uh he's on there with Jacob Siegel, who's the editor of a Jewish magazine called The Tablet, and they that that's a really wild, wide-ranging, interesting, cross-cultural, cross-faith conversation. Uh, there's so many of these kinds of things. I could go on just listing them and fill up our entire time here. I don't want to do that. Um, but it my point is that if people start looking, they'll find so many corners that are probably addressing the exact thing that they want to address or have a conversation about. There's there are people out there already having these conversations. It's not like you have to look very far or dig very deeply, where I think when I was in school, I did feel that I had to dig deeply and look far. I thought, you know, who is bringing these two worlds together that matter so much to me of creativity and faith in a seriously intellectual way? Um Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

Well, that brings us quite naturally and directly to the new literary imprint from Word on Fire that you yourself are hoping to lead, which is called Luminore. Now, this imprint, as I've read, seeks to provide beautifully rendered prose, verse, narrative. I wonder if you could tell us more about the kind of works this imprint offers, or to put it another way, what what do you want readers to find there?

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Yeah, I'd like it to be very wide-ranging and for people to be able to find something for everyone. I want it to be at once serious and welcoming. Uh, so I want the the bar to be there, uh, but not so high that someone who's just starting out can't clear it. So I would like to offer work from, excuse me, uh for serious readers of any faith or none. So I'm not taking for granted that you know all of our readers will necessarily be Catholics, uh, will necessarily be cradle Catholics, or will necessarily uh have an interest right now in conversion. But uh the the hope is to offer a creative estuary again where people can can come and think about uh the the intellectual and aesthetic contributions of the Catholic worldview uh in a serious way uh and uh in in a low low pressure but high engagement kind of way. Who I like if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

Yeah, low pressure, high engagement. I like that a lot. Well, let's let me ask you this. This is a different way maybe of thinking about this for people. Um, if you were to think about some of the sort of uh classic Catholic writers from previous generations, who are some of the ones that that you might think of who would have found a home in Luminar, Luminor were they writing today?

SPEAKER_00 15:27

We would publish the heck out of Graham Green.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

I love that I love it.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

In fact, we did do a classics uh edition of his end of the affair not long ago that I wrote this number for.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

We have a we have a whole podcast episode on that book alone. So we're now it's getting put in the show notes with this one. Perfect. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

But again, I don't want to pigeonhole because I think so many young writers come to this and they feel crushed. And I felt crushed when I was starting under the weight of the legacy of Wynnery O'Connor, right? How do I carry this? You know, I can't be this or do this, so I have to do this in my own way. Uh, I want new writers, new voices to be able to find their own ways to take up the ambit that these writers at mid-century Wall and Green and O'Connor were carrying and to carry it forward in their own way and to realize that there has been a continuous unbroken tradition of writers trying to do things in these veins that maybe they're not aware of because they uh because these writers flew under the radar, I think, in order to survive uh in a publishing environment that, you know, if from the 60s onward was very much less hospitable to faith and to narratives of faith than uh than the 50s and early 60s had been. Uh they they masked maybe in order to get by, but it doesn't mean that they weren't there or weren't contributing. Uh it means that their contributions looked somewhat different. Uh, and I think now there's a moment, as I alluded to before, that's opening up where people are again interested in and open to narratives of faith in a way that hasn't been the case since since that time. And maybe there's more, of course, there's more relativism in the air, there's more nihilism in the air. But then again, we have to remember that O'Connor thought of herself as mainly writing to and for non-believers. She would be very surprised, I think, by what we've made of her since then.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

That's a great point. That's a great point. You know, I just had one of my uh first year students in my office today, and he'd come talk about a few things, but one of the things he asked for was uh recommended reading for the summer. And what he what he noted was what would be good for somebody who's sort of skeptical about faith. So obviously presenting, you know, something of where he would like to place himself and think about, but somebody who's seeking in that case, right? And what I found myself offering were a few things that were nonfiction. Like I think he wants to think through some things, you know, so a little bit uh theological, philosophical type things. But I was really thinking even more about or thinking out loud with him about um works of fiction that present a kind of way of being. So Graham Green was certainly proposed, and I didn't give him like 50 things, I gave him like four things. Um why did I do that? I mean, I think I have a sense of why I do that, but I guess like a younger version of me, right out of graduate school, might have thought, like, well, let me give him there's this really important theological book and this thing, which will explain that. But I was more drawn now to wanting him to encounter something in the fiction that I thought would be more, I don't know, healthy or would be more broadening or opening for him. So help me understand myself, Katie. Why did I do that?

SPEAKER_00 19:03

I think that that's that's a great question. I think in our moment we have so much debate going on and we're so immersed in signaling, right? If you go online as all of our students are do, and as we ourselves do, to try to find descriptions of what's happening, to try to make sense of our moment and of ourselves, what we run into it are two things. Right, we want we run into very highly polarized abstraction, and we run into very fragmented narrative, right? I think literary art has the capacity to bring those fractured things back together to tell stories in a way that is not fragmented and instrumentalized and made into a kind of spectacle, but it is integrated and patient and slow and works more like experience actually works, right? Can give you kind of the fruit of certain experiences where you start some of these things you might not actually want to live through, but if you look at the entire arc of how those things unfold, uh then you can gain a kind of experiential uh benefit uh without having to suffer through the things that the characters suffered through to attain the wisdom that they attained. Uh and you can also arrive at what you know the critical consensus would call epiphany, uh with uh with some kind of reliability abstracting from that experience, uh without, again, sort of the burden or the weight of heavily theorized or you know excessively uh you know overdetermined kinds of narratives that you you you run into when you you're not looking at narrative through the lens of art, but through the lens of purpose in a capital P sense.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, this this point about uh sort of the fractured narrative or the fragmentation uh draws my attention back to something I had read that you wrote that you shared, I think you uh might have directed me towards this, where you were actually bringing attention to Pope Francis's presentation of art in the human person, but specifically in relation to the devotion to the sacred heart of Jesus. And in that presentation, I think what we're encountering is a rediscovery of the fullness and the wholeness of the human person in Christ. So I'd love to hear you speak about that a little bit. In your view, what do you think that Pope Francis has given us when he reproposed the sacred heart as that key to a rediscovery of our humanity?

SPEAKER_00 22:15

I love the way that he puts this because he talks about sitting with narrative as a way of learning to hear the human voice again. Right. And there's something parallel to this in the way that Pope Leo now talks about learning to see the human face, right? A central theme of our time is holding on to humanity in a moment where the question of what it means to be human is very much on the table again. And all of the scientific and technological consensuses that we've come to can't answer that question for us. They raise questions that they can't answer. You know, we have to come back to the ways in which humans have always grappled with these questions. And one of those ways is through telling stories about who we are and what we've been through. So for Francis, I think he's also putting a kind of emphasis on accompanying the individual, knowing someone's story, sitting beside someone, uh, knowing what they in particular as one individual have gone through. I think there's also an importance to knowing our our story as history, our story as you know, peoples, as nations, as um groups, right? Again, not to over-determine things and explain the individual always in light of these larger lenses. Um again, because this can get very instrumentalized very fast, uh, and very dehumanized very fast. Um but to to realize that these things necessarily play a part in our individual stories, um, and knowing how those relate to each other uh again can be a part of um uh our learning to know ourselves uh as ultimately uh know ourselves before before God as well as along with others uh and as distinct from others too.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

Yeah, yeah, indeed. Well, as we as we draw this to a close, can you sh uh uh kind of tell us if we're interested in in following the work that's going to be coming forth from Luminore? Where do we get started? Like what should we be looking for and where should we go?

SPEAKER_00 24:34

Yes, please. Uh go to wordonfire.org slash luminor. Uh you'll be able to see our spring catalog, which we're getting ready to launch. This is our very first spring catalog. Super exciting. Exciting. Yeah. Uh so we have a couple of novels coming out uh and a book of literary criticism. And then in the fall, we'll be announcing a guide to reading poetry. Uh excellent. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

So it's all and we'll be sure to yeah, yeah, we'll be sure to provide the link in the show notes for this so people, if they can't remember by listening, they can go and look and click on the link and find all this stuff themselves.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

Great. Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

Excellent. Well, Katie, this has been so good to learn about this work and your uh expertise and views on art and especially art, the literary arts coming from uh a Catholic worldview and from Catholic creators. So thanks so much for all of this.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

Thank you. It's been such a joy.

SPEAKER_01 25:35

And thanks to all of you, as always, for joining us on Church Life today. This has been a production of OSV Podcasts. To learn more, visit osvpodcasts.com.