Image is a religious journal, but maybe not in the way you'd expect. Our executive editor, Mary Kenagy Mitchell, says that "we give voice to writers who are devout, or full of doubt. The grapplers, the joyful, the angry, the bereaved, the confused. The connecting thread is the effort to get language and art to bear transcendent mystery. We aren’t interested in ideal faith but in faith as it actually is. A faith balanced against doubt."

This, Mitchell says, is why we named our annual award after Denise Levertov.

Levertov’s identity as a Christian believer—a pilgrim whose faith was inextricably entwined with doubt—was an important facet of her work.

Forché is a poet, editor, translator, and activist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. Many readers will also know Forché through the anthologies she edited, Against Forgetting and Poetry of Witness. Her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, was published in 2019.

Forché delivered the Levertov Award lecture at Hugo House, a center for Seattle writers offering readings, classes, and community events.

She began by recalling a life-changing event in Michigan State’s writing program in 1968, when Dr. Linda Wagner Martin, who taught her poetry workshop, played a recording of Denise Levertov reading poetry.

Both Forché and Levertov got into trouble with their poetry. Levertov wrote about the Vietnam War and Forché, in her 20s, wrote about El Salvador on the brink of civil war in The Country Between Us. Levertov, who was so influential on the younger Forché, became a colleague and a mentor. She expressed her admiration for Forché's work, calling it lyrical and engaged, saying it was the kind of work she wanted to do.

In this episode, you'll hear Carolyn Forché pay tribute to Levertov, read her own work, and answer questions about how writers can both bear witness and sustain each other in times of political and personal upheaval.

Every year, we present this award, in partnership with Seattle Pacific University’s Department of English and MFA in creative writing, and with Seattle’s Hugo House, to an artist, musician or writer whose work exemplifies a serious and sustained engagement with faith. Poet Marilyn Nelson will receive the 2019 Levertov Award in November.

In 2018, Scott Cairns presented Carolyn Forché with the Levertov Award for her life’s work as a poet of witness, as an activist, and as a writer whose work reflects a long engagement with faith, justice and beauty.

Faith, Justice, Beauty: Carolyn Forché’s Levertov Award Lecture

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."

Original music composed by Sister Sinjin

Episode produced by Cassidy Hall and Roy Salmond.

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Touching Eternity: A Conversation with Scott Cairns and Malcolm Guite

Season 2, Episode 1: “In This Here Place, We Flesh: Black Bodies in Art and Church ” 

My guests for this episode are Jessica B. Davenport and Biko Mandela Gray. 

Jessica B. Davenport is a doctoral student in the department of religion at Rice University researching black religion, aesthetics, and visual culture. She also has an MDiv from the Candler School of Theology. 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 offered a workshop on the blackness of art. They talked to me about how black theology, and especially what is known as Womanist theology, have always reached beyond traditional liturgical materials to music, art, dance and literature. The arts and theology are often one and the same.

Black people are producing, have always produced, creative works of theology that must be taken seriously within the Christian tradition. 

Many times when I talk to white artists of faith, we’ll express how we are drawn to certain liturgical forms because they involve the body in worship. But the body is usually involved in prescribed forms—standing, sitting, kneeling, bowing, moving the hands in the sign of the cross or even moving fingers along beads. I was struck by Jessica’s and Biko’s description of worship in historically black churches as a completely different experience of embodiment, one that is one that is not about mastery and conformity but about liberation. Black churches have often been the only place it’s safe to live fully and freely in a black body—to celebrate the body as an instrument through which God moves. 

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.

Friendship Is More Than Coffee and Proximity

The theme for this year’s 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 Basiquiat. Jessica’s lecture focused on historic images of black people with their white employers and art photography of black women together. You can listen to their talks on the Image website, and we explore both those topics in the next segment of my interview.  

But first, both Biko and Jessica talked frankly about their hesitancy in discussing friendship at all in a predominantly white space.

In This Here Place, We Flesh: Black Bodies in Art and Church

Writing and Womaning Online with Tara Isabella Burton, Kaya Oakes, and Natasha Oladokun

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.

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 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.

Writing and Womaning Online

The Image Podcast brings you the best in all things Art, Faith, and Mystery. Tune in for conversations with our favorite writers and artists, along with book, film, and movie reviews. We'll also feature exclusive content from the pages of Image Journal, read out loud.