Great idea. Look forward the disscussion.

Now...in this faraway land
Strange...that the palms of my hands
Should be damp with expectancy

Spring...and the air's turning mild
City lights...and the glimpse of a child
Of the alleyway infantry

Friends...do they know what I mean
Rain...and the gathering green
Of an afternoon out-of-town

But Lord I had to go
My trail was laid too slow behind me
To face the call of fame
Or make a drunkard's name for me
Though now this other life
Has brought a different understanding
And from these endless days
Shall come a broader sympathy
And though I count the hours
To be alone is no injury...

My home... was a place near the sand
Cliffs... and a military band
Blew an air of normality

Exiled In The Dobruja

The poet is screwed in a place like this --
No one comes to talk, no one ever thinks to. --Ovid 1
This country house stands a troubled evening.
The hills beyond are waving frantically high
And new spring grasses thatch the ground to sky.
I came here knowing I’d not be leaving
Here where stars and darkness always trade roles.
Disturbances no greater than a breeze
Are enough to astonish one’s kept muse
As lace fenestrations frayed at the sills.
Nothing here can be observed except through
Remotest of accidents. Here, a song
Is played like a millhouse door on its hinge
Every time the winds show a will to blow.
But things will happen – capricious as Zeus,
Whenever a goddess resides in a place.
2
The Black Sea suffers from similar turmoils,
Dishing severe storms through my windows when
Plum and beech die off. I feast on fat eels
And jelled eggplant. If this Romanian
Rot-gut for wine doesn’t end debauchery,
The girls (who prefer day-workers to poets)
Will. But I am out of season anyway --
Sent packing, shipped off to outer limits
Of empire. You plumb the wrong depth, reviled
And beached up for just the wrong disguises --
Heu! But not what’s found in fellow exiles
Anyway.So your wife’s farewell chastises:
”Spring in Rumania lacks the loving
Which winter in Bulgaria is having.”

3
Her back to me, arching toward tapered light,
With Juno’s eyes reset in Circe’s face,
Her legs cross; she draws out a cigarette
With deft fingerings from a golden case.
The poet hungers for her cold eloquence --
For the crisp sound her lips make when they part,
Or, in a kind of religious observance,
Invites her silken legs to grip the heart.
Her small talk starts to magnify the ache
Like air around us. She is topical,
”Don’t worry, dummy. Caesars and poets take
The march of many feet to make their rule
Of monuments to lost souls - dead bodies
Like yours will winter out;you will not freeze.”
4
Embodied thus with moment, why can’t she
Stay ? She walks over the exotic mix
Of carpet patterns. The parlor gallantry
Of taut lampshades and tabled antique facts.
Adultery in divine irritation
Is out of harmony. The tangy quiver
Of shifts and stays is soured. Transformation
And exhortations... themes of the lover:
She drops a cigarette into my drink.
An artist might work her figure with ease
But her mind won’t stand still long enough to
think
When it does not please her body to please.
Each time she sips at her vodka and lime,
Her teeth chime the glass’s edge:"there is no time."

5
In her wake, my songs squawk with artless love –
They should have sparked a liturgical movement,
These, panned as smoke-in-your-eye sentiment.
So, now I consider my next irrelevant move
As mystery passes me by: a poem
Offers some answer to that lovely hole
In the universe, no? Scarves of smoke trail
From my cigarette, held firm as her wake’s foam.
But these ghosts of circumstance will rise now
Above my occasion. Whose lungs were blessed
As her thurifer and her temple priest
Could bellow such billowing songs from below…
As for me, well... in paperback copies
They’ve translated chasuble as codpiece.

Yikes, I hope I qualify as a real Catholic!

Hi XC,

Oops. That wasn't very clear. Sorry about that. We're referring to the fact that Hopkins and the other characters in the book were actual figures in history.

No problem. I guess Ron Hansen often writes about real persons -- Jesse James, etc.

I intend to read the discussion just to see what they have to say (I love Amy's Prove It books), but really isn't it a mute point since Catholic writers can't get "Catholic fiction" published? Catholic publishers won't publish fiction.

Dear Inside Catholic,

The Book Circle is a wonderful idea. May you soon wield Oprah's might.

Cheers,

David Athey
author, Danny Gospel

"Exiles" is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. That's as mainstream as can be.

Ignatius Press (Catholic, of course) has been known to publish a small amount of fiction.

Idylls Press is a new Catholic press which publishes fiction and poetry. <a href="http://www.idyllspress.com/">Check it out!</a>

Arx Publishing is another.

Regina Doman managed to get her popular YA novels published by fiction-phobic Catholic presses for a long time, but now she is successfully self-publishing through her "Chesterton Press." (This is also how Idylls Press got started.)

If we want to read truly great "Catholic fiction," someone has to write it. The reason we see so little of it is not so much because mainstream presses won't print it - it's because almost no one knows how to write beautiful English anymore.

"If we want to read truly great "Catholic fiction," someone has to write it. The reason we see so little of it is not so much because mainstream presses won't print it - it's because almost no one knows how to write beautiful English anymore."

No, no, and no.
Not true on ANY account.
Not even slightly.

Major Catholic presses are fiction-phobic--unless they're printing reissues of "classics." Try to sell a contemporary Catholic novel--one that's not "creative nonfiction" (which EXILES certainly sounds like to me) or a "creative" treatment of Biblical/Scriptural era character--to any legitimate, royalty-paying Catholic publisher. By that, I mean one that's not a family enterprise on a shoestring, an enterprise that basically exists to promote one author's work, or a self-publishing venture cloaked under the disguise of being a "publisher." If you succeed, please come back and tell the rest of us about it, because unpublished manuscripts are out there that are written beautifully, that tell great stories, and that have a Catholic element/essence/message in them...and they are going UNTOUCHED. And, no, you can't sell them in most Christian markets; they get one whiff of the dreaded Papism, and you may as well hang a sign around the book saying "Unclean! Unclean!"

I'm also more than a little distressed by the use of the phrase "write beautiful English" (as in "no one can do this anymore"). That's simply not true, either; but it's all too easy to "make true" if your definition of "beautiful English" begins and ends at things either written a hundred years ago, or things that would qualify as "literary"--but does not include genre fiction. And, unfortunately, that's another brick in the wall against some Catholic writers; if we're writing in a genre, in commercial fiction at all--especially in a genre like, say, romance, or science fiction, or fantasy--some of even our Catholic brothers and sisters dismiss us as "real writers" out of hand. This literary snobbism is, in effect, our other worst enemy. This is why many Catholics who want to write novels often end up self-publishing; they can't sell the genre fiction to a secular publisher without "taking the religious stuff out of it"...but a Catholic publisher won't take it, either.

Until the blinders are off Catholic publishers to the point where they're willing to realize that commercial fiction can be written with a faithful Catholic viewpoint AND be beautifully written and entertaining at the same time--AND sell like hotcakes--we will forever be having this discussion. Unfortunately, sentiments like the ones expressed above only put that dream farther and farther away...because if "everybody knows" this "won't work" from the get-go, no one is going to try it.

And that's our loss. Because our Catholic readers are flocking to Christian bookstores just to get some good, wholesome fiction to read. They're holding their noses and gritting their teeth over the anti-Catholic tone of some books to do it...but we haven't given them any other choices. Even secular publishers are smart enough to jump on that bandwagon. It's only in our own backyards, apparently, that Catholic fiction authors have no respect...

JB

I must take strong exception to the statement "noone writes beautiful English anymore."

So wrong. There are many, many writers working to get Catholic and Catholic friendly fiction into the marketplace. I'm a Prod myself, but would dearly love to treat Catholic characters in my fiction in a realistic manner. Why should I apologize that I write historical fiction where the characters are of necessity Catholic? or if I wish to include a Catholic character in a contemporary piece? I will NOT apologize that there are Christians who believe/worship differently than I do, and I will not diminish them.

Yet I'm told such books are impossible to sell in so-called Christian fiction. I submit that until there's a Catholic fiction market (and there are writers who can do the job, but the pubs aren't buying), we will continue to struggle against this most unfortunate mindset.

Off now to write some more beautiful English.

The Writers' Union of Canada's listserve pointed me in this direction, and I decided I had to add my two cents to the discussion.

My latest novel, The Violets of Usambara, has as one of its two main characters Louise Brossard who is a devout Catholic and who was devoted her life to things spiritual and to good works. Her husband Thomas has been a Canadian politician and she has guided his career. As the story opens it is 1997 and he is in Burundi on a fact-finding mission, visiting refugee camps as a representative of a Catholic NGO. Matters of faith and good intentions are central to the book which I think deals sensitively with them.

"The novel is a wonderfully matter-of-fact portrayal of two pragmatic characters struggling to find themselves and reconnect with each other,"The Globe and Mail said June 16, 2008

I invite you to check it out. Available from Cormorant Books on Amazon.ca

Best wishes

Mary

I think this was quite misunderstood. "Great Catholic fiction" is not just "a Catholic message" bound up in professional writing. It is the abundance and incarnation of beautiful writing itself. It must be that incarnational. The English language itself was, I think it safe to say, formed by a Catholic culture.

Please keep in mind, the words were, "The reason we see so little of it is not so much because mainstream presses won't print it..."

This is clearly not a broadside. The person is getting across the notion that we have largely lost the vital connection to what makes us truly creative. And it's rather true that almost no one knows how to write beautiful English anymore. This would include the secular writers as well. There's a certain hardened varnish over the cultural world of fictional words. We must break it.

Perhaps it's the notion of "Catholic" fiction that is at least part of the perceived problem. At least one of the comments above refers to a "Catholic message." What is a Catholic message? Is writing evangelical? If it is, are all writers preaching some kind of "message"? Indeed, some of them are, and, as a reader, I must say that unless I happen to agree with the message aforehand, I strongly resent being preached to in fiction.

I rather think it is our business as Catholics simply to be good Catholics. If we also happen to be writers, the Catholicism is evident only in criticism. The Lord of the Rings is a Catholic novel solely because it is the product of a Catholic mind. If we are good Catholics, our Catholicism pervades literally everything we do--including our writing. It is not a conscious effort to "write Catholic"; it's as natural as breathing.

Dena et al,

Given the paucity of thought coming out of Hollywood and Broadway (which whatever else you might think about either or both, are still a practical barometer for creative thought in our day) my suspicion is that Catholic or otherwise, the fictionalist has really forgotten HOW to tell a story. Throw in the lackluster performances coming out of the publishing world - with rare but significant exceptions - and I think you can make a convincing case for cultural atrophy exacerbated by a lack of foundation in craft. You can want to tell a "Catholic" story all you want, but if you don't know how to craft a story, you're done for, really.

I appreciate the comments on no one being able to compose good (or even adequate) English anymore. Forgetting the creative aspect for the moment, this proposition seems true even of expository and discursive writing - again, with significant exceptions.

But, perhaps more importantly, at the risk of sounding like a doomsayer, I'd say most people just don't give a damn about reading the printed word anymore - well, except in text messaging, emails and blog [sic] potshots.

I do suspect that these two things - the reading community's apathy and the writing community's ineptitude go hand in hand, and arise simultaneously from one another.

JOB

So how does one go about breaking the vicious circle of bored readers and bad writers?

Well, to return to the matter at hand, and with the hope that it will help someone out there to rediscover the art of story and craft, I will be greedy and suggest three more books to enjoy with a summer cocktail or 20.

1. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form by Paul Fussell. Had Aristotle written a book on the lyric genre, it would probably look something like this. For certain, he mentions a few things in passing in his Poetics about the lyric, but Fussell's handbook on English prosody fills out the rest of the story. It is as the title promises, a discourse on Meter - and he manages to reduce this hydra-headed monster to a remarkably practical and simple number of principles for the student. Likewise, the applications of lyric Forms for the fictionalist are grossly underestimated.

2. The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. The same John Gardner who wrote Grendel also gathered up his class notes from his creative writing classes into a sort of "Fiction Writing 101: The Book." Whether you're a writer or just a reader, it will help you understand the art of the novel (or short story, or even narrative poem) with clear and concise principles. First principle: A fiction is like a dream. When the dream is no longer believable, you have lost your audience, and no longer have a story anyone cares about. Gardner shows the multitude of ways this can happen.

3. Figures of Speech by Arthur Quinn. Geometricians must know axioms; chemists must know the periodic table; doctors must know skeleton bones; the writer must know figures of speech. But as Quinn points out, it's not so important to know the definition of, say, a hendiadys or an hypozeuxis, as it is to be able to recognize - and even, if you're lucky, successfully execute - in a piece of writing one or more of the 60 traditional figures of speech. Quinn includes a full English garden of examples from the Masters: Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Dryden, St. James Bible, etc.

Yeats scolded the Irish scops of his day to "learn your trade/ Sing whatever is well made."

I do believe the man knew that of which he spoke.

So... let's get reading.

JOB

Dear JOB,
Good suggestions, but they do apply to all writers of fiction. If you are a Catholic writer, just write, and your work will be "Catholic." The only way your work can escape that adjective is if you yourself escape your own faith while you write it. Pray God that never happens.

Writing and getting published are two different ventures, almost unrelated. I suggest that if you are a writer, you will write. The noun is the by-product of the verb. A writer is one who writes, not one who "wants" to write, and not one who "gets published." Writing requires only your own cooperation. Getting published, on the other hand, requires other cooperation. God's will is still operating in the universe and still stronger than any "market analysis."

I'm not sure that we're experiencing a dearth of good Catholic fiction (Tolkien's phenomenal popularity is a case in point) but we are between canonical generations. A new generation arises even as we speak. Hansen seems to be the harbinger.

How about Ann Rice. Her writing has always been compelling. but now that she has seen the LIGHT, her writing is even better. if you haven't read her last 2 novels - please do. and yes she is Catholic.

I read the first two chapters of Out of Egypt (Ann Rice) because I was curious to see how she managed a fictional account of Jesus' childhood. She's a good writer. I didn't read further, and I don't think I'll read Exiles, because I don't want to read fictional accounts of historical persons. I enjoy historical novels, but not that sort. I am writing one, Red and White, set in Elizabethan England, in which I refer to historical persons (Elizabeth and Walsingham, so far) but they are not characters in the novel. I am attempting to be as historically accurate as possible and that purpose excludes fictional characterization of historical persons. In other words, the novel says, "This is what might have happened to ordinary people like Caroline, Edward, and others," but it does not say, "This is what so-and-so was probably like."

But what I'm glad to see in Ann Rice is that Catholic writers are writing "popular" fiction. I enjoyed very much The Red Hat and Father Elijah.. I do read more "literary" fiction, such as Mariette in Ecstacy, but I enjoy page-turners very much, especially mysteries, adventures. I'm surprised that Red and White seems to be turning out that way. The very small bit of fiction I've done in the past--only five stories--has been quite different. I doubt anyone will ever publish R&W but it's definitely of the popular type, which is, I have to say, more fun to write, less--well, I don't know what to call it.

But this is 15 July, and wasn't our panel to discuss Exiles beginning 14 July? I'm eager to see what they have to say.