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Many thanks to Matthew and Bishop Flores for starting the conversation off so beautifully. My first entry, written on the fly, on the road, will, I hope, be followed by more substantial thoughts. For now, I will do what I seem to do best: toss out some seeds. Or small explosives? You decide.

Like everyone else so far, it seems, I was a bit taken aback by what initially seemed to me to be a reportorial tone in Exiles: notes for a novel, as Matthew mentioned, or even a literary essay weaving together Hopkins's biography with the events described in the poem.

It is, indeed, very different from Mariette in Ecstasy and Atticus, but perhaps not so different from Hitler's Niece -- a similar, it seems to me, historically based novel. And one that I was not crazy about.

I'm suspecting, however, that as both Matthew and Bishop Flores have suggested, there is more than meets the eye here, for I did enjoy the novel -- I think it's important to say right off, before the questions and discussion. And I don't think that is simply wishful thinking, either. It's something that I'm sure we'll develop as the week goes on.

One thought: I wonder, for example, if Hansen's reserve about Hopkins's inner life -- and particularly his spirituality -- is rooted in the respect of an author for the integrity of a real person. Perhaps he went as far as he felt he legitimately could? Here, I'll just muse.

All of us involved in this conversation are writers of one sort or another. We all confront various obstacles in our writing -- innumerable ones, barriers real and imagined we can blame for all sorts of things. And who among us has not thought, "My writing could be so much more real and authentic if I could write freely about Ms. X." Or without fear of hurting another's feelings, or -- even worse -- doing real damage. We look with a combination of envy and horror at writers who simply do as they will, who employ a scorched-earth policy in writing about other real human beings.

But then, grappling with the interior duel between imagination and fidelity to truth, even as we know the imagination can tell the truth, we pause. Perhaps out of fear, or perhaps out of simple Christian charity and respect, we step back and decide to tell the story in another way -- just as true, we hope, but one that will not do violence to who people really are.

So the point of that excursion is twofold: to posit a theory about the rather cautious tone of the Hopkins material in Exiles and to throw out the question to writers: Do writers striving to live as disciples of Jesus confront the challenge of writing imaginatively about real people -- either contemporary or historical -- in any kind of unique way?

Perhaps Robert Olen Butler's latest collection, Intercourse, in which he imagines varied real historical figures (and not all historical -- some living) doing just what the title indicates (and I don't mean "social"), provides a helpful contrast. A wildly apposite contrast, true. But I think the question is part of considering Exiles. Are there boundaries? Do Christian writers -- or any writers who share that basic respect for other human beings -- run up against those boundaries with particular force? Is that to our loss or to our credit as artists?

Finally, playing a bit of Bishop Flores's eloquent survey of the deaths in this novel:

As I began to read the novel, I thought, "Oh, how sad this is, following the nuns around on their preparations for the journey, knowing what happens to them in the end." It was almost unbearable.

But then I had to consider this: We know what happens to all of us in the end.

It may be less horrific or more painful, or be a moment of greater peace than freezing and drowning as the consequence of a terrible, blundering accident -- so beautifully and powerfully narrated by Hansen -- but this much is so true. We know what happens to all of us in the end.

What narrative of our own lives does that leave us with, here, as we all are, in exile?

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Amy Welborn is a prolific and popular Catholic author and speaker who blogs at amywelborn.wordpress.com.