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Tell us a bit about yourself, will you?\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>I grew up in Montana, spent summers on my grandparents\u2019 ranch, hiked the mountains and fished the rivers with my father, and listened to gospel music from the Imperials with my mom.\u00a0\u00a0I love my wife,\u00a0Jennifer, and have loved her for the last 33 years!\u00a0 She is my friend, my beloved, and the one my soul loves.\u00a0 She also leads a large multinational sports company and is\u00a0the electrifying, hilarious, deeply\u00a0intuitive, and deeply intelligent\u00a0mother of our three daughters, Natalya, Ariana, and Isabella.\u00a0 The love I receive from\u00a0all four of them\u00a0is the essence of God in my life.\u00a0 They speak the mystery into me, they embody grace and power, they are life-giving, and they humble me.\u00a0 I can hardly believe the gift I\u2019ve been given to be loved by them!<\/p>\n I pray to see the world with a poet\u2019s eyes, and value how the great poets give us peace and lead us deeper into ourselves and closer to each other.\u00a0\u00a0I\u00a0spent part of my childhood on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeast Montana, and as a forgiveness researcher I\u2019ve had the honor to serve as a visiting scholar in North and South America,\u00a0Africa, Asia, and Europe.\u00a0I am\u00a0the author of the\u00a0novel\u00a0American Copper<\/a>,<\/i>\u00a0winner of the Foreword Readers Choice Book of the Year\u00a0Award and the\u00a0Spur Award from the Western Writers of America;\u00a0American Masculine<\/i><\/a>, which\u00a0received the American Book Award and the Bakeless Prize;\u00a0a work of political theory,\u00a0Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity<\/i><\/a>, an Amazon Top Ten Hot New\u00a0Selection in War and Peace in Current Events;\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Balefire<\/i><\/a>, a poetry collection that was granted the High Plains Book Award in poetry.\u00a0My\u00a0work has\u00a0been honored with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and\u00a0featured\u00a0in\u00a0Esquire<\/i>,\u00a0P<\/i>oetry<\/i>,\u00a0McSweeney\u2019s<\/i>,\u00a0Montana Quarterly<\/i>,\u00a0Narrative<\/i>, and\u00a0Salon<\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0A systems psychologist focusing on the psychology of men,\u00a0I\u00a0now live in Spokane, Washington, teaching\u00a0leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s talk about your book: what, in a nutshell, is your book about anyway?\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>Sweetclover<\/i><\/a> is a book about the marriage bed beyond nihilism.\u00a0 I find that pairing not only necessary for good marriage, but hilarious in it\u2019s philosophical irony.<\/p>\n Do tell, what was the inspiration behind it?\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>A couple of years ago I witnessed a play featuring modern dance in which the dancers interpreted Rilke\u2019s\u00a0Book of Hours<\/i><\/a>\u00a0through individual and collective interpretations of the\u00a0body in movement, silent, vocal, ethereal, muscular, transcendent.\u00a0 This struck me as so unique and raw and beautiful, it sent me seeking\u00a0to write\u00a0a book of poems that would not see God as distant, unreachable, or\u00a0voiceless, but rather as intimate, closer than a sister or brother, and\u00a0speaking with\u00a0an elegant \u00a0physical music.\u00a0 In the Latin, the soul of Christ, the Anima Christi<\/i>,\u00a0takes the feminine form.\u00a0 My wife lives in such a way that I see and feel the soul of Christ, revealed in her everyday life toward me.<\/p>\n I wanted to write a book about wilderness, in Montana, in the lands that surround us on every continent, and also about the wilderness so often found in the heart of marriage.\u00a0\u00a0Sweetclover<\/i><\/a>\u00a0came from that impulse.\u00a0\u00a0Sweetclover<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>is a book of poems\u00a0that speaks of\u00a0the marriage bed in which two unite to become one, through all desolations, shadows, and internal or external threats, being\u00a0made whole through a sacred, if winnowing, process over the many years and seasons of marriage.\u00a0 We all experience fracture.\u00a0 I hope these poems\u00a0embrace that fracture, and respond by\u00a0asking forgiveness, making atonement with one another, and looking with both bodily and spiritual desire into\u00a0what my wife and I see see as the sacrament of marriage.\u00a0 This intimacy, found in the kind of marital\u00a0love I\u2019ve experienced as healing my wounds, healing our\u00a0brokenness, and leading us home hand in hand, forms the central poetry sequence of the book, from which the other\u00a0poems spiral and move\u00a0outward into\u00a0the\u00a0borderlands of the collection.<\/p>\n How do you hope readers will be changed by your words? \u00a0<\/strong><\/em>I think love changes us.\u00a0 Poems can embody or speak love.\u00a0 That\u2019s the hope.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Lest we forget to ask, how have YOU been changed by writing the book?\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>I\u2019ve found that people who\u00a0desire communion with one another in a beloved community, and communion with God, often feel great despair over the failure of relationships, especially marriage relationships.\u00a0 Certainly, it is\u00a0part of the great mystery\u00a0to consider, desire, and purposefully develop\u00a0wholeness in marriage, emotionally, in friendship, intellectually, sexually, and spiritually.\u00a0 This book helped me contemplate the beauty of the wife in oneness with the beauty of the husband.\u00a0 Because of the journey with these poems,\u00a0I feel more\u00a0humbled, more\u00a0grateful, and more in tune with the body of marriage, which I see as\u00a0a graceful if elusive essence of God in the world.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n How and where can we find you on the internet?\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>You can find me through\u00a0this website, www.shannray.com<\/a>\u00a0or by email at ferch@gonzaga.edu<\/a>.\u00a0 I\u2019m so grateful for the community of artists, readers, writers, dancers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and beloved others I\u2019ve been given to know and learn from.\u00a0 Love to hear from you!<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n Well, I don\u2019t know about you, but I\u2019m eager to get my hands on this book. I got to preview a couple of the poems, and friends, they\u2019re delectable. So, leave a comment below for your chance to win!\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n *Post contains LOTS of Amazon links. Obviously.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well friends, I\u2019ve got a treat for you today! Shann Ray is a friend, a poet, a systems psychologist, an award-winning novelist, a dad and a husband. And y\u2019all, after spending a week together at\u00a0Collegeville Institute, not only did I know he was the real deal, but I\u00a0knew I wanted to host him in this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3607,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[72,373,370,367],"class_list":["post-1543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-book-giveaway","tag-poetry","tag-shann-ray","tag-sweetclover"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/1063\/2019\/02\/color-vest-shann-ray-full-color.jpg\")
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