This post is excerpted from Gregory Wolfe’s final commencement address as director of the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing last month. Wolfe, who founded the program, stepped down as director yesterday. Read part 1 here. I’d like to close my commencement address by taking a lesson or two from the texts we’ve been studying in the Art and Faith seminar. One of those texts is Brown: The Last Discovery of America by Richard Rodriguez. It’s... Read more
This post is excerpted from Gregory Wolfe’s final commencement address as director of the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing last month. Wolfe, who founded the program, steps down as director today. Once upon a time—well, seventeen years ago, to be exact—I was contacted by Mark Walhout, the chair of the English department at Seattle Pacific University to consult with him regarding the possibility of SPU starting an MFA program in creative writing. He felt that... Read more
I’ve always promised myself I wouldn’t work with anything living, a prohibition I applied first when, in high school, I job-shadowed a pathologist and fainted when watching a lung biopsy, fainted when seeing the wall of stored blood, fainted ad infinitum into the twenty-first century. I couldn’t deal with watching pain, and I hadn’t considered that pathologists work not only with the dead, but with the suffering living, and with blood that is distinctly never where it ought to be.... Read more
In her photo on the jacket flap of Negroland: A Memoir, Margo Jefferson looks to me like an attractive white woman in her late sixties. In the chapter where she delineates beauty standards for African American girls in the 1950s, when she was a child, her list of skin color options astounds me: “Ivory, cream, beige, wheat, tan, moccasin, fawn, café au lait, and the paler shades of honey, amber, and bronze are best. Sienna, chocolate, saddle brown, umber (burnt... Read more
At night at the Ingalls Homestead in DeSmet, SD, we can see the pale, translucent arm of the Milky Way divide a sky of a million stars. The small bright point of a satellite zips across to our left with striking speed and intention. We can’t see the same sky from Evanston, IL. Down the hill at the homestead, ten acres of corn, beans, and oats are discernible only as a dark patch in a wider expanse of dark. We... Read more
Poetry can recall us to the sensuousness of ordinary experience. Elizabeth Smither does this in “The Embrace” through the pointed choice of particular details. We are invited into a room in which almost nothing is happening, yet the room fills with sumptuously imaged life: two pianos which seem to be playing (though literally they’re not); two people leaning joyously into each other; a meal appearing in all its lusciously itemized dishes. All of this takes place in only two sentences—for... Read more
By Jeffrey Overstreet Continued from yesterday. “You’re the sort of man who can’t know anyone intimately, least of all a woman.” That may be the most stinging, hurtful reprimand I’ve ever heard. Thank God it wasn’t aimed at me: Those words were spoken by Miss Lucy Honeychurch to her fiancé, Mr. Cesil Vyse, in 1985’s A Room With a View. The insult broke their engagement. It also broke the poor man’s heart, just as it would have broken mine. As... Read more
By Jeffrey Overstreet In late July of 1992, Batman Returns ruled the box office. I bought a ticket for something else: A film about two married women and a grumpy widow who take a holiday and, as The Seattle Times put it, “rediscover their sensuality on the sunny Mediterranean.” Strange, I know. But there I was, a twenty-one-year-old male, spending what little money I had to see Enchanted April. How many college guys would you guess were in the audience... Read more
“I want a holy experience!” I say to my companions, Amy and Danielle, leaning toward them in the cafeteria of St. John’s College in Santa Fe. We are all spending a week away from our children and husbands at the Glen Workshop to get some time to write and explore the area. They seem mildly amused by my outburst, possibly because they are used to my naive, idealistic longing for a mystical encounter. We continue discussing a place called Chimayo—about... Read more
I’m an introvert who loves to talk, an often confusing combination that can leave me drained in spite of myself, or perplex my friends when I suddenly slink off after an hour of raucous guffawing. But I just spent a week in Santa Fe at the Glen Workshop, a gathering of writers, artists, and musicians who meet at St. John’s College every summer to hone their craft, eat and worship together, and listen to some of the world’s most inspiring... Read more
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