The latest Dappled Things is on the air!

Dear Friends,

Has “the bleak midwinter” chilled you to the bone? Then warm up with a new edition of Dappled Things that is hot off the presses. Here’s a sample of the sizzling writing you will find in the new issue:

In our feature, “A Fix for Catholic Music,” Sacred Music expert Jeffrey Tucker goes beyond analyzing the many problems with contemporary Catholic music to suggest concrete practical steps for improving music at the parish level. By way of doing so, he lays out a case for the importance of music within the liturgy and shares some interesting details concerning the Church’s rich musical tradition, a tradition that he thinks it is time to recover:

Catholics in particular have an astonishingly noble history in music. It is the Church’s tradition that formed the basis of Western music with Gregorian chant in the first millennium. Catholics invented the first form of staff writing so that music could be transferred across time and space without memorization. In fact, Catholics dominated music for the first 500 years in the second millennium and gave the world what is called the treasury of sacred music. This tradition belongs to the Church and we must reclaim it for use in every parish.

Those of you following Eileen Cunis’s in-depth exploration of the vocation of the Christian artist will enjoy the culmination of her three part series in this issue with an essay that gets into specifics as it considers “How Does Catholicism Aid the Artist?” Of course, some in our forums have challenged the very idea that art can be a “vocation.” We invite you to read Cunis’s series and then stop by the forums to join in the fray.

Of course, if what you crave is a great story, we’ve got that too. Novelist John Desjarlais shares with us Assisted Living, a poignant short story that ponders the subtle action of Providence on a life, while Arthur Powers explores the reality of evil in Exú, a story that considers the dark paths some tread in their search for love. Whatever else you read, though, make sure not to miss Dena Hunt’s Bienville, a hard, unflinching look at the life of a young girl growing up in a poor New Orleans neighborhood:

Loxie sat at the table stirring her raisin bran. There was only a little milk, so it took a while to get the dry flakes moist. She looked at the paper sack of garbage standing under the sink and the empty Pet milk can on top. A roach ran down the side of the sack. “What you running for?” she said aloud. “You got nothing to be afraid of.” She stretched her long thin legs out under the table and studied the fruit basket pattern of the vinyl tablecloth, barely visible on the top, nearly vanished from many wipings, but around the edges, it was still vivid.She remembered when Mama bought the tablecloth five years ago, when she was only eight years old. She had long ago observed the placement of the various fruits in the baskets, counted each basket in the pattern; now there was nothing left to figure except maybe how many more wipings would be necessary before the pattern disappeared entirely. She occupied herself with this speculation now as she ate her raisin bran. It allowed her to dismiss the garbage sack, the roach, and the miserable steaminess of the New Orleans summer morning.

But that isn’t all. This issue features artist Ryan Hannigan’s gorgeous paintings and some truly excellent poems by familiar contributors like R.S. Mitchell, Sarah Gajkowski-Hill, and Amanda Glass, as well as work from poets new to Dappled Things like Beth Gylys, whose award-winning writing has previously appeared in journals like the Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, and The New Republic, among others.

As a final note, I want to point out a couple of news items of interest to readers of Dappled Things:

• Early DT adopter Matthew Lickona has finally finished Alphonse: Murder Sleep, the second installment in his five-part comic book series chronicling the life of an angry young fetus (yes, you read that right) and the troubled world into which he was born. It’s available now at IndyPlanet.com for just $2.99: . He calls the work his “faint echo/gross exaggeration of O’Connnor’s masterful grotesquerie — with pictures!” Check it out – proceeds from the comic will go to fund production of the rest of the story.
• DT reader Mike Schorsch will be hosting a panel at the Iowa City Newman Center on January 24th at noon. Its theme is “Being Catholic / Being an Artist.” Anyone who lives in the area is welcome to come. The panel, which really will be a kind of public conversation among four practicing Catholics who are practitioners of art, should be informal and last an hour or so. The participants will be Joshua Casteel (graduate of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and currently a student in the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program), Patrick Haas (current student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop), Daniel Houglum (PhD student in music composition), and Mr. Schorch himself (a current student in the Iowa Translation Workshop). Throughout the semester he will also be running a “Great Catholic Authors” book group. E-mail him if you’re going to be around and want updates on the group, or even if you just want to be informed about what Catholics at the Iowa Writing Behemoth are up to.
• Finally, if you have not yet contributed to our fundraising campaing, please consider making a donation today. Your support this year is absolutely crucial to our work.

Wishing all of you a blessed New Year,

Bernardo Aparicio García
President, Dappled Things