Grab a drink at the bar and then head to the 3rd Floor. We’ll be in the Wiliford B Room, and we’ll be serving light appetizers. The reading will begin at 7:00 and each reader will read just a short sampling of their work, which makes for a lively and interesting evening. We hope to see you there!

WHEN: Friday, March 2nd
7:00-8:15 PM

WHERE: The Hilton Chicago
3rd Floor, Wiliford B Room
720 South Michigan Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60605

Josh MacIvor-Andersen lives with his wife, a cat named Baby Kitty, and a brand new baby human. He is an award winning writer, teacher and tree climber. Josh blogs occasionally for Ruminate, and his piece “Flexing, Texting, and Flying” was selected by Al Haley as the winner of Ruminate’s 2011 Nonfiction Prize and appears in Issue 20.

Allyson Armistead is a graduate of the MFA program at George Mason University. She was listed in Narrative Magazine as one of 30 Under 30 exceptional emerging writers, was nominated for the 2010 Best New American Voices anthology, and was the recipient of the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award in 2008.  She is currently at work on a novel, The Way of Lien, a story set around the events of the 1937 Nanking massacre. Allyson resides in the Washington, DC, area with her husband and cat. Her short story “Oasis” was selected by Leif Enger as the winner of Ruminate’s 2011 Short Story Prize and appears in Issue 19.

My son is five months. Such a tiny sliver of lifetime yet substantial enough that it’s hard to look past and remember anything without him. Those pre-Levin memories are there, but I’m starting to see them as blips in a deepening fog. The kid casts a long shadow.

We’re together tonight in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Peter Gabriel is full blast even though my wife rolls her eyes, says he’s too eighties. She’s out for the night. The boy and I are YouTubing like mad, digging deep into the Gabriel archive.

The temperature has dropped and the leaves have dropped. My son is five months alive and our friends, five months pregnant, just lost the baby. There was life in the womb and now, suddenly, there isn’t.

So Levin and I built a fire in the stove in the middle of the kitchen and we fed it until the house hit seventy, then seventy-two, humming heat, and we shouted at the universe for the things we’ve lost: him, for the wooden dowel on which he had been chewing that fell to the floor and me, for our friends who now grieve, for justice and its absence, for Stephen Biko who was murdered in a South African interrogation room in 1977 and for Paul Yoder, killed on a Pennsylvania highway. For all those we miss.

Levin shouted at the universe and he shook his fist, a little bob of his curled fingers the way folks say “yes” in sign language, and he sobbed so full of agony and longing (I swear I’m not pumping this full of writerly hyperbole—he really wanted that dowel) that he sucked in a deep breath and, suddenly, he had caught the universe’s attention. There was a kind of heavy pause. A colossal second of silence. The cosmos was all ears.

And what does one say when the universe is listening? Do you protest? Do you praise? Do you unscroll your list of demands and stammer through it before that window snaps shut?

My little boy chose to coo, but only after I picked up the wooden dowel and gave it back to him. He put it in his mouth and clamped it between his gum and two lower teeth and was satisfied.

We live here now, on the shores of Lake Superior, portions of which are currently covered in ice. There are snowmen on the sandy snowy beaches outside, watching, looking outward at the waves, melting a little and refreezing and then melting some more.

We are alive now in this kitchen by the lake rejoicing and grieving and swaggering shirtless around the fire when it all makes sense and when it doesn’t. We dance around the fire tonight for our friends—god bless you god keep you god shine his face upon you—and we shake our fists at the universe (Levin’s so incredibly tiny) until—shhhh, son—it actually listens.

RM: The paintings in your series interventions feel almost like movie stills to me. It takes a second to process the colors and fill in the story and then your breath catches as you think ahead to the next frame. How did these ‘in-between” moments come to capture your attention?

MB: Initially, I was struck by a particular painting, and, later, a body of work produced by the Siena School painters of pre-Renaissance Italy. In the “Blessed Agostino Novello” altarpiece (1324), by Simone Martini, there is a depiction of a child falling to the street from a second floor balcony. The child plummets to the earth as Saint Agostino swoops in from a cloud to snatch her up before she perishes. Coming upon this picture, and knowing nothing of the story, had quite an effect on me.

Simone Martini. Blessed Agostino Novello.

Prior to this interventions series, I had been painting quiet, domestic scenes of my family life, but this Martini picture, so opposite in subject matter, touched on something urgent and sensational. Here there was this suspension . . . a child inches from the ground, hanging in the balance . . . unprepared for an encounter with the divine . . . just a split second away from a miraculous intervention or death. These are the moments you never get a photo of, because they are unanticipated and instant, personal and unbelievable.

In my paintings, I don’t assume that the viewer will know what happened just prior to the accident, or what happens immediately following the accident. In this way they do function like movie stills of a film you’ve never seen, a tense moment where the viewer must fill in the context. These images come from my own life, and sometimes the intervention is “successful,” other times, injury inevitable.

So, to address your question . . . I was drawn to these liminal passages, between safety and danger, human and divine . . . the hanging in the balance. The “in–between” is known and is the nexus between the two unknowns on either side.

RM: So much of our lives are lived “unprepared for an encounter with the divine.” I find myself wondering about the bystanders in your paintings: the children who are watching, the figure at the side of the bed. For the central figures, the intervention is, as you mentioned, deeply personal — an event that divides life into before and after. How do the witnesses to such an event respond?

MB: The witnesses depicted in the interventions paintings run the gamut from being keenly aware to completely oblivious. In i4 (children with dove), there are two children in the room; one is an active participant and the other a passive onlooker. This disengaged observer may be indifferent but refuses to intervene, playing the role of complicity. Additionally, the well-intended witness that would act, if possible (mother painted in the portrait on the wall), observes the event but physically cannot adjust the outcome. Certainly we have all been in this position — something across the room is falling and we can’t reach it in time to prevent disaster. So, we have the guards in Sophocles’ Antigone, detached and apathetic to imminent tragedy and Mary at the foot of the cross, desperate, but unable to alter the course of her son’s fate.

Some of these interventions are dramatic and others subtle, and in i5 (grandmother in bed) we get the sense of an angel sneaking away a soul, leaving the witness unaware. In i1 (child falling down stairs–on the cover of Issue 22) and i2 (man falling off hay wagon), the only acknowledged witness to this event is you, the viewer. This puts you in a privileged position, but also may elicit empathy or even responsibility.

I hope I have not said too much and sucked all the life out of the work. These thoughts are not “the” interpretation, but how I am thinking about the works this evening.

RM: Not at all! We have the freedom to interpret these split seconds in the context of past and future, reconciling the suggested outcome with the fact that it is unknown. I love this quote from Edward Lucie-Smith, British art critic and writer: “One of the distinguishing characteristics of the true work of art is that it is able to both contain and express different meanings -– meanings which may in fact contradict each other.” Is there a particular work that takes on a new meaning for you every time you approach it?

MB: Hmmm . . . besides the Bible? The Robert Enrico adaption of Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge would certainly be a contender. It is such a poignant, short film . . . rich with metaphor. The haunting and beautiful album Surf’s Up by the Beach Boys would be in there somewhere, as well.

If I’m forced to choose one, I’d speak to Giovanni di Paolo’s paintings in his cycle on John the Baptist. My reactions to these paintings run the gamut: mystery, repulsion, disgust, horror, devotion, grief, compassion, etc. Some days it’s a historical record of a influential and eccentric mystic, other days it’s a testimony of vision amidst some of humanity’s darkest moments: manipulation, perversion, capitulation, and murder. Maybe Lucie-Smith’s quote can be aptly applied to these paintings. John the Baptist — humanity persisting despite fatal consequences, or the opposite John the Baptist — humanity so depraved and misaligned that it extinguishes the best and brightest.

How I see it, all of the works mentioned are big, expansive . . . and they contain a dynamic, universal nature. They call us back, and initiate a conversation with us that is relevant with where we are.

RM:  Thank you for taking the time to speak with us Micah, and for sharing your beautiful work with us in Issue 22. Congratulations once again on winning Ruminate Magazine’s 2011 Visual Art Prize!

You can read other interviews from our Works with Soul series here.

Join Ruminate March 1 – March 3, 2012 at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Chicago! More than 500 small presses and literary magazines will be featured at the Book Fair in the Hilton Chicago – find us at table H24 in the Southwest Hall. We’ll be there from 8:30 to 5:30 Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and Saturday’s Book Fair is open to the public. But you might want to time your visit to coincide with our events below.

Ruminate is pleased to announce that they are co-hosting a reception with Rock & Sling and WordFarm, Friday, Mar 2, from 7pm to 8:15pm at the Hilton Chicago. Ruminate contributors Allyson Armistead and Josh MacIvor-Andersen will be sharing their work. Allyson Armistead won Ruminate’s 2012 Short Story Prize, and Josh MacIvor-Andersen was the recipient of Ruminate’s inaugural Nonfiction Prize. Other readings include Ruminate contributors Tania Runyan and Jeffrey G. Dodd in addition to Bryan Dietrich, Ruth Goring, Christopher Howell and Amy McCann. The reception is also open to the general public, and you can be sure to reserve a spot by emailing us. Please join us!

In addition to their reading, MacIvor-Andersen and Armistead will be participating in an author signing at the Ruminate table on Saturday at 11:00 am. We will have refreshments; you bring your copies of Issues 19 and 20 – or just pick them up at our table when you stop by. We are pleased to have published these exceptional writers and hope you will join us in celebrating their work!

Planning your trip? A quick and easy guide:
(Both events are open to the general public. No need to be an attendee of the conference. The Book Fair is open to the public only on Saturday, March 3rd)

A Reading and Reception Hosted by Ruminate Magazine, Rock & Sling, and WordFarm.
Featured Ruminate Contributors: Readings from Allyson Armistead, Josh MacIvor-Andersen, Jeffrey G. Dodd, and Tanya Runyan, in addition to readings from Word Farm and Rock and Sling authors.
Reception Reservations: Email Us to RSVP (you are welcome to come without an RSVP, but it does help us with planning)
Date: Friday, March 2
Time: 7:00 PM to 8:15 PM Reception
Location: Hilton Chicago Hotel, 3rd Floor Wiliford B Room

Author Signing: with Ruminate Contributors and Prize Winners–Allyson Armistead and Josh MacIvor-Andersen
Date: Saturday March 3
Time: 11:00 am – Noon
Location: Hilton Chicago Hotel, Southwest Hall, Table number H24

Book Fair:
Time: 8:30 am to 5:30 pm
Date: Mar 1 to Mar 3 (Thursday through Saturday)
Location: Hilton Chicago Hotel, Southwest Hall, Table number H24
Open to the public on Saturday, March 3rd

The lead actress/comedienne, Carrie Brownstein, came of age in the alternative music and feminist scene of Olympia Washington in the nineties, but later came to despise “the élitism that passes itself off as inclusiveness.” In such hyper-niched existences, Brownstein explains, “the rules are so esoteric, so hard to follow, that no one else could fit in. And what you’ll never admit to yourself is that you don’t want other people to fit in.”

Such is the target of Portlandia’s satire; it could be called snobby anti-snobbiness.

There are lots of adjectives and appellations for such holier-than-thous today, including “geek” (as in, “I’m a beer geek”), snob (“I’m a coffee snob”) or even “evangelists” (as in a Mac-evangelist”); also, there’s “OCD” (the “D”, in case you forgot, stands for “disorder”), “control freak” (no comment), and even (perhaps most tellingly) “addict.” That such micro perfectionist mindsets are passed over with little more than a half-hearted apology shows how infected our every day lives are with what might well be termed the idolatry of the “particular.” A revealing discovery, to be sure. But not a new one.

Thoreau, that old agnostic puritan sage, observed the beast he called a “hop goblin” that bedeviled little minds who adopt a “foolish consistency.” He declined to articulate what would so constitute his brand of foolishness; likely, he would have said it was anything that didn’t follow his pattern of non-conformity. Teenagers are easy targets for this kind of critique: in zeal to not “fit in” they follow one another’s speech, dress, and taste habits lock step lemming-wise over the cliff (sometimes tragically). Teenagers, as well as artists.

The history of art is the history of one trend correcting another, as portrayed so well in the movie Midnight in Paris starring Owen Wilson. In the film, up for awards this year, we see a frustrated writer become unblocked through time travel (why didn’t I try that?) as he witnesses one heroic generation of discontented artist, writer, and poet after another (perhaps we could say “before another” since the movie moves in reverse) decrying the ills and idiocy of the generation/movement/school it is about to supersede. Why this is so is a matter for philosophy, theology, and, in Portlandia, the stuff of cable TV.

Here’s my take: the artist’s impulse to improve and correct its parents (or hold on to them in some cases) is connected both to what is godlike in Man as well as what is human. Our heavenly “imago dei” yearns to make perfect art. And we will; but not yet. Now, our broken humanity can’t lift itself out of its coffin, so to speak, in order to see with the clarity our souls crave. We thus always overcompensate in our diagnosing our elders’ ills. As a result, the history of human art, and of culture, is like a pendulum that swings from one extreme to another. Craving-Decrying-Correcting-Enshrining. Repeat.

The Christian exit from this intellectual carnival ride is Jesus.

Not pictures OF him–which incidentally give a remarkable cultural snapshot of the place the pendulum is in its swing in any given epoch in the history of the modern world–not pictures, I say, but theologies of him. In Jesus, the Christian artist sees a line perfectly bisecting the pendulum’s arc. The Christian teaching on the incarnation of Jesus anchors the believing artist with an additional waypoint besides surrounding cultural trends.

Artistic creator, culture, and Christ combine to make a kind of triangle, a stable base on which beauty can be built. In terms of navigation, such a triad enables the artist to triangulate, so to speak, on the God Man, Jesus. His two Natures are the philosophical key: full divinity (“Son of God”) and full humanity (“Son of Man”). As such, Jesus is at one and the same time imbedded in the story of human history and over and above the story as Author and Artist. In him we are raised from the coffin, from the dead. In him we see.

Ruminate’s effort to create an aesthetically pleasing printed biome that encourages individual artists as they geocache their way through our generation’s cultural woodlands and mountainsides with this kind of “incarnational theology” is rare today. And worthy of support. But it is also potentially dangerous.

For, as a literary magazine, it is on the margins of culture, on the higher, more refined, and more sophisticated side. Ruminate’s margin is the margin that includes the sophisticated, geeky, and OCDesque members of the cult of the particular who can identify with, and laugh at the characters and lifestyles lampooned in Portlandia. They remind us of ourselves.

So as we meditate on the intersection of life, faith, and art, we do so with fear and trembling lest in our cogitations we somehow fall short of the mark. As aesthetes, with refined tastes, we do well to confess (and not deny) that we may well be more than just committed to rejecting simplistic religion, overused clichés, and tired, spiritualized platitudes. We may, in fact, be addicted. As such, our sophistication may become our undoing.

After all, this Jesus, this philosophical anchor for the artist soul, didn’t come for the sophisticated but for the simple; not the wise but for the foolish; not the strong, but for the weak, even the ugly. “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised and we esteemed him not.” (the prophet Isaiah)

And those who will inherit this beautiful artistic earth are also those from whom “men hide their faces”: the meek, the beggars, and the poor. They are from Bethlehem, the least of all the clans of Judah, where the Son of God first undertook his unlikely, new creational work on our behalf.

Good Lord, guide your artists, and this magazine dedicated to them, to this overlooked enclave.

Now, I must give props where props are due; this website has, in fact, sussed out more than a few disturbing contradictions within contemporary Christian culture here in the USA and beyond. Arguably, that’s the intent of the site. It’s thought provoking, in a way that will likely make you giggle, too, before deeper reflection, and perhaps horror sinks in. I don’t want to try to defend or refute the site’s intention or inclusion of different objects/ artifacts. You should check out the site and decide for yourself.

The object I was looking for that led me to this site: a Jesus Pez Dispenser. Lately I’ve been exploring images that address the commodification of spirituality, and a contemporary theological fallacy that seems to have taken deep root especially in the US. I refer to the fallacy as the “God=Candy Dispenser” syndrome.

Other, more erudite thinkers than myself have also noticed this trend. It’s the idea that allows us to approach the mysterious, majestic, and infinite being of God as though he is a kindly, perhaps teensy bit senile grandpa whose sole purpose is to dole out to us whatever we ask for every time we ask. Because I want to comment directly on this idea through visual media, the idea of Jesus Pez seems apropos, and I was looking around to see if someone beat me to it.

Finding a similar item labeled as a sign of apostasy rattled me a bit. Not long after my web discovery, a friend and colleague listened to my brief description about my current work, and then asked point blank, “What’s up with all the sacrilege?”

sac·ri·lege
noun
1. the violation or profanation of anything sacred or held sacred.
2. an instance of this.
3. the stealing of anything consecrated to the service of God.

I find it hard to imagine Pez candy, or any vessel for distributing it, ever being consecrated to the service of God. At least not in the context of genuine worship. So I think I’m safely not committing the 3rd infringement. But I might be guilty of the first. Jesus is sacred; is conflating him with candy an act of profaning him?

pro·fane
verb (used with object)
6. to misuse (anything that should be held in reverence or respect); defile; debase; employ basely or unworthily.
7. to treat (anything sacred) with irreverence or contempt; violate the sanctity of: to profane a shrine.

See, here’s the catch—I am not profaning Jesus, or the name of God. I am using a representation of Jesus as my subject matter—the person/ place/ thing (noun) that I’m going to contextualize in order to convey content (meaning—in this case that to think of God as a supernatural candy machine is actually profane). My obvious and pointed comment is not mocking God. If anything I’m mocking consumerism as it conflates with our theology. But as a viewer, you have to look, AND reflect on the implications of the context in order to reach that understanding. If you dismiss the work based upon a superficial sense of “secular vs. sacred” you’ll miss the whole point.

My specific example is anecdotal. But it describes what I hear many artists and writers, who are also people of faith, describing. We encounter the question of legitimized subjects and content on a regular basis. We ask the question of ourselves, or we have the question imposed upon us by various cross-sections of Christian community. Certain subjects become taboo—regardless of the content we intend to convey. Alternatively, if our work doesn’t directly reference God or Jesus in an overt and/or socially acceptable way, it can be categorized as “secular,” and then relegated to the category of “not pertinent to the matters of faith.”

Dividing artifacts—some captured candidly, and others crafted by the creative energies of artists and artistic directors—into categories such as proper, improper, sacred, secular, and apostate is problematic. It begs a larger question regarding how we as artists comment not only on the state of the world—beautiful and tragic—but how we might also reflect the beautiful and tragic realities of the Church universal, and the church local of which, like it or not, we are a part.

Discernment is an absolutely necessary discipline as a maker of and reader/ viewer of art. But categorizing something based upon subject matter alone, or the superficial reading of the content is not discernment. Rather, this type of spiritualized taxonomy is a practice of maintaining a status quo. It runs the risk of dismissing thoughtful, beautiful, grotesque, and even prophetic voices from people making excellent work that could help us encounter the presence of God . . . sometimes when they are not even aware of trying to do so.

My invitation: chime in! I’d like to know your thoughts about the issue.

Celebrating the fact that material objects and articulated ideas have the capacity to help us encounter the ineffable, sometimes when we least expect it,

Stefani

Our finalist judge for this year’s competition is the award-winning author and editor of The Spirit of Food, Leslie Leyland Fields. The entry fee of $15 includes one nonfiction submission of 7000 words or less, and includes a copy of Issue 24.

Curious about past winners? Download a PDF of Issue 20 to read last year’s winning piece by Josh MacIvor-Andersen, or take a look at our interview with him in our “Works with Soul” interview series.

You can read all the guidelines and submit here. We look forward to reading your work!
Ruminate Staff

*You can also see our other writing competitions here.

Motherhood has often been seen as an inferior, overly sentimental subject for poetry, but what of motherhood poems that move from the internal to the external, between mothering and the politics of war, race, class, and sex?

The above text is a question posed by the 2010 AWP panel “Birth and the Politics of Motherhood in Contemporary Poetry” (poets on the panel included Diana Garcia, Beth Ann Fennelly, Alicia Ostriker, Misha Cahnmann-Taylor, and Patricia Smith). The panel was full of beautiful stories, argument, and poetry. But, setting aside explicit interactions with issues of war, race, class, and sex, I began to wonder: what of motherhood poems apart from “external” justification?

What about the poem with the word “mother” in it? And where will the thematic censuring end if we disallow the “mother” (and motherhood) from poetry? Does the father and fatherhood go next, as they (logically) should? Do children disappear? Infants? What about birth—will birth be the next archetypal metaphor exiled from poetry?

Now, an editor has every right to influence his or her journal according to personal taste—in fact, a full-bodied editorial influence is what makes any journal worth reading. But poets and poems are wise to be pragmatic when it comes to human experience, because denying any part of the human experience in our creative writing results in loss.

Have poets committed acts of sentimentality while writing about mothers? Well, yes they have. They have also waxed sentimental over their dog, their brother, the golden gate bridge, deer on the lawn in dawn’s light, pear trees, traffic lights. It’s not the subject of the poem that makes the creation sentimental, but the subject writing the poem.

Two recent examples of writing that incorporates themes of motherhood in a deft and dexterous way include Julie Brooks Barbour’s poem, “Two Days,” published in Issue 2 of UCity Review, and Michelle Tooker’s poem “One Month After Miscarriage,” published by Ruminate in Issue 21, Autumn 2011. The voices of the two poems side by side offer a remedy to the type of motherhood poem that would, I think, upset the editor in the above story:

“Two days after my daughter’s birth,” Barbour writes, “jaundice sets in.”

“Grief lingers longer in half sleep,” Tooker writes, “ignores the children’s laughter / rising like waters in a ready womb.”

“Two days after my daughter’s birth, the sun beams into the apartment / like a beacon,” Barbour writes.

“Is it forkfuls of noon / -the sun’s honey- / floating through the window/ onto our sleeping bodies?” Tooker questions.

These are poems of motherhood, but also poems of illness and loss. The sun shines in both poems, as does a tenderness towards the child and would-be child. The presence of the mother is held in each line. There is no need to actually use the word “mother,” as the perspective is that of the mother. Would these poems meet the editor’s standards? I believe they would.

Both of these poems remind me of an ancient use of maternal metaphor in Luke 13:34, when Christ exclaims over Jerusalem: “How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…!” Even though I’ve only quoted the second half of the verse, the note of lament is rich in these lines. Christ illustrates loss by employing the image of a mother hen’s empty wing. The mother separated from her children: it is difficult to find a more tragic sight.

My seven-week-old son has been lying in my arms as I typed the above. His head is wedged in the cradle of my right arm, and balancing my laptop and him has presented its own creative challenge. What if he never entered my poems? What if I never felt comfortable writing as a mother or making use of the role of motherhood in my poetry? As artists we are not limited to the creative equivalent of roses and candy hearts. We can write the difficult and the human, the sickness and the death, into our work in as many ways as we can imagine. We can imagine beyond the sentimental.

In a recent Ruminate blog post, Alexa Van Dalsem writes of God as creating the world “full of beauty and surprises.” I would go so far as to say the beautiful surprises (see also Richard Wilbur’s poem “The Beautiful Changes”). The poet is also capable of creating that surprising beauty in a poem, with any choice of words. That’s part of what makes the human mind itself a beautiful, and surprising, creation.