Issue 17: Pilgrimage

Editor’s Note: Issue 17

Welcome to Ruminate’s Issue 17: Pilgrimage. You may notice some changes around here, that we’ve taken our own pilgrimage, of sorts. And well, we have. Over the past four and a half years Ruminate has grown into a robust publication with talented contributors and faithful readers. And we’ve learned some things about ourselves along the way.

We love making Ruminate, making it open and playful and rich. We also like the quietness of the creamy white space on the page and the carefully placed letters and images. We like the contemplative gift thatRuminate extends to our readers, the prayers it shares, and grappling that it encourages. So we’ve reworked our logo and layout to reflect this, we have plans to add interviews and reviews, and we even changed our tagline from “faith in literature and art” to the more earthy and playful “chewing on life, faith, and art.” Thank you all for taking this journey with us—we hope you like the changes.

This issue also holds the winning poems from our 2010 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize. Thank you to all of our entrants for sharing your work and to our gracious judge Vito Aiuto. Congratulations to the winning poet, Hannah VanderHart, and to Ryan Harper and Ellaraine Lockie for the runner-up prizes, and to all of our finalists. Mr. Aiuto writes: “I am thankful I was asked to read the poems that comprised the finalists forRuminate’s poetry prize. It was a privilege and a pleasure to spend some time in the company of people who were willing to sing like that.”

You’ll also find in this issue our gatherings on the theme of pilgrimage, on journeys of all kinds—from losing one’s house to fire, traveling to a Taizé monastery in France, floating past the English countryside on a canal boat, and journeying through Philadelphia, to an evening in the Boreal forest, a lost chance for love, the Idaho State Roadkill Fur Auction, and making a shelter. It bears proof that we are all pilgrims traveling great distances and depths to see the sacred place.

I hope you enjoy the travels,

Brianna Van Dyke

Editor-in-Chief

2011 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize

Judged by Vito Aiuto, who is a husband, father, poet, pastor and, with his wife Monique, half  of the gospel folk duo The Welcome Wagon. Sponsored by Steve and Kim Franchini in loving memory of Janet McCabe, who was a faithful collector of good words.

First Place
Hannah VanderHart: Owls

Runner-up
Ryan Harper: God Shed His Grace

Honorable Mention
Ellaraine Lockie: Waiting for Midnight

Owls

Hannah VanderHart
for my brother Ansil

Our intellect is related to what is most evident as the eye of an owl to the sun.
—Aquinas, De Trinitate

i.

Aquinas runs his finger down the untried
Difficult, ponders at the algae in

The pool, effect of the sun all day; we do
Not see things as they are, or if we do

We call them visions, separate them out
Like cards with insufficient postage.

ii.

Pack your bag and thermos, brother, we
Will hunt tonight in slippers, carry nets,

Leave the luna moths on the front door’s screen,
Leave the great green wings in order to see

New things: the moon. We will leave the sun to owls
That fly by day, diurnal, golden eyes

That flinch at nothing externally bright. The northern
Hawk is such an owl: lululu it sings in the

Boreal forest. We will look for twenty-
Three specimens of delight, knowing that twenty-

Three times twenty-three times seventy
Are the numbers of the beautiful at night.

iii.

Day shines—and we heft our bags like there was no
Night of seeing or a starry past

You are loading boxes for a man,
Testing his guns, each gun, every gun that is

Rat-a-tat-a-tat—and at my desk
Some songs are playing, mimicry of owls.

Artist’s Note

Gene Schmidt lives in New York with his wife and son. Before LOVETOWN PA, he spent a year measuring the width and length of Manhattan with yardsticks in a project called MANHATTAN MEASURE. A documentary film about the project, directed by Johnny Gerhart and Philip Armand, was screened at film festivals around the country, including the Big Apple Film Festival, Nashville Film Festival, Los Angeles United Film Festival, and Docufest Atlanta.

LOVETOWN PA: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE CITY

A group of artists from the Tiger Strikes Asteroid gallery in Philadelphia invited me to propose a project that could be realized in Philadelphia and exhibited in their gallery. Since it is the City of Brotherly Love, I decided to take St. Paul’s text on love from I Corinthians out onto the streets to see what would happen.

I assembled the entire text using panels of reclaimed scrap wood collected in the months leading up to the project. The letters were cut out of the panels like stencils, allowing the text to be the city itself showing through. I mapped out a journey through the city and began making my way by spelling out the text wherever I could find a wall or fence to lean the panels. The project became a very physical way for me to meditate on the text and learn some lessons on love from a city that still knows something about it.

For projects such as these to have a life beyond the initial performance they need to be well documented. Photographer Alicia Hansen collaborated with me to present LOVETOWN PA to those who were not able to see the work in progress and in person.

To see additional excerpts from the project, please visit www.lovetownpa.com

Contributor’s Notes

Kelly Beahm is an MFA candidate at Chatham University. As part of that program, she has started her own publishing house, Twisted Tree Press. Her own work will  be published in the fall issue of the Coal Hill Review. She lives and works in Pittsburgh.

Christiane Buuck lives, teaches, and writes in Columbus, Ohio. Her fiction has appeared in Cutthroat Magazine, her nonfiction in the Seneca Review, and her artwork in the Connecticut Review Elvis issue. She was first drawn to pilgrimage through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and later walked the Camino de Compostela across Spain and parts of France. She is currently working on a novel inspired by these experiences. Christiane writes: “The Alliance Catholique gift store, in all its gaudy splendor, epitomizes Lourdes to me: a town where devotion and consumerism walk in lock step. This picture was taken in the gloom of February, when the town was nearly deserted, and yet the neon glows on, and the Virgin is ever for sale under the watchful eye of the security camera.”

Thom Caraway lives in Spokane, Washington, with his wife, two children, dog, and a cat who recently adopted the family. The cat is a proficient hunter of birds. When not shooing the cat away from birds or the birds away from the garden, Thom teaches at Whitworth University. His work has previously appeared in Yalobusha Review, Smartish Pace, and  Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. His book A Visitor’s Guide to North Dakota was published by Finishing Line Press in 2007.

Bill Cass is an educator who lives in San Diego. He has had eleven short stories accepted for publication in mostly smaller literary magazines such as Bellowing Ark, Red Wheelbarrow, ESC-Magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs, and A Year in Ink, Vol. III.

Maryann Corbett is still figuring out what poetry should do, though she’s the author of two chapbooks,Dissonance (Scienter Press, 2009) and Gardening in a Time of War (Pudding House, 2007). Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in over sixty journals in print and online, from the very serious and reverent First Things and Christianity and Literature to the extremely irreverent Shit Creek Review. She lives in St. Paul with her husband, relies on Facebook to get her twenty-something kids to talk to her, and works for the Minnesota legislature.

Heather Matesich Cousins grew up in Bear Lake, a small town in northern Michigan. She holds degrees from Bryn Mawr College, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Georgia. Her first book, Something in the Potato Room, was selected by Patricia Smith as the winner of the Kore Press First Book Award and was published in January 2010. She currently lives in Monroe, Georgia, with her husband and two dogs and teaches at the University of Georgia.

Rachel Dacus  is the author of Another Circle of Delight, Femme au chapeau, and Earth Lessons. Her work appears in the anthologies Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English, Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po LISTSERV, and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose About Alzheimer’s Disease, as well as in numerous print and online magazines. Read more at www.dacushome.com. She also interviews poets for Fringe magazine. The daughter of a rocket scientist, her name is on a piece of floating space junk.

Heather A. Goodman secretly wishes to be a Broadway star. On any given day, you can find her randomly breaking out into song and dance in grocery store aisles, park trails, and back alleyways. She writes to keep the voices in her head and her imaginary friends happy. Her fiction has been published in Relief Journal,Infuze Magazine, Generate Magazine, and others, and her short films have been produced for film festivals and church productions.

Ken Gibson’s photographs were recently selected for solo exhibition at University of Cincinnati Clermont College and are part of the permanent collections of the University of Louisville Photographic Archives, Central Washington University, and Northern Kentucky University. You can see more work at www.kengibsonimagery.com. When not visiting grandchildren, he and his wife can usually be found in southern Indiana. Ken writes: “‘Holy Water (Vatican),’ taken in Saint Peter’s Square, is tightly framed with individuality subservient to the gesture. The perpetual challenge I face with photography is providing clarity to each moment I frame. Framing by necessity excludes and I exclude a lot, seeking only what is essential.”

Sara Maria Harenchar lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is a native of Greensburg, Pennsylvania. After spending four years as an undergraduate in English literature in beautiful Gettysburg, she decided to pursue an MA in professional writing at Carnegie Mellon University. Sara enjoys working with nonprofits and is pursuing a career in grant writing. In addition to coffee, good books, and writing, Sara also enjoys acapella, playing guitar and piano, the Golden Girls, Glee, and being Catholic. She believes in writing that shakes you awake and moves you to action. “The Remaking” is Sara’s first published poem.

Ryan Harper is a doctoral student in religion at Princeton University, where he is finishing an ethnography of contemporary southern gospel music. Some of his recent poems have appeared in Big Muddy, the Litchfield Review, and Red Clay Review. He and his spouse, writer and chaplain Lynn Casteel Harper, are both proud natives of southeast Missouri, and proud residents of New Jersey. A long-time jazz drummer, Ryan currently plays in an all-graduate-student quartet, which is adorably interdisciplinary.

Emily Hayes received her MA in English literature from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She teaches at Carbondale Community High School and is co-editor of the Village Pariah. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have previously appeared in various journals, including Review Americana, Paterson Literary Review, Broad River Review, and Diverse Voices Quarterly. Above all, she is known as “Mama” to her four-year-old son Benjamin, a little boy who already understands the power of poems.

Chelsea Henderson is an undergraduate entering her fourth year at the University of Virginia where she is pursuing a degree in poetry. She has had poems accepted or published in North American Review, Tar River,Sow’s Ear, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. Besides her studies, she is actively involved in a campus fellowship where she leads worship on a weekly basis. After graduating, she plans to pursue an MFA in poetry.

Marianne Lettieri grew up within sight of missile gantries at Cape Canaveral, Florida, during the space race. Visual juxtapositions, such as egrets flying at the rumble of a rocket launch, gave her a lasting appreciation of images that are at once familiar and strange. Her work has been exhibited and published nationally, and she is the founder of Arts of the Covenant, a group for visual artists of the Christian faith in the San Francisco area. More of her work can be viewed at www.mariannelettieri.com. She writes: “As a species, we tend to wander and journey. The Forwarding Address explores how, with every move, we take our notions of home with us in boxes and in our hearts. And You Can’t Go Home Again speaks to everyone who has tried to return to their place of childhood long after wearing ruby shoes in the Emerald City.”

Ellaraine Lockie is a well-published and awarded poet, nonfiction book author, and essayist. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area but leaves her husband, cat, and twelve rabbits every summer for as long as she can get away to Montana. There she stays in a cabin on a horse ranch that used to be her family’s homestead and spends time with her two horses. Ellaraine teaches both poetry/writing and papermaking workshops and serves as poetry editor for the lifestyles magazine Lilipoh.

Stephen Mead is a published artist, writer, and maker of short collage-films, living in New York. His latest book, Our Book of Common Faith, contains poetry and art that explores world religions and cultures to find that which might bond humanity rather than divide it. He writes: “With ‘Threshold,’ I had the good fortune of being in the Musée d’Orsay just wandering around the halls with my camera when I looked up and saw this gigantic clock. Reverie is what I experienced, a moment that seemed to stand still, and when a gentleman stepped in front of the clock, I saw it as a perfect image of life’s journey.”

Sally Molini was born in New York City and has had a variety of job experiences, including working with Southeast Asian refugees, Chamber of Commerce executives, the elderly, and New Zealand printers. Currently she is a co-editor for Cerise Press, an online international journal based in the US and France (www.cerisepress.com). Her work is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, andBarrow Street. She lives in Nebraska.

Ellen O’Connell, originally from California, just completed an MFA in nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Her previous articles and essays have appeared in Redivider, Spectrum, the Independent, and santa clara review. She was the senior fiction editor for Lumina and will begin teaching writing at University of California Santa Barbara in 2011.  When she is not writing, Ellen watches Masterpiece Mystery shows and makes strawberry shortcake. She is happy to be back in California where there is such good horchata and plans someday to subscribe to the New Yorker.

Richard Osler is a poet, specialty money manager, poetry workshop facilitator, father of four grown children, and partner of Somae Claire. He lives in Duncan, an hour north of Victoria on Vancouver Island. His poem “Remnants” was written when he lived on Bowen Island, a short ferry ride from Vancouver. His brown lab Cape spent countless days on the beach including the evening before she died in her sleep. Her memory, another remnant in my life.

April Schmidt teaches writing at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received an MFA from Hamline University, and her creative work has recently appeared in Geez Magazine. This is her second piece inRuminate. She lives with her husband and son in leafy, literary Minneapolis.

Mandy Thrasher is a photographer living in northern Colorado. She recently had her first solo exhibit at Everyday Joe’s, a music and arthouse in Fort Collins, Colorado. She writes: “When looking at the rural areas along the Front Range of northern Colorado changing from farm lands of corn rows and grazing cattle into cookie-cutter subdivisions and places where you can spend an afternoon of golf, I felt the need to show what is. For the people who live in these areas it is an old way of life budding into a new world. Whether that new world is full of prosperity or one of loss, it is a landscape full of change.”

Hannah VanderHart lives by the Severn River in Annapolis, Maryland, with her husband Luke and their two cats. Hannah is one of seven children, a Virginia native, and in addition to an agrarian background, she has many family members serving in the United States military. Books and British cooking are two of her greater joys. A recent graduate of George Mason University’s MFA program, Hannah has poetry published and forthcoming in the Basilica Review, Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, and So to Speak. As of fall 2010, she will be studying contemporary British poetry at Georgetown University.