‘The Writing Life: What’s Faith Got to Do with It?’
December 5, 2011, 3:30 pm
Posted by Grant Gallicho
Last month, with the New York University Creative Writing Center, we sponsored a panel discussion featuring Paul Elie, Alice McDermott, Valerie Sayers, and Rand Richards Cooper. They wrestled with the question of the hour: How does the faith of a writer — or her subject — influence her creative process? Here’s a video of the event:
Commonweal Conversations 2011 – The Writing Life: What’s Faith Got to Do with It? from Commonweal Magazine on Vimeo.
Just watched the video. Thanks. If you don’t have all these things together in an archive section of the web site, you might consider that. It would be a rich resource for your readers.
Creative period followed by critical period that makes the next creative period possible. Sad that we’ve been in that fallow critical period for so long. And, as Elie said, there may be no creative period this time. It seems that now everyone’s talking but few are listening, and those perhaps not very closely. The air and the internet today are filled with jabbering. As McDermott, I think, remarked at the end, everything’s got to be externalized – the internal is suspect.
One writer who writes about people who happen to be Catholic; another writer who writes with Catholicism more in the foreground? But neither of them – none of the four? – writes original stories deeply involved with a Catholic sense of morality. It’s not that there’s no audience – the audience may be small, but it’s certainly there – it’s, apparently, that there are no writers for whom the topic is compelling. Catholicism, I suspect, is evaporating, at least in this country, and perhaps in the West. Whatever it may become in Asia and Africa may be something very different from what it’s been in Europe and America. If that’s the case, we may have seen the last of Western Catholic literature. It’ll all recede into the past from now on, and, probably, disappear from view.
In the end, of course, fiction is just story telling. Pretty trivial, fluffy stuff. The academy has raised it high above our heads to adore, but it’s only people telling stories. Art itself isn’t all that great when it doesn’t resonate with people – when it resonates only with critics – as is the case today. The writers here were all sanctioned by the establishment – lots of prizes, lots of publication by establishment periodicals. All or most university presses? How many ordinary people read them? Only “literary” types?
Good conversation. Thanks for the video.
David,
Sadly, I agree that we may be seeing the end of Western creativity, at least for a while.
You say that “Fiction is just story-telling”, but I can’t agree with that. The best fiction is about human lives and human lives count. God became man because he loves us “trivial” folk. Gpd is no fool, so I can’t believe we’re not worth much. This reminds me that many, many years ago I saw the first Prime Minister Nehru in a news clip in which he was asked something like, “Mr. Prime Minister, you are the head of a nation of 300 million people in which an individuals becomes a trivial thing among . . . ” Nehru cut his questioner off saying sharply, “No human being is trivial”. I’ve never forgotten that lesson.
OK, so stories are fiction. But fiction, as has been said many times before, can reveal truth about indviduals, and reveal it in a way that science in all its triumphant clarity and universality never can.
So. If I heard right, the panelists agreed that in the writing life (as in everything else), “Faith without good works is useless.”