by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Caffeine-Powered Literary Revival
It took nearly two hundred pieces posted here this fall — this one is number 196 — before a person in a position to know reminded me of a first principle of social media: use your site to point readers toward your work in other media.
I am lucky to have a number of pieces in other media just now, so I am going to be posting links to some of them in the days to come.
First up is an address at a conference on Walker Percy’s book Lost in the Cosmos, sponsored by the Walker Percy Center for Writing and Publishing at Loyola University in New Orleans. Video is here.
You can see in it how tired I was, which perhaps explains the exuberantly caffeinated answers I gave in an interview with Joseph O’Brien of Dappled Things just beforehand. The interview, artfully transcribed and introduced, is up on their site. A takeout:
DT: ”So taking our lead from Flannery O’Connor, what strategy ought the Catholic writer take in seeking to be published—and published widely?”
PE: ”Instead of making blanket assumptions about what is possible and what’s not, you get in there and try to figure out how to get it done. You have to be savvy about what the obstacles are to getting your work read, but you have to ignore the big blanket statements about what you can or can’t do. Truly, it wasn’t any easier for Catholic writers in the 1950s. For every better aspect then, there were also worse ones in the culture. You had more believing readers, possibly, but you also had a lot of teachers pushing pious pap on people. You had Cardinal Spellman writing a novel (one Flannery O’Connor thought `pretty short’); you had Madame Bovary on the Index; and on and on.
"You’re getting me on one of my soapboxes here, but I prefer to work at a more specific level — whether it’s in The Life You Save or the Times essay. I prefer to say; Let’s look at the works and the twenty ways in which religious belief figures into some recent novels. Instead of saying that this stuff doesn’t exist, I’ll work through twenty examples of how it does appear, and then wind up by saying, `OK, but still: the central religious experience isn’t there in the way I yearn for.’ So what do we do? We look to non-fiction, other countries’ authors. We keep hoping. And we try to make the work ourselves.”
Dappled Things is a lively website devoted to Catholic literature and its revival.