My poetry often wrestles with the spiritual, but seldom through nature. Not formal religion, and seldom through worship. Regardless, I hope that my readers sense that, though the angles at which I approach this subject can be acute and vary widely, their target remains the same. The tension between science and belief is constant. The parallels are striking and have provided a lifetime of points of entry into my poetry.
My interest is in expressing, to the best of my ability, the richness of human experience. When people sum up experience in narrow ways, when they claim sure knowledge of a world that is, in final analysis, beyond human knowing, when they claim that life is void of meaning—though, so often, we experience a sense of fullness every day—they are in a flight from meaning, in my sense of things.
One day for reasons unknown I was struck with this image of a boy riding with his father along a back country road. When I put myself in that boy’s shoes, I couldn’t help but see from the perspective of my own boyhood, which put them in North Carolina, and made the boy’s father a Vietnam combat veteran—someone big, powerful, and dangerous, as my stepfather was (or at least that’s how I saw him at the time).
What I began to do was to pore over the Greek of the original, compare my own impressions with existing translations—where they existed—and in a crazy mixture of line-stealing, argumentation, agreement, and general response to what came to mind as I read the Greek and the English versions, I answered these poets with poems of my own.
I think moments from my own life always find their way into my fiction, but certainly this novel and my earlier short stories blend both personal experience and invention. That’s typical for most writers I know and have read about. The narrator, Joe, began as a character similar to me, but so did his girlfriend Ashley. I suppose they both mirror basic aspects of my life.
There’s a moment in the piece titled “Security” when a number of cultures and religions—Israeli, Palestinian, Arab-American, straight-up American, Muslim, Jewish, Arab Christian and American Christian (!)—are all gathered around an impending meal, and there’s a moment of shared holiness despite the locale and the means by which we arrived at this venue.
Some readers have asked: who is the you? I hope it’s not greedy to have “you” mean multiple things! First it speaks to the reader, the “you” who’s invited into the book. In some of the poems “You” addresses the Divine. And in other poems the “you” is addressed to the friend, a character in the book. Finally, “Matters for you Alone”: not only meant for a single person, but also for someone literally by himself: a solitary reader.
Fr. Giussani does what great thinkers do: he gets to first principles. It strikes me that what has been forgotten about liturgical renewal is that it was intended to help us live worshipful lives in the world. That’s what he invites us to throughout: it’s not about liturgical reform first but a liturgical way of living.
The initial impulse for me comes almost exclusively from other writers. I’ll be reading something with a clear mind, which is difficult to do these days, and I’ll be struck by a phrase, an idea, an image, and then I’ll start a draft. That’s how it happens for me. My inner life finds its way into the poems through the medium of other texts, so that I can really call my poetry intertextual.
I started writing “There Will Never Be Another Night Like This” because I was trying to remember the feeling of being very young, bold, romantic, and sort of benignly self-centered. Remember those days? A story began to emerge around this feeling. Some of the places and people and events are based on real life—the drive-in theater, for example—but the predominant autobiographical link is that sense of invincibility that Nils is enjoying, but which even he seems to realize is fleeting.
Rymkiewicz is fighting a battle on two fronts. On the one hand, he resorts to what you call a “documentary” style in order, like a historian, to establish the objective reality of what once happened, while he will switch to “personal recollections of childhood” to make of his account an eyewitness testimony, not merely a thoroughly researched historical account.
I miss the very close community that I believe we all felt when my family and other families in our conservative Baptist church saw one another as special and bonded. We counted on one another. Whenever the pastor turned the lights on, we were there: Sunday School, church, prayer meeting, young peoples’ meetings, vacation Bible school, mother-daughter banquets, midnight watches, potlucks, revivals, and car washes on Sunday afternoons.
Q: In his foreword to this translation, Rowan Williams says that you invite the reader to get “lost” in these poems—and that while we are lost we may become open to noticing something we hadn’t seen before. Does this description resonate with you?
A: What a profound and precise observation! It is the author, first and foremost, who “gets lost.” He (or she, in my case) is the one who must catch sight of something “we’ve never seen before.”
I didn’t expect to ever publish this memoir, primarily because I didn’t feel it “fit” the genre as it exists today (and it doesn’t, but that’s why I treasure indie publishers like Slant Books). I embedded these poems and fables and theological reflections in various places in the narrative to give variety to what might otherwise have been a wearing litany.
When I am writing about subjects that touch my emotional life—my mother’s decent into dementia, my father’s murder—the forms help me constrain the passion, which heightens the energy. On a more prosaic level, my mother was a lover of crossword puzzles and word games, and there is definitely an element of challenge and fun for me to work in strict forms. Plus, I just like the way sonnets look on the page.
Every act of welcome is a gesture of gratuitousness. There is no profit or calculation that shapes the relationship, but only unconditional love for the destiny of the other. We don’t need anything more than this love to welcome someone into our house and thus into our life. For this reason, gratuitousness is at the origin of every experience of welcoming or hospitality.
Piccinini was an Italian surgeon at Sant’Orsola hospital in Bologna, a husband, a father of four, and a passionate leader and friend of thousands of high school and university students in Italy between the 1970s and the end of the twentieth century. He died at the age of 48 in 1999 in a car accident on the highway between Milan and Bologna. At his funeral in Bologna, celebrated in the basilica of San Petronio by the then archbishop Giacomo Biffi, there were seven thousand people.
I have been gathering and archiving Lorenzo Albacete’s writings and related audiovisual materials for the past five years. As a result, I now have a fairly comprehensive knowledge of Albacete’s overall body of work, but writing the biographical essay was an opportunity to make connections between all these materials and discover the person behind them.
One trigger for this particular novel was coming across the King James Bible phrase “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess 2:7-9). I found it a very intriguing phrase, one always relevant but no more so than today. (Modern translations lean toward rendering this “the spirit of lawlessness,” which certainly seems loose in the world today in many ways both overt and subtle.) What is evil? Why do we participate in it?
During the years I was writing the pages of Sister Zero, I was also teaching myself to do mosaic tiling. With each little project—covering a wooden box, a mirror frame, a clay pot—I learned from small successes and big mistakes. (Plus, smashing china plates can be very cathartic!)