Misinformational advertising in a post-truth age
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Anaya & Søren Hren, circa the founding of Wiseblood in 2013, looking into the future
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Dear Readers,
In search of kairos across the calendar's ordinary and extraordinary time signatures, we’re revisiting the past year with great gratitude and looking forward to the future with full hearts. All of us at Wiseblood are especially thankful for your ongoing support—for the books you’ve purchased, the kind words you’ve offered about the work we do, and for the material support you’ve given to us. We would cease to exist were it not for your generosity and confidence. Earlier this year, a large, influential, multi-million dollar entity attempted to buy Wiseblood and hire me, but I said no. I said no in order to stay fiercely committed to our founding vision of bringing to life works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that wrestle us from the ruse of distraction; find redemption in uncanny places and people; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as “political animals”; and render well this world’s sufferings without forfeiting hope—all of this with an unflinching gaze, wide-eyed and open to epiphanies of beauty. In the mysterious ordering of kairos, you-our steadfast supporters-said yes. Providentially, without knowing this backstory, we received a major donation in the wake of this no, and took that as a yes. Deo gratias. Yes. Yes, Wiseblood must persevere as an independent press that fosters literature marked by a cosmic vision that reaches down to the fundamental questions. Despite the beauty and scope of this type of literature, it can remain neglected and even go unpublished when measured merely by market metrics, and, while we weigh our dollars with care and strive to amplify their efficacy, we at Wiseblood believe we are called to look beyond the market metrics to find and foster this literature marked by a cosmic vision. Our increasing reach and your love of what we are about-your letters and orders and sacrificial giving-helps us keep our eyes toward the skies. |
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As you love books and know well the ways they deepen and enliven your life, you will appreciate this truth, which has been much on our minds this past year:
Access to great and good books from the past and solid new works of literature are not mere givens. Books neither preserve nor print themselves. A neglected tradition can be erased. Your own personal library of books is a stay against the oblivion of neglect and time.
At Wiseblood Books, we are dedicated to carrying forward that literary tradition by resurrecting old (and sometimes forgotten) literature and elevating new writers you should know about. We invite you to join us in that perpetually-timely mission. Janus faced, hearts beating gratefully to the Sacred Heart’s rhythms, let’s look back at these days of 2024, even while we anticipate the gifts of the new year. As we love our editors and our designers and are overwhelmed with gratitude for the critics who make visible the yields of our publication calendar and catalogue, and as we love our readers and our writers, we can think of few better ways to pass an hour:
Access to great and good books from the past and solid new works of literature are not mere givens. Books neither preserve nor print themselves. A neglected tradition can be erased. Your own personal library of books is a stay against the oblivion of neglect and time.
At Wiseblood Books, we are dedicated to carrying forward that literary tradition by resurrecting old (and sometimes forgotten) literature and elevating new writers you should know about. We invite you to join us in that perpetually-timely mission. Janus faced, hearts beating gratefully to the Sacred Heart’s rhythms, let’s look back at these days of 2024, even while we anticipate the gifts of the new year. As we love our editors and our designers and are overwhelmed with gratitude for the critics who make visible the yields of our publication calendar and catalogue, and as we love our readers and our writers, we can think of few better ways to pass an hour:
NEW PRAISE FOR PAST YEARS’ BOOKS
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In the North American Review, Ann Spiers reviews One Hundred Visions of War (2022), Alfred Nicol’s staggeringly good rendering of Julien Vocance’s World War I haikus and finds that “Nicol’s translation serves the haiku with clarity and without fuss. It is reverent.” Spiers also praises the “book design,” which “facilitates an intense read of the entire volume in one sitting . . . Each haiku is given importance . . . demanding the reader’s tight focus,” prompting “a pause for reflection, and another pause for expectation as the reader turns the page.” Edward Howells, an expert in the writings of St. John of the Cross, celebrates The Spring That Feeds the Torrent (2023), Rhina P. Espaillat’s translations of the poems of St. John of the Cross, in his Ad Fontes review. Noting that “The delight of any translation of John of the Cross’ poems is of course John’s own extraordinary genius. Yet non-native readers will always rely on a translator who is skilled not just in the meaning of the words but in the art of poetry, to convey the idiom and poetic form in another language.” He knows well the “crowded field of translations,” and his own favorite is “Lynda Nicholson’s translation,” but discovers that “Espaillat brings new riches.” |
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In May I traveled to the University Club of Chicago at the invitation of Lumen Christi, who hosted a conversation on Mark Shiffman’s monograph What is Ideology? co-sponsored by Wiseblood and Public Discourse. You can watch and listen to the dialogue between Shiffman and James Matthew Wilson HERE.
I returned to Chicago later the same month for a First Things conversation between R.R. Reno and Patrick Deneen. Wiseblood Books gave complimentary copies of our Wiseblood Essay in Contemporary Culture The Tragedy of the Republic, by Pierre Manent, for which Deneen composed the Preface. In her Current review of Katy Carl’s Fragile Objects, LuElla D’Amico determines that “[Flannery] O’Connor undoubtedly influences Carl’s writing, yet I found Carl’s style gentler, less freakish and more odd. Less jarring overall and truer to a strange moment or two.” |
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Writing for the National Catholic Register, Alex Taylor situates Fragile Objects in the stream of Virginia Woolf, conscious of both the continuities between Carl’s aesthetics and the ways in which she is doing something different: “Just as Woolf and Yeats were not afraid to consider little things like broken tea cups in order to reach what Yeats called in another poem the ‘rag-and-bone shop of the heart,’ so does Carl dare, not only to examine slender beauties, but also to consider abyssal moments.” He goes on to answer the legitimate question, asked by many: “In an already-difficult world, why should we turn to read about such horrors in fiction?” Carl’s “substantial storytelling” for realists possessed of “a strong stomach” receives another appreciation by Madelyn Reichert. Reichert returns in her review of Sally Thomas’s Works of Mercy (2022), concluding that “if one is the kind of reader to categorize characters into symbols of vice and virtue, as this reviewer admittedly is, then Works of Mercy serves as a sorely needed, but gentle, chiding . . . Thomas has done the near-impossible: created a story with the moral of not treating real people like characters in a moral story.” |
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Jenn Frey hosted Dana Gioia for an in-depth exchange centered on his translation of Seneca’s The Madness of Hercules. Gioia dispenses wisdom as if by accident, and Frey poses questions that get to the heart of the matter. When Frey asks whether Seneca’s stoical response to the problem of suffering was the best, most adequate answer, Gioia says that he sees a deep philosopher-poet who outlines, on a natural level, the sense of Providence, but one that ends in utter death—a worldview “without a chance of redemption.” “The early Christian fathers read him and said yes, that’s exactly it,” you avoid luxuries and “control the way that you think about suffering,” for we suffer most not from the thing itself but our compulsive obsessions about the pain. Gioia says that Seneca’s harrowing dramatization of agonies and absurd sufferings “at the utmost limits” is chastising, it accurately, with unflinching truthfulness, captures the horrors that populate the earth, but it “does not provide the answers.” And yet, again, that accentuation of suffering is proto-Catholic. Christ bids us take up our crosses daily. “Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you,” says St. Paul, who promises that redemptive pain will “fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the church” (Colossians 1:24). Gioia also engaged in an extended conversation on Seneca’s vision with Word on Fire’s Tod Worner. |
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Colin Redemer really came through in his perceptive First Things review of Trevor Cribben Merrill’s Minor Indignities (2020): “Merrill, in this delightful book, asks what it would take for underground men to mature into surface dwellers. The answer, only hinted at in the novel, is summed up nicely by Girard: ‘As soon as we sincerely imitate Jesus instead of our neighbors, the power of scandals vanishes.’” Merrill also appeared on The Line of Beauty, a podcast (and Substack) hosted by Tara Isabella Burton and her husband Dhananjay Jagannathan, for a Symposium on the Novel. Writing for The University Bookman, Daniel James Sundahl digs into the Second, Revised Edition of James Matthew Wilson’s Some Permanent Things and emerges to announce that “the best poems” of Wilson’s revised early collection “are seasoned reflections that develop in waves and ‘become’ informed by faith, which mellows and matures in the process of ‘being’ and develops into a certain kind of dramatic wonderment called ‘becoming.’” He unearths “an expansive vision beautifully at home in these poems, well made and which gradually lead all of us to higher and greater mysteries.” Thomas Mirus included Marly Youmans’s Seren of the Wildwood (2023) in his Best of 2023 List, noting his gratitude that “there are a few people out there reviving the lost art of narrative verse. Youmans gives us a book-length fairy tale combining iambic pentameter with the ‘bob and wheel’ familiar to readers of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” |
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An Acton Institute review of Jane Clark Scharl’s Sonnez Les Matines (2023) discovers that, “Outrageous as he appears, François [Rabelais] alone trusts that reality is sacramental, more than the sum of its mangled material parts. Even the all-too-human blood that marks his clothes has a sacramental character, having flowed from a body that, for all the marks which time and experience have left on it, still bears the image of God.” Nick Ripatrazone appreciates the absurdist ethos of Scharl’s play, comparing her eccentric achievement with Eugène Ionesco, “whose absurd plays were curiously anchored by a certain orthodoxy . . . One can imagine talented comedic performers creating a knockout of a live performance. Scharl’s play is a jaunty, theologically-rich ride.” Thankfully, we need not only imagine; Sonnez Les Matines has been performed in several cities across the United States. |
The debut of Sonnez Les Matines in NYC
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A RICH RECEPTION OF TWENTY-TWENTY-FOUR’S TITLES
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Mark Bauerlein invited First Things Senior Editor Julia Yost to unravel the central claims of her new book Jane Austen’s Darkness, a contrarian reading of Austen’s oeuvre that grew out of her Compact essay “Austen’s Darkness.” Yost also joined Princeton University’s Madison’s Notes podcast to take another look at the book.
In a short review, Gerardo Munoz finds Jane Austen's Darkness "not only short but unpretentious . . . but they do carry weight. And some of them carry a lot of weight and durable resonances." And in First Things, Peter J. Leithart says that "Crisp and witty, Jane Austen’s Darkness is bigger inside than out. I’ve encountered no book or essay on Austen with so much insight per sentence. By attending to Austen’s darkness, Yost casts fresh light in every direction." |
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Dan Rattelle’s debut collection of poetry, Painting Over the Growth Chart, rallied rounds of applause. In a University Bookman review, A. M. Juster notes that Rattelle walks “in the footsteps” of fellow New Englander Robert Frost with free verse that provides a sense of “geography and gritty perspective,” and “lyrical poems [that] echo Frost both in obvious ways and in their inventiveness.” Like Juster, Robert Shaw finds “forebears like Frost unavoidably in the background, Rattelle’s first book revivifies traditional forms and scenes with exacting craft and distinctive insights. He has followed what Frost called ‘the old way to be new,’ and his reward is equally that of the reader.” Shawn Phillip Cooper, too, sees in Rattelle “A Worthy Successor to Frost.” With his characteristically careful close reading, Cooper comes back to reckon with Anna Lewis’s debut collection Memory’s Abacus, and concludes that “Despite its complexity, the gravity of its content, and the impeccable precision of word choice (the use of “grasp” in particular), Memory’s Abacus conveys a sense of absolute effortlessness in execution—the lightness of touch that allows a substantial image to be expressed briefly and yet linger, developing in the mind upon reflection and further thought.” |
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Memory’s Abacus caught the attention of Nick Ripatrazone, who penned this recommendation over at Image: Art, Faith, Mystery:
“There’s a sharp scene in “Childhood Home,” an early poem in Lewis’s debut poetry collection, where the narrator writes of her past home on Redwood Avenue in Hamilton, New Jersey. Her “Babinka” would “tug a branch” of a dogwood tree down to eye level so the children could look: “the rusty stains at petal’s edge / denoted holy wounds; / the bristling core, a crown of thorns; / the Passion in a bloom.” The stanza is juxtaposed with the poem’s concluding lines: “And—fragile hope—the balcony / we always wished to build / still seems to overhang somewhere / like prayer gone unfulfilled.” A similar sentiment fills "Easter River," when a warm afternoon recalls a river "along our forest path that whispers, true, // with highway sound but also has our swing, / the vine that swayed with both our weights." Lewis has a gift for ending lines: "Our waters test how well love has me know / and not know you, thus baring you anew." There’s a melancholy hue to this moving book; a series of narrators who acknowledge the inevitable nature of change. One poem ends: “I’ve grown. I think you’ve grown. Yet how we speak / has dwindled from a torrent to a leak.” “Cemetery Visit” is an elegy for her father; she contemplates the shape of his name—years of it “on envelopes, in print or shaped by hand, / on all our fluttering, pink permissions slips, / on checks financed by hours at your desk / and tendered to us as gifts to ease our way.” My favorite poem of the book is the tight “What Else is There”; poems that end with question marks have my heart." From out of the Shadowlands Dispatch emerged this appreciation of Anna Lewis’s art, and Wiseblood champion Joan Bauer compares the collection to “the trajectory of an involuntary memory–a moment that we must pause and experience while it lasts.” In just this way, “the poems of Anna Lewis’s debut collection gather and elevate, leaving sweetness behind as they ebb.” |
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Though it would be difficult for any reader to do justice to Heimito von Doderer’s double-volume The Demons, Jonathan Geltner was just the man to do it. “One comes away from The Demons,” he muses in his Dappled Things review, “with the impression that a city may be experienced as an epic of neighborhoods, and as the story of the communion between city and hinterlands . . . Such is the value of aesthetic distance for novelistic technique: only the narrator, mediator between story and audience and thus master of the aesthetic interval, may give us the most vivid example of what it is like to perceive a beautiful order (cosmos) according to the whole.” The Demons, one of the most labor intensive books Wiseblood has ever dared. Surely our Deputy Editor Mary Finnegan nearly lost her eyesight along the way as she read and reread the massive tome! This Wiseblood double-volume contains both an extended introduction by Martin Mosebach, “The Art of Archery and the Novel: The ‘Commentarii’ of Heimito von Doderer,” and an appendix with von Doderer’s lectures on the “Foundations and Function of the Novel.” Both of these works have been ably translated by Dr. Vincent Kling. It is especially gratifying to see the beautiful book get notice, not only in print but also in this video review by Brock Covington. |
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Our February release was another treasure from time’s bookshelves, J. C. Whitehouse’s scintillating translation of Georges Bernanos’s Under Satan’s Sun.
As Phil Klay, recipient of the National Book Award, observes: “The stakes in Bernanos feel just as vital as in any war fiction. This is because, for Bernanos, the characters’ souls are on the line.” Under Satan’s Sun, Bernanos’s first novel, grips the problem of evil like a firebrand and holds on no matter the burn, following the fortunes and misfortunes of Donisson, a young Catholic priest. This misfit runs roughshod over his Church and the world and yet, his insights into the inner lives of others and his perception of the workings of Satan in the everyday are gifts that come into play in the priest’s fateful encounter with a young murderess, whose life and emotions he can see with a dreadful clarity, and whose destiny inexorably becomes entangled with his own. Ruminating on Bernanos' magnanimity, Hans Urs von Balthasar insists that “We must listen carefully to Bernanos to learn how love and indignation, obedience and a critical spirit, can interpenetrate fruitfully in a . . . heart.” |
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Englewood Review of Books rightly recognized Sally Thomas’s debut collection The Blackbird and Other Stories as a book to watch, and Gina Dalfonso realizes that the stories “slip up on you, insinuating themselves into your mind and heart.” In March of 2024, T. S. Eliot Walked into a Book. James Matthew Wilson’s latest contribution to our Wiseblood Essays in Contemporary Culture series, T. S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy, traces Eliot’s lifelong corrective of Matthew Arnold. Whereas Arnold celebrated poetry as both a substitute for religion and a way of maintaining moral and cultural standards in an increasingly secular and anarchic age, Eliot recognized that nothing could be a substitute for anything else. Religion was not to be contained within culture as one object among others. Rather, culture was itself an expression of the sacred realm, which transcends it. In his response to Arnold, Eliot insists that far from preparing us for a modern age where all will be reduced to the “natural,” it is the poet’s task to recover the “supernatural” and to give critical and poetic expression to the sacred in our day. Wilson shows how Eliot’s career led him down a path that would culminate in the greatest religious poem of the twentieth century, Four Quartets. |
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In April, Katy Carl showered the parched plains of secularity with Christopher Beha: Novelist in a Postsecular World. This Wiseblood Essay in Contemporary Culture offers readers the first consideration of Beha’s entire oeuvre, including his three novels and memoir. Carl shows how Beha balances on the tightrope between the disillusioned and the credulous, between the believer and the skeptic, and thus creates stories that span, and broaden, the possibilities still available in realistic fiction. With deft outward turns, Beha frees his characters from solipsistic self-focus, moving them toward locales and liturgies widely supposed to be empty of any metaphysical reality–only to find these empty places uncannily occupied. This is precisely the kind of worthy take Wiseblood can bring you. As Beha is a minor American novelist, many presses might not find a reading of his corpus timely or justifiable, but as he is a a major Catholic writer of our times, Carl’s consideration of the former Harper’s editor who reverted to the faith after (and partially through) writing his debut What Happened to Sophie Wilder is essential to the new movement tracking sights of the unseen in a secular age. |
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In collaboration with Well-Read Mom, a book club with over 8,000 members, we released Pinocchio: With Reflections on a Father’s Love. This new edition of Carlo Collodi’s novel pairs the original story with a personable yet profound commentary by the Italian writer, teacher, and Dante expert Franco Nembrini. In the first review of this remarkable book, Mary Grace Mangano notes that “this beautiful edition . . . then, is a chance to ask questions such as: What is freedom? How do I live according to my nature and for the good? The wooden puppet boy’s adventures hold a mirror to our own lives and all the ways we have misunderstood what it means to be free or happy or to discover who we are. Just as the children reading the original installments of Pinocchio knew, death is not the end. There is a greater, truer ending—for Pinocchio and for each of us.”
As if publishing his well-received Painting Over the Growth Chart were not enough for one year, Dan Rattelle also contributed an Afterword to The Enchafèd Flood, W. H. Auden’s attempt to understand the nature of Romanticism through an examination of its treatment of a single theme, the sea,” to probe the Romantic proclivity to seek escape from responsibility and community. Auden offers both his reading of Romanticism, and the artists of that age, as well as their swan song, for, as he notes: “We live in a new age . . . Our temptations are not theirs. We are less likely to be tempted by solitude into Promethean pride: we are far more likely to become cowards in the face of the tyrant who would compel us to lie in the service of the False City.” On the eve of All Souls, Wiseblood released the first ever English-language translation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s The Woman without a Shadow under the same cover as the opera libretto of the same story. This “fairytale written in the age of Freud” portrays the “mysteries of existence” through the story of two couples—one royal and supernatural, the other mortal—who struggle with love, betrayal, infertility, and redemption. Using some of the standard conceits of the fairytale—shape-shifting characters, an embittered, wicked woman, an unknown curse, and diabolical double-dealings—Hofmannsthal “ponders the primal importance of procreation,” offering a sweeping vision of new life as the bridge between the past and future, a miracle which redeems humanity from death. This translation by award-winning translator Vincent Kling also includes an insightful introduction from Dana Gioia, who describes this as a drama of “great themes played under the eyes of God.” Marvelously, Die Frau ohne Schatten was performed at The Met around the same time our edition was released. |
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The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham
Not wanting to crowd too much into the kairos time of Advent, Wiseblood released our final 2024 title in November. The Complete Essays of J. V. Cunningham marks an important moment in American letters. This Wiseblood Books Edition is more than a book—it is an artifact, a monument to a pivotal figure in literature whose influence exceeds his recognition. To honor Cunningham’s work, we’ve produced both a hard and soft cover version. Our handsome edition is a beauty to behold, with a stately cover indicative of the dignified and serious work inside. The work of this self-described “renegade Irish Catholic from the plains of Montana” has about it the prudence and thriftiness so common to those who’ve lived through the Great Depression. His formal verse was clear and concise, and though his poetic output was modest, his essays constitute a profound exploration of our literary inheritance, now beautifully collected and expanded in this definitive edition from Wiseblood Books. In his introduction (possibly his finest piece of criticism to date—a bold claim, yes, but read it for yourself and see), James Matthew Wilson makes the case for Cunningham’s enduring relevance: “[Cunningham’s] work in verse and prose were two ways of speaking within a single way of life; they were complementary means toward a single end.” This Wiseblood Books Edition of The Complete Essays of J. V. Cunningham collects Cunningham’s prose, including work never before anthologized, and an engaging, wide-ranging interview with Timothy Steele conducted near the end of Cunningham’s life. (Did I mention that Mary Finnegan labored with great and sometimes anguished love to bring this book into your hands? As if the Doderer double-volume with which the year began were not enough of a Herculean effort, her heroism returned at the year’s end and was rewarded by a handsome 800+ page beauty.) |
Copies of Cunningham arriving across the country
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The Wiseblood Masthead
Heartfelt thanks to Luke Burgis and the Cluny Institute for your hospitality!
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Although I continue to tend to a wide range of Wiseblood responsibilities, Mary’s presence with the press has allowed me to assume a more visionary role, even as I continue as Associate Professor of Humanities in the UST MFA, teaching courses like “The Art and Metaphysics of Fiction,” “Dostoevsky and the Eternal Questions,” and Graduate Fiction Workshops, and . . . writing! I was selected to be the Cluny Institute’s Inaugural Writer-in-Residence, and wrote nearly 25,000 decent words toward my third novel, The Hôtel-Dieu, in about seven days spent on the wintry shores of Lake Michigan.
In October of 2024 my second novel Blue Walls Falling Down appeared, and we hosted a book launch reading and discussion hosted by First Things Poetry Editor and Editor of Prufrock Micah Mattix and featuring Wiseblood author Sally Thomas, who read from The Blackbird & Other Stories. Watch the book launch recording HERE. I joined Catholic Culture’s Criteria podcast to discuss Ethan and Maya Hawke’s Flannery O’Connor biopic Wildcat, and appeared on the Spe Salvi podcast twice, once as part of a Blue Walls Falling Down launch and the second time to weigh in–alongside Trevor Cribben Merrill and Andrew Petiprin–on Michel Houellebecq’s final novel Annihilation, a book I had the honor of reviewing for First Things HERE. Andrew Petiprin’s gracious championing of Blue Walls continued in a print review placed in the UK’s Catholic Herald. |
Our Deputy Editor Mary Finnegan
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Mary setting up the Wiseblood table at a Milwaukee event
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In her service as our first-ever Deputy Editor, Mary Finnegan has continued to take Wiseblood to new heights. Mary made untold sacrifices this past year. Her work, though often hidden, yielded a cornucopia of good books, as well as an in-depth Newsletter of increased frequency that immerses you in all-things-Wiseblood. In her dogged commitment to our mission and her execution of the press’s founding vision, Mary remains a total treasure. She is able to both fulfill daily duties and yet–from time-to-time–stand on the mountaintop long enough to espy the yet-undiscovered paths of Wiseblood’s advancement. She has proven to us once again the hand of Providence is steadying our press for–please God–many more years of beautiful books.
Longstanding typesetter Louis Maltese continued to make major contributions to our catalogue in 2024. We are grateful to have received, for the first time, the typesetting expertise of Rhonda Ortiz, with whom we hope to regularly collaborate. We continue to receive indispensable editorial assistance from Kathy West, who is fast becoming a Wiseblood staple, and we send ongoing thanks to copyeditors Kate Weaver, John Gray, Katherine Simmerer, Elijah Blumov.
Brittney Hren, ever our architect of thoughtfulness and order, kept our books coming to your doors. She and our two-year-old daughter Avila pounded the pavement between our door and the Post Office, where Miss Amy plied the child with sweets.
Brittney and Avila taking the day's orders to the P.O.
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Kathy West
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Louis Maltese
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Wiseblood Odysseys
Wiseblood has had a presence both at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture Fall Conference and at the biennial Catholic Imagination Conference for many years and counting. This year, these two important events were combined on the campus of Notre Dame, where writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and others gathered together to explore the ever ancient, ever new wisdom, beauty, and wonder of the Catholic Imagination.
A few days before heading to Notre Dame, we participated in a Wiseblood event sponsored by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee that was made even more hospitable by the unseasonably mellow-for-near-winter weather. The warmth seemed like a fluke for sure, but the mild weather continued for our trip to South Bend, Indiana, which did not disappoint with its display of autumnal glory. Jenny Martin and the staff at the Center for Ethics and Culture truly outdid themselves, hosting, with gracious aplomb and harmonious design, one of the finest conferences we’ve ever attended.
A few days before heading to Notre Dame, we participated in a Wiseblood event sponsored by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee that was made even more hospitable by the unseasonably mellow-for-near-winter weather. The warmth seemed like a fluke for sure, but the mild weather continued for our trip to South Bend, Indiana, which did not disappoint with its display of autumnal glory. Jenny Martin and the staff at the Center for Ethics and Culture truly outdid themselves, hosting, with gracious aplomb and harmonious design, one of the finest conferences we’ve ever attended.
At Anodyne Coffee Roasters in the heart of Milwaukee
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A "small" contingent of the over 100 students in the MFA at UST. We love our students!
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On Friday morning, James Matthew Wilson hosted the first of several panels that included Wiseblood authors. The topic was A School of the Catholic Imagination and the discussion centered on the University of St. Thomas’s MFA program Wilson and I co-founded in 2021. Wiseblood authors Katy Carl and Ryan Wilson also participated in this conversation which contained an inspiring continuity and spirit of camaraderie, a spirit shared by many in the standing-room-only space. The panel was a timely reminder that so many of these common projects have common goods. I was able to share, HERE, a shorter version of a speech delivered at a packed-to-the-gills house party held for students, faculty, and friends of the MFA.
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Immediately following this panel, I hosted The Wiseblood Books Reading Room with Julia Yost, Sally Thomas, Glenn Arbery, and I each reading from our work to a roomful of rapt listeners. I began by sharing the animating spirit behind Wiseblood Books, making manifest our essential role in fostering the Catholic literary revival. For us, this was an especially affecting session because we were able to hear, in person, our authors read their words. So much effort goes into the final product—editing, typesetting, proofreading, choosing cover designs, and finally, sharing the books with readers—that the actual pleasure of the words on the page can get, for a time, forgotten. This panel offered us—and a roomful of fans—the opportunity to sit and listen, to savor words written well and read with soul.
Later that afternoon, Trevor Cribben Merrill joined host Brett Robinson and co-panelists Tara Isabella Burton and Michael P. Murphy to discuss Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: René Girard and the Moral Imagination. Trevor’s appearance brought a number of people over to the book booth to purchase copies not only of his novel, Minor Indignities, but also William F. Lynch’s Christ and Apollo.
Later that afternoon, Trevor Cribben Merrill joined host Brett Robinson and co-panelists Tara Isabella Burton and Michael P. Murphy to discuss Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: René Girard and the Moral Imagination. Trevor’s appearance brought a number of people over to the book booth to purchase copies not only of his novel, Minor Indignities, but also William F. Lynch’s Christ and Apollo.
Before several blessed days of nonstop conversations with customers . . .
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Attendees at the Well-Read Mom Conference
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Saturday morning I joined Dappled Things’s Rhonda Ortiz (who graciously and generously shared some of her space in the book vendor’s room for our bounteous boxes of books) and panelists Katy Carl from Word on Fire (Carl read movingly from her debut Wiseblood novel As Earth Without Water), as well as Mary Ann Miller from Presence Journal, to talk about The Flesh Made Word: The State of Catholic Publishing Today, articulating the gains of the past ten years and looking ahead to the coming decade.
If all of this wasn’t enough, J. C. Scharl’s Sonnez Les Matines was one of two Page to Stage live readings. Jane’s play is turning out to be a perennial favorite and we are looking forward to publishing the second installment of her verse trilogy, The Death of Rabelais, in 2025. And, finally, Wiseblood authors James Matthew Wilson and Sally Thomas joined Ron Hanson and host Jenny Martin for the Closing Roundtable: The Future of the Catholic Imagination, a lively and profound discussion.
I went on to deliver a lecture “Reading for ‘Message’ or Moral Depth: What's the Difference?” at the Well-Read Mom National Conference, hosted at Marquette University, and Mary Finnegan staffed the Wiseblood booth, sharing our good with devoted readers and getting to know Well-Read Mom women along the way.
My month-long litany of lectures and readings ended with a Los Angeles Salon on the state of contemporary literature made by writers of faith hosted by Fieldstead and Company. What a word-and-world-transcending honor it was to have former Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts Dana Gioia introduce and moderate this panel, and to tell Wiseblood's story alongside Jessica Hooten Wilson and James Matthew Wilson.
If all of this wasn’t enough, J. C. Scharl’s Sonnez Les Matines was one of two Page to Stage live readings. Jane’s play is turning out to be a perennial favorite and we are looking forward to publishing the second installment of her verse trilogy, The Death of Rabelais, in 2025. And, finally, Wiseblood authors James Matthew Wilson and Sally Thomas joined Ron Hanson and host Jenny Martin for the Closing Roundtable: The Future of the Catholic Imagination, a lively and profound discussion.
I went on to deliver a lecture “Reading for ‘Message’ or Moral Depth: What's the Difference?” at the Well-Read Mom National Conference, hosted at Marquette University, and Mary Finnegan staffed the Wiseblood booth, sharing our good with devoted readers and getting to know Well-Read Mom women along the way.
My month-long litany of lectures and readings ended with a Los Angeles Salon on the state of contemporary literature made by writers of faith hosted by Fieldstead and Company. What a word-and-world-transcending honor it was to have former Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts Dana Gioia introduce and moderate this panel, and to tell Wiseblood's story alongside Jessica Hooten Wilson and James Matthew Wilson.
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Cheers for the Wiseblood Writer-in-Residence
At Wiseblood Books, our commitment to fostering great literature takes many forms—so many forms that we don’t widely publicize them all. Our Writer-in-Residence program is just one of those ways in which we nurture and bring into being contemporary literature that seeks to endure. Some writers do not, for various reasons, have the opportunity to pursue a full Master of Fine Arts program, and yet their irradiating talent just begs to be developed. I first conceived of our Writer-in-Residence program as a remedy for gifted writers seeking immersion in the art and craft of fiction. When the Residency came up during the Salon in Los Angeles, the crowd burst into cheers and applause, affirming our sense that this sui generis effort is filling a need in a manner that stirs hope.
Each year (minus one), Wiseblood Books finds a new writer who may otherwise not have the time and the means to bring a manuscript to completion. We send that writer a small library of books on craft and works of fiction that correspond well with his or her vision. We pay for some combination of room and board for a Residency of approximately ten days. We pair that writer with a successfully published author to cultivate an important project that would not see fruition without encouraging, exacting mentorship. If the final manuscript reaches its fullness, Wiseblood offers a book publication contract. In past years, this program has led to two brilliant and well-received novels: Katy Carl’s As Earth Without Water and Sally Thomas’s Works of Mercy.
Each year (minus one), Wiseblood Books finds a new writer who may otherwise not have the time and the means to bring a manuscript to completion. We send that writer a small library of books on craft and works of fiction that correspond well with his or her vision. We pay for some combination of room and board for a Residency of approximately ten days. We pair that writer with a successfully published author to cultivate an important project that would not see fruition without encouraging, exacting mentorship. If the final manuscript reaches its fullness, Wiseblood offers a book publication contract. In past years, this program has led to two brilliant and well-received novels: Katy Carl’s As Earth Without Water and Sally Thomas’s Works of Mercy.
This year’s Wiseblood Writer-in-Residence is Australia’s own Lucas Smith, winner in the John Marsden Prize for Young Australian Writers. Lucas spent ten days working with Katy Carl, intensively editing and refining his manuscript, Spare Us Yet and Other Stories. Lucas has already made a name for himself in his home country through his work with Bonfire Books, his essays and reviews of important writers like Les Murray and Christopher Koch, and with his own poetry and fiction. Listen to Lucas read an excerpt from his story “Compline” HERE.
We couldn’t be happier to announce that Wiseblood Book’s 2025 Writer-in-Residence is Dublin author Janille Stephens. Janille will perfect her novel Sweet Alyssum under the astute tutelage of Brigid Pasulka.
We couldn’t be happier to announce that Wiseblood Book’s 2025 Writer-in-Residence is Dublin author Janille Stephens. Janille will perfect her novel Sweet Alyssum under the astute tutelage of Brigid Pasulka.
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Forecasting the Future
In 2025, we’ve lined up a distinguished and varied roster of titles, each representing an important contribution to contemporary literature—a number of truly exceptional books, including:
Alfred Nicol’s poetry collection After the Carnival and Paul Pastor’s The Locust Years; Spare Us Yet and Other Stories by Lucas Smith and Glenn Arbery’s third novel Gates of Heaven; Cassandra Nelson’s A Theology of Fiction, James Matthew Wilson’s The Wayward Thomist: A Critical Introduction to John Martin Finlay, and Nobody Was Paying Any Attention to the Sky: Flannery O’Connor and Modernity by Father Damien Ference–all Wiseblood Essays in Contemporary Culture; and–last but not least–Jane Clark Scharl’s verse play The Death of Rabelais.
Alfred Nicol’s poetry collection After the Carnival and Paul Pastor’s The Locust Years; Spare Us Yet and Other Stories by Lucas Smith and Glenn Arbery’s third novel Gates of Heaven; Cassandra Nelson’s A Theology of Fiction, James Matthew Wilson’s The Wayward Thomist: A Critical Introduction to John Martin Finlay, and Nobody Was Paying Any Attention to the Sky: Flannery O’Connor and Modernity by Father Damien Ference–all Wiseblood Essays in Contemporary Culture; and–last but not least–Jane Clark Scharl’s verse play The Death of Rabelais.
Doing the Math
Our sales in 2023 were nearly double those of 2022, and in 2024 our sales were more than double those of 2023–unmistakable evidence that our books are finding their ways into a growing array of eager readers.
In 2024, Wiseblood either received or received promise of some of the largest donations in the history of the press--pure providence, as, with a full-time Deputy Editor and a growing reach, we need more monies to meet our annual budget. To this end, we doubled the goal of our “crowd-source” fundraiser to $20,000, and, at the eleventh hour, achieved that goal. Further, before the official fundraiser began, supporters gave over $4,000 in donations. Thanks to so many of you for coming through! We promise to direct your giving to good ends. We could die of gratitude for all the gifts piled up this past year–both practical and literary, especially those friendships born of books, foretaste of the Lasting City, a rich rapprochement between art and life, the seen and the unseen, rooted in our stubborn pursuit of the real.
Do you want to see more literature with real stakes make its way into the world? Then please consider becoming (or continue to be) a patron of Wiseblood Books by directly purchasing books from our website or at in-person events, sharing our newsletter with friends and family, following us on social media, and contributing to our ongoing fundraising efforts. We cannot do justice to our great gratitude to each of you for all of your support and we look ahead to the New Year with you, wide-eyed for hard-won wisdom, wide-eyed for new epiphanies of beauty.
As always, thank you for reading,
au Coeur Sacré,
Joshua
Founder and Editor, Wiseblood Books
Associate Professor of Humanities
at the MFA Program in Creative Writing
University of St. Thomas, Houston
In 2024, Wiseblood either received or received promise of some of the largest donations in the history of the press--pure providence, as, with a full-time Deputy Editor and a growing reach, we need more monies to meet our annual budget. To this end, we doubled the goal of our “crowd-source” fundraiser to $20,000, and, at the eleventh hour, achieved that goal. Further, before the official fundraiser began, supporters gave over $4,000 in donations. Thanks to so many of you for coming through! We promise to direct your giving to good ends. We could die of gratitude for all the gifts piled up this past year–both practical and literary, especially those friendships born of books, foretaste of the Lasting City, a rich rapprochement between art and life, the seen and the unseen, rooted in our stubborn pursuit of the real.
Do you want to see more literature with real stakes make its way into the world? Then please consider becoming (or continue to be) a patron of Wiseblood Books by directly purchasing books from our website or at in-person events, sharing our newsletter with friends and family, following us on social media, and contributing to our ongoing fundraising efforts. We cannot do justice to our great gratitude to each of you for all of your support and we look ahead to the New Year with you, wide-eyed for hard-won wisdom, wide-eyed for new epiphanies of beauty.
As always, thank you for reading,
au Coeur Sacré,
Joshua
Founder and Editor, Wiseblood Books
Associate Professor of Humanities
at the MFA Program in Creative Writing
University of St. Thomas, Houston
