2021 Writer-in-Residence
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We are thrilled to announce the recipient of our 2021 Summer Residency--Sally Thomas! She will receive a small library of paradigmatic novels and books on the art of fiction, a stipend, two weeks of room and board, intensive (daily) and extensive editorial and craft advice from Wiseblood editor-in-chief Joshua Hren, and the prospect of a publication contract.
Sally Thomas is the author of a poetry collection, Motherland, a finalist for the 2018 Able Muse Book Award and published by Able Muse Press in 2020, and two poetry chapbooks. Her short story, "A Fire in the Hills," received the 2020 J.F. Powers Prize in Short Fiction from Dappled Things magazine. Recently her poetry, fiction, literary criticism, and other essays have appeared in First Things, Local Culture, North American Anglican, Plough Quarterly, Public Discourse, Relief, and THINK Journal, whose editors nominated her poem "Hare" for a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She lives with her family in North Carolina. |
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About the Novel-in-Progress:
Works of Mercy (working title) follows a woman who "was in many ways a more contented widow than I had been a wife" as she cleans the rectory "for the good of my soul" and travels through the tangled backroads of her mind, sorting out how it is that she got there. The Wiseblood editors found in Thomas's novel a "spare, ruminative style that somehow admits the lyrical without blushing and arrives at psychological insight through understatement or indirection."
2020 Writer-in-Residence
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Katy Carl was our Wiseblood Books' 2020 Writer-in-Residence. During her residency, Katy continued to compose her novel As Earth Without Water. She is the editor in chief of Dappled Things, a literary magazine of ideas, art, and faith. Her nonfiction has appeared in the National Catholic Register, Evangelization & Culture, St. Louis Magazine, and in Wiseblood and Ignatius Press editions, among other outlets. A native of Mobile, AL, she studied English and Creative Writing at Saint Louis University before moving to the Washington, DC, area to work as an editor. She now lives in the greater Houston area with her husband and their children. As Earth Without Water is her first novel.
About the Novel-in-ProgressThe former lovers at the heart of As Earth Without Water have each thrown out all their old plans and drastically remade their circumstances in hopes of a fresh start. Still, their stories stalk them and block their paths. Angele thinks of herself as a failed artist, despite her success in escaping difficult origins and learning to make her own way in the city. Dylan has fled city life, and his success as an artist, in an attempt to overcome his own disastrous selfishness and find personal peace. When Angele makes a retreat at the monastery where Dylan is a candidate for entry, both of them must face the forces that threaten their futures.
We are delighted to announce Wiseblood Books will publish Earth and Water in 2021.
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Testimony
The Wiseblood Books residency program offers an innovative, sui generis opportunity for writers. No other workshop that I am aware of integrates meticulous feedback, practical support, and intellectual and spiritual community in quite the same way. It is designed to be flexible so that anyone with a full manuscript in need of revision can complete it from anywhere. In the preparatory period, the press sent me books on the craft of fiction as well as thematically related novels, locating the work within its tradition. Then at the beginning of the first intensive week, we opened up a sustained conversation that would last throughout the residency.
The extraordinary “ordinary” days of the intensive session each started with a long writing time in the morning, following up on edits sent the night before. Then, each afternoon, we met by video chat, starting with short devotions, then covering readings from a wide range of texts that bore directly on themes in the work, and finally spending time on in-depth edits to the manuscript, both line-by-line and developmental. Joshua Hren’s patient, generous, incisive critique both honored my vision for the work and led me into a deeper way of thinking about its relation to the responsibility of the literary artist. I’m profoundly grateful for the experience—it has been nothing short of a gift and, in a very real way, an answer to prayer.
—Katy Carl, Recipient of the 2020 Wiseblood Books Writing Residency
The extraordinary “ordinary” days of the intensive session each started with a long writing time in the morning, following up on edits sent the night before. Then, each afternoon, we met by video chat, starting with short devotions, then covering readings from a wide range of texts that bore directly on themes in the work, and finally spending time on in-depth edits to the manuscript, both line-by-line and developmental. Joshua Hren’s patient, generous, incisive critique both honored my vision for the work and led me into a deeper way of thinking about its relation to the responsibility of the literary artist. I’m profoundly grateful for the experience—it has been nothing short of a gift and, in a very real way, an answer to prayer.
—Katy Carl, Recipient of the 2020 Wiseblood Books Writing Residency
