Guestsplaining: Katy Carl on Catholic Literature | Fr. Bonaventure Chapman & Fr. Patrick Briscoe
January 6, 2025
Fr. Bonaventure: This is Father Bonavature Chapman.
Fr. Patrick: And this is Father Patrick Briscoe.
Welcome to Godsplaining. Thanks to all those who support us. If you enjoy the show, please consider making a monthly donation on Patreon. Be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining wherever you listen to your podcast. Ahh, gentle TV viewer land, we have a special podcast. This is a Guestsplaining episode. Father Patrick and I are joined by Katy Carl. Katy, thanks so much for coming on.
Katy: Hi, thank you guys for having me. It’s really a delight.
Fr. Bonaventure: All right, Katy Carl is an author. We don’t generally have like fiction authors on here, but you had a debut novel in 2021, Earth Without Water, and then a collection of short stories, Fragile Objects in 2023. And you are now, you’re involved in, you’re involved in and dappled things as an editor in chief. But now you are starting a new program at Word on Fire, a new imprint which we’re delighted to hear about. So tell us a little about this new program.
Katy: Yeah, so thank you so much for as well for having me on and for giving me the opportunity to talk about this. Word on Fire Luminor is a literary imprint of Word on Fire Publishing. It’s goal is to spread seeds of the word in the culture and in the Church. So I think oftentimes when we think about reading as Catholics, right, we have a sense that this means maybe reading theology, reading a lot of philosophy, like forming ourselves intellectually, and all of this is fantastic. As you guys know very well, my own husband is a philosophy professor. I find this a very important thing for Catholics to do, something that I have valued in my own formation. But once you have sort of built this structure of the abstract thought, I think a lot of times people can kind of struggle to connect that to everyday life. What does it mean for us to practice mercy? What does it mean for us to be charitable? What does it mean for us to try to grow in this or that virtue, what does it mean for us to deal with things and the kind of struggles and complex situations that we find ourselves in, and in practical everyday life? And this is where literature can really be of help. Pope Francis recently wrote a letter about the role of literature in formation. For Catholics, he wrote it, he says initially for priests or for seminarians, people in formation for the priesthood. I actually wanted to get y’all’s to take on this in just a minute. But I also wanted to say that he expanded this out. He introduces the letter by saying, you know, I’ve realized that this is actually an incredibly important part of all Catholics’ formation. Just their heat and formation as personal growth, and especially in the era of– he uses the word toxic, toxic, and superficial and violent fake news, he says, right? We have to sort of seal ourselves against these falsehoods, these realities, these attempts to redefine reality that are coming in from outside of our minds that are coming in, maybe sometimes also from inside the mind, right, or from various voices and sources around. You sort of have to make sure that we ourselves are clarifying our perceptions and are trying to make it so that we are receiving reality as it really is and maybe not as we would have it be or prefer it to be. So he says that we shouldn’t consider that it’s just a minor art or an entertainment. He says, really important to think about literature as an essential part of an intellectual life and an important part of human culture. Not something that’s sort of dispensable or extraneous, something that’s really epic or because it has to do with how we tell stories about ourselves about the world that we live in, about the communities that we live in, right? And if we sort of skip over that or kind of try to minimize it or put it off to the margins of life, then we’ll find that that’s actually so far from serving our sense of reality, it’s going to skew it pretty severely. We over conceptualize, I think some of the fixes that we have ourselves in presently, are partly a fruit of over conceptualization. And the failure to be a term that I think I’m gonna come back to quite a bit actively receptive toward reality, right? So I think as he goes on in this letter, he brings up the concepts that are also important as readers of literature, but also just as human beings of reading or listening to another person’s voice, he says, is it definition of literature he finds useful. Listening to another person’s voice, he talks about the challenges of listening to someone who challenges you, who’s sort of calling you out beyond your present capabilities, you know, calling you to something maybe higher, maybe better, maybe just to understand something that you don’t presently understand very well, right? You know, I don’t understand precisely through experience that differs from yours, right? This is, and on the flip side of this, right? It was just as he’s telling us as readers that we can’t learn to speak a language that we don’t somehow hear or in some way receive. He’s also telling artists along with Pope Paul VI and along with John Paul II, the artists and writers have a you know a responsibility or role to, and this is a quote, this is directly from Paul VI. He says to render the invisible world, as well as the visible world, I would add to render the invisible world in accessible and intelligible ways. And he says, if you can’t do this kind of rendering, you’re going to have it difficult times or reaching people or trying to speak to their hearts, because this is really, this is part of what it means to have a dialogue, to have a fruitful conversation with somebody, is to be able to understand where they’re coming from and also have the capacity to communicate something of where you come from…
Fr. Bonaventure: So I’ve got, I mean, I’ve got so much talk about this, but Fr. Patrick, do you have any, do you want to jump on this first?
Fr. Patrick: Right off the back, Katy, you know, I’m loving, as you’re introducing this letter, which I hope our listeners have heard about, and I hope it made their way. I’m recalling my youth, right, as when I was growing up, I’m the child that used to hoard batteries and flashlights so that I could secretly read underneath covers at night, you know, and books have been long, long friends of mine. And I noticed in my life the more, however that I relied on other forms of entertainment, the more restless I would become. And there’s something, there’s something fundamentally different about reading a book that does the kinds of things you’re suggesting. So you know, you’re, so you’re saying with a book, you can put yourself in, in another person’s shoes. In a way that it doesn’t seem like you can when you’re listening to a podcast or when you’re watching television. I don’t want to… People should hear me clearly. I’m not positing that in an absolute way. But I’m saying that the mechanism of reading and what encountering a fiction story does is somehow different. So I wondered if you could speak to that a little bit. Why is it different to hold a book in your hands when you, when you have this encounter from all the other different ways that we hear or receive stories today?
Katy: Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. So I think Father Walter Ong, a Jesuit writer about media and culture in his book Orality and literacy, he talks about how the medium itself shapes thought he’s actually one of the figures who, you know, prompted this idea for for figures like Marshall McLuhan. And he noticed that when you move from an oral story telling culture, which engages the entire community at once with audience response and the kind of immediacy, right? You’re sort of developing one set of virtues, right? When you move to literate culture, it’s not that you’re suddenly losing something, you’re gaining something, right? You also lose some of those virtues that come with oral storytelling, like extended memory and the ability to change as you go. But when you sit down with a book, right, you are developing sort of capacity in yourself to still yourself, right, to still your other senses and receive and actually develop something in your own mind as you as you’re going over the text, you’re having to not just decode as you read, but you’re having to also imagine you’re having to create the picture in your mind somehow and Pope Francis actually talks about this as well. He kind of delves under reader response theory which is fun for a literary person to find happening, the Pope telling you, right, you’re actually helping to construct the story as you read, as a reader, you’re helping to create something that the author began in you’re, in a sense, completing yeah, it’s also, I think, a virtue of co-creation, almost, if you’re being a good reader.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, I think this is an active receptivity, which I’m excited about, talk about, because I do like this, the co-create of stuff. I teach philosophy of art, and we do, Robin Collinwood and his stuff on philosophy of art about the ideal object and the relationship between how we recreate in our minds through imagination. I think this is right. And the nice part about the reading is that the imagination is we have to fill in the details, like you’re watching a movie or something. It’s doing a lot of the work for you. Whereas when you’re reading a book, you have basically minimal content, you have just the thoughts of the author and some capacity, but you have to see it. So you’re filling out all of the smells, the bell, I mean, they’re giving some of it, of course, but they want to give it all. And even the characters are not fully drawn. You can’t see all of them. So your imagination, which I take it is super important aspect that makes it different than, say, animals and it makes the different angels between those two, that we are these kind of soul and body, unity and our imagination is the place where this meets. Literature allows you to use the imagination to form yourself and form the images in your mind with these. So while you’re reading, you’re reconstructing not only a story, but also your own character in reflection to the events and all that. I think that’s just gotta be right. It’s gotta be a great moral experience of reading a book and engaging with it. And I think that letter is, but he’s been hitting out the ballpark recently. It seems like he did wanna blaze past golf a year ago, which is great. He did want to modern on the 50th anniversary of the modern wing of the Vatican Museum, what do you think about the arts in there, It’s a great talk. And then the new encyclical and Sacred Heart. But so with literature, yeah, literature has this ability to get us to move outside of ourselves, but also to actively receive. And I like that aspect. So talk about, talk a little about this active reception and maybe some examples of the kind of literature you think, maybe in your own life or or just in general, that might produce this active receptivity.
Katy: Yeah, so the concept of active receptivity is something I’m picking up from Father Norris Clark who has this little treatise called person and being. I think it’s a Gifford Lecture, isn’t it right? It’s one of those series that were plus to be lectures that yeah yeah. So Father Norris Clark talks about active receptivity. I think he’s talking about it more,forgive me I’m not very fresh on this, but the concept of more in relationships, right, more in sort of primary relationships with other human beings. But it kind of has an extension when you think about your relationship to a work of art, right? You can see the analogy is easy to draw there. You’re relating to this work of art in a way that you’re trying to understand what’s being communicated. But what your understanding of what’s being communicated is itself kind of dependent on and, you know, consequent to your own prior experience of reality. Right? So it’s something that writers have to struggle with because you have to kind of anticipate what your ideal or imagined readers response might be, you know, what kinds of experiences have they had? And are they going to have the same associations with a word like green or a word like incense, right? I’m just drawing examples out of thin air. You know, are they going to hear, feel, smell, see what I imagine when I hear those words, are they going to have radically different associations with those thanI think that they are right. This is something that a good workshop can do for a writer. I can clue you into ways in which your own imaginary might be idiosyncratic or might have not all the freight that you actually think it does. Using, and especially I see this with something that I had to learn not to do, something that I see now student writing is sometimes you will use an abstract word. And you will think that the abstract word kind of conveys everything that you think it does. So I almost fear that I’m doing that when I talk about active receptivity,right? That this might not have all the resonance for my listener that it does for me. But I think, what kind of, so to jump to what kind of books, what kind of literature might give us the ability to or the practice with this, with this facility, with this capacity that we have, I think actually poetry, I think even if you are someone who loves story, if you love fiction, the most you should still study poetry, you should still read, you know, for that kind of sensory and musical experience that only a poem can really give. For the cadence of the language and for the capacity of an image to speak in metaphor and analogy and to bring a memory into kind of cohesion and clarity a memory into cohesion and clarity in a very crystallized way that even the best pros really will struggle to do. A poem can really do that. I think also it’s important to read texts from a range of times. It’s important to read both classic and contemporary works. In part because when you read classics you check your own presentism I guess against the the wisdom of the ages and you get the opportunity to see well you know are these things that I bring to the text am I bringing them because they’re real or am I just bringing them because they’re sort of conditions that I’ve received socially, right? Are these just kind of constructions? That my society’s handed me, but maybe these aren’t innate to human nature, right? And then if you only read classic texts, you kind of struggle and the opposite way you will end up, not necessarily having the capacity to understand the experiences that are common in your time or be able to speak to it very well as an artist. So there’s a real need, or even if you’re not, you know, someone who’s a writer, who cares about that, you might find that by only relying on older texts, you sort of lose the ability to connect, right, with folks who are more immersed in the contemporary. So I think there’s a real need for a balance.
Fr. Patrick: I love that line. C.S. Lewis brings it up in his introduction to On The Incarnation, when that was republished, St. Athanasius’ great work. And Lewis is defending the old book, right, and he’s saying, well, for every modern book you read, you should read one ancient book. Read one old book. And there’s something to that.
Katy: Doesn’t he say three?
Fr. Patrick: Oh, do I have the ratio off? There it is.
Fr. Bonaventure: It’s probably three for Lewis. Yeah. That’s fair enough. I mean, fair enough.
Fr. Patrick: Yeah. But I, but I, but I love this point, this point of balance, um, or emphasis as the case may be on Lewis about going back. So I wonder, you know, for the perspective of Luminor or and your imprint, I wonder what, to what extent this will be a project of recovery. And the reason I ask is because I found in my conversations with older Catholics, as I started reading a certain kind of American Catholic literature, I found that they were all steeped in it, that they read these books in their schools, and now I’m thinking of something, you know, that’s not a classic such that it might be at the tip of our tongue, but Miles Connolly’s Mr. Blue. You know, that is a book that a Catholic who has raised a certain time knows very well, and it’s a fairly good book actually it’s very it’s quite charming. And so I wonder, I wonder what what sense of recovery of a culture you know of something that was once a kind of common language of American Catholics to what extent that’s behind the project you’re proposing in the Luminor imprint?
Katy: That is definitely part of it. I definitely have my eye on the issue of reprints. There’s a lot of good work already being done out there. I think Clooney Media is doing fantastic work, Wise Blood Books, which is my own fiction publisher is doing fantastic work. Angelico to some extent, right, slant to some extent. You see these presses that are interested in, I think the Loyola classics series from Ignatius…
Fr. Patrick: Yeah, they kinda kicked off a few years ago.
Katy: Yeah, 15 and 20 years ago, right? Amy Wellborn and the folks at Ignatius did some incredible work bringing Mr. Blue and John Hasler and [unk] I have some of these out there, right? Brian Moore’s Catholics is another one. Yeah, these sort of lost titles, right? That I, oh Edwin Connor’s The Edge of Sadness is an extraordinary book. So folks haven’t encountered these. It’s absolutely worth doing and they do exist out there. I’m trying to find another, I’m interested in all of this and especially in the 20th century, but I’m also interested in titles that maybe are lesser known, but maybe got, you know, to some degree lost because, you know, the sort of turmoil after, you know, in the 60s and the 70s, just cultural upheaval, right? There still was a kind of certain older story being still told, but maybe it lost cultural traction. Maybe works went out of print faster than they might have, but they continued to be relevant, but nobody was reading them. So nobody knew. I’m kind of doing some digging in that area.
Fr. Bonaventure: Name names, what do you got?
Katy: Oh, so I don’t have, I don’t know if I should name names ’cause I don’t have rights to anything yet.
Fr. Bonaventure: Oh fair enough.
Katy: Let’s be, yeah, I’m doing-
Fr. Patrick: [laughs] Hypothetically in the pantheon of things that might interest you.
Katy: Hypothetically, I’m looking at some Caroline Gordon’s later titles, Alice Thomas Ellis.
Fr. Patrick: Oh!
Katy: Also Moriak. There’s other stuff of his that deserves additions that aren’t out yet. It also texts that going back further in the tradition. But texts that Moriak himself was reading and was influenced by that we need to have, that were influences on the French Catholic revival, that we’re influencing guys like Mariak, and Bernanose, and who I’ve done, elaborating about that, maybe not everybody knows the guy who knows that.
Fr. Patrick: Yeah, I love this group. These are some of my fondest… And Katie, do you have a favorite of Moriak’s? –
Katy: Oh my gosh. It’s between Viper’s-
Fr. Patrick: Viper’s Tangle.
Katy: It’s between Viper’s Tangle and The Desert of Love for me. Therese of Lisieux is another, I’m really fond… But just the original, not the ones that he kind of built in later to kind of try to make her story more more Catholic, those are interesting.
Fr. Patrick: Yeah, anyone that likes A Christmas Carol needs to read a Viper’s Tangle and discover a much more psychological Ebonezer Scrooge.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, that’s great. Katy, so you mentioned some of these Catholic classics here and things like that. What’s the relationship between reading just Catholic literature or reading great literature in general? Like, bring to this, I know the imprint obviously is going for Catholic things, I suspect, but maybe you’ll say some general comments about like, is it if it’s one modern contemporary to three ancients, is it one Catholic to one non Catholic writer, is it even is they even worth saying Catholic, non Catholic? Like, how do we think about non Catholic writers or non Catholic literature or in relation to these questions?
Katy: Well, yeah, there’s a variety of ways you could go about thinking about this. There’s one which is very deeply rooted in the Tradition itself, which is if it’s true, it’s Catholic, right? This is, I think even Pope Francis quotes this Saint Basil, right? That is the way to engage with the classical tradition. But yeah, Basil of Caesarea here it is. He saw the richness of classical literature as itself something that the church could take in, could appropriate, could kind of outprise and make its own. So that is absolutely Pope Francis’ approach here too. He says, there’s already sort of implicit truth in all of our sort of yearning and naming and asking and seeking and our striving after something better. It’s very much resonant with God, immense best, the joys and hopes, the stars and anxieties of all humans, anything human is already ours. Nothing resonates with the ancient poet Terrence, nothing human is alien to me. Pope Francis has a line that’s almost word for where exactly that in here.
Fr. Bonaventure: This is the most time that Pope Francis has been quoted on this podcast, I think ever. So just, who would have known, but carry on? Yeah, just keep going.
Katy: But yeah, I mean, so there’s that way of thinking about it, right? If it’s true, it’s Catholic, but also I think there’s a need to sort of sit with authors who are taking us into the particularity of what it is to live with the Church’s specific teachings, not as if those were something sort of separated off, right, in their own enclave from the rest of reality, but those are something that’s deeply integrated with the structure of reality. Like, I think the reason that people end up finding, in doctrine compelling, is that it is reality-shaped, right? And sort of corresponds to some of the deeper experiences that we have as human beings. And actually safeguards and it brings about a closer contact with those realities instead of sort of sequestering us off from them. So, but of course we live in a world where that’s not always fully honored. And so the authors that, you know, sometimes particularly interest me are those who are looking at the clash between what it means to live in this deep reality and what it means to live in a world that doesn’t recognize this deep reality the way that you do. So the confessional Catholic authors who are really deeply struggling with the problems of what it means to be a Catholic in this world. Like JF Powers, like Flannery O’Connor, like for instance, Francois Mariak like, you know, [unk], these, right. And others, I mean, they could go on and keep naming, but these, these folks who are deeply interested in, you know, the specific problems that you run into when your vision and the vision of most of the people around you find themselves to be somewhat at odds.
Fr. Patrick: Katy, I think so my favorite line from this document, which again is just so fascinating from Pope Francis, I think we’ll resonate with a lot of listeners. If you can believe it, we have a lot of people who listen to us that are highly intelligent. They belong to this cast of Americans that we call engineers or accountants. They’re unbelievable. But whenever we talk about literature, they look at us as scans and they say, “Well, I don’t really understand why this is important. We’ve been making an argument here for it.” But the line that I think is so compelling that the Pope says, and I’d like to hear you react to a little bit, because I think it will help our audience, which is this. The Holy Father says, “The difficulty or tedium that we feel in reading certain texts is not necessarily bad or useless. The difficulty or tedium that we feel in reading certain texts is not necessarily bad or useless.” Now you can expect that when you’re reading something theological or philosophical and you just say, “Wow, this person is actually a lot smarter than I am,” and I don’t know what this means, and you kind of encounter mystery. But that’s a little bit different. I think when you find yourself hypothetically in the middle of a Russian novel, and you say, I don’t know who any of these people are or what’s going on here. So what do you have to say to that line?
Fr. Bonaventure: Or Ulysses, James Joyce, which I’m reading right now.
Fr. Patrick: Nice, oh perfect.
Katy: Oh, awesome. Yeah, I love this question because we, I mean, if you are a literature person, if you think of yourself as a literature person or not, you’re still this storytelling creature, right? Every person is by the virtue of being a person always engaged and telling themselves, telling others some kind of story about their lives, right? And the novel in particular as a form is kind of a school in how we do this. And in fact, in how some of our narratives might be skewed or might be off-center. And the thing is the difficulty not necessarily being a bad thing. So it opens up a couple things for me. And one of them is just the it’s one that Pope Francis mentions. It slows you down and makes you think a little bit more carefully about what’s actually going on and makes you question your own ability to read a situation, right? Kind of reads you back in that sense. So having to struggle through that actually kind of builds a quality of character. But then I almost say to talk about it like that because that makes it sound like reading literature is kind of eating your vegetables, eating your broccoli. And there might be this among us who love broccoli, maybe not everybody falls in that category. But it’s more than that. It’s not just like something that you’re doing just because it’s healthy for you and maybe you don’t really enjoy it, but it’s actually something that you can like that can come to be enjoyable in itself, right? Wrestling with the, you know, what’s going on here and who is this again and how do these people all know each other? And right, if you’re describing the experience that I had in the middle of reading Dostiyevsky’s The Demons or I mean, name a Dostoyevsky novel, right? You probably have this experience with it. The first time that you read it, but as you sit with it, you see he’s doing something complicated with the way that again, these various different perceptions of the world are kind of coming together in this thunderhead and are clashing with each other and are making you question, what exactly is real in this situation since everybody in this situation seems to see it so radically differently and want something so different out of it. And this is partly goes to build up an effect that the critic of a Victor Schlofsky talks about as “instrangement,” right? It makes the act of perception itself more difficult for the sake of ultimately making it more enjoyable and more fruitful. Right? Because once you have to start asking those kinds of questions, then you start examining much more closely. Well, I heard this person react that way to this speech, but in fact, it doesn’t seem that the words of the speech actually warrant that reaction or something disproportionate about that. What could have triggered that, right? And then you go further on into that. It kind of drives you forward to find out, “What is making this character tick? What is making this character think that so-and-so hates him and really so-and-so that’s time, etc. etc. etc. Right?” You know, you kind of dig more deeply into the situation and the more deeply you dig into the situation you find that you’re actually enjoying the process of learning about these people, learning about the human heart that you wouldn’t find out any other way.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, that’s great. Human heart. I love it. There’s a famous person a while ago that said the unexamined life is not worth living. And that doesn’t mean like the the… I Mean I grew up not reading books where my brother always read books and I never read books. I was a science guy, so that was and that was a miss those a problem obviously but here here we are…and the unexamined life doesn’t mean like oh, yeah, cool wave mechanics you know the unexamined life means like what life is and I think that literature, as you have started with, has some of the best, we say lenses are telescope or microscope on what life is about. So if you want to live an examined life, then you do literature. So I’m going to end with a rapid fire questionnaire for you, which is, um, if there is one microscope or telescope or examining tool, which will be a book, um, what one book would you recommend? And you could recommend many, but what one book would you recommend that just like this one? Yeah, it’ll get you pretty far. Like this is a good one. There’s some books you read. Doesn’t exist help examine life that much. But what, what book do you have to recommend? This is going to you, Fr. Patrick, after this and I’ll close her off.
Katy: All right well since we’re sitting with Dostoyevsky I’ll say, pick The Brothers Karamazov of right? You can’t do better than that.
Fr. Bonaventure: Okay Father Patrick, what do you think?
Fr. Patrick: Great well you said “Brothers K” and we already mentioned Viper’s Tangles so I will say “Brideshead”.
Fr. Bonaventure: “Brideshead!” Darn, that’s a good pick. I’m gonna go Dostoyevsky and I’m going to say The Idiot because I love The Idiot. Brother’s K is obviously a better, more like explosive novel like covering more, but The Idiot I think is tight. And I think that’s his best like tight novel, but it’s but Brother’s K is fantastic. Dostoyevsky’s really brilliant. Okay, Katy, we’re so happy to have you on here. We obviously, people will be looking forward to the imprint and things coming out through there but they can also find you online and different places where can they find your things or work and they find out more about this whole literature business?
Katy: So I have this sub-stack it’s called “Depth Perception” and I write about contemplative realism and related topics then there’s also of course, “Stable Things” where I was for many years, dablethings.org. Word on Fire, Luminor has its own page. I think as of this recording, it will be live with some more information, including some stuff about an upcoming short story contest that folks can enter if they’re interested in doing that.
Fr. Patrick: Teaser! You’re such a tease, Katy.
Fr. Bonaventure: Fantastic, and of course, Katy has short story collection, fragile objects, and then her first novel, “As Earth Without Water.” So those those might be tools for examined life that people might wanna look into, but Katy, so happy to have you, and thank you for taking your time with us.
Katy: Thank you so much, guys, it’s been great.
Fr. Bonaventure: Okay, thanks again to all our supporters, turn to you all, folks. Those who will be reading pretty soon, I hope. If you’d like to tithe their support, tithe whatever, our work, check us out on patreon.com/godsplaining follow us on Facebook, X Instagram, whatever we have those things. Like subscribe, we have five star reviews as worthy. Visit godsplaining.org to shop, we have new merch. Who knows? And maybe we’ll have an imprint of Godsplaining books, but that’s not going to happen. Shop and get dates and information from upcoming Godsplaining events. You can see the show notes for this for things linked to Katy’s work and and those places you mentioned and know of our prayers for you. Please pray for us. We’ll catch you next time on Godsplaining.