Events

Tuesday - Thursday, April 1 - 3, 2008
Speaker and breakout leader, Transforming Culture, a conference for pastors, church leaders, and artists, First Evangelical Free Church, 4420 Monterey Oaks Blvd.
Austin, TX 78749, Contact W. David O. Taylor at 512-377-3900 www.transformingculture.org

Saturday, April 12, 2008
Poetry reading, Santa Fe, NM, in connection with the IMAGE journal board meeting. Contact Greg Wolfe, gwolfe@imagejournal.org for details

Thursday - Saturday, April 17 - 19, 2008
Speaker, Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing.
Contact: Shelly LeMahieu Dunn at mld@calvin.edu, www.calvin.edu/festival

Thursday, April 21, 2008, 3:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Speaker at Trinity Western University Open House in Bellingham, followed by book signing and KGMI radio interview.
Contact Debra Hannenberg, debra.hanenberg@twu.ca for details.

Saturday, May 3, 2008
Speaker, Luncheon, Orcas Island Community Church.
Contact Barbara Iwarsson, biwarsson@rockisland.com for details.

Saturday, May 17, 2008
IMAGE journal soiree, home of Andrea Lairson.
Contact Julie Mullins, julie@spu.edu for details.

Recent Publications and Reviews

"I started sending postcards to a friend many years ago while I was traveling. I would begin each one by saying, 'the light was like this in Texas, or in Iowa, etc.," explained Luci Shaw about the genesis of What the Light Was Like (WordFarm, April), one of several recent books of poems, collected when Shaw realized she had a large number of pieces centered around a particular theme.Shaw's newest collection, Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation (Eerdmans, July) has a story of similar origin, and only became a book after she realized she had accumulated a large number of poems about the incarnation, most of which were sent out during past Advent seasons in her Christmas cards. Shaw knew without hesitation which poem in the collection strikes the most powerful chord. "It's definitely "Mary's Song." I wrote it twenty-five to thirty years ago." Shaw explained that "Mary's Song"—a poem about Mary as a mother cradling her newborn son—has even been set to music by the Norwegian composer, Knut Nystadt, and is performed all over the world, including in Vancouver, near where she lives in Bellingham, WA.

Shaw devotes a considerable number of poems—the entire first section of Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation—to the visitation of Mary by the angel Gabriel. "It's such a pivotal moment in history and, for me, Mary is a model of someone unexpectedly called to do something utterly unusual," Shaw explained. "Because of Mary, a whole new era comes into the world. She's like a bridge between heaven and earth and, like Mary, I believe that we too can become pregnant with God."

Luci Shaw was recently interviewed by Jon Sweeney. The topic was "What does it mean to lead a Spiritual Life?" The interview is available on explorefaith.org. This interview reveals fresh insights from Shaw, who continues to write and explore the connections between faith and Creation in her poetry and essays.

Also, the March 1 issue of IMAGE Update reviewed Luci Shaw's most recent book Breath for the Bones as follows:

Art and faith need each other to flourish. That's the message at the core of Breath for the Bones, a graceful patchwork of meditations by poet and spiritual writer Luci Shaw on creativity and its intimate relationship with the life of the soul. Drawn from Shaw's writings over the years, this is a book for anyone who has felt the creative impulse and wondered where it comes from and how to cultivate it. Creativity is a seed planted in each of us, she believes. It's a matter of recognizing it as the divine gift it is and helping it grow. Knowing well that the church can be leery of the imagination--unpredictable and impractical, it must therefore be dangerous--Shaw gently lays those fears to rest with some theological groundwork.

She reminds us that the excessive beauty of creation reveals a God who endorses creativity for its own sake, and that Christ himself uses story and metaphor to communicate truth that might otherwise diminish and fall flat. What's so lovely about this collection of accumulated wisdom is the way it effortlessly weaves the theological with the immediate, personal voice of a poet who has been at this delicate work for decades. She tells stories, she shares journal entries and poems, and paints bright images to draw us into her own vital relationship with creativity and faith. Along the way we learn the importance of leaving receptors open to the arrival of the Spirit as muse, who comes without warning like a breeze lifting the leaves. We begin to face fear and take the risks that leave us vulnerable to challenge and growth, to savor the tiniest details as glimmers of the divine, and to learn to dwell in the troughs and shadows, trusting they are necessary contrasts to the coming light. From practical advice for growing artists and hand questions and writing prompts in the back, to moments of ecstatic affirmation of art-making as a way of seeing more deeply, Shaw's "wild hope" is that in a world increasingly fragmented and myopic, "creative Christians, by means of their "baptized imaginations," may be able to help integrate the universe by...seeing the whole picture as if through God's eyes...and saying, "Yes, I see. This is connected to that. There is meaning in it."