a stay against confusion...

I'm barely into Ron Hansen's A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction, [title taken from robert frost, my favorite poet] but already it's a must-own. For writers and readers, it's up there with Mystery and Manners.

I love reading about people who are passionate and thoughtful about the interaction of faith and art. Hansen's prose is brilliant. I get to meet him next week, as he's our visiting writer this semester.

A few highlights so far:

"Writing not only gives form and meaning to our sometimes disorderly existence, but gives the author the chance for self-disclosure and communion with others, while giving readers a privileged share in another's inner life that, perhaps imperceptibly, questions and illuminates their own. Reading attentively, connecting our lives with those of fictional characters, choosing ethically and emotionally just as they do or in contradistinction to them, we enter the realm of the spirit where we simultaneously discover our likeness to others and our difference, our uniqueness. Questioning ourselves and our world, finding in it, for all its coincidence, accidents, and contingencies a mysterious coherence, we may become aware of a horizon beyond which abides the One who is the creator and context of our existence." [this is why i want to teach, learn, and love: to help those around me understand something beyond ourselves through simple words on plain pages.]

"...I knew the books I liked best were not those that seemed tailored to contemporary tastes but those that were unfashionable, refractory, in subordinate, that seemed the products not of a market analysis but of a writer's private obsession." [can i work for this type of publishing company, please? i'll even sort paper clips if necessary]

I'm sure I'll keep adding to this. But get yourself some Hansen, mkay?
[sorry this isn't pictures, schmol. we'll take a bunch together soon!]