The Great Gatsby with Katy Carl

A century after its publication, The Great Gatsby still demands more of readers than its first audience was prepared to give. This conversation explores why Fitzgerald's third novel flopped in 1925, how its three-act tragic structure works, and what it means to read its vices and virtues with Christian eyes. Along the way: Fitzgerald's complicated Catholic formation, the role of beauty in a moral imagination, the state of American Christian fiction since the mid-century, and the case for writing classics now. With Nadya Williams and novelist Katy Carl, editor of Word on Fire's literary imprint, Luminor.

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Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member today at http://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:18

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my head ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had. He didn't say anymore, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve old judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran boars. When I came back from the East last autumn, I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and had a sort of moral attention forever. I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction. Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. Gatsby turned out all right at the end. It is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams, that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. So wrote the American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in opening his novel, The Great Gatsby. Published in 1925, it turned a hundred years young last year. Although he had written three other novels, most people wouldn't be able to name any. And yet, in its year of publication, the Great Gatsby, his third novel, sold fewer than 23,000 copies and was considered a flop. Of course, since then, in the decades that followed and into the present, the Great Gatsby has become a mainstay in high school and college curricula. Welcome to the Christians Reading Classics podcast from Muir Orthodoxy. I am Nadia Williams, books editor for Muir Orthodoxy. This second season of the podcast has been focused largely around classics American Christians should read in this year of America's 250th birthday. And I think the Great Gatsby is a great example of this kind of classic. Today it is a wonderful privilege to talk about The Great Gatsby with the novelist Katie Carl. In every aspect of her work, Katie cares deeply about Christian literary arts, past and present. She is the editor of Luminore, Word on Fire's Literary Imprint. She is the author of the novel As Earth Without Water and the short story collection Fragile Objects. And she serves as writer in residence at the University of St. Thomas Houston. And I could keep going because you can find her writing everywhere. But I will stop here and just say, Katie, thank you for joining me today.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Nadia, thank you so much for having me on the show. This is a delight. Thanks so much. Pleased to be here.

SPEAKER_02 3:30

So let's start with this thorny question. What is a classic?

SPEAKER_01 3:36

A classic is a work that, no matter how old it is, is always new. And I don't mean by that that it's necessarily feeling ripped from the headlines or written yesterday. Often quite the contrary, but a classic descends into the particulars of its own world, its own historical period, its own moment. And in so doing, in the particular, it finds the universal, teaches us how to see the world, how to pay attention to our own world. And being of its time might make it in some respects foreign to us, but it's still going to speak on some level to timeless human truths that are more valid the older they are. There's a French saying, uh, and forgive me, please, anyone who actually speaks fluent French. I'm afraid I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, but uh plus se change, plus c'est la même chose. The more a thing changes, the more it stays the same. That's human nature in a nutshell. And I think the classics live in that space where change and sameness are both working together to reveal what's enduring. And at the same time, every time you open up a classic work, it offers you something fresh. So you never fully understand a classic if you've only read it once.

SPEAKER_02 4:57

I love that the practice of rereading over the course of a lifetime with some really great books.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

Yeah, I think I've read Gatsby at least six or seven times. And the first time was, of course, in high school, as he mentioned, that uh it's continued to open out and grow, right, as as I've grown.

SPEAKER_02 5:17

One other thought I wanted to follow up on. You mentioned that classic teaches us to see the world. Can you expand on that a little bit? Because I think a lot of times people don't think about the power of classic books to do that.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

Yeah, no, um, I think by anchoring its vision in a perspective, right? Uh, any any work gives you sort of a lens through which to see the world. And Louise Callan will talk about uh four different main sort of lenses or ways of viewing the world that are the genres, right? And these are uh the tragic, the comic, the epic, and the lyric. I think Gatsby falls into the realm of tragedy, uh, but then further by grounding it in a specific voice, um, in the specific person of Nick Caraway, who's close to Fitzgerald's own uh age and time and experience in life, and yet in some ways is also a better version of Fitzgerald than Fitzgerald himself. Um, it he gives us a kind of implicit moral vision, right? That's as the opening quote indicated, right? I wanted the world to be at a kind of moral attention forever, and yet he recognizes that it's not, right? And we can get deeper into this when we talk about what it is to read specifically as a Christian, right? And to kind of have a strong sense of morality that you bring to anything you read. Um, and yet to be aware at the same time that not all the characters are going to be living by that same vision by any means, right? I think Fitzgerald gets short-shrift as a Christian writer precisely because his own life was so uh tumultuous in this respect, but he was deeply formed by his his Catholic, his Christian upbringing, and continued to see that as implicitly right, even you know, despite and throughout an entire mess that was the 1920s and 30s, um, really his entire life.

SPEAKER_02 7:30

So, what do you think made this novel a failure initially, and why do we affirm that it is a classic now?

SPEAKER_01 7:38

Some of it, I think, was just the moment. Uh it was it maybe overshadowed by other things that were happening in that same time period. You know, this is in the the interwar period where this is happening. It's coterminous in a lot of ways with Evelyn Waugh's uh Bright Young Things novels, right? Decline and Fall of Vile Bodies, uh happening in that kind of tumultuous period. Um and in the 30s, particularly, right, uh, it was not rediscovered in large part because of the Great Depression. It wasn't rediscovered until a bit later. Uh none of that actually answers why in the same year it came out, it didn't sell to the same degree that his earlier works, which technically are quite inferior. Um, there's a reason we don't know the names of uh uh This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. Uh they're they're just journeyman pieces. Um, and yet they were wildly popular in their time, but I think because they didn't ask as much from their audience. Uh I think the the readers of 1925 were not in a place to process a book that demanded as much of the reader as Great Godspeed demands of the reader. It is a tragedy, it is uh bleak, it is dark. Um, it's not to say that there isn't hope at the end, but it's it's a very muted, it's a very tempered kind of hope. And people were uh kind of in a frenzy where they they wanted distraction and stimulation and excitement. And the book offers all those things too, but it offers them at a cost and it shows their costs. Uh, and that wasn't immediately welcome, I think.

SPEAKER_02 9:29

That's striking, and the idea that the classics demand something of us, that when we read great books, it's not just entertainment of the sort that we can just kind of passively receive it, but there's something that is expected from us in the process. Yeah, absolutely. So walk us through this novel for someone who might not have read it ever or maybe hasn't read it since high school.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Sure. Uh so this is a perfect three-act tragedy, and it has three major movements. So the first movement is uh Nick's introducing us to the world of Gatsby. He himself has just moved to the New York area, specifically to a little uh bedroom community outside the area called West Egg. Um, and it's off the island slightly. It's a tiny island of its own. Uh, but he can commute to his finance job in New York very easily from this place. And it just so happens that he's found a little bungalow that's very affordable, uh, that's sandwiched in between some huge vacation houses where you know rentals or you know, purchases by the very wealthy, you know, come and go very often. So his next door neighbor, uh Jay Gatsby, uh, it just so happens to turn out, um, although we won't find this out for several chapters, uh, was once intimately connected with um Nick's own cousin, Daisy. And it's the cousin we meet first. Uh Daisy has just married a man named Tom Buchanan uh a few years back. Uh, they have one little girl together. Uh, and Daisy has a friend named Jordan Baker who's a celebrated golf player uh who Nick develops a romantic interest in. And the first major uh ensemble scene is a dinner party where Daisy, Nick Jordan, and Tom are all sitting together on the veranda. We get a sense of these women and these men and how different it is to be a woman in this society than to be a man in this society. Um, the kinds of things that preoccupy and concern Tom, who is a football player who had his glory days in college and will really never experience that kind of peak again. Uh, Tom has recently gotten himself into uh an intellectual quagmire. He's reading books with theories that are racist that will turn out to be the kinds of things that would promote uh anti-Semitism and anti-Black prejudice uh in, you know, and would fuel the um the problematic movements in Europe uh in just a few short years. Uh, but that's all very lightly handled, that's all very lightly worn, right? Um, because the focus of uh Fitzgerald's attention is actually on the interpersonal relationships and particularly on the fact that um Tom and Daisy's marriage has been a disaster from the beginning. Uh Tom is already unfaithful to Daisy. It will turn out later that um Tom has been unfaithful since the very beginning. Um, and very soon we go down into uh town with Tom and Nick. This is a scene following the dinner party uh in which we meet Tom's mistress, Myrtle, and uh discover that he's keeping her an apartment. There's a party that is violent and alcohol fueled. Uh, this is during Prohibition, so this is all very illicit. Um, and the ironic thing about this party is that is way wilder than anything happens at Gatsby's mansion later. Uh, but Gatsby's mansion is the one that will get the reputation for uh for wildness, even though, as Tom and Jordan find out when they attend the party, um, there's all this music and food and gypsies and trembling opal, and yet they're bored. They're sitting there bored to tears. Um, it's incredibly funny. And and Fitzgerald just handles all of this uh travel through this social milieu that's so privileged and yet so self-obsessed and so vexed and so caught up in its own envy of itself that um it can't even manage to be interesting to itself. Yeah. So this this is a fascinating territory to have this drama unfold in. Um second act begins when uh Gatsby uh has learned that Daisy lives nearby and is Nick's cousin and asks Nick through Jordan. Um he uses an intermediary, he can't even ask Nick himself. That's how closely he holds this. Um, he asks Nick to set up a meeting, uh, invite him to tea, and invite Daisy on the same day so they can see each other again. Um, and through this very awkward tea, and again, where the evidence of Nick's poverty as compared to Gatsby's extreme wealth is very much on display. Uh, it there's this intense, tender moment uh that we don't quite see. It's it's offstage. Um, Nick is out of the room when it happens, uh, but it there's a reunion between Daisy and Gatsby. Uh, they go to his house. Um, she sees everything that he's accomplished and achieved, uh, you know, built up through um you know through these years where he's been striving to earn and deserve her, uh, and she sees it as kind of tawdry, and he's able to see it that way finally, too. So the issue of all this is that he decides that he has to start over with her, and he's going to demand that she um go to her husband and say, you know, I never loved you, right? And that's the beginning of the third act. I won't completely spoil the third act for everyone, but uh the third act of this tragedy, um again, there's there's a major ensemble scene in the Plaza Hotel, uh, which is incredibly emotionally tense. I mean, it's hard not to be on edge reading this scene. Um, and the outcome of that scene with incredible dramatic efficiency leads directly to um uh a moment of violence, um inadvertent, careless violence that's nevertheless uh explodes everything that all of the characters think is true of themselves and of each other, right? And uh will ultimately lead to um Gatsby's downfall. So that's in a nutshell.

SPEAKER_02 16:19

Yeah. It's a striking novel. And what I really what stood out to me on this rereading is character development. We get really rich characters, they're real persons.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

They are they're fully drawn and so deftly, right? There are these short descriptions. Uh, Fitzgerald doesn't waste page space or a single word, even. Uh, this is in some ways a short story writer's novel, right? In the he's extremely compact and tight, but you get things like Jordan's uh, you know, her whole personality almost is this hard, jaunty sportswoman, right? She's clean, she's cold, she's rational, she's cool, she's detached, right? She's not going to stand anybody's romantic nonsense, including Nick's, even though to some extent she welcomes it because it's pleasant to her, right? But she's um she she's got no time for the kind of uh drama that she sees in these clever, you know, capable men who control everything around them and force their way. She's not going to have that. She chooses Nick in a lot of ways because um he is not like that. He is uh notoriously reserved and um in including in terms of his judgment, uh, this is the the first and the major thing that we learn about Nick. Um and we can talk about reserve judgment later. But it but the same with with Daisy, she's a balloon the first time we meet her. Her dress is ballooning. We see how how light in every sense she is, physically, morally, spiritually. Uh she she's um not a sense. Uh she's intelligent, but she knows that she's not, in some sense, a serious person either. Uh, and it's uh borne out later in that the way that she comes together with Tom is given greater presence in that last act, right before the third act, to increase the sort of sense of sorrow that we feel over uh what becomes of all of them. And it's obvious that nobody who thought seriously about her own life could have done what Daisy did, could have changed her allegiance so easily and so completely and so suddenly. Um, we can get into Tom too. Again, Tom, in contrast to Daisy, is this just heavy, imposing, uh terrifying presence, right? He's casually violent and cruel, um, and casually superior in his sense of himself, um, unjustifiedly superior, um, except insofar as regards his his physical abilities, he's just not that bright or that good of a person. Um it's his entire virtue is physical virtue, so to speak. Um so you have this sort of uh tetrad, right? This this um this quartet of of characters who are all going to set each other off um in in these you know in these ways. And then here comes Gatsby sailing into this like a meteor. It's going to explode the whole thing.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

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SPEAKER_00 20:18

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SPEAKER_02 21:13

So as we read this, all of these characters, what characterizes them is their vices. What do we do with this as Christian readers? And what do you think Fitzgerald especially wanted us to take from this, considering that his own life was very much kind of looks like this novel?

SPEAKER_01 21:31

Yeah, I think he's self-aware about that. I don't think that there's um you know maybe a lack of consciousness or conscience on his part so much as a lack of control, except in terms of his art, right? Um we could get deeper into the biography if you want to, but uh just to dig a little bit more into the novel and to you know to mention right these vices and contrast to Gatsby's virtue, because the one characteristic of Tragedy is that the the protagonist who experiences the downfall, right? The tragic figure is, um, as Aristotle says, often nobler, right, than those who surround him or those who are observing the the you know the play from the audience or the scene from the audience. Uh there's a moment toward the very end, uh, right before the um the final scene where uh Nick is saying goodbye to Gatsby at the end of a meal and he waves, you know, he's leaving this the this long sweeping huge lawn with the big stairs, and he turns around and says to Gatsby, uh, you're worth the whole pack of them. Yeah, so so Gatsby himself is in some sense a model of some virtue, but it's a it's a distorted virtue. It's an overgrown virtue. It's the the kind of uh Hamarcia or superbia, right? Uh there's there's pride involved, uh, there's uh a virtue that would be a virtue if it weren't overgrown and out of proportion to every other quality in the character. Uh so again, I think Fitzgerald is not trying to condone um certainly the vices that he depicts. Instead, he's trying to give presence to those things in a way that demonstrates their outcomes, right? And demonstrates them realistically.

SPEAKER_02 23:26

How do we read this differently, do you think, as Christians, as opposed to someone who doesn't have any kind of belief in God?

SPEAKER_01 23:34

In a way we do, and in a way we don't. I think we, you know, there's a right, uh a kind of disposition to um to Christian life in that, you know, whatsoever you do, do it for the glory of God. If you're playing sports, try to play sports as well as you can for the glory of God. If you're reading, try to read as well as you can for the glory of God. So someone who's reading this novel well, uh, but from outside of a Christian perspective might perceive many of the same things in it that we do. Um, but I think as we read it from again within a moral framework, we're able to add another layer to that, right? And to gain perspective on human nature, um, to be prevented from falling into uh some of the errors that are endemic and specific to Christian thinking about human nature, right? Uh it's easy to uh dismiss or discount original sin when you've mostly been around good people your entire life or think, no, you know, nobody could act like that, or nobody I know could act like that. Um, you know, that would never happen in my community. I would never do such a thing, right? Um but by encountering these dispositions in fictional form, uh we can undeceive ourselves to some extent. Uh, I think we can resist certain illusions about human nature because we're aware, you know, even if we're very um, you know, like Nick, we experience right internal blocks and rules, right, that act as checks on our conduct. Um, you know, we we're still aware of certain first movements in ourselves, right? That unchecked or untended to um could result in um in worse than we want or would hope for. Uh so being aware of human nature in that way, um, again, is not something that a secular reader or someone coming from outside a Christian framework is incapable of by any means. Um, I just think it gains an extra layer for us in that we're bringing something to it that that you know, a reader who's you know not bringing that filters, not bringing, sorry, that's tautological, right? Um and I guess filter is the wrong word because we're not trying to block anything out of our experience of the reading. Um, rather, it's enriched, I want to say, by uh by the extra dimension of faith.

SPEAKER_02 26:06

I like that. And I was thinking there's something very Aristotelian at the core of this, the idea that a good tragedy, Aristotle said, will bring about this public catharsis, this purification of pity and fear. And we definitely experience these kinds of strong emotions reading something like The Great Gatsby. And there's the pity, obviously, for so many of these characters like you were describing. Like, how could somebody make as big a mess of her life as Daisy does? It takes uh real effort. But um, but at the same time, uh, there's also this fear of like, could this happen to me? And perhaps that's where an awareness of original sin is all of us have hints of these kinds of that that fallen nature that's within all of us, except that normally most of us would not act like this. And yet, what if somebody did? And again, um, I wonder for readers in the 20s when uh you hear kind of outrageous public behavior and the whole like fueled by the prohibition, ironically, um, ridiculous parties really did happen. Like we have historical evidence. This is not just making it up whole cloth in the novel. Um at the same time, there's something transcendent about this novel. So, what is it? How do we see it?

SPEAKER_01 27:32

I think, and again, in part because of his formation, Fitzgerald is conscious of the endless longing in human nature for that which transcends our nature. Uh, and Gatsby's ambition in some ways is a materialized or imminentized expression of that longing. And it's radically insufficient. It can't give him what he wants. Um, by you know, quite the quite the opposite. It prevents him from attaining anything like uh the kind of peace or satisfaction that he thinks it's going to bring him. Um, and I think at the same time, Fitzgerald is able to pinpoint that and note it, um, and not more than note it, presence it, uh, make it artistically believable and real and fully embodied in his characters. Um, he's also able to see what's good in it uh and not to cancel out that good. Um, in fact, the conclusion of the novel ends with an affirmation of what was good in that uh and the gift for uh, as Nick will say in the beginning, romantic readiness and hope. Um, Fitzgerald will reaffirm that as a value, even though he's just spent 50,000 words showing us what happens when it goes wrong, when it becomes uh what Girard would call metaphysical desire, right? Deviated transcendence, right?

unknown 29:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:11

And in that regard, the novel really does become um something that is good, true, and beautiful. Um, at least there's a beauty, um, even if not in the things the characters do. Um, this is beautifully written and it is true. And we have good impulses that hopefully um we hope at the end that maybe somebody um will actually follow later. We don't, we don't quite know what happens, of course. Like this, this is the end. And yeah, you kind of wonder what happened to Nick later in his life.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

Yeah, that's right. Well, yeah, I think it's implied that he goes back to the Midwest, having discovered that that's really where he belongs. That's you know, what's made him, that's where his roots are, and that's where he's going to be best suited. Um, it it reminds me in some ways of Wendell Berry and the myth of the better place. Uh, you you can't really um it change your nature or the nature of your um your upbringing, uh your your place. Um, and for someone whose place was the East, uh, that might be perfectly suitable. Um, but but Nick realizes at the end that it's not for him. Um and I think what's what's so lovely is that uh Fitzgerald shows the limits of the uh virtue which Nick has been attempting to practice, which is um which is patience, which is uh prudence, right? Um Nick has been trying to uh reserve judgment up to a point, uh, right? He's been trying to weight perception more heavily, uh, and he discovers in the end that there has to be a balance between these two things, right? That they can't uh stand in isolation from each other.

SPEAKER_02 31:03

As we think about the Great Gatsby and just the tradition of Christian novels, Christian fiction in America, um I guess including both uh fiction written by writers who would say that they are Christians, um, and fiction that is inspired perhaps by um the author's uh rootedness originally in their belief. Like with Fitzgerald, even though he did not behave like um a Catholic throughout his adult life, as you said, he was very influenced by that. So as we think about all of this, what kind of themes typically define um American Christian fiction today, or you know, over the course of the last century?

SPEAKER_01 31:49

Yeah, uh it's a tricky question because uh we didn't really experience uh revival or resurgence of uh you know meaningfully uh Christian writing until the mid-century. And then after that point, there was a significant decline, uh, driven in large part by commercialism, but also by um I think just the dissolution of uh the 60s and the culture that kind of fell apart all at once, and people were uncertain what to make of this. Um, a lot of Christian writers, uh and Catholic writers in particular, which is my specialty, um, went underground, so to speak, uh masked their belief in order to uh continue to write about it, uh, although in ways that uh would pass in the culture without being objected to or um you know openly bringing on conflict. Um so I think I'll focus in on the mid-century writers in that they're the ones who most noticeably are committed equally at once to um to fullness of truth and to fullness of craft. Uh and these writers are uh typically concerned with um, they're typically concerned with the the the human person, right? The with human nature in its uh both its grief and its glory. Uh they're concerned with uh with humans in society. What do we owe to society? What do we um you know, what do we not owe, or what might we need to oppose, right? Uh so there's a kind of creative tension before uh there's a kind of confluence, right? Um there they're in America, it's it's interesting too. They are concerned with uh what it means to be American and what it means to um live in this country and yeah, have your your ultimate spiritual allegiance be not to this country as um some continue to think it should be, um, even your spiritual allegiance, uh, which is radically distorted, but um you know to some you know of a vision of America itself rather than to God, right? This is um you know a danger that uh particularly I'm thinking of O'Connor, right? Where she, for example, has um the farm wife who's in the displaced person, right, is is calling attention to the fact that they're having these foreign people visiting. And the foreign people who are visiting are going to be, oh my goodness, will they even know what windows are? Will they even know what colors are? How foreign is foreign, right? Um you know, there's there's a sense of um needing to put America in perspective and in proportion, right? Um, not as an idol, right? And not as a um, you know, not not as something to be denigrated either, but to um you know, to hold in balance and to realize that it is in many ways a balance of um of opposites and of multiples of of multiplicity. Um and that this is, as O'Connor uh will say, not of America, but of you know, um intellectual and spiritual life in general, that um, you know, it is it is one of the relative things that we can hold as merely relative if we realize that there is an absolute that's above it and holds everything else in place as a keystone.

SPEAKER_02 35:44

This is um this is fascinating. I guess I didn't realize there was kind of like a wave up and down um in this. So I'd love to hear from you. You are a Catholic novelist. So how did when did you know this is who you were, that this is what you wanted to do and how you this is what you wanted to write, and that you really wanted to write specifically as a Catholic. How did it all come together?

SPEAKER_01 36:10

Uh gradually and then suddenly, like the bankruptcy in Hemingway. Um and I haven't said enough about Hemingway, by the way. Um he's another one with Fitzgerald who gets short shrift as a uh as a Catholic writer, which he was. Um, again, not someone who lived by the teachings of the church, but someone who continued to hold them seriously, um, you know, take them seriously, even as he struggled with practice. Um he uh famously donated his uh 1952, 1951, I'm gonna get the year wrong, uh, his Nobel Prize uh after the old man in the sea, uh, he he donated it to a Marian shrine. Uh he gave that away. I did not know that. Yeah, that's true. Um yeah, of course, he was living with his fourth spouse at the time, but he uh had this this sort of tension, very similar to Fitzgerald, in in terms of thinking of the teachings of the church as true and yet struggling to live by them, right? Um so, but that's not an answer to the question and uh trying to keep uh you know focus on me. Um I think when I wanted to, when I first wanted to write, I was very, very young. I mean, very young. Um I would entertain myself as a kid by making little paper booklets with stories in them. Uh, it was one of my favorite games. I would, you know, put together magazines at home with a stack of printer paper and my stapler. Like this, this has an origin story. Right. But I think I started taking writing much more seriously in high school and with uh particularly my American-lit AP class. Uh, I fell in love with the tradition of the American novel, uh the American short story. Uh, only later came to find that these are very deeply rooted in um European traditions of the novel and short story that subsisted for centuries before this. Um and right, just really wanted to practice these forms. Um, of course, I went through a lot of twists and turns on the way to um you know practicing the craft consistently uh on my own, but uh I um eventually was able to uh publish a novel in 2021 through Wise Blood Books. Uh I took my MFA and the UST uh Catholic um you know MFA program uh for fiction, uh, graduated in the first cohort of that and released a book of short stories, uh fragile objects that same year. Um I think I knew that I wanted to write uh seriously because there's no other form. Um, and I tried many, but there's really no other form that allows you to do quite what the short story and the novel allow you to do, which is give this sense of capaciousness and of full life going on behind a story while at the same time uh you know telling the through line of that story uh in a way that's you know robust and succinct. And um, yeah, you know, you can do it in a narrative poem, uh, but a narrative poem has sort of an incantatory uh it almost feels sacred, right? Poetry almost feels sacred. There's a reason that we respond the way we do to the epic classics that are told in in verse, right? And particularly, you know, uh the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy. Uh, we respond to these things as though they're sacred narratives because in a way um they're they're adjacent, right? They're evoking that the same kind of uh complete immersion. And I wanted to preserve that line and say there are things that happen to us humanly that are not quite meeting that register yet, uh, but nevertheless need to be explored, need to be understood. And the the prose narrative does that like nothing else can or ever will. And so um that's that's the short version of the answer. I love that. So, what are you writing now? Uh, I'm working on a novel. I have about 70,000 words under my belt. That's not nearly enough for this one. It's going to be quite a bit longer. It is a huge sprawling Catholic family story set uh in South Texas. Um, it you know takes in a lot of the um you know social tensions that are spinning around the world uh in the post-COVID era, um, and you know, maps those onto how they affect the life of this single family as you know the adult children deal with the passing of their parents and um I think about what's next for all five of them as they're responding to the um you know the realities of their own formation, their own upbringing. So that's where I am. Uh it's called Carolon, and a chapter of it just came out in the first issue of Coliseum magazine, um, which is through Franciscan University Press. Uh and uh Michael Yost, uh fellow USC MFA or is a uh is on the editorial board there. Um so that's how yeah, uh that's that's how that's going. Uh and then as you know, um also working with Word on Fire to launch this literary imprint luminar, where some of the the questions that we've been talking through here with regard to Gatsby uh are you know being sorted through in a 21st century way as well. Um, Joshua Vern's More Than a Matter of Taste, which is due out uh very soon, May 11th, is our release date for that one. And Joshua's book digs very deep into what it means to uh see morally through uh the moral imagination in literature. Um it's a it's a very complex argument, but he takes in the role of empathy, um, the role of what happens when you have uh you know beautiful art with good characters in it, good art with bad characters in it, um, you know, how you you kind of can say that the arc of a whole work is moral when uh many of the actions that it depicts are um in fact vicious, right? Um as as we have here with Gatsby. And then, forgive me, um, where were we? Where were we headed? What you're what you're doing with Luminore, so you mentioned. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:54

Uh uh. More than a matter of taste.

SPEAKER_01 42:56

And yeah. Yeah. Uh I think by the by the time this episode releases, we'll be, we'll be close to the release date on that. Our first release um was uh one and only novel by uh Peter Kruft uh called Ocean Full of Angels. Uh and it has a tragic arc of its own. Uh it might speak to some readers of Gatsby, now that I think about it that way. Um, it it too uh is unfolding on a coast amid the big questions of life. It too is dealing with uh the uh drama that unfolds inside a big house full of disagreements, um, and yet also full of aspirations and love. So I think a lot of readers uh will enjoy this. And it is a particularly American work uh in a lot of ways, right? Uh it's it's another New England work, um, although much, you know, much more rooted uh in that place, because Craeft is rooted in that place than uh you know the Nick Caraway is.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

It seems almost arrogant to say that classics are still being written, but it's lovely to think that beautiful literature is still being written and being published. And of course, who knows, some of it may become classics over time.

SPEAKER_01 44:16

Is that a enduring value is something we should be striving for if we're uh if we're if we're bothering to write literature at all. You know, there's kind of a shallow version of uh literature, which um I'm thinking now of the way that Jacques Maritan uses the term literature. And he actually goes so far once as to say, God hates literature, but he means the kind of shallow um is merely just manipulation of words on the page, um, and to try to get a shallow effect rather than what he terms poetry, which is something that goes deep into the nature of and the heart of human character and human life, um, and the the beauty of human life, right? The beauty of the prose here in the Great Gaspi, which we mentioned, um, is part of what gives it that classic quality, and I think is so interesting, particularly morally, in that what Fitzgerald is doing with it is not beautifying the vices. He's showing that there are real beauties and goods that um that exist here, um, despite the fact that people are taking all kinds of wrong turns amidst them in large part because they're missing the beauties. Um so, so to show that beauty, uh, Mirthan thinks, I think is deeply moral. And that's part of the heart of what poetry is to him. And I think he might agree with me that um you can say that you know a beautiful work of prose is a work of poesis in the sense of making, right? The beautiful, well-made thing, right? Um, so if so if you're gonna if you're gonna do it at all, uh I think try to do it in the sense of enduring value. Try to write a classic, why not?

SPEAKER_02 46:05

I love that. And that's a great exhortation to new writers right now, like any of us, that on the one hand, it seems arrogant to say it's like, I'm I'm aspiring to write a classic. I hope that that's what I'm doing. On the other hand, but that's that's what that's what we should be doing. Do all things for the glory of God, and that means do them well.

SPEAKER_01 46:24

Yeah, yeah. In a lot of ways, the ideal uh character character, forgive me, the I the ideal career arc for a writer is to do the Emily Dickinson plan, you know, make beautiful things for years and years uh in relative isolation, uh, live a quiet life. Um I had discovered and have a revival a hundred years after you're gone.

SPEAKER_02 46:48

I love it. I actually I'm seeing Emily Dickinson in a whole another light after Valerie Stiver's recent book on um just um recipes and just um she includes um she includes uh Dickinson and a whole bunch of other writers in her book just looking at um their favorite recipes and how they cooked. But apparently a lot of Dickinson's poems, she first jotted them on the back of recipes. And some of them have like smudges from, I don't know, chocolate and things, because she was cooking and presumably had an idea. It's like, oh yes, while I'm making these cookies, I have an idea for a poem. And she would just jot it down on the back of a piece of paper, and the only piece of paper you would have in a kitchen as well, like your well-used recipe.

SPEAKER_01 47:33

That's completely brilliant. Yeah, I love that. I thought that's a fun read. Uh, Valerie's a lovely essayist. Uh yeah, it it reminds me too of the Bronte sisters uh doing their chores and in between snatching their pages up and you know Austin hiding her manuscript under the you know the book on her little tiny table when people would come in and need her attention and you know take it right back out and keep keep trucking away. Uh yeah, I think there's um cigarettes, right? Writing in bed until noon. You know, while somebody else looks after the children, that's a nice one if you can get it. Yeah, but there are ways. There are ways. And I think writing is more deeply integrated into life than we realize. And we when we mythologize art, you know, I've been saying all of this high flown language about poetry and about, you know, the well-made, beautiful work, but uh really that happens in the context of a whole life. That doesn't happen uh isolated from or cut off from um it from what else there is. And I mean, the really tragic thing to consider about Fitzgerald's life is if he hadn't lived in such upheaval, like what more might he have been able to bring us, right? If he wasn't throwing wild parties and you know blowing his whole advance before he'd earned it, um why? You know, what what more white might we um might we have been able to benefit? And he he have been able to benefit as well from that. So from just like a steady life. Yeah, or whole persons. Yeah, a fact of a man's being a poisoner might be nothing against his pros, but again, marathon. Uh if you poison the person, you'll poison the pros in the long run, too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:22

Well, Katie, final question that I always ask guests. What classic do you wish you had written? And why? This is so hard. I have to just pick one.

SPEAKER_01 49:33

Well, I'm gonna say, You can pick two. If you want to, you can do two. Great. All right, I'll pick a European and an American one. Um, Sacred Umsets, Kristen Labyrinth's daughter. Although she thought Olive Adamson was the finer work, and she might be right. Um, still I have a soft spot in my heart for Kristen and um Robert Penborne's All the Kingsman. I love it. A European and an American.

SPEAKER_02 49:55

Well, thank you so much, Katie. Thank you, Nadia. This has been so fun. So fun.