Friday Links
She Contains Multitudes by Emily Pastor
February 21, 2025
Literary Matters
Adam Plunkett on Robert Frost & Artistic Ethos
John Wilson review: Invisible Helix: A Detective Galileo Novel by Keigo Higashino
Flannery at 100 in Iowa City
A Mardis Gras Murder Mystery in Verse: Sonnez Les Matines
An Evening of Poetry and Fiction with Sally Thomas
Literary Matters
Though Ryan Wilson is no longer at the helm, Literary Matters, thankfully, continues on with editor John Matthew Steinhafel. Please do check out their latest issue. Caitlin Doyle interviews Rita Dove, and there are some great poems in this issue (as always), including two each from Shane McCrae and Morri Creech.
Adam Plunkett on Robert Frost & Artistic Ethos
No idea animated Frost in England like what he called “the vital sentence” or, in a letter to John Bartlett, “the sound of sense.” An evocative theory of much of Frost’s own practice, the idea behind the vital sentence was that the essence of good writing was its ability to convey tones of speech that the reader could recognize in the experience of reading. The sentence could be seen not as it usually was, as “a grammatical cluster of words,” but as a sound in itself that a careful writer could affix to the page and a careful reader could hear as it was meant to be spoken.
John Wilson review: Invisible Helix: A Detective Galileo Novel by Keigo Higashino
Higashino, born in 1958, earned a degree in electrical engineering and worked in that field for several years after his graduation before he became a full-time writer. “A good electrical engineer,” so an AI bot informs me, “has a combination of technical skills, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills.” Who knew? Higashino's novels are intensely “orderly,” not at all in a way that conflicts with his depiction of human beings (like us) at their best, at their worst, and in the midst of what we sometimes call “everyday life.”
Flannery at 100 in Iowa City
Fr. Damian Ference and Katy Carl will join our friends at The University of Iowa’s Newman Catholic Student Center to discuss Flannery O’Connor and her work. If you can get there, this is a not-to-be-missed event. The event takes place March 2, starting at 1:30pm, at St. Mary of the Visitation (Flannery’s parish when she was a student in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop).
A Mardis Gras Murder Mystery in Verse: Sonnez Les Matines
Another not to be missed event, this one can be enjoyed from the comfort of your couch on March 3 from 8-9:30pm EST. The Benedict XVI Institute brings you a dramatic reading of J. C. Scharl’s verse play Sonnez Les Matines. Copies of this lively and fun play are available from Wiseblood Books HERE. This play is particularly well suited to a dramatic reading because the dialogue is gloriously fun and clever and profound.
An Evening of Poetry and Fiction with Sally Thomas
If you were unable to make it to Thomas Moore College for an evening with Sally Thomas (she read poems from Motherland and Among the Living: Poems, as well as excerpts from her fiction), be not sad, for they recorded it and now you can watch it.
