Fiction today and the Catholic Faith: An interview with Dr. Joshua Hren

Joshua Hren is the co-founder, with James Matthew Wilson, of the Catholic MFA program at the University of St. Thomas, as well as the founder of Wiseblood Books. He is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent novel is Infinite Regress (Angelico Press 2022).

CWR: Let’s begin with a bit about your background. How did you end up as an accomplished artist and teacher in the Catholic literary world?

Hren: Pope John Paul II said that artists are close to God because when we create something, we mirror God. That line which begins his Letter to Artists puts this quite boldly: ” None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands.” I’ll always remember the first time I read it, because it should inspire immediate humility, but this analogy between the Creator and creative writers and other artists goes a long way toward explaining why so many artists have pride as their besetting sin; it is as if so many makers of fictional worlds sense that affinity and elevate themselves.

As a remedy for this, J.R.R. Tolkien enunciates our place as “subcreators.” Unlike God, we do not create ex nihilo–out of nothing: “we make in our own measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made.” We were all of us made out of nothing, but none of us can make something out of nothing. Only God can do that. We are always and only laborers in the vineyard of the Word. Our stories contain–at best–an inflection of the Story unfolded through the scroll of Revelation. Still, to paraphrase St. John Henry Newman, literature must “change in order to stay the same”; the eternal truths need to be transposed into a language that answers–again and again, in every “present age”–those questions of the human heart in conflict with itself, with its brothers, with its Maker.

I wrote my first novel in fourth grade–a 96 page shameless imitation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings–surely the best thing I’ve ever done, lost to posterity due to . . . spilled milk. After high school, I did not think that college was the right endeavor. I worked in a paper factory and waited tables in order to write and write and write. . . A woman I was dating was taking a creative writing class and one evening when she had to work late asked if I could write a short story for her, which I duly did, penning the thing on a napkin. After she typed it up to share with her class, her professor said this was the best thing anyone had turned into his class in many years. That recognition helped me realize that I should take the art of fiction seriously.

Thankfully, I not long thereafter discovered Dappled Things, which was trying to demonstrate that orthodoxy of faith and artistic excellence were not antinomous. As eventual editor of the magazine, I came across a number of poets and novelists who were having a hard time getting their stories published in New York. To bring the books of such writers into being, I founded Wiseblood Books at the end of my doctoral studies, when our family lived in a run-down neighborhood of Milwaukee and I was literally counting the cents of each book sale coming in, determining whether we could have onions with the beans that evening.

Around this time Dana Gioia published The Catholic Writer Today. I wrote a fourteen page response, and Dana wrote back with further clarifications, indicating also that he wanted to gift the book form of his essay to Wiseblood Books. The publication of that book put us on the national map. Since then, we’ve published at least two and usually close to ten books per year, doing all we can to buoy up poetry and fiction as well as essays that, steeped with a Catholic vision, speaks in an idiom for our time.

Meanwhile, while also working as a full-time professor, I pieced together two short story collections (This Our Exile and In the Wine Press) over a number of years, as well as How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic, which set out to justify the ways of literature to a Catholic readership. Infinite Regress was cooking on a second-hand hotplate for six years before it boiled towards a fit finale. Just prior to its publication, I co-founded an MFA program deeply rooted in the Catholic literary and intellectual tradition, devoted to the best developments of the art and craft and oriented toward the perfection of these natural gains by grace.

CWR: Can you share some thoughts on the Catholic MFA program at the University of St. Thomas?

Hren: Joseph Ratzinger is right when he worries that anyone who tries to give witness to the faith amidst the mores of “modern life” can “really feel like a clown, or rather perhaps like someone who, rising from an ancient sarcophagus, walks into the midst of the world of today dressed and thinking in the ancient fashion and can neither understand nor be understood by this world of ours.”

In our time, both unbelievers and believers are surrounded by the same culture of uncertainty. In contemporary fiction that renders wrestlings with faith in our time, doubt typically receives as much if not more dramatic nerve. We need new literature that goes beyond sincere and moving exploration of doubt. We need new literature that makes attractive what we ought to worship even as it helps us “locate” ourselves amidst the continuum that swings from self-deceit to wisdom. Determining the tenor(s) and shape(s) of such stories takes a sustained, leisurely conversation carried over the course of years. Achieving the actualization of such stories is still harder, especially as those writers still committed to telling them are scattered all over the States, adding alienation to the innate loneliness of the writer’s life.

I co-founded the MFA at UST with James Matthew Wilson so that we could provide a locus where students could cultivate the aforementioned ends among friends. I have been amazed by our Lord’s superabundance: as of the start of our second year we have over fifty students happily sharing this pursuit.

CWR: Your novel Infinite Regress was reviewed in the LA Review of Books. How does it feel to have “made it” in the literary world?

Hren: As is the case with any success, this reception has been simultaneously a great blessings and a situation of new temptations . . . a tipping towards pride, for instance, or a too-fierce attachment to the honors given by mere fellow mortals. As Aristotle argues in Nicomachean Ethics, the magnanimous man holds even honor–the one great thing he could receive–loosely. I make no claims to magnanimity, but aspire after it constantly. The flurry of great reviews has been a providence I never anticipated. A good critic is . . . hard to find!

Too often book reviews are either puff pieces or resentful decimations, when in truth most books worth their salt have merits and cracks–even the fissured masterpiece The Golden Bowl of Henry James. That so many readers treated Infinite Regress with such sympathetic care and thoughtful cracking-open–what can I say? Deo gratias! These lauds also piqued some into tearing the book apart, which has in turn required more detachment. Francois Mauriac, in God and Mammon, remarked that “to write is to hand one’s self over.” Even if a work of art is not autobiographical–and mine is not–it still contains a distillation of the soul, and it can be hard to hand it over. As Plato proclaimed in the Phaedrus, writing is inferior to living speech in that the book cannot explain or defend itself. Kierkegaard gave this fact a somewhat mad but also maybe weirdly humble twist when he pseudonymously wrote negative reviews of his own books! With Shirely Jackson you can say to the disappointed reader “If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree,” but this would likely be too glib, and a better route would be to sift out from one’s critics what’s genuine and true. Henry James captures the generative character of artistic vulnerability when he writes that “We work in the dark–we do what we can– we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

It is crucial to try and live sub specie aeternitatis, seeing even the greatest of created goods as an iota, lest the parts seem like the whole, the reflective shard of the word the actual Light of the World. While literature is a storehouse of human wisdom, “Of making many books there is no end” (Ecclesiastes 12).

CWR: Many of your works are set in the upper Midwest. Do you consider yourself a Midwestern writer?

Hren: First Things columnist Cassandra Nelson called Infinite Regress a “gritty love letter to Milwaukee.” I wrote it in exile from this place, and like Dante outside of Florence and Joyce outside Ireland, the gaze of my soul could not shake home–the place where I’d spent the first thirty-three years of life, the polis that played no small part in shaping my vision of what’s real. The city has so many rich and stubbornly persistent traditions—including their being (in our old neighborhood) a bar and a church on every block. Once a dear friend of ours was assigned to a new Southside parish and when we went to Mass there, the whole church had the overpowering scent not of frankincense but of fishfry—the parish fishfry still reeking from the day before! That tradition of Friday meals shared in church basements was so crucial for bonding the body of Christ–and not antinomous but in tandem with the holy Sacrifice offered on the altar above the convivial basement.

And always close to my heart are the distinctive tensions of the city–not the least of which are racial. Because it needs saying: you don’t have to be “woke” to care deeply about such things. The novel includes an homage to the old black Bronzeville neighborhood destroyed by the interstate but whose culture is still scattered in jazz bars . . . Franciscans in that neighborhood founded St. Benedict the Moor, which also provided good education to children who may not have otherwise had it. In my twenties, I worked in an outreach to the homeless for a number of years. It was run out of that parish. May the spirit of those Franciscan works of mercy be ever strong in my city!

But no, I’m not a “midwestern” or “regional” writer. Commenting on the stories of Nikolai Gogol, Andrei Sinyavsky said that “art has the provinces in its blood.” To move beyond historical or documentary artifact, the work of art has to pass through the particulars of a given place or the specific struggles of a singular person and into those verities that all souls share. If Dante’s great poem had been cut from a cosmic vision, it could have become a record of thirteenth century internecine Florentine struggles. Because he succeeded, it is now a map of the human soul. All artists surely strive after the same.

CWR: You are also a scholar and popular nonfiction writer. Does your scholarly background aide or hinder your artistic production?

Hren: In the last five years or so, I have turned away from scholarly articles. This is in part because they require a tremendous amount of (often hairsplitting) labor, and, almost by necessity hyper-specialized, most of them have an audience of two (the editor and the author). I tried to cultivate a more belletristic essayistic style which would be able to reach a broader readership, to participate in larger cultural conversations that defy the siloization of “disciplines,” drawing freely from theology and philosophy amidst literary criticism. Once I shook the straightjacket of academese, fiction also flowed more freely. And now that I’m over forty and likely at best midway through this life, the question of what’s worth leaving behind is burning like a firecracker in my soul. With what gifts God has given me, trying to complete a novel or two more seems like the right route to avoid being on the bad side of the parable of buried talents.

CWR: Your work often deals with the abuse scandals in the Church. What would you say to Catholics who feel discouraged by so much “bad news”?

Hren: Yes, “Work of Human Hands” and “Tears in Things” from In the Wine Press, and Infinite Regress all reckon with the sexual abuse crisis. Understandably, this crisis has blinded many to the Church as spiritual and moral lodestar. Fathers meant to be analogues of the Father ended up eclipsing God from the hearts of their flock. I wished to enter into the crisis imaginatively in order to grant it a necessary thickness that is often lost in news headlines.

Curiositas has countless, constant outlets. While, as Aristotle makes plain, “all men desire to know,” St. Augustine adds a necessary corrective: some of our desire to know is disordered by what he calls “concupiscence of the palate.” From the comfort of our computers, we can glut ourselves on scandal and bad news all day long, stimulating what seems like a sense of justice but may well be the sick pleasure of powerless ressentiment.

In the novel The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling discloses a secret: “I go to the library and read controversial periodicals.” Walker Percy’s professional moviegoer is not so much concerned with conservative or liberal principles, with eternal measures for our protean passing days. Rather, he mainly reads both sides of the daily news because he is “enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other.”

Binx is warped by a wayward attraction to this hatred. He does not wish to know in order to expand his soul, but rather to titillate the delights of wrath. When his mood is low, he “plunks” himself down with a liberal weekly and nods at each blow the given author deals. “Damn right, old son,” he says, rattling in his seat with incensed approval, “pour it on them.” But then he picks up a conservative monthly and drops down into a new chair. Soon he’s lost in the counter-attack, sure that the new points have sunk the opponents roundly. Eventually, he emerges from the library, his “neck prickling with satisfaction.” It is likely wise to keep a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, and each according to his station must calibrate exactly how much (bad) news is needed to keep abreast with the zeitgeist and the sufficient evil of each day (Matthew 6:34), but let that Percy scene stand, for all of us, as a figura for the perils of curiositas.

Evil is easier to expose and to render persuasively than good. Sister Mariella Gable, O.S.B., an undersung hero of the 20th-century Catholic literary movement, enunciates the need for “an art which moves the reader to accept the good as lovable”—fiction that achieves a psychology of goodness “with anything like artistic success that commonly distinguishes the analysis of evil.” At he same time, she cautions against “edification at the expense of truth.” Because so many portraits of goodness end up unconvincing, overly-moralistic or wooden, the real art of goodness remains, she wrote “still undiscovered.” We have a few instances to the contrary–Anne Elliot in Austen’s Persuasion, Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl, to cite two of the few–but we artists need to strive with abandon to advance this psychology of goodness in art.

CWR: What is your next project?

Hren: I am ankle-deep into another novel. To boil its trajectory down: if Infinite Regress pursued the prodigal who is trying to return home, and followed that arc of return to the very threshold, the next book begins, thematically, after the return and probes the tensions a young woman experiences when, as a single mother, she needs to move back in with her parents. Stella was involved in a tumultuous relationship with P.C. (Peter Claver), a psychologist activist in South Chicago, and she returns to find her father holding extremist conspiracy meetings in the basement and assembling, at first unwittingly, a makeshift militia. While her “politics” are entirely contrary to her family’s, she must reckon with the witness of her folks’ lavish generosity and sacrifice; especially her dad is so good, so patient, so present to her child. Still she keeps trying to “escape,” at times reuniting with the child’s father, who has growing doubts about his own ideology even as he is handed a national microphone (with strings attached).

And then one of her father’s friends catches word of her involvement with an “enemy” and seeks to do away with him . . . without revealing too much, and without knowing, even, quite what conclusions these characters will encounter, I can say that Stella will eventually make the acquaintance of Blake Yourrick, protagonist of Infinite Regress, and while this isn’t a sequel or a Jane Austen novel, the distinctive, difficult goods of the “marriage plot” are much on my mind.