Friday Links
October 24, 2025
Tobias and the Archangel Raphael by Giovanni Girolamo Savaldo
Lydwine: Goodbye Home
Margaret of Cortona Repents
Art, Life, and the Sonnet: Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
On Literary Citizenship and the Secret to Small Press Publishing Success
James Matthew Wilson on Catholic Poetry and the Culture of Beauty
Lydwine: Goodbye Home
A new song from the folks at Lydwine that considers home and so much more. Read the essay, listen to the song, watch the video:
In an oft-quoted passage from The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ponders on what might have happened to those “intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov, who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years,” if somehow confronted with the barbarity of the Soviet regime, concluding wryly that in such a scenario “not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.”
Margaret of Cortona Repents
Despite living in luxury, Margaret was miserable. She felt enslaved by her lifestyle and was haunted by memories of her mother and the shame she had brought upon her family. This period of her life ended abruptly when her lover was murdered and she discovered his body hidden in a pile of sticks. The horrific sight was a spiritual awakening for Margaret, forcing her to confront her sinful life and the state of her own soul.
Art, Life, and the Sonnet: Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
I was fortunate enough to attend the Frost Farm Conference this year and to hear Angela deliver her keynote, in which she “consider[s] why we feel this powerful attraction to rhythm and rhyme.” She uses the sonnet to school us on how its form seduces us (in the most chaste way, of course!):
In addition, the sonnet also offers the poet and reader a paradigm for a journey. Each metered line in the sonnet measures both time and distance. It is a marvelous poetic fact that each line consists of a series of metrical “feet,” one step followed by another. These lines then gather into a fourteen-line chapter, each one constituting a station along the journey the poet/pilgrim/reader makes. It is another marvelous poetic fact there are as many lines in the sonnet as there are stations in the Stations of the Cross—did I mention that I was Catholic? The Stations of the Cross tell the story, in 14 movements, of Christ carrying his cross from Lion’s Gate in the city of Jerusalem to Mount Calvary. Seen through the lens of this tradition, the sonnet retraces the Via Dolorosa, and the road to Calvary serves as a template for the universal human pilgrimage.
On Literary Citizenship and the Secret to Small Press Publishing Success
This was surprisingly good, though it may shock some of you to be reminded that most books don’t sell very many copies. Why is that? Are we just that used to getting “content” for free? What does it mean to be a good literary citizen?
I think in publishing we often expect miracles from the editors whom we entrust with our work. If your platform is narrow, your marketing efforts non-existent, and yet your expectations for publishing success remain outlandishly high, you may be coming into a tumultuous industry with unrealistic expectations.
Building the platform to even achieve a modest success (selling 50%+ of a run, or outside of your immediate social circles) cannot be achieved overnight, and is a matter of literary citizenship as much or more so than social media popularity, even if it may not always feel that way. It is perhaps better, especially for beginning writers, to, instead of asking how to break into an already-overcrowded publishing scene, ask themselves who they want for peers and collaborators, and begin working with organizations based on common interests, social affiliations, and aesthetic goals, rather than the perceived likelihood of ‘making it’ as a writer. This may be a bitter pill, but based on my own experience in publishing, it is one that will save a lot of heartache.
James Matthew Wilson on Catholic Poetry and the Culture of Beauty
In this interview with the Fraternité Saint-Ephraim, James talks about Catholic poetry, a culture of beauty, education, and more.