Friday Links
August 28, 2026
The Magpie by Claude Monet
How David Mason Makes Money Writing
Late Have I Loved Thee: Returning Home to Rome with St. Augsutine
Released from Countdowns
So You’ve Converted—What Now?
Poets and the faith Peter Steele
David Mason Makes Money Writing
The title of this Substack always makes me laugh!
David Mason has the kind of résumé poets dream of: he is a former Poet Laureate of Colorado, a Fulbright Fellow, and the winner of The Colorado Book Award. But his financial reality wasn’t funded by verse. For a decade, he worked as a house painter and gardener, and later spent thirty years as a professor, treating his paycheck as the grant that allowed him to write what he wanted. Now living in Tasmania, he is still at it, piecing together a living from book reviews and opera commissions.
Late Have I Loved Thee: Returning Home to Rome with St. Augustine
H. W. Coates writes on conversion and Nolan’s The Odyssey
I am not the only one who observes that Nolan turned Matt Damon’s Odysseus into a tortured Catholic male of the twenty-first-century sort, one who doubts the gods are worth a damn but still lives in a Zeus haunted world, in dire need to repent for the slaughterous sins he committed in the name of a king not worth following. His desire is to confess, to be heard, to be known as the one who broke the law of God and brought down the ties of civilization around him, and in being known, being forgiven. Odysseus wants to go home, but he cannot. Not yet. The Odyssey and its cousin The Iliad stand on their own. They are not the tellings of a Christian imagination.
Released from Countdowns
Anthony Domestico on Harriet Clark’s The Hill:
The novel’s premise is, from a certain angle, quite simple. When the book opens, the narrator, Suzanna Klein, is eight years old and living with her grandparents in New York City. She doesn’t know who her father is. Her mother, Helen, is a political radical who drove the getaway car in a bank robbery. The crime, which occurred when Suzanna was a baby, went horribly wrong—a security guard was killed—and Helen was sentenced to life in prison upstate at a place called Hillcrest.
So You’ve Converted—What Now?
Katy Carl writes about Trevor Cribben Merrill’s new novel, The Comforts of Exile (which is very, very funny, even while considering the most serious of subjects: the salvation of our souls):
Here, a freshly graduated and recently baptized-and-confirmed Colin oscillates between Paris’s Left Bank and Manhattan’s gentrifying streets, represented respectively by his two love interests: alluring, chaste Laure and repentant, conflicted Julia, both Catholics yet each holding a different attitude toward the Church’s more difficult teachings. Suspense arises, as it did in the first book, both from the fraught charge of eros and from the comic question to what degree Colin’s propensity for self-sabotage will get in the way of his not inconsiderable talents.
Poets and the faith Peter Steele
Jesuit priest and poet Andrew Bulleen addresses the life and poetry of fellow Jesuit Peter Steele, a priest who taught in the English Literature of The University of Melbourne for four decades (1966-2005), all the while composing a significant body of poetry that captures a poignant sense of place - namely, Parkville - as well as a earthy vision of the central content of Christian Revelation. The address was delivered on the 9th of July, 2024, in the Hall of St Peter's Eastern Hill Anglican Church.
