Friday Links
July 31, 2026
Elk Lake, Waymart, Pennsylvania
Announcing the Winners of the 2026 Jane Greer Memorial Poetry Contest
Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else
Will the cinema god forgive Nolan?
A Review of Call Out Coyote by Seth Wieck
Announcing the Winners of the 2026 Jane Greer Memorial Poetry Contest
Thanks to the generosity of the Catholic literary community, and with the blessing of Jane’s family, Dappled Things announces the winners of the 2026 Jane Greer Memorial Poetry Contest, for the best poems submitted to the journal this year. These poems will appear in our 2026 Saints Peter and Paul issue.
First Place: Saint Anthony of Padua Speaks to the Fish by Dale Phillips
Second Place: Unspring by Forester McClatchey
Third Place: St. Antoninus by Billy Critchley-Menor, SJ
Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else
Tim Lake on author Patrick O’Brien’s lies:
The Daily Telegraph, following up on biographical discrepancy in a BBC documentary, uncovered proof that Patrick O’Brian…was not Patrick O’Brian. He had invented huge parts of his own biography, lying about an Irish childhood (he grew up in England), a prolonged exposure to sailing vessels (he had never worked on a ship, perhaps had never been at sea), and the details of his education (he had never attended the Sorbonne, Eton, or Oxford). His name was not Patrick O’Brian, but Patrick Russ. He had changed it in order to sever ties with his first wife, Elizabeth, whom he had abandoned in the 1940s in order to begin an affair with Mary, Countess Tolstoy. In doing so, he had abandoned two small children—one of whom was fatally ill. He was permanently estranged from his surviving son Richard, who, according to Elizabeth, “thoroughly disliked” his controlling and bullying father. He was, she went on, “a violent and erratic man,” whose “passion for culture…overrode all human considerations.”
Will the cinema god forgive Nolan?
Since everyone seems to be talking about Nolan’s Odyssey, here’s one take. David Thomason writes that Nolan has a history of missing the point:
Anyway, our full house sat through it, as dogged and drained of passion as Matt Damon’s weary, soured college professor Odysseus. But, like Matt, we weren’t with it — and if you’re going to cherish large audiences at the movies you have to hope for a kind of communion. It’s like the crowd on a roller coaster, learning how every looming Up precedes a wipe-out Down. Great movies teach us their rhythm so that we may ride along on the thrill and the dread.
A Review of Call Out Coyote by Seth Wieck
Sarah Asbach reviews Seth Wieck’s Call Out Coyote for New Verse Review:
The poems speaks intimately to us of a life many don’t remember anymore, intimately, but without self-reference or congratulation. Wieck presents us with a Father and a Son who might well be working side-by-side in Eden, even as Adam long ago named the animals. The Father names creatures for the Son, teaching him to approach the world in wonder, leaving the self behind to encounter the other, suturing over the wounds of suffering.
