How a single scriptural phrase for damnation becomes, in James Mulhern’s fiction, the shimmer over a baptism.
Read the essayCriticism & Craft
Essays
Short critical and personal essays on the recurring images, religious interpretation, governing methods, and working beliefs behind the fiction, poetry, and teaching of James Mulhern.
An Editor’s Note
On this series
These six essays read James Mulhern’s work the way a careful reader would — following a single image or conviction across stories, poems, and the classroom until it declares its own logic. Four are close readings: recurring imagery in fire and water, the sacred hidden inside shabby, ordinary detail, and a scholarly reading of the Assumption of Mary as a key to “Assumptions.” Two are the author’s own account of what he believes writing and teaching are for.
Six Essays
Read the Series
Tears, rain, tide pools, and the unglamorous water of the sickroom — the element that carries mercy through Mulhern’s fiction and verse.
Read the essayWhy the holy in James Mulhern’s work always arrives disguised as the ordinary — a housedress, a bottle of suntan oil, a classroom of restless teenagers.
Read the essayReading “Assumptions” against the Catholic dogma of the Assumption — and asking what it means to grant a flawed, ordinary body the imagery reserved for the sinless one.
Read the essayNotes on attention, revision, and the belief that a sentence, closely enough watched, will tell you what it is for.
Read the essayA short statement of belief, for readers, students, and the working writer.
Read the essayFor the Full Study
Readers who want the long-form scholarly treatment — a full concordance of religious and literary allusion across the collected fiction — can find it in The Religious Architecture of James Mulhern’s Work, available on request. The essay above, “Altogether Beautiful,” is drawn from its opening chapter.