Unquenchable Fire

About the Essay

Where Judgment Turns to Grace

Unquenchable Fire takes its title from the Gospels — the phrase used in Matthew and Mark for the fire of Gehenna, the fire that judgment cannot put out. Mulhern follows that phrase into his short story “Assumptions,” where it undergoes a quiet reversal: the fire of damnation becomes the shimmer of sunlight on water, as two women wade into the sea to be healed.

The essay traces a pattern that recurs across Mulhern’s fiction, poetry, and teaching — the deliberate conversion of fearsome, punitive imagery into imagery of mercy. Fire becomes sunlight. A crown of thorns becomes a laurel of sun-bleached peach fuzz. Stigmata becomes spilled juice on a child’s hands. A burial shroud becomes a housedress hung to dry. The Cross becomes a father’s crossed arms. Each substitution keeps the weight of the original image while emptying it of terror, and refilling it with tenderness.

It is the first essay in Essays: Criticism & Craft, Mulhern’s ongoing series of close readings of his own work, published on his author website alongside Water, and What It Carries, The Sacred in the Shabby, Altogether Beautiful, and nine further essays on recurring imagery, religious interpretation, and the working beliefs behind his fiction and poetry.

Read Unquenchable Fire and the full essay series