At a fantastic community reading last week at Cal State San Bernardino (CSUSB)–featuring lightning rounds of poems and short prose works from students at Riverside City College, participants in the Spring 2018 Riverside Inlandia Workshop, and current Cal State students–I offered 2-minutes from MASS, a 340-page book with three sections and just over 100 pages of notes and sources. (A colleague and a mentee teased me that it simply could not be done, but I managed!)
Preparing something brief to clue in the audience about the structure and approach of the book, I realized something that I also wanted to share here: MASS: A Sniper, a Father, and a Priest is a hybrid work of literary nonfiction with three beginnings and no fixed ending. Instead, I’m seeking a turning-towards in each literary movement, aiming to unsettle a PowerPoint mentality about the pressing subjects of violence and spectacle that make distance a bit too easy. I wanted the stories to operate as concentric circles or cycles that double-back or rewind over each other, forming new lenses into stories we might have thought we already knew, or knew how to know.
I’ll be talking in future blog posts and articles about how this approach reflects a specifically Catholic aesthetic and understanding, an understanding that I found organic to the research, the writing, and the vision of MASS–even if my practice of the tradition is no longer literal or “devout.”
The “end” of MASS, if there is to be one (and why one? why not many?), can only emerge within diverse individuals and communities of readers.
I hope you’ll pick up your copy today from Amazon–or ask your local bookseller. She or he can get it in time for your summer binge!
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