“Such as we write, such are the times”: An interview with Katy Carl

Katy Carl is the author of As Earth Without Water (Wiseblood, 2021),  Praying the Great O Antiphons: My Soul Magnifies the Lord (Catholic Truth Society, 2021), and a new short story collection titled Fragile Objects (Wiseblood, 2023). She is editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine.

A senior affiliate fellow of Penn’s Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society, Katy is pursuing her MFA in creative writing at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. She was honored to be the inaugural Wiseblood Books Writer in Residence in 2020.

She spoke recently with Catholic World Report about the editing, writing, the art of fiction, and writing about “taboo” topics.

CWR:  You are involved in several creative endeavors, including being the editor of Dappled Things. Could you tell us a little about Dappled Things?

Katy Carl: I’d be delighted. Dappled Things magazine is a quarterly journal of ideas, art, and Catholic faith, which was founded in 2005 by a core staff made up of Catholic graduates of Penn and their likeminded friends from other schools. I was not part of the original core, and as a graduate of Saint Louis University I am a likeminded friend from another school. But thanks to the marvels of the Internet, I entered into conversation with the founders very early on, joined the staff in 2007, and have been part of the editorial board in one way or another ever since.

For many years the journal functioned independently before coming home to Penn in 2019-2020, under the umbrella of the Ars Vivendi Initiative of the Collegium Institute. We seek to make a home for writing that locates itself within the Catholic literary tradition, that is confluent with the fullness of the Catholic faith, and that embodies or exemplifies a uniquely Catholic contribution to the culture of letters. There are many valuable journals out there, and their number is growing continually, that explore the intersection of religious faith with the arts, or Catholic and Christian traditions with global ideas, or some other recombination of related factors, in ways that are compelling and necessary. But as far as I’m aware, we are still the only journal that combines a commitment to arts and letters with a commitment to Catholicism in quite the same way that we do.

CWR: What was the experience like writing As Earth Without Water?

Katy Carl: To back up a step before answering, I’ll point out that I see my own work as participatory in a context of contemporary revitalization within Catholic letters, which has much more serious and more productive exponents than one modest debut novel such as mine—let’s look for examples at the work of Phil Klay, Randy Boyagoda, Uwem Akpan, Brigid Pasulka, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Natalie Morrill, and Christopher Beha, to name a few of the many who could be included with justice.

At the most recent Catholic Imagination Conference, Beha said something to the effect that, against declinist narratives of Catholic engagement in the literary world, the core issue we face, in our time in America, is a decline of overall engagement with arts and letters writ large. It isn’t that the Catholic imagination is devalued, it’s that all imagination is devalued. But—he went on to add—wherever the imagination is still prized, the Catholic imagination is still valued and respected, even by those who don’t necessarily value or agree with Catholic metaphysics or Catholic social teaching.

I will say that when I began writing first drafts of As Earth Without Water in a serious way, I felt relatively isolated in what I was trying to do, in that I only knew of a few other writers who were making efforts along similar lines. To that extent, the declinist narrative seemed essentially true to me then. But in the process I have come to discover a vital context in which, far from being isolated or an outlier, the work I have long wanted to do is profoundly expressive of a movement toward reintegration of novelist and believer. To paraphrase St. Augustine: Such as we write, such are the times.

CWR: It has been said that every author’s first novel is autobiographical. Is this true with As Earth Without Water?

No way. First of all, I disagree with that generalization, which seems to flatten or ignore important differences between autofiction, fictionalized autobiography, and the far more common category in which a writer makes use of a character from broadly similar demographics and life circumstances precisely to highlight differences of concrete situation, action, and point of view. Autofiction, or a truly autobiographical novel, is the last thing I would ever want to write. On the contrary, I wanted to capture a sense of characters with temperaments, callings, and experiences widely different from my own. These characters are more interesting to me than I am to myself—or to a reader, for sure.

But then, writing any fictional character at all forces you to consider the similarities as well as the differences between yourself and that person or concatenation of people to whom you’re trying to give life and presence. Character development can be akin to an examination of conscience that way: I watch my character make a mistake and realize how easily I could fall into the same trap if our situations were reversed, or how I too make certain self-destructive choices I can’t explain away or excuse. Still, by the time I am done, the characters are very much themselves. Both their flaws and their virtues are their own.

CWR: Your novel is, on one level, a coming-of-age novel about a girl encountering upper echelons of the literary and art world. It has been said that there are effectively two Americas: the coastal elite and fly-over country. Do you feel yourself as living in these two worlds?

Katy Carl: Really, every American is living in not duplicate, but multiple, Americas at one time. We could say a lot about this, but let’s stick to the text. One of the strongest similarities between me and my narrator is that she and I both spent our childhoods in the South and then spent significant time in other regions of the country as adults. Significantly for her development, though, she grew up in poverty and in a post-secular, formerly Bible Belt, religiously arid place—a desert, even, if you will—while I had my formation in a very placid and stable Catholic environment that was still expressive of a lot of Old World cultural influence. Still, she and I share a lively sense of culture shock and a particular attentiveness to the ways these layers of culture find expression and recombine, with infinite variety, in each individual.

It’s a common thing for this recombination to be a particular source of distress for American artists, who are popularly supposed to exist in tension with their origins no matter what they were. But I’m continually fascinated by artists who somehow manage to reconcile or resolve that tension with their place of origin within themselves. My narrator manages it; I’ll confess I have not been so lucky so far; but it is something I work on in myself, and something I watch in other artists with interest.

CWR: Your novel deals with the question of vocation and the confusing road that many contemporary Catholics have experienced attempting to discern the vocation to marriage or religious life as well as the vocation of an artist. Do you have any advice for young people attempting to discern a vocation.

Katy Carl: I’m no one’s vocational director, for good reason, but I will try to describe what I see happening out there, in the hope that doing so might help. Young Catholics are under so much pressure, and so many are facing struggles they would never have chosen for themselves: economic constraint, relational brokenness, cultural opposition. All these taken together can make the problems of discernment seem intractable from the very outset. But sometimes what looks like an unsalvageable ruin is the very context into which God is asking you to bring His renewal. You can’t go very far wrong by listening for the voice of the Holy Spirit and by trying to find, or to build, a context of reliable, trustworthy witnesses who can help you to discern which of the many voices clamoring and competing for your attention are really speaking God’s direction into your life.

My own discernment has been especially guided both by good Jesuits and good Dominicans, which makes me want to emphasize the importance of seeking both the objectively true, that which is the way it is whether we particularly like it to be that way or not, and the subjectively true, that which is unique in your circumstances, history, and creaturely being that might or might not apply to someone else on a similar path. God speaks to us through both.

CWR: You deal with Catholics struggling with “sins of the flesh.” Some Catholics would argue that certain topics are taboo in Catholic art. What are your thoughts?

Katy Carl: Okay, I’ll answer this question by a long road, but I hope you’ll follow me to the end of it. This question makes me think of the issues that were raised in the 1857 obscenity trials over Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, with the prosecution insisting that that novel is immoral because it depicts serial marital infidelity and suicide.

On the contrary, Flaubert’s defense lawyer insisted, Flaubert’s classic novel is profoundly moral precisely because it depicts those issues—or rather, because of the way in which it depicts them. Despite Flaubert’s own conviction that he was engaged in an art that could be amoral, neither moral or immoral but “simply” showing reality as it is (as if that were a “simple” thing to do!), Flaubert’s defender got him acquitted by demonstrating that Flaubert unrelentingly deals with the misery and destruction Emma Bovary brings on herself and on others by her choices.

The upshot of the defender’s argument, though framed differently in the text, was that whenever we attempt to show reality as it is, we unavoidably engage ourselves in a profoundly moral enterprise, though not necessarily a moralistic one. When we depict the human person, we depict a stable core reality: a reality subject to certain differences, yes, but always one and the same kind of thing. If, like good artists, we stay true to what we perceive and experience, we can’t help but observe that people consistently flourish under certain conditions and consistently devolve into chaos under others.

Now Flaubert himself, as a self-described mystical believer in nothing, might not have agreed with the highly Christianized way the defense lawyer drew his conclusions (though he was smart enough not to say so too loudly in public, since he had already won). But this necessary distinction between the moral and the moralistic, which his work embodies apart from his theorizing, that distinction is what I’m driving at. In the art of fiction you can address any issue—from infidelity to genocide, war, personal betrayal, or the most heinous kinds of abuse—in a moral way. That doesn’t mean a moralistic way.

A Catholic author doesn’t (or should not) force conclusions where the bad guys suffer and the good guys triumph, and certainly doesn’t need to shy away from saying what people really did in a given situation, however grievous. Rather, any good author—Catholic or otherwise—will make the effort to depict serious matter in a serious manner. This means with a reverence toward the human person, even in comedy, but especially in tragedy. It means not making light of others’ significant pain and not depicting them or their circumstances in ways that feel predatory or exploitative. Along with this, I think Catholic authors tend to carry a particular concern about not being exploitative of their readers’ attention. They will on average be more concerned about not wanting to render action in a way that will make their readers complicit in a character’s wrongdoing, or that will make use of particular sensitivities or sufferings in a superficial or instrumentalizing way, to keep a reader riveted to the page out of pure shock. They will want to acknowledge a fuller range of emotions and experiences, in which, yes, shock has its place, but so too have tenderness, bravery, fear, pity, warmth, devotion…

As a Catholic you will always on some level care about the perfection of your reader’s soul, but as an artist your first responsibility is to the perfection of the work. These values aren’t necessarily in tension or opposition, as they are sometimes presented. Sometimes they are profoundly confluent. But discerning the path can be tricky.

I don’t have any foolproof formulae to offer. That’s because there aren’t any. If there were, someone would have discovered them by now. But most Catholic writers of my acquaintance—and again, good writers generally—start with genuine care, caritas, for the character and for the reader. And writing from care is a more productive posture than writing from a place of, let’s say, hubris or sensationalism or revenge.

CWR: You deal with clerical abuse in your book. These revelations have been difficult for Catholics to deal with. What would you say to a Catholic that encounters evil among the leadership of the Church?

Katy Carl: There is so much suffering, within and outside the Church, around this phenomenon. Sometimes, very understandably, abuse destroys people’s trust in God, because people who were supposed to represent the ultimate trustworthiness of God instead acted in ways that were so radically untrustworthy. This is a profound sorrow. And I brought that sorrow to the art of the novel to try to work out, because any merely dialectic way of engaging it seemed inadequate or reductive. Dialogue over abstractions quickly becomes faceless, nameless. But every person affected by abuse within the Church has a face and a name. Even so, an individual work of art can’t speak to every situation, only to the limited situations it covers. But in that very particularity art might sometimes be able to rise to some things that are universal. One universal note I hope As Earth Without Water strikes is catharsis for the pain and rage and sorrow that all people of good will feel over abuse. Pain and rage and sorrow are legitimate emotions here. Another note is the restoration and healing of the goodness of the human person, wounded but not destroyed by abuse. Beyond that, whatever I would say to an individual, I would try to listen well first, to make sure it responded directly to their circumstances.

CWR: What’s the best advice you can give to a young, aspiring Catholic writer?

Katy Carl: Work hard, trust God, and don’t fear that your craft and your faith are somehow opposed or irresolvably in tension. They aren’t. You are learning to resolve them in yourself in a way that will be unique to your practice of the virtue of art.

Read constantly; read the best work you can find. Work in light of Raïssa Maritain’s advice to Catholic thinkers and artists: “It seems to me that Catholics ought to possess a genuinely informed doctrine concerning everything which is human, a doctrine which conforms with truth, taste, and intelligence. No timidity. No pharisaism. No ignorance. No prudishness. No Manicheism. But the full and luminous Catholic doctrine.” This fivefold prohibition of distortions forms a good guidestar for any Catholic engaged in the world around them, really. It isn’t limited to the writer’s life at all.