This year’s online conference was fruitful as always . Congratulations to all our participants who pitched to publishers this round — watch this spot for updates on the progress of those projects.
Laura Lowder is already busy organizing the 2013 online conference. Mark your calendars for March 4-15, 2013. She is lining up presentations even now, so if you’d been planning teach at the conference next year, please contact her!
The online conference contact e-mail is: CWGOnlineCon@catholicwritersguild.com
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One of my most exciting conference discoveries was a new volunteer to publish member news here on the blog. Our beloved Larissa Hoffman is on sabbatical while she gets her new novel ready for publication, but Annette Tenny has bravely stepped forward to keep us going. Please welcome Annette to the CWG team.
You can submit your news with an e-mail to membernews @catholicwritersguild.com. Please include your userid from the catholicwritersguild.com so we can verify your membership status. Thanks!
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As 30K for Christ unrolls throughout April, we’ve been sharing several of the talks from the online conference. Meanwhile, Ann Lewis forwards this OSV article, “The Rise and Fall of a Great Literary Culture”:
There are always good writers here or there down the ages, but the years before the First World War and the inter-war years are very special in terms of Catholic literary production. Of course, we can ascribe this to the accident of genius, which can occur at any point in history. But there is also some validity in the theory which sees literary creativity as shaped by milieu and moment. The milieu in which many of the French and English Catholic writers worked was one with great pressures, marked by sometimes violent hostility to Catholicism. There may be some mileage in blaming the fall away in good Catholic writing in the 1950s on the relative prosperity and peace these years brought the Church in North America and Europe.
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Where’d the open combox go? For the month of April, please take advantage of our many options for participating in the 30K for Christ to share your writing progress. Even if you don’t have 30,000 words, we’d love you to join in as you are able.
Jennifer Fitz
Jennifer Fitz is the author of The How-to Book of Evangelization: Everything You Need to Know But No One Ever Taught You from Our Sunday Visitor and Classroom Management for Catechists from Liguori Publications. She writes about all things evangelization and discipleship at jenniferfitz.substack.com. For updates on where else to find her, visit JenniferFitz.com.
In deciding on our masthead for our on-line E-courses, “Life is Art – Beauty it’s Evidence of God”, it is with the understanding that our Creator has placed us here at this time in history to live our lives using the talents He has bestowed on us to carry out His plan for eternity. Many thanks to Ann Lewis for directing our attention to the OSV article discussing the dirth of Catholic Literature in our post-modern world. This clarion call reminds us that the Guild has it’s work cut out for us. It’s hard to see ourselves as God’s literary answer to an ever increasing hostility toward the salvific message of the Good News. But, that is what He has done. Just as the trumpet’s call at the walls of Jericho, it’s time for us to strike up the band.