Wolfe returns with Image Magazine and a folk band

Home Culture Wolfe returns with Image Magazine and a folk band

“Fires where all our sparks could scatter, midnight stars could drop their ladders, I’m not sure any of it matters, but all of it was music,” a crooning voice emerges over a thick folk guitar base.

The folk band Over the Rhine will perform at Hillsdale during the English department’s Visiting Writers seminar on Oct. 20. This unprecedented two-day event will be held in the Dow Leadership Center on Oct. 20 and 21, and will center on the relationship between faith and the arts. In addition to the musical performance, alumnus Gregory Wolfe ’80, founder and editor-in-chief of Image magazine will speak, along with pulitzer-nominated poet Andrew Hudgins, and his wife, novelist Erin McGraw.

In previous years, Visiting Writers program guests have come individually for two days, holding readings of their work, then giving a lecture. This semester, the several visits will coincide in a special seminar to mark the 25th anniversary of Image magazine.

Image, one of America’s leading literary quarterlies, is a forum for the best writing and artwork that explores new ways to discover religious truth and experience through art and literature.

The magazine shares a special connection with the Visiting Writers program: many previous featured guests of the program have served on the Editorial Advisory Board of the magazine. Hudgins is a member of the board, along with poet Paul Mariani, featured last year, novelist and essayist Doris Betts, poet and essayist Thomas Lynch, and novelist Ron Hansen.

Wolfe, who graduated from Hillsdale in 1980 with degrees in history and English, has since earned a master’s degree in English from the University of Oxford, written 15 books and more than 200 essays and articles, founded and served 25 years as editor of Image, and has served as a writer-in-residence at Seattle Pacific University since 2000. He is currently researching for a book about the renaissance Christian humanist Desiderius Erasmus.

“What he has done is remarkable. We want to honor him,” Visiting Writers Program Director John Somerville said. “So this being the 25th anniversary of Image, it seemed like the perfect year to do it.”

Wolfe is a prevalent voice in the literary world advocating for the renewal of interest in the relationship between art and religion. Hansen has described Wolfe as “one of the most incisive and persuasive voices of our generation.”

Wolfe told the Collegian that he plans to speak on the relationship between conservative thought and the arts.

“I think it will be autobiographical,” Wolfe said. “I know the topic because it goes back to my Hillsdale education.”

During his time as a student at Hillsdale, Wolfe founded the Hillsdale Review: An American Miscellany, a quarterly journal of cultural and literary criticism that garnered several thousand subscribers during his editorship.

Wolfe says the experience founding the journal was helpful when he began the process of founding Image. When he graduated, Wolfe had plans to start another publication during his career, but wasn’t certain that it would be successful.

“I don’t know that I was sure that such a thing would happen,” Wolfe said, of Image’s founding. “I certainly hoped that it would.”

Despite the strong ties of his time at Hillsdale to the success of his career, Wolfe has not returned to Hillsdale since graduation in 1980, and he’s looking forward to being back in the area for a few days.

“I look forward to seeing if Central Hall is still standing,” Wolfe chuckled.

Over The Rhine is an Ohio-based folk band, founded in 1989. The band’s husband-and-wife pair songwriting team, guitarist Linford Detweiler and vocalist Karin Bergquist, will join Wolfe for a panel on faith and the arts on Oct. 21.

The band’s critically acclaimed latest album, “Meet Me At The Edge of The World,” was inspired by the couple’s farmhouse in rural Ohio and the geographical influences of Highland County, the region near Cincinnati where the band was founded.

“These songs all grew loosely out of the soil we live on,” Detweiler explains on the band’s website. “We had always dreamed of having a piece of unpaved earth which would serve as our home base, just like many other American artists or writers that are immediately associated with a specific geographical place. We call our place Nowhere Farm: nowhere, or now here, depending on how you look at it.”