|
Bad
Men Who Love Jesus:
The Contest!
It was one of those ideas that comes to you late
in the day when you’ve been too long at a tedious task. We
were working our way through the last of the proofreading and corrections
for “Wild Writers We Have Known,” the double issue chronicling
our symposium on the young writers who are revitalizing the short
story form in Canada, when one of us came across this invitation,
proffered in a panel discussion on the nature of influence: “A
couple of month’s ago, I was down in Mexico with Terence and
Patricia Young, poets and fiction writers, and their family. Their
family is quite literary, their daughter is writing too, and my
invitation to them was this: I said, while we are here we all must
write a story—Patricia, you may write a poem if you prefer—using
the same title, and this is the title: Bad Men Who Love Jesus. So
I wrote my story; Terence I think is finished his. But what I wanted
was a thousand stories, all called ‘Bad Men Who Love Jesus,’
all submitted to the same magazine on the same day.” And we
thought, Why not?
The suggestion was, of course, Leon Rooke’s.
Who else on the Canadian literary scene would have that extravagant—and
that irreverent— an imagination? And so we asked him if he’d
be willing to adjudicate, and we advertised a contest—no submission
fee, no cash prizes, but publication for the winning entries.
We thought of it as a bit of a lark—irreverent,
but not too irreverent. In fact, if we thought of the religious
implications at all—and I can’t say that we did—we
would have found them quite conventional. Wasn’t Christ’s
mission to redeem humankind—sinners all—through the
power of his love and loving sacrifice? And, more to the point,
don’t most of our stories, both religious and secular, turn
on the theme of human imperfection, the quest to know and the courage
to act upon the good, or, failing that, to find forgiveness and
redemption? But no, we were thinking of the comic possibilities,
of seeing how differently diverse writers would enact the same theme.
And we were not insensitive to the fact that a number of literary
classics—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for one—had
come out of challenges not unlike Leon’s.
What did we get? First of all, not a thousand stories,
but nearly 200, works in a variety of genres—stories (both
long and short), poems, theatre pieces, and essays. Leon, it turned
out, had written not one but seven stories, submitted under a variety
of comic, and comically transparent, pseudonyms, all with accompanying
biographical notes (“Amo el-Amar is a philosopher pamphleteer
living in Buffalo. His previous works have all been self-published.”).
We include three of Leon’s stories here under his own name.
Second, many people, as in the original challenge,
seemed to have taken on the project as a family. Published here
are two husband and wife responses plus a mother/daughter pair.
Third, though the tone of the entries ran the gamut
from the serious to the comic, the poignant to the profane, there
was a persistently and distressingly dark vein, stories about religious
hypocrisy and sexual abuse by the clergy, some drawn, to be sure,
from the headlines, but others, sadly, from life.
There were many ingenious takes on the title. We
got Bad Men Who Love Jesus rock bands, Bad Men Who Love Jesus motorcycle
gangs, Bad Men Who Love Jesus corporations, Women (both good and
bad) Who Love Bad Men Who Love Jesus, women named Jesus (plus one
hermaphrodite), and a lone good man sporting the unfortunate surname
Badmen. And, most shocking of all, people cheated on the title:
we got a handful of subtitles plus such misrenderings as “Ba(l)d
Men(: )Who Love(s You, Baby?) Jesus (, Nobody. Maybe Yo’ Momma),”
“Bad Men Who Love Jesus at the Last Minute,” and “Bad
Men Who Love Jesus (and Women Like Me).”
A first cut was done by New Quarterly editor Kim
Jernigan and board members Bill Klos and Ed Tell together with his
daughter Emily Broad. Then, with nearly half the original offerings
in hand, Leon rolled up his sleeves and began to select and edit.
At first we envisioned a few winners published over several issues,
but when we saw the breadth and diversity of material, much of it
wonderfully written, we began to think of an entire issue. Of course
the genius of the issue, that every piece published would have the
same title, was also a complication, and it was Leon who came up
with the idea of attaching to each a “summoning” phrase,
something to give our readers a sense of what they were about to
encounter as they picked their way through the offerings.
But before the final selections were made, the
frightening 9/11 plane attacks in New York and Washington knocked
the heart out of things and made us rethink the project. Terror
was abroad and with it its unfortunate offspring, racial and religious
intolerance. Leon wrote to say that we might need to reconsider
the tone and scope of the project. In the end, we decided to incorporate
something that would give a sense of the moral climate in which
the issue would be received as well as the one in which it was conceived.
We added the Apocalypse section. The pieces published there, four
of them originally broadcast on CBC radio (“Loss & Legacy:
September 11th”), reflect the writers’ diverse ethnic
and religious ancestry, but share what might seem to some an unpatriotic,
perhaps unfair, aversion to retaliatory action. I tend to see these
pieces in a different light, as the response of people who embrace
the ideals of the west, but want it to live up to those ideals,
to take the moral high-ground, to eschew aggression, to turn the
other cheek.
The final mix of poems and stories will outrage
you, comfort you, stun you with its unexpected turns, make you laugh
aloud. At least, it did all that for me. Like Leon (whose introduction
follows), I have my favorites. But I’m not telling.
---- Kim Jernigan
|