“The root of the word fiction is to make. And what fiction makes is life, and should we so believe, the next life.” This quote is from Liam Callanan '90, the winner of the 2017 George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts & Letters, in his acceptance speech at the Yale Club of New York City on Thursday, September 21, 2017.
Callanan’s speech was entitled “Truth in Fiction and Fiction in Truth.” “Good nonfiction teaches us what to believe,” Callanan said, “but it is fiction that teaches us to believe.” Callanan used Kirstin Valdez Quade’s short story “Christina the Astonishing (1150-1224),” recently published in The New Yorker, as an example of Catholic fiction that transcends its boundaries. In the story, Valdez Quade tells the tale of the thirteenth-century folk saint Christina, who, at her funeral, astonishes the congregation of mourners by rising from her coffin and ascending into the church rafters. Valdez Quade claimed in an interview that the truth of whether or not the historical Christina spoke with God was irrelevant; in Valdez Quade’s story, the truth is that Christina “flew.”
Liam Callanan '90 accepts the Hunt Prize from Rev. Robert Beloin while Rev. Matthew Malone looks on.
Callanan then brought the room to an emotional climax with a personal anecdote. As a senior in high school, he had read Ironweed, William Kennedy’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize winning novel. In it, a father buries the child he had accidentally dropped and spends the novel searching for closure, which in the end, the reader is not sure the father finds. Callanan, disturbed by the ambiguity, wrote to Kennedy seeking answers, but the author of Ironweed would not share what had happened beyond the ending of the story. Callanan then spoke of himself, years later, burying his infant daughter—much like the father in the novel. “Fiction moves us,” Callanan said at the end of his speech, “[it] finds us truths we might not have recognized when first presented to us as fact. ... Fiction teaches us empathy, with characters whose lives lie far beyond our own or are so eerily similar, they feel identical.” His daughter’s death inspired him to write, to seek truth through fiction, like he now found in Kennedy’s novel.
Liam Callanan '90 speaks with Gregory Pfeiffer '17 M.P.H, M.A.R. and Michael Lally GRD '18 in the Top Room at the Yale Club of New York City.
Callanan is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the author of The Cloud Atlas, All Saints, Listen and Paris by the Book (forthcoming, April 2018). The Hunt Prize, co-sponsored by STM and America Media, is awarded annually to an author who displays exceptional Roman Catholic intelligence and imagination in her or his work. To view the lecture, visit https://goo.gl/T93Yp4.
