Nick Ripatrazone's Sacramental Vision

In the 46th in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Nick Ripatrazone, author of Good People (Foxhead Books), explores his awe of words.

In his brief essay, “In Awe of Words,” John Steinbeck writes “The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.”

I agree that the act of writing requires significant awe for words. Awe is not equivalent to innocence, but they are not exclusive. When asked what the word "religious" meant to her, poet Denise Levertov said it was "the impulse to kneel in wonder . . . the impulse to kiss the ground . . . the sense of awe.” Like Levertov, I am a Catholic, and think a sacramental vision of the world means that even the most profane and pungent words carry some residual awe. The same goes for people. By titling a story collection Good People, and admitting that the characters contained within do very bad things, I am dissociating action from actor. That might sound like a generous theology, but if I am truly in awe of words, I am not doing my characters any undue favors; I am simply giving them the freedom and power to organically evolve.

That freedom is an action of awe. My awe for words is not idolatry; it is a recognition that the finest and foulest stories in English must choose from the same 26 letters. Like Steinbeck, I think awe is connected to a willingness to be surprised. Our surrounding world can be painfully prosaic. We can find thousands of things to bemoan. These are failures of perspective; of spirit, perhaps, as William Faulkner claimed. Failures of sight and sense.

Although it is often mentioned in connection with poetry—think of Gerard Manley Hopkins in “Spring”: “What is all this juice and all this joy?”—I think the short story is the perfect form for awe. Sonnets are made for questions and answers, and sestinas for recursivity. Essays are bred for inquiry. Short stories tend to lean forward. They end almost as quickly as they begin. And, if crafted well, they open many doors fully but leave others only cracked.

Indelibly awesome: "they is" thrice

I think of Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” which begins as sardonic as they come, gets absolutely violent, but ends on such a perfect note, with a boy’s misspoken words: “they is, they is, they is.” Catholics haven’t cornered the market on awe, but Wolff—writing about the work of fellow Catholic Andre Dubus—said “the quotidian and the spiritual don’t exist on different planes, but infuse each other... ordinary things participate in the miraculous, the miraculous in ordinary things.” Of course awe can lead to sentimentality. Devotion and dogma are best left for the cold wood of pews and the privacy of hearts. Faith works much better on the page. Faith is pliable, imperfect, a work of passion. Like awe, faith requires a good deal of fear. I don’t trust a story that I’m writing unless I am unsettled by the decisions of the characters. I need to offer them the path to a bad place, and then, once there, they can remain or seek resolution.

Awe is what suffuses those characters with the sense of mystery necessary for fiction; it is what makes me treat my characters with care, even if I’ve created situations where they might suffer. That paradox is a necessary one in Catholic theology, and is equally applicable to fiction. If a story draft feels like cardboard; if my characters talk and live toward theses, then I have failed to see the world with awe. I have fallen for the cynicism of reduction. But the beautiful thing about fiction—and life—is that there is always time for a second, third, and tenth draft.

Piece of Cake: Nick Ripatrazone's Standing Oblations

By Phedra Deonarine

The Cake Shop in New York sells cake, but it’s also a bar, a record store, and a live music venue. In short, it seems an unlikely place for a reading. A deep stairwell leads down to a long room with a low ceiling and a stage decorated with yellow Christmas lights and red and gold tinsel. None of this, though, distracted from Paul Lisicky's and Nick Ripatrazone’s reading on Sunday for the release of Ripatrazone’s Oblations.

Author Nick Ripatrazone at the Cake Shop

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder. He teaches at NYU. The work he read from was a primer on the value of travel for writers. He read first from work inspired by his stay in North Carolina while teaching at UNC Wilmington. Usually a first person stylist, Lisicky ventured into the third person for his new work. Highlights included a story about a boy who finds that he no longer loves the ocean as he once did and an unusual piece about an alligator who lived in a containment pond behind a Walmart. As always, Lisicky balanced an economy of language against the urge to lyricism in his work. He concluded with a pair of stories written in recent months.

Ripatrazone teaches AP classes in public school, recently completed his Masters of Fine Arts at Rutgers University-Newark, and works as an adjunct there. Yet despite all that, he still managed to put together Oblations, a collection of prose poetry published by Gold Wake Press.

The collection itself is broken into five parts: barns, baseball, miscellanea, work, and parishes. He spoke to this design during his reading. His move to rural New Jersey helped renew his interest in the tension between traditional rural living and the new energy which infuses such places with the arrival of transplants from the city.

Ripatrazone’s pieces unfold through a series of short utterances. His writing is pared down and gives an impressionistic sense of people, places, and language that few writers are patient enough to record. He finished with a reading from his new work, more conventional poetry than Oblations.