Welcome to Image!
Image, a literary and arts quarterly, was founded in 1989 to demonstrate the vitality and diversity of well-made art and writing that engage seriously with the historic faiths of the West in our time. Now one of the leading literary magazines published in the English language, it is read all over the world—and it forms the nexus of a warm and lively community.
The journal is a unique forum for the best writing and artwork that is informed by—or grapples with—religious faith. We have never been interested in art that merely regurgitates dogma or falls back on easy answers or didacticism. Instead, our focus has been on writing and visual artwork that embody a spiritual struggle, that seek to strike a balance between tradition and a profound openness to the world. Here the larger questions of existence intersect with what the poet Albert Goldbarth calls the “greasy doorknobs and salty tearducts” of our everyday lives.
With the journal as our cornerstone, Image has grown to include many other programs that support our mission.
Online Classes
Through the Glen Online, writers at all levels of study can pursue excellence year-round from their own desks, with the direction and personal feedback of world-class writers featured in the pages of Image and the Glen.
Learn more here.
The Glen Workshop
The Glen Workshop, sponsored by Image, began in 1995 as an innovative and enriching week combining the best elements of a workshop, an arts festival, and a spiritual retreat. Twenty years later, the Glen has grown into an annual event featuring nationally acclaimed authors and artists.
Learn more here.
Readings and Events
Image hosts several readings and intimate concerts throughout the year, including the annual Denise Levertov Award in our hometown of Seattle. Past events include readings in Washington, D.C., a gallery talk with Makoto Fujimura in Vancouver, B.C., seminars in Italy, and conferences in New York City.
Learn more here.
Good Letters
For the humanists of the Renaissance, literature mattered because it was concrete and experiential—it grounded ideas in people’s lives. Their name for this kind of writing was bonae litterae, a phrase we’ve borrowed as the title for our blog. Every weekday, one of the gifted writers on our blogging team will offer a personal essay that makes a fresh connection between the world of faith and the world of daily life, spanning the gap between theology and experience and giving language a human shape.
Read Good Letters here.