FINDING GOD ON PARK STREET
Dive into the heart of the Catholic experience at Yale University with host Grace Klise, Director of Alumni Engagement at Saint Thomas More. In each episode, Grace and her student co-hosts engage in conversations with students, alumni, faculty, staff, and community members. Together, they discuss the nuances of living out the Catholic faith in today's world, culminating in the question, "Where have you found God?" This podcast offers a space to explore the intersection of spirituality, community, and education, providing listeners with personal insights and meaningful perspectives. Subscribe now to join the journey of discovery and connection.
FINDING GOD ON PARK STREET
Liam Callanan ’90: Unraveling God’s Literary Calling
Dive into the life story of author and professor Liam Callanan, a Yale College alumnus from the Class of 1990. As we sit down with Liam, listeners will traverse Yale's hallowed halls (and some of the lesser-known spots on campus!), where his daughters now leave their mark as students. After Yale, Liam found professional success before personal tragedy changed the trajectory of his life. He and his wife turned to faith as they ventured into the unknown, trusting God's call. To this day, Liam trusts that call and continues to follow it as he writes, teaches, parents, and grows in faith.
Liam's voice brings a resonance to the conversation that only someone who has experienced both profound sorrow and enduring peace could achieve. Listeners will gather insight into the transformative power of embracing one's true calling as they enjoy Liam's wit and banter, from tales of his large Irish Catholic family to the discovery of his passion for writing and teaching. The power of storytelling and fiction shine through as Liam reveals the ways in which his faith animates his writing. Hear about the inspiring stories and global adventures behind his most recent novel, When In Rome.
Liam's anecdotes of student life at Yale, his latest literary endeavors, and the significance of Saint Thomas More on his life all contribute to a rich conversation on discovering God's grace in unexpected places, even in loss.
In this final episode of Season 2, be moved and inspired to find God seeking you, too, in your everyday life.
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Show notes:
Learn more about Liam’s work on his website: https://www.liamcallanan.com/
Mentioned in the episode: Catholic Imagination Conference, La Civiltà Cattolica, When in Rome: A Novel, The 2017 George W. Hunt, S.J. Prize Ceremony, Abbey of Gethsemani, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, For Love of the Broken Body: A Spiritual Memoir
This is a podcast from Saint Thomas More, Yale's Catholic Chapel and Center. I'm your host, Grace Klise, with my student co-host today, Zach Moynihan. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Finding God on Park Street. Our guest today loves a good story and he has a lot of experience writing them too.
Grace Klise:Liam Callanan, a Yale College graduate from the class of 1990, is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. In addition to his academic role, he is widely recognized as a celebrated novelist and has been honored with the prestigious George Hunt Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts and Letters. A devoted father, Liam takes pride in his all-daughter family, one of whom is a current Yale student and one of whom is a recent grad. Yet Liam's journey from Yale College to where he is now was not a straight line. It had starts and stops, personal tragedy and loss and a profound leap of faith to pursue more meaningful work, both for himself and the world. And in Liam's story we see that God's grace brings life out of death in unexpected ways. We just have to have faith. So let's dive in. So, Liam, Yale has kind of become a family affair for you, with your three girls, two girls who have come through here and another one who's running around campus right now.
Liam Callanan:Right, we'll see if the third can escape the clutches of Mother Yale. They're a tenacious, so we'll have to see how that works out.
Grace Klise:So what a fun thing to be able to share with your daughters.
Liam Callanan:It's glorious, it's a lot of fun to be back. The campus has changed so much, but the heart of it hasn't.
Grace Klise:Yeah well, we're very grateful to have you back and we love having your two oldest daughters a part of our community. And something we've been hearing about from our guests this season is the role that family has played in their faith development. So could you take us back to your childhood and the role that your family, home and your parents had in your Catholic faith?
Liam Callanan:Absolutely so I was born in Washington DC, I was a—m y dad was born at Georgetown. I was born at Georgetown. Mary Grace was our oldest was born at Georgetown. In fact, I always joke that they should have had a program where, like every third generation, free childbirth, but they didn't. They didn't do that for Mary, so we'll have to see how the next two generations go.
Liam Callanan:But so we grew up in a Catholic family. We were practicing, we went to Mass every Sunday, but I was kind of, I think, of a multi-generational catechesis of the informal Catholic we were talking about before the mics were on about. I was just in Washington DC last weekend for a second cousin's, husband's, father's funeral. One was a beautiful, beautiful funeral, but we were also— I was reminded of the importance of an extended family and there we were at the wake, and then we were celebrating a young cousin's birthday at the same time and I just remember that that part of life growing up that it wasn't there, wasn't so much our door to our house is here and the door to the church is there. It was much more of a seamless transition, but there wasn't necessarily a holy place and a secular space, it was very much all part of a single cloth, or so I like to imagine. And I feel like that really was the most powerful part of my upbringing, almost talking shop with my grandmother and great aunt, who were quite a pair and extremely devout but also cantankerous in wonderful ways, and so just seeing a church where that could accommodate that kind of broad spectrum of belief and conversation was really formative.
Liam Callanan:And it was formative for my wife as well, who I met at Yale senior year and she was brought up Episcopalian and when we were going to get married she thought, well, maybe I will convert before we get married. And my great aunt God bless her said like well, why don't you try it out first? Like let's not just do this for the wedding, let's do it because you want to do it. And that was incredibly wise and spiritual advice. And I think because of that advice and because of what my wife saw in that family, of all the kind of rabble rosin they would do and they were very talkative like oh, that sermon, I don't know about that. Or like, oh, we really got to get that. Or like, oh, you've got to see this, or we've got to stop here, or just all the spiritual aspects and the kind of cultural aspects. One of my grandmother's famous notions was that you get three wishes every time you went into a new church. And I'm not exactly sure that wishes are compatible with most catechism, and my great aunt would always say never pass a church or a bathroom without going in. And so that served us very well in Europe. So we stored up quite a few things like that.
Liam Callanan:So, again, the family that I came from, we were steeping in Catholicism. It wasn't that we had stacks of Bibles around, we didn't, but it was just kind of a cultural aspect to it. And then when I went to Loyola High School in Los Angeles because after DC we moved to LA. That also gave me a sense, a richer sense, which I then found at Yale too and I've looked for ever since. It's a sense of community. Just the notion of the Jesuits living in community was very powerful. And then, of course, being part of a high school community always Catholic high school sometimes community too tight, but at the same time just being part of a special community that honors itself by what it believes and how it supports others. And that notion of being a person for others is that from Father Ruppe is something I still carry forward with me and I'm very conscious in all that I do now of trying to be part of a community, trying to foster a community, and Thomas More was one of those communities when I came here. It's so different now. It's glorious. It's just amazing what's happened.
Liam Callanan:But it was a smaller operation. There was just the chapel and then there was a priest office on one side, I think, and rectory on the other side, and the joke was well, it wasn't a joke we had the closest room at Yale to the chapel because we were in Davenport. We were literally the first room inside the gate. And so I remember Father Russell was the chaplain at that time. He said you have no excuse, you can always get here for Mass, and that was true, and sometimes he would call me to help serve if he needed something at the last second. I remember gosh, it was Holy Week, maybe Holy Thursday, where it turned out it was just he and I in the morning and he called me. He was like Liam, we've got to put this Mass together and I said, well, this is just you and I. He's like that's why we're doing it, and I find that a very powerful experience. But I remember Mardi Gras parties and I remember service missions and, of course, I remember the Wednesday. Is it still Wednesday? The soup kitchen.
Grace Klise:Yes, it is.
Liam Callanan:I remember that. I remember unfortunately— and I always apologize to our guests at the soup kitchen, but— I was put in charge of making the chili one week. You just took whatever food they had, and so that week it was beans, ketchup, and then like a kind of a mystery meat from the government that came in a large can and I think we may have driven a few people away from the faith that day. So I wasn't interested. But after that I did the more important work and I remember Paul Kennedy used to always say you're going and sitting down and talking with folks, that's the most important thing you can do there, and so that's why I did it after that.
Zach Moynihan:It's wonderful to hear about all of the various Catholic communities that you've been through throughout your lifetime, whether it's starting in the family and then extending out to school communities or, specifically, church communities like the one here at STM, which is integrated school, church, all in one. I'm wondering how you have seen and experienced your faith change as you've transitioned through those different communities. Having that foundation from your family is obviously so important, but as you grow up and develop into your personality, your interests, your faith, how does that change things for you?
Liam Callanan:That's a great question and I think it's the surprise for me has that my faith life has become richer and deeper, but also more challenging. We often told to celebrate the faith of a child, and it's true, but I remember very simple things like go to Mass on Sunday or else, or something like this kind of voice and button just do this, do that, and then you don't really have to think through it. And certainly the Jesuit started unlocking that in high school, saying like there's more to it than that. The world created, seven days—l et's think a little bit bigger than that. Let's not reduce everything just to watch words and catch phrases and let's really interrogate what that means. And then, if you are left a little bit at sea after that interrogation, well good, then you've got some things to figure out.
Liam Callanan:And that was something that I started in high school and has continued to a certain degree at Yale, because I came out of an all boys Catholic high school and Yale, despite its beginnings as a theological seminary, is all kinds of different beliefs here. So that was really interesting and exciting for me to be part of that and to learn more about what I was up to. And then, ever since then, it's been interesting to kind of join new communities. In each one I kind of take a little bit more away from it. And then, as I get involved in various things, there's a conference that's called the Catholic Imagination. That happens every couple years. It's almost a movement now and it's like a gathering of writers and poets from around the country and around the world. And the more I've been involved in that, the more I've seen how other people live their lives and enrich their own faith lives and that. So that's been a study to me. I kind of very much kind of sit on the side and say like, oh, that's how that works. I had a particular kind of an apex of that experience was the Jesuit magazine in Rome. Sevalita Catilica Catholic— we'll have to look up the name of that—c onvened a conference in Rome at the end of May and they drew writers from around the world, from Africa, from India, from North America, and brought us all together and had us kind of share our work and discuss with each other.
Liam Callanan:And that was an amazing catechesis for me, like just really kind of deep in my faith. And then it was gobsmacked. But we were, we were granted an audience with Pope Francis afterwards and so we got to go visit with him in the Apostolic Palace and he came in and he gave a beautiful talk about the role of writers and artists in the church and the importance of the theme of the talk was that it is always overflowing. And when I got to it he was like don't, don't stay, don't color within the lines. It's a terrible, terrible misquote of what he was talking about, but but very kind of powerful like notion of kind of overflowing, and it was, it was a beautiful, this really beautiful moment and I got to present him a copy of my new novel 'When in Rome,' so that was a real treat.
Grace Klise:Wow, that's really special. I finished reading it recently and felt like I had just gone on vacation to Rome, been totally immersed in the city. But we've now been talking about writing a little bit and the ways in which that clearly is part of your vocational call. When did that come to the scene? Were you always interested in writing, even as a child, or was that something that emerged during high school and college?
Liam Callanan:A little of both. It was something I was definitely, something that I was good at is like I definitely knew I wasn't any good at math or chemistry. I was just talking with my youngest daughter, who's in chemistry this year and doing fairly well, certainly better than her dad because the chemistry teacher would return my labs each week with a line through them and I thought that was a check mark, like I'd done it, and he meant it was completely wrong. So for an entire year of chemistry I'd gotten every single lab result wrong, which is why I don't do science chemistry today, but writing is a little bit better at, and it was fostered that experience in high school into some degree at Yale.
Liam Callanan:Although when I was here the creative writing offerings were rather limited. There was kind of one nonfiction course, one fiction course, maybe a poetry course. It wasn't very easy to get into them, so I was an English major but it was almost something like they tried not to recognize, like maybe there's some creative writing going on here but just we'll keep our ears closed and hopefully it'll pass. But for me it was a permanent condition and so I continued to do it and then after school I tried to pick it up. But I remember I was down in DC because my wife to be had moved there. She had a job on Capitol Hill. I did not have a job and I was living rent- free with my grandmother and my uncle, who's lived in DC for many, many years, and he came down while I was, you know, sprawled on the couch one day, eating free food, sitting on a free couch, and he said so you're going to get a job, right? And I was like no, I'm going to be a writer. He's like no, no, a job. And so I thought, oh, I really do need a job. Actually, before that, my grandmother had spotted a notice in the church bulletin that the National Office of Catholic Charities was hiring and they were looking for someone to help edit their newsletter. And so that was my first, my first job out of college was actually working for Charities USA, the journal there, but then that led into public relations and copywriting and it led me into kind of a corporate career for a while.
Liam Callanan:And then we had this rather dramatic moment in our lives where things changed for us in a really profound way, which is we were expecting our first child and she died just before she was born. Her name was Lucy. My wife and I both thought, like what is life for if not to be lived to the fullest? And I had a, I actually had a conversation, a series of emails, with an old associate pastor at St Thomas More who I kept up with, Dennis Murphy, and as part of it he said something along the lines of you can serve money and man, or you can serve God, but you can't serve both. And I thought, wow, I mean, I knew that, I guess intellectually, but it hadn't hit my heart quite so much and I thought I think I do need to do that.
Liam Callanan:So I went in and my to my boss I was working at a big Fortune 500 company by then and he said, yeah, I've got great news, Liam. I'm going to promote you, you're going to be head of this team that's got people in Denver and Boston and, all over the place, Los Angeles. And he said you should take this seriously because this is going to be a big step up. And I said I think I should quit. And he said, wow, are you serious? And I said I think I am, and that that's when everything changed.
Liam Callanan:So, and it was a gift it was a gift from Lucy, but it was also even more, or equally, a gift from my wife, who stayed employed and kept us in health benefits and also said this is a dream, even if it doesn't work out, you have to see if you can do it. And so I wrote at home for about a month or two and then I realized like there's no way I was going to do it by myself, and so I enrolled in graduate school, George Mason University, and the plan was that I would study for an MFA and get a thesis written and then publish that thesis and then, on the basis of the published book and the degree, you get myself a job teaching creative writing, and, much to our astonishment, that actually came to be true. So that's what I've been doing. So the, for the past 25 years I've been teaching creative writing 18 of those at University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, go Panthers, and it's been a,
Liam Callanan:It's been a tremendous joy, but it's in some ways I thought this is, this is always what I thought I would do, but I never thought it would come out this way, and so I'm very moved and many magical things about Lucy's arrival in her life.
Liam Callanan:So one of them we had come up with the name before and so that was— or no, we had come up with a different name before, I think, I can't remember, but but once she was with us that was, that was just the name that came to us. And then I learned later that she's one of the patron saints of writers and I thought, oh. Now certain people quibble with me on this and they say there's another patron saint of writers, but St Lucy's definitely the patron saint of eyeglass wearers. So sometimes she gets conflated with the patron saints of writers. So I've decided that I've declared that she's one of the patron saints of novelists at least, if not writers. But yeah, that's, things like that happen all the time and that's just little stories that come together. She always makes an appearance in all my books.
Liam Callanan:There's always like a little moment, either named or not, where there's a little Lucy that appears.
Grace Klise:So yeah, the influence that she, she still has on your life and on your family. It's amazing.
Liam Callanan:The girls still, like Honor my child, who's a junior here at Yale, she'll send us, she always sends us a text on her birthday every year. And then I have an amazing story of one of the women that I worked with at the big Fortune 500 company before I quit. She knew that I liked this special kind of cookie from Baltimore which are called burgers cookies, and she was based in Baltimore and I was based in Washington DC and I love these cookies are called, they're just basically chocolate frosting delivery devices and she was so supportive during the whole aftermath and even after I quit. And so the first year she sent me on her birthday, she sent me a box of these cookies and it was just incredible. And then the next year she sent me another box of cookies and then the next year she sent me another box of cookies and I was so moved by this and after a while I was.
Liam Callanan:I was talking with someone about these cookies that were always coming and I was like it's such a lovely reminder. And this person, very well-meaning person, said that's a lot like to be keep being reminded like 10 years later, maybe the cookie thing you know you can back off on and I was like, oh, I guess. And so I wrote Kathy a note and I said you know, thank you for the cookies. But someone pointed out that, like, this is a lot. And you know, and Kathy, God bless her, sent this note and she sent it, she addressed it to our daughters and she said please let your father know that this is not an imposition but an honor, and this is as much a tradition in my family as it is in yours, and I will continue sending cookies for the rest of my life.
Liam Callanan:So we just got her 26 bucks of cookies two weeks ago. So it's, it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. So, and now she sends them to my daughters too. So Honor got her own package of cookies here at Yale station, if I could get her to go to the post office— Zach, do kids today, like people don't go to the post office anymore, do they?
Zach Moynihan:No, we typically rely on the student package center, unless you have a PO box.
Liam Callanan:I had to show them, how to, my daughters how to put the envelope, like where you put the address and where the stamp goes, and things like that.
Grace Klise:But they're really good at email and social media.
Zach Moynihan:Of course, yeah, but not that balances things out, right.
Liam Callanan:Not so much the phone, no.
Zach Moynihan:That's a whole other no as much as I would like to to twirl the cord around my hand, I, I I typically stick to the cordless now.
Liam Callanan:We used to have when we were at Yale, we had the guys who lived on the floor above us they're, they had a phone, a landline obviously, but the ring was broken, so they would just pick it up every now and then to see if anyone was calling them. And so, and no one ever was. It was a very sad, sad thing.
Grace Klise:Thank you for sharing that, the this beautiful part of your family and your life, and your work now as a writer, and the ways in which Lucy continues to be very present and inspiring your work. I think, even if she's not officially the patron saint of writers, she, it seems like she's the patron saint of your work.
Liam Callanan:She's absolutely the patron saint of my work and another way that we honor it, so Kathy sends us cookies and then we donate a crib. So we're up to and for the past couple of years we've done a couple of cribs. We do Pack-n-Plays because it seems like moms in need these days need more mobility. At the beginning we would buy wooden cribs and I would deliver them and build them and things like that, but now it's more of a like an on the go thing. So we're probably up to 30 cribs and that's a powerful, that's a powerful act of it and just to be, you're very much blessed by the recipients for that. But but it really has been something I realized like not something to walk away from in life, but rather there's something to kind of embrace. We have four daughters.
Zach Moynihan:And it's so nice to reflect on the way that this has informed the structure and function of your family and how you organize yourselves and how you let your faith run through that and you've taken it upon yourself to be that capsule of faith brought down to future generations. And thinking about St Lucy, that's my home parish.
Liam Callanan:Oh, really, st Lucy Parish, I'm getting goosebumps. So this is clearly. See, she does this.
Zach Moynihan:It's where I was baptized. It's about a five minute walk from my house, and so that's a very powerful saint in my life. I live in an area of Massachusetts. It's very Catholic, a lot of Catholic churches. We have Augustine and Monica and Lucy. And so I think of those saints, particularly as part of my local community, my local family.
Liam Callanan:Oh, that's wonderful, like she always kind of pops up like that when you least expect it. There'll be like a little thing like oh, I see what you're up to.
Grace Klise:Our faith is such a gift in that way in that, no matter where you are, there are these little reminders of home which is for us, ultimately, home is with God, and with God in heaven, which is where we believe that Lucy is, and the ways in which that veil between heaven and earth is so thin and is lifted all the time.
Liam Callanan:Absolutely. And, like I was saying earlier, that notion between home and church, that was kind of a seamless garment. I feel like that notion of exactly as you're saying, like that veil is very thin, not in a spooky way, in a very powerful way, very powerful way.
Grace Klise:Something you have said, Liam, is that your writing has gotten more Catholic over time. What do you attribute that to, or how have you seen that over the last 25 years in your writing, but also in your teaching?
Liam Callanan:That's really interesting. I wouldn't say my teaching so much reflects that, other than my teaching, I realize is an active witness, to be available to people who want to learn how to write and to very much be a person for others, and so I try and embody that in the classroom and again create a community. But I'm at a state school so we don't talk about religion. I mean, if a student brings it up I'm happy to talk about it, but I don't talk about my own, other than trying to live a life of you know service that if someone puts it together eventually, great, and my writing I feel like I think I have thought like it's gotten more Catholic. But I think when I look back like it was there all the time, like I've always been looking again for kind of communities, for people who are engaged in acts of witness, who kind of fall on their path to faith, who kind of lose their faith, who try and gain it back but never fully lose it, like faith is something that they can't kind of almost rid themselves of and sometimes they want to and they realize that God has a hold on them and God won't let go, and I think that's such a powerful and that's something my texts remind me, like, even when you run away, it's like God was, you turned out you were running to God. Actually, you thought you were running away, but that's where you were running to, and I feel like that has come up in my books again and again, and I mean they've gone all over the place.
Liam Callanan:So I've always been interested in the notion of faith, both as a kind of a secular muscle, like what it means to believe in something that you're not holding in your hand, and then where that stems from, which seems to me to have a very spiritual basis, and so those are things that I'm kind of constantly testing myself and my characters are testing themselves too. But I remember at some point telling an interviewer I think this was around after the Hunt Prize, which was a few years back saying, like you know, writing Catholic doesn't mean you have to write about priests and nuns all the time, and they're like oh my gosh, I just published a book with all these nuns. So I was like, yes, yes, that's that's, but but again, I follow the stories where they come. So and that and this one definitely had a story, and that was the story that came out.
Zach Moynihan:I want to pick up on that last point about the subject of your writing, and I'm interested in this idea that there's so many ways to access our faith and as I've reflected on ways to grow my faith in college, I've leaned a little bit more towards the nonfiction, theological writings, things like that. But what is the role of fiction in leading people towards faith? What does it reveal to us and how can delving a little bit more into into the fictional world help us develop our faith?
Liam Callanan:I feel like stories are the source code of our belief, like Jesus spoke to us in parables and when he wanted to make a point he didn't say like so, you know, add two cups of water, one cup of flour. That's actually a terrible recipe, Jesus, so we'll have to work on that one. But he didn't give us those sorts of recipes. He spoke to us in stories because he knew that people would take those stories to heart and understand them.
Liam Callanan:I'm making no comparison between the fiction I'm doing or, for that matter, the fiction anyone's doing is like trying to figure out that this is, this is in any way kind of comparing to the parables. But I do feel like it's, it's so present that, like fiction, is a way that kind of reminds us that we can conjure a world and conjure an example and make something that you again can't hold in your hand. You can make it very real and present. We've all had the experience, I bet, of being swept up by a book and being completely immersed in that other place and time. And once we're there, then we think how did this come to be like this? This doesn't exist, it's just words on pages, and then that reminds us that you know very much, Jesus was trying to reach people that they couldn't. They couldn't see the Kingdom of heaven, they couldn't see that it was all around them at that moment. But through a story perhaps they would be able to.
Grace Klise:Yeah, I'm thinking of the Catholic imagination group that you mentioned before, that we, I think today, often lack an imagination or a way of seeing the world in our faith. That fiction can help strengthen so that we can see those little God moments that are in front of us each day or when that veil is lifted, that we can imagine a world apart from this broken one, where there is suffering and death and loss, that we don't have to run away from it, but we also can lift our eyes to a different site and just thinking about the ways in which spending time with fiction can help train those muscles and encourage us, inspire us to see differently absolutely.
Liam Callanan:I've always thought that kind of fiction kind of exercises that same muscle and so if theology teaches kind of what we believe, fiction teaches us how we believe. I'm not sure I can speak ex-cathedra on that point, so why protect that? But I do like the idea that there's a place for it and I think that less is always more like the more kind of doctrinaire you get in your work you kind of loosen people, because then they feel like well, you're, you're solving this problem for me, and that's what I've always found as a teacher. Again, students are going to come away with more from the class if they have done the work to kind of assemble the box themselves. What is it? Hear and forget, see and remember, do and understand, which is the motto of many things, including a children's museum or two. But I think it's also great pedagogy and I feel like for readers the doing is putting together what you see on the page and then coming away from it with your own kind of sense of what it is. And if those people get from that text what you put into it, great if they get something that you hadn't put into it.
Liam Callanan:I remember with my first books a guy wrote me, or wrote in a review, I think he said something like well, clearly, this is based on the third chapter of Genesis, and I thought, ooh, that took place in Alaska so, and they were during World War Two, so, and that had not been thinking about the third chapter of Genesis and that at all. But that's where he, that's what he took away from it. And so I thought, well, so he's assembled it, so that's where, that's where his learning has come from. But it's different for everybody, and I think that's the other thing. Fiction is also uniquely— even when we all read the same book or, expanding a little bit, watching movie with an audience, we each have our own individual reaction to it. We're forming our own individual response to it inside ourselves and I think that also teaches us that faith and it's important is for community, that communities made up of people who are building their faith in their own individual ways.
Grace Klise:I'd love to hear a little bit more from the person who is behind the writing of When in Rome, your most recent novel, and we'll link this novel in the show notes. But this is a beautiful story of calling, searching, discernment, discovery that cuts through New Haven and Yale's campus and goes all the way to Rome.
Grace Klise:So can you tell us a little bit about the process for writing this book and then also the ways in which your own faith was challenged and tugged and and moved on account of the coming together of this story and these characters?
Liam Callanan:Absolutely. I mean, the doing of the book was simple. I just sat down and typed for two days and was done, which is so, not true. All my books— I used to run marathons before my knees said no more and I always said each one of those marathons took something off my life as opposed to being a healthy activity.
Liam Callanan:And I think the books do too. They just it's, there's a lot, you know. The book is about a hundred thousand words and I'm sure I wrote 350 or 400 thousand words. So those other ones are gone and they were good pages too, but thank God they're gone.
Liam Callanan:But it's interesting. It's a little bit like a lot of authors I think, I have a magpie approach where different things kind of lodge in my imagination and they lodge there and then they kind of, something will kind of accrue and then I'll make, connect it with something else, and in this book it was a couple different things were connecting. One I had a cousin, or we called him an uncle, but again extended Irish family. So uncle cousin, who knows, his name, was Morris Shine and famously he grew up in Chicago, early part of the 20th century and eventually became quite the man about town, kind of a playboy, big-time salesman, fancy cars, girlfriend on each arm would go to the Kentucky Derby every year and have a wild time. And then he would have such a wild time that on the way home he would stop by the Abbey of Gethsemane, which is not too far from the Kentucky Derby, and kind of like do a little spiritual detox cleansing. So one year he went there for the weekend and he told the Abbey, said I think I'd like to stay. And the Abbott said well, sure you, we got room. You can say the whole month if you want. He said no, I want to stay the rest of my life. And that was like no, no, no, you're a big-time salesman, you have this beautiful car out front, you're, I think he was 40, 45 years old at the time. He said I'm sure you're not gonna stay. And he said, just watch. And so he did. And so his name is brother Kevin, or was brother Kevin. He passed away a few years back and he was a contemporary of Thomas Merton and after about a year they sold the car and he never left that property again and it was like one day a year that he was allowed to receive visitors and we would go down and visit him and he was, by the time I caught him, up with him he was very advanced in age, was a man, a few words, but he was still very kind of rye and humorous and and I just was astounded at this life that you could kind of depart this life and kind of leave it for another and that you could have a spiritual calling like that. So that's one seed and then another seed.
Liam Callanan:I was in Rome researching an article about Roman fountains and because Rome is famous for fountains and I found this little fountain that I I was just like a little fountain in the wall and I liked it quite a bit and it was very, photographed very well and I took a sip and then, as I turned around, there was this very high wall and this kind of fortress type building and unlike every other building like that in Rome, this one, the gate was open. So I went inside and I discovered that it was a hotel but had recently been a convent, so recently actually, that they still had nuns and residents. They had like one wing that they had retreated to and sold off the rest of it for the hotel, but they still had a chapel. The hotel next to the reception desk had this beautiful chapel and I asked them what was going on and the hotel said, well, their community is dwindled in size and so they're selling off. And so I had my uncle's experience of like, what's it like to join a community and stay there forever. And then I had the experience of these nuns. I thought what is it like when the community that you join kind of disappears out from under you? And I was very moved by this. And then I live in Milwaukee, a city of many old churches. We live in the city and I was watching a lot of the churches get sold and turned into hotels or parking lots.
Liam Callanan:So I came up with the story about like, what if a woman who's a realtor in the United States Goes to Rome to help these nuns with one last job? Because the woman, the realtor, is just tired of just all this closing, like it's just her heart breaks. But these nuns, they really need her help and so she goes to Rome for one last job and then when she gets there she thinks this building is so beautiful. Maybe this is a way to save it and maybe I can save it by joining and and it just that moment her old college flame from Yale shows up and you'll just have to read to find out what happens next. But you can see how the all the different things came together for me.
Liam Callanan:So it's like I set out actually to write a riff on a Midsummer Night's Dream which I took in a study in a course with Suzanne Wofford here about 30, four years ago, and I loved the course so much, and a friend of mine, Peter Molly, was, played Puck in the later student production of it, and so I've always wanted to do a riff on that. So all that remains from that manuscript there's a lovely garden in the back of this convent in Rome as I envision it, and there's a garden of course in the Midsummer Night's Dream and this actually there's some other kind of riffs that kind of come through. But so those are all the different pieces of DNA. But it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun to write and there were discoveries all along the way as I did it, and so, even though the convent is not quite the same convent, I took some fictional liberties with it, I was very kind of fascinated with all the different pieces as they fell together.
Grace Klise:You can borrow my copy Zach.
Zach Moynihan:Oh, you sold it to me. I'm ready to read it.
Liam Callanan:Zach needs to buy his own copy. No, he's a student, we'll make sure he gets a student discount.
Grace Klise:Well, what a it's so special to hear the behind the scenes, the fabric that was building in your mind and and heart, that then has spilled out on these pages. I imagine you traveled to Rome either for an extended period of time or multiple times.
Liam Callanan:Multiple times, and the last trip that I took, or not the— one of the trips that I took was quite quite magical, and that one day I got one of those too good to be true airfare emails. So it was a $300 ticket to Rome. So I bought it and I booked it out for a couple months and then the pandemic started and so they canceled the ticket and they said the refund, the money, or I could just take a future ticket. So I said I'll just take it and I kept doing that, and so then they finally said once, as a pandemic was kind of waning, al Italia said you either use this ticket or we're sending you $300. It's like I don't want $300. I'd like to come to Rome. So we were on one of, if not the first, one of the first flights into Rome after they reopened and so we landed, we landed kind of into like a medical tent, like we were all taking off the plane. We're swabbed. We sat down by all these people in hazmat gear, but then once we passed through that, Rome was ours and I brought Jane and my wife Susan along with me and we were the only we're the only Americans in Rome, and it was, it was, I mean, God was definitely kind of keeping an eye out for us at that point.
Liam Callanan:I like to do everything that happens on my books. I like to research and kind of make— so at one point one of my characters gets into some medical trouble and needs to visit a hospital, and so I went to that same hospital. I told them I needed a COVID test and they were like confused. So they would send me down the hallway and then I would tell the people at the hallway that I didn't we speak Italian, could they—a nd then I would walk down another hallway and by the time I've been directed through the entire building, like I finally did have to take a COVID test, but I'd seen the whole place. So I was set and then and then there's also scene in the book— I don't know if this will spoil things but I'll mention it any way.
Liam Callanan:So it's a scene in the book where— and Zach can appreciate because this because I know you ran down from Science Hill for the podcast today— in the, in my novel, the realtor character, Claire, is a marathon runner and she wants to get her laps in. So she goes running around St Peter's Square one night because she thinks it'll be safe in the middle of the night. The night before, I think, we left Rome I looked at my wife and I was like I think I have to go run laps around St Peter's Square. It's almost midnight. She said that's crazy. I was like it's in the book, like I need to know if it's really like that, and so I laced up and I ran over there in the middle of the night and, to my astonishment, the Guards and caribou nary and the Swiss guard, they were all like sure like go ahead, run some laps.
Liam Callanan:And so I ran laps around there and then, as I was leaving, I thought I, it was just a trick of my mind, but I was like I was sure that Pope Francis was in the balcony, which it doesn't make any sense because he doesn't, he's not up in that in the papal apartment overnight, or doesn't even, that's not even his normal place to sleep. But I was sure he was there. So I wrote in the book that like the Pope blesses the character, or from a distance, and she's not sure either, and the guards were very entertained by this whole thing. So I went back so, and so, when I presented him a copy, When in Rome, I said you're in the book, and he got a big kick out of that, and so there's a great picture of him smiling, holding the book, and I think I'm trying to point on the page like this is where I said you were. I'm not sure he was— a little bit more English than he had at that point, but so it's, but it is wild to kind of see how all these things kind of come together, but some, but it's all earned, like I, all the places in the book that I said I went and in fact, well, you'll both appreciate this. So there's a scene— I don't know that we'll have to run this by the Yale censors
Liam Callanan:This part of the podcast, but— part of the book takes place during the character's undergraduate years at Yale and she, at one point, goes up on on the roof of the Beinecke library not the external roof, but the glass tower inside. Sure, there's a that roof. The roof of the glass tower actually stops about four to six feet short of the external roof. It's a glass box inside a marble box. And while I was a student at Yale, I convinced the director of the Beinecke that I was writing an article about the rooftops of Yale and to do it right I would really need to go up on the roof of the Beinecke.
Liam Callanan:And he said well, even better than that, you should go on the the inner roof and then kind of look down at the Gutenberg Bible from, you know, eight stories up. And I thought there's no way he's gonna let us do that. And the security guard also seemed to think that. But the director was the director and so he said up you go. So a friend of mine who is a photographer, for we did this for the Yale Daily News magazine, I believe, and we actually did go in the roof of the Beinecke and, kind of like army, crawl to the edge and look down. Got to be one of the most interesting things I've ever done in my life. But that's on the book too, and so that also checks out it's, it's exactly as described.
Zach Moynihan:Well, I now that you mention it I feel like there's a need for a volume two of that article. Where are we now? Where are the rooftops now? And I think I'd love to pursue that. Grace Klise: Some adventures this weekend, yeah.
Liam Callanan:Back in the day it wasn't that it was the Wild West, but there were a lot of unlocked doors. Hmm, like you could just go play, and there were certainly no badges, sure, and then. So then Yale's keys were so ancient at the time like you never really knew what you could open. Like it's definitely your dorm, but there are other doors too, like there's the old observatory in Bingham.
Liam Callanan:I don't know what they've done with that space. But there was an old, but the copper dome was still there. That was very easily accessible. Then we could kind of climb up on the roof of Bingham all the time, which now that I'm a parent of college students, I think that's a terrible idea. So I hope they've locked all the doors. But but when I was here it was all for grabs. The Beinecke, of course we needed, I needed his help to access, because you can't just go up to the top of that, which is a good thing again, that would be wrong. But but yes, so all the things in the book. I'm trying to think at this, I didn't, at the very end of the book there's some things I make up, a couple secret passageways which may or may not exist, but I'll leave it at that.
Zach Moynihan:Off to do some follow-up work on that.
Grace Klise:It's fun to see the mentions of Saint Thomas More and Father Bob in the book as well, so we hope that all who are listening will go out and and get their own copy.
Liam Callanan:When I—and you know, actually probably in advance of just I, and this reminds me I have to write him—w hile I was a student in DL, I was a producer for the for the dramatic and the children's dramatic, and some friends of mine put together called Ma ss Appeal, and they decided to stage it in Saint Thomas More so that's actually that scenes in the book too. Like, because I did go up into the rafters and adjust the lights, which also was incredibly dangerous. I can't believe they let us do that.
Liam Callanan:No fear of heights over here. No, no, no. I used to, when I would give tours of Yale, I would stand up on that, railing around the Gucci sculpture garden. I couldn't stand up on that wall today like I'm. I can't believe they would let me, that they let me do. I was like this is the universe and the Sun, the moon and the stars. Oh to be young again.
Zach Moynihan:I took a tour of the top of Harkness my first year. Yes, beautiful views, but I don't think I could go much higher than that. And I was very thankful for all those guardrails in the close eye of my Head of College keeping keeping watch over us as we surveyed the campus. But you know that there's there's all these secret vantage points that are just waiting, waiting to be accessed, and it's so fun to see the college in a new way, because every day I feel like I'm just sprinting around looking at the same things and it's just, it's just nice to take a moment to look around sometimes and say I didn't, I didn't notice that there, but I'm glad that it's there.
Liam Callanan:And not to be the English professor, but isn't that a wonderful metaphor? Like that's all about what writing and reading and faith is all about. Like giving yourself a different way to see something that you see every day.
Zach Moynihan:I wasn't thinking about that when I was crafting it, but I'll take credit. The best professors, they, they take what you give them and they allow you to see it in a new light.
Grace Klise:Well, we're so grateful for your time this afternoon and your your visit out here to campus and hopefully it is fun reliving all of these, these memories and revisiting some of these places now with your daughters as well. But the last question that we ask all of our guests is where have you been finding God recently?
Liam Callanan:I found God most recently in the, we had a mission, a parish Lenten mission, back at my home church, which is actually part of a family of five churches and we're— it's a family three. There's three holy women, five churches, seven locations. It's the the study of urban Catholicism these days. But we had this wonderful sister come up from Chicago. Sister Julia Walsh, who's the author of a new memoir, called for Love of a Broken Body where she reflects on her own physical healing that led to spiritual healing and she actually helped with When in Rome she was my technical advisor in all things sisterhood. But it was a beautiful, beautiful. She gave a talk for three nights earlier this week and it was absolutely gorgeous and you could really feel God present in that room, not just from what she was saying but how people responding and you could see between the two, between the professing of faith and the receiving of it. They were kind of creating this beautiful new thing between them and that was definitely God was present there.
Grace Klise:Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for sharing some memories from the past and some of some moments from your life's journey that brought you here to Yale and beyond and back to Yale with your family. We're so grateful for your witness and we know that this conversation will will bless and inspire those who are listening to also to take that leap of faith and to continue to look for God in our everyday life. So thanks so much for joining us, Liam.
Liam Callanan:Thanks for having me. This has been a real treat to come back like this and thank you for everything that you're doing for Yale students past and present. It's so glorious to see St Thomas More's mission continuing.
Grace Klise:We love it. All right, I think that's a wrap. If you enjoyed listening today, please share this episode with a friend or relative and leave us a rating and review. The producer of this podcast is Robin McShane, director of communications at STM. Sound mixing and editing are by Ryan McEvoy of Yale broadcast studio, and graphics are by Mary Lou Cadwell of Cadwell Art Direction. We hope this podcast encourages you to seek God's presence in your everyday life. Thanks for listening and know of our prayers.
