As you can see on amazon.com, there are blurbs by my fellow Canadians Michael Coren (Why Catholics are Right) and Richard Greene (Edith Sitwell: Avante Garde Poet, British Genius), by rising star Fiorella Maria Nash and elder statesman Piers Paul Read.
Piers Paul Read, people. I really hoped Ignatius would send him my book and they did.
Meanwhile, I am terribly pleased by all the blurbs, and I am thinking, "If they all came to dinner, what an amazing dinner party that would be!"
Once again, I feel I should mention that this is going to be a controversial book and not okay for Sunday School. Brilliant for Book Club and Theology on Tap and anywhere brainy young Catholic adults congregate to chatter, but not for les petits enfants.
Update: Here's a great article by Piers Paul Read about being a Catholic author. His Death of a Pope was published by Ignatius Press because it was deemed "too Catholic" by his agent for British publishers.
That said, I don't want any of you Catholic artists getting bogged down with "I'll never get anywhere because I'm a Catholic"-type thinking. That is not true. You just have to keep doing your thing and trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing again. Basically, you cannot give up because, unlike falling in love and getting married, learning your craft and getting it out there is something that does indeed depend entirely on you.
Oh, and you must be careful not to write Catholic propaganda. I know it is a terrific temptation, but really you must write as though everybody is Catholic and you don't need to convert anyone. We anglophones are at a disadvantage because we are a minority. Imagine how nice it would be to be a Polish writer (or painter, et alia): they just assume 90% of their readers are Catholics, so there is no temptation to explain or to make their church-going characters all so incredibly good.
