Greg Wolfe, Editor of Image Magazine, Visits Campus
Written by Chandler Ryd
Several weeks ago, Hillsdale hosted Greg Wolfe, Writer in Residence at Seattle Pacific University and founder of Image literary magazine. Unfortunately, nobody told him he’d missed Charger Homecoming by a short fourteen days.
The visit was, however, something of a personal homecoming for Wolfe, who graduated from the college thirty-four years ago.
Accompanied by his wife Suzanne, Wolfe returned to Hillsdale for a two-day celebration in honor of his work. In an event that included a performance by Americana-folk band Over the Rhine and readings by distinguished writers Andrew Hudgens and Erin McGraw, Wolfe delivered a series of lectures and biographical talks, concluding with a lecture titled “Conservatism and the Arts: A Lover’s Quarrel.”
“At Hillsdale, we talk about liberty a great deal,” Wolfe said in his lecture, “but perhaps not often about the connection between beauty and liberty. If liberty means anything, it has to be a space free of interests and agendas.” He commented on the influence of culture and politics, saying that “beauty has a chance to fly under the radar and pierce us.”
Turning, later, to the birth of his publishing career, Wolfe drew on his time at Hillsdale, where he first began to notice a gap in appeal between the heritage of Western Civilization and the modern public that had inherited it. Concerned and ambitious, Wolfe set out to mend it. His professors suggested that he turn to T.S. Eliot and the literary journals of his day. Soon after, Wolfe found himself on the lowest underground floor of Hillsdale’s Mossey Library, flipping gingerly through journals that had lived out nearly fifty years. “I guess I was dweebish, nerdish, peekish enough to love looking through all those volumes,” he said. “Those professors made me feel like I should be doing the same thing. In that sense, they encouraged me to be entrepreneurial.” His work began to pay off when, during his sophomore year, Wolfe founded The Hillsdale Review, a small campus magazine that carried on five years after his graduation from Hillsdale.
Wolfe told his audience that the Review served as a training ground for Image– “kind of like a pilot TV-show, in a way.” “I formulated a first rule of publishing…you start low, and people will not be impressed. So,” Wolfe concluded, “when we did that pilot issue, it was production values to the max.”
Wolfe conceived of Image following his graduation, when postgraduate life confirmed old fears about a growing disconnect between the public and its heritage. He told his audience, “millions of religious folk and almost all the cultural gatekeepers of the secular world…seemed to agree that contemporary art and literature that seriously engaged the western faith traditions was not possible anymore.” With Image, Wolfe hoped to provide writers with a forum to freely explore tradition and religion. “I’ve discovered,” Wolfe said, “the artists and writers are actually out there . . . who are deeply grappling with the traditions we care about.” Especially in its early years, when it was still gaining traction, Image brought a certain relief to a wearied and scattered community of religious writers. Many, Wolfe said, approached Image with elation, saying, “I thought I was alone.”
“I may be, ironically, preaching to the choir here,” Wolfe said, “but this is my story, and it was started at Hillsdale.” “If I had to sum it up? Sometimes, when you seek, you find.”
Chandler Ryd is a freshman at Hillsdale College who is majoring in English. He is a Collegian Freelancer, creative writer, photographer, filmmaker, and craft root beer enthusiast.