Becoming a Catholic Writer

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture

Available on-demand

From a “medieval” Sicilian-Mexican childhood in Los Angeles to the halls of Harvard, acclaimed poet Dana Gioia explores the tension between faith and secular meritocracy. Discover why the former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts advocates for the “vocation of the quitter” in this profound reflection on beauty, poetry, and the Catholic imagination.

Men and women of faith continue to draw on the wisdom, wonder, and beauty of the evergreen Catholic tradition to inform a particular mode of understanding and engaging with the world around them. Inspired by a sacramental vision of reality, the Catholic arts in particular grapple with the mystery and meaning that permeate the created order, giving shape and expression to the transcendent.

At its 24th annual Fall Conference, the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture considered the idea of the Catholic imagination, its enduring and inexhaustible nature, and how it continues to illumine our modern world. With a particular focus on the literary arts, the conference explored unique expressions of the Catholic imagination in more than 150 presentations, performances, and discussions across the disciplines, including philosophy, theology, ethics, law, history, and the natural and social sciences, as well as the creative domains of film, music, theater, and the visual arts.

For 2024’s Fall Conference, the de Nicola Center was pleased to partner with the Biennial Catholic Imagination Conference, which aims to enhance the understanding and appreciation of the richness and variety of contributions by Catholic artists; to explore the critical and theoretical foundations of the Catholic imagination; and to foster community and collaboration among writers and readers who share a knowledge of and respect for the Catholic tradition.

The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture’s 24th Annual Fall Conference, “Ever Ancient, Ever New,” provided a prestigious platform for Dana Gioia’s keynote address. Gioia’s presentation functioned as both a personal memoir and a professional manifesto, positioning the “Catholic imagination” not as an abstract theological concept, but as a lived reality that intersects with the rigors of modern life.

The “Medieval” Origins

Gioia describes his upbringing in a Sicilian-Mexican working-class enclave in Los Angeles as living in a “medieval peasant village.” This environment was characterized by a multi-generational, multilingual existence where the linguistic landscape was deeply symbolic. Gioia noted that by 9:00 a.m. each day, he had moved through three distinct worlds: the Italian of his family (the Old World), the Spanish of his neighborhood (the New World), and the Latin of the Mass (the Next World). This environment shaped a fundamental, metaphysical intuition: that the world is simultaneously physical and spiritual. Before entering the secular academic sphere, Gioia’s reality was populated by “saints, ghosts, and miracles,” establishing a worldview where the living and the dead remained in an unbroken conversation.

The Academic Divide

At 18, Gioia transitioned from his “village” to the “planet” of Stanford and later Harvard. He describes this shift as entering a competitive meritocracy that prioritized individual accomplishment over tribal loyalty. In these elite spaces, he felt like a “street cat who had wandered into the Westminster Kennel Club.” Crucially, he observed a profound “So What?” in the secularization of art. His professors—mostly atheists or agnostics—treated the concept of “beauty” as an academic embarrassment, passing over the term in silence “as if someone had just farted.” Gioia realized that the research university model was training him to write for a narrow elite of a few thousand people, a path that threatened to exclude the very people he came from. He recognized that elite meritocracy often strips away the metaphysical foundations that make literature a human necessity.

The Vocation of the “Quitter”

Recognizing that he was being groomed for a life of narrow academic careerism, Gioia took the unconventional path of “fleeing into a wilderness.” He made the strategic decision to bifurcate his life, separating his economic survival from his artistic vocation. He entered the business world by day to protect the “infant industries” of his soul by night. For seven years, Gioia chose not to publish, risking what friends called “career suicide” to ensure his work remained a genuine conversation between intellect and intuition rather than a pursuit of institutional status. He argues that “quitting” prestigious but soul-crushing paths is often a strategic necessity for an artist’s survival, allowing one to stand on their own ground until the world eventually comes to meet them.

The Artistic Performance

Gioia concluded by bridging the sacred and secular through his poetry, demonstrating how craft can reclaim the “dead space” of modern life. He shared Pity the Beautiful, a reflection on the fleeting nature of secular glamour, and Angel with the Broken Wing. The latter, spoken from the perspective of a forgotten statue, serves as a “perfect emblem for futility” that eventually becomes the “hunger” the faithful feed upon. These works, along with the Psalm to Our Lady—which honors the “mixed and misbegotten” founders of Los Angeles—reveal a poet who has successfully integrated his working-class origins with a high-literary mastery of the sacred.

This biographical journey provides the foundation for several practical, counter-intuitive insights for artists and thinkers navigating the secular professional world.

Distilling high-level discourse into actionable insights is essential for an audience of lifelong learners who seek to integrate intellectual theories into their personal and professional vocations. Dana Gioia’s reflections offer a blueprint for maintaining artistic and spiritual integrity.

Defy Institutional Definitions of Success: Institutions are designed to reward performance, not to recognize the nuances of a calling. Gioia emphasizes that because an institution cannot know the nature of an individual’s vocation—only the individual and God can—one must be prepared to reject the “pomps and promises” of elite meritocracies.
Embrace the “Wilderness” for Clarity: True clarity often requires a period of isolation and a refusal to meet the world on its own terms. By choosing a seven-year hiatus from the literary marketplace, Gioia transformed his craft from a careerist pursuit into a deep, meditative conversation between intellect and intuition.
Prioritize the Language of Beauty: In a culture that treats beauty as an embarrassment or an outdated historical notion, the artist must reclaim it as “truth in beautiful words.” Art should not be an exercise in exclusion but should serve human purposes that resonate across the divides of class and education.
Protect the Vocation Through Separation: Maintaining creative independence often requires a strategic bifurcation of one’s economic and artistic lives. By refusing to rely on the literary establishment for his livelihood, Gioia secured the freedom to write without the pressure of conforming to academic or market-driven trends.
Accept Setbacks as Nourishment: Far from being obstacles, humiliations and defeats are the “instruments of martyrdom” that nourish the artist’s resolve. The willingness to “quit” a prestigious path that stifles the spirit is often the necessary catalyst for a true creative beginning.

“Don’t let an institution define the terms of your success. It doesn’t know the nature of your vocation. Only you and God do.” — Dana Gioia

“I wanted to be a poet… but I did know one thing: I didn’t want to write in a way that excluded the people I came from.” — Dana Gioia

“Poetry [is] things that are true in words that are beautiful.” — Dana Gioia (paraphrasing Dante Alighieri)

“It is the desire of the moth for the star… the wild effort to reach the beauty above inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave.” — Dana Gioia (quoting Edgar Allan Poe)

“I couldn’t have held my own and done myself credit unless I had been a quitter. My infant industries needed the protection of a dead space around them.” — Dana Gioia (quoting Robert Frost)