Tod Worner, the Editor in Chief of Evangelization & Culture, had the opportunity to connect with Word on Fire’s Katy Carl about the newest publishing imprint, Luminor. The imprint has just launched with its inaugural title, An Ocean Full of Angels by philosopher and bestselling author Peter Kreeft.
The following interview first appeared in Issue XXIV: “Music” of the Word on Fire Institute’s quarterly journal, Evangelization & Culture.
Tod Worner: Katy, it is a pleasure to talk with you! Let’s begin with a little background. You have written extensively for such outfits as Evangelization & Culture, Windhover, Vita Poetica, Belle Ombre, Across the Margin, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Genealogies of Modernity, St. Louis Magazine, and the National Catholic Register (among others). You have served as editor in chief of the Catholic literary journal Dappled Things. You are the author of several books including As Earth Without Water, Fragile Objects, and Praying the Great O Antiphons: My Soul Magnifies the Lord. If that weren’t enough, you recently completed your MFA in creative writing at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. Now, you have added a new position serving as editor of Word on Fire’s literary imprint, Luminor. Let’s get the most important question asked first: When, Katy, do you sleep?
Katy Carl: These days, as early as possible! I’m trying to become one of those early risers, but for a lifelong night owl, it’s no joke. Flaubert advised young writers to become regular in their habits so that they’ll have the energy to be original in their work. From what I’ve seen, that is pretty decent advice. I’m trying to take it.
TW: Katy, when did you first find yourself drawn to great literature?
KC: Books were always a source of solace and connection for me. I credit my parents for filling our house with beautiful, worthwhile books and bringing me to the library as a regular habit. And I always wrote to entertain myself and amuse other people and record things that happened. I was in high school, though, before I began to notice that I was way more drawn to writing marked by tone and structure, a certain flow and melodiousness, an attention to sound. This I understood to be the literary quality in writing—this, to borrow a phrase from novelist Jonathan Geltner, “absolute music”—and I set about chasing it down and trying to capture it. Shakespeare got hold of me first, then what felt like this freight train of all the finest American novelists at once: Hawthorne and Melville and Morrison and O’Connor and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Henry James and William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. I had the tremendous good fortune of a junior AP English teacher who was tough on the weak spots in my writing but encouraging and specific in her feedback about what was working in it. She absolutely taught me to read the great works through Catholic lenses but so softly that I didn’t realize at the time that was what was happening to me. If she had been overt about that, I might have resisted it. Instead the class theme was “Suffering into Wisdom.” Thoreau became seriously important to me that year and still is; he offers a great secular preparation for understanding and appreciating the monastic vocation, even for someone like me who doesn’t have it.
Luminor seeks to illuminate the Catholic vision of life for serious readers of any faith or none, to release seeds of the Word, and to encourage rich new growth . . .
TW: Flannery O’Connor once explained, “You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”1 It gets me thinking about Jesus telling us to love our neighbors as ourselves but then illustrating it with the parable of the Good Samaritan. What is it about stories that reach into our souls?
KC: Story puts a body on an idea. It makes the abstract concrete. I have read so many works by people whose minds are full of brilliant thought and who can turn a phrase like nobody’s business and yet who aren’t writing literary fiction because they’ve not yet begun to render a world. We need such essayistic works too—Thoreau wasn’t a novelist. But in the parables Our Lord showed that he also valued the need for narrative, complete narrative. Jesus tells stories in such a compressed, poetic manner. He perfectly understood what Aristotle meant about complete dramatic action of a certain magnitude. “He did not need anyone to explain to him what was in the human heart, for he himself understood it well” (see John 2:25). And how reluctant he is to explain the story afterward!
TW: Wiseblood Books, Angelico Press, and Ignatius Press are just a few of the publishing houses offering quality literature with a Catholic sensibility. In your opinion, what is the state of Catholic literature today?
KC: If I don’t mistake the signs, we are at the beginning of a wave of renewal in global literary writing to which Catholics are going to contribute unmistakably, vitally, indispensably. That wave is going to crest sometime in the next five to ten years. We’re in the swell of it now. I am not the only person seeing this or saying something about it, but I can add that I have been praying for it since I was a teenager, and I am almost floored with gratitude that I get to wake up every day and participate in that. To paraphrase a remark O’Connor made in a letter to Caroline Gordon, it almost frightens me to think how good God is to give you a gift and let you have the chance to use it.
TW: Why did Word on Fire decide to launch a literary publishing imprint?
KC: In a culture so polarized, divided, and fragmented as the technofeudalist, symbolic-capitalist English-speaking world, it can be hard to know where to look for literature that is life giving instead of exhausted, demoralizing, and despair ridden. It isn’t as if that literature is not being produced but only that it isn’t being quickly enough discovered and brought to its natural audiences. The test of time sifts things, to be sure. But if market and technological forces are allowed to have their way unopposed, then we will see not discovery or preservation but breakdown. Books will become full of fashionable despondency or raw information or lowest-common-denominator slop. And in mainstream publishing we do see exactly these phenomena. But the human mind and soul can’t thrive in such a river of commercial trash. We have to not only swim against that tide. We have to get up on the riverbank and start cleanup efforts and open nature preserves. There is a desperate need for what Makoto Fujimura, a Christian visual artist and writer, calls culture care. Luminor is not alone in practicing culture care for Catholicity in literature, but we are pitching in with existing efforts. Word on Fire already has a natural audience attuned to matters of faith and ready to appreciate “seeds of the Word” in unexpected places. It’s really a short step from there to renewal. Because we are Catholics, we cannot afford to be less than supporters of the arts.
If it’s anachronistic, then we need more anachronism. If it’s a risk, it’s a necessary one. The moment may have changed, but the human person hasn’t.
TW: I love the name of the imprint: Luminor. How does the name embody the ethos?
KC: Luminor is derived from “luminaria,” festival lanterns used to light a path or adorn a public space. There’s a folk tradition that at Christmastime they welcome the spirit of the Christ child into the home or church where they glow. They might be called farolitos or velitas depending on where you are from. In the American Southwest, the faithful lit bonfires as their luminaria, and they used pinecones as their firestarters because of the high resin content, which burns easily and smells fragrant. Pinecones also release their seeds in the presence of fire. That’s what the golden pinecone logo represents. So Luminor seeks to illuminate the Catholic vision of life for serious readers of any faith or none, to release seeds of the Word, and to encourage rich new growth after a cultural era so marked by loss and destruction.
TW: In a distracted and impatient age of Netflix and Amazon Prime, YouTube and TikTok, is it a risky anachronism to launch Luminor, a publishing house for print literature?
KC: If it’s anachronistic, then we need more anachronism. If it’s a risk, it’s a necessary one. The moment may have changed, but the human person hasn’t. We have to be aware of and responsive to shifts in culture, but we can’t fall into presentism either. When the wind blows hard one way, sailors have to tack in the opposite direction to stay on course. Writers are no different. Humans are no different. We are embodied creatures, and we just don’t respond the same to ink on paper as to pixels on screens. Print culture is a healing remedy for the hum and buzz of digital dissociation. Ask a brain researcher. Ask a psychologist. Ask any pediatrician. I think our great-grandchildren will react to the excesses of our overwired, disembodied milieu with the same kind of visceral horror with which we now react to nineteenth-century unreformed factory working conditions.
TW: Flannery O’Connor offered, “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”2 Katy, how will Luminor’s works speak to an unbelieving reader?
KC: This one quote of O’Connor’s alone has mothered forth a whole body of commentary just within the last ten years. Ask: “Should we shout or should we whisper?” and anyone who has attended a Catholic Imagination Conference knows what that means: Is our best strategy still to get loud and weird? Or should we aim for subtler signals? My editorial answer is, again, O’Connor’s: “You can do whatever you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.”3 I also like the answer given by Karen Ullo at Chrism Press. She says (I’m paraphrasing): Shout maybe sometimes, whisper maybe others, but also, have you thought about trying to sing? That musical quality in literature lives at the core of what speaks to the human in all of us, whatever our convictions. I hope our books leave readers of any faith or none with a sense of inner resonance.
TW: Many of us have been touched by timeless Catholic literature. Dante’s Divine Comedy, Georges Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest, and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood have had seismic impacts on my faith. Between novels and short stories, poetry and literary criticism, is there a particular style or angle that would distinguish Luminor’s works from other publishing houses?
KC: Quite simply, Luminor is looking for literary voices formed by Catholic Christianity that can speak to a wide and diverse audience. That does not necessarily mean protagonists will always be orthodox Catholics—they may very often not. Literature is not an alternative means of delivering catechesis. It’s a mode of observing human action and motivation and coming more clearly to comprehend these complex realities. Ideally, I want Luminor to be publishing work that is good enough in quality for any literary house and that speaks directly to questions that are urgent for faithful Catholics to address.
TW: Can you give us a sneak peek of some of the writers or themes that will inaugurate the Luminor imprint?
KC: As of this writing, we are not yet announcing titles, but readers of E&C can look forward to seeing the winner of Luminor’s inaugural short fiction contest in your pages in early 2026. They can also check our website (wordonfire.org/luminor) for continual updates.
TW: If someone is interested in publishing with Luminor, how might they go about connecting with you?
KC: Please send me your pitches and manuscripts at [email protected]. I love reading new work.
TW: Finally, Katy, what are your hopes for Luminor?
KC: I hope we can refine, extend, and enrich the conversation about literature in Catholic spaces, about Catholic truth in literary spaces, and about goodness, truth, and beauty everywhere.
Thank you, Katy!
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1 Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1962), 96.
2 Flannery O’Connor, Mysteries and Manners, 34.
3 Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 76.