We sometimes speak of hope as though it were a kind of optimism—a brightness we choose in spite of the world as it is. But what if hope, at its truest, is something else? Something more encompassing—weightier, more substantial? In this conversation, Mary Kenagy Mitchell reflects on the life and work of Luci Shaw, a poet whose faith was neither forced nor sentimental, but attentive and quietly steadfast—with, as it turns out, a bit of spice and even a touch of mischief. Drawing on years of acquaintance, both personal and through her work with Image Journal, Mary offers a portrait of a woman whose presence was marked by patience, attentiveness, and a hope that never felt naïve. Along the way, the conversation explores friendship as vocation, the role of community in artistic life, the discipline of noticing, and the quiet ways faith takes shape in ordinary practices.
Mary Kenagy Mitchell has worked at Image, a quarterly journal of art and writing that engage with faith, since 2000 and now serves as executive editor. Her writing has appeared in Image, Good Letters, The Millions, 3 Quarks Daily, Georgia Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, St Katherine Review, and Bearings Online, and is forthcoming in Copper Nickel. She lives in Seattle.
Radix: Thank you so much for sharing yourself and your memories with us! When I was casting about for people to contact about Luci, your name came up. And of course, Image Journal has a long history with Luci. Maybe, to begin with, when did you first come into contact with Luci, or with her work?
Mary Kenagy Mitchell: I’m so glad to talk about Luci. I have such fond memories of her and such respect. To answer the question, when I was brand new at Image—fresh out of school—she was a speaker at a conference we hosted. I was still learning my job and was fairly discombobulated, and I remember her being very kind and wise.
Before my time at Image, Luci was one of its earliest supporters. The journal was founded in 1989, and she was among the small group who provided the initial funding, and later served as a longtime board member. By the time I arrived, she was simply part of the fabric of Image, its community and ethos. So, as I was getting to know the organization, she was already woven into its life.
Radix: Something I’ve heard from a few people is that Luci had a certain “spiciness” to her personality. You know, like how some people can appear very gentle and soft, but when a moment calls for conviction or action, suddenly they have very clear opinions. I’m curious to get your take.
MKM: I’ve heard that too. People who knew her well would say, “Don’t mistake Luci for simply sweet.” She had a kindly surface, but I’ve been told she could be assertive and even salty when needed, though I didn’t personally get to see that side all that often. I mostly saw a wise, hopeful presence. At a small nonprofit, there’s usually some kind of crisis every year or so—difficult decisions, sometimes even existential questions about whether the organization can continue. In those moments Luci had this beautiful, steadying, hopeful spirit.
Radix: Ok.
MKM: Our board meetings were usually fairly practical, very brass tacks. People didn’t talk overtly about spirituality very often because there was a lot of business to take care of, but at hard moments Luci would be the one to say something like, “Well, I believe God wants Image to exist.” Everyone would pause and think, Yes, that’s a helpful perspective. And it was. It brought a kind of grounding.
So, back to your question, I didn’t see the spicy side much myself, but I liked knowing it was there. On the surface she might seem like a stereotypical nice Christian grandmother, but she was mischievous.
Radix: [Laughter] Ok, Ok. Most interesting. “Mischievous”?
MKM: When I picture Luci in my mind, I imagine her leaning toward you with a kind of conspiratorial smile—as though there was a joke you were both in on.
Radix: Really interesting. For me, one of the only live images I have was when I saw Luci at Regent College in Vancouver: it was when Malcolm Guite gave the Laing Lectures at Regent in 2019. During one of the lectures Luci gave a reading of her poem “Kenosis.” I remember Malcolm telling the audience that Luci Shaw was going to do a reading, and all the heads turning as she descended the stairs and glided to the podium so regally—my goodness, she just had the entire room in a spell. It was really something beautiful to see.
MKM: She knew how to carry herself. She was stylish, distinctive. People always respected her; though I never felt she was intimidating in the way I imagine someone like Judi Dench or Marilynne Robinson might be, you know? There was this blend of warmth and dignity.
Radix: I’ve also read in several places that she cared deeply about relationships—especially nurturing friendships, not only with young writers but with people of all ages. That seems to have been very important to her.
MKM: Yes, absolutely. Friendship is really one of the main themes running through her work—both her poetry and her prose.
I was recently looking back at some of my favorite poems of hers, and so often she is in conversation with someone. With a friend. What you really get in those poems is a sense of long-standing relationships. And I know writers of all ages experienced her that way—someone who took friendship very seriously. And, of course, she wrote a book with Madeleine L’Engle about their friendship. I think Madeleine L’Engle must have been one of her closest friends—someone she knew a long, long time, with whom she shared a deep bond. But Luci had friends of all ages.
Radix: Let me ask something about personality. Sometimes people present themselves in a certain way publicly—there’s a kind of persona—and yet the private reality can be quite different. From the little I knew of Luci, and from what others have said, she certainly had a strong public presence. But did the persona match the person? In other words, was Luci simply Luci?
MKM: I don’t feel like I knew a secret inner Luci that others didn’t. The Luci I experienced seemed consistent with the person others saw, I guess with her public self, you could say, with the self in her books. There was such warmth about her, but she wasn’t an over-sharer. She was simply honest and genuinely interested in other people. If you spent time with her, she was more likely to get you talking about yourself than to talk about herself.
Radix: Interesting.
MKM: It was also a matter of good manners. She wasn’t the sort of person who would dominate a conversation by talking about herself.
Radix: Did you ever work with her editorially, when publishing something that she wrote?
MKM: Image published poems and essays of hers, and I would do the line-editing. With poetry there isn’t usually much involved. You might standardize a few things, but generally what the poet writes is what appears. I would have edited a prose piece or two, though I don’t have strong memories of that. That probably just means she was a clean writer.
Radix: You mentioned earlier that she helped get Image started. I didn’t realize she was involved at that early stage.
MKM: Yes. The founding editors were Greg Wolfe, Suzanne Wolfe, and Harold Fickett, and Luci was one of the founding donors, and in the first issue she’s listed as a member of the publication committee. I was always told that from the beginning she was one of the guiding spirits of the magazine.
The magazine is about thirty-five years old now, and her work appears in the very first issue and again very early on. It’s interesting: I was just looking at a poem of hers in an issue from 1996, almost thirty years ago, and aging is already the subject. I suppose I always thought of her as someone going before us. Perhaps especially as a woman and a mother. I remember Luci holding my son when he was a baby—I only had one child then, and I had brought him along to a board meeting. She held him while he slept in her arms. That baby is a high school sophomore now!
Radix: [Laughter]
MKM: And when my husband and I bought our house, Luci came and blessed it when we moved in.
Radix: Really?
MKM: Oh, yes. She used prayers from the Book of Common Prayer, which is full of beautiful treasures. I’m not Episcopalian, so I hadn’t encountered many of them before. But of course, there are prayers for every part of the house. There’s even one for the bathroom, reflecting on water and cleansing. There are prayers for sleeping, for eating, for hospitality—and Luci went through each room offering a blessing. It was incredibly meaningful. We still live in that house now, nearly twenty years later. I feel very fortunate to have had her in my life.
Radix: That’s really lovely.
Years ago Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking sparked a whole conversation about personality types. People began asking whether someone was more introverted or extroverted. If someone had asked Luci—or asked you about Luci—what do you think she would have said she was?
MKM: That’s a hard question to answer for someone else. People can be socially gifted and still be introverts. Someone might appear very talkative and generous in conversation but still need solitude to recharge. My guess is that Luci would have said she was an introvert. She was certainly socially gifted, but she was also very observant.
Radix: Something a bit different. Since writing and publishing have historically speaking been quite male-dominated fields—though I assume things are somewhat different now than they were in the earlier days—did Luci ever talk about the challenges of being a woman in publishing?
MKM: You know, I don’t remember her speaking about that directly. She was born in the late 1920s, so she would have grown up in a very different world. She lived overseas for a time, and was part of a Christian culture that had defined roles for men and women. She would have been a girl in the 1940s and a young woman in the 1950s. But I think simply by being who she was, she helped change things. We all shape the world in small ways, but Luci did more than most.
I’d think there are now a couple of generations of women writers who can imagine certain ways of being in the world partly because Luci modeled them. At the same time, she was very much of her generation, in the best sense. She was self-contained, cheerful, and positive. But that wasn’t the whole story either. Her writing doesn’t shy away from darkness or pain. I imagine that in her era there may have been some cultural pressure to remain cheerful or optimistic. That quality certainly made her delightful, but her work held far more range than that.
I’ll say this too: when she expressed hope—and she often did—it felt earned. It felt honest.
Radix: That’s interesting. In various interviews I often ask people whether they feel hopeful about the future. Many people respond as though I’m asking if they’re optimistic, and those are different things. Hope isn’t necessarily optimism. Anyway, someone once described Luci to me as “very hopeful,” but said it in a slightly pejorative tone—as if that meant something kind of naive. Yet from the little I’ve read of her work, she never struck me that way.
MKM: When I look at her poems, something I find especially instructive is how they begin. Like many poets, she often started with a concrete image—a sign beside the road, a tree moving through the seasons, something small and ordinary. She has a poem about the floaters that sometimes appear in your vision—you know, those little shapes that drift across your eyesight. She would begin with a humble image like that, and from there the poem could go anywhere. Sometimes it stayed entirely with the image. Sometimes it moved toward something painful or dark. And sometimes it took a transcendent turn. But it never felt predetermined. There was no sense that she felt obligated to find some kind of silver lining. Nor did it feel as though she avoided spiritual themes out of fear of sounding too abstract. It was as if she simply allowed the poem to go where it needed to go. That freedom is part of what made her a strong poet. Her poems contain real surprises.
Radix: So in that sense her writing feels timeless rather than merely timely.
MKM: Yes—timeless and honest.
Readers are skeptical of poetry that tries too hard to be spiritual. Luci’s poems never felt forced in that way. They were free either to take a spiritual turn or not. So when they did, it felt authentic.
Radix: Earlier you mentioned that in board meetings Luci wasn’t afraid to bring a spiritual perspective or impetus into the room—to name God as a source of strength, or to acknowledge God’s presence in a concrete situation. In our time, that kind of language can be dismissed as a crutch. When someone like Luci does it, it can feel grounding—almost permission-giving. You think, If it’s fitting for her to speak this way, it’s fitting for anyone.
Was Luci unique in that? Or do you think she was part of a larger group of writers who are simply comfortable with the spiritual?
MKM: No, I don’t think she was unique in that sense. She did it in a way that was unique to her, but thankfully there isn’t a shortage of writers who are comfortably amphibious—able to move between the very concrete and the transcendent without strain. And it isn’t exactly common, but it’s not rare either. Every writer who does that shows a new way of doing it. And Luci certainly did.
Another word I’d use to describe her poems is patience. She didn’t force a poem into a certain shape. She would stay with an image and let it be itself. She was willing to sit with things, to notice. She was observant. That patience felt special to her.
Radix: On the topic of friendship and community: Malcolm Guite, a great admirer of Luci, spoke about her love for the Inklings. I remember hearing him read something connected to an anniversary project about the Inklings that Luci had written. It made me think about how the Inklings themselves modeled friendship and community.
In some Christian backgrounds—mine included—there can be a strong emphasis on Jesus as our friend, which is good and true. But Jesus isn’t meant to be our only friend. Friendship is meant to be lived out in community: the body of Christ, shared life, shared joys and sorrows. I assume Luci valued that? That she wasn’t a lone wolf, but instead was deeply integrated into community, and grateful for it?
MKM: Yes. I always had that sense too.
I didn’t live near her or go to church with her, but I did have the sense that for her, and for John, their church community mattered. Being part of that life seemed important to who they were and how they lived. And you also see it in her investment in magazines and literary communities like Image, Radix, and also Crux.
I think her love of literary journals matters to who she was. Writers publish books, of course: that’s their bread and butter. Magazines and journals, though, that’s where writers are in conversation. Your poem might literally face someone else’s poem on the page. In that way, it’s a shared space. I think her commitment to journals reflects her conviction that writers should be in conversation with each other.
Probably the largest expression of that for her and John was the Chrysostom Society: this community of Christian writers who met regularly, read each other’s work, encouraged each other, and spent time together. It was a big part of her life, and she cared deeply about it. Those were long friendships—decades and decades.
Radix: Most interesting. I’ve been struck by the sheer length of relational connection in some friends of Luci’s that I know, like Susan Phillips, and the late Laurel Gasque as well; the astounding longevity of their friendships! Friendships going back to when they were quite young—like eight years old! This is rare. I suppose in some cases, it may come naturally to people: you know, like temperament, sociability, and such giftings. But it also seems like something a person would have to cultivate: you invest, you keep showing up, you keep tending that relationship. I think even a saint still has to actively nurture such things as friendship. So the fact that someone develops friendships and keeps them for that long—it speaks to something quite glorious in them as a person.
MKM: I think on some level it’s a skill and a discipline. Some people do it naturally, but I think it also involves conscious choices: I should call that person. I should write that person. And when I do, I should take time to really talk about what’s going on with me and ask what’s going on with them. I say that as someone who isn’t always great at it. I benefit from long friendships partly because I have friends who are good at it. My husband is good at it.
With Luci I imagine it was both: a discipline and a natural part of who she was. People were drawn to her because she had this quality: when she looked at you, you felt she was really seeing you. She was really paying attention. I’ve known only a handful of people with that kind of attentiveness. It draws people because it’s rare. We can all do it, in some measure—but there’s something almost magnetic about people who truly make you feel seen.
Radix: Do you remember whether Luci ever mentioned particular practices she regularly kept? Any spiritual habits or disciplines that stood out to you?
MKM: She wasn’t the sort of person to say things like, “In my prayer time this morning…” or to narrate her spiritual life in that kind of way—though it was very evident in her writing. The Luci I know best is the Luci of her poems. Of course, the speaker in a poem isn’t identical to the person, but the consciousness behind those poems reveals a great deal.
It always seemed clear that her way of moving through the world was shaped by a closeness to God. She saw the world—with all its brokenness—as still fundamentally a good creation of a good God. That way of seeing seemed to stay with her even when she wrote about painful things. So while I don’t know what her daily practices were, I assume there must have been a deep prayer life behind that way of seeing.
Radix: In closing,is there anything in particular that you’d like to leave people with—things that people should remember about Luci?
MKM: Well, one thing: Luci was stylish. That mattered to her. Not in an excessive way, but she cared about color and fabric because she was tactile. She was a knitter, and she could knit without looking at her hands. She would occasionally knit during board meetings—even something fairly complex, like a seed stitch—and listen and talk and never look down. It amazed me, the skill of knitting without looking, but also that she felt perfectly comfortable knitting in a board meeting. That takes a certain confidence and stature. It also reflected her love for the physical world—the textures, colors, smells, and sounds of things. She appreciated those aspects of creation. You mentioned Laurel Gasque earlier—another board member at Image—who was similar in that way: Laurel also loved scarves and big jewelry and those kinds of details.
Luci was a great mentor, with great generosity toward young writers. I miss her. At the same time, though, she’s one of those people you feel certain is in heaven. Because of that, I find it very natural to pray with Luci now.
Radix: That reminds me of something I once read from the book Into the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C. S. Lewis by David C. Downing. That when Charles Williams died, C. S. Lewis said it wasn’t the idea of Williams who had changed in his mind—rather, it was his idea of death that had changed. Williams was just that … full of reality. Of course, death is still painful when someone goes. I haven’t experienced it many times yet, but even small remembrances of them can bring it suddenly to heart and mind. After someone passes, you realize how often you’d share small things with them—little moments, little questions. Suddenly you want to ask them something. And they’re not there. Though, again, speaking of Laurel, I once had an experience shortly after her passing during a late evening walk in the full moon where it felt, in a strange way, as though Laurel was present with me. I don’t mean anything mystical, exactly, but it felt real and quite comforting. So when you mentioned praying with Luci, it reminded me of that.
MKM: That’s really beautiful. I’m Catholic, so maybe that’s why the idea feels pretty natural to me. When someone dies—especially someone you’re confident is with God—it feels natural to ask for their prayers. Luci cared deeply about organizations like Image and Radix. Nonprofits always have to struggle just to keep existing, and I like to think she’s interceding for us. She was always a patron, and now she’s a patron saint.