A Tease For My First Book

Here I will post a brief sample to the foreword I am writing for my book I hope to publish with Leonine Publishing. I am calling it "Writings For The Sacred Mind",

Samuel Johnson once wrote “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” I am a blockhead for sure. My goal is not to write for personal financial gain, or wealth or even just to make ends meat (though the last is a peripheral reason to do so). I write these poems for the Glory of God and to give whoever read these a sense of the sacred, and to give them a longing for truth and beauty. Yes indeed, I write these poems just because I love to write and because it gives me fulfilment as a creative personality type. I’ve always been the kind of creator who does not believe  at all in “art for art’s sake” all art must and does have a purpose. Music without purpose is just pretty noise, movies without purpose is just a bland moving picture, and writing without purpose is just scribbles of gibberish. Any Byzantine Icon exudes beauty not for its own sake but for the glory of God, The Holy Trinity which we traditionally minded Catholics believe overflows into God’s creation which is a vestige of God himself. Art is both subjective and objective. The subjective comes in your individual existential experience as a reader, listener, or observer, the objective comes when you can sense the given work of art pointing to the beauty of God. A great example of this is when someone who has never been to a Shakespeare play, goes to one and is struck emotionally with words Shakespeare wrote that the actor portrays so wonderfully, the feel like Shakespeare is talking about them and they are so profoundly moved, they can not voice how they truly feel.  My writing feels explicitly Catholic that is because it is a result of deep personal experience I have had with God and I feel the need to express that experience through art.

My approach to art may seem old fashioned to a lot of people, though I feel, has always remained the approach for most religiously minded artists. I can’t predict the kind of feelings I will to provoke in people, all I can do is get this message out there so people can see into the mind of Nate Nobile the writer and poet and that’s all this really can hope to do. I do not believe in simply catering to what readers want from me as a writer.