A friend sent me an email last Friday telling me about Treason’s win of the gold medal in religious fiction in the Independent Publishers Annual Book Awards (mentioned in Michael Lichens’ post yesterday). Within seconds, I emailed three people: the publisher, Sophia Institute Press, who took a chance in publishing this novel—it’s not their sort of thing; Joseph Pearce, who is very probably the busiest person I’ve ever met, but who took the time to support me in my efforts to get the novel published and even volunteered to write the introduction; and Ellen Hrkach, an amazing woman, writer, editor, publisher, president of the Catholic Writers Guild, wife and mother, and heaven-knows-what-else, who read the book, loved it, contacted the publisher and set about doing all she could to promote a book she had nothing to do with. One of the things she managed was to get it entered as one of the 5,500 entries in the competition. Let me put this differently: They had no stake in Treason’s success or failure. Why did they do it?

The answer to that question is also the answer to why the Catholic literary revival is happening. It has nothing to do with writers. I had nothing to do with Treason’s win—I didn’t even have anything to do with its publication, a subject about which I know less than nothing, and I couldn’t market my way out of a paper bag, even if my life depended on it. So, while the literary blogs talk about a revival of Catholic literature in terms of writers or their works, here are three examples of those who will actually accomplish that long hoped-for event. And here are a few others; Dappled Things, a Catholic literary print magazine; new risk-taking Catholic publishers Tuscany Press and Wise Blood; Pilgrim Journal, an excellent online Catholic quarterly. And there are many others. The freight may be the writer’s work, but these are the engines that actually move that train.

Treason is available everywhere online, including Canada and the UK, I think. Also, reviews abound everywhere—one has only to google—but the two that are the most unbiased, comprehensive, and authoritative are Father Peter Milward’s in StAR and Michael Morow’s in The Wanderer.