Instress
Instress has been published by the students of Misericordia since December 1966. The word instress was coined by Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Bernadette Waterman Ward describes instress thus: "Instress is an action of the will - a moral action, for good or evil. Instress is assent, to use Newman's term, to an inscape. To call out an inscape is a pleasure, though not one necessarily leading to God; ... But the ability to see and instress inscapes is the imaginative faculty that makes love possible." Instress at Misericordia is therefore an opportunity of the artistic and literary imagination to make possible something - call it love or even grandeur - like the following, from Gerard Manley Hobkins' "God's Grandeur":
...
And for all this, nature spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down thing
Current Issue of Instress
Instress 2024 Digital Flipbook
To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Instress Journal of the Arts 2024
Past Issues
2023 Issue
2019 Issue
2022 Issue
2018 Issue
2021 Issue
2017 Issue
2020 Issue
Instress Archives
Instress has showcased Misericordia students' literary and artistic ouevre since December 1966.
The first issue of Instress offers an editorial statement and explanation of the choice for the title: "...a magazine through which the reader can share the enjoyment of a creation with the author of originator of the creation. More important, the reader may be moved by the experience to create still another work through which others may share with him, and so on -- ad infinitum."
Click on the button below to access the Instress archives through the Misericordia Digital Commons.