Eileen Favorite

Reading Hilton Als's review of Brenda Shaughnessy's new poetry collection, Our Andromeda, left me full of shock and wonder.  The collection details the birth of her son, Cal, after a difficult labor that left the infant with multiple disabilities.  In the middle of National Poetry Month, I finally purchased the book and read it in the kitchen, gobbling up poems between boiling pots of water, setting the table, wiping down counters, and ordering my children to help with these tasks.  One foot balanced on my thigh, I stirred a pot, laughing and crying as I read the breathtaking/heart-breaking poems.  

I met Brenda in 1995, when we both attended a poetry conference led by Billy Collins in Galway, Ireland.  She was a graduate student at Columbia, I was a newlywed.  I'd scrimped to get there.  Brenda and I connected over pints of Guinness, salmon plates, and hikes through the Burren (I published a poem about it in Spoon River Quarterly--Brenda's the one with the "Japanese eyes"). On a rocky ferry ride to the Aran Islands, we stood out on the deck, and Brenda and another woman, Elizabeth, (pictured here with Billy) sang "Closer to Fine" by The Indigo Girls  so beautifully that a school of dolphins started trailing our boat. I swear to God. We wore rain ponchos and braved the mist.

Though we fell out of touch after the trip, I always had fond memories of our time there, and I knew exactly what she meant when I read this poem:  "Billy Collins, have you any idea how important you were to my twenty-five-year-old self? You weren't Poet Laureate yet, You were just a teacher I had in Ireland.  You were expansive and you believed in me."

In the title poem, "Our Andromeda," Brenda imagines life with Cal in another constellation, where he'll "get the chance to walk without pain," and where all the "doctors are whole-organism empaths."  She blames herself for his condition, "I wasn't careful enough" and "I joined that cult of expectant mothers who felt ourselves too delicate and optimistic to entertain the notion... of something going wrong with the birth of my child."  She indicts her friends who failed to provide the support her family needed, "Why on earth would it be the closest, dearest friends to shit the most toxically on a sad new family struggling to find blessing where blessings were? I wondered." Yet in the final stanzas she returns to hope, exultant, stating that Cal is a "joyful boy who may never talk who ruthlessly teaches the teacher the truth about where children really live." He's a "tough, funny beauty of a boy who holds my hand and blinks his eyes until I'm excruciated, mad with love."  She says, "I cannot beat my own heart anymore.  Cal, shall we stay? Oh let's stay.  We've only just arrived here, rightly, whirling and weeping, freely, breathing, brightly born."

Brenda, thanks for sharing your story, your truth, and your inimitable way with words. 

I'm launching this new writing venture for many reasons.  The primary one is that I love to teach stories and writing to adults.  Yes, of course, I love my undergraduate students as well, but there's a real freedom in teaching people who've chosen to take a class--there's somehow more risk and adventure at hand, when people decide to add a new activity to their lives. I hope to attract people who can't put away some nagging creative inspiration and perhaps to even grow a community.  So often my students are only with me for 16 weeks, and then it's over.  I relish the chance to develop longer relationships with student-writers. 

Generative exercises are an essential component of a fiction workshop. In beginners’ workshops, I include in-class exercises, to help launch a student’s work, which can later be refined and edited and then brought forward for class discussion. Exercises also have the effect of leveling the playing field and diminishing students’ competitive impulses or fears, because no one student ever succeeds or fails at every exercise. I stress revision as the most crucial step in the writing process. Click here for details!

Every St. Patrick's Day when I was at St. Jude the Apostle school, we'd adorn our plaid Catholic school jumpers with Kiss-Me-I'm-Irish buttons, shamrocks fashioned from green pipe cleaners, Erin Go Braugh pins.  We'd tie up our pigtails or weave our braids with green ribbons. We'd pull up our kelly-green knee socks to ward off the March wind. Sometimes on Fridays during Lent, we'd score the bonanza:  Filet-O-Fish sandwiches and Shamrock Shakes from McDonald's.

Years later, I would wonder, what does any of this have to do with St. Patrick or with Ireland? 

Not much. But we had a lot of fun.

St. Patrick was captured as a young Briton (resident of present-day England) by marauding Irishmen and sold into slavery to a shepherd.  He endured terrible hardship tending sheep on those lonely Irish hills--hunger, cold, loneliness. One day he heard a voice telling him to go forth, to escape his harsh life.  He headed toward the sea, and after days of travel he found a ship heading back home and was snuck on board by some friendly sailors.  Back in Briton, he didn't fit in (his Latin was poor; he was rough around the edges).  He returned to Ireland later after becoming a priest, to convert the Celts to Christianity in what might be called a Velvet Revolution.  Not a drop of blood was shed in this conversion act.

So what does this have to do with green beer?  Or a river dyed green?  Not much. But there's something to it...

My maternal grandparents came from County Cork in the early 1900s.  They both came from huge families of 10+ children, and neither owned the land their families farmed.  My grandmother would often shake her fist and curse, "The 'lord"--short for landlord, not God above, whom she honored by attending daily Mass at St. Rita's, even after she'd been mugged on the street. My grandparents owned a two-flat in Woodlawn, and my grandmother worked in the employee cafeteria at Marshall Field's after her husband died suddenly in 1943.  My grandmother was only 17 when she came over.  She died at 95.  So most of her life was lived in Chicago. What the Irish immigrants to America forged was an identity that incorporated something Irish, something American.  They never lost sight of their roots, and yet the way their ethnicity was expressed morphed into something different.  Celebrating St. Patrick's Day was a way to distinguish themselves from the Italians, Poles, Greeks, etc.--all the other dominant ethnic groups in the major U.S. cities.  To remember the Old World in a New World fasion.

So I'll be celebrating St. Patrick's Day  with my large extended family at the North Side Irish Parade, and we'll drink Bailey's and eat mint brownies and my daughters will wave Irish flags and jig.  For however little this celebration may have to do with the saint himself or even the country of Ireland, it means something to us as Irish Americans, honoring our ancestors and our survival, handing down a love of poetry, song, and dance. 

I just completed a two-week residency at the Roger Brown and George Veronda home and studio in New Buffalo.  What a break after the holiday hoopla to settle into this quiet place, surrounded by nature, and have a luxurious studio space to sit and take a wider view of my novel-in-progress.  Since I hadn't written (according to my log) since October 16, it's no wonder I felt as if I would never be done with this book.  In fact, once I settled into my desk and contemplated the sunlight on the snow outside, I discovered that I'm much closer to the end than I'd realized. The studio has two walls of floor-to-ceiling windows and a big wall for tacking up whatever you want.  (The visual artists use it for painting, sculpture, etc.).  My current concern has been about the structure of the book.  Serendipitously, I grabbed Madison Smartt Bell's anthology, Narrative Design, on my way out the door.  The drawings of Freitag triangles (eek!) inspired me to roll out a big sheet of artist paper in the studio and plot out the novel. There are two parallel story lines: one when the protagonist, Maggie Flynn, is twenty; one when she's 45.  I've been struggling to visualize how/when/where the story lines should intersect.  So I grabbed a sharpie and drew a crazy narrative line, which looked a bit like a bunny-level ski slope.  The whole drawing got messier as the week went by, but it helped me to get the big picture.  When I write, it's always with short, at best, 2-hour intervals, so I'm constantly working on a postage-stamp sized moment in the book.  This luxurious time let me see that there were thematic links between the narratives that emerged in an unplanned way.

I thank my employer, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for granting me this respite. What's terrific about this experience, for me as the mother of small children, is that I'm allowed to bring my family along.  Since I've had children, I've had to forego residencies at other artists colonies because my children were too young for me to leave them for several weeks.  So here they are, hanging out (Martin's the photographer), while I was in the studio...writing away. We all benefited from being surrounded by Roger and George's wonderful art collections, watching flocks of geese fly over the river, and looking for deer tracks in the snow.  We took walks to the lakefront and watched Lassie Come Home.

I just finished teaching a humanities seminar on four novels by these three English writers. I called the course, The Marriage Plot, and we read Austen's Northanger Abbey and Emma; Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre; and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. My copies of the novels were so old (Wuthering Heights dated from my high school Honors English class) that pages dropped from the binding as I turned them, and not a cover withstood the semester's abuse. How intriguing to reread these classics and to view them as a writer with a bit more of the long view.  Austen gently guides her heroines to happy endings (marriage), but the Brontës made those ladies and gents suffer, suffer, suffer. 

Quick Takes 

In Northanger Abbey, a satire of the Gothic novel, the heroine Catherine Morland's naïveté wore a bit thin.  I've become fatigued by narration that involves both the author and I looking down on the protagonist. (Too much of this in contemporary American fiction, but that's another subject.)

With Emma, Austen said that she was going to write a character whom "no one but myself will much like."  I like that she took on the unlikable-character constraint.  A flawed character is an interesting character.  My issue is with the perfect hero, Mr. Knightley, who's very name is like a hammer blow to the skull.  Cue the Prince Charming music.  My perfect-hero gripe applies to Henry in Northanger Abbey as well. Did Austen see women as more naïve, proud, and vain than men? Not always. These guys made me jones for Mr. Darcy. 

Rereading Jane Eyre inspired this woeful cry, "Why didn't  I have Jane Eyre appear in The Heroines?"  When I sold my novel, my Scribner editor asked if I would sliver an Austen character into the manuscript.  Alas, I told her, they don't fit my constraints: the heroines have to be in dire straits in order to warrant a stay at the Prairie Homestead. Jane Eyre would have figured in perfectly.  I adored the trouble and pain that Charlotte Brontë made her character endure.  Rock on, Rochester, you flawed but sexy love interest.  Their flirtatious dialogue, full of gentle ribbing, was so so fresh. My new all-time favorite novel.

Reading about the dysfunctional antics of the Earnshaws in Wuthering Heights felt like watching a reality show set in Appalachia, complete with drunken sots, religious zealots, and spiteful feuding. Yet the text is written with the most elevated language and has awesome ghost scenes. I'm not much of a horror or fantasy reader, but I loved how Emily Brontë walked that supernatural fine line, making those elements just believable enough.  Did I actually tell my students that Heathcliff reminded me of the guy in "Creep" by Radiohead?  Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff played a big part in my novel, The Heroines, so I'm ever indebted to Emily Brontë's public-domain, posthumous gift of her characters for my humble appropriation. 

Two months after my oldest daughter was born in late November 2006, my mother-in-law's breast cancer reappeared after five years of remission.  She passed away in March 2008.  By August of 2008, my father's prostate cancer was no longer responding to treatment. He passed away in March 2009.  Three months after my father died, I found myself pregant again.

What does any of this have to do with this DIY Publicity course I'll be teaching at Story Studio?  In the midst of all that birth and death, my novel, The Heroines, was published in January 2008.  By September, the market crashed, book stores closed, magazines and newspapers folded, publishers went bankrupt, and when my paperback was released in February 2009 (a month before my father died), my Scribner publicist couldn't get me more than one reading to promote the book.  I didn't think much about it at the moment. I was absorbed with caring for my dying father, my devoted mother, and a two-year-old. 

By August of 2011, six months after my second daughter was born, I started to come up for air.  I looked around me.  The whole world of publishing had changed.  I hated my website.  I never posted on it.  I'd started a second novel.  When would I finish it,  and if I did, who would buy it?  I joined a women's business group in my neighborhood.  I decided I needed help, so I advertised for an intern through DePaul University.  I found Andrea Pelose, and for the last fifteen months, we've been working to build a web presence. Here's a link to an interview with Claire Glass, where Andrea and I discuss the sometimes dovetailing, sometimes contradictory perspectives of a marketing professional and an author. I've learned a tremendous amount during this journey with Andrea, and I'm thrilled to share a bit of our knowledge with other writers.  I wish my dad were here, my CPA and mentor, to discuss this enterprise, which I know he would love for its creativity and community outreach.

I recently was asked by local poet Yvonne Zipter to contribute a poem to a gumball machine of poetry.  I thought this such a cool idea, so I responded yes, yes, yes.  The initiative began in the 45th ward as an effort to bring art to the area's empty storefronts, and a number of murals have gone up around Cicero and Milwaukee.  City Newsstand is the hosting site for the first gumball machine. Ms. Zipter would love for these gumball machines to take off around the city (sort of like the cow parade of 1999). If anybody has any funding ideas, contact me. It might also be cool to get some artists to design funky versions of the gumball machines.   

I recently attended an event at Women and Children First, featuring Susan Hahn reading from her first novel, The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter, published by Fifth Star Press.  I was delighted to hold the book, which has a gorgeous cover, with a photograph by Vivian Maier, the celebrated nanny who took thousands of photographs and hid them in storage lockers. Hats off to Ian Morris & Company at the press, who've shown that beautiful, innovative books can be printed in hardcover. With the glut of self-published books and self-proclaimed editors of vanity presses, it's refreshing to see people with genuine editorial experience launching a press with a distinctive vision: Chicago history and voices. (Morris worked for years at Triquarterly.)

Now I must sit back and read this wild tale, narrated from the Other Side and glittering with poetry!

This beautiful essay from Rushdie's memoir details the early days of his life in hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (essentially, a death sentence) against Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses.  Rushdie chooses in this essay to write about himself in the third-person.  By not using the "I" to describe his life, he gains an objectivity regarding the experience that adds to its power.  Perhaps he believed that owning the experience through the "I" might tilt the piece toward self-pity (though our sympathy for him is certainly well deserved). He elucidates how the meaning of his work was twisted for political gain, by those who probably never even read it.  He describes the valiant police officers whose task it was to guard him, and a harrowing evening when he could not locate his son. Tolerance and freedom of expression.  Stand up for them!