Essays
Becoming Jo
What’s In a Name?
Recently, I found a faded blue construction-paper book called The Eagle buried in my mother’s desk. A crayon sketch of our national bird adorned the cover. I assumed it was a school assignment created by one of her six children. But my mother had shed possessions when she moved from Philadelphia back to her native Vermont when my father retired. Gone were most of our magazine collages and the “spiritual bouquets” from Catholic school that listed our Hail Marys to save her soul. Why had she kept this project?
Read More at the Pen Gazette
Bringing Up the Dead
Searching for Marcel Proust, and everything else.
We’d entered without a map. The Père Lachaise cemetery loomed so large in my mind that I was sure I would instinctively find my way to the right grave. To be safe, my husband Bob photographed the faded blue sign at a side entrance that identified the dead alphabetically and by number. I thrilled at the thought of passing the tombs of writers I loved, along with luminaries like Edith Piaf, Amedeo Modigliani, and Frédéric Chopin. But I wasn’t seeking every famous grave. The object of my pilgrimage was Marcel Proust.
Read more at the Penn Gazette
How To Write A Biography
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize
Stand before a 1933 mural in Morelia, Mexico. Wonder at the images of Purépecha women wrapped in rebozos, the fishermen bent over butterfly nets on Lake Pátzcuaro. Marvel that you’ve never seen this painting through twenty years of visiting Michoacán. Register that spine tingling jolt that art delivers when viewer and artist unite across time. Ask the guard for the muralist’s name. Fight chagrin that you assumed it was a man – one of the “Three Greats” – Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros. Listen to the call of the dead as Marion Greenwood’s life overtakes your own.
- Lazuli Literary Group, March 2020
Read more: Lazuli Literary Group
Neurosurgery by Marion Greenwood
Marion Greenwood and Anne Poor: The Women Artists of the WWII Art Program
In 1944, Marion Greenwood held a red-drenched paintbrush to an easel in the operating room of Atlantic City’s Thomas England Hospital. “Neurosurgery” depicts a scalpel-wielding doctor and his assistants bent over a soldier. The eerie green of their medical scrubs forms a nimbus around the painting’s bloody center.
- Hyperallergic, June 2019
Read more: Hyperallergic
Richard Lillash
Ink Addict: Confessions of a Book Keeper
I’m a bibliovore, catholic in my book choices. I use my Kindle frequently, especially for long flights when I panic if deprived of reading material. But let’s be clear: nothing will ever replace the physical book, talisman of memory and identity.
To understand why, let me take you to my childhood home, where eight people lived in too close quarters.
- The Pennsylvania Gazette, July/August 2017
Read more: The Penn Gazette
Marion Greenwood’s mural of Tennessee musical history
The Lives of Others: A Reconsideration of Biography
“My God, how does one write a Biography?” Virginia Woolf asked as she grappled with shaping the life of painter and art critic Roger Fry. Hermione Lee opened her biography of Woolf with the same question, one any biographer might ask. The exasperated tone speaks to the audacity of the task. Beyond the seeming impossibility of apprehending another’s life, how does one write it?
- The Writer’s Chronicle, September/October 2017
Read more: At The Writers Chronicle
Marion Greenwood
Here’s a link to an interview (in Spanish) with Mexico City writer Michael Schuessler: http://cultura.nexos.com.mx/?p=12461
Greenwood’s mural in the
Abelardo Rodriguez Market, Mexico City
My father in Germany 1952
Unimaginable Riches
A hermetic seal enclosed my childhood in an Irish and Italian Catholic neighborhood near Philadelphia. But for a smattering of grandmothers who spoke their native Italian, English dominated. Cultural assimilation prevailed. Uniform-clad children streamed daily to St. Dorothy’s School to sit in straight-backed chairs and diagram sentences, then to our street to play kickball. My father applauded both realms: the neighborhood teeming with children, and the nuns’ focus on grammar. He was devoted to family, home, crossword puzzles, and all things language-related.
Oregon Humanities, Summer 2011
Read more: Unimaginable Riches
Weave and Mend
“Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds
from all the lost collections.”
— “A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far”
Adrienne Rich
On a fine June day in 1995, Ruth Carr, an Irish poet and editor, picked me up at the Belfast bus terminal. As she patiently cradled her seven-month old baby, Amy, I argued with the counter clerk about where to store my bag. Not in the station, he assured me, because “Ye just don’t know what’s in a wee bag, now do ye?” My duffel finally landed across the street at the Europa, the most frequently bombed hotel in Europe.
Read more: Weave and Mend
Oregon: A Contrary Unity
They named themselves as they stood, one by one, survivors of nations within our state: Burns Paiute, Coquille, Klamath, the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua, and five separate groups of Confederated Tribes – Grand Ronde; Warm Springs; Siletz; Umatilla; and Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw. Beaded regalia shimmered under the lights of the Portland Convention Center, newly opened in 1990. Smatterings of Sahaptin and Chinook mingled with English as Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes processed through the hall. Their presence refuted the 1950’s attempt to assimilate American Indians by terminating their tribal status. Of the 106 tribes and bands terminated nationally, 62 had been native to Oregon. They called themselves “The First Oregonians.”
– These United States, 2002
Clotheslines: A Nostalgic Journey
“Laundry is a rebirth, a new beginning,” sings one laundress in Roberta Cantow’s documentary film, “Clotheslines.” “There is an art to hanging laundry,” chants another, ascending to her Brooklyn rooftop. In the footage that follows, women pound clothes on rocks in the Ganges. Parka-clad Inuits bend over washboards. Clotheslines layer a Hong Kong sky. I was thirty years old, studying for a Ph.D. in Folklore when I first saw this film. Friends didn’t understand why I was spending the plentiful 1980′s nearly penniless … Now I could explain. It all came back to laundry …”
– Lavanderia: A Load of Women, Wash, and Words, 2009
Hunger
“So much alike is our historical
And spiritual pattern, a heap
Of stones anywhere is consecrated
By love’s terrible need.”
– Patrick Kavanagh, “Lough Derg: A Poem”
I paced the Derry bus terminal on a balmy July day. Beach-bound passengers surrounded me, faces blistered by the hottest summer sun in a century, spirits soothed by the dawning of peace after twenty-five years. I envied their light spirits. Slave to some inner voice, I’d awakened at 5 a.m., determined to get to Lough Derg, the legendary pilgrimage site on the border of Northern Ireland and the Republic.
– New Letters Essay Award, 1997
The Calling
“You would know when the call came. Father McGuire stood in front of the class, ample body swaying side to side, brow knit in concentration. His hand covered his heart, then touched his ear. “You’ll have to listen hard, inside and out.” I focused on the white hairs edging Father’s ears, on the blue eyes shining in his craggy face. A shiver snaked through my body. Mystery surrounded the summons to a vocation: How would you recognize your calling? Some knowledge cannot be stated, only pointed to. A vocation yoked some inner awareness to an outer path, an umbilicus that sought growth rather than severance. ”
– Breaking Free: Women of Spirit at Midlife and Beyond, 200
Magical Thinking
Two young men linger in the driveway of Eva Castellanoz’s house in Nyssa, Oregon on a fine June day. People waiting to be healed—a scene I’ve witnessed many times over the two decades that I’ve known Eva. The men, handsome young Mexicans, came from a migrant camp in Idaho. One man’s jeans bag at the crotch; his baseball cap completes the urban look. The other, unsmiling under a thick mustache, sports tighter jeans and a broad-brimmed cowboy hat. Like many of Eva’s clients, they have no appointment and know about her work through word-of-mouth.
– Anthropology and Humanism, June 2010
Quiet Hour
Rule # 1
No talking whatsoever for the hour between noon and one. Never forget this foundational rule for Quiet Hour. Let time suspend on sticky, sultry summer afternoons in two boxlike brick houses on Flintlock Road, in Pilgrim Gardens, outside Philadelphia, for two intertwined Catholic families. Picture a pair of mothers, circa 1968. Yours wears plaid Bermuda shorts and Bobbie socks or perhaps a Hawaiian muumuu that is all the rage; her best friend, Mary Mealing, sports white shorts and sleeveless shell. Imagine their eagerness for time alone as their combined thirteen children trudge off to their rooms.
– Portland Magazine, December 2003
Between the Lines
Morning light filled the kitchen window the August dawn that I turned the final page of my cloth-bound library book. I hadn’t wanted the story to end. By habit, I went back to the first line, not knowing that “All happy families are alike …” was among the most famous in literature. But it was the small print on the title page of Anna Karenina that stopped me. For the first time, I noticed “translated by Constance Garnett.” …
– Oregon English Journal, Summer 2012
Waitress
In the fall of 1969, I wore a white polyester uniform, hemmed modestly at the knee, and a black apron. My sturdy white shoes seemed better suited for a 65-year-old woman than a fifteen-year-old girl. My sister, Pat, two years older and identically dressed, already knew the ropes at the Dolly Madison Ice Cream Parlor. She showed me which busboys to avoid; how to sneak ice cream from the walk-in freezer; how to write a “dupe”; and how to spot the “sad men” who came for dinner each night.
– Oregon Humanities, Fall 2007
Through Dreams and Shadows
I looked out from my kitchen window as the steel hulls of crab boats glided like floating pyramids into the Kodiak boat harbor. Eleven p.m. and still daylight. Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour” played in my mind. “Between the dark and the daylight, when the night is beginning to lower …” But no time felt “between” here. There was light. Or deep darkness.
– The Stories That Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write About the West, 1995