Alice McDermott began her reading by, well, telling us why she was reading the passages she was reading. She explained that she liked to wait until the last minute to decide what to read, to be inspired by some fact of the day or something the audience says. As a fiction writer she has an “eternal struggle to surprise [herself];” after all, they’re generally the ones doing the surprising.

The first thing she read was not from one of her published novels but was something “still under-construction.” It was a scene describing the main character’s earliest memory–she mentioned that she was fascinated with earliest memories because they were almost always fictionalized, either mostly or entirety–which was of being a baby pushed in a carriage. Though usually when writers try to write from the POV of young, young children, it becomes rather one-dimensional and dull, McDermott managed to create believable urgency in the mind of this baby. The baby wasn’t just a baby, but a character in his own right; he had a personality. The passage ended with him looking over at another carriage, seeing a baby girl, and thinking “there’s the girl I’ll marry.”

The next two things she read were from her last novel, Someone. The first was another first memory, this time from the main character, Marie waiting for her father to come home and the various rituals of her home life. This included the wonderful line: “I sometimes wonder if all the faith and all the fancy, all the fear, the speculation, all the wild imaginings that go into the study of heaven and hell, don’t shortchange, after all, that other, earlier uncertainty: the darkness before the slow coming to awareness of the first light.” The second passage was much later in Marie’s life and described the birth of her first child and all the horror and pain that went with it. Throughout this section, the most striking thing to me was how well the character’s attitude and identity were maintained. The story didn’t feel like McDermott asked hersled “what would a person do in this situation?”, but “what would Marie do?”

There was a brief Q&A section after the reading. During this, a question was raised about how many critics have described this book as about an “unremarkable life.” As someone who has read the book, this is fair criticism–there is nothing remarkable about Marie, she is nothing more than an ordinary Irish girl growing up in Brooklyn. There is no real plot, no great twists and turns, no excitement boiling underneath the surface, there is only Marie. In response to this question, McDermott talked about how it would be easy to say something like “but is any of us really ordinary” to these critics, but she believes that yes, most of us are just ordinary. And that’s the kind of book she was writing. There are numerous glimpses in the book of lives more interesting than Marie, and according to McDermott, it was tempting to let one of these characters take over, to let things actually happen in the book–but she resisted and the novel remains the story of single, ordinary girl.

If this has sparked your interest, Alice McDermott will be having a conversation with Professor Eileen Pollack, this Thursday at 5:30 in the UMMA auditorium. McDermott says many interesting things about writing and gives advice for young writers, so if that sounds interesting, be sure to be there!

With awesome cheese and bread from White Lotus Farms and 3 spectacular poets, Monday evening’s Poetry Series at Literati was a great start to the week! And a great tribute to the celebration of April as National Poetry Month.

While nibbling on the cheese that Sarah Messer brought from White Lotus Farms (where she works), Messer and Kidder Smith, her co-author, began reading from their book Having Once Paused: Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu (1394-1481). Similar to their collaboration on the book, Smith read the poems first in Chinese and Sarah then read the final poetic English version. Smith explained before reading, in his quiet but resonating voice, that Master Ikkyu was a Japanese monk but that during this period all really well educated Japanese monks wrote poems in Chinese. It was fascinating to hear him read the poem and then immediately to get to hear the English. Even for me, who doesn’t understand the language in which the poem was written, there is something inspiring by hearing it how it was originally meant to be heard.

Sarah Messer then read some of her work on her own. She actually started with a poem that was inspired by her work with Kidder Smith. One night she mistranslated a line they were working on and it inspired her poem “Today.” One of my favorites of the evening, and one she had shared in the poetry class I take with her, is her poem “My life as a Puritan Bedpost.” My favorite lines are in the ending: “Now all the Puritans have died. But their ghosts keep trying/ to lie down again and again inside me.” Read the rest of the poem HERE, from when it was published in the Michigan Quarterly Review.

Suzanne Wise, the other featured reader of the evening, read from her new manuscript. It is a book length love letter to Ray Johnson. Ray Johnson was an artist who worked in mail art. Wise introduced us to some insights as to how he worked and some of his quirks that she used to spark her poems, which was REALLY helpful because I knew nothing about him before Monday. Ray Johnson would often send collages to famous artists (usually friends of his) and have them add to it before sending the work back. He often refused to show his work and made it difficult for admiring collectors to obtain his art. He was the founder of the New York Correspondence School. Wise’s poetry, in this extended letter form, is very sound conscious; her lines are full of assonance, alliteration, and slant rhymes. It was great to listen to and her voice has such a clear quality to it that her reading was very beautiful. Along with its beauty there were also humorous and entertaining moments by her personification of death, lines like “yesterays,” or vivid lines such as “slamming into a wall…we are a wallflower.” I can’t wait to see the whole manuscript!

As April is National Poetry Month, Literati and other local bookstores will be hosting more amazing events that my fellow poets and I don’t want to miss out on. Keep a look out!