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Hispanic Authors-Artists Part of Omaha Lit Fest Experience
Hispanic Authors-Artists Part of Omaha Lit Fest Experience
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally published in El Perico (el-pericp.com)
The September 10-11, 2010 (downtown) Omaha Lit Fest gathers authors and artists to investigate the theme Curiouser & Curiouser: The Book in Flux.
Some guests, like University of Nebraska-Lincoln Ph.D. candidate Sarah Chavez, are Hispanic, Others, like first-time festival panelist Peter Kuper of Manhattan, New York, are not, but explore Hispanic themes.
Nebraska native Belinda Acosta, the Latina author of two Quinceanera Club novels, was a panelist last year and the Austin, Texas resident would like to come back again.
Chavez, a Fresno, Calif. native poet, has completed a chapbook she’s expanding into a full-length volume. This will be her first Omaha Lit Fest. She read some of her original work at an August 26 preview. She looks forward to the fest, saying she’s “impressed” by the supportive literary community here and by the diversity and quality of writers presenting at area lit events.
In her poetry Chavez explores the working class character of Fresno. She also explores borders and boundaries of identity. Her father is a first generation Mexican-American migrant worker. As a girl she joined her father laboring in the fields. Her Irish-American mother comes from upper middle class roots.
Chavez said by phone, “I was always sort of aware of this transferring back and forth between cultures. My parents divorced fairly early on, so I was always going back and forth, crossing like city and cultural borders, learning you act like this in this environment but then you can act like this in this other environment.
“So I was always aware of this mobility and the tenuous nature of environment. I was also aware of being, like my sister and I joke, ‘half breeds.’ Because of that mix we’re able to pass in different areas. I go to minority programs and have cultural cachet as a Mexican there but then people don’t automatically assume I am of that heritage. I don’t quite fit, I don’t look like this but I don’t feel like this other group.”
She considers different cultural expectations attending Latinas or African-American women and white women. She examines what it means for women of color to move away from traditional domestic duties to inhabit professional and academic roles.
Political cartoonist and illustrator.Kuper anticipated a two-year siesta in Oaxaca, Mexico with his wife and daughter, but when a teachers’ strike there was violently put down by government forces, he went from casual tourist to engaged reporter. His visceral Diario de Oaxaca journal sketches and commentaries capture how nature and civilization, history and modernity, bounty and deprivation are intertwined there.
He prized playing the role of first-hand witness and participant. In a phone interview he said this active, intimate experience “made it feel we were inside of Mexico rather than standing on the edge regarding it from a slight distance.” He said when he first arrived he made up for his “lousy” Spanish by using his sketches to communicate with people, adding that his habit of walking the streets offered interactions that drew him deeper into local rituals and customs.
His work expresses the surreal-like quality of nature run riot amid a busy tourist trade, an oppressive regime, crushing poverty and citizen protests.
“It’s fascinating. I kept on feeling I was walking through a metaphor.”
Perhaps most striking to him is how people risk everything to oppose an unjust ruling class. He’s quite taken by the politicized street art there. He’s also impressed by how every day people make art an expressive part of their life, whether arranging flower and candle homages for Day of the Dead festivities or painting murals.
“There’s so much creating of art that goes on in daily life as a natural thing to do,” he said. “It really gives me a sense of art having purpose, enriching and playing a role.”
He said the whole experience shook him up artistically, putting him on a different track once he returned home.
“It challenged and opened me up to trying different approaches. I had to sort of reinvent myself with the new information.”
Acosta grew up in Lincoln. She was active in Omaha theater, helping found the Center Stage Theatre and touring a one-woman show on Midwestern Latinas, before attending the University of Texas at Austin to focus on writing.
A freelance journalist by trade, she’s a contributing writer for the Austin Chronicle and Texas Observer. Her books Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz and Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over chart family relationships within the backdrop of the quinceanera, which she finds ironic since she never had a quince herself. But she said she researched the coming-of-age celebration in preparation for her books.
She’s presently working on a new book set in Nebraska.
For event details, visit www.omahalitfest.com.
A series commemorating Black History Month – North Omaha stories Part III
2017 Nebraska Book Festival: Saturday, July 15 in Lincoln
Source: Announcing the Nebraska Book Festival
I am proud to be a part of the 2017 Nebraska Book Festival this weekend in Lincoln’s Union Plaza. The Saturday, July 15 event is an all-day (9 a.m. to 6 p.m.) celebration of the written word featuring presentations by several Nebraska authors, including yours truly. As the following description explains, I will share my writer’s life as an author-journalist-blogger. Since the figure and subject of Alexander Payne plays a prominent part in my career, I will discuss my book “Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film” and sign copies of it.
2:15-3:15 p.m.
Jane Snyder Trails Center
“My Adventures as a Nonfiction Book Author, Freelance Journalist and Compulsive Blogger” with Leo Adam Biga
Sponsored by Nebraska Writers Guild
Veteran Omaha writer Leo Adam Biga has done a little of everything in his career. He started in public relations in the arts and athletics fields, then became a freelance journalist for business and health publications. His work today as a contributing writer for newspapers, magazines and online sites ranges across many topics – from boxing to books and movies to food to social justice issues. His extensive work on Oscar-winning filmmaker Alexander Payne is the basis of his book Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film, one of a handful of books that Biga has written. He will share insights into what the life of a full-time writer entails, including its challenges, rewards and opportunities.
Click links for the complete schedule of author presentations and festival events and activities.
I hope to see some of my Lincoln friends there. And if any of you from Omaha can make it, so much the better.
Wish I could make it to the festival kick-off party the evening of Friday, July 14, but my schedule won’t allow it. Hope to see you there on Saturday.
MCC Creative Writing Forum – October 28-29
Join yours truly and fellow area wordsmiths, along with keynote speaker Sam Ligon, for the MCC Creative Writing Forum on Friday, October 28 and Saturday, October 29 at Metropolitan Community College’s Fort Omaha campus. This all things considered writing forum is highly recommended for aspiring and emerging writers looking to navigate the process, publishing and business sides of the craft.It’s a chance to hear from and ask questions of veteran writers from different genres and mediums. Networking opportunities abound.
Hope to see you at the Writing for Local Markets panel I am a part of from 9 to 10:20 a.m. on Saturday.
Full event details, presenter bios and registration information can be found or linked to below.
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| $45 Regular forum | Includes all sessions, hospitality and a copy of Sam Ligon’s book. |
| $25 Student forum | High school and college students. Includes all sessions, hospitality and a copy of Sam Ligon’s book. |
| $20 Friday only | Includes opening session, poetry slam and hospitality only. |
| $30 Saturday only | Includes Saturday sessions only and lunch buffet. |
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More details and presenter bios can be found at here. Online registration can be found at creativewriting.brownpapertickets.com. |
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This year’s keynote speaker is Sam Ligon. He is an associate professor at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, Washington. Ligon is also the editor of Willow Springs and the artistic director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. He is the author of two collection of stories, “Wonderland” and “Drift and Swerve,” as well as two novels, “Among the Dead and Dreaming” and “Safe in Heaven Dead.” His stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Story Quarterly, New England Review, Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, Post Road, Keyhole, Sleepingfish, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Okey-Panky and New Orleans Review. A recipient of a 2005 Artists Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship, Ligon holds an MA from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA from New School University.
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Friday, Oct. 28 |
Mule Barn, Building 21 |
| 6–7 p.m. | Opening reception: heavy hors d’oeuvres, cash bar, soda and water, networking. |
| 7–8 p.m. | Reading and Q&A with Sam Ligon. |
| 8:15–10 p.m. | Poetry Slam – coordinated by Matt Mason. |
Saturday, Oct. 29 |
Swanson Conference Center, Building 22 |
| 8:30–9 a.m. | Check in, coffee, networking. |
| 9–10:20 a.m. | Breakout session #1 (three sessions)
Young adult reading and Q&ALydia Kang, Tonya Kuper, Christie Rushenberg Writing for local marketsRyan Syrek, Kevin Coffey, Leo Adam Biga Telling your (compelling) storyLiz Kay and Brett Mertins |
| 10:30–11:50 a.m. | Breakout session #2 (three sessions)
Tell me about your processStephen Coyne, Liz Kay, Tim Schaffert Slam poetry, process and performanceSara Lihz Staroska, Stacey Waite, Noni Williams Writing to get paidLindsey Anne Baker, Danielle Herzog, Elizabeth Mack |
| Noon–12:30 p.m | Lunch buffet and networking. |
| 12:30–2 p.m. | General session
How to get publishedSam Ligon and Q&A. |
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Hardy’s one-man “A Christmas Carol” highlights Dickens-themed literary festival
There’s something appealing about a lone actor assuming dozens of roles in a one-man performance of a multi-character play and John Hardy is bold enough to tackle a much read, seen and loved work, the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol. He performs his adaptation at this fall’s Joslyn Castle Literary Festival, whose theme “Dickens at the Castle” is celebrating the great author’s work in many other ways as well, including lectures and concerts. But clearly Hardy’s one-man rendition of this work that so many of us are familiar with through theater and film versions is the main attraction. I profile Hardy and the “Dickens of a time” he has bringing this work to life in the following story I did for The Reader (www.thereader.com). By the way, if you’ve never been to the Joslyn Castle, use this as your escuse because it is a must-see place in Omaha that really has no equivalent in the metro. You should also check out the arts and culture programming that goes on year-round at the Castle.
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Hardy’s one-man “A Christmas Carol” highlights Dickens-themed literary festival
Actor to bring timeless classic to life by enacting dozens of characters
©by Leo Adam Biga
Appeared in the November 2015 issue of The Reader (www.thereader.com)
The Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol has long haunted actor-writer-director John Hardy. Though ghosts have yet to visit him ala Scrooge, the story’s held an enchanted place in Hardy’s heart ever since he got his Equity card acting in a professional stage version.
Much theater work followed but he soon tired of others dictating his artistic life and took creative matters into his own hands. He’s since developed a pair of one-man shows he now tours nationally, including a solo rendition of Christmas Carol. He will perform his adaptation of Carol at the free Nov. 14-December 13 Joslyn Castle Literary Festival, “Dickens at the Castle.”
Joslyn Castle is located at 3902 Davenport Street.
The festival includes lectures, concerts and other Dickens-themed events. But Hardy’s one-man Carol stands apart. In his energetic show he assumes more than 40 roles across a spectrum of Victorian and Industrial Age archetypes.
The well-traveled Hardy is no stranger to Omaha. He performed his other one-man play, Rattlesnake, here. He directed Othello at this past summer’s Nebraska Shakespeare Festival.
Able to pick and choose his projects, he’s reached a golden period in his performing life. But getting there took years of searching.
This native of Texas grew up in New Jersey and got bitten by the theater bug attending plays in New York City. He studied drama and stagecraft under his muse, Bud Frank, at East Tennessee State University. He no sooner graduated then went off to do the starving acting bit in the Big Apple, making the rounds at casting calls and booking work on stage and screen. A stated desire to create “my own opportunities” led him to Calif., where he co-founded a theater. Then he earned a master of fine arts degree at the University of Alabama, where he started another theater.
He soon established himself a director and acting coach. Once fully committed to following his own creative instincts, his original one-man play, Rattlesnake, emerged.
“You know how it is, you come to things when you come to them,” Hardy says. “Freedom explains all good things I get. Man, there’s nothing like liberation.”
In casting around for another one-man play, he returned to his old friends, Dickens and Christmas Carol.
“As much as I had done it, I always felt like there was something else there. I wasn’t quite sure what it was. But there’s a reason why that play is done and why that book’s become a play and become so many movies. I feel like people were searching for it, just as I was, too.
“The other thing is it had a built-in commercial appeal. People have heard of it, it’s known.”
Tried and true is fine, but Hardy imagined a fresh take on the classic.
“I’ve seen one-man versions, but they’re nothing like the one I do. The one I do is not storytelling, it’s not described. Mine is dramatic theater, It’s characters fully involved in this world, this existence from moment to moment. I’ve never seen that in a one-man Christmas Carol. In the others, there’s always a separation – it’s storytelling with a hint of characterization here and there. Whereas mine is moment to moment characters living through this world, which makes it distinctly different.”
The more Hardy dug into the book and play, the more he discovered.
“A Christmas Carol must have a universal thing in it because it never dies and therefore there must be some very human thing that most of us can see in it and relate to in it.”
He believes Dickens possessed insights rare even among great authors or dramatists in exploring the experiences that shape us, such as the transformative powers of forgiveness, humility and gratitude.
“It’s a thrill to have anything to do with Dickens or talk about him. Dickens is just one of those people like Shakespeare that seems to have a window into the human experience that few people have. The more we get to know about ourselves through his work then the closer we get to not killing ourselves and I would like to participate in that endeavor,” he says.
“The psychology of the human being – that seems to be what he has an insight into in a way that is almost never if ever spoken. In other words, what he does is allow characters to engage in living from moment to moment and doesn’t necessarily draw conclusions about it. He doesn’t explain their behavior, he allows them to live.”
That approach works well for Hardy, who abides by the axiom that “you only really come to know a character when they’re engaged in doing something – forget about someone describing them or they describing themselves.” And therein lies the key I think to A Christmas Carol,” he adds.. “It’s not an accident this story has been made into a play and a movie again and again because it’s so active. Somebody’s engaged in doing something. It’s on its way somewhere a hundred percent of the time. It’s never static. It’s not reflective. It moves past a moment into the next moment and you can’t stop and think about it.”
“Even as a book it doesn’t have that page-long description of reaching for a door handle and turning it and that kind of thing. It’s in the room, it’s taking in the room, it’s dealing with what’s in the room and going into the next room. It never stops moving forward. It really doesn’t take a breath. It lends itself to the dramatic universe as opposed to the prosaic. It’s a series of actions characters do – and that reveals them.”
In his one-man show Hardy is our avatar embedded in the story. He embodies the entire gallery of characters immersed in this fable of redemption. As he moves from one characterization to the next, he seductively pulls us inside to intimately experience with him-them the despair, tragedy, fright, frivolity, inspiration and joy.
“Seeing a person move through that whole thing is even more human,” he says. ‘We see ourselves passing through it as this one human being passing through it. Maybe we are everyone in A Christmas Carol –Scrooge, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit – and Scrooge is everyone, too.”
Because this is Hardy’s vision of Carol, he can play the omnipresent God who let’s us see and hear things not in the original text.
“I get to do things the book and the plays don’t get to do. For instance, in the book I think Tiny Tim says one thing – ‘God bless us everyone.’ He says it a couple of times. Well, I get to have Tiny Tim say whatever I want him to say. In the book Bob Cratchit explains to his wife what Tiny Tim said when he was carrying him home from church on Christmas morning but I get to have Tiny Tim actually say that. I get to have him actually experience these things and you get to see him live a little more. That’s the kind of thing I can do.”
Hardy’s well aware he’s doing the show in a place with a special relationship to the Dickens drama. The Omaha Community Playhouse production of Charles Jones’ musical adaptation is a perennial sell-out here and in cities across America where the Nebraska Theatre Caravan tours it. Hardy auditioned for the Caravan himself one year.
“It seems like half of everyone I know in the business has had something to do with the Nebraska Theatre Caravan or with the Playhouse or A Christmas Carol. It’s kind of like six degrees of separation – you’re not far away from knowing someone who knows someone who was in that.”
As for his own relationship to Carol, he says, “I’ve been with that story for a long time.”
His one-man homage kicks off “Dickens at the Castle” on November 14 at 6:30 p.m. A pre-show panel of local theater artists, plus Hardy, will discuss adapting the novel. For dates-times of Hardy’s other performances of Carol during the fest and for more event details, visit http://joslyncastle.com/.
Artist facing life-altering disease makes “Dracula” subject of literary festival: Jill Anderson and friends explore Bram Stoker’s dark vision
A not-so-funny-thing-happened-on-the-way-to Jill Anderson organizing the Joslyn Castle Literary Festival this year: strange, unsettling, and often debilitating symptoms began appearing out of nowhere and after many tests, a mis-diagnosis and many more tests she found out the culprit: multiple sclerosis. In true trouper fashion she has carried on and “the show” is indeed going on in her capable hands. It is ironic perhaps that her life-altering disease should come in the year the festival explores the permutations of Bram Stoker’s classic transmutation novel Dracula. Her festival, Shadows at the Castle: Bram Stoker’s Dark Vision, runs Oct. 17 through Nov. 1 and uses art, music, drama, film, literature, and more to explore the themes bound up in the Stoker work and the superstitions and cultural traditions that influenced his creation. Read about Jill, her perseverance, and her festival in this story for The Reader (http://www.thereader.com/).
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Artist facing life-altering disease makes “Dracula” subject of literary festival
Jill Anderson and friends explore Bram Stoker’s dark vision
©BY LEO ADAM BIGA
Originally appeared in The Reader (http://www.thereader.com/)
When Jill Anderson made Bram Stoker’s dark transmutation novel Dracula the theme for the 2014 Joslyn Castle Literary Festival she never imagined her own life would be marked by fear-inducing, life-altering transformation.
In February the founder-artistic director of the annual festival, now in its fourth year, suffered the sudden onset of debilitating ailments initially attributed to a stroke. After rounds of invasive testing the stroke idea was laid to rest. Instead, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an inflammatory disease affecting the nerve cells of the brain and spinal chord. As the Omaha singer-actress has shared via Facebook posts, she’s dealt with endless doctor visits and frequent bouts of fatigue yet maintained a busy professional schedule. Even during the worst of it, plagued by nausea, double vision and vertigo, she fulfilled many performing obligations. She even made an out-state tour – with the help of friends and family.
“My mom literally went on tour with me, stayed in the hotels, made sure I got fed, It’s weird at age 47 to be like the invalid and having your mom as your caretaker,” she says.
Her indefatigable spirit’s hardly wavered, at least not on social media sites, where her humor shines through. In one post she compared her tour experience to Weekend at Bernie’s because she was nearly dragged from place to place like the corpse of that film comedy, only to be propped up at the mic to perform.
The emergence of her disease is still so new that she’s far from knowing yet what her long-term prognosis is.
“It hits everybody differently, there’s no way to predict how it’s going to affect you. One person might end up in a wheelchair and somebody else – no issues, no problems, or very little. So you have to figure out how quickly and aggressively your case is progressing and there’s no way to know that other than through observation over a number of years.
“I’ve heard stories from a handful of people about someone in their family who has MS and is in dire condition. Those have been the days that have been the hardest for me – hearing about the MS stories that are not triumphant and hopeful. You can’t have a chronic degenerative disease and not have the thought occur to you – What if I get hit really hard at some point in my life and there’s no one around to help me? I’ve had blue days with those kind of thoughts.”
Despite personal challenges, this trouper made sure the literary festival, whose proceeds benefit the Joslyn Castle Trust, was never in doubt. Much like her treatment of past subjects the Bronte sisters, Oscar Wilde and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Shadows at the Castle: Bram Stoker’s Dark Vision is a multifaceted event informed by her curiosity and wit. With the Durham Museum, the University of Nebraska at Omaha and other collaborators, the fest explores its theme through cinema, lecture, drama, dance and music.
“Every new project I do is a whole new world of discovery, especially the literary festival because it requires a lot of research,” she says. “I love to have an excuse to research my butt off. One of the neatest things about what the festival has become is this sort of melting pot of artists and scholars. Visual art is always involved. Drama is always a centerpiece.”
“There’s really no group in town doing exactly this,” she says. Indeed, the downtown Omaha Lit Fest has a contemporary focus. In theater circles she says “Brigit St. Brigit certainly does a great job with the classics, but they’re doing the drama aspect without exploding that out into all these other facets.” What distinguishes her event, she says, is its examination of “what inspired these much loved classic stories that still fire people’s imaginations.” That niche, she adds, has found “a passionate audience and we want to find more people who get it and dig it and are looking for a thought-provoking, intellectually-stimulating, interactive, exploratory approach to this literature.”
Then there’s the singular setting of the Scottish Baronial castle at 3902 Davenport Street. Built in 1903, the imposing four-story structure is the closest thing to a Count Dracula lair as you’ll find in the metro.
“The castle is gorgeous. An incredible, historic venue. It has a built-in ambience. So it’s really like a perfect marriage between this great literature from past periods and that evocative building.”
Anderson says as she filled out the Stoker festival with programming everything she needed fell into place but one element: authentic Transylvanian folk art from the 19th century.
“It’s been the festival of ultimate syncronicity because when I most need something it magically materializes. One thing I wanted for sure was an exhibit of Transylvanian folk art and lore because it informs a lot of things in Dracula. Stoker was a great consumer and enthusiast of folk lore, he was constantly studying it and speaking to people who knew about it and taking it facts and information. I also wanted to get some actual artifacts – a traditional Transylvanian costume from a hundred years ago.
Searches on eBay only turned up things she couldn’t afford.
“I was beginning to despair and then a friend and I were walking around in the Brass Armadillo antiques store, where I interacted intermittently with a shop clerk with a strange and unidentifiable accent.
My friend and I found this kitsch cross but I said, ‘It will never work for Dracula,’ and the clerk said, ‘I am related to him.’ My friend said, ‘Van Helsing?’ ‘No.’ With a real live relation to Dracula or more accurately to the inspiration for the vampire legend, Vlad the Imapler, standing next to her, she did what any red-blooded girl would do.
“I leaped on him,” she says. The object of her enthusiasm, George Mihai, is not only a Transylvania native but a Romanian cultural studies expert with a personal collection of period artifacts from his home country, including many from his family.
“What are the chances?” asks Anderson, whose own powers of seduction or persuasion has Mihai loaning artifacts for display and delivering a lecture.
Where does a popular entertainer like Anderson fit into all of this?
“I would never be pretentious enough to say I bring any level of academia to this programming. I like to think I bring the juice to it.”
For 2014 she sought “something classic, completely indelible, that everyone knows and is irresistibly popular and sexy to the American public.” With fellow creatives she’s concocted an eclectic look at Dracula. The schedule:
•October 17
Movie Night, 7 p.m.
Nosferatu on the Green
F.W. Murnau’s silent film classic Nosferatu gets projected outdoors against the castle’s north facade. Audience members can throw down blankets on the lawn. Tiki torches and fire pits add to the mood. A UNO scholar comments on Dracula’s rich screen and stage history. An American Red Cross blood drive precedes the event with a bloodmobile taking donors from 2 to 7 p.m.. “Isn’t that fun?” Anderson says.
•October 23 through November 1
Exhibit, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily
Durham Museum at the Castle: Vampires and Victorians
Victorian ways and Romanian folk art take center stage in this exhibition drawn from the Durham’s permanent collection and from the personal collection of Tranyslvania native George Mihai, respectively. Victorian funerary customs and the rise of female emancipation are sub-themes in Dracula. Mihai’s family artifacts go back many generations.
•October 23-26 and 29-30
Drama Duet, 7 p.m.
Kirk Koczanowkski delivers a one-man performance of Dracula: The Journal of Jonathan Harker. Anderson, who’s directing, says, “This brilliant actor played our Oscar Wilde two years ago and just was dazzling. He’s young but sort of timeless and ageless. He’s transmutable, He can shape shift into anything you want him to be.”
Paired with that show is a staged reading of The Jewel of Seven Stars, a Stoker story about an attempt to reanimate an Egyptian mummy. Omaha theater artist Laura Leininger wrote the adaptation.
The two shows take place in the castle’s atmospheric attic full of turrets, nooks and crannies.
•October 27-28
Double Lecture, 6 p.m.
The Man Behind the Monster
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Life and Afterlife in Romanian Mythology
Stoker expert BJ Buchelt (UNO) speaks about the author’s life before the iconic novel. Stoker was bedridden as a child. He managed the Lyceum Theatre in London, where he was also personal assistant to England’s preeminent theater personality, Henry Irving. His wide travels in Eastern Europe and his studies of its folk tales prepared him to write Dracula.
Transylvania native and Romanian cultural studies expert George Mihai of Omaha shares what Anderson describes as “absolutely fascinating stories” about Vlad the Impaler, a historical figure whose reign of terror helped inspire vampire mythology, and about that area’s deeply rooted and peristent native superstitions.
•October 31
Vampyre Ball, 7 p.m.
This “big blowout party on Halloween night will feature tarot readers, palm readers, fire spinner dancers, performers enacting vampiress bride scenes live readings by actors and a costume contest. Plus, lots of food, drink, music and revelry.
•November 1
Music of the Unknown, 7 p.m.
Hal France conducts a chamber ensemble of vocalists Anderson, Sam Swerczek and Terry Hodgesand and cellist David Downing performing period folk, operatic and popular stage music that deals with the supernatural.
Anderson, a much beloved and versatile artist equally adept at performing cabaret, Irish music, Shakespeare, Sondheim, high drama and broad comedy, makes sure music is always a part of the festival. The power of music has taken on new import for her.
“My ability to perform music, to use music to soothe and help other people is an incredible thing for me. I’ve gone to care facilities and sung from bedside to bedside for people and it does have an immediate affect on people. I’ve gotten thank you letters from people who’ve seen me in a cabaret show or some musical production saying they brought their father to the show and they hadn’t seen him smile since his wife died. That’s the letter you save for a lifetime. Music did that. Live performance did that.”
Then there are the unexpected, unscripted moments when music’s transformative power takes hold. In a September 9 post she wrote about one such moment at the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis, where she spend a couple weeks undergoing tests.
“On the lowest level of the big open atrium there is a grand piano. It is open to anyone who feels inclined to tickle the ivories. Most days from 10 to Noon a seasoned old pro of a piano player, a woman who can play pretty much any request, sits at the piano and accompanies anyone who wants to stand up and sing…Yesterday, a barrel-chested surgeon in full scrubs walked up to me with his big baritone booming and, taking me by both hands, sang ‘Climb Every Mountain’ straight to my face.”
“It was totally surprising and wonderful,” Anderson says now in reflection. Never too shy to to break into song herself, at various times she did Mayo solos of “Stardust,” “Amazing Grace,” “Softly” and Tenderly” and “How Great Thou Art,” no doubt moving onlookers with her performances. Having the shoe on the other foot was an eye-opener for her.
She posted:
“Music is and always has been the great healer. I’ve usually been on the providing side of that equation. It’s interesting to be on the receiving end as well.”
The solace of music is always available to her. Her health problems surfaced in the middle of planning the literary festival, which complicated things but also allowed her to lose herself and her woes in the work. She says organizing the event is an “all-consuming feat” she values now more than ever.
“It’s easy to feel like your identity is becoming the disease and I don’t want that to be the case. It’s great to have something like the literary festival to pour my creative passion and energy into. It’s something that pumps me up and keeps me moving forward.”
She’s having fun, too, going goth, fangs and all, in promos.
The public knows her best as a performer but she also directs and she’s looking forward to helming Dracula: The Journal of Jonathan Harker at the fest.
“This Dracula I’m directing is really going to be outside-the-box. It’s a one-man Dracula with a single actor who morphs from one character to another, so that requires tremendous theatrical invention to come up with how do we make that happen, how do we make it clear when you go from one character to another.”
Directing is something she expects to do more of.
“I’ve done more performing than directing but I’ve been directing for years and now I’m feeling I really want to steer my ship in the direction of directing more,” says Anderson, who concedes dealing with stamina and fatigue issues is part of that deliberation going forward.
She owns long associations with the Blue Barn Theatre, the Omaha Community Playhouse and the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival. She and Tim Siragusa had Bad Rep Productions together. She’s left Omaha to make a living doing cabaret and regional theater in places like New York City and Los Angeles, but she’s always returned home.
She’s grateful for the outpouring of care she’s received here in the wake of her diagnosis from extended family and friends. She says the “incredible love and loyalty” she’s received has meant a lot to her as she’s navigated this “scary stuff.”
She’s grateful to for the generosity others have shown. Fellow performers staged a May benefit that paid her way to the Mayo Clinic.
“This big beautiful event went off without a hitch. There was so much heart in all of it – it was overwhelming. It’s almost impossible to describe what it feels like when your friends step in and just support you.”
She was also gifted with a long dreamed of trip to her ancestral homeland of Ireland.
These experiences, she says, have given her “new insight” into her many blessings and a new appreciation for life.
“I think people are never brought closer to the essence of who they are than when they’re facing scary illness. When you’re sick, the bullshit goes away, you see things very clearly for what they are and in a way you’re hypersensitized. It brings you face-to-face with a lot of truths.
As an actress, Anderson’s called to be in the moment but she says she has just as much trouble achieving that state as most of us do.
“Oh God it’s hard to do. I think people’s ambition and drive put their head down the line instead of right here, right now.”
There’s nothing like a devastating health scare to get you to slow down, be still and surrender to the here and now
“All the weird stuff that’s happened medically has really snapped me into the moment, to being able to be fully and deeply touched by experience. To have sensual and delicious moments I’m actually enjoying and am involved in. I wasn’t able to do that before, not really. My head was always somewhere else. It was very hard to slow down and focus in before.”
In an April 5 post she shared, “Here are the things I noticed today: Spring is here. The magnolia tree outside my parents’ house is in glorious blushing bloom. Sprinklers were sending glistening droplets into the air. Lilac buds were packed and purple on the bush in my south garden. The air had a balmy feel. My sweet potato tasted incredible…I sang my guts out at a rehearsal for a gig and loved the feeling of making musical sounds.”
That ability to be in the moment, she says, “is the best thing that’s come out of it (her health crisis).” It’s why when people ask how she’s doing she can honestly say, “I’m taking it one day at a time.”
For prices and tickets, call 402-595-2199 or visit http://www.joslyncastle.com.
Omaha Lit Fest Offers a Written Word Feast
It’s Omaha Lit Fest time again. Chances are you didn’t even know Omaha had a literature festival but it does. Nine years strong. It’s all the brainchild of Omaha-based novelist Timothy Schaffert. The 2013 edition brings authors together from near and far for panel discussions and shop talk. There’s also a cool exhiibtion entitled Carnival of Souls that has top local designers showing their takes on cult movie posters.. It happens Friday and Saturday, Oct. 18 and 19, at the W. Dale Clark Library downtown. I’m serving as a panelist on one panel and as a moderator for another panel. Visit omahalitfest.com for details. My story about Lit Fest is now appearing in The Reader (www.thereader.com).
Omaha Lit Fest Offers a Written Word Feast
Appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)
©by Leo Adam Biga
Writer predilections take precedence at the October 18-19 (downtown) Omaha Lit Fest, an annual orgy of the written word organized by acclaimed resident author Timothy Schaffert (The Coffins of Little Hope).
Nine years running Schaffert’s partnered with the Omaha Public Library for the free event that calls the W. Dale Clark Library, 215 So. 15th St., home. As usual, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln assistant professor and Nebraska Writers Summer Conference director has gathered an eclectic roster of authors for quirky panel discussions. This year’s theme is Literary Obsessions and Cult Followings. Helping him explore these musings are authors from near and far and on different publishing paths. Ohio author Alissa Nutting‘s novel Tampa and its frank distillation of a sex deviant was published by Ecco/Harper Collins. Omaha author Thom Sibbitt self-published his Beat-inspired pseudo-memoir The Turnpike. Nebraska author Mary K. Stillwell’s dual biography-critical study of poet Ted Kooser was published by the University of Nebraska Press.
“I like inviting writers that I think are doing work that has a lot of edge and maybe not getting all the attention the other writers are getting and yet are worthy of that attention,” says Schaffert, who like any good host mixes and matches authors to enliven the conversation.
The intimate, idiosyncratic fest offers opportunities to talk-up authors, some of whom will be at Friday’s 6:30 to 9:30 opening night party and exhibition, Carnival of Souls. Creatives from the Nebraska chapter of AIGA, the professional association for design, will display their takes on classic movie posters from cult cinema. Beginning at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday a series of panels unfolds, including one billed Cinematic that considers movies as subject, inspiration and influence and another, Trigger Warnings, that promises a provocative spin on sex lit.
A 5:30 signing by Lit Fest authors concludes the festival.
As an academic and a former newspaper editor Schaffert tracks currents and poses questions. That’s how he arrived at the panel Obsessed and its topic of authors doggedly pursuing biographical subjects. Panelist Mary K. Stillwell’s book The Life and Poetry of Ted Kooser grew out of a dissertation she began years before. She says she discovered Kooser’s work when a poetry instructor “started bringing me in work by all the Nebraska poets and he kept saying, ‘You come from this fertile land of poetry, look what your people do.’ It really turned me on. Here were people from my own neighborhood talking about things I knew, so it was really a gift to me. We have this long history that goes all the way back to the Pawnee. It got me to thinking of the (Ogallala) Aquifer – there must be something poetic in that water.”
Her fascination resulted in the anthology Being(s) in Place(s): Poetry in and of Nebraska. She cultivated an association with Kooser, the 2004-2005 U.S. Poet Laureate. Then she decided to make him the subject of a book. Researching it meant visiting his childhood home of Ames, Iowa, interviewing his friends there and elsewhere, corresponding with Kooser and immersing herself in his poems
“Going back to his poems you can see the depth of his literary knowledge, you can see the influence of (John) Keats or Thomas Transformer or even (Robert) Frost. Some of his images just seem to be in brotherhood with Frost. So each time you go back you get another layer. It’s sort of an archaeological expedition when you study a Kooser poem over time.”
She says Kooser proved a “cooperative” and “generous” subject who was “patient” with her many questions.
Research comes in many forms. New York state-based author Owen King informed his new novel Double Feature about a famous B-movie director by watching unholy hours of old flicks.
“Taking a survey of the B-movies of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s was essential to the book,” says King, the son of authors Stephen and Tabitha King and the husband of fellow Lit Fest guest author Kelly Braffet. “I had seen quite a few before I started but I gained a newfound respect for them in the process of watching and rewatching so many in a relatively short period. There’s an earnestness at work in most of the films that I didn’t fully grasp beforehand. Which is why, although I have some fun with B-movies in Double Feature, I also hope aficionados feel like I did them justice.”
Portland, Oregon author Monica Drake partially drew on her own experiences as a clown for her novel Clown Girl. Her observations working at a zoo and her adventures in parenting helped inspire her novel The Stud Book.
Timothy Schaffert became a virtual 19th century explorer researching his new novel The Swan Gondola set at the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha. He enjoyed the immersion in all things Victorian for his novel due out in February.
“it was completely pleasurable. It was valuable to learn about the history of the world’s fair and also the general development of the city of Omaha. When I embarked on that research I knew nothing about how people lived day by day in the 1890s and so reading newspapers and books published at the time I did feel myself drawing closer and closer to that age,”
“It got to the point,” he says, “I would get up in the morning and read from the Library of Congress website that day’s news of 1898. You get sort of hypnotized by it so that you’re even imagining yourself living in that period, driving some place in a horse and buggy.
“The 1890s were kind of a terrible time for anyone who wasn’t a wealthy white man. Despite all the racism and ugliness I began to feel more comfortable there than in the 21st century.”
He says his investigation “did require a great deal of time and concentration,” adding, “I was kind of writing and researching at the same time, so I’d write a scene and then go back and figure out how close that scene could be to the reality of the culture of the time – to the social customs and habits and gestures. I wanted it to be an authentic representation of the day.”
Schaffert’s among a handful of Lit Fest authors with novels at some stage of development for the screen. Local crime and suspense fiction writer Sean Doolittle has The Cleanup in development with director Alex Turner (Dead Birds). Unlike Schaffert and author Monica Drake, whose Clown Girl was optioned by Kristin Wiig, Doolittle’s taken an active hand in the process.
Doolittle says Turner “wrote the initial draft of the screenplay, then asked me if I’d be interested in rewriting it. That was my introduction to screenwriting. I’ve been with the project through a number of additional rewrites, until the screen version evolved into both a faithful representation of, and a significant departure from, the original story.
On “the metamorphosis” from novel to script, he says, “I learned a lot about structure – looking at an existing story from different angles and moving as much weight as possible with each narrative decision.”
Most writing’s done in isolation and if you’re self-publishing it can be an especially lonely but rewarding journey. Thom Sibbitt will join fellow lone wolf authors on the panel Experiments: Writing Around the Mainstream that discusses risk, invention, small-press publishing, dangerous subjects and the literary underground. Given that his novel The Turnpike is “this not for everybody material” Sibbitt says he felt it best served by self-publishing. Despite the hard work the process entails he says “it’s been great – I actually feel super empowered to have been able to do it myself.”
Schaffert says today’s digital platforms and micro presses are viable options that allow authors to get their work out as never before. “This is a really exciting time for writers.”
In an era of shrinking attention spans and publications that values technology over literature, Lit Fest celebrates the enduring power of the written word.
Omaha Public Library marketing manager Emily Getzchman says the event aligns well with OPL’s mission. “This event inspires people to think critically and look beyond the words on the page. It provides a rare opportunity to combine authors, art and their works with the community who consumes it. Our hope is that the ideas and perspectives that emerge will inspire people to continue conversations about life and culture.”
For event details visit omahalitfest.com.
NOTE: Leo Adam Biga is the author of Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film. Read more of his work at leoadambiga.wordpress.com.
Related articles
- Leo Adam Biga, Author of ‘Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film,’ to Serve as Panelist and Moderator at (downtown) Omaha Lit Fest (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
- From the desk of Mary Stillwell (nebraskapress.typepad.com)
- Author Wins National Poetry Award (nebraskapress.typepad.com)
- The Life & Poetry of Ted Kooser (ameshistoricoldtown.wordpress.com)
Artist-Author-Educator Faith Ringgold, A Faithful Conjurer of Stories, Dreams, Memories and History
I tried to get an interview with artist-author-educator Faith Ringgold before and during her visit to Omaha a few years ago but her tightly packed schedule just wouldn’t allow it. So, with an assignment due and no interview to draw on I made the best of it by planting myself at the lecture she gave here and liberally borrowing some of her comments to inform my story. I also viewed an exhibition of her work here. At the conclusion of her talk I unexpectedly heard my name intoned over the auditorium’s amplifier system. I was summoned to the stage to meet Ms. Ringgold, who apologized for not being able to speak with me earlier and offered me the opportunity to ride with her to the airport and interview her enroute. I declined because I was already rather time-pressed to get the story in but I thanked her for the offer. I thought that was a gracious and generous thing for her to do and it’s certainly not something most celebrities would think to do in the aftermath of a gig and heading out of town. Her art is sublime. She taps deep roots in her work, which is infused with images of yearning, hope, joy, and life, and some pain, too. You feel the images speaking to you. There is energy in those visuals. You sense life being lived. It’s easy to get lost in the ocean of feeling and memory she evokes.
Artist-Author-Educator Faith Ringgold, A Faithful Conjurer of Stories, Dreams, Memories and History
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally published in The Reader (www.thereader.com)
Artist-author-educator Faith Ringgold spoke about the power of dreams during an October 8 lecture at Joslyn Art Museum’s Witherspoon Concert Hall, whose nearly filled to capacity auditorium testified to the popularity of her work. The official role of her Omaha appearance was to give the keynote address at the Nebraska Art Teachers Association’s fall conference. But her real mission was to deliver a message of hope and possibility, as expressed in the affirming, empowering tales of her painted story quilts, costumes, masks and children’s books and her life.
Her visit coincided with her 75th birthday, which organizers celebrated in a musical program that moved Ringgold to tears, as well as two area exhibitions of her work. Now through November 20 at the UNO Art Gallery is Art: Keeping the Faith (Ringgold), a selection of illustrations from her children’s book Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky, along with examples of her story quilts, tankas and mixed media pieces. Now through December 23 at Love’s Jazz and Art Center is a selection of book art from Dinner at Aunt Connie’s House, along with two of her finest story quilts combining fabric, painting and narrative.
The Harlem native has broken many barriers as an African-American female artist with works in major collections, books on best-sellers’ lists and art embraced by culturally and racially diverse audiences of children and adults.
“My art has been a celebration of my life, my dreams and my struggles and how I learned from other people,” she said.
Much of her work, whether story quilts combining painted canvas on decorative fabric or book illustrations done in acrylic, depict the struggles and contributions of historical black figures. Many are in praise of the Harlem Renaissance artists she came to know, such as Alfred Jacob Lawrence. Many are about strong females like herself, ranging from underground railroad conductor Harriet Tubman to Civil Rights heroine Rosa Parks. She often creates series of works. Coming to Jones Road deals with the trains of refugees on the underground railroad. Her most recent is a jazz series called Mama Can Sing and Papa Can Blow.
“For the image of a people to be celebrated is an important thing for their creative identity,” she said.
Her books often show her child alter ego, Cassie, interacting with men and women of achievement, whose life lessons “of being resourceful, being creative and being strong” offer inspiration. In Ringgold’s award-winning Tar Beach, which began as a quilt, Cassie takes imaginative leaps of faith that enable her to fly over the world and, in so doing, own it. Flight represents the liberation that comes with dreaming.
“That’s what flying is — it’s a determination to do something that seems almost impossible,” Ringgold said. “Cassie is an expression of that feeling — Who said I can’t do it? Unless I say it, it doesn’t mean anything.”
As she reminded her Joslyn audience, many of them teachers, “Every good thing starts with a dream. Children growing up without dreams is really no growing up at all.” The “anyone can fly” and “if she can do it, anyone can” themes from Tar Beach are so closely associated with Ringgold, who also wrote a song entitled Anyone Can Fly , that they’ve become the catch phrases for her vision. After her Joslyn lecture, the Belvedere Bels choir from Belvedere Elementary School in Omaha serenaded Ringgold with a soulful rendition of Anyone Can Fly.
Related to her visit and showings here, Omaha Public Schools students this fall are studying her work, viewing her exhibits and creating their own story quilts.
Her favorite medium, the story quilt, is rooted in two African-American traditions — oral storytelling and quiltmaking — traced to slaves, who created images on quilts that recorded family history, symbolized events and revealed coded messages. She’s the latest in a long line of master quiltmakers in her own family, going all the way back to her great-great grandmother, a slave, and down through her great grandmother, grandmother and her later fashion designer mother, from whose hands she learned the craft and with whom she collaborated on her first quilts.
Beyond the familial and cultural connections, quilts appeal to Ringgold for their practicality and accessibility.
“It’s the most fantastic way of creating paintings. You have it become a quilt by piecing it together, so that it doesn’t have that fragility of one piece of paper or canvas. A quilt is really two-dimensional, but it’s also three-dimensional, and that’s why I really love it,” she said. “You can make it as big as you like it and it doesn’t have weight to it. You can roll it up and carry it around.”
She enjoys, too, the communal aspects of the form.
“Quilting is something a group of people can do. You can have a lot of people engaged in the activity, so that your art doesn’t become such a solitary thing.”
Her impetus for doing story quilts arose when editors balked at publishing her autobiography unless she changed her story to conform to what she considered a stereotypical black female portrayal. She refused and instead found an alternative form, the story quilt and performance art, for charting her life and for sharing her perspectives on the figures, events and issues affecting her and her people.
“It made me really angry to think that somebody else could decide what my story was supposed to be or decide my story’s not appropriate to me, an African American woman. So, I started writing these stories,” she said. “I used performance and story quilts to get my story out there. Writing it in the art, when the art was published in a program — the words would be to, unedited.”
When her work hangs in museums or galleries, her simple or elaborate but always eloquent words can be appreciated by viewers. Often splayed all around the borders, the text acts as a narrative frame that focuses the eye on the central image she paints in her palette of sure brushstrokes and bold colors.
The many influences on Ringgold, who studied at City College of New York and has traveled the world to soak up art, are apparent in her folk-style work, including her rich African-American heritage, the traditions of European masters, the abstract expressionists and Tibetan tankas. A professor of art at the University of California in San Diego, she lives in Englewood, NJ, where she has her studio.
She continues a busy schedule of creating art, lecturing and dreaming.
Related articles
- People who turned their dreams to reality (cnn.com)
- An Artist Ends Ties to Museum in Harlem (nytimes.com)
- Faith Ringgold Paper Quilts (rakarchives.wordpress.com)
Writer, wanderer, waitress: Author Colleen Reilly follows her father’s footsteps with her publishedbBooks
The late Bob Reilly was a mentor of mine. The former public relations-advertising executive taught journalism at the University of Nebraska at Omaha for several years. He was a husband, father, and grandfather of a large Irish Catholic family. He was a raconteur. He was an encourager. But most of all, he was a writer. He published scores of articles and books. One of his books, The Fighting Prince of Donegal, was optioned by Disney and made into a feature film whose script he helped write. At least two of his children became writers, Hugh and Colleen, and here I profile the latter. Colleen is, as the main title or headline, a writer, wanderer, and sometime waitress who, much like her father Bob did, lives a full life that somehow also leaves room for insatiable reading and writing.
Writer, wanderer, waitress: Author Colleen Reilly follows her father’s footsteps with her published books
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally appeared in the City Weekly
Independence is something Colleen Reilly cherishes. Long marching to the beat of a distant drummer, this twice-married mother of two has chafed at conformity from the time she was a young woman, when she left behind the security of her large Irish Catholic family for a new life overseas.
A daughter of Omaha author and former UNO professor Robert Reilly, she’s followed in her father’s footsteps to become both a writer and teacher, but has also journeyed far afield from her family, faith and homeland. She first left the States in 1968 to attend college in Ireland, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature and where she met her first husband. She returned to the U.S. only long enough to receive her master’s in English lit and give birth to her first child. Hungry to see more of the world and to make a fresh start for themselves, in 1973 she, then-husband Pat and son Declan moved lock-stock-and-barrel to New Zealand, which she called home for 20 years.
Down Under, she enjoyed her status as an American expatriate abroad. Hailing from a family of artists, actors, writers and attorneys, she forged a career as an American literature professor (at Victoria University of Wellington) before heeding her birthright and taking pen in hand. She wrote criticism for newspapers and eventually authored two novels and a book of short stories, all of which were published.
When home beckoned to her, she returned to America in 1994, resettling in the South with her second husband, Pearce, an over-the-road truck driver. Once here, she again chose an unconventional path by eschewing the comfortable life of an academic to work instead as a waitress and as a semi driver alongside her mate. “I don’t think Dad likes to hear this, but I am prouder of learning to drive a big truck than I am of my books or my degrees or anything else because it was so out of character and so far from my upbringing,” she said. “It was a huge challenge. I’ve heard so many women say, ‘I’ve always wanted to drive a truck.’ My mother is one of them. And I did it, and I’m so proud of that.”
Unlike teaching, which she enjoyed but felt shackled by, waiting tables and hauling freight have provided enough freedom for her to pursue her two passions — reading and writing. Then in 1998, spurred by a desire to be by her aging and ailing parents (Her father endured a quadruple bypass and her mother developed Alzheimer’s), this prodigal daughter finally came back to Omaha, where she and Pearce now live in “a cottage” of a house in Benson, mere blocks from where she grew up. While he continues driving an 18-wheeler, she writes at home during the day and waits tables at Trovato’s at night. As her agent searches for a publisher for her latest novel, Reilly’s sense of wanderlust keeps her dreaming of traveling to distant lands and of one day returning to New Zealand, where she and Pearce keep a home.
Reilly first felt the call to adventure at 17, when she went off to attend University College Dublin. The Emerald Isle is a special place for her Irish Catholic clan (She is one of 10 brothers and sisters.). Her father is a devotee of Irish literature and has written articles and books relating to various aspects of Irish heritage and lore. Colleen came to Ireland a “young naive American” and left a little older and wiser. It was 1968 and her mod apparel and liberal views were not accepted. Then there was the fallout from the Vietnam War.
“There was some holding me accountable.” Hardly an Ugly American, she was in fact an anti-war sympathizer. In between her studies, she tramped across the countryside. “Every holiday I had I’d go somewhere in Ireland. I don’t think there’s any corner of Ireland I haven’t seen. It’s a beautiful country. I miss it. I miss the talk. I don’t mean talking with people, but the eavesdropping talk of just sitting in a pub and just listening to these people’s amazing verbal facility.”
She also made forays into London and Paris, but regrets not seeing more of Europe when she had the chance. She has since traveled with Pearce to Morocco, Belize and other far-flung spots.
Aside from her travels, her major exploration has been an intellectual one. From early childhood on, reading has consumed her. She did dabble in writing, even winning a national scholastic poetry contest at 16 while a student at Marian High School, but it was reading not writing that sustained her and that continues sustaining her. “Reading is my real passion,” she said. “I still think of myself more as a reader than a writer. I can’t imagine not reading. It’s my great joy. I probably read five novels a week. I’m a great haunter of the new book shelves in the library and of second-hand book stores. If I bought new all the books I read, we’d be bankrupt.” She estimates her book collection numbers in the thousands.
By her late teens she got hooked on Russian literature. Her experience in The Old Country introduced in her a love for the great Irish writers. Then, while working on her M.A. at UNO she steeped herself in American literature and discovered the book that continues to stir her most deeply — Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby Dick. “I just fell in love with that book. I’ve probably read it now 18 times, both to teach it and just for pleasure.” For her, Melville’s epic yet intimate fiction delivers everything she seeks in a book.
“The ideas. The passion and the compassion. The way he gives us both Ishmael and Ahab, two extreme American types, and lets you choose and makes you realize there’s heroism in each. And also the poetry of his language. In this 600-page novel you can take a paragraph and see the alliteration there that you would normally ascribe to poetry, not fiction, especially not in a 600-page fiction. It’s everything. It’s the beauty of the language, the beauty of his exploration of the ideas. Everything.”
Upon completing her M.A. in landlocked Nebraska Reilly followed an Ishmael-like hankering to be by the sea again. She wanted to return to Ireland while her then husband, Pat Cox, wanted to stay in America. So, they compromised and headed with their infant son Declan for New Zealand, which owing to Cox’s English citizenship granted all three permanent residency with minimal red-tape. For their home, they chose the sea-side capitol, Wellington, and never looked back.
“It’s on the southern tip of the north island,” she said. “It’s a beautiful hilly city surrounded by the sea. People say it looks a lot like San Francisco.” The place still exerts a powerful pull on her. It’s where her second son, Eoin, was born and where both her boys, now adults, still live. It’s where her best friends reside. Where she blossomed as a writer. And where she met her second husband, Pearce Carey, a fellow reading enthusiast.
“I miss my kids so much. I only get back to see them once a year. I miss them. I miss my friends. I miss the sea. We still keep a home in New Zealand where we will one day retire to. I would like to be back there by the time I’m 55, which is three years from now. I definitely intend to live out my old age there. I love New Zealanders. I love their humor. Their humor, like Australian humor, is a great distance from tragedy. They have a great sense of irony and fun. There’s just none of the self-pity and none of the victim mentality and none of the get-even mentality we have.”
Words carry more than the usual import for Reilly, who early on felt the expectations of her writer-father to display a like appreciation for and prowess with language. The pressure to write, as much self-imposed as anything, weighed heavily on her.
“Being Dad’s daughter there was this desire to please him and a feeling I should write. That made it difficult for me,” she said. However, she long ago overcame any timidity about him reading her work and now routinely trusts him to give uncensored feedback. Unlike her father, who writes every day, she struggles maintaining even the semblance of a strict schedule. “I still don’t write regularly. I’m constantly beating myself up for that. I just don’t have that kind of discipline. I’ll sometimes go two years before writing anything or I’ll get two chapters into something and then not finish it. When I am writing it’s never for more than three hours at a time. I’ll find anything to keep me away from it.”
After winning that youth poetry contest at 16 Reilly did not write again, save for academic papers, until almost 31. She only resumed it in the fallout of a personal crisis. “I did have a nervous breakdown. By that I mean all the defenses that had worked no longer worked, so I had to make new ones.”
Although she said there was nothing specific to trigger the breakdown, she had been in “a passionless marriage” that ended in divorce and that left her with two young kids to raise alone. And that’s when she sought comfort in the one thing that had always given her solace — words. “I remember talking with my best friend, Margaret, in the middle of all my crying and this stuff you do and saying, ‘I have to write,’ and her saying, like a typical New Zealander, ‘Yeah, so why don’t you? What’s the big deal?’” With such help, Reilly pulled herself together and got on with the business of living and writing. The fruits of her early work were a novella and several short stories, which were published in a collection of her short fiction.
Her short stories, along with the novels that followed, focus on loneliness and alienation, apt subjects for an introspective expatriate estranged from the religion she was raised in and separated so long from the family she grew up in.
“The theme of loneliness comes up again and again and again,” she said. “Different kinds of loneliness. Sometimes it’s a romantic loneliness. Sometimes it’s spiritual. Sometimes it’s social. But it’s all about…how not to be lonely, if one cannot be lonely, especially if you haven’t got the consolation of a religious belief, which I don’t have, and if you haven’t got the consolation of some great meaning to life, which I don’t have.”
The separation she’s felt in her own life reverberates in her work. Her first novel, Christine (Allen & Unwin, 1988), is set in Omaha and Maine and offers a protagonist isolated from family and other ties by venturing far from home in an attempt to live alone in a seaside town. The title character is obsessed with the idea of a twin brother, whose life begins to assume a greater reality than the world around her. Once ‘cured,’ there is the question of how much Christine has given up in the process. Although Reilly completed Christine before starting her second novel, The Deputy Head (Allen & Unwin, 1986), the latter novel was published first. The Deputy Head concerns an uptight New Zealand high school principal and his rigid Anglophile views of and stagnant relationships with women.
Her latest novel, For Caroline, is the first she is trying to find an American publisher for and she expects its provocative take on abused women will make it a hard sell.
“It’s about an 80-year-old man and this obsession he has with this girl-into-a-woman named Caroline, which starts when she is an infant. It’s not a sexual thing. It’s a protective thing. He wants to protect her from the abusive men she’s attracted to. It’s written from his point of view and describes 50-odd years of protecting her. He blames mothers and specifically her mother for giving their daughters such low self-esteem that they will be attracted to abusive men. The first sentence of the book is, ‘All mothers hate their daughters…’ It’s politically-incorrect in that he believes the advice given to abused women is ridiculous. That instead of working things out it just should be, Get angry and get out. I’ll be surprised if I get a publisher, because it’s virtually saying the opposite of what’s being told women.”
While awaiting word on her novel’s publication prospects, she seeks a publisher for a piece she’s written on the hazards of waitressing, something she’s had seven years of experience doing. Beyond the occasional bad customer, she, like many an artist, has found a certain bliss in waiting tables.
“I really like it. I like the freedom more than anything, especially compared with teaching. When you’re a teacher, you never check out. You never leave the job. With waitressing, you clock in and you clock out. It’s the mental freedom you have. That’s the way writers should live.”
Teaching is something she’s considered resuming but always balks at after calculating she “can make twice as much waiting tables — and without the headaches. Besides, there’s all sorts of ways I feel like I’m still a teacher here with all the young people I work with. Granted, I’m more a teacher in life than in literature, but so what? I always have Pearce or Dad to discuss literature with.”
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