Midway along the journey...

not in a dark wood

….but in an MFA program. As unlikely as it seems (to me, anyway), I am beginning an MFA program in Creative Writing this fall. I’m sharing an adapted version of the personal essay I wrote for my application:

When I was small, my family took day trips to Atlantic City. We played on the beach, fair skinned and frying in the sun, until it was time to wash up in the public showers and head to the boardwalk. My father’s favorite part of these trips was the smorgasbord restaurant, where a poor man could treat his family to exotic foods like fried chicken, pierogies, and big fat hot dogs called bratwurst. His kids could eat to bursting then sip Shirley Temples until they had room for dessert. For my father, the sheer abundance was a delight. “Go on, eat,” he’d say. “Eat all you want.” As long as the restaurant was open and we had a table, there was no need to worry. The bill was paid. 

In my mind, Atlantic City had the Miss America Pageant, mobsters eating pasta with gravy, sharks, a boardwalk! I loved it all. My favorite was the glassblower. Standing outside his stall, we watched him take a blob of glass, a long pipe, heat, his own breath, and make something beautiful, an elephant, a dog, an angel. That act of creation mesmerized me, the delicate balance between man and material. All that effort and focus to make something easily broken seemed a miracle worthy of my attention. 

There were other makings that awed me, too. My mother’s family showered Irish words and names onto English to conjure up Cresslough, this magical place, greener, wetter, wilder, more beautiful than anywhere else in the world. My father’s family, holy hooligans, told stories that careened down the side streets and alleyways of Devil’s Pocket, where kids fell and lost an eye like Uncle Tommy, and people moved from apartment to apartment “to beat the rent,” where my father made the papers for hitting a Peeping Tom in the head with an axe. 

Then there was Mass. With the Host raised in the air, the priest said the same words every week, bells rang, and bread and wine became the Body and Blood of Christ. Another miracle worthy of my attention. How did it work? I wondered. 

When I heard about this extraordinary MFA program, I was filled with joy. How exciting for the students. I told friends and family about it, mentioned it during a speech at a local high school. Again and again I claimed, I would apply if I were younger, if I didn’t have to work, if, if, if…

Applying to the program kept popping up, like a Jack-in-the-Box. Each time, I slammed the lid down. Then found a way to turn the crank again. I listened to interviews with the founders, re-read articles, encouraged friends to apply. I printed the course list and gathered the books from my shelves to do a DIY version of the program. That, along with a few classes, seemed a sensible compromise. I was blessed beyond imagining when I found Catholic Literary Arts and became friends with Sarah, Lesley, Paige, Katy, and others. My prayers for a Catholic writing community had been answered a hundred-fold. It would be enough.

While not applying, I updated my resume, ordered transcripts, scribbled notes for this essay. A lot of effort for a pipe dream. Why all the angst about applying? Sadly, because I know that I have squandered so many opportunities and so much time. Like Kristen Lavransdatter, to meet God worthily, I must walk many miles over rough terrain, barefoot, with a baby on my back. 

Considering the essay prompt asking for the writer’s “arc,” her discovery of and commitment to writing and interest in the Catholic literary tradition, I see no arc, no unbroken curve. Instead, I see fits and starts, giving up, trying again, a cycle of hope and discouragement. Courage shadowed by cowardice, laziness, rejection, failure, my own and others. Harsh anti-Catholic teachers, a fellow writer’s perplexed “again with the God poems,” the world’s clamoring insistence that God, faith, and an imagination engaged with the sacramental vision have no place in a “real” writer’s life. 

So maybe a chipped arc, which began with two loving and devout parents, so good it never occurred to me that I could lose my faith or needed to work very hard to keep it. Like many, I took faith not as gift, but as patrimony, luxury, a sanctuary for when I needed help, not a home to live in and maintain. I hung on to it by rote, not heart and soul.

My college professors, though wonderful, were agnostic or antagonistic towards faith. They led me to believe that the chances of being both Catholic and a writer were pretty slim, the slots mostly filled by dead writers. Being a fallen away Catholic writer was the way to go, despite the glut, there’d make room for more. As dumb and cavalier as I was about my faith, I didn’t want that. What I wanted was to be a saint, not any time soon, mind you, but at some convenient point in the future. 

Those professors gave me a decent education, an understanding that writing is work, and enough encouragement to carry me through the years, but I graduated believing there was no place for someone like me - a working class, Catholic uninterested in falling away. 

I became a nurse, a job I loved for many years and was good at. It seemed I should forget writing and so I tried to do that. Over the years, though, there was that twitch, a story for my niece, poems given as gifts, writing workshops. I wrote pages, threw them away. I read a lot. Then, an online class led to a revelation, a turning point. I surrendered, grabbed hold of the writing string, and followed it. God sent supportive friends to guide me. I stopped taking my faith for granted, grew to cherish it, to know that God and His love are the essence of all things. Poetry, literature, the imagination, and writing form part of the guardrail that kept me from falling off the path, that keep me steady on the arduous climb to heaven. 

The usual suspects, Dante, O’Connor, Hopkins, and others, such as Sally Read and Donal Ryan, were my writer guides. I also learned from “regular” people who showed me that humans need stories. Harold with his tale of how the Hail Mary helped him survive as a POW. Pete, who chain smoked and spoke with St. Francis and sang off-key. My divorced and remarried aunt. After her first husband died, she went to mass. After receiving the Eucharist, for the first time in forty years, she knelt in her pew and wept.

Of those writer’s I love, I owe the greatest debt to Seamus Heaney. He was proof that a writer could be happy, that poets weren’t all train wrecks. He may have fallen away, but he did not hate. He showed me that my wellspring of memories–a happy childhood with good people, of places where ordinary things happened–was the stuff of poetry. He taught me that writing about these places and people can reveal them for what they are - radiant reflections of God, His love, grace, and mercy. 

My family taught me to keep one eye cocked for a good story, to edit always, even on the fly, to bet the whole stash with every telling for the world never runs out of stories if you pay attention. 

The Church taught me the power of words, that if you say the right ones in the right order even metaphor can become a living thing that saves you. 

My father, though, still teaches me the most important lesson, that our God is a God of abundant generosity, so sit at the table, pile your plate high, eat your fill. The bill has already been paid.