This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I am really looking forward to being at the Alliance Française in Chicago in live conversation with friend and ally Isabelle David, a wonderful poet, philosopher, and literature expert–a real Renaissance woman. She honored me when asking if she could be the first to interview me about the novel. I am thrilled and I guarantee you it will be a fun and interesting hour, incisive and thought-provoking as we use the novel to talk about the themes within it–and we laugh often together. The interview will be in English, and I will read Isabelle’s requests from the novel, and then she will open the floor to questions and answers in English and French, which we will interpret in both languages. Please come. Refreshments will be served. I am very grateful to Isabelle and the Alliance for this invitation and for the writing spaces they have provided me, their friendship, and all of the interesting cultural events they offer. I would also like to extend special thanks to Renée Roger-Saito, Director of the Resource Center/ Mediathèque, and to Tiana Pigford, Communication and Library Intern.  Please come join us on Tuesday,  June 12th, at 6:30 p.m.

https://www.af-chicago.org/event/1682

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I am thinking of what it means to be divine, holy, sacred. When I stepped into St. Joe’s Key West last week to be quiet for a while before the first reading of my first novel I was struck by many things. The portrait of Mary in the vestibule first caught my eye-I had never seen it before nor such a direct image of her. I thought of the praise I spoke for my mother at her funeral.

I wanted to light three candles, one for each of my grandmothers and one for my mother, to thank them and to ask them to be with me at the bookstore for the reading, but there were only two candle holders available so I lit one candle with the names of my grandmas on my lips and the other talking to Mom alone. I stepped back and noticed that Mom’s was shining more brightly than all the rest, which it did for the entire time I sat in the front pew of the empty church, and then while I noticed the library of the sanctuary for the first time. When I would show my sister the photos of it the next morning, she would point to the candlesticks on the altar and say, “Those are from Grandma. They were put there for her funeral and have been there ever since.”

On my way out, I noticed the 8th Station of the Cross in a way I never had before. I have memories of spending Good Friday afternoons in the church, praying at each station. I thought of those women who supported Jesus and mostly I kept looking at those two words together: Holy Women. I thought of all the women in my life and how much they have supported me and how rarely I have seen those two words together: Holy and Women. I went to the cemetery and stood over the ground where my beloved mother’s body lays in rest and noticed the shadow of mine over hers. I remembered those precious moments putting the last touches on the novel with Mom at my side, often entering them with one hand as I held hers with the other.

My niece gave me a manicure and told me that I moaned in pleasure at the same points in the hand massage that my mom had. My niece then gently washed and styled my hair. Her daughters watched me get ready for the big night. I remembered my niece, my sister, and I all very close to my mother’s body as we did her hair, at the funeral home before the wake.

When I walked into the bookstore on Main Street of my hometown, the woman who owns it, and the women who work there, and some very dear women friends who arrived before I did opened their arms to me then led me to a table they had set with wine and food for the guests. My sisters were there, and many members of my mom’s family. Women and men. There were women and men I had gone to grade school with, too, and high school, who had known me all my life, others who introduced themselves, and others who had become my friends in the five years I re-rooted there upon return from Europe.

I talked about this story about women, about identity, about abuse, about relationship, about a search for home. I talked, too, about the mother’s voice. My mother’s voice. Women’s voices. My voice. In conversation with women and men.

Women and men. Women and men. Women and men. Amen.

Here are some clips that my sister shot during the reading:

Watch more video clips of the reading here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY3FEAga6xRNaoazK7QVFJQ

When I stopped by the bookstore today, boxes filled with this beautiful novel were being opened, registered, and by now are on the shelves. Lucy is coming out as Mom is leaving.

Get your copy at River Lights tomorrow morning. Doors open at 10 at 1098 Main Street, Dubuque, Iowa.

Lucy’s coming-out party will also be there soon. But, first, come one, come all, and read all about her.

Just like in life right now, Mom’s picture is more vivid here, Dad is a bit blurry, not as well lit. I’ve introduced you to my mother, told you what she and her voice have meant to me. And I will keep telling you stories about her, I will bear her torch. I am my parents in so many, many ways. My dad means the world to me, too, as any of you who know me, know. He’s been gone from us earthlings for six and a half years but I still feel his spirit moving around nearby.

“A good grieving cry, now that helps, ” he said once when we were considering the wastefulness of tears.

I’m helping myself to a lot of those cries right now. This morning I woke up and the image of me as a girl near my mom’s side of the bed, looking at her sleeping, came to me and I helped myself again.

Once, while Mom was in the hospital and Dad and I were waking up at home, and the whole house felt so strange without her in it, and we were wondering about going to do something and I said, “I just want to be with Mom,” he said, “you’re like me, babe.”

I’m preparing myself to say the final earthly goodbye to her, and she has given us the gift of a long one, given us the gift of letting her departure settle in, as parts of her go, and with her, more of Dad goes, too, of course.

I keep hearing her say, “I want to go home,” as she did when she moved into the memory care unit where she is now.

And I said, “Mom, I think the home you mean is in your heart now. It’s with Dad and all of us and we are all together. And we are, Mom, in your heart. We always will be.”

I watched the relief move through her body and I was so grateful we were sitting in the sun.

“And, anyway, Mom, wherever you are is home to me,” I said.

She dried her tears, and pulled herself together, then looked straight into me with those brilliant blue eyes of hers and said, “You better remember that.”

It would be so selfish of me to want her to carry on now, just so I could go and rest my head and feel her hand on it, her fingers playing with my hair.

A world without my mother, however, and without my parents, is difficult, if not desolate, to imagine living in.

I posted this picture because I want to introduce you to Millie and Bob. Their love created so much good and made seven fascinating human beings and supported and inspired countless others. They were the showing up kind of people, the carrying on kind, the do what you can where you can kind. The kindness kind. The ready and willing and able kind. People who were not afraid to say “I don’t know,” and then to try and find out, if they thought it was necessary and knowable. They tried to understand, to connect, to soothe, to lighten others’ loads  They were the freedom-loving charitable Blessed Virgin Mother Sisters of Charity  and St. Francis kind of people, seeking to console more than to be consoled. They were people who understood the healing nature of laughter. People who knew that education, sharing, and justice make systems work well.  People who made mistakes, admitted, learned, and grew from them. They honored their mothers and fathers. They were people who said what they meant and meant what they said or kept quiet. They worked hard and had fun and moved through joy and pain and sorrow and disappointment and accomplishment and worry and relief. They said they were sorry sincerely or didn’t. They liked to dance. “Oh, that made your dad and I feel so good to watch you dance like that,” Mom said after I danced with others at their retirement center, when they could not anymore.

I feel so fortunate to be sprung from these people, to carry both of them inside of me.

Please think some kind thoughts of celebration of Mom’s precious life as she journeys home. Please remember Dad. Please remember them. Talk to me of them when you see me. Tell me of the times they lifted your hearts as it will lift mine.

I think I can speak for my sisters and brothers, too, when I say our hearts are heavy and our guts are working hard.

Once when I was gathering some newspapers off the floor around Dad’s feet, and he was around 84 or 85 at that time, I asked, “Do you need any of this?”

“Not unless there is something in there about my parents coming back,” was his answer.

Yesterday, as I drove in Chicago, the radio in the car died, the clock died, the heater died, but the engine was still going and I said out loud, “Please just get me to Dubuque,” and believe it or not, the radio, heater, clock, and lights all went back on in a moment and in succession.

Home is huge, I know, and as I journey home to accompany my mother’s journey home I also know I am home. We are home. As we watch her go, others are excited to see her coming, I believe. Is there an other side? Who knows for sure? I feel it. I have witnessed what feels like proof of it. Many people call it many different things and many believe it just goes black. Maybe I like the term the “other side” best because it is part of my favorite joke:

Two people are across from each other, a river in between them. One hollers, “How do I get to the other side?”

The other hollers back, “You are on the other side.”

Addendum:

About a decade ago, Mom, Dad, and I were hanging around the living room,  they were laid back in their chairs, and I was on my back on the floor. We were kibbitzin’, as Dad would say, and the subject of heaven came up. “It sounds kind of boring to me,” I said to the air.

Mom sat up in her recliner, smiled, and said, “I am sure they have a lot of fun activities there.”

“You’ve got guts, babe,” my dad told me once, and I recall that moment often at times like these.

I am thrilled to announce the availability of the hardcover print 1st edition of Lucy, go see.  You can order it through Chez Soi Press. For the time being, the novel will only be distributed through the press and those independent bookstores who would like to carry it. Printing and shipping will take up to 2 weeks, once ordered. In 2-3 months, I will post news about the paperback, the audio book and e-book. I will also post about upcoming readings in independent bookstores. Please tell your favorite independent bookstores about the novel, if you like it. You can also request that they order it for you, through the press. Long live independent bookstores!! Also, please recommend it to your local library if you like it.

The prima materia of the story is of the most intimate nature. I both hope that the novel leaves readers speechless, and that it inspires thoughtful, careful conversation.

It has been an amazing journey of writing and refining.  I wrote some of it in Olivet, France, and most of it in Sitges, Catalonia, Spain. I edited it in many places: Spain, Canada, England, California, Vermont, Wisconsin, Iowa, Florida, Illinois. In some ways, it has taken me 40 years to get it out, and in others, 25, and in others, 18. There are so many fabulous stories involved in the making of this one.

Below are some of the places I wrote and most of the photos (you can click on any one to see it bigger) of me are by my son, who often watched me and once said to his grandfather, “My mom is always writing or reading, always with books and papers” and my dad told him, “That is a nice way for a boy to see his mom.”

At the beginning, I often wrote while my son napped. When he woke, we played music and danced; we used chopsticks as drumsticks and pretended the daybed in the sunny den was a set of drums. This past November, the night before Thanksgiving, he and I were walking in Iowa City, down the hill behind the Dey House, and across the bridge that is a favorite of mine. “I love this bridge,” he said, and then, “Mom, what is the theme song of your novel?”

“Hmm, I don’t know. But one reviewer told me she liked the soundtrack of it.”

“There’s a soundtrack?”

“Kind of, I mention music that Lucy listens to throughout it. I guess if I had to choose one of the songs it would be from The Four Non-Blondes, ‘What’s Going On?'”

My son looked for it on his phone, “are you sure it’s not called ‘What’s Up?’, to which I nodded, and then with the small speaker attached to his belt, he played it, and we danced together there on the bridge under the stars and over the Iowa River, in celebration.

I hear my mother’s voice less these days and feel like I am missing pieces of heart and gut, those parts from where I instinctively reach for her. I am a spinning top as my lifelong conversation with her trails off. “Speech will go next” one of her caretakers told my sisters and me last week, without mention of if and when. The only home phone number I’ve known no longer reaches her. I call the Memory Care Unit where she is a resident and the nurse takes the phone to wherever she has cruised in her wheelchair. Her brain will let her process one or two sentences at a time, and respond in kind. We share the most important ones: “I love you, I miss you, Lots of hugs and kisses.” When I look at this mosaic of photos, her voice throughout the years still speaks in my heart, where it will always live.

“Be brave” she looked in my eyes and told me when I left for Spain from the hospital where I stayed with her and dad for two weeks after his stroke.

“What else are you going to be?” she demanded when I called from thousands of miles away, in tears, asking, “Do you mean I should be nice to her?”

“Who is he, God?” she set me straight when I once worried that my father might never respect me again.

“I know my daughter, and I can tell by her eyes she is telling the truth,” she stood up for me, squeezing my trembling hand in front of the accuser.

“Whatever you decide, just always know that you can always come home,” I heard much more often than once.

“It will be different every day,” is what she told me about motherhood.

“I am not leaving here until that baby comes home from the hospital,” she told my dad in Atlanta, after the birth of my son who needed to stay ten days in the nursery.

“I just wish I could have been in there holding your hand and getting you out of all of those troubles” she told me after reading a memoir I wrote.

“Don’t give up praying for what you want, honey,” she made me smile with those words a few weeks ago.

Mom sang “You Are My Sunshine” and the “A, B, Cs”  as she rocked babies, and hummed as she worked, and she always cooed to birds and children. (She could also slay a person with a word or two.)

Last week, thanks to the nurse who helped her call me, I answered the phone and heard her, “Marianne?”–and my entire body jolted in recognition of what I thought was long lost, tears rising to my eyes.

“Get some pictures of yourself with that baby” she said twenty years ago, after watching me behind the camera when my son was a newborn, so I marched out to the back yard and insisted upon this one below, among others.

Today I thought about how seeing one’s child happy might be the best happiness. I did not know when I had a child how much my future happiness would depend on his. Nor did I know how difficult it can be for a child to be happy when his or her mother is unhappy.

“Nobody knows until they know,” Mom says that, too.

At the most critical moments of my life, her voice calls forth her–and my–love, bravery, dignity, and decency.  So though I think I am losing it, I have it.

“We had a good time, honey, didn’t we?” she said after a recent visit. Those are the words I hold closest to my heart for now.

Marianne Maili, Joseph Lariosa, Fateena Alghorra, at The Poetry Foundation, 61 West Superior, Chicago.

Wednesday night at the IWP poetry event at The Poetry Foundation in Chicago, three beautiful souls bared themselves and brought more light to the world. Fatena Alghorra, Kristian Sendon Cordero, and Ali Cobby Eckerman moved and illuminated the audience. I was reminded how important the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa is, offering space and time for distant, often silenced, voices, and how important poetry is for our hearts. How lovely these occasions are in the way they gather and connect the wordsmith lights around the world, forming constellations. Please read poetry every day. Also, if you really want to find out about another country, read their poets, their storytellers (not the news).

• 

• 

• 

It was thrilling to be at Jane Fonda’s tribute in Chicago last night. Thank you #chifilmfest and thank you, Jane.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a great sketching event at the Art Institute. We sat in one of the Modern Art galleries (there were about 25 of us, I think, I became so absorbed in the sketching for the entire hour and a half). The artist leading us gave us the assignment of juxtaposition, instructing us to take small parts of one work and put them in different places, or to take parts of many works and put them together in a new one, which is what I did. I used what attracted me in six different works to sketch this new one, which I did not have time to finish yet. Anyway, why am I telling you this? Well, it got me thinking about the word, juxtapose, juxtaposition, and about fiction, and life, and how many of my stories are made of juxtaposition, taking parts of life and putting them in different places, near other parts of other stories. It’s playful and concentrated and creates a new way of looking at things, and more often than not an enlightened understanding. The parts of works juxtaposed here are from the art work of Öyvind Fahlström, Christina Ramberg, Ed Ruscha, Wanda Pimentel, Ed Paschke and Benny Andrews.

 

On Saturday, I Facebook posted Roxane Gay’s recent writing, “My body is a cage of my own making”: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/01/roxane-gay-my-body-is-a-cage-of-my-own-making?CMP=fb_gu

Comments posted, and most especially one in which Gay is referred to as a victim, triggered me to immediately defend her. Am I alone in thinking that in this society being called a victim can be equivalent to being called a loser? It is true that loss is involved when a victim. Yet, I have heard people say with disdain about others, “Oh, s/he is such a victim.” I have been criticized for acting like one. I am unsure that this is the meaning this commentator had in mind when she wrote, “Victim. This was a great piece showing how this author remains forever a victim — by society, her coping skills, and her abusers from long ago.”

Yet are we not all victims? Have we not all been harmed, duped, and/or sacrificed in some way by someone or something recently and long ago? And will we not forever be? I have also been wondering what the opposite of a victim is? Is that a perpetrator? Or is it what Gay, and each of us are, too? Survivors.

Are we not all overwhelmed at times by the prospect of letting go of our survival mechanisms? It helps me to remind myself that I no longer need whichever one I know needs to go. But the first step is seeing how we acquired them.

In her writing Gay speaks of her extra weight as protection and in response to having been raped, at age 12, by a boy she loved and several others. Her way to survive was to think of ways to make herself unattractive to men. And now, her protection has become too heavy to carry and dropping it is daunting and difficult, and to add insult to injury she is criticized and judged for it. (And those boys, where are they now as men and what havoc are they wreaking in other lives and do they carry the responsibility of their act or is Roxane Gay carrying it for them? I am curious if their collective weight at the time of the act could add up to the extra weight she has carried.)

Our bodies are our boundaries and in some ways the body is a cage, yet it is also a home. Our body is home. And we are the host at the door, hopefully, deciding who (and what) we let in and  don’t. When that home has been violated. especially at a very early age, before we have learned and acquired dominion over it, the price we pay to have comfort in our homes is higher. It’s terrifically unfair, as life can be. As male privilege is.

What has male privilege done to a female’s image of her body/home? And what has male privilege and abuse cost females in terms of self/body/home protection? How can we measure the influence of others on how a female presents her body to the world? Feeling at home in one’s body is a challenging task while living among others who set “acceptable” standards for it.

For the record, I do not think this is only a female issue though it is easily arguable that a female’s body is more monitored and criticized than a male’s.

I think about Lucy Pilgrim, the character in my first novel, and how she struggles with her body/her home. I smile when I look at a sketch of her above and the exaggerated shoulders, knowing how she was carrying much more responsibility than was hers. Also notable about Lucy and this article is how Lucy, refusing to see herself as a victim, made it impossible for her to see the damage that had been done to her, and thus, blinded her to her vulnerability, and thus, her healing.