Novelist Síle Post Wears the Green

 Síle Post 

   
  If you’re yearning for an Irish adventure this St. Patrick’s Day, but your budget has you staying in place, why not set out on a voyage to the Old Country with Síle Post’s courageous Áine O’Connor, as she journeys back to her homeland along the Dingle Peninsula, where a bequest and a mission await her?

     The rightness of the move washes over her as she works to rehabilitate the neglected garden adjacent the stone cottage she’s inherited.  “This was how it felt to be truly rooted in place,” wild salmon conservationist Áine muses. “To feel so close to the earth, the sky, and the sea – understanding the very life force that animates their essence, flows through humans as well, uniting all creation. Isn’t this the reason to live close to the Earth . . .  To experience this life force pulsing through our veins, invigorating us to feel, to see, to love – real love.”

     That real love of Place infuses Post’s beautifully written Your Own Ones, recently published by Vermont’s Green Writers Press.  In environmental activist Dede Cummings, who founded the fast growing house just two years ago, Post says she’s discovered her “kindred literary spirit.”

     Cummings, with a long history in publishing as a designer, agent, and author of seven books herself, felt called to create a press that would “make a difference.”  "Our mission,” says Cummings, “’to give voice to writers and artists who will make the world a better place,' relies on building a community around publishing books that inspire our readers to grow a deeper appreciation, respect, and responsibility for their natural environment."

     According to Cummings, Post’s Your Own Ones “fits nicely” with Green Writers Press’s growing list of books addressing climate change, notable among them Don Bredes’s acclaimed Polly and The One and Only World, brought out by the press in 2014.  “Post’s commitment to environmental sustainability and the local food movement, as demonstrated through the grassroots movement started in Ireland by her heroine in Your Own Ones, is linked to our mission and help us to augment a hopeful outlook for small groups, urban and rural, around the world that seek to work together to bring about change.”

Dede Cummings 

     With a Ph. D. from The University of Chicago, graduate studies in Ireland and Norway, a decade teaching American Literature and Nature writing, significant publications with university presses, plus continued work on the boards of several scholarly organizations, Post brings to her fiction an uncommon intellectual curiosity, thematic grace, and narrative ease and richness.  Steeped as her work is in place and sustainability, however, it’s never didactic or admonishing. 

    Not one to sit idly by, Post has another book due out this spring, also from Green Writers Press: The Road to Walden North. Cummings says that this novel (as others forthcoming), “segue with our mission  . . . [and] speak to quality of life and the beauty of nature, which is why her forthcoming The Road to Walden North was such an exciting acquisition for us. Post reimagines Thoreau's Walden through the eyes of her heroine, Kate, and many of us will be hopefully entertained and inspired by her writing."

     The author, who has spent over half her life living in the White Mountains and Vermont, keeps that same hope close to heart. “I bring to my writing an overwhelming passion for Place,” says Post, as she creates “unforgettable characters who so love their special places, that they scale seemingly insurmountable challenges to protect them.”

     The reward for her characters – intelligent, fully imagined souls who summon the courage to face those challenges -- is rich.  So is the reward for readers who travel along with them.

What inspired you to write and publish two novels almost simultaneously?

As someone who had taught college literature and writing for well over a decade, I decided, much like Dr. Kate Brown, the heroine of my forthcoming novel, The Road to Walden North, to move from ‘talking the talk’ to ‘walking the walk’: writing my own fiction.

Living in northern Vermont, surrounded by my wonderful organic grower/farmer neighbors, has certainly taught me to adopt a lifestyle based on a ‘local foods-local living’ philosophy—‘grounded,’ so to speak, in actual experience. As one inclined to ‘sow the literary seeds of truth and simplicity,’ as it were, I felt compelled to create stories of local living in fiction.

While the Hardwick local food movement—and the incredible individuals that made it possible—shape the plot and themes of my novel, Your Own Ones, (though set in Atlantic Canada & Ireland), the experience of discovering the simple and the local life in Walden, Vermont, sets the narrative stage for my novel, The Road to Walden North.

Both of your novels have received very positive endorsements from acclaimed author, Howard Mosher. What links your writing?

A recent exchange with Howard Mosher triggered the realization that my decision to focus on writing fiction actually stemmed from the utterly transformational resonance for me of one of his stories. He had me at the title—who would not be smitten by a landscape (place) Where the Rivers Run North?

For almost a decade, while teaching college in Boston, I spent weekends and vacation time in a log cabin deep in the woods of the White Mountains, where I fell completely in love—with the landscape. Howard Mosher’s poignant depiction of the haunting, primeval beauty of the North Country—augmented by Jay Craven’s gorgeous film adaptation, (both of which I picked up one Saturday morning at the charming Village Bookstore in Littleton), struck me in some deeply soulful way. Mosher’s moving account of the people who assumed nearly insurmountable challenges to protect their cherished sense of Place, inspired me to write my own fictional odes to the special places in my life—and the people who endeavor to preserve their ways of living there.

Mosher has praised your “courage to write about big issues.” Tell us about the high stakes at heart in Your Own Ones.

Your Own Ones speaks to North Country readers interested in protecting their special places, as well as in preserving the cultural traditions and practices long associated with those places, that we have, for generations, called Home. Set in agricultural Ireland, the story of a rural place on the verge of losing its special identity, traditions, and local lifestyle, serves as a cautionary tale for both the Irish and Vermonters, alike.

The term, “your own ones,” refers to the natural elements of those special places—the hillside farms, grazing pastures, maple bush, forested mountains, and river-bend hollows that distinguish the landscape of Vermont from other places—as well as to the people who reside and work in those places: our families, friends, neighbors, farmers, and townspeople. 

Idiosyncratic places—and the independent people who reside therein—face the daunting challenge today of losing their individual identity, their time-honored ways, even the topographical features of those special places, in the face of global economic forces seeking to homogenize cultures worldwide.

This issue surely resonates with anyone from such unique places as ours in Vermont, New Hampshire, (or even the traditional areas of Atlantic Canada & Ireland), who has traveled to the seemingly endless sprawl of a large metropolitan area, lined in miles of box stores and shopping malls, followed by residential ‘developments’ with identical houses or apartment buildings, both in this country and abroad.

Your Own Ones chronicles the success story of how, in common economic parlance, Main Street takes on Wall Street, in a deliberate return to their cultural ‘roots’, so to speak—their traditional and local food practices. Who would have thought that (heirloom) potatoes would save Ireland once again?

The “big issues” noted by Howard Mosher refer to the courage of the individuals who people my novel to confront those forces at work in eradicating the particulars of their (and our) special places. Your Own Ones tells the story of how individuals can make a difference, can shape the future of their special places—by simply trying.

Mosher also praises your forthcoming The Road to Walden North as: “Fascinating and original . . . following in the tradition of . . . Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” In what ways does your novel relate to Dillard’s remarkable work?

Heralded as a tribute to Thoreau, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek described phenomena through the lens of a naturalist, similar in kind to Thoreau’s essays, yet like Thoreau’s mix of naturalistic detail with metaphysical and transcendental insights, particularly in Walden, Pilgrim blends ‘observation and introspection, mystery and knowledge’—traits resulting in her winning the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.

While obviously influenced by and grateful for Dillard’s example, I attempted to contribute to this tradition by relying on the genre of fiction, through writing a novel that blends the motifs of each chapter from Walden, with a contemporary story of the process of awakening for a set of individuals whose lives intersect, both on the campus of Harvard University and within the forested hills of Walden North, Vermont.

You might think of it as a fictional ‘Reader’s Guide’ to Walden for the modern reader. While many claim to have picked up Walden, even more (secretly) admit to not ever completing the book! It was my intention to provide in The Road to Walden North, an accessible, inviting, and intriguing story that illustrates for contemporary readers, the continued resonance of Thoreauvian themes in our lives today. At the same time, the novel celebrates the natural, the local, and the simple through focusing on selected unique characters living in the woods of Walden North, as well as those intrigued by their lifestyles. 

Your heroines are intelligent, accomplished women who have worked hard to reach a place of prominence along challenging career paths. Yet they both step off to take the road less traveled. Tell us about Áine and Kate and the decisions they make.

While some novelists choose to set ordinary characters in extraordinary circumstances, I prefer to focus on depicting extraordinary individuals confronted by ordinary circumstances—to see how life experiences, however un-dramatic, mundane even, might shape their actions, their sense of self, and their chosen paths in life. After all, often it is the ordinary, the coincidental, perhaps even the synchronous, events in life that result in life-altering, transformational, and transcendent changes. Of course, the subtle, sub-textual theme inherent in the stories of my female (as well as male) characters is to show that we can all strive to reach what Thoreau called ‘our higher selves’—often by following, the ‘beat of a different drummer’ along the ‘road less traveled’.

 At the same time, though, I’d like to mention that both my novels are not overtly ‘preachy’, but rather humorous, actually—reminiscent of the ‘humor of Maeve Binchy,’ according to one reviewer.  The female protagonists are depicted as modest, self-deprecating heroines with a great sense of humor, able to point fun at their own foibles and misunderstandings, related in witty dialogue. It’s humor, after all, that helps us cope—even thrive—in challenging times.

The Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, VT

What’s your next literary adventure?

While I may have ‘many more lives to live’ as a novelist, like Thoreau, (who separated himself from living amid fellow Concordians in order to study and write about their culture in solitude at Walden Pond), I have returned to my special place in the forests of the White Mts., where I am completing my White Mountain novel, NorthWoods, as well as writing a sequel to The Road to Walden North, called The Vermonters.  I think of my sojourn here in the Northwoods in the Wordsworthian sense of ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’: a literal Yeatsian return to my ‘cabin of clay and wattles made’ in the White Mountains—my ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’.

This interview appears in the March 2016 issue of The North Star Monthly.  Check out their site:
www.northstarmonthly.com

For more information on Post and Your Own Ones,  see her website: www.silepost.com 
And for more on Green Writers Press, their mission, and their books, follow this link:  http://greenwriterspress.com/

Lincoln Reloaded: Playwright Gary Moore Raps the Great Emancipator

Gary Moore in  Shanghai, 1988

   

     When the student is ready, the saying goes, the teacher will appear. 

     Surely this was the case when author Gary Moore took a teaching job he didn’t particularly want on a campus full of students who didn’t particularly want to be there themselves.

     The place was Shanghai. The year, 1988. 

     Moore, armed with 100 copies of the Gettysburg address, taught his students to rap. They showed him the drama of freedom in the streets. The rest, as they say as well, is history.

     Moore, an award-winning playwright, poet, novelist, and Dean Emeritus of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, has been enthralled with the life and work of Abraham Lincoln since his twenties. While he modestly refrains from calling himself a scholar or “conventional political historian,” more consumed with Lincoln’s character and philosophy than his policies, Moore’s insatiable research on the 16^th president has informed much of his creative work, which has encompassed genres from rap opera to screenplays, from poetry to “naturalistic” fiction.

     Recently retired from academia, Moore, who earned an MA from Johns Hopkins, held faculty and administrative posts across Vermont, Maryland, and Pennsylvania; he spent two years teaching in Shanghai, and another two at Koc University in Istanbul, developing and teaching communications.  Relocated from Vermont to the west coast of sunny Puerto Rico, he now devotes his time to writing.

     That writing is about Lincoln.  But the man who emerges from Moore’s fertile imagination and empathetic interpretation isn’t simply the statesman carved in marble. Moore’s Lincoln raps and swaggers. He sleepwalks. He makes love high in the clouds above the White House. He espouses Buddhist philosophy.  In short, he has a heart huge as a giant’s.

     When asked what lessons we can learn from Lincoln today, Moore cites an early poem of the president’s, a funeral memorial, in which he asks God to “experience empathy” for the deceased; Lincoln goes so far as to ask God himself to live by the Golden Rule.  “Both are important needs of our time, “ says Moore, “unfortunately more tooted about than actualized, in affairs small and large.”

     Even more important to save today’s violent world, Moore says, is love. And it’s Lincoln’s love story the author richly envisions in his newly completed novel, Abe and Ann.

Tell us about “Burning in China,” your one-man play about your experiences in Shanghai during the turbulent year leading up to Tiananmen Square.

Burning in China now seems like a play about the human struggle toward the light that shines in darkness but when I first wrote it in a fever after fleeing a Chinese government crackdown following the Tiananmen revolt in 1989 it was popular with North American audiences for its authentic witnessing of passionate historical events.  I’d gone to China as an exchange professor from Johnson State College in August of 1988 but I went reluctantly because I was tired of teaching and deep into the writing of my first full-length verse drama, Beaver Falls, and I didn’t want to be distracted from it.  I had yet to become, as I am today, an addicted world traveler with frequent spells of wanderlust.

It turned out my students didn’t want to be at the university in Shanghai either.  They were adults, mid-career teachers, coming back to school to bolster their English as part of China’s ambitions in the global economy, but being an English teacher had no “face” at that time.  Their salaries were low, and the government forbade them to change jobs.  Their students who owned color televisions looked down on them.  Made for a damned slow classroom, I’m tellin ya.

Burning in China recounts my finally getting my repressed students to express themselves after I wrote and produced and performed with them in a bi-lingual rap opera called The Great Emancipator Meets The Monkey King.  In this musical drama, the first performance of rap music in the People’s Republic of China, a group of anonymous Victims of Fear cast off their masks of intimidation and dance in the music of freedom.  The rap opera got a standing ovation from an audience of 1700, I was interviewed for Shanghai radio and television, and our play was scheduled for another performance, on the national holiday of May 4, in a soccer stadium, for an audience of 50,000.

But.  In April the student movement started its pro-democracy rebellion against the government, in Shanghai and Beijing and a hundred other Chinese cities.  And by May there was no rap opera planned for a soccer stadium but a real opera in the streets where millions of victims of fear threw off their masks and danced and sang for the world they believed in.  Martial law was declared.  The tanks and soldiers fired in Tiananmen Square.  Foreigners were advised to leave the country and some of us resisted and stayed until we were afraid our Chinese friends might be punished for knowing us, and our friends sent us off saying, “You must tell the world what happened here!”

For several years audiences were eager for my account of what had happened, I think for its historic and journalistic value more than its art.  Twenty years later Caleb Deschanel, a five-time Academy Award nominee in Cinematography and a fine director as well, revived Burning… for the stage in New York with actor Jeff LeBeau standing in for me -- a younger, better-looking Gary Moore as my wife said.  We did some rewrites then to heighten the universal dimensions of the story and decrease its historical aspects for an audience most of whom were no longer people who had been glued to their televisions about all of that back in 1989. 

The play sold out at the New York International Fringe Festival and was recommended by the New York Times and the New Yorker, and the next year I left my wonderful job as Academic Dean at VCFA to go write full time on a sunny island.  

Rap Opera Cast and Crew

During that trip to China, you brought along 100 copies of the Gettysburg Address.

Ah, what a time!  I gave a lecture on Abraham Lincoln to my American Culture class of fifty students.  About a hundred fifty students came to see it in a theater-style lecture hall.  I closed by emphasizing Lincoln’s well-known formulation of democracy in the “Gettysburg Address” and then said that I had a hundred facsimile copies of that address in a box on the stage and they were welcome to take one on their way out. 

The stampede knocked me over and spilled my water pitcher and knocked the live microphone into the water spreading across the stage.  I yelled for help as I struggled up and ran to unplug the microphone before all of us on the watery stage got electrocuted for wanting democracy.  Students rushed out hiding the “Gettysburg Address” under their clothing as if it were dangerous.  A month later these words preceded a twenty-foot Goddess of Liberty in a demonstration of a million in downtown Shanghai: Government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Early Campaign Portrait, Library of Congress

Why Lincoln?  

I hate to say it, but I had a vision.

I was 26 and just out of the Army and living with my macrobiotic astrologer girlfriend on the Lower East Side of New York.  Sound like the 60’s?  I’d taken my M.A. in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins before the army and now that I was out I wanted to get back to trying to be a poet but I had no idea what to write.  I was a lot better at seeming like a poet than being one.  One night the universe got even for my contradictory ambition and dithering.  It laid a vision on me. 

Now, I smoked my share of dope in those days, and read Tao Te Ching and the like, but at heart I’m a classical school kind of guy, not an Aquarian romantic.  I liked my astrologer girlfriend a lot, but I was skeptical of anything ever really happening because my Mercury was retrograde.  So I don’t say “vision” lightly.  And I say it with a sense of humor, and a sense of resignation because it’s the closest way I’ve been able to describe the strange thing that happened. 

While Jan was taking a bath at the back of the “railroad” apartment, I cleared the dinner dishes and sat down at the clean table with some paper and a pen.  Jan, the romantic God bless her, had lit candles for dinner, and for some reason I turned off the lamps in our living-dining room and sat down to write by candle-light.  I was playing at writing by candle-light and a thought came to me about the young Abraham Lincoln writing by candle-light and I described it in four or five simple sentences.  Another Lincoln scene came to me and I wrote it down.  Another.  In three pages of short scenes – splitting rails, giving speeches -- I worked my way through what I imagined of Lincoln’s growing up and being president and being shot.  I couldn’t remember ever taking a special interest in Lincoln, and I didn’t know anything about him except what we all read or heard in fourth grade or half-dozed through in American History class or whatever. 

Who is this guy? The next morning I went to the closest bookstore and bought my first Lincoln book and started it while I walked home and didn’t yet know that Lincoln too liked to read while he walked.  Luckily the book I found that first day of my fascination was one of those “his/her life in his/her own writings” books that gives you historical and biographical context for each letter or notebook entry or legislative bill or text of a speech, so I learned something about how the man lived and also how he thought as expressed in his own words.  Whoa! He writes like a poet, like a statesman, like a lawyer.  He’s funny and wise.  An oaf and an angel.  He told jokes about vomit and saved democracy.  His favorite story was about a bunch of wizards. 

What to read next?  I was gone.  In story hours at the Carnegie Library in my home town of Beaver Falls, I got hooked on the feeling of fairytale, legend, myth.  That’s how I saw this guy.  Right away.  Better than reality.  And I was gone into fifty years of reading about Lincoln, lecturing about Lincoln, writing about Lincoln.  My lectures have pretty much had their feet on the ground, but I never (OK, just about never) write about the naturalistic historical biographical Lincoln.  Always a Lincoln with an unexpected edge.  A 20-minute performance poem about Lincoln as a hundred foot giant appearing to a little boy to help him find his giant heart.  A play about Lincoln as the inheritor of a curse from his medieval ancestor Long Lankin.  A rap opera about Lincoln appearing in China to inspire the Victims of Fear. 

I’ve sometimes had to fight myself to write anything that’s not about Lincoln.  In the middle of writing my play Beaver Falls about a single mother in the 1960’s who saves herself and her child by shooting pool, this smooth-shooting black guy showed up to emancipate people from some prejudice, and he said his name was Lincoln.  OK.  I think you won’t be surprised if I tell you I don’t feel I do my Lincoln work because I choose to.  This Lincoln enchantment came to me, and still comes sometimes, and says, “Here it is, Gar, do it.” 

That’s how I came to write Abe and Ann after the success of my play Burning in China in New York had motivated me to find a literary form that’s not as evanescent as stage drama.  A novel?  A novel can be distributed to millions of people over ages of years, not just the ninety people you might get into the stiff little seats of your off-Broadway theater for a couple of weeks. What novel?  Well, there was this one Abraham Lincoln story that just needed told soooo bad.

Photo of Minnie Harms, said to closely resemble
Ann Rutledge.  Library of Congress.

Tell us about Abe and Ann.

I’ve said that sometimes the universe seems to send me my themes and characters and forms  -- poem, novel, play, verse drama, opera (Why couldn’t I be one of those writers who knew from the start he just wanted to write in one form and did it and did it and got good at it?), and I know many other writers agree with me that the best stuff is the stuff we don’t fully make up but seem to receive.  But there are times I’ve had to put my foot down.  Like when I was writing Abe and Ann. 

This novel tells the love story of the beardless and timid 20-something Abe Lincoln courting Ann Rutledge, the dazzling and literate red-haired daughter of the tavern keeper in an 1830 prairie village of “a hundred souls.”  This story, the outlines of which are historically authentic, didn’t need turned into a fairy tale because it’s magical in its unlikely nature.  My goal was to combine authenticity and lyricism to show the passion the couple must have shared for witnesses to tell us that Lincoln threw himself on her grave in a rainstorm when she was taken from him.  So while my inclination has always been to write in extremes and go beyond, I vowed to tell Abe and Ann in a naturalistic way while letting its legendary qualities speak for themselves.  It hurt me to revise out a wind that wanted to talk directly to Ann behind the barn or delete pages of dialogue between Abe and the Devil in a forsaken time.  But I did it. 

My real but legendary naturalistic novel is now in the hands of the real but legendary New York agent Marly Rusoff who’s looking for the one good editor it needs to need it.  Will it be a hard sell?  Historical and biographical novels have a big market.  One of my friends who writes vivid and deep human stories that just happen to be in the nineteenth century just got her third six-figure advance.  But Abe and Ann doesn’t have the feel of epic historical context.  It’s a close tale of two young people who love books and are looking for more and find each other in an illiterate frontier village in an Illinois oak grove.  It’s a ballad, not an epic.  Some of my early readers tell me that my novel Abe and Ann is actually a poem, and I like that response. 

You’ve said, “Historical characters and events are vessels we fill with meaning according to our changing needs.” Why do we need Lincoln today?

When I take questions after lecturing on Lincoln someone usually asks what Lincoln would do if he came back?  Or could do?  I’d counsel him to first get a college degree based on experiential learning.  For his thesis he should write a self-help book that will give him a platform for lucrative consulting contracts, international acclaim, and an opportunity to affect the fate of life of Earth.  Why mess around? 

Seriously, the thing I think we need most from Lincoln’s skill set is his compassion for those who opposed him.  “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies,” he told the South.  He spoke of Southerners who wanted to kill him as errant brothers.  We are in a time of increasing intolerance.  Respect for the other is declining, empathy is scorned.  Lincoln said the Southerners in rebellion were but what we would be if we were in their place.  Compassion is not an easy message to spread when so many are so frightened, angry, violent, and cruel.  We need Lincoln’s patience and determination as well as his open heart.

I love the message of Lincoln’s favorite story, which primacy means a lot I think when you consider that the man knew a great great number of stories, he whom some suggest might have been an even better story teller than he was a statesman.  I won’t give the full telling here, but I can summarize by saying that when the king’s assembled wizards bring him the briefest statement of the greatest wisdom on Earth, it’s this:  This too shall pass.  “How cautioning,” Lincoln used to add, “in our hour of pride.  How comforting in our hour of affliction.” 

Everything vanishes.  The good, the bad, parents, children, money, love, flowers, jobs, the Earth and moon and stars, life.  And death?  If we can fully accept impermanence we can live happily in a world of joys and losses.  Buddhist wisdom.  From Abraham Lincoln?  Who knew?  Important for today?  Always.

Is poetry your first love? 

Yes.  And maybe my last.  It’s of course been an affair with joys and woes. I got disappointed with literary poetry in my thirties – all that scheming to create little Chinese puzzles of interlocked and ambiguous images about small moments of loss – all that art for art’s sake formalism.  I read some complex quiet poetry at the Barre Opera House one night and got a smattering of applause compared with the foot-stomping ovation the boys from Waterbury got with their cover of “Bungalo Bill.”  I vowed to write poetry that was immediately accessible and moving.  This led me to writing narrative poetry and calling for the return of the oral tradition.   

Rap and slams hadn’t yet popularized performance poetry, or maybe I should say “re-popularized” it, because oral tradition poetry of course preceded literary poetry by thousand of years and gave birth to it. In my own way I started recapitulating the history of literary form.  I wrote narrative poems for performance until I started hearing more than one voice and Lo! the play was invented.  Writing extended stories in dramatic form led to writing extended stories in novels.  Two novels in, I felt a combination of security and late-age abandon that let me to go back to writing poetry as well.  Or is it desperation?  I’m getting a book of poems called Sojourner ready for publication.  These poems celebrate the vanishing beauties of our time passing through life.  Many of them are about my erotic relationship with the stars.  Why mess around?  

You spend your days in Puerto Rico, looking out over the ocean, which you call muse and companion. In your poem, “The Lonely Ocean,” the narrator relates to the sea in this way: “As if it were your soul vast flat and gray / Willing but not able to hide all you’ve done." What is the ocean unearthing for you now?

I’m writing a new novel with no naturalism pledge and no chains of historical authenticity.  Hooray!  It’s got sex, drugs, global travel, art smuggling, and mysticism.  It’s called The Lost Venus.  As of page 70, it has no appearance by Abraham Lincoln.

As well, I have a hankering to produce a play in an ancient Greek theater a mile up in the cloud at Termessos in Turkey.  The play, Beaver Falls, will be a modern rust-belt single mother story set in the ancient theater’s atmosphere of tragic destiny.  The play is finished, it’s in verse, and it seems to me the best thing I’ve written.  It won the Artist Fellowship of the Vermont Arts Council and Lost Nation Theater in Montpelier did 13 performances of it for inspired and weeping audiences.  Investors are welcome.

I have to ask you about Joe Namath. 

I grew up with Joe in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.  I was too small for the high school football team but a pretty fair athlete who played plenty of pick-up baseball and basketball and football with Joe when we were all neighborhood kids at the school yard.  One night at 37^th street where a tree marked the goal, Joey – who I think had picked me first to show his varsity buddies he could beat them even with skinny little wannabees – told me in the huddle to run straight down to the tree and cut left behind it and when I came out the other side the ball would be in my hands.  I did and it was.  You see the true dimensions.  But there is this fact: I caught a touchdown pass from Joe Namath.  

This interview appears, in abbreviated form, in the February 2016 issue of The North Star Monthly.  

http://www.northstarmonthly.com/ 

See Gary Moore's website for more on "Burning in China" --  http://www.garymoore.info/

Begin With the Weather: Diaries of a "Common Laborer"

   

     
     My days of regularly haunting antique shops are largely over. For many years, I fancied myself a collector of fine things, and in truth, the phrase “hand-painted Bavarian porcelain” still whets the appetite. But one does reach a point when arithmetic trumps the flashier arts, when the likely cost of keeping body and soul together in old age multiplied by the desire to leave behind something other than shelves of tchotchkes is too great to ignore. And in time, the tyranny of possessions, of bright, shiny objects, does loosen its grip.

     During that wanton heyday, though, I came across a set of four diaries from the early 1900s, meticulously kept by a man named Luke Flynn, who lived in Waterbury with his wife, Kate. Small, unpretentious volumes, four in all, about an inch thick and the size of an index card, covered in canvas with an overlapping flap, the edges trimmed in narrow, burgundy leather. In these diaries, Mr. Flynn recorded what we might assume mattered most to him: the weather, his work, the comings and goings of family and close friends.

     As a writer, I was immediately intrigued. I’ve kept a journal most of my adult life, though slacking off for great stretches now and again, when the tedium or occasional tragedy of the days seemed too numbing to chronicle. I rarely return to them; the banality of most entries serves only to upend the already fragile confidence.  I only hope that before I reach a state of mindless decrepitude, I have the good sense to take a match to the plastic tubful of assorted spiral notebooks, sketch pads, and leather-bound journals I’ve despoiled over the years.  God forbid anyone should read them. 

Waterbury, VT 1914 -- Library of Congress

     

     Yet, Mr. Flynn’s diaries have survived for over a century, and I’m glad for that. In laconic prose, and spelling we’ll call idiosyncratic, they reveal a poignant if narrow slice of his life and an earlier time.  We are listeners in a darkened hallway, leaning toward a door left just slightly ajar.

     Luke Joseph Flynn was born on January 12, 1855 in Moretown, Vermont, one of six children of Irish immigrants; the family appears in the 1860 US census. At that time, the surname was Flinn. In 1885 he married Kate Donovan, whose own parents were born in Ireland as well. When his first child arrived the following year, Mr. Flynn called himself a farmer. But by the time he penciled in his days in the pages of “The Standard Diary,” he was, in his own term, a common laborer.

     Every entry begins with the weather, as we might expect from one who spent so much of his life toiling out in the elements. Simple descriptions suffice: cool, cold, warm, clear. In the last volume I have, 1913, Mr. Flynn logs the temperature as well. Strong winds merit notating their direction. Many a day, even one that dawned at zero, are, in his words, “fine and pleasant.”  Hot summer days are sometimes simply “lousy.”

     Occasionally bad weather – heavy snows, or pelting, lasting rains -- keeps him from his work. And that work was hard: building roads, raising barns, chopping and drawing logs, shoveling gravel, as well as every sort of field labor one can imagine. Cultivating corn, sowing oats, digging potatoes. Long weeks devoted to mowing hay.

1906 Waterbury, VT -- Library of Congress

    
     Although the Flynns were boarders, they kept a garden for themselves, and raised livestock, too.  A sow has piglets. Sausage is prepared. A cow is slaughtered and the weight of even the hide documented.  Bette, a beloved mare, gives birth to a colt. Her movement from one pasture to another is worthy of mention in these spare entries.

     Six days of work nearly every week brought Mr. Flynn about $10.50.  He detailed money received and spent, credits extended and occasionally requested, as well as the names of his employers: Palmer, Donovan, Shepler, Arkley.  A hunting license in 1913 cost 75 cents; a shave and a haircut, 35. A can of tobacco was a dime. He bought a suit of clothes on installment. Two shirts cost $3; a pair of shoes, $2.50.  He “pays” the priest a dollar for the monthly collection. Every penny spent on lodging and a single hotel meal during a trip to Rochester to work on “the road” is jotted down.

     More than a few times, the entire week’s wages went directly to doctors’ fees. Illness finds its way onto the diary pages with some frequency. Now and then, it keeps Mr. Flynn home. Often we read, without further description, that Kate or Nellie or John is “sick.”

    A little research revealed that John, whose work is recorded periodically, was the Flynn’s eldest son, and Nellie, their daughter. Mabel is mentioned now and again; she was John’s wife, and Georgie, their child.  Who Will and Christie might have been, I’ve not yet uncovered.  

    The names of those who don’t appear in Mr. Flynn’s diaries deserve acknowledgement here: two other children.  In 1892, a second son, Daniel, was born, and five years later, Florence arrived.   But 1903 was a year of unimaginable heartbreak.  In February, Daniel, then 11, died from cerebrospinal meningitis following a fall.  And in August, little Florence, just six, was lost to typhoid fever.

     I don’t know how you go on after such a year. But the Flynns managed to do so.

     Visits from John and Nellie, young adults, are documented in the diaries. Kate makes frequent trips to “the center.”  John sells a carriage; Nellie acquires a piano. The price for the former is given, but not the later.  John’s marriage receives a notation that runs along the left hand of the page.  Nellie’s marriage in Burlington, apparently not attended by her father, does not. Funerals and hospital visits are cataloged, as well as a fire at “the creamery.”

Typical entry in Mr. Flynn's Standard Diaries.

   
     Sunday is a day of rest, and nearly always attendance at Mass. As you might imagine, entries describing entertainment are few: the Flynns enjoy an “Italian wedding” and a dance at the Catholic hall. John and Mabel go to a party. There’s berry picking at a state farm, and one evening devoted to playing cards.  Notable is a trip to Montpelier to see the circus, and another outing to watch the “moving pictures,” where they probably saw silent film actress Edith Storey in “A Postal Substitute,” which a Barre Daily Times advertisement describes as “a thrilling Western drama.”

November 9, 1910 advertisement from The Barre Daily Times

     If Mr. Flynn kept additional diaries, they were not among those I found. Regardless, there’d be few more. He died on the 8^th of July, 1915, his death certificate states, of “valvular heart disease” complicated by tuberculosis.  His last diary confirms he was a granite worker toward the end of his life, spending many days as he noted in “the stone shed.” He was 60 years old.

     Kate died a few years later, after an operation; she’d suffered from stomach cancer and chronic bronchitis. Mr. Flynn’s surviving son did not outlive him for long, either.  Apparently, he got into a bad bottle of Grappa and was found dead at the age of 34.  But his daughter Nellie -- for whom that luxury, the piano, was acquired -- had married a barber named James Finnegan and later worked as a clerk in a pharmacy.  A Berlin resident, she buried an infant son and both her husband and young daughter far too soon. But she lived to an admirable 106, her passing attributed simply to “advanced age.”

     We can’t be sure what will become of our stories, once we tell them. In all likelihood, Mr. Flynn couldn’t have imagined that 100 years after his death, a woman would discover his diaries and find in them a testament to resilience and strength. As a writer, I spend my hours crafting and revising and culling until the sentences reach a state as close to song as I can manage, as I’ve learned to do, through study and practice.  Luke Flynn started each day appreciating the weather. He never left a page blank. There’s a lesson there, as well.

This article appears in the January 2016 issue of The North Star Monthly.  Check out their site:  www.northstarmonthly.com/