When my younger daughter began a college drawing class this fall, the instructor, who is also a brilliant painter, told the students that he believes artists should be discouraged at all costs. Even so, noting my daughter’s passion for art, he began helping her refine her raw talent—before discouragement came to her in a nearly fatal form.
A few weeks ago, on the back of a friend’s motorcycle, my daughter enjoyed flying over a country highway, the wind in her face. Then, she and her friend were struck by a car, and suddenly they were both sailing through the air in quite a different way. Both survived, each with a broken right leg. My daughter, the right-handed artist, also broke her right arm and shoulder. Months of physical and occupational therapy lie ahead. Breaking a sweat while swirling a brush at the easel is a distant goal.
During the weeks I’ve spent with my daughter in the hospital, my motherly self wished to draw her pain away into my own body, to spare her all suffering. But my writer/artist self watched in awe as she moved beyond the agony of her injuries into the early stages of recovery. I know the terror of the accident will outlast the cuts and bruises and the broken bones, and I can’t spare her the awful memories and nightmares. I can only reassure her that her feelings belong to her—they are her material, as real as pencil and paper, paint and canvas. Through the nights she and I have talked of that terror, I’ve glimpsed what she may do with it, make from it. Though aching and discouraged, she is still compelled by art.
Some people say things happen for a reason. Maybe things happen, and we find a reason, create a pattern from chaos. I live in hope of experiencing what this wounded, wonderful young woman will create.
Rosemary Poole-Carter
http://poole-carter.info/
Monday, November 26, 2007
Friday, November 2, 2007
DIRTY LAUNDRY
“In 19th century United States, Ireland, Scotland, and England, asylums for ‘fallen women’ opened that were named for Mary Magdalene: a saint that many remember as a sinner. Though administrators and clergy proposed to offer reform and rehabilitation, the asylums often became de facto prisons. So too the fictional Magdalene Ladies’ Lunatic Asylum, as the protagonist of Rosemary Poole-Carter’s Women of Magdalene discovers.”
The paragraph above opens Amiee Houser’s review of my novel for FOREWORD. Although, while writing WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, I knew nothing of the Magdalene asylums Houser mentions, I’m grateful to her for drawing the comparison. In such asylums, girls labeled by authority figures as wayward were incarcerated and forced to work in laundries under the harsh supervision of nuns. When I finished writing my novel in late 2001, still ignorant of the asylum laundries, I sent the manuscript to an agent, and started another project to take my mind off the long wait for a response. Then, in 2002, a Houston publicist sent me an invitation to a screening at the Museum of Fine Arts for Peter Mullan’s powerful film, THE MAGDALENE SISTERS, which depicts the sadistic treatment of girls and women in asylum laundries. That publicist had found the connections I’d not known existed between the film she was promoting and my ficitonal world: Mary Magdalene and dirty laundry.
Searching the Internet for Houstonians to invite to Mullan’s film, the publicist must have seen the mention on my website of my ficitonal Magdalene Ladies’ Lunatic Asylum. My novel was still a long way from publication, but my short play INCONVENIENT WOMEN, which shares the Deep South asylum setting, was already described on the site. While researching WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, I found Jeffrey L. Geller & Maxine Harris’s wonderful book entitled WOMEN OF THE ASYLUM: VOICES FROM BEHIND THE WALLS, 1840 – 1945. Inspired and chilled by the first-person accounts of inmates collected in this book, I began my novel, taking a little time out to write the short play, produced in Houston and Albany, in which four women from different times come out of the woodwork to compare notes on who committed them and why. Whether applied to an actual or fictional asylum, Mary Magdalene’s name does, indeed, remind us of the saint labeled a sinner, the woman misjudged by those with the power to make and enforce their rules.
As dramatized in Peter Mullan’s THE MAGDALENE SISTERS, the inmates of historic asylum laundries, laboring like slaves, were forced to take in washing from communities, while their keepers collected the fees. In my novel, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, a particular patient, Effie Rampling, takes refuge in washing all the dirty laundry she can find. Though, as Lady Macbeth might attest, there are stains of experience that cannot be washed away.
Yes, all that washing becomes a metaphor, certainly for shame and guilt, but also for the duties and obligations and obstacles that keep us from ourselves and our dreams. Perhaps, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE might have been polished and published sooner if I hadn’t been so tangled up with my laundry. Yet, I know the book could not have found a better publishing home than Kunati Inc., where writers and their characters are appreciated for challenging authority, provoking thought, and hanging out the dirty laundry.
Aimee Houser writes: “WOMEN OF MAGDALENE is a brilliant example of the best historical fiction can do: illuminate the past not as it really, truly was, but as we imagine it to be, in order to better understand our own motives, desires, and prejudices.” Reading the reviewer’s words, I thought of the Zen saying “after ecstasy, the laundry” and of a wise young woman’s reminder to her mother: “the phrase could also be after laundry, the ecstasy.”
Women of Magalene, ISBN 978-1-60164-014-7
The paragraph above opens Amiee Houser’s review of my novel for FOREWORD. Although, while writing WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, I knew nothing of the Magdalene asylums Houser mentions, I’m grateful to her for drawing the comparison. In such asylums, girls labeled by authority figures as wayward were incarcerated and forced to work in laundries under the harsh supervision of nuns. When I finished writing my novel in late 2001, still ignorant of the asylum laundries, I sent the manuscript to an agent, and started another project to take my mind off the long wait for a response. Then, in 2002, a Houston publicist sent me an invitation to a screening at the Museum of Fine Arts for Peter Mullan’s powerful film, THE MAGDALENE SISTERS, which depicts the sadistic treatment of girls and women in asylum laundries. That publicist had found the connections I’d not known existed between the film she was promoting and my ficitonal world: Mary Magdalene and dirty laundry.
Searching the Internet for Houstonians to invite to Mullan’s film, the publicist must have seen the mention on my website of my ficitonal Magdalene Ladies’ Lunatic Asylum. My novel was still a long way from publication, but my short play INCONVENIENT WOMEN, which shares the Deep South asylum setting, was already described on the site. While researching WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, I found Jeffrey L. Geller & Maxine Harris’s wonderful book entitled WOMEN OF THE ASYLUM: VOICES FROM BEHIND THE WALLS, 1840 – 1945. Inspired and chilled by the first-person accounts of inmates collected in this book, I began my novel, taking a little time out to write the short play, produced in Houston and Albany, in which four women from different times come out of the woodwork to compare notes on who committed them and why. Whether applied to an actual or fictional asylum, Mary Magdalene’s name does, indeed, remind us of the saint labeled a sinner, the woman misjudged by those with the power to make and enforce their rules.
As dramatized in Peter Mullan’s THE MAGDALENE SISTERS, the inmates of historic asylum laundries, laboring like slaves, were forced to take in washing from communities, while their keepers collected the fees. In my novel, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, a particular patient, Effie Rampling, takes refuge in washing all the dirty laundry she can find. Though, as Lady Macbeth might attest, there are stains of experience that cannot be washed away.
Yes, all that washing becomes a metaphor, certainly for shame and guilt, but also for the duties and obligations and obstacles that keep us from ourselves and our dreams. Perhaps, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE might have been polished and published sooner if I hadn’t been so tangled up with my laundry. Yet, I know the book could not have found a better publishing home than Kunati Inc., where writers and their characters are appreciated for challenging authority, provoking thought, and hanging out the dirty laundry.
Aimee Houser writes: “WOMEN OF MAGDALENE is a brilliant example of the best historical fiction can do: illuminate the past not as it really, truly was, but as we imagine it to be, in order to better understand our own motives, desires, and prejudices.” Reading the reviewer’s words, I thought of the Zen saying “after ecstasy, the laundry” and of a wise young woman’s reminder to her mother: “the phrase could also be after laundry, the ecstasy.”
Women of Magalene, ISBN 978-1-60164-014-7
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