Transcription of Monica Wood for the show Freedom, #65
Dr. Lisa: The topic of today’s show is freedom. We’re going to spend time with people who represent different ways of looking at this notion “freedom” and what it means as an individual and maybe within the culture. Today, we have Monica Wood, author of Any Bitter Thing and also When We Were the Kennedys. The way that I became interested in having Monica come and speak was because she does work with the Maine Correctional Center in Windham.
I appreciate your coming in to talk to us today about all the things that you do Monica.
Monica Wood: You’re very welcome.
Dr. Lisa: Monica, I finished When We Were the Kennedys and I was really struck by the fact that I think there’s so much shared culture that you are describing that so many of us in Maine have felt. This sort of mill town, Mexico, paper mill … My family is from Biddeford, and I know that this culture was there for us and the Catholicism. Why was it important for you to write about that particular topic?
Monica Wood: Well, it’s funny that freedom is the topic today because writing non-fiction was a big jump out of the corral for me because I am known as a novelist. I’ve got 4 novels. Everybody, my editors, my agent, my readers, everybody was expecting another novel which I mightily tried to do and left it abandoned. I probably will get back to it, but I was in a real trough. Not just a writing trough, but a trough of … Despair is maybe too strong a word, but I had had 2 friends had died, my father-in-law died. This was all within about 4 months and then, I know this sounds silly, but cat lovers will know, and also a very beloved old cat died. That just felt like the last straw.
It’s just one of those places you end up in in life; everybody does. It just happened that all these things seemed to be converging at once and I didn’t write for a while. I was simply not in a place to do that, especially something that I was struggling with so mightily. Finally … What I always do when I’m in despair, is I went home, but I went home metaphorically this time. I started writing about my childhood and there was something so palliative for me about doing that. It felt good to be back with my family, even though I’m writing about a sad year in my family’s life. I was 9 years old and my father dropped dead on his way to work at the Oxford Paper Company, which was the mill in town, but there was something about going back and in a way being back with my family. That was extremely calming to me. I just felt that I’d been drawn back into the bosom of all those things that made me who I am.
I grew up feeling cherished and special and loved, so there was that way of getting back to that feeling again. At the same time, there was something a little bold about it because I was working on non-fiction, which I had never intended to do. I thought there was zero audience for this book, starting with my agent, who is kind of the troll under the bridge. You have to get past her to get anywhere else. She’s wonderful. We’ve been together for a long time, but we have our moments. So it was … You know, talk about freedom … I felt like I’d kind of went busting out of a little box that I’d been in for quite a while.
Dr. Lisa: Well, I would think that it would be very different because I’ve read all of your works of fiction and that’s something that you’re creating, something that you’re pulling together out of somewhere, your mind and things around you, but this is something that has to come from within you. The non-fiction, the autobiographical aspect, and you’re talking about really difficult times. Your father died and then you eventually talk about the fact that your mother died. You talk about this sort of re-jiggering of the family trying to understand itself better after what was known to be ceased to exist anymore. What did that bring up for you as you were writing?
Monica Wood: People ask me “Was it hard to write? Did you cry all the way through it?” Honestly, I never shed a tear. It was probably the most joyful writing I have ever done and probably because what I’m writing about is a transformation of a family. It was, I cannot even possibly overestimate the blow Dad’s death was to all of us and yet we ended up being … This very traditional mill family and, just like every other family in town, completely connected to the mill through Dad’s work. then he’s gone and so we’re something else. We don’t really know what. A family of women, 4 daughters … My brother was married with children of his own at that point, so here was my mother and these 4 girls.
In the last scene of the book, before the epilogue, I have my sister Anne, who is at the time a 21-year-old schoolteacher and then there’s the 3 little girls. There’s my little sister Betty who is mentally disabled. I’m 9 at the time and my sister Cathy is 8. The big thing is Anne getting her driver’s license so we can finally get Dad’s car going. This is a year and a half later. She finally gets her license. Back then it was just a big deal. We all piled into the car and were driving around town and tooting the horn at this one and that one. It’s sort of a culmination of all the things that you’ve seen in the town and in the story, but at the end, she pulls into the driveway and we’re singing the car trip song. We had this song we always sang when we were in the car and the last line is “There is no journey we cannot make this way”. In other words, here we are now as this other kind of family and we’re going to be okay.
Even though the reader knows in not too many years my mother will also die, but it prepares them, even though that’s not part of the story. They know we’re going to be okay with that too because we have become this very tight, close family of girls that can manage anything.
Dr. Lisa: Some of the way that your family was able to be okay was through this national tragedy that occurred not too long after your father died.
Monica Wood: Yes, the Kennedy assassination resonated very deeply in my family. My mother at first … And this I picked up on even as a 9-year-old child … My sister Cathy teases me. She says “You know, you were the one who was always listening to what people weren’t saying, the things nobody else noticed”, and I thought that’s pretty much the definition of a child who grows up to be a writer. Every writer I know had that kind childhood, kind of anxious, always looking between the lines wondering “What did they mean by that?”.
What I picked up from my mother is that she was ashamed to be a widow. When the national tragedy happened, we have Jackie Kennedy, the most beautiful, glamorous woman on the face of the earth, who has suffered exactly the same tragedy my mother suffered a few months earlier than that. I could see how watching the televised grace of Jackie Kennedy showing the whole world that this kind of sorrow A) can be borne and B) can be beautiful. It elevated my mother’s status in her own heart, I think, and as a result, mine too. I was mortified to be fatherless, absolutely mortified, and I don’t think that’s an uncommon feeling, but the idea that Caroline Kennedy also had this exact same thing happen. It was just a funny sort of comforting idea that we weren’t … That God hadn’t kind of picked us out for this, that these things happen to all kinds of families, including, of all families, the Kennedy family.
Dr. Lisa: This idea of loss carried through as a theme because you talk about the mill and people losing their jobs and things getting reconfigured there and the sense of some enormous institution that had always been there also having to be restructured.
Monica Wood: Right. The book really has 3 threads and 3 themes. One is this family that’s going through this enormous transition. The nation also of course is going through an enormous transition and also the American manufacturing, in the form of the Oxford Paper Company, is also going through a transition because that same year the towns were bracing for a protracted labor strike that would change the relationship between the mill and the town forever more. That’s what’s happening in the book; these 3 institutions on the cusp of enormous change.
Dr. Lisa: You also describe the shoe manufacturing business and how things are pulled together and how things used to be so hands-on at that time in Maine history.
Monica Wood: Yes, we had a next-door neighbor Mrs. Gagnon who we all had a huge crush on. She was absolutely gorgeous. She had this beautiful auburn hair rippling down her back … Didn’t really look like the other mothers. She wore kind of that French eyeliner back then. She was a lovely woman and she used to take in piecework from the shoe … We called them the shoe shops … The shoe factories. From Biddeford, you know exactly what I mean. She had 3 little girls the same age as our youngest 3, and my sister Cathy and I used to go over there and help Mrs. Gagnon and her 3 daughters sew shoes.
There was a pickup/dropoff in Rumford, on Waldo Street, and she’d come home once a week with 2 giant cartons with uppers and lowers. They were just loose flaps of leather, and she taught us to sew the toe end of the shoe with the rawhide pie-crust stitch. We would help her do that. It was my first skill, my first job, and I was very, very proud of it because it wasn’t the kind of thing that you said “Oh well, let’s let the kids try it”. You had to do it correctly or she didn’t get paid for the work, so it was a very interesting thing. Very shortly there after, even that went away. The shoe industry was kind of on its last legs at the point, and by the end of the decade, it was virtually gone. This was a booming industry that within 10 years disappeared entirely.
Dr. Lisa: Do you think that there’s some larger lesson that could be learned from the experiences that you describe in the book? Obviously, our country has been going through economic reconfigurations over the last several years, and some people are feeling hopeless, as if it’s never going to end, as if nothing is going to change, as if everything that they’ve ever known has been sort of thrown out of the window. Yet, you went through this yourself as an individual, as a family, as a town. What lessons do you think can be learned from your experience that possibly could be extrapolated to the experience of those who are listening?
Monica Wood: I don’t know about lessons. I’m not a good lesson person, but I have to say that I thoroughly believe that the human animal is built for resilience. We just are, and there is no journey we cannot make, no matter what befalls us. We see it all the time. The “tragedy” that I suffered as a child is nothing compared to the tragedies that children in say Iraq over the last 10 years, and yet they too I assume have some resilience, some way to overcome what is befalling them right now.
The other thing is the idea of the creative impulse as a way of, not curing any of this stuff, but retaining your humanity in the face of the something that may feel as if it’s about the destroy you. When you think of in the Holocaust, when they went and visited the camps, that they found poems rolled up and papers stuffed into pipes. I find stories like that, not only hair raising, but also unbelievably comforting, that, yes, no matter what happens, it’s still the human impulse for creating, for preserving our humanity, even in the most inhumane circumstances.
Dr. Lisa: As far as humanity is concerned, you’ve chosen to work with a group that really is pretty down on its luck, and this was profiled in a Maine Magazine story not so long ago. This is work you do through the Maine Correctional Center in Windham. Why were you drawn to that?
Monica Wood: Oh my gosh, Lisa, I honestly can’t answer it except to say that I started out … I was asked to visit a book group that a volunteer was running at the Maine Correctional Center. This was in the women’s unit. There are about 80 women in the unit, out of a prison that holds about 600 inmates; most of them are male. They were reading one of my books, Ernie’s Ark. I went in … She called me through … Or emailed me or something and asked if I would come and visit their group and I said “Sure”. Went over, walked in and the second I walked in that room … There were 12 women in the group, all in their blue prison garb and this volunteer. The second I walked in there, something just came over me. I can’t explain it. I’ve never had this experience about anything, including writing, in my life, but I thought “I completely belong here and I have to come back”.
I had a wonderful 2 hours. It was the best book group I’ve ever visited. It was all about the book and the characters and the stories and very insightful and interesting and funny. So I left and I immediately wrote up a proposal for something. I brought it over to the Maine Humanities Council and they gave me money to buy books, and I started this program. It’s called Meet The Authors. I kind of dragged in 3 of my women-writer friends into doing this with me, Hannah Holmes, who is a science writer, my friend Amy MacDonald who writes for children and that first time it was Betsy Scholl who at the time was our poet laureate. She’s a poet. I asked them if they would do this with me. The format is it’s 12 weeks, I’m there every week and we talk about the writing of the writer who is about to come in and visit. We have 2 sessions. We read the book, talk about the book and then the writer comes in for a Q&A and like a mini-workshop on that type of writing.
Hannah had them doing close personal observation of human beings basically as any animal species, which was hilarious, to say the least, because these are caged animals really, who have territory issues and all kinds of stuff like that. Her work really resonated with them very much. She’s also hilariously funny, so they appreciated her, and also has no … When I choose people for this, I have to think in terms of 3 things. One is will their writing resonate with the women, and I want to pick somebody who has very few barriers, very open people, and also, somebody with not even a whiff of noblesse oblige. People who are just there to meet some great gals and have some fun and do a little teaching and some back and forth.
It’s worked out really, really well. I’ve never done anything like it before. I didn’t know whether it was going to work. I have to say that I made very few adjustments the second time around. I’ve done it now 3 times, and I’m about to start a new one. What I have found is … What we do in the … This is I guess about freedom. Prison is not an easy place to live. We’re in this room and the first thing we did … I thought this was going to go over like a lead balloon. I thought “Well, I’ll just try it”. I had us all raise our arms over our head and create a metaphorical bubble around us, and that inside this bubble our only identity is as readers and writers, that’s it. They completely went with it. In fact, if I forget, they remind me.
We also did … Sometimes, a guard would come in to do something or the education director would come in just to sit in for a little while, and we would say, “Well, I’m sorry you have to come inside our bubble”. They were so disarmed by it, they’d just say “Uh, okay”, and they would do it. It gave the women, not only autonomy within this circumscribed metaphorical place we had invented, but it gave them a little bit of authority, that “You can’t come in here unless you do this”. It was very, very interesting, and the writing they have produced has been sometimes utterly astonishing.
I have a friend who’s a DA. We obviously have very different views about prisoners. What I tell him though is that the person that he prosecutes in court is not the person I see coming into my class. That person is now clean and sober, for one thing, and that’s huge. A lot of these horrible crimes were committed under the influence of very bad drugs. Again, those are all choices, but … I’m not saying it’s an excuse for behavior, but it is part of the package. The women that I’m seeing are clean and sober, and you’re a different person when you’re clean and sober. You’re more the person you might have been, or hoped you would be, before all of this happened.
It’s really given me a … I never thought at all about people in prison. I wasn’t interested in them. I didn’t give a thought to them in any way. Now, I think about them all the time. I think about them all the time. If I’m having a glass of wine in the evening … I joked to them, I said “You know I think I could do okay in prison because I actually like small spaces and I like structure”. They’re the ones who told me … They said “You’d do great in here”. I said “I would do great, except I couldn’t stand going without a glass of wine in the evening. That would be my worst thing. And lousy coffee”. I do think of them sometimes. I think “Well, here I am in my house with my glass of wine” and I know exactly where they are at that same time because everything is so regimented, but most of them are getting out, sooner or later, some sooner, some much later. I think that if I can have any role in sending them back out there with their creativity ignited, then I think that can’t be a bad thing.
Dr. Lisa: Monica, how can people find out about the work that you’re doing? About the books that you’re writing and the things that you’re out in the world contributing?
Monica Wood: I have a website, monicawood.com and I try to keep it up. I’m on Facebook and anybody can friend me on Facebook if they want to see what’s going on there. And that’s about it. I don’t Twitter, Tweet whatever at all. Facebook is enough of a timesuck as it is, so I try to keep as low a profile as I can while still fulfilling my obligations of book promotion, etc.
Dr. Lisa: We are so grateful to you for coming in and being part of what we’re trying to do with encouraging people to find their own creativity and perhaps use this to engage in their own freedom activities.
Monica Wood: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: So thank you for coming in and talking to us today.
Monica Wood: You’re welcome. I really enjoyed myself, Lisa, thanks.