Suzanne Strempek Shea
Write and Retreat in Maine with Suzanne this fall at the annual Iota Short Forms Writing Conference, Oct. 15 to 18, and the optional retreat to follow, Oct. 18 to 22.
Write and Retreat in Maine with Suzanne this fall at the annual Iota Short Forms Writing Conference, Oct. 15 to 18, and the optional retreat to follow, Oct. 18 to 22.
Compositions by
Suzannne Strempek Shea
Foreword by Karol Jackowski
A captivating, humorous and touching memoir of one child’s 1960s/early ‘70s life in a heavily Polish-American Massachusetts village, school and church
With Compositions, Suzanne Strempek Shea returns to the Polish America in which she set her first four acclaimed novels, chiseling an extraordinary memoir, about her early years in a close-knit 1960s and ‘70s Polish-American Massachusetts grade school and community. Life revolves in a circle of faith and family. Fine societal distinctions are made: Polish Catholics and French-Canadian Catholics, the two majorities, each have their own churches and their own schools, even their own funeral home. At the author’s school – known in the village as “Polish school” - the most important grade is for conduct.
Written in the author’s voice and point of view in her first eight years of school, the humorous and poignant essays show a past still fully present. At school, eighth-grade graduation photos lining the walls include that of her mother and the parents of so many of her 29 classmates. She and her friends sit in the same classrooms with the same wooden desks, same windows, same blackboards, and some of the same nuns those parents had. Strempek Shea lets us eavesdrop as she learns new words --- bubbler for water fountain, sodality for club, lavatory for bathroom, Father for priest even if he wasn’t hers. One snowy afternoon, looking at all the familiar faces, companions from early morning to afternoon, Monday through Friday, from for as long as she can remember, she realizes she likes school, thanks in part to the nuns who taught patiently, sang folk songs beneath a tree, and danced the hula, and despite the ones who wielded a croquet stick or hurled textbooks.
In this world, the first whiff of spring air is drinkable, and Strempek Shea races to her beloved woods upon getting home from school. Strempek Shea navigates fishing holes and family outings with friends or cousins whose fathers, like hers, work mainly in factories. Adults are in charge, although when her grandfather dies suddenly, she sees for the first time that they can wobble.
Reverence is everywhere: dropped bread receives a kiss, swimmers bless themselves before diving, parishioners walk on their knees each Good Friday. The miracles Strempek Shea prays for –a horse or at least a pony, her grandfather’s health – never take place. Yet something no less tender and beautiful does as she engraves childhood moments, like running past nylon stockings dangling from the clothesline, hoping to escape the fate of adults who prefer constricting clothes to soft corduroys; like seeing for the first time the new classmate who’ll become a best friend; like looking out from the other eighth-grade graduates on stage and imagining the future.
Compositions is a kaleidoscope of close-to-the-bone observations and stories written as energetically as if the author had always been waiting to tell the world all she knew. Read them and realize you’ve always been waiting for that, too.
About Suzanne
Suzanne Strempek Shea grew up in a small Polish-American Western Massachusetts village, dreaming of becoming a horse trainer or an artist. Her first published writing was a newspaper she handwrote and drew for her parents every Saturday night when they went polka dancing and she stayed overnight downstairs at the home of her maternal grandparents. OK, so The Nutty News had only a circulation of one copy, but it was a start. She fell into writing in high school, when she went down to the office of The Palmer Journal and Monson Register, her town’s newspaper, to complain that it never wrote a story about the high school’s hockey team, which contained both a sport and a couple of boys she loved. The editor told her there were no reporters free to go to the games, and if she went, as she did to every game, she and her pal Barbara Sekula being the statisticians, why didn’t she just write up a story each week and hand it in for publication. She learned to write and shoot and develop on deadline. She also learned that it paid to complain.
Photo by Deirdre Rusk Photography
Books
Selling the Lite of Heaven
The unnamed narrator, ingenuous yet unflappable, is the 32-year-old daughter of Polish immigrants who throughout life have slathered her in Vicks and mild exasperation. Still living under her parents’ roof, she is abandoned not at the altar but for the altar as her fiance leaves her for the priesthood. Attempting to sell her engagement ring through the newspaper classifieds, she meets a string of browsers, and her future.
Songs From a Leadlined Room
Songs from a Lead-Lined Room is a memoir rooted in truth and raw experience, with a sure and compelling voice. The lead-lined room is the radiation therapy unit where Suzanne was treated for breast cancer and is one of the settings of this diary she kept over those six and a half weeks, sharing her despair, confusion, and fear as well as the compassion and caring of her friends, her husband, and her fellow patients.
Shelf Life
While recovering from radiation therapy, Shea heard from a friend who was looking for help at her bookstore. Shea volunteered, seeing it as nothing more than a way to get out of her pajamas and back into the world. But over next twelve months, from St. Patrick’s Day through Poetry Month, graduation/Father’s Day/summer reading/Christmas and back again to those shamrock displays, Shea lived and breathed books in a place she says sells “ideas, stories, encouragement, answers, solace, validation, the basic ammunition for daily life.”