Memoirous

If you are attending this years Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, please consider signing up for my Festival Lunch Circle. Slow Looking: Freeing the Mind to Observe This Circle introduces participants to Corita Kent, an Immaculate Heart sister known as the "Pop Art Nun," who captured the imagination of the 60s and early 70s with her free-spirited designs (her iconic LOVE stamp is still sold by the U.S. post office). Sister Corita helped her students to see the world a new way—in small bite-size pieces. Her “finder,” a small cardboard frame, reshaped the everyday and brought minutia into perspective. Jane Hertenstein  is the author of over 90 published stories both macro and micro: fiction, creative non-fiction, and blurred genre. She teaches a workshop on Flash Memoir and can be found blogging at http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/ Join this Circle Use this link to read more and sign up: https://ccfw.calvin.edu/festival/festival-lunch-circles/ From To Begin with ...

I’ve come to the end of the year, a busy year at that for publication acceptances. I’ve worked hard on revisions and submitting manuscripts to publishers, agents, and contests. I rode my bike up the Rhine River through Germany, France, and Switzerland. And, I’ve come to the end of new stuff to write about. So it feels like. Lately. Perhaps, I need to lower the bar or slow down. Part of my preparation for my talk at the Festival for Faith and Writing, Slow Looking, is about honing observation skills. Living in the moment. Creating a Zen-like attitude toward the world. Definitely not listening to the news. I never liked nature poetry. I relegated it to old ladies, to people who went to bed at 7 pm and asked for the senior discount at the donut shop. There was a 4 o’clock special at the Denny’s restaurant I worked at in Centerville, where we could count on the same retirees showing up with their potbellies and suspenders and pocketbooks full of half-used tissues and Hawaiian white g...

Last spring I submitted a proposal to the Festival of Faith and Writing for their upcoming 2024 conference—the first in about 6 years to be in-person—for a Festival Circle. My proposal was selected! Slow Looking: Freeing the Mind to Observe This Circle introduces participants to Corita Kent, an Immaculate Heart sister known as the "Pop Art Nun," who captured the imagination of the 60s and early 70s with her free-spirited designs (her iconic LOVE stamp is still sold by the U.S. post office). Sister Corita helped her students to see the world a new way—in small bite-size pieces. Her “finder,” a small cardboard frame, reshaped the everyday and brought minutia into perspective. Jane Hertenstein is the author of over 90 published stories both macro and micro: fiction, creative non-fiction, and blurred genre. She teaches a workshop on Flash Memoir and can be found blogging at http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/ Do I have a clue as to how I’m going to present? No—it’s slowly...

Who Would She Be?   When Sister Corita contemplated a step away, she had to completely re-imagine her identity, who she was and who she would be. She had been a member of the Immaculate Heart of Mary for 32 years, since 1936 when she decided after high school to go into the order. Her devotion was such that she had to give her all. During her time at Immaculate Heart College she thrust her whole self into teaching. Many of her former students could testify as to the amount of work she piled on them as if her class was the only one they were taking. Her assignments ranged from visiting gas stations and grocery stores to observe signage to helping create installations for the New York World’s Fair and a walk-thru exhibit at the World Council of Churches Assembly in Uppsala, Sweden. And, of course, there was the Mary’s Day Parade where the class printed banners, programs, etc for the ceremony. This last move would be a great leap. For so long she had been a teacher-nun, a si...

Change is coming, a time to leave   During the process of Vatican II, Corita and her community embraced change, not just for change-sake, but to become more relevant to the students and broader community they served. If change was needed to bring the message of Christ to their constituents in this turbulent time, then they were for it. The sisters voted overwhelmingly to pursue Vatican II renewals, such as eliminating the habit and compulsory daily prayer. Archbishop James McIntyre was not happy. From that moment on he sought to restrict the order and banned them from teaching. He gave them an ultimatum to abandon what he saw as leftist tendencies or dispense with their vows. Another vote. Three-quarters of the sisters left to form their own order, Immaculate Heart Community, an ecumenical community for both men and women of all faiths. Prior to this Sister Corita took a sabbatical at the invitation of a friend and spent the summer of 1968 in Cape Cod. There, away from the in...

 Stay and Fight?   The early Sixties would later be known as a hotbed of creative and artistic experimentation—indeed, ushering in an era of radical priests and nuns. Sister Corita had started a series of masterclasses at Immaculate Heart featuring some of the most ingenious voices in the arts, visual, literature, and music. The lectures and conversations of the Great Man series (notice how this was titled purposely not to stir up controversy) featured Charles Eames, John Cage, Alfred Hitchcock, Buckminster Fuller, and Father Daniel Berrigan. It is this enduring friendship with the Vietnam War critic and activist that doomed Sister Corita. Los Angeles Cardinal James McIntyre who served from 1948 to 1970 would later be described in a Washington Post obituary as “one of the Catholic Church's most conservative and controversial prelates.” He was a Nixon man, a John Birch supporter, a staunch anti-communist, and even his own allies and fellow priests had to kindly ask him ...

 Stay and fight or leave, it’s not possible to do nothing   I started this series of essays as a critique/review of the recent film, Women Talking based upon the book by the Canadian author Miriam Toews about an isolated old-school Mennonite Colony is a remote area in South America. In the film we’re not sure where the action is taking place. Suffice it to say, the women didn’t either. They have no road map, no knowledge of the language of the region, nor practical skills outside of husbandry. Of the three options, during a round of voting, stay and do nothing is ruled out, so the conversations revolve around stay and fight or leave. Contemplating this conundrum, I was reminded of Sister Corita. Sister Corita 1918-1986 was a member of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, a teaching order. She taught at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, California. This posh area of LA is not the first place one thinks of for a convent and Catholic college, tucked into the Holl...

In My post Baby Games http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/2022/05/baby-games.html I realized later after writing about playing with my grandson—how much this approach is similar to my writing process. 1)       Starting with a kind of structure or form, such as standard hide n’ seek 2)       A plot twist, baby changes games by putting on a hat 3)       Story spins off into make believe, pretends to hide in plain sight In fact upon rereading some notes I’d made a couple years ago about activist/artist nun Corita Kent I happened upon this: Learning By Heart. “Try looking the way the child looks—as if always for the first time—and you will, I promise, feel wider awake.” In her book Learning by Heart: teachings to free the creative spirit, was published in 1992, six years after her death. The first chapter is devoted—simply but significantly—to “LOOKING.” She starts by conjuring the lofty ghost of her f...