The Ninth Hour 

 By Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)  

It could be said that Alice McDermott has perfected her subject matter. The National Book Award  winner and Johns Hopkins University professor’s most celebrated works have been set in the world of Irish Catholics in New York as they struggle to build their lives and find an identity in early 20th-century America. That was true of her last book, Someone, and it is true  of her latest. This time,  she explores how one event—a man’s suicide—reverberates through the lives of those around him, from his grief-stricken widow to the nuns who care for his ravaged family in his stead. It is in these women of the cloth that McDermott finds some of her richest characters yet—strong women who steadfastedly fight for the poor and disadvantaged but who receive little notice or acclaim. McDermott has a way of transcending the day-to-day existence of her characters to bring us slices of human truths. We find ourselves drawn into a world that, though much different from our own, is made relevant and relatable through her marvelous prose.

Read our full interview with writer Alice McDermott.

Basilio Boullosa Stars In The Fountain of Highlandtown

By Rafael Alvarez  (CityLit Press)

Twenty years ago, a city desk reporter for The Sun debuted his first work of fiction—a short story collection called The Fountain of Highlandtown, which captured the heartache, yearning, and disenchantment of growing up in blue-collar East Baltimore. Much has changed since then: that reporter, Rafael Alvarez, has added several books and a stint writing for the acclaimed TV show The Wire to his resume, subsequently establishing himself as a key voice in capturing Baltimore’s story. (He also occasionally contributes to Baltimore.) Now, he has returned to this familiar territory to bring us another collection, which, like its predecessor, revolves around his alter ego, Basilio Boullosa, an artist who is haunted by the relics of Baltimore’s past. We follow Alvarez’s path, which is ripe with nostalgia and brimming with the in-between feelings that come with understanding that we want to leave our hometown, while not knowing how. Ultimately, Alvarez’s stories serve as a reminder that we can move away, but we’re never really far from where we’ve come from. 

Award-winning writer and Johns Hopkins University professor Alice McDermott’s most celebrated works have been set in the world of Irish Catholics in 20th-century New York. The same is true for her latest novel, The Ninth Hour, in which she explores how one event—a man’s suicide—reverberates through the lives of those around him. We got the change to talk to McDermott about her latest work, real-life inspiration, and how true friends keep you honest.

It feels like we’re going into welcome familiar territory with the subject matter of The Ninth Hour. You’ve found so much fruit in Irish Catholic America. What is it about that framework that has allowed you to get so much creatively from it?
I never feel like the driving for these novels is the milieu itself. I sort of find myself ending up there. I’m not a sociologist or a social historian that’s particularly interested in those matters. For me, I start out trying to understand something about our common experience and then because as a storyteller you need the details, I am drawn back to territory that I know, but always in such a different pursuit that it never strikes me that I’ve returned to a place I’ve been before. I always feel like this is all brand new to me. Eight books into this job, I’m aware of my readers kind of rolling his or her eyes and saying, “Ohhh, we’re back here again?” [Laughs] 

But as my own first reader, I always feel that it’s such new territory because with each book you’re telling a different story, dealing with different ideas, trying to get at very different things. For me, it’s a pursuit of what’s this life of all of ours about not just Irish Americans in the New York area in the early 20th century. What’s experience like? How do we make sense of any of this? There’s a great line, I think I read it ages and ages ago, in Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, and he talks about how we live between two darknesses—the time before we’re born and the time after we’re gone and the only light is whatever time we have here. I go to ficition for anybody who can help me to understand that period of light that we all get, no matter or how brief or long. It’s all we’ve got and there’s a lot to figure out about that.

Why do you think you end up back in Irish Catholic America?
Well, number one it’s material I’m familiar with, being Irish American myself, having grown up second generation. I grew up in Long Island at a time when all of my peers were second or third generation. Almost every grandparent I ever encountered growing up had some sort of accent—Russian, Polish, Italian, Irish. The language of that milieu I already have in my head, I already have the vocabulary, and also writing about characters who have Catholicism as a faith tradition, that also gives them vocabulary, they have ways of talking about things that they might not have the where-with-all to talk about otherwise. A lot of those things are the things I’m interested in—mortality and hope and selflessness, sacrifice, especially in this book.

In this book, you delve into vivid characters who happen to be nuns. Were you waiting for the opportunity to dive into their world with this book?
No, I think I was avoiding it at all costs. (laughs) Oddly enough, the genesis of this book was that I was thinking a lot about the idea of substitutes in the Civil War. I had a conversation with a friend who’d had a substitute in his distant family, someone who went to war so that one of his great-great uncles didn’t have to go. And that conversation stirred my interest, and I started reading historical accounts and trying to figure out how much did it cost, what was it all about? And when you’re a fiction writer, not a historian, as soon as you get something that interests you, you do a little bit of research, but you’re not looking for the historical record. It brings up this whole idea of whose life is more valuable, who puts themselves on the line for somebody else and is going to live? How long do you stay grateful to the person who stepped in? 

Once you start thinking about that, you’re thinking about who died so that we all might live. That was really what started the thoughts, and that led to the metaphors of selflessness and who gives up their lives so other lives can be saved, and that led me to nuns, and I thought, Oh my god, here they are. And then, of course, you start reading, trying to make something of what life was like in Brooklyn for these nuns and these poor families, but, again, two, three generations on, how do we look back at those lives, do we forget them, do we dismiss them? The more you read about what nuns have done in this country, the more you realize that the good things they’ve done have been nearly erased and replaced with the crazy, screaming witch or clown in a crazy habit.

Were you drawing on anyone you’d known in particular when you were coming up with the characters?
I was very aware of not modeling them in any way. I went through 12 years of Catholic school, had a lot of nuns in grammar school, a fair number in high school, but I didn’t want to use any of my own experience as models because I really wanted these to be a fresh look and to make sure that each one of them was not in any way diminished by cliché, that they were fully human, flawed, striving, thoughtful. And the thing that I loved was the more that I read, I found that there were so many orders of nuns in the New York area at this time, thousands and thousands of nuns in Brooklyn alone. It was almost like found poetry looking at the names of all the orders. It revealed so much about how they thought of themselves. The order that I created for the novel is an amalgam of a number of orders, like nuns who called themselves Little Nursing Sisters, the Little Sisters of the Sick and Poor. 

When you think about women who had such little power at that time, especially in the Catholic Church, claiming this kind of humility, oh we’re just little. But on the other hand, what their ambition is is that they’re going to go up and stand up against suffering, this tremendous egotistical ambition. All of it’s embodied in what they call themselves. That’s what fascinated me, and that’s what reconciled myself that I was writing about an order of nuns. And how much they did underground, it’s not subtle there are lots of themes about being underground in this novel, but it’s sort of the machinery of getting things done, taking care of what needs to be taken care of literally under the radar of the hierarchy of the church. It continues to happen. The role of women in the church, and especially religious orders, is still much the same.

In terms of your writing process, how long does it take you to finish a book like this?
It depends. I established a very bad habit early in my career and I keep falling into it and that is that I always have two things going simultaneously, two novels. And that kind of slows you down, but then it always seems to happen that one pulls ahead. For most of last year, I just knew that I had to stick with this novel, to put my head down and sink deeply into it to understand it. Except for a version of the first chapter that was published as a short story in The New Yorker, my poor, long-suffering editor hadn’t seen a word of it until I sent the completed novel to him in late December 2016. I was sort of emerging into the sunlight when I finished it, kind of blinking and saying, what do you think of this?

Have you had the same editor for a while?
Yes, from the very beginning. It’s very rare in publishing, but I was all of 26 or 27 and I only had written 100 pages of my first novel when my editor Jonathan Galassi, who was at that time probably all of 30 or 31, purchased it incomplete. We’ve just been working together ever since. I feel very fortunate. He’s a great editor because he just lets me go off and lock the door, go underground and write what I feel compelled to write. He’s very supportive. 

How do you balance your work with teaching?
I tend to teach one course a semester, so I’m at Johns Hopkins University generally one day a week. It’s not onerous because I still have four weekdays and weekends for my own work, and I find it energizing. I’ve always been a little bit afraid of going too deeply underground to write fiction and to forget the real world and real readers and writers. It’s the same as when my kids were small and I’d have to stop writing to go get in the car pool line. Sometimes I would say, “Well, Tolstoy never had to do this,” but on the other hand, it keeps you real, from getting too full of yourself and your own ideas. And teaching is the same way. I love hearing what my students are reading and thinking about and I love reading their work. And there’s also a reminder that it doesn’t matter what stage you’re at in this career, you’re always dealing with the same things—how to get those sentences right, how to be honest, what’s the best way to tell the story. Every story that you start, you’re a novice all over again, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done before. 

Do you find that you are drawn to students who have similar interests to you, or who are writing things that are completely different?
For me, it’s what’s on the page, and if it’s wonderful and engaging, then I’m excited about it and if it’s not yet, I think it’s an awful lot of fun to sit with a writer and say, where is it? It’s in there somewhere, how do we find it? I have never taught one of my own books, I would never be able to do that. So in some ways, even if you’re the writer at the head of the table, I think you have to approach teaching. I think it was John Barth who said, “We’re not teachers, we’re coaches.” Here’s a young writer with talent, what can I do to help this writer realize fully the talent that he or she has. I forget about myself. I’ve never been inclined to say, Oh, I wrote a scene like that once, maybe you should go read that. I’m just more like, we’re down in the ditches with these sentences, ok, how come this scene is not completely realized? Let’s figure out how we can fix that. That’s the fun part. The nice part is not thinking about yourself. 

Who do you read, and what have you liked reading recently?
Fortunately, I’ve been teaching long enough that it seems like once a week I get galleys from former students who are publishing. It’s wonderful, but it’s the obligatory reading. When I don’t have a pile of obligatory reading, I’m the most scattered reader. I pick up things that strike my fancy or that someone sent me, so I’m all over the place. I do read a lot of poetry because it reminds me of how wonderful and thrilling language can be in a not time consuming way. W.H. Auden’s series of poems on the divine hours was very much with me as I was composing The Ninth Hour. I’ve been re-reading a lot of Elizabeth Bishop just for fun, and I just finished Margot Lindsay’s novel Mercury, which was an interesting novel about a marriage and a horse. I just read a very, very short novel called Sisters by Lily Tuck, which I just found hypnotic. Claire Messud’s novel The Burning Girl, I just read in the last month. It also has wonderful, strong female characters and she’s just a wonderful writer. There’s always something that you just can’t wait to get to.

How do you gauge the opinions of your audience, and is that something that’s important to you?
I was a reader long before I was a writer, and I’m always sure that I’m a reader—there are plenty of days when I’m not sure that I’m a writer. I always feel that you have this dual personality, even as you’re composing, you’re still the first reader of your own work. But you have to get out and talk to other readers and realize where literature stands in the real world. And where it stands is not in a really important place. There are lots of people who are busy with things we really need, and literature is there and for some of us it feels like life’s blood and it feels essential, but I think it’s always a good idea for a writer to understand that there are plenty of people who don’t feel it’s essential. You want to be in some way including them, with the hope that if they do pick up this book, they might be surprised. I think it keeps you honest. 

I have a group of old, dear friends, none of whom were even English majors who read all kinds of different things, books I would never read, and I think of them as my touchstone. As the Irish say, don’t get ahead of yourself. Don’t be writing just for other writers, don’t be writing to show off how much research you’ve done, or how clever you are. You should have an agreement with all readers that I’m not going to waste your time, I’m really going to get at something that we all want to think about or are puzzled by and I want to bring everybody with me. 

Five things to eat, drink, see, hear, and do with your Charm City weekend.

 EAT

September 24: Union Graze

Artifact Coffee, 1500 Union Ave. 5-8 p.m. Free. 410-464-8000.   

It might be in the eighties this Sunday but we’re hoping the temperature drops by sundown to celebrate the first weekend of autumn with Union Graze. Located at the courtyard behind Artifact Coffee, this family-friendly shindig features provisions by chef Craig Falk of the beloved Lunchbox Lady and Big Softy plus the neighborhood’s own Union Craft beers and the warm Americana tunes of Rattlewood. Graze on a seasonal selection of soups—Hungarian hock and bean, squash and lentil, crab and corn verde—and creative grilled cheese creations—oven-roasted tomato, pulled pork, something amazing called “three-cheese dream”—and get ready for the flavors of fall.

 DRINK

Sept. 23: Mr. Trash Wheel’s Friendversary Party

Peabody Heights Brewery, 401 E. 30th St. 7-10:30 p.m. $25-35.

When a 5-foot West African ball python was found on Mr. Trash Wheel back in 2015, no one expected the incident to lead to a tight relationship between the googly-eyed trash interceptor and Peabody Heights Brewery. But lo and behold, that odd event has created the most unlikely of friendships—one that has even led to the creation of Mr. Trash Wheel’s very own session IPA, named after the sneaky spotted snake that started it all. At this weekend’s celebration, indulge in all-you-can drink Lost Python ales and Peabody Heights brews while enjoying local food, live music, and real-life animal encounters with serpents from Eco Adventures. Proceeds will benefit the Waterfront Partnership and Healthy Harbor Initiative, so raise a glass to friendship, beer, and clean waters. 

 SEE

September 22-24: Baltimore Comic Con

Baltimore Convention Center, 1 W. Pratt St. Fri. 1-7 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.-7 p.m., Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. $25-1,000. 410-526-7410.

This weekend, the streets of Baltimore will transform into a cartoon lover’s paradise as the 18th Baltimore ComicCon takes over the convention center. Come dressed to impress and let your geek flag fly as the three-day event features a costume contest, comic books for perusal or purchase, and the opportunity to meet famous superheroes, like O.G. Wonder Woman Lynda Carter. You might even get an autograph from Maryland cartoonist Frank Miller, of late-era Batman comics, Daredevil, Sin City, and 300 fame, who will also be in attendance.

 HEAR

September 22: CreativeMornings: Compassion

Tectonic Space, 2000 Greenmount Ave. 8:30-10 a.m. Free. 931-305-0883. 

With all the hustle and bustle we experience as weekday warriors, finding the time to slow down and be mindful of others can be a trying task. This Friday, start the weekend off on the right note with the monthly CreativeMornings breakfast talks. Amidst the street art and graffiti-inspired exhibit at the new Tectonic Space in Barclay, the September talk tackles the topic of compassion, featuring with Baltimore-based musicians Joy Postell and Al Rogers Jr. Postell, a bold unabashed neo-soul singer and one of our 2017 Best of Baltimore winners, and Rogers, a funky, forward-thinking hip-hop artist, will discuss social awareness and the importance of radiating compassion out into the world. Hopefully next thing you know, you’ll be planting seeds of kindness everywhere you go. 

 DO

September 22-24: Baltimore Book Festival

Inner Harbor. 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Free.  

Baltimore may no longer be “the city that reads,” but during the Baltimore Book Festival, it sure could’ve fooled us. For three days, the Inner Harbor becomes a bookworm’s dream, filled with book sales of all genres, author signings, poetry readings, panel discussions, and much more. For the 22nd year, grab some paperbacks and be sure to sit in on conversations with renowned writers like TED Talk celeb of We Should All Be Feminists fame Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, former Sun sportswriter John Eisenberg, and National Book Award winner Alice McDermott. While you’re there, be sure to enjoy a Dogfish Head happy hour with brewmaster Sam Calagione, a meet-and-greet with a Guerrilla Girl, and a chance to ask rock-star-matriarch-turned-author Virginia Grohl your burning Foo Fighters questions. Yes, that’s Dave’s mom.

September in Baltimore means one thing for bibliophiles—The Baltimore Book Festival. For three days, the Inner Harbor becomes a book store, reading room, and literary salon all rolled into one, with stages featuring a host of local, national, and international authors to gather inspiration from. To make navigating this weekend’s schedule a little easier, we’ve highlighted 10 writers and events that are not to be missed—and broken them down by your genre of choice.

Literature Lovers

Maryland Humanities presents Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 24, Literary Salon  This Johns Hopkins grad who grew up in Nigeria has taken the literary world by storm. Her latest novel Americanah, was published around the world in 2013, and has received numerous accolades, including winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction, and it was named one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year. Her 2003 novel Purple Hibiscus was the One Maryland One Book selection this year and her TED talk about feminism is a must-see.

Alice McDermott
3:30 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 24, Literary Salon  McDermott, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of seven novels, including Someone, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and Charming Billy, which won the National Book Award. She’s also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice, and her articles, reviews, and stories have appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, USA Today, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. She’ll be promoting her new book The Ninth Hour at the festival.

True Crime Enthusiasts

It’s amazing that a few years after the Serial podcast became such a huge hit that we are still pondering the future of Adnan Syed, who was convicted in the murder of Hae Min Lee. Two women with special connections to Syed are appearing at the festival. First is Asia McClain Chapman, who will tell her story of how she became the key alibi witness for Syed in Serial, and now in her book, Confessions of a Serial Alibi. (3 p.m. Saturday, Inner Harbor Stage.) And an hour later, catch Rabia Chaudry, Syed’s public advocate and author of the New York Times bestselling book Adnan’s Story. (4 p.m. Saturday, Inner Harbor Stage.) 

Local Scenesters

A Touch of Literati 
6 p.m. Friday, CityLit Stage Baltimore’s own CityLit Press celebrates the launch of author Rafael Alvarez’s new collection of fiction, Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown. The book commemorates the 20th anniversary of Alvarez’s fiction debut, The Fountain of Highlandtown. The celebration includes two prize-winners: 2017 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellow Devin Allen, who will speak about the Time magazine photo that changed his life and the youth educational program he founded, and Deborah Rudacille, a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, and science writer who tells stories about the ways in which science influences culture and culture informs science, the links between science and social justice movements. This session is moderated by WYPR’s Aaron Henkin. 

Foodies

The intersection of food and literature is always a welcome discussion, and the book fest has plenty of cooking demos and cookbook signings at its Food for Thought Stage. But there’s also Lunch at the Homesick Restaurant (1 p.m. Friday, Food for Thought Stage), where national best-selling mystery author Laura Lippman joins author Ann Hood and author and home cook Michael Ruhlman to discuss the way fiction informs food and food informs fiction, both in their own work and the works of others. Audience members who know their fictional food will have a chance to win some distinctly Baltimore treats.

Kids or Kids at Heart

Pets on Wheels
(11 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday, Top of the World Observation Level) What could be better than cute pets and books? Children will be partnered with a therapy dog (or cat!) from Pets on Wheels. After selecting a favorite book, the child is invited to sit and read to their furry friend. And we maintain this event shouldn’t just be for kids—adults like to read books aloud, too. 

The Conservation Conscious

McKay Jenkins (11:30 a.m. Saturday, Food For Thought Stage) has been writing about people and the natural world for 30 years, and continues this work in his new book, Food Fight: GMOs and the Future of the American Diet. He is also the author of ContamiNation, which chronicles his investigation into the myriad synthetic chemicals we encounter in our daily lives, and the growing body of evidence about the harm these chemicals do to our bodies and the environment. He teaches at The University of Delaware and lives in Baltimore.

Poetry Aficionados

Poets Speak: Raw Wounds, Wise Blood, Speak Water
(2 p.m. Sunday, CityLit Stage) You might know the name Kondwani Fidel from his recent viral essay that analyzed the human toll of Baltimore’s violence in his personal experiences. The writer, speaker, and spoken word poet has also authored a book, Raw Wounds, has been featured in Business Insider and CNN, and was a 2016 recipient of the Ford: Men of Courage Award. He joins Robert Earl Price the author of four books of poetry, including Wise Blood and Truth Thomas, a singer-songwriter and poet who was the winner of the 2013 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. Ron Kipling Williams, author of Black Freak Mosh Heaven, will moderate.

Be Free Live! hosted by Love the Poet (Michelle Antoinette Nelson)
(4 p.m. Sunday, Inner Harbor Stage) Baltimore’s longest running monthly open mic will take place live at the book festival. Hosted by Michelle Antoinette Nelson aka LOVE the poet an artist, innovator, and Founder of Brown and Healthy a non-profit and global health and wellness initiative for people of color. She’s dedicated over a decade to her life’s work to authoring books, plays, writing arts + education curricula, and providing platforms for artists to explore and discover the true nature of their art. Featuring Almight Ra, Antoine Hayes, Najh Bayyan, and others.

When Alice McDermott suggests meeting for lunch at the Irish Inn at
Glen Echo, it seems like an obvious choice. Critics often tag her as an
Irish-American, or Irish-Catholic, writer, and the proposed setting
conjures images of Guinness on tap, shamrock decorations, fish and
chips, and a steady stream of stock phrases like “luck of the Irish” and
“Irish eyes are smiling.” But it turns out that the Inn, like McDermott
and her work, defies stereotyping. Its humble exterior—painted yellow
with a dark-shingled roof—is unremarkable. Inside, it exudes carefully
cultivated taste, with white linen covering the tables and framed oil
paintings lining the walls. It is, indeed, a leprechaun-free zone. The
menu lists black-tiger-prawn spring roll and smoked-salmon carpaccio
alongside more traditional fare such as shepherd’s pie.

McDermott,
who lives in nearby Bethesda, appears to be a regular, greeting the
hostess and server with a familiarity that trumps formality. After
glancing at the menu, she orders a beet salad and iced tea. A
youthful-looking 60 years old, she smiles easily, often, and for good
reason—she has, for decades, been acclaimed as a top-tier literary
talent.

McDermott’s latest novel, Someone, was recently
nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. (The
winner will be announced March 13.) She’s already won a National Book
Award for 1998’s Charming Billy and earned three Pulitzer Prize
nominations. McDermott’s crisp, purposeful prose has been praised by
many publications, including The New York Times, which lauded her for “writing with wisdom and grace and refusing to sentimentalize her characters.”

Peers
like Anne Tyler feel similarly. “I am a huge admirer of Alice
McDermott’s work,” says Tyler, who cites Someone as a particular
favorite. “It was beautifully written and very touching, with its
unpredictable landings on different, random times in one woman’s
life.”

McDermott appreciates the acclaim but doesn’t make too
much of it, likely the result of a middle-class upbringing and its
accompanying don’t-get-too-big-for-your-britches ethos. She often seems
more interested in talking about the successes of others, notably her
students.

What’s less known about McDermott is that she’s forged a
stellar reputation as an educator. She has, since 1996, taught in the
Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University, where she conducts
graduate and undergraduate fiction workshops. “It’s energizing,” she
says. “I enjoy looking at that first draft and thinking, ‘What have we
got here? What’s on the page that we can make use of?’ I occasionally
feel like I’m more invested in the stories than they are, but it’s
always fun because they’re so talented.”

One of those talented
students, 2003 grad Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a fellow nominee for
the National Book Critics Circle Award this year. She came to the U.S.
from Nigeria at the age of 19, determined to become a serious writer. In
2008, she won a MacArthur “genius” grant. Another former student,
Matthew Thomas, graduated from Hopkins and took a job teaching English
at a Jesuit high school in New York. For 10 years, he didn’t publish
anything, but worked steadily on his first book, which he recently sold
to Simon & Schuster for $1 million.

Listening to McDermott
talk about them, it’s apparent she isn’t bragging or basking in some
reflected glow. She certainly isn’t competitive, and their awards and
advances, though nice, don’t really impress her. On a deeper level, she
understands the enormity of how far they’ve come and the sheer
improbability of their journey.

She relates to that.

McDermott
grew up in Elmont, a Long Island suburb, where she went to Catholic
school and read constantly. She had two older brothers. Her mother did
secretarial work and kept house; her father was a sales rep for Con
Edison. He worked a desk job his entire life, valued the health care and
pension it gave him, and expected his children to have similar
aspirations. As a result, McDermott’s notion of going to college as an
English major and becoming a writer was greeted with eye-rolling doubt.

“It
wasn’t just that I thought it was an impossibility,” she recalls. “I
was told it was an impossibility. My parents said it was silly, or, even
worse, dangerous.”

But after realizing how serious their daughter
was, her folks softened a bit, figuring she could teach or become a
secretary in a publishing house. “But you’ll have to get your shorthand
and typing skills up,” they advised her.

McDermott graduated with
an English degree from the State University of New York at Oswego, where
an instructor once took her aside to say, “I have bad news for you.
You’re a writer, and you’ll never shake it.”

After a short stint
working as (no kidding) a secretary at a publishing house, she went back
to school and got her master’s in writing at the University of New
Hampshire in 1978. That same year, she sold her first short story to Ms.
magazine, an event that proved to be a professional and personal
turning point.

McDermott was out celebrating the story’s
publication with friends in New York when she met her future husband at
the Mad Hatter, a singles bar on the Upper East Side. David Armstrong
had just moved to the city from Ohio to get a Ph.D. in neuroscience at
Cornell University. When asked if they started out as friends, McDermott
interjects, “This was the Seventies. You didn’t write letters.”

So it was immediate, love at first sight? “Oh, yeah,” says McDermott, with a nod and laugh that drives home the point.

Two years later—after publishing more stories in Mademoiselle, Redbook, and Seventeen—McDermott sold her first novel, A Bigamist’s Daughter,
to Houghton Mifflin for $12,500. The modest advance “felt like a
million dollars,” she says, but even more significantly, it fed her
belief that “this crazy idea I had of being a writer could become a
reality that was recognizable to the rest of the world.”

Still, her parents cautioned—her chosen line of work didn’t come with benefits.

McDermott
and Armstrong married in 1979, and his career researching Alzheimer’s
disease has pretty much determined where the family—they have three
children, two boys and a girl—has lived. It’s taken them to San Diego,
Pittsburgh, and, ultimately, the D.C. suburbs, after Armstrong landed at
the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

While living in
Pittsburgh in 1996, McDermott was approached by John Irwin— who chaired
the Writing Seminars at that time—about coming to Hopkins for a writing
residency. By that time, she’d written three books, been a finalist for
the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, and done some college
teaching. “I heard her read at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference [in
Tennessee] and knew she’d be a perfect fit,” recalls Irwin. “Her writing
was humane and deeply felt. She was a consummate stylist.”

McDermott
accepted the invitation, “because it was Hopkins,” she says. “It was
the house that Barth built,” referring to longtime faculty member, John
Barth, who built up the program and retired before she arrived.

She
commuted from Pittsburgh for a year and enjoyed working with
serious-minded colleagues like Stephen Dixon, who says that McDermott
was, indeed, a perfect fit. “She created a fair, relaxed, and warm
atmosphere in the classroom,” says Dixon. “In addition to that, she was
incisive and very smart.”

After the residency was over,
McDermott was invited to stay. Around the same time, her husband got the
NIH job, they made the move to Bethesda, and she became a regular
presence at the university, though her exposure to Baltimore was limited
to reading Anne Tyler books, which, she notes, made her “very receptive
to the city.” She was named the Richard A. Macksey Professor for
Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities, which is an endowed chair, in
1999, the year after winning the National Book Award.

Since then,
she has been Hopkins’ marquee writer, following predecessors such as
Barth, Robert Stone, and Mark Strand. “As a highly visible writer, she
attracts students to the fiction department,” says Irwin. “And she’s
very hands-on once they get here, a truly great teacher.”

“She was
very human, kind, and honest,” says former student Adichie. “She had a
quiet class and grace and wore her immense talent very lightly. She was
also very sharp as a reader—she got things and saw things. I paid
attention to the comments she wrote on my stories.” (McDermott, for her
part, takes no credit for Adichie’s success, saying she was “almost
fully formed when she came to us.”)

Matthew Thomas was similarly
impressed. “Alice taught us that every story should be not just one
story, but two stories, or more than two if possible,” he recalls.
“There should always be a parallel story, she urged. With that in mind, I
will say that there is the story Alice’s work tells, and then there is
the parallel story of the remarkable person Alice is in the world.

“She
is one of those transformative teachers one is lucky to meet even once
in a lifetime, a great writer, an American treasure, a gift to readers
everywhere. Nearly above all else, what I remember about Alice is her
wonderful laugh, which suggested that everything was right in the world,
or could be with a little mutual effort.”

McDermott has long
maintained that writing fiction helps her make sense of the world, so
it’s remarkable that making sense of others’ fiction holds such appeal
for her. “It’s just a matter of getting down and dirty in their prose
with them,” she explains. “We’re all there trying to make the story,
novel, or chapter as good as it can be. It’s a constant struggle to get
it down, get it clear, and understand that your intentions are the same,
whether you’re an undergraduate writing a short story or a writer with
seven published novels. The continually reassuring thing is that we’re
all novices when we start a new work.”

That point gives her pause. She takes a sip of tea and adds: “There’s so much you don’t know until you start writing.”

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Read author Matthew Thomas’s tribute to Alice McDermott. >>

Matthew Thomas studied with Alice McDermott when he was a Writing
Seminars student at Johns Hopkins University. When asked about
McDermott for our March profile, he sent the following essay about her
as an instructor, writer, and mentor. It beautifully amplifies the
importance of McDermott’s contributions in the classroom and beyond.
Thomas’s debut novel, We Are Not Ourselves, will be published by Simon
and Schuster in September.

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Alice McDermott’s indisputable
brilliance as a writer is a matter of historical record. Her brilliance
as a human being, however—her magnanimity, decency, and extraordinary
humility—deserves its own separate accounting.

When I studied
under Alice in the Writing Seminars at the turn of the century, she was
only a couple of years removed from the triumphant publication of Charming Billy.
Nobody would have begrudged Alice feeling her oats a little, had she
been inclined to do so, because few American writers could claim so
august a resume as hers.What was remarkable from the
beginning of my acquaintance with Alice was how thoroughly humble she
was, what a common touch she had, what a model she was for carrying
oneself with grace. (It’s a testament to Alice’s humility that I
hesitate to go on at length here, because I’m certain it will mortify
her to read an account of her remarkable qualities, but in the interest
of inspiring readers with the idea that someone like Alice exists in the
world, I will continue, and court her ire.) She was generous with her
time and enthusiasm, and endlessly supportive of the writers in her
charge. She also gave freely of her extraordinary insights into craft.
Alice made the insoluble problems of composition seem solvable with
enough effort, which was something of a miracle, and a generous gift for
a master craftsman to give to an apprentice.

The lessons Alice
taught us were extraordinarily useful and specific. She told us she
wrote by hand, on legal pads, and some of us, freed from the burden of
editing as we wrote, found a new fluency by following her example. I
never forgot her lesson in the proper placement of dialogue tags, which
she boiled down to the pithy, “After the first natural pause.” I could
have felt around in the dark for years without seeing that bit of truth
on my own as lucidly as she’d put it. A minute of her time cleared away
every error in that category forever, and it strikes me now that a good
portion of her pedagogical philosophy involves demystifying the writing
process in order to allow room for the deeper mystery of creation,
namely how a work gets imbued with individuality, personality, soul.

Alice
taught us never to populate a story with disembodied heads, brains in a
jar. Fiction, she argued, must evoke a world outside the limited
confines of an individual character’s consciousness. To Alice, a writer
was responsible for giving readers clues about the world a story’s
characters inhabit. Verisimilitude didn’t have to be achieved in the
first draft, if one wasn’t gifted at instantly rendering the
three-dimensional world. It was possible to write a scene and then
circle back and layer in details that provided a visceral sense of
reality. This is best accomplished, perhaps only accomplished, she
taught, by availing oneself of senses other than those two most overused
by beginning writers, sight and sound. Only when we write with all the
senses are our characters allowed to come fully to life.

A
startling amount of the practical writing advice she gave us stays with
me to this day. I’ll never forget when she said, “You can’t say of a
character, ‘He lifted five rabbits out of a hat, one at a time.’ You
can’t see someone pick up five rabbits, one at a time. You see one rabbit, then another, then another.”

It
mattered, too, how many times the rabbit came out of the hat. Alice was
adamant that details had to be chosen for a reason. Every detail had to
be significant for it to remain in a given story. “If you have a story
where the character is an aspiring architect,” she once said, “and he
builds models of cathedrals at home out of paper, and he has a cat, then
the cat must crush the model, or else his being an architect is
inessential, does not advance the plot. Don’t pick something at random.
He must be an architect for a reason, not just to add a layer of
brushstrokes to the character.”

Moments in time rigorously
observed mattered to her. She insisted that we avoid resorting to
invocations of habitual actions, like “He would often go to the store.”
To Alice, it blurred a scene to talk about what “always” happened. What
someone did in a specific moment was inevitably far more compelling.

One
of the most useful things Alice ever taught us ostensibly flies in the
face of one of the central tenets of much creative writing instruction.
She took the “show, don’t tell” maxim and turned it on its head. Don’t
be afraid of exposition, she urged; exposition is always ready at hand
as a tool to be used, and a narrator must be allowed to advance the
plot, explicate a situation, develop a character. At the same time, she
insisted, exposition can’t be workaday or obligatory. The writer’s
paramount task, at all times, is to create a continuous fictive dream.
When the work is done right, she suggested, the reader forgets that
there’s an author. It’s not that she taught us not to “show” things;
there is no writer alive more gifted than Alice at constructing scenes,
choosing resonant details, and allowing a dialogic exchange, even a
silent room, to come alive based on the people and objects in it.
Rather, she gave us permission, even urged us, to lean on exposition to
do a good deal of interesting work. What this insistence of hers
actually had the effect of doing was enabling us to write more
compelling scenes. That was true, in part, because if one holds the note
of exposition longer, when one delves into a particular scene it will
be a crucial one. One directive I’ll never forget: Withhold dialogue
until a character absolutely has to speak. That will make everything he
or she says relevant and necessary. Relevance and necessity were the
bellweathers for Alice. Invoking the famous last line of Frank
O’Connor’s great story, “Guests of the Nation,” she taught that a good
short story captures the moment after which nothing will ever be the
same. If everything has happened a certain way for a hundred days in a
row, she urged, a story is when things change on the hundred and first
day.

Alice possesses that rare quality that is the hallmark of any
highly evolved person: she acts the same with everyone she meets. She
is serious, but never solemn. She radiates peace, and a kind of
serenity, but never at the expense of a good chuckle, the way one
pictures Buddha laughing generously at human foibles and frailty. The
enormous insights into life that she has acquired over a career spent
getting to know her characters as intimately as she knows them, and
greeting them with as much love as she does, allows Alice to project an
air of perpetual calm and ease that one suspects covers an even deeper
level of calm and ease beneath it. (For someone who is so personally
calm, she writes about violent turmoil with startling facility. Dip into
the beginning pages of That Night, where men are crashing heavy metal chains into each other, to see what an extraordinary imagination she has.)

If
all of that is not a tall enough order, Alice taught us that every
story should be not just one story, but two stories, or more than two if
possible. There should always be a parallel story, she urged. With that
in mind, I will say that there is the story Alice’s work tells, and
then there is the parallel story of the remarkable person Alice is in
the world. Having said all I’ve said about Alice as one of those
transformative teachers one is lucky to meet even once in a lifetime, a
great writer, an American treasure, a gift to readers everywhere, let me
say that nearly above all else what I remember about Alice is her
wonderful laugh, which suggested that everything was right in the world,
or could be with a little mutual effort. She made us want to be better
people for her.

Someone

Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Eudora Welty once compared V.S. Pritchett’s fiction to “a well-going fire. Wasteless and, at the same time well-fed, it shoots up in flame from its own spark like a poem or magic trick.” The same could be said of McDermott, a Hopkins professor who writes with economy and elegance in this novel, which traces the life of one ordinary woman. Every page sparks with sensuous detail, fires the imagination, and leaves the reader asking, “How did she do that?”

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James McHenry Forgotten Federalist

Karen E. Robins (University of Georgia Press)

Like a lot of Baltimoreans, my knowledge of Fort McHenry revolves around the War of 1812 and the writing of the national anthem. The man the fort’s named after, James McHenry, never gets much play and tends to be overlooked. Robbins recounts McHenry’s revolutionary cred—serving under Washington and Adams and representing Maryland at the Constitutional Convention—and helps move him from the margins to the pages of history.