To Mother Again With Love Book Comfort
Correct after it was published, I discovered Ann Hood'due south non-fiction memoir Condolement (2008). I read the advance review with involvement. Having lost a kid myself, I was related to her raw expressions of grief after losing her five-yr quondam girl in 2002. It was an admittedly hell-ridden journey of but 36 hours, when Grace died of an unthinkably virulent and destructive strep infection. It was a horror that some parents accept to suffer – the unimaginable sojourn of a losing a child.
Ann Hood and her hubby returned from the hospital to tell their living older son, Grace'due south older brother Sam, that his sister had died. So unexpectedly and then quickly.
Ann Hood'southward raw grief was that which simply a parent can experience. The listen-fog. The confusion. The nightmarish realization that life has sped up just left yous behind with a kid'south wear left on a claw, her toys left on a shelf, desolate comforters and pillows left on a bed.
Ann Hood and other parents never really recover from the gut-wrenching grief of losing a kid. Merely, they do larn to alive again. Deeply, richly, and happily. Comfort speaks to the journey back to life that Ann Hood lived.
As well reading a few non-fiction essays in books that were edited by Ann Hood, or those that she was included in, I had little experience with her writing before or after 2008. A few years ago, however, my hubby gave me Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting in 2013, a compilation of essay written by women who knit (and who happen to write, likewise.) When her book, Knitting Pearls: Writers Writing about Knitting (2016) hit the library shelf earlier this year, I was one of the starting time to grab information technology.
After Grace died in 2002, Ann Hood could not write for several years. Consumed with grief, she sought solace in the comfort of knitting. Two years subsequently, however, The Knitting Circle was published with a familiar theme: a woman who has lost her only child suddenly. In the volume, mother Mary Baxter not only learns knitting technique, just that a caring and loving camaraderie can be constitute in a group of knitters.
Ann Hood did non begin to write virtually grief simply after her girl Grace died, withal. One of her before novels, (Ruby, 1998) is the story of a woman who is widowed early on in her wedlock. Withal, information technology is non until her own father's struggles with cancer in the late 1990s does Ann face death head on in her not-fiction memoir, Do Not Become Gentle.
And what does this have to practice with 60th altogether parties, cupcakes, and commemoration?
Ann's latest novel, The Book That Matters Almost, was published in past August. Her publisher challenged her to visit 60 book groups before her 60th birthday which is coming upward on Dec 9. On her Facebook page, Ann invited herself to whatsoever book group – whether it be on Skype or in person. Because Ann lives in Providence, Rhode Island, the staff book group at our library was the perfect venue. I invited Ann and the only stipulation for her visit was that nosotros all read her near recent book and sing happy birthday with a candle and cupcake.
On Friday, September 30, most xx of our staff wished Ann a happy 60th birthday afterwards she shared her stories of writing with us. While she began with questions about The Book That Matters Most, she quickly answered questions about her writing history, writing fashion, and writing techniques. We learned that Ann has written a immature developed novel, biographies for children, and that she teaches writing in an online course through the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In addition, she has taught in writing programs in New York and Vermont.
Ann began her published writing history when she finished her outset novel (Off the Declension of Maine, 1983). She was a flight attendant at the time, attending graduate school, and spending her furloughs feverishly writing the book that would begin her career as a published writer. At the time, she was overcoming the loss of her older blood brother, Skip, who had died unexpectedly in an accident. When the book was finally published in 1987, Ann had already learned that her person experience in three short stories, was actually meant to be a novel.
Soon after Ann's career as a flying attendant ended with layoffs due to a TWA strikes, she began writing full time and in hostage. Her second book was followed by a third and within a decade, she had published at least seven novels.
Ann'south recent novels (The Ruby-red Thread, 2010; The Obituary Writer, 2013; and The Italian Married woman, 2014) join the personal essays she has contributed to compilations. These announced in Dumped: Stories of Women Unfriending Women; Sorrow'due south Company: Writers on Loss & Grief; Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Directly Up; Every Father'due south Daughters: 24 Women Writers Call up Their Fathers; Melt and Stealing; and Considering I Love Her: 34 Women Writers Reverberate on the Female parent-Girl Bond.
In the essay "Little Audrey" (in Cooking and Stealing, 2004), Ann writes of her personal pilgrimages of helping heal her father of cancer. In "Non the Girl She Had in Mind" (in Because I Love Her, 2009), Ann looks back on the relationship she had with her female parent. "How I Lost Her" (in Dumped, 2015), Ann shares her sadness of a friendship ended with i of her oldest and honey friends.
I detect Ann's essays particularly poignant and relevant to my ain life. She has found both comfort and joy in life lost and in life establish.
Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the October xiii, 2016 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.
Source: http://www.norwoodlibrary.org/comfort-joy-writings-ann-hood/
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