Monday, 3:00 p.m.
For an hour Freya Manfred and her sons Bly and Rowan Pope conjured up novelist Frederick Manfred. Freya, of course, is Manfred's daughter and a writer in her own right, and her sons are writers and artists too. These three spoke of "the Manfred legacy." Bill Holm introduced them as "the Manfred Family Team" and said Freya was "a true chip off the old block."
"I felt welcomed by both of you," Freya told Holm and Jim Heynen, speaking of their presentation at noon. "You summoned the spirits of other writers who are no longer with us. We're going to summon the spirit of Frederick Manfred...."
When she was in college, Freya would dream. She was supposed to be in class, but didn't have any clothes. The next time she dreamed, she was supposed to be in class and she had only her socks. The dream after that, she had her socks and her shoes, and so on until she was fully dressed. Then she dreamed she couldn't find the classroom. The next dream, when she opened the test, she didn't know any of the answers. Eventually she dreamed she turned in an empty blue book and told the teacher she was leaving. "You didn't answer the questions," the teacher said. "I don't have to," Freya responded, and a piece of fruit appeared in her hand; she sliced it and shared it with the other students. "I gave what I could. That's what art does...."
Freya showed a brief video of memorial for Frederick Manfred; she was reading on the sound track: "Did his eyes start the fire without matches, those bolts of blue lightning.... If he goes, I'm wind again.... If he goes, will I remember how to make a fire?... We are crouched here at the fire and we are one and we are home...."
"You know him well enough to know that you writers are his children too," Freya told us.
"The most profound thing I learned from my father: we all have in us a vital, adaptive spirit, related to creativity.... It allows us to bring ourselves back from the dead, as it were...."
"He was always learning, always changing...."
"These writers you're going to meet," Freya said to the students, "they are not compliant people...."
"I learned from my father that creativity is a healthy way of living, that avoiding darkness shuts you off from light...."
Frederick Manfred believed "that a place finally selects the people who will give it voice.... If a place truly finds voice, at last the sacred force speaks.... When you write, you burn, you burn at 100%.... When opening a book, you don't peek at the ending because it spoils the story and it's not fair to the writer.... You have to give the writer at least 100 pages to get your attention.... Most dead people alive today cannot remember their dreams...."
"My father thought of himself as an American novelist," Freya said, though Manfred was often considered a "regionalist."
"He was a person who spoke to the American soul.... He was a maverick...."
"I have always had words, but for the moment of death, my father's death, I have no words...."
In a dream, Freya's father said: "What do you mean, dead? I'm very much alive...."
Then the sons, those grandsons, talked of their grandfather, read from their work. First Bly, who remembered when he and Rowan were six or seven years old, Frederick would sit in a chair, straighten and stiffen his body, and the boys would climb up the couch behind him and use that 6' 9" length of Manfred as a slide. They'd slide down him again and again.
Of Eagle Rock, Bly read: "I was born here, am born here, will always be born here.... And I will die here too...."
Rowan and Bly are twins. Bly read from a poem about their birth: "The blood like the wind.... What am I, strange friend, what am I?... Brother, I lost my universe with you...."
Rowan got up to read and speak. "Sorry," he said, "I'm a little choked up at my brother's reading...." Then he read two pages from a piece of fiction written "when I was reading too much Kafka."
"He wished he had seen the blue sooner. It seemed so important to him now...."
"... and then he gave her the quarter, though he knew his mother would never understand."
And he read from other work:
"The day was still honey-colored and warm...."
"... beauty deserves to startle...."
He recalled watching the family converse: "My grandfather spoke over 75% of the conversation, my mother spoke about 20%, and my father only 5%."
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