Tuesday, 3:30 p.m.
Sonia Gernes is very recently retired from teaching at Notre Dame, and a former student of hers introduced her: "The word on campus was 'Take Gernes....'" Gernes was also the "Winona County Apron Queen" at age 10, we were told.
Gernes is a poet and fiction writer, a native of Winona, Minnesota, whose mother was born and raised in the Marshall/Ghent area. At this reading, Gernes was in the interesting position of reading what she has written about her family with a collection of uncles and cousins sitting in front of her. I have been in that same interesting position myself....
She is the author of the novel The Way to St. Ives and three books of poems, Brief Lives, Women at Forty, and A Breeze Called the Fremantle Doctor. Her new and selected poems, What You Hear in the Dark, is forthcoming in 2006.
Gernes' mother was suffering for Alzheimer's. Her brother brought Gernes a box of her mother's letters and papers: "She wants you to have them. I think she wants you to write something...."
Speaking to her relatives, Gernes explained: "I have re-arranged things a bit for the sake of the story...."
The Indian school: "No blankets, no beads, no speaking in Sioux...."
"... nuns who said it served me right to freeze an ear for vanity...."
"A woman's hair, like falling rain...."
Indian Joe: "'Pipestone is part of our flesh,' he said.... 'When you white men pray, does it come from breath? Does it come from bone?'"
"When I rise each day with my recipes, am I the knife or the snake?"
"The bowl of red stone is Mother Earth...."
"Life-breath of the universe.... I hear myself say it: Holy Ghost...."
"The afternoon is a vast white room where something drifts...."
As her mother's Alzheimer's worsened, Gernes said, "she forgot us in reverse...."
"If you kept going back to back, you'd get to a kind of primeval place...."
"Nothing is expected to remember its fruit...."
Gernes had an aunt who could, because of a ruptured anyeurism in the brain, speak only in numbers: "A gun reloaded with sorrows she cannot calculate.... How much sadness adds up to 9?"
"One steps a little carefully through her mother's prose...."
Gesturing to her relatives in the audience, Gernes said, "Walter, if I get anything wrong, I really was pretty young, so forgive me...."
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