Actor and director Ethan Hawke joined Fordham’s Angela O’Donnell and David Gibson at a May 3 private screening of Wildcat, a movie about Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor directed by Hawke and starring his daughter, Maya Hawke. 

In a Q&A after the screening, attended by 300 people at a Manhattan movie theater, Ethan Hawke said it was an “absolute honor” to be with O’Donnell and thanked her for writing her book Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor (Fordham University Press, 2020), which deepened his understanding of the writer.

The film follows the life of O’Connor, who is celebrated for short stories such as those in Everything That Rises Must Converge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965) but also criticized for her views on race.

Fordham has been a center of research and events related to O’Connor’s work since 2018, when the writer’s estate granted $450,000 for an endowment at Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, where O’Donnell is the associate director.

A Writer’s Complexities

Although his mother had introduced him to O’Connor when he was a child, Hawke said, reading Radical Ambivalence helped him better understand how complex a person O’Connor was. He mentioned the book in an essay he wrote for Variety explaining why he and Maya ultimately decided to go forward with the film.

“I’m just so grateful for your time and for your enthusiasm and open-mindedness,” he said of O’Donnell’s writings on O’Connor. “I can’t imagine knowing as much as you know about Flannery. I have to bottle it into an hour and a half.”

O’Donnell said the Variety article was the first time she learned that Hawke had read her book, and said she was deeply moved by the film. 

“When I wrote the book, I was hoping that it was going to be useful to people in some way and not just something that academics would read,” she said. 

Hawke credited Maya with pushing the film to completion and suggested that O’Connor’s faith, coupled with her unflinching exploration of the way religion and morality sometimes collide in horrific ways, makes her appealing to a generation that is otherwise turning away from organized religion.

“A lot of people are scared to talk about faith. If we were all at Thanksgiving dinner together and I said, ‘Hey, can we talk about God?’ about half of you would go to the bathroom because you’re worried people are going to have an agenda,” he said.

“What I try to do with the movie is model Ms. O’Connor, which is that she’s not trying to convince you to believe anything. She’s trying to be a good artist and present something for you.”

For Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, a new book of poetry serves as a tribute to both types of “holy lands,” be they far or near.

Holy Land, (Paraclete Press, 2022) a collection of 87 poems that won the Paraclete Press Award in 2021 and was published in October of this year, was in fact inspired by a trip that she took to Palestine in 2019.

The first chapter, Christ Sightings, is based on her time in Palestine. What follows is a series of chapters—Crossing Ireland, Ancestral Lands, Sounding the Days, Literary Islands, and Border Songs—that were inspired by her travels to places that may not be the Holy Land, but are holy to her just the same.

Crossing Ireland features poems O’Donnell composed after visiting the Emerald Isle, while Ancestral Lands features meditations on her native northeast Pennsylvania. The poems in Sounding the Days and Literary Islands expand the notion of holy lands into the spiritual, emotional, and intellectual realms. The book ends with 15 triolets inspired by the crisis at the United States-Mexico border that dominated the news in 2019.

The book’s first poem, “The Storm Chaser,” was inspired by a visit to the Sea of Galilee. The view of the sea has changed little in the 2,000 years since Jesus and his disciples were said to have spent time there, so O’Donnell said it was easy to create a picture in her head of what it would have been like then.

Running along the Sea of Galilee,
I see you in your boat, tall brown
man that you are, standing in the prow,

“All of these stories that I had been hearing all of my life in church in the Gospel readings suddenly became so much more powerful and real when I was in the landscape where they unfolded,” she said. 

“There was something electrifying about walking literally in the footsteps of Jesus and being in those spaces where these events took place.”

As moved as she was by the geography there, O’Donnell said she knew didn’t want to limit herself strictly to one location.

“It’s arguable that there are no places that aren’t holy, that aren’t sanctified in some way by human experience,” she said, noting that Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is considered sacred ground because nearly 50,000 soldiers died there during the infamous Civil War battle.

“I used to take my kids there, and I remember having this eerie sense of so many lives being lost in this peaceful, rural place. You know, the very dirt of the ground being watered by the blood of human beings. That’s a sacred ground.”

When she started considering other holy lands she’s visited, it dawned on her that many of them are places that most people don’t think of as holy. In “304 Washington Street,” for instance, she considers growing up in a small town just south of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Squat and square, her pea green shingles
made her strange on our straight street
lined by wood white houses,
their faces bland and neat.

“Northeastern Pennsylvania was very beautiful at one time and then was ruined by coal mining. The land is sacred in the sense that that’s where my immigrant ancestors settled down, where they lived and died, and that’s where my family flourished,” she said.

From there, O’Donnell made a leap to the idea that parenthood can be holy ground, as can being a sibling. And if one lives a creative life, the bonds one forms with practitioners of the past are also relevant. In the Literary Islands chapter, “Flannery’s Last Day” marks the anniversary of the Aug. 3 death of Flannery O’Connor, whose family trust endowed Fordham with a grant in 2018 to promote scholarship of the writer. 

Today of all days you would show up
making sure you are not forgotten.
Your suffering at the end was true,

The final chapter, Border Songs, was arguably the toughest in which to envision a connection with God, she said. The poems are meant to be “poetry of witness,” a term that the Nobel-prize winning Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz coined to describe his writing about the experience and aftermath of World War II. She wrote the poems in an attempt at accompaniment, as the world watched the horrors at the border unfold during the spring and summer of 2019.

“I felt as though it was important to meditate, to pray for, and to memorialize these people who are forgotten—people who no one cares about, people who are alienated and don’t belong,” she said.

She decided the best form to use was the triolet, a song-like poem which features several lines that are repeated several times.

“The idea is to create this haunting incantatory effect, particularly when the poem is read and listened to out loud,” O’Donnell said. 

One of the first ones she wrote, “Border Song #2,” was inspired by a report that immigrants who were taken into custody were having their rosary beads confiscated. 

They confiscate your rosary when you come.
I cannot go to sleep without one.
Thumbing each bead until the night is done.
They confiscate your rosary when you come.

She penned 15 triolets in short order.

“I didn’t have to look very hard.  Every day, there was a new outrage, a new photograph or quotation that I would see in the news that would trigger another triolet,” she said.

She noted that in his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl declared that God was with him in the concentration camp, “suffering and dying with us every day.”

“That sense of God dwelling in brokenness and in sorrow and horror as well as in the sunny places that we remember happily—that’s part of what this book is about,” she said. 

“There is divinity in everything—even in those dark places that we don’t necessarily want to be. There are times when we have to celebrate the darkness, and some of these poems attempt to do that.”

Knowing that what was happening was unprecedented and looking for a way to bear witness to this historic moment, she sat down at the beginning of quarantine and began documenting life through a series of new sonnets, the first one titled “The Fire.” A year later, she concluded with one called “Anniversary.”

On June 8, she published 58 of those poems in Love in the Time of Coronavirus: A Pandemic Pilgrimage (Paraclete Press, 2021).

O’Donnell, an associate director of the Curran Center for Catholic Studies who also teaches undergraduate students, said she hopes the book will serve as a time capsule for those who have lived through the pandemic and those seeking to learn about it in the future.

In poems such as “In Which I Consider My Wardrobe” and “The Virus Remakes the World,” O’Donnell said she was aiming to document both her own personal experiences and those felt by others, especially in the New York region.

The former resurrects a time in which street and work clothes appeared to be destined never to leave our homes:

Six pairs of boots lined up in a row.
Three black suits hung limp in the closet.

“The Virus Remakes the World,” on the other hand, reflects on the way nature seemingly filled the void as humans retreated to safety:

The animals are taking back the earth.
Birds build their nests in the air conditioners.

Enduring a Collective Isolation

“Many of us suffered under lockdown. None of us were able to go to the theaters or restaurants, bars or movies; none of us were able to meet with our friends the way were used to,” she said.

“I began then to see the poems as a chronicle of a very strange time that we endured alone and together.”

The poems are grouped into four sections and follow a chronology roughly akin to the four seasons. The first features titles like “House Arrest” and “Survival;” the second has pieces such as “Wherein I Miss My Children” and “Palm Sunday.” The third and fourth sections recount the resurgence of the virus and, ultimately, offer glimpses of hope in “The Virus Begins to Abate” and “Pandemic Epiphany.”

One of the first poems that she wrote, “COVID Has Made Me Stupid,” explores the disorientation she felt in the initial weeks of lockdown with the opening lines:

Good books line my shelves but I don’t read them.
Three sentences in and my mind wanders off
like a toddler in search of a snack . . .

In November, The Christian Century published the poem, and the responses were illuminating.

“I can’t tell you how many people wrote to me and said, ‘This describes exactly how scattered my mind has been for the last few months,’’ she said.

“I realized that my experience isn’t an isolated one. There are other people who are going as crazy as I am trying to figure out how to live our lives: What are the risks? What should I be doing? What can I do? What can I not do?”

A Reflection on Teaching

Some of her pieces are more specific to her own life, like “Wherein I Teach Remotely.” Teaching was a very poignant, moving experience, she said, and reminded her of what it was like to work with students in the aftermath of 9/11.

“All of a sudden, literature became very relevant because literature offers the wisdom of the ages and insight into the circumstances of the human condition. Suddenly four-hundred-year-old Shakespeare plays that were about doom and disorder and the undoing of a grand kingdom—that’s what was happening to us,” she said.

Capturing the ‘Interior’ Drama

Although “COVID Has Made Me Stupid” features a line that mentions the president, the poems steer clear of other major cultural and political developments of the past year, such as the murder of George Floyd and the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. That was a conscious decision. “My writing poetry about George Floyd’s suffering risks voyeurism and could be seen as presumptuous and writing about insurrectionists could easily come across as preachy,” O’Donnell said.

“As W.B. Yeats once wrote, ‘Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.’ Poetry is always trying to capture the interior drama that’s going on because we all live with mixed feelings,” she said.

“I really wanted the focus to be on the virus and the ways it changed our lives.”

A narrow focus also allowed her to explore poetic form more. “Pandemic Acrostic,” for instance, is her first published acrostic; the first letters of the 14 lines spell out “COVID19” forward and then backward.

“I thought it was a fun exercise, even though it’s a serious subject—to just play with the language and this interesting name that was never a part of our lexicon before and has now become a word we all know and use daily.”

A final poem, called “Pandemic Prayer,” ends the book with these hopeful lines: “The virus can’t destroy / this urge to bless our lives & praise / even these pandemic days.”

“Saint Ignatius always reminds us that we move between the poles of desolation and consolation—times when we feel God is distant and absent from our lives and times when we feel God’s presence, when we’re assured that things are going to be okay and that there is a providential design in all of this,” she said.

“Even in the midst of suffering, there is blessing.”

“Hers is a confident, yet compassionate voice that speaks from an unabashedly feminine perspective,” she said.

An accomplished teacher and scholar, Ponsot has translated 40 books from French into English, written radio and TV scripts, and taught students at Queens College, The New School, Columbia University, the 92^nd Street Y, Poets House, and other venues.

As a young woman, O’Donnell said, the native New Yorker moved to Paris after earning a master’s degree from Columbia. On the boat voyage over, she met poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti—a meeting which led to the publication of her first book, True Minds, as part of his City Lights series, in the 1950s.

Ponsot did not seek to publish her second book, Admit Impediment, for some 24 years as she raised seven children, said O’Donnell. Remarking on this unpublished period of her life, Ponsot wrote: “You don’t wait for someone to approve. If you go on doing it and enjoying it, well what have you done? You’ve spent time enjoying what your language makes of you. Very often this makes for a more comfortable self than any other you’ll ever meet.”

Speaking softly to a large audience gathered in the Corrigan Conference center, Ponsot exclaimed “it’s exciting” to receive the award and to be given an opportunity to read portions of her poetry. She was subsequently presented with a plaque and a collage of her published book covers, to which she threw up her arms delightedly.

The recipient of several poetry awards, Ponsot has also published two books on the pedagogy of writing, and, in 2010, was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

The event was co-sponsored by the Mezzo Cammin Women poets Timeline.

“The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination,” held from April 27 to 29, drew 375 attendees for panel discussions, workshops and keynote addresses by writers Dana Gioia, Ron Hansen, Mary Gordon, and Alice McDermott. At the heart of the conference, sponsored by Fordham’s Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, were focuses on the works of writers and presenters from New York City and Fordham, and an emphasis on the Ignatian and Catholic imaginations.

The Irish Influence

In a Friday panel, “Irish Incarnations of the Catholic Imagination,” McDermott, Kathleen Hill, Michael O’Siadhail, and Peter Quinn tackled the ways in which the Emerald Isle’s deep ties to Catholicism could be felt in their work.

Quinn highlighted the way that Irish-American Catholics’ attitudes were shaped by their role as scapegoats as recently as the early 20th century. He said his first introduction to Irish Catholic literature came via Elizabeth Cullinan’s House of Gold, (Houghton Mifflin, 1970). The book, which delved deep into the personal stories of East Bronx Irish Catholics, was seen as a betrayal of the tribe in its scorching portrayals.

“My parents were educated people, both college graduates, but their reaction [to the book]was my introduction to the code of silence, the Irish version of Omertà,” he said.

Some of this was understandable; after all, the arrival in New York of one million people—one-eighth of the Irish population—between 1845 and 1855, made the Irish immigrants prime targets, he said.

“Critics debated whether it was Catholicism that made the Irish ignorant and stupid, or it was their stupidity and gullibility that made them Catholic,” said Quinn, noting the anti-Irish sentiment.

But as prime targets of criticism, no other ethic group better understood the gift of faith, said McDermott. While it was said in jest that the Irish could learn about ambition from the Jews, about food from the Italians, and about self-discipline from the Germans, being Irish was still the best, because it was the Irish who had Catholicism right.

“I was told, you might not want an Irish doctor, and certainly not an Irish lawyer, or an Irish chef. You might not even want some Irish guy painting your house, but there was no better priest than an Irish priest,” she said.

“I was taught that ultimately it was best not to identify with your ethnic origins,” she said, “But with the one faith that is willing and able to forgive us all for our many inevitable human failings. It’s a faith that both forgives us and more remarkable still, offers us eternal life despite how annoying we all are.”

On Stage and Screen

The panel “Catholics Writing for the Stage and Screen,” held on Saturday, featured playwright and director Karin Coonrod; screenwriter, playwright, and producer Tom Fontana; and screenwriter and producer Thomas Kelly.

Fontana, who went to a Jesuit high school and later attended a public college, said it was his departure from religious schooling that helped him realize the importance of his faith.

“I had this discipline from the Jesuits, and this wonderful freedom during the sixties,” he said. “I was able to find a place for the two to live together within my soul.”

He said that when he began working in television, his writing was nearly all faith-related. In his HBO drama series, Oz, he used a prison setting to tell stories of redemption and retribution in a place that offered so little of it.

“Our mantra on Oz was: If you could find God in a prison, he must exist,” he said, adding that in his stories he prefers to raise questions of morality rather than to preach.

For Kelly, who said he was raised Catholic but later became agnostic, it was a slow transition back to the appreciation of his faith. After his father’s death, Catholicism began to seep back into his life.

Kelly said he began to realize that all of his main characters were Catholic. On his television series, Blue Bloods, he noted that he focuses on situational morality.

“The individuals in these stories are striving to do good, and some of them are very conflicted about not being able to do good,” he said.

Coonrod, the founder of the Arden Party and Compagnia de’ Colombari, two New York-based theater companies, said she brings her own religious imaginings to a live audience through literary interpretations. She once asked a light designer to create a literal interpretation of the birth of Christ as “the light of the world,” creating a scenario where the actress playing Mary appeared to cradle light. “Is it a baby? Is it a cloth that comes undone? Or is it actually light?” Coonrod asked, noting how theater can stimulate our religious imaginations.

The conference was a follow-up to the first Catholic Imagination conference at the University of Southern California held in spring of 2015.

Angela O’Donnell, conference organizer and associate director of the Curran Center, noted the timeliness of this year’s conference, saying writers were “never so relevant as we are now.”

“In any given culture, writers are the designated truth-tellers, as well as the repository of memory,” she said. “Every era needs its writers to remind people of their core values and hold us to exacting standards of thought and action.”
Angie Chen contributed reporting

Pinsky, a former saxophonist, has said the excitement and tension of jazz still inspire him as a poet. He said he writes with the audience as his medium, and he believes his work will not live until it’s read in someone else’s voice, and given volume. In the same sense then, it can be said that Pinsky has allowed Dante’s Inferno to live a little louder in his American translation.

As to his unique opinions on the poem, Pinsky had this to tell his Lincoln Center audience: “This is not a poem about punishment, but the sin of despair… the agony of feeling defective and being defective… I believe Inferno is the best book ever written about depression.”

The Fordham Reads Dante initiative meets once a month to read and discuss Dante’s Divina Commedia. Their next discussion will be on Sept. 22, at 5:30 p.m. in Faber Hall 568 on the Rose Hill campus.

– Kiran Singh

In her most recent collection of poems, Lovers’ Almanac, (Wipf & Stock, 2015) Angela Alaimo O’Donnell explores the many forms of love humans experience from birth to death: familial love, divine love, romantic love, and the passion of artists and heroes.

Lovers’ Almanac begins with a 12-poem sonnet sequence. A dialog between a man and woman, each poem represents one month of the year.

“Each of the months and seasons reflect different phases of their love,” explained O’Donnell, who a lecturer of English, creative writing, and American Catholic studies at Fordham and is associate director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies.

What inspired a book about love?

“I spent several years writing about death,” O’Donnell said, referring to Mortal Blessings (Ave Maria Press, 2014) and Waking my Mother (Word Press, 2013), a book of prose and a collection of elegies, both inspired by her mother’s illness and death six years ago. “I’m tired of poems about grief. I wanted to get this train going on another track.”

The poem “On Botticelli’s Annunciation” explores divine love, through the lens of the artist in his famous painting of the angel who visits Mary on behalf of God.

“I love the physicality,” O’Donnell said, referring to the painter’s vision of the angel and of Mary. “How bold of Botticelli to use these figures to tell the story of how the incarnation came to be.”

“Putting my sons on my C.V.,” takes a more whimsical look at the deep love and attachment a parent has for her children, while “Unfallen” explores the obsessive love an artist has for his work. The poem is about Philippe Petit who walked on a tightrope between the Twin Towers in 1974.

“This is a good example of a person who has a passion for his art that is so great that he is willing to do insane things!” O’Donnell said. “Petit’s love for his art is incredible. His walk was an act of love and an act of faith.”

O’Donnell’s works include Saint Sinatra and Other Poems and Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith, among others. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including America, Christian Century, Comstock Poetry Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Potomac Review, Vineyards, Windhover, and Xavier Review, and have been nominated for several awards.

—Claire Curry

“She would of been a good woman,” the killer then says, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

“I didn’t know what to make of it,” said O’Donnell, associate director of The Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, who found the writing funny and horrible at the same time. “[About O’Connor] I thought ‘wow, what a ghoul.’”

A few years later, however, O’Donnell, then a graduate student, discovered that O’Connor’s dark, humorous, and disturbing fiction was deeply rooted in religious themes—good, evil, grace, redemption—and that the author was a devout Catholic.

Flannery O’Connor, Fiction Fired by Faith (Liturgical Press 2015), a new book by O’Donnell, now examines O’Connor and her works through that Catholic lens.

The book maps O’Connor’s journey from her young girlhood in Savannah’s segregated Catholic neighborhood of Lafayette Square to formative years in the small town of Milledgeville to her ensuing literary success and subsequent demise from a disease that also killed her father.

O’Donnell, an accomplished poet who has taught English for 10 years at Fordham, said she frequently includes O’Connor’s work on her class syllabus.

“She’s a cornerstone of great American and American-Catholic writers,” she said.

Although she recently published a book of hours based on O’Connor’s prayer practice, The Province of Joy (Paraclete, 2012), and has written both memoir and poetry, O’Donnell had never tackled a biography.

“It gave me an opportunity to revisit O’Connor primarily with a focus on her spiritual life—the relationship between her faith and her art.”

The 130-page book explores how O’Connor’s religion shaped and defined her experiences over the course of her short life (she, too, died from complications from Lupus).

As a young student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, O’Connor struggled with the many “non-believers” who populated her world, fearing her own loss of faith.

When she got sick a few years later, and returned to Milledgeville and her mother’s care, she found grace in her continual suffering.

Too ill to leave, O’Connor relied on the tenets of her faith to give her the strength to continue writing. She prayed and attended Mass daily, and wrote of the small-town life she observed. O’Donnell said many of her stories from this period reflect a physical and spiritual sickness, manifested through characters with missing limbs, deafness, muteness, poor eyesight, and other afflictions of suffering.

“The grace that she finds when she goes back to Milledgeville is that there are so many interesting people,” said O’Donnell. “And she writes about the people she knows best. That becomes her world.”

While O’Connor’s stories don’t feature many Catholic characters, the worldview portrayed in the stories is steeped in the incarnation, the Last Judgment, spiritual embodiment, and other Roman Catholic themes.

“Her characters are enacting over and over the story of the fall from grace, and redemption,” said O’Donnell. “She can’t help herself. That is the world she believes in.

“The church, for Flannery, is the only source of salvation in an increasingly troubled world.” (top photo courtesy of everythingthatrises.com.)

— Janet Sassi

In December 2009, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s already-frail mother took a bad fall and broke her hip. Forty-eight days later, she was gone. Mortal Blessings is the story of how the author and her siblings cared for their mother in that short, sacred time span, when mundane acts of caregiving took on divine grace. O’Donnell, associate director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, divides this memoir into chapters named for newfound sacraments. There’s “The Sacrament of the Cell Phone and the Wheelchair,” for example, an account of regular calls to family members and daily strolls around the hospital that “served as a kind of communion for us,” writes O’Donnell. “We moved up and down those hallways as one, two parts of a single whole.” Even their ritual of enjoying pie together had become “Eucharist by another name.” And like the Eucharist, O’Donnell writes, her sacramental witness to her mother’s final days “was one more way of affirming life in the face of apparent death.”