Retrieving Scattered Light

Here is my statement that helped me get into Temple University’s MFA for writing program. I know it helped me to read worked and did not work when I was working on my application.

“What I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.”

~David Bowie

I am a Virgo and the tarot card that corresponds with my zodiac sign is The Hermit. In the past two years the card I have pulled most frequently for myself is in fact The Hermit, a card about trusting one’s inner elder or wisest self. Writer Christopher Marmolejo describes the card as an invitation for one “to retrieve scattered light.”  That invitation is seductive and pressing as I inch closer to becoming an actual elder since turning fifty last year. When I think of the self that graduated in 1995 with an English degree from Penn State, to the 2024 Rina that is seeking more formal education, The Hermit presents not so much as a lone cave dweller but as a ghost like figure, showing me how to integrate parts of past, present, and future selves. Ghosts know that time is short, memory is long, and love is what matters most.

I wrote furtively as a student and young adult. A formative class at Penn State devoted to women writers extolled the virtue of journaling. This was my gateway into writing, and was an important lesson in how the stories people tell can save a life, even if only that of the author. I wrote poetry in college and received positive feedback but did not take myself seriously as a writer.

Despite a lifelong love of reading and writing, my early career goals were more focused on working with families in crisis in social work settings, especially with women and children. This is what happens when, as a teenager, one takes to heart the words of writers like Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. My time as a Mercy Volunteer working in Philadelphia at Mercy Hospice and later as a possible candidate for religious life with the Sisters of Mercy, Mid Atlantic Region, had me learning about injustice in our world and how systems are not always in place to help people. The arts remained important to me, but in my youthful earnestness and ignorance, writing or submitting my own work at the time would have seemed frivolous in comparison to social work. Perhaps I was simply too shaken by the horrors of working in a domestic violence shelter after my volunteer experience and hadn’t yet learned to express that sense of overwhelm in ways that would have been meaningful to myself or anyone else. Gaps in my writing exist during those years.

When I left religious life and began trying to have a family, words once again became vital. I experienced multiple miscarriages including a stillbirth. I sought kinship with women through the ages that had had similar experiences and who wrote about them outright or surreptitiously. I remember thinking how appropriate it was that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein while pregnant AND mourning an infant who had died earlier. I even had an eerily similar dream to one of hers, of trying to rub a poor dead baby back to life.  I resonated with the idea of writing to bring people back to life, to bring myself back to life. I appreciated women writers who detailed stories not discussed in polite society.

Years after my experience with miscarriage and stillbirth, I began to write a memoir based on pregnancy loss and the aftermath. The process was like pumping a well. Writing was no longer something I did in stolen moments sitting next to my kids as they played. I became  recommitted to writing poems and stories while I wrote the manuscript. I decided to self publish the memoir (I tried unsuccessfully to acquire an agent) partly because I didn’t have a huge social media following which seems necessary for non fiction publication. Also, I knew it would have a hard time, as a spiritual book, finding a home in traditional spiritual publications. Much of what I see published as spiritual writing by women is rather bloodless, and needs an official imprimatur of approval from a church hierarchy that does not like anything female and messy, and my story was very female and messy. The work I did on my memoir allowed me to deconstruct from the aspects of my lifelong faith that didn’t allow a story like mine to be holy.

My most recent literary influences include living poets like Ada Limon, Solmaz Sharif, Jose Hernandez Diaz. Of course I always go back to Mary Oliver, Frank O’Hara, Frank Bidart, Marina Tsvetaeva, Lucille Clifton, Anna Akhmatova.  I love the short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Ashleigh Bryant Phillips. I think of the final paragraph of Lauren Groff’s short story “The Wind” once a week. I admire the grace and beauty in the works of horror author Stephen Graham Jones and just read my first Ottessa Moshfegh novel.

    For non fiction, I respect the work of Sarah Kendzior and Jared Yates Sexton and bell hooks. My favorite writer over the past few years has been the multi-genre wonder Sophie Strand, a self described “compost heap” who, along with writers like David Abram, has awakened me to the vitalness of listening to the non human world. I am trying to read more about what it means decolonize the mind and heart, of not having whiteness at the center of everything. I am also drawn to noir, elevated true crime, multi generational family drama, gothic literature, and horror. Often I find elements of all those genres in the non fiction history of America that I was not exposed to as a young student.

In my writing and in the work of people I admire, there is room left open for the supernatural, the uncanny, and the weird. I love the ghost story as a way for women to communicate between worlds, to transgress normal rules and societal expectation.  I have been in mediumship development classes for several years and this focus on listening to the dead has also been a huge kind of creative act, and has helped me to be open to the voice of “the other.” I am less interested in controlling a personal narrative than in letting words come through me that can heal. Mediumship has helped my writing become more ungated.

 My work in progress is a novel about obsessive love. It is a multigenerational story which follows two main characters who cannot seem to forget each other, and who influence each other from a great distance over a lifetime.  The story moves from the American South, to Philly, to the walls of the Vatican. It is fundamentally a love story, and explores how different characters engage with the magic and power dynamics of the unseen world. The most important quality of any work of art to me is dignity, which is an aspect of love, and I hope to keep love and magic at the center of whatever I write or create.

The epigraph to my book about miscarriage comes from Fernando Garcia Lorca and is from his play Blood Wedding: “You have to follow where your blood takes you.”  Through pregnancy loss and childbirth, my blood literally brought me back to writing. The stories of my deep family roots in Philadelphia have me wanting to study in a city I have always loved and for which I have a strong sense of loyalty.  When I write, I try to be worthy of my own dead, the family who have gone before me, both biological and chosen. A favorite memory of Philadelphia is watching people dance in the streets after the 2020 election, knowing that her inhabitants helped vote a tyrant out of office.  For all of its problems, I have experienced Philly as a place that is authentic, passionate, and strong. I am the product of many love stories that began in Philly, weird and wonderful stories of light scattered through decades.

Professionally I am not sure yet where an MFA would take me. It may keep me solidly working with the three/four year old set, and that would be just fine. It may see me working in a school with older children (especially if I seek certification).  I see inherent value in the course work and degree in that it will offer me needed criticism from educators and fellow writers, while encouraging me to take my writing and my ghosts even more seriously.  Ultimately, my goal is to answer The Hermit’s call to retrieve scattered light and angle it towards the future.

Thank you for reading. I think I would be a considerate and supportive fellow MFA student at Temple University.  I am much sunnier and more joyful than all this talk of death and gloom and blood would suggest.

Sincerely,

Rina Kenney

September 2024