In a writing exercise to create two diverse individuals, I imagined a wounded physician and a café owner trying to become pregnant by artificial insemination. Theirs became the main story of my new novel, A Million Miles from Yesterday.
As a physician, my medical experiences — some sad, some hilarious — informed this novel. The town doctor in Alma, Wisconsin, Hank Cleary, failed his wife when she died. He’s numb from grief and medical training. He struggles to climb back into life. Will he forgive himself? Will he confront himself in new ways? Where does courage come from?
A Chicago expatriate, he is challenged by other migrants: the Chicana owner of Livy’s Bar and Café, an old man who loves jazz, a Navajo family transplanted from the Southwest, a strange woman who rarely speaks, a drifting Menominee, and the iconoclastic Bookstore Ladies. Disparate cultures rub up against each other.
When a cataclysmic fire engulfs the Alma recycling plant in mid-summer, Hank cannot resuscitate Silent Margaret, and he relives his despair at being unable to save his wife. At the turn of the millennium, healing comes in unexpected ways.
I’m a native of Chicago and also have Irish citizenship. I relish our many cultures in the city. My novel, set in northern Wisconsin, contains multiple cultures — Irish, Navajo, Latino, Menominee. Disparate cultures rub up against each other.
I did medical work with the Navajo Nation in the ’90s, living in an isolated compound in the four corners area of Arizona. I was drawn to the rich fabric of their lives. I met and learned from a Navajo shaman, treated babies on cradleboards and women in long skirts and velvet blouses, enjoyed the beauty of the canyons and mountains. In the novel, a Navajo family, comprising a shaman, visual artist, storyteller, and factory worker, has migrated from the southwest. Hank shares myths with a Navajo child.
Other characters made their way onto the page — an old man who loves jazz, a strange woman who rarely speaks, a Menominee living on the reservation, a drifting teenager. Strong women and indigenous people surround the widowed doctor.
Why a small town in the North Woods of Wisconsin? As a child, I remember my family driving there for vacations, the rented cottages, weedy lakes, fish boils, firs and birches. My grandfather would help us kids put worms on hooks, gut the small fish we caught. The novel evokes the pleasure of those times in the setting. The story, to quote Yeats, embraces “the water and the wild,” and reflects small-town culture with its eccentricities.
In A Million Miles from Yesterday, set in the millennium year 1999, time becomes important. Time can speed up or slow down depending on emotional state, or even fall away. The rhythm of the prose reflects this when Hank, a Chicago ex-patriate, travels to the city, visiting places that hold deep memories.
I wrote A Million Miles from Yesterday over years, many parts at a nature sanctuary in western Illinois. Medical jobs in between allowed me to write. I’ve been active for decades in the Chicago writing community, and have read poetry and fiction at Guild Complex, Space, and other venues.
Maureen Connolly, who was interviewed about her new book on WZRD Radio 88.3 FM on June 22, is an Oak Park resident. Her book is available at Book Table in Oak Park, as well as Barnes & Noble and other bookstores, and online through Amazon, et al.