Suzanne Strempek Shea in Person

Join us on Wednesday, September 9 at 7 PM as Suzanne Strempek Shea presents her new memoir, Compositions: A memoir in 42 essays by 1 kid on her 8 years in Catholic School, handed in 60 Years late.

An extraordinary memoir about the author’s early years in a close-knit 1960s and ‘70s Polish-American Massachusetts grade school and community, Compositions details a life that revolves in a circle of faith and family. Written in the author’s voice and point of view from her first eight years of school, the humorous and poignant essays show a past still fully present. Graduation photos lining the walls include students’ parents who once sat in the same classrooms with the same wooden desks, same windows, same blackboards, and some of the same nuns. Strempek Shea learns new words --- bubbler for water fountain, sodality for club, lavatory for bathroom, Father for priest even if he wasn’t hers. One snowy afternoon, looking at all the familiar faces, companions from early morning to afternoon, Monday through Friday, from for as long as she can remember, she realizes she likes school, thanks in part to the nuns who taught patiently, sang folk songs beneath a tree, and danced the hula, and despite the ones who wielded a croquet stick or hurled textbooks. Reverence is everywhere: dropped bread receives a kiss, swimmers bless themselves before diving, parishioners walk on their knees each Good Friday. The miracles in Compositions that Strempek Shea prays for – a horse or at least a pony, her grandfather’s health – never take place. Yet something no less tender and beautiful does as she spins childhood in a kaleidoscope of close-to-the-bone observations and stories written as energetically as if the author had always been waiting to tell the world all she knew. Read them and realize you’ve always been waiting for that, too.

Suzanne Strempek Shea is the author of six novels and six works of nonfiction. Her freelance journalism and fiction have appeared in publications including Yankee, The Bark, Golf World, The Boston Globe, The Irish Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Brevity, Down East, and ESPN the Magazine. Awards for her books include the New England Book Award and the Oskar Halecki Prize. Her journalism was shortlisted for the Penney-Missouri Awards, and her creative writing was recognized in Best American Fiction. She taught at University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing for 18 years, and for 12 years was inaugural writer-in-residence and director of the creative writing program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Mass., where she created its MFA in creative nonfiction. She co-directs the Dingle Writers’ Workshop in Ireland and the Iota Short Forms Conference in Downeast Maine. She is married to lifelong journalist Tommy Shea. They divide their time between Bondsville, Massachusetts, and Howth, Ireland.

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