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At age seven, before I even owned a leotard, I dedicated myself to the technique of Martha Graham and to the person of my teacher, Ethel Butler, who had been a member of Graham’s first company. For two summers I took the intensive June course at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in New York and absorbed her sense of dance as vocation. After college, I founded Chicago Contemporary Dance Theatre, a modern dance company in residence at Chicago’s Body Politic theatre complex. There we presented children’s shows and adult concerts featuring choreography by company members, guest, Carolyn Lord, and me. With support from the National Endowment for the Arts’ Dance Touring Program, we toured from Alaska to Jamaica. At age thirty-nine, I was a happily married mother of four as well as director of a dance company. My husband and I left our mentally handicapped son with my parents and took the other children on vacation to Jamaica. Our car hit a stone wall, and there The Crack between the Worlds begins. Read the first chapter. |
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I come from no traditional religion. I grew up without prayers before bed or grace before meals, no Bible in the house and no Christianity in Christmas, no matter how much generosity and joy. In our family, what you saw was what you got, and life was a series of problems to be solved by your own effort and ingenuity. Neither of my parents—like me before 1980—had ever read the Bible. They raised me with books and plays and music, but strictly without religion. To read more about this, see Mindful Metropolis, pages 42-43. Three years of mourning followed the accident and eventually led me to investigate Catholicism and enter the Church, where I found a community of faith that helped me make sense of a catalytic experience. My faith sought understanding, and I began a theological studies program at Catholic Theological Union. While studying I developed a practice of liturgical dance (dance as worship), which I taught and practiced as Kast & Company Liturgical Dancers. See Image “Artist of the Month,” where you can read "Contemporary Choreography: Reclaiming the Sacred. Recently, a friend said to me, “I presume you regard yourself as a liberal Catholic.” In response I asked myself what kind of Catholic I am, and what is “liberal?” To read more, click here. |
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After my husband’s death, I found myself a single parent of a ten-year-old, a developmentally disabled eighteen-year-old, and two college-aged sons. I began to write, lines and stanzas springing to life in the middle of journal entries. When writing became a daily, multi-hour practice, I applied to the low-residency program at Vermont College (now Vermont College of Fine Arts) and two years later received an MFA in fiction. My stories have appeared in The Sun, Nimrod (finalist in the Katherine Anne Porter prize for fiction), Paper Street, Rosebud (honorable mention in the Ursula Leguin prize for fantasy fiction) and others, and my essays have appeared in Contact Quarterly, Writer’s Chronicle, Image and others. The story, “Joyful Noise,” about a developmentally disabled young man, was anthologized in Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs, edited by Suzanne Kamata (Boston, Beacon Press, 2008). Excerpts from The Crack between the Worlds have appeared in America, Image and ACM/Another Chicago Magazine. The latter won a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council and a Pushcart nomination. My grown sons are now married, one in San Francisco and one off the grid in rural Oregon, and I have two granddaughters, Iris and Lola, whom I visit. Recently my daughter finished graduate school in arts management and moved back to Chicago, to my delight. I teach writing and rhetoric part time at Columbia College Chicago, occasionally sail through treetops, practice yoga, cook, bike, and continue a faith-filled search for understanding. |
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Maggie, in love with Martha Graham | Maggie, lost and found | Maggie tells her story | Video |
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