Could you give us a bit of background on when you first became interested in writing about your father’s story?

 

Sometime in my teens, my mother revealed that my father spent five years of his childhood in St. Joseph’s Home. By my twenties, my father wanted to share his experiences in the orphanage with me. On long walks together, he began disclosing some of his memories, especially of the cruelty and brutality he endured there, not with anger, but sadness. My father did not know the reasons for the abandonment that led to his institutionalization, and I knew much of his pain stemmed from that. As a cultural anthropologist, I understood the importance of a coherent narrative in helping us make sense of our lives. My goal, for many years, was to reconstruct an intelligible story for my father. I wanted to find reasons for the rupture that defined his childhood—the sudden break with his parents and all he knew—and suture it. I thought if I could connect the threads of his history, it might give him a new understanding of his life, one that might bring closure and even, perhaps, heal wounds. I wanted to “write” my father’s story for him. I didn’t think about literally writing it until 2011 when I met Alisse Waterston, an anthropologist finishing her book of her father’s life, writing it as an “intimate ethnography,” a genre she pioneered. She inspired me to think about writing my father’s story. I remember telling her that, ever since my father shared his first memory with me in my 30s—being held in the arms of a policeman, crying—it had haunted me, lurking in the back of my mind for years. That memory, I told her, would be the first line of anything I wrote (although, it ends up, it wasn’t). I didn’t know until I voiced it that I had been unconsciously processing and thinking about putting pen to paper for quite some time. It wasn’t until I began writing creative nonfiction, after retiring in 2017, that I found the right vehicle.

 

What was the process of trying to reconstruct his memories and experiences like for you?

 

Much of the process of putting together the bits and pieces of my father’s life was frustrating. I kept coming up short, whether due to unproductive interviews, failed searches of archives and records (many before the internet), or St. Joseph’s refusal to release information. Much of it angered me, especially the treatment my father was subjected to in the orphanage. The process was painful from the beginning, from when I first heard my father’s harrowing memories to the writing of “Echoes” itself. I was shocked when I came across the “Enumeration.” Seeing my father identified as “inmate” was heart-wrenching. But nothing was more heartbreaking than when I took my father back to the orphanage in the 1990s, when he was in his 70s. My father wanted to experience St. Joseph’s as an adult, to verify his memories, but mostly, I believe, to look the place that had caused him such harm in the face. I was still seeking information to help me fill in the fissures in his history. When we went inside to speak with the nun in the front office, my father asked about Sister Teresa, the harshest of the nuns. I was furious when his question was trivialized with, “oh yes, she was a tough one.” I was frustrated when she skirted my questions. I was devasted when, toward the end of our visit, my father lamented, “Where was my mother? Where was my mother?” I didn’t know. I felt helpless. I walked away and wept. Writing the final section felt triumphal and cathartic. It is the crux of my story—how my father overcame cruelty and violence to become an exceptional parent. After my father died in 2020, I knew I would write a tribute to him. In 2024, I sat down and wrote, “Echoes.”

 

What would you say writing in a personal or memoiristic register opens up for you that is different from other forms of writing?

 

Writing “Echoes” as a piece of creative nonfiction—specifically, memoir—was the very thing that allowed me to write it at all. As a first-person narrative, it shifted my focus from reconstructing my father’s early life -- which had proved impossible--- to the story of my search to find a way to tell his story. Writing it through the lens of my experiences, I tried to connect my emotions with reflections on my father’s childhood, hopefully allowing readers to feel those emotions with me. I drew on conventions from fiction and poetry to, I hope, make “Echoes” evocative and appealing to a wide audience. At the same time, “Echoes” is not just my story. It is also a portrait of my father’s young life placed in the historical context that shaped his childhood: the racism, classism—and especially the sexism—within which my grandfather, as an immigrant man, was trapped and the institutionalized violence of the Catholic Church. My father embodied that violence throughout his life. Even into his 100s, he maintained meticulous handwriting, continued to scrub his body in long showers and to exercise to maintain erect posture, sometimes with a pole threaded under his arms and across his back. He never ate pudding. But, most importantly, for me, “Echoes” is a story of a father and daughter and our deep connection and love for one another.

 

How does your essay speak to the possibility of an otherwise?

 

My father’s story is one of possibility, the possibility of choosing to live a life “otherwise,” even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. For years, my siblings and I have marveled at our father’s ability to overcome his devastating childhood, but none of us knows how. “Echoes” offers no blueprint. But my father’s story is one of hope and resilience, one that makes me believe we might find ways to break out of our own bleak and terrifying here and now however impossible, difficult, painful, and obscure our choices seem right now. At times, I want to give up. And then I think of my father. And I don’t. I choose otherwise.