from PROJECT to PILGRIMAGE

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This is a blog about my current poetry project. But it isn’t, either. It’s about what a little poetry project has BECOME...

I've been writing poems for a long time that explore women's lives, and I was working on a chapbook (small book of poems loosely organized around a theme or thread) about the Radium Girls (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls).

Then one day I heard Joni Mitchell's song, "The Magdalene Laundries" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU1Zymqlhko). I had no idea what the laundries were, so I did some quick research. I was stunned to learn these were commercial laundries in Ireland from 1765 to 1996 (!), operated after 1922 by four orders of Roman Catholic sisters, with the approval and cooperation of the government. In the laundries, young women (girls as young as 11 and young women who were "fallen," precocious, sexually active, pregnant, victims of rape/incest, abandoned, etc.) were institutionalized, forced into labor, abused, had babies taken from them, and sometimes died.

The more research I did, and continue to do, the more I became convinced that (1) I needed to focus on the laundries and save the Radium Girls work for later, and (2) this might end up being bigger than a short cycle of poems. (For instance, did you know there were 28 Magdalene laundries in the U.S. too? And that they’ve been called “the first women’s prisons”? Yeah. Neither did I.)

A couple years and loads of obsessive research later, I realized I would need to go to Ireland to really begin to understand how the laundries could happen, and to get a feel for their aftermath. I'm a teacher in South Dakota, so as you might imagine, I'm prairie poor. Now, though, thanks to a GoFundMe page (www.gofundme.com/magdalenes), and to the jaw-dropping support of my family, dear friends, and even complete strangers, I'm going.

My friend D and I will be spending about 5 weeks in Ireland and Scotland. My LP (life partner) isn't keen on big travel, and neither is D's, and D has been an enthusiastic and determined supporter of my need to follow the Magdalenes since the project's beginning, so we make a good travel team.

We will visit all ten laundry sites in Ireland, visit the cemeteries where so many Magdalenes (and many of their babies) are buried, and talk to as many people as we can. My goal for the project, shifting and evolving as it is, is awareness: I hope to shine a small light on the story of the Magdalenes in the medium I know best—poetry. I’ve already started work on a full-length collection of poems that I hope will find a publishing home one day. I do believe we repeat the history we ignore, and I believe that healing, if it can come at all, will only come with acknowledgement. I’m not looking to blast the Catholic Church, though I won’t ignore or sugar-coat their part in this sad history, either. I’m doing my best to approach the project in a spirit of compassion, understanding, a desire for truth, and whatever forgiveness I can find.

I can never repay the help and support I've been given. But what I CAN do is to journal this strange and unfolding adventure and, in a sense, bring you all with me. So please come along, and go raibh maith agat!