Though Maureen Brady wrote the humor column of her junior
high school newspaper, she didn't actually comprehend that she was a writer
until after she had moved to New York City
in her twenties, where she began taking writing workshops at The New School and
then fell headlong into the consciousness raising groups of the early 1970's.
She published her first novel,
Give Me Your Good Ear,
in 1979, and it was published by The Women's Press in England
in 1981. Her novel,
Folly, was excerpted in Southern Exposure,
received wide critical acclaim, was nominated by Adrienne Rich for an ALA Gay
Book Award and was reprinted as a classic by The Feminist Press. She published
a collection of short stories,
The Question She Put to Herself, in
1987, then turned to writing nonfiction in the '90's, publishing
Daybreak:
Meditations for Women Survivors of Sexual Abuse and
Midlife:
Meditations for Women. She returned to fiction with the novel,
Ginger's
Fire, and her most recent novel,
Getaway.
Her recent work has appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Bellevue Literary Review;
Just Like A Girl; Cabbage and Bones: Irish American Women's Fiction, Mom, In
the Family, and Intersections: An Anthology of Banff Writers. Brady's essays
and stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and were finalists for
the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Nelsen Algren Short Story
contest.
An Adjunct Assistant Professor, she teaches creative writing at New
York University
and New York Writers Workshop @ the Jewish Community Center, and works as a
free-lance editor and tutor, helping writers across the spectrum take their
writing to the next stage.
A co-founder of Spinsters Ink, Brady edited such books as The Cancer
Journals by Audre Lorde and The Woman Who Breathes Fire by Kitty Tsui. She also
served as a panelist for The New York State Council on the Arts Literature
Program and as a fiction judge for Oregon Literary Arts. She is a founding
member of The New York Writers Workshop and has long served as Board President
of Money for Women Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.
She has received grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation; New York State
Council on the Arts Writer-in-Residence; New York State Council on the Arts
CAPS grant; Holding Our Own; Briarcombe Foundation; and The Virginia Center for
the Creative Arts Fellowship to The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland.
She was the winner of the Saints and Sinners short story contest for 2015 and
is also a Saints and Sinners Hall of Fame winner.
She lives in New York City and Woodstock
with her long term partner, Martha, and their joy dog, Bessie.
Title: GETAWAY
Author: Maureen Brady
Publisher: Bacon Press Books
Pages: 230
Genre: Women’s Fiction
BOOK BLURB:
After stabbing
her abusive husband and leaving him dying on the kitchen floor, Cookie Wagner
flees to remote Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. For a moment, she seems to have gotten away with murder.
But, consigned to a secretive life with a new name and the need to be on
constant alert, she faces all she has not gotten away with. She is helped
by the recently widowed Mrs. Biddle, who offers her a place to stay, and the
lobster fisherman Butch, who gives her a job and later falls in love with her.
Walking the cliffs and beaches, taking in the scruffy windblown plants that
survive the buffeting wind by growing at an angle, she begins to heal.
Yet, there is
no leaving behind the notion that Warren is dead as the result of her action.
Or is he? And
if not, will he one day come to find her?
Sexual
harassment and abuse are all over the news these days, often involving
celebrites and other well-known figures, but Cookie, the protagonist of Getaway, is no celebrity. She’s an
ordinary woman married to a working class guy who drinks too much and resorts
to violence. Their story reveals how endemic the phenomenon of abuse is, and
the quandary Cookie lands in when she fights back.
Praise
for Getaway:
“Sensitive,
sensual, and stirring. "Getaway" is a true page-turner, but one with
heart and with context. I couldn’t put it down until I got to the end, not just to find out what happened, but also to discover who
these intriguing and complex characters would develop into. An extremely
satisfying read!”
Danielle Ofri, author of What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear, Editor-in-Chief, Bellevue
Literary Review.
Getaway
is available at Amazon.
We welcome you to My Bookish
Pleasures! Can you tell us how you got started writing fiction?
I started by reading. When I was a
child, I thought I would try to read right down the shelf from A to B to C, in
the kid’s section of my local library where I often went after school, to wait
for my mother to finish working at a hospital across the street. As I grew
older, I often had the thought when I finished a book (and I didn’t think it
fair not to read them all the way through) that I could have written it better.
Still, I had little confidence about my ability and even in college was afraid
to take a writing class because I feared I would be too devastated if what I
wrote turned out to be no good. But after college, when I was hungry for more release
for my imagination, I took the big step of signing up for a class at The New
School called First Fiction. There were about 20 or more students and only 2 or
3 of us really wrote, but I was like a ripe fig about to drop off a tree, and
when the teacher said write, I went for it and wrote 3 or 4 very short stories
during that semester.
Then I completed my first novel, Give Me
Your Good Ear, and published it, and the passion for writing never left me.
Describe your writing process.
Do you plot or write by the seat of your pants? When and where do you write?
I might have a few plot ideas, but mostly I
subscribe to the idea that I have entered a dark tunnel and can only see as far
ahead of me as the car lights shine. So the only way to go forward is to write
down what I can see and then I will be able to see the next part. So the story
develops for me as I go along. I have a small writing studio across a stream
from my house. It is a little red out building I renovated to give myself quiet
space. It looks upon the stream and then a meadow where the deer come to feast
at sunset and sunrise. When possible I try to write in the morning before other
life challenges start demanding attention.
What do you find most rewarding about
writing?
It provides a constant challenge to
stretch yourself when you don’t feel you can go any further, and a chance to
spend time in the imagination. Also, when a story comes together in a way that
moves me, then I feel there is a good chance it will move others and that is a good
feeling. I also realize that I enjoy the privilege of having this way to
express myself, and it’s hard to imagine living without such a resource.
Can you tell us about your most
recent release?
Sexual abuse and harassment are all over the news these days,
often involving celebrities and well-known sports figures, but Cookie, the
protagonist of Getaway, is no
celebrity. She’s an ordinary woman married to a working class guy who drinks
too much and turns to violence. Their story reveals how endemic the phenomenon
of abuse is, and the quandary Cookie lands in when she fights back.
After stabbing her husband and leaving him dying on the
kitchen floor, she flees to remote Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. For a moment,
she seems to have gotten away with murder. But, consigned to a secretive
life with a new name and the need to be on constant alert, she faces all she
has not gotten away with. She is helped by the recently widowed Mrs.
Biddle, who offers her a place to stay, and the lobster fisherman Butch, who gives
her a job and later falls in love with her. Walking the cliffs and beaches,
taking in the scruffy windblown plants that survive the buffeting wind by
growing at an angle, she too begins to grow at an angle.
Yet, there is no leaving behind the notion that Warren is dead as the
result of her action. Or if he is not,
will he one day come to find her?
How did you get the idea for
the book?
I started with an exercise I
use in fiction writing classes, taken from John Gardner, in which I instruct
them to write a scene in which a person who has just committed a murder comes
upon a body of water. So after a 20 minute free write, I had Cookie
bushwhacking around Cooper Lake, a
reservoir in the Catskills I frequent for walks, having just stabbed her
abusive husband. And then it took off from there.
Of all your characters, which
one is your favorite? Why?
Cookie is my favorite in Getaway, because it is really her survival and then the development
of self that she gains when getting out from under Warren that
captivated me. But I am also partial to Chrissie, an adolescent girl who
befriends Cookie, because Chrissie is so vulnerable and yet so full of the
potential to spring into life.
What was the most challenging
aspect of writing your book?
Bringing Warren to
life and cracking his character so that he would be three-dimensional and not
just “the bad guy”.
What projects are you currently
working on?
I am working on a collection of short stories,
as yet untitled. Several of them have been published in journals such as
Bellevue Literary Journal and Sinister Wisdom, or anthologies such as Just Like
A Girl, Cabbage and Bones: Irish American Women’s Fiction, and Saints and
Sinners New Fiction from the Festival (winner of the fiction contest for 2015).
After that I would like to
write an historical novel about the immigration of my Irish ancestors during
the potato famine.
What advice would you offer to
new or aspiring fiction authors?
Stick to writing the book you
want to write. Enjoy the process, both for how it will stretch you further than
you thought possible, and for the privilege of having an endeavor that you can
give your all to.
