Spring Break
Award-winning novelist reads work at UConn
Irish novelist and poet Geraldine Mills returned to the United States to read various poems and short stories at the UConn Co-op yesterday
Caitlin Mazzola
Issue date: 10/27/09 Section: Focus
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"It's always wonderful to come back," she said. "I have a great connection with the people in America. They appreciate my work."
Mills' trip to Connecticut was suggested by Lisa C. Taylor, a poet and creative writing teacher at Arts at the Capitol Theater magnet high school in Willimantic.
Taylor met Mills in the summer of 2008 when Mills attended the Cape Cod Writers' Conference. They kept in touch, and Taylor was able to work with Mills in Ireland this past summer through the Surdna Foundation Arts Teachers Fellowship.
"We were able to rent a beautiful place and work together," said Taylor. "It was an amazing and life-transforming experience."
Taylor later got in touch with English department lecturer Jason Courtmanche, who is also director of the Connecticut Writing Project. The Writing Project supports professional development in teachers, exposes teachers to writing and gives them opportunities to write, said Courtmanche.
"Geraldine was of interest to the creative writing and Irish studies teachers," said Courtmanche, so her visit was arranged.
Mills read a varied selection of poems, as well as a short story, "This is From the Woman Who Does," which was produced as a monologue in 2004 by the Provincetown Theater's Playwrights' Festival.
"This is From the Woman Who Does" is a funny account told by a cleaning lady who comments on the women she cleans for. The speaker has especially humorous encounters with one of the clients' cat, Herman, who seems to be out to get the cleaning lady.
Mills' new selection of poems included works about her parents. "Reading My Father's Hand" was dedicated to the father she barely had a chance to know.
He moved to London to work when she was three and died when she was nine. He sent letters and money to the family, but it was only after her mother passed some years ago that Mills read the letters from her father.
"I found my father in the letters I had never known before," she said.
Her poem, "Pearl," was also dedicated to her mother after she passed - a metaphor based on her hard-working mother's long life compared to the fingernail she ruined as a young girl performing difficult labor to help her family get by during hard times.
"The language was really clear, and she used lots of strong, specific images that brought the poems to life," said Alysha Metcalf, a 7th-semester history major.
Mills, who has received many awards since the start of her career, including the title "Millenium winner" of the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune New Irish Writer Award, did not always plan to be a novelist or a poet.
"I never thought I could be a writer," she said. "Only after many years of writing and some successes, I realized the great pleasure it brought me and the realization that I didn't want to do anything else."
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