Suzanne Strempek Shea has chiseled an extraordinary memoir about her early years in a close-knit 1960s and ’70s Polish American Massachusetts grade school and community.
With her latest, Compositions, life revolves in a circle of faith and family. Fine societal distinctions are made: Polish Catholics and French-Canadian Catholics, the two majorities, have their own churches and their own schools, even their own funeral homes.
At Stremek Shea’s school — known in the village as “Polish school” — the most important grade is for conduct.
Written in the author’s voice and point of view from her first eight years of school, the humorous and poignant essays show a past still fully present. At school, eighth-grade graduation photos lining the walls include that of her mother and the parents of so many of her 29 classmates. She and her friends sit in the same classrooms with the same wooden desks, same windows, same blackboards, and some of the same nuns those parents had. Strempek Shea lets us eavesdrop as she learns new words — bubbler for water fountain, sodality for club, lavatory for bathroom, Father for priest even if he wasn’t hers. One snowy afternoon, looking at all the familiar faces, companions from early morning to afternoon, Monday through Friday, from for as long as she can remember, she realizes she likes school, thanks in part to the nuns who taught patiently, sang folk songs beneath a tree, and danced the hula, and despite the ones who wielded a croquet stick or hurled textbooks.
In this world, the first whiff of spring air is drinkable, and Strempek Shea races to her beloved woods upon getting home from school. Strempek Shea navigates fishing holes and family outings with friends or cousins whose fathers, like hers, work mainly in factories. Adults are in charge, although when her grandfather dies suddenly, she sees for the first time that they can wobble.
Reverence is everywhere: dropped bread receives a kiss, swimmers bless themselves before diving, parishioners walk on their knees each Good Friday. The miracles in Compositions that Strempek Shea prays for – a horse or at least a pony, her grandfather’s health – never take place. Yet something no less tender and beautiful does as she engraves childhood moments, like running past nylon stockings dangling from the clothesline, hoping to escape the fate of adults who prefer constricting clothes to soft corduroys; like seeing for the first time the new classmate who’ll become a best friend; like looking out from the other eighth-grade graduates on stage and imagining the future.
Compositions is a kaleidoscope of close-to-the-bone observations and stories written as energetically as if the author had always been waiting to tell the world all she knew. Read them and realize you’ve always been waiting for that, too.
Strempek Shea’s career as a writer began with reporting for newspapers, beginning with the Springfield (Massachusetts) Newspapers, going on to The Providence (Rhode Island) Journal and ending in Springfield when her career as an author took off with the first of five novels. Set in her native Polish America, the books were featured in national and international media including twice on NBC’s Today; on The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder, NPR and Voice of America; and in major newspapers and magazines in both the United States and Poland.
She taught fiction and nonfiction at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing for 18 years, and for 12 years was inaugural writer-in-residence and director of the creative writing program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Mass., where she created the university’s MFA program in nonfiction. She also was on the faculty of the MFA programs at Emerson College and the University of South Florida.
Strempek Shea co-directs the annual Dingle Writers’ Workshop in Dingle, Ireland, with Ann Hood, and the annual Iota Short Forms Writing Conference on the easternmost coast of Maine, with Penny Guisinger. She’s married to lifelong journalist Tommy Shea, to whom, as a high school junior, she wrote a letter of complaint when his coverage of high school hockey failed to include the team she was covering in her first newspaper beat as a freelancer for The Palmer (Massachusetts) Journal and Monson Register. They live in Bondsville, Massachusetts, and Howth, Ireland.
