The Howard County
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VOL.10, NO.3
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McDermott’s parents emigrated from Ireland to Brooklyn, where she was born. She was raised on Long Island before moving to Maryland in 1989. Her husband, David Armstrong, is a retired National Institutes of Health neuroscientist. They have three grown children. McDermott was only 12 years old when she finished her first novel — “a romance featuring a singing group that vaguely resembled the Beatles.” Even then, she said with a smile, “I had an appreciation for storytelling.” She had to wait another 19 years before her first (real) novel, A Bigamist’s Daughter, was published in 1982 by Random House. (The Beatles were not mentioned.) Charming Billy, her fourth novel, won the National Book Award in 1998. The story about an Irish-American family was adapted for the stage in 2011; the play de-
MARCH 2020
I N S I D E …
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From Ireland to Maryland
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Alice McDermott on life and faith By Robert Friedman On a gray afternoon this winter, novelist Alice McDermott paused for a pint of Guinness at the Irish Inn in Glen Echo, Maryland, to chat with a reporter about, among other things, life, literature and what it means to be an American. “What makes all Americans Americans, regardless of the hyphenation, is that they are from someone, or are someone, who left [their home], whether for reasons of ambition or desperation,” said Irish-American McDermott, 66. “That is the essence of the American character. It’s a kind of contrariness — and, at the heart, a certain optimism and imagination,” she said. McDermott is a National Book Award winner, bestselling author and three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker and elsewhere. She also teaches writing as the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. McDermott will speak about matters Irish and literary at the 42nd Annual Evening of Irish Music and Poetry sponsored by the Howard County Poetry and Literary Society (HoCoPoLitSo). The event will take place on February 21 at Howard Community College in Columbia.
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Alice McDermott, a Johns Hopkins University writing professor and best-selling author, has written eight novels, one of which won the National Book Award. She will read from The Ninth Hour, her latest book, which draws on her Irish ancestry, at an Irish Music and Poetry evening in Columbia on Feb. 21.
Kinky Boots struts its stuff at Toby’s Dinner Theatre through March 22; plus, HoCoPoLitSo, a literary group that lures famous writers to the area page 26
buted at RoundHouse Theater, in Bethesda, Maryland. NPR reporter Alice Leccese Powers once described McDermott’s tone and her place in today’s literature: “With pitch-perfect voice, she claims Long Island her territory, just as surely as Faulkner’s was Mississippi. No detail escapes her.” Her eight novels about the ups, downs and sideways moves of seemingly ordinary Irish-American families are known for “closely examining the cracks and crevices of the human heart” (O, The Oprah Magazine). “Ordinary life is made extraordinary” by her “tender characterizations of
women, of husbands, of sons, of parents,” according to The Kansas City Star.
Musings on great writers McDermott said that like many other American writers, she came of age with appreciation of “the big three: Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.” Now, she said, her students want to read more than just books by those “three white men.” Young writers today, she said, seek out books by minority writers from other countries. “It’s no longer just Dickens, Conrad, See McDERMOTT, page 28
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