Making Easter baskets for the kids? Grandkids? What are you giving the adults? How about Sister of Saidnaya? All my readers have told me that they enjoyed reading the novel. I guarantee Sister of Saidnaya will last longer than the Easter baskets!
What has changed
In Sister of Saidnaya you can read and smile as you watch Nadra, the heroine, doing her bread dance. She forms small loaves which Farid bakes then tosses to the laughing children.
Today weep as the warring factions in Syria slaughter families and starve children!
Sister of Saidnaya’s Seduction
Sister of Saidnaya offers you the sights, sounds, and smells of an exotic world. At mahrajans dancing women beckon men into the erotic circle as the rhythmic sounds of the darabuka ring out. Responding to the seduction, the men insinuate themselves slowly but boldly into the erotic circle. When the dubkee begins, the dancers hop and stomp to the increasing beat as they wind around the room. Meanwhile the children laugh, devour the rosewater flavored sweets, and steal the Jordan almonds.
Past and Present
Growing up in a Syrian community I heard elders talk about the poverty, religious and political persecutions, and brutal military conscription that drove the first families to leave their motherland. I incorporated some of that early history in my novel Sister of Saidnaya. But little of that affected me until now, when I see bombed cities, homeless families, maimed children, and engineers building underground hospitals for heroic doctors.
Throughout Sister of Saidnaya I also described the happy times, especially the gracious hospitality and delicious food that characterizes Syrian people. Now all that impales my heart when on the news I see the little girl in Ghouta saying “I want to die so I can have food.”
How I Began Writing
After shooting off my mouth in Father Kernan’s Composition and Speech class (Contempore Speech), I began writing a newspaper column. I was trying to be Wheeling College’s Joe Blundo.
Also wrote short stories about West Virginians or Syrian people. Next came playwriting. I asked my playwriting professor, a devout convert to Catholicism, how to get plays produced. She said “Sleep with producers.”
Instead I accepted a graduate fellowship in English. John Carroll in Cleveland was integrating. I was one of the first eight women. My initial assignment was to teach the football players bonehead English five days a week at 8:00 am. I was one page ahead of them until the day I rushed in late, spoke a paragraph, and realized nothing was coming out of my mouth. We shared a laugh and went for coffee!
Can’t believe that I would eventually write a 335 page novel, Sister of Saidnaya.
Extempore speech
I escaped the clutches of family, school, and church when I received a scholarship to Wheeling College, the first Jesuit school in West Virginia. One pleasant afternoon I was dozing in Father Kernan’s rhetoric and speech class. Occasionally it was his custom to call on a student to give an extempore speech. On that sleepy day he called on me. My speech was on how to survive Jesuit education. I groused about the muddy plateau the two new buildings were on, Father Kernan’s dramatic habit of kneeling to pray before each class, his admonitions to write without adjectives and adverbs, and his research assignments to read every book written by that author. The more my audience laughed, the more outrageous my comments. Father ended the class (without prayer) saying “Now that Rose Ann has reprimanded the Society of Jesus….”
Greeks have been known to bear….
Greeks have been known to bear….
I was among the first students to enroll in Wheeling College in Wheeling, WV. The college consisted of an administration building and a classroom building floating on a sea of mud and construction. When I went to register I was told my classes. When I saw calculus and trig, I said “No way!” I had just spent my senior year copying geometry from Danny White. The response was “Then you will have to take Greek.” Before I could even say no to that, I was sitting in front of Father Gannon who said “Recite the Greek alphabet.”
Years later when I applied to graduate school, I was asked “Any bad grades?’ “D in first semester Greek” I replied. The counselor laughed.
Years after that I would explain to my English classes the benefits of knowing Latin and Greek root words.