Honor Moore

April 18, 2008

Like most folks, I get behind in my NewYorkers.

But since I started back up at the gym i’ve been taking them to read while on the cycle-thingy and the walky-army thingy (the bike? the elliptical? stairmaster?)– you can see how much time i’ve spent in a gym in my life.

Anyway, recently I read the story (per Amy’s recommendation) “The Bell Ringer” by John Burnside in the March 17 edition. Wowza. That one packs a wallop at the end. Read it here.
I also just finished (yesterday) the excerpt from Honor Moore’s memoir about life with her father, Bishop Paul Moore, growing up in NYC (the memoir is called The Bishop’s Daughter, and will be published in May).

I’ve long been a fan of Honor Moore’s poetry– which often times read like conversations in a comfortable living room; they are honest, generous, lyrical. And in this new book she details her father’s life (he was an Episcopal Priest, activist, and Bishop) as well as his and the family secrets. The excerpt garnered an angry letter from Moore’s brother and sister just a week after it was published in the NYer.

I have to say, the excerpt was heartbreaking, and beautifully written (when her elderly, dying father tells her a story about a little girl, I was riding the elliptical thingy and wanted to start sobbing right there; though part of that could have been due to the level I had programmed into the machine). The piece was much too short, though, I was wanting to read more when it ended too abruptly.

Here she describes going to Evensong one night:

Once, after supper, my father swept me up into his black seminarian’s cape and across the street for Evensong. I remember the starry sky, the cold darkness as we climbed the stairs to the seminary path to the chapel. I could already hear it, something like the rushing wind, the coming of a storm. We were late, and as we slipped into the pew in the candlelit church full of men I understood that the rushing sound was singing. The rumbling voices of priests and seminarians, resounding against the stone walls of the small chapel, were otherworldly, even Godlike. I was scared, and so I leaned against my father, nuzzling the black cape still fresh from the night air, but he didn’t look down at me or put his hand on my head. Now he belonged to something else, this big and strange sound, so deep and loud it made me shake. I could hardly breathe as all the men together spoke words I couldn’t yet understand. And with thy spirit. Ah-men. Alleluia.

You can read the entire excerpt here.