Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 12, 1993 TAG: 9312090122
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Beth Macy staff writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Writer Rita Ciresi has a way of finding humor in the most poignantly intense events.
Death, for instance.
In her novel (working title: "Who is Adonai?"), she explores the clashing of two cultures through her character Rosa, a working-class Italian Catholic, and her new husband, Gary, an upper-middle-class Jew. Underlying the hilarity of all the family squabbles is Gary's cancer and impending death.
"I wanted the death scenes to be both funny and sad because that's the way people really act," explains Ciresi, a Hollins College literature and creative-writing professor. "When people who are dying have prolonged deaths, the people around them get really bored with it."
That juxtaposition of wit and poignancy is what makes Ciresi's work so "artfully balanced," wrote one New York Times Book Review critic last month. What jolts the reader, the reviewer wrote, "is the consistent blasts of vitality in the author's prose. She has an edgy, vivacious style."
The critic was referring to Ciresi's recently released short-story collection, "Mother Rocket" (University of Georgia Press, $19.95), which won the Flannery O'Connor Award and was a finalist in the Los Angeles Times Book Award. But he could have just as easily been referring to Ciresi's current work on her novel.
When Ciresi read from the novel at Hollins in March, listeners were bent over crying, they were laughing so hard. In her inimitable, nervous-yet-punchy style, Ciresi riveted the crowd with her perfect Northeastern accent and her hilariously rendered dialogue.
Ciresi, 33, tends to focus on the nitty-gritty realities of the human experience - all the family tensions, all the funny embarrassments that surface at the most inopportune moments - both in her writing and her life.
When her 3-year-old daughter, Celeste, grabbed her book off the shelf at Books Strings & Things recently and yelled, "LOOK MOMMY, HERE'S YOUR PICTURE!" Ciresi was mortified. But she couldn't stop laughing.
Ciresi on her first full-time writing job, producing an agricultural research magazine at Penn State: "I was, like, writing about bovine methane and stuff like that. . . . I thought it was fascinating that people could spend their entire lives looking at cockroaches."
Ciresi on her mother's reaction to her fiction: "She's only read the first story in `Mother Rocket,' and she said, `I had no idea you wrote such risky stuff.' She meant risque."
Ciresi on the movie, "Love Story": "I grew up with that stupid movie. I mean I thought it was the epitome of film. . . . My novel is a kind of spoof on the `Love Story' theme."
On his deathbed, Ciresi's Gary character reflects on the awkwardness of youth by recalling a bar mitzvah:
I remember standing by this table piled high with pastries, listening to the microphone screech and looking at this tiered crystal fountain piled high with fruit. On the very top there was a bronze cherub that peed Hawaiian Punch all over the oranges and pineapples and bananas. I remember standing there staring at this stinky little wiener and wishing I could just be normal, just be American - Jesus, just be anything in the world but Jewish!
While her husband, historian Jeff Lipkes, is Jewish, Ciresi's background is similar to her character Rosa's. She was raised Catholic in the town-and-gown climate of New Haven, Conn., the youngest of four daughters. Her Italian-immigrant father and uncle made a living selling fruits and vegetables to restaurants.
Ciresi was a quiet girl in a loud - extremely loud - family. "The noise level in our house was so incredible, it gave me a headache. . . . The whole community was like that. But somehow I knew that wasn't the way to be."
So Ciresi retreated to her bedroom and made up stories about things she wished for - running away from home, being an orphan. "My daughter does that now. She tells these great little stories on the couch about going on journeys to Africa, and I remember doing that. I played with dolls till I was, like, 11."
Ciresi loved getting away from home when she went to college at New College in Sarasota, Fla. She got a master of arts degree in English at Iowa and a master of fine arts degree at Penn State, where she wrote most of "Mother Rocket."
Her short stories don't draw from personal experience as much as her novel characters do, she says. In "Lifelines," a 17-year-old girl fields a sexual pass from a middle-aged co-worker at Dairy Queen, and finds it easier to toss aside his bumbling come-on than to resist the hold of her angry, deserted mother.
Says the New York Times critic: "The wonderfully epiphanic `Resurrection' takes a near-stock situation - a teen-age boy's crush on an exotic older woman - and transforms it into a fresh evocation of that period when one exclaims things like `I want to be anything other than what I am,' when the future seems like an endless concerto one will never quite manage to play right."
Ciresi says she used to be too embarrassed about her upbringing to write about it. "But now," she says, laughing, "I wanna exploit it!"
And so her novel is set in her New Haven hometown, where the ethnic lines sharply divide Italian, Puerto Rican and black neighborhoods - and the uppityness of Yale adds to the class friction.
While Gary's death is imminent in the book, the humor focuses on the clashing of the two religious cultures. "They both have overbearing parents, and their overbearingness comes from their cultures," she says.
Though she resents not being able to work on her novel full-time, Ciresi says she loves teaching at Hollins, where "sometimes you read the students' work and think, `Ooh, that's better than I write.' "
"It's hard to be shy and teach. If I had my way I'd stay in a closet all day," she says. "I feel crabby this semester because I can't write as much." This semester she's teaching creative writing, the 19th-century British novel and "Literature of the Immigrant Experience."
"When I don't write enough, I'm like a drain all backed up. Isn't that pleasant - comparing yourself to a hairball?"
While Ciresi admits enjoying her own humor, she won't concede to guffawing at her keyboard. She does say: "You know Flannery O'Connor was supposed to sit at her desk and laugh. I think that's a cute image."
Ciresi hasn't signed a book contract yet, but the recent New York Times publicity has generated a lot of agent interest for the novel, which she hopes to finish next year.
"Publishers get anxious; there's a mystique about the first novel, and so you're hot," she says. "Of course by the time your second novel comes out, you're out in the cold. It's such a shmoozing world."
Ciresi is dreading the reaction from her parents when they read the novel. Even though the characters aren't her parents, they'll think they are - and so will their friends, she says.
"That rankles me. It doesn't give you any credit for your imagination. They act like you're stripping in public, and you're not."
It's vintage Ciresi to notice and - as she says, exploit - such family tensions, but to do it in a thoughtful, compassionate way. As her colleague, novelist Jeanne Larsen, says, "Rita is pungently aware of human folly, but invested with compassion. Her characters do foolish things because they're all very human. . . . Her stories are about how tough it is to be foolish."
When she's not working or with her family, Ciresi takes piano lessons. "Growing up we had this rickety old piano with the ivories missing, an old player piano with the rolls taken out."
In her typical way, Ciresi poignantly describes her love for the piano - an instrument she still dreams of perfecting "in another life."
And then comes the joke: "I love to play the big piano here in Talmadge Hall," above the English department, where she and her colleagues have offices. "I like to bang away right over [Professor] Rick Trethewey's head and drive him crazy."
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB