Marylee MacDonald

For the most part, I write short stories and novels, but I’ve also written a memoir. If you’d like me to pop into your inbox occasionally, enter your contact info in the Newsletter tab at left. When I update my blog or announce a giveaway, you’ll hear from me. I have just recently begun a Substack blog, so maybe I will see some of you over there.

 

Perceptive, moving, and quietly powerful.  — Prairies Book Review

 

Fourteen unforgettable stories. One powerful theme. A beautifully written collection. Highly recommended.  — The Wishing Shelf

 

 

I’m thrilled to share that my new short story collection, Bodies of Water, is coming soon. Thirteen stories set across four continents — from Lake Powell in drought-stricken Arizona to the Ganges at dawn, from a nursing home in suburban Illinois to a Greek fishing dory somewhere between France and Greece. Every story has water in it. Every story is about something else entirely.

 

Some of these stories come from personal experience. Some come from research. Some come from conversations — a professor in Dresden who took me to a village of toymakers; a firefighter who described September 11th in language I’ve never forgotten; a yoga student who’d gone to Rishikesh and described the Ganges at dawn. The stories that move me most are the ones where the research disappears entirely and what’s left is just the human being.

 

I have moved five times in the past five years, but one of pluses of those moves was finding a manuscript I thought I had lost. Manila folders holding individual chapters were in a wooden peach crate. Imagine my surprise when I began reading Chapter 1 and discovered it was actually pretty good. Each chapter had gone through three or four drafts. A small floppy disk held my original Wordstar files. Remember Wordstar? For that matter, remember Kaypro computers with their boxy steel chassis?

In addition to discovering the novel, I discovered that I had written the equivalent of three novels, not one. After I imported my chapter files into Scrivener, the word count feature of Scrivener told me I had a horrifying 190,000 words on my hands. My solution? Break the story into three parts and call the trilogy by the manuscript’s original name: Kinship.

Places We Call Home will be the first book in that series. The novel begins when the main character, Claire, leaves Cameroun on her way back to her teaching job at Loyola in Chicago.

 

 

The taxi to Garoua airport left at four in the morning, which meant that Claire had been awake since two, sitting on her packed bags in the courtyard of the guesthouse, listening to the compound dogs and the occasional lorry on the road outside the wall. The night was warm and moonless and smelled of dust and cook smoke and the particular sweetness of the neem trees that lined the guesthouse lane. She had been in this courtyard for eleven months. She knew the hour by the dogs.
   The two leather suitcases stood beside her on the packed earth, each one tied with lightweight rope in the manner of a parcel — two lengths crossing at the center, knotted twice. She had learned this from the market women in Poli who bundled their goods the same way, trusting the rope to hold what the latches couldn’t guarantee. The suitcases were heavy. She had distributed the weight carefully, wrapping each piece of pottery in a layer of clothing before nesting it against its neighbor, building a kind of internal architecture that she hoped would survive the journey. She had done what she could. The rest was out of her hands.
   Father Mallevialle had come to see her off. He stood near the gate, his white soutane, aglow in the darkness, and held out a small parcel he had brought as a going-away gift — dried mangoes from his housekeeper Yvonne, wrapped in newspaper. He pressed the package into her hands and clasped them even when the taxi came.
   “You must write as soon as you arrive,” he said.
   “I will,” she said. “And you must use the Aeroflot routing. Not the Douala routing.”
   He made a dismissive sound. “Aeroflot. Moscow in November.”
   “Father. The district chief is not going to forget what happened. If you route through Douala, Mfono’s men will be watching the airport. You know this.”
   “I am a French citizen and a priest,” he said. “They will not touch me.”
   “They touched me,” she said. “And I am an American citizen and a professor.”
   He was quiet for a moment. The taxi driver had gotten out and was looking at the suitcases with the expression of a man calculating whether his springs would hold.
   “Moscow in November,” Mallevialle said again, but without conviction.
   “Aeroflot through Moscow to Paris. Then Air France to wherever you’re going. It adds two days but it keeps you out of their reach.” She picked up her shoulder bag. ”Promise me.”
   He promised. She did not entirely believe him, but at least he conscience was clear. She had tried.
   The taxi driver loaded the suitcases into the boot with the efficiency of a man who has learned that speed is its own form of courtesy at four in the morning. Claire got in the back seat. The compound dogs had gone quiet. Father Mallevialle stood at the gate until the taxi turned the corner and the headlights swept the neem trees and then there was only the road.

After the craziness of Covid and multiple moves in the last four years, I put this novel on hold, mainly because I need time to develop a marketing plan. The Vermillion Sea is about a young, French artist who goes to Baja California in 1769. You can learn more about my research on the characters by clicking the BLOG tab above.

My first novel, Montpelier Tomorrow, is definitely not a beach read, but for anyone who has ever been a caregiver, I think it will offer a measure of comfort. So often caregivers beat themselves up. There’s a kind of mythology about caregiving that makes us feel we have to be superhuman, even if we’re sleep-deprived and going broke.

Montpelier Tomorrow won a Gold Medal for Drama from the Readers’ Favorites International Book Awards. It was also a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Prize, the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the Faulkner-Wisdom Award, and the Bellwether Prize. Even if I never publish another book, I am proud to say I wrote this one.