Judith Favor

Author

Queries about Silence

By

Is silence collaborative, complicit?

“You know your part in this,” Sheriff Bowen once told him, and he did. Leo had not spoken up. He should have told someone about his brother torturing dogs. Leo knew he had been a coward.

  • from Silent Voices, Part One: Boy

Is silence the space between words, a pause between heartbeats?

That evening, Cordelia heard Leo’s baritone sounding the overture to an opus, one she would be hearing for nearly thirty years. It took longer for her to discover the complexities of this opus, to make out its woodwind harmonies, its percussive dissonances and its long, silent rests.

  • from Silent Voices, Part Three: Coming Together

Does silence signify absence? Does it entail presence?

Leo didn’t quite know how to be normal under the shadow of goodbye, although he had lived through it once. In Granny Phoebe’s case, he had her love to live up to. In Margaret’s case, his mother-in-law’s temper outweighed most everything else.

  • from Silent Voices, Part Three: Coming Together

Does silence make you nervous? Can it be menacing?

The silence that followed Leo’s departure was like a held breath. Chastened by her husband’s outburst, Cordelia wilted into a state of rebuke. Little did she know it would become a permanent condition.

  • from Silent Voices, Part Four: Wife

Is silence voluntary, even communal?

What are Leo’s mother and I doing here, sitting quietly like this, Cordelia wondered. Praying, she supposed, though neither said anything remotely prayerful. She didn’t want to break the peace by asking.

            – from Silent Voices, Part Four: Wife

Is silence a refusal to speak, or to respond?

Nothing had ever been said about her husband’s mother leaving the convent. Cordelia felt the pressure to ask, but was relieved by the silence. She was not at all ready to hear about private matters between a failed nun and her God.

  • from Silent Voices, Part Four: Wife

How may silence and gender be related?

On this winter day she felt it again, the race of her pulse that propelled her to keep after him. “You may have uncovered a terrible crime. What will you do, Leo? You must do something about this.”

            He hung his head and went mute, not for the first time. She was desperate for him to speak, to say anything, but he was too busy breathing. No matter how hard she pressed, no matter how urgently she pleaded, Leo kept his mouth shut, saying nothing for such a long time that she eventually stopped waiting for an answer.

  • from Silent Voices: Part Seven: Widow

Can silence be pleasurable, even palpable?

            Nobody knows about our sexual chemistry during my first two pregnancies. Our secret. She used to wonder what the men at the bank thought when Leo came to work with his face aglow, but never dared ask.

  • from Silent Voices: Part Seven: Widow

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

Chapter One of Silent Voices

By

But this is not the story of a life.
It is the story of lives, knit together,
overlapping in succession, rising
again from grave after grave.
                                  Wendell Berry, from “Rising”

1902    ON THE RUN

The boy slumped, forehead resting against the grimy window of the train.  Leo removed his spectacles and put them in his shirt pocket.  He couldn’t see much without them but that was how he wanted it today.  He was too ashamed to look anyone in the eye.  The past two weeks had been tense with accusations and threats.  Now – all because of his younger brother – his family had been run out of town.  He was furious at Albert, humiliated about being forced to leave his home in Montana.  Leo had found a seat as far as possible from his family and pretended he didn’t even know them.   His brother had a problem with violence.  It was a form of madness, Leo thought.  Albert’s madness had already caused more heartache than he could bear.

The last glimpses of home made his belly ache.  After Dad announced they’d be settling in Oregon, starting over, Leo already hated it there, just as he had begun to hate it here.   He kept his back to the aisle, shrugged Mother’s hand off when she touched his shoulder and ignored her until she went away.  Tears rose, threatening to spill over.  Leo tightened his throat, forcing back the tears, clamping his jaw so hard it made his molars ache.

“Bull.”  That’s what Dad called his younger brother, sounding proud.  “Loner,” he called Leo, sounding mean.  He hated it when they made fun of him.  Sheriff Bowen had said “solitary.”   Leo rolled the word around in his mouth.  Solitary tasted better than loner.

“You and I are a lot alike, son.  We both tend to be solitary,” the sheriff had told him on that awful evening.  “Yes,” he’d repeated, “we have something in common.  That’s why I’m giving you a chance to get right with what you’ve done.”

Tears filled his eyes again.  Remembering the sheriff’s gentle tone made his nose run.  Leo wiped his coat sleeve across his face and hoped no one noticed.  Mother told him to use a handkerchief but he didn’t have one now.   Dad told him boys don’t cry and his younger brother didn’t.   Albert – who told everyone to call him Bull – hadn’t shed a tear since he was in diapers, at least not that Leo had seen.  They had to share a room but that was no place to let his feelings out.  Leo went into the woods whenever he had to cry.  Will there be any woods in Oregon?  What if I can’t find any woods?

Alongside the tracks Leo spotted a railroad storage shed painted the same dried-blood color as the one he’d vomited behind a few weeks back.  He shuddered in his seat, remembering what he’d heard on his way home from school that afternoon.   Slugger, Albert’s buddy, was showing a second-grader what they’d done to a stray dog in the rail yard.  “Bull said this here dog is shivering, let’s get it warm.   You shoulda seen that dumb dog dance.”   And I shoulda told Dad, Leo thought, except he woulda told me to quit making up awful stories.  And to quit trying to get my brother in trouble.  The bile rose in his throat again.  He had to swallow hard to keep his breakfast from coming up.

Leo gazed unseeing at the rough terrain as the Great Northern labored into Idaho.  His thoughts were in Billings, on what he’d been doing before Sunday turned bloody.  His mother made him go to Mass but she didn’t care what he did the rest of the day as long as he was home for supper.  Leo liked to ramble in the woods, moving up mountain trails and down steep ravines.  Sometimes he sat on a rock, breathing the pine-scented air.   Sometimes he’d see a shy animal go by.  Occasionally he caught sight of a doe with her fawn or a buck with a great rack of antlers.  Once he’d even spotted a mountain lion, the most elusive of creatures.

On that terrible Sunday, two weeks after his thirteenth birthday, he’d paused at the top of a ridge to look around.  He picked up a pine knot, turned it this way and that, looking for the face hidden in it.  He thought of pretty Alice, who sat in front of him in history class.   Leo’s face flushed, remembering how embarrassed he’d been after splattering egg yolks on her pretty green dress. Maybe he’d carve a gnome for Alice, something to make up for his clumsiness.

He balanced the pine knot on his left palm and had just slipped the blade of his jack-knife into a seam when he heard something that made his ears stand straight out.  It sounded like an animal in pain.  Leo heard it again.  The scream split the afternoon. Oh no, only a wounded creature makes a noise like that.  Just yesterday he’d heard a customer tell Mrs. Mac that her beagle had disappeared.  “I can’t imagine what happened to my little Buddy,” the woman said.  She’d looked so sad.

He snapped his jack-knife shut and headed toward the trouble.  Dodging branches on the ridge and sliding feet-first down a rocky chute, Leo gave no care to his britches.  They were old, already torn at one knee, now ripping in the seat.  The closer he got to the shriek, the faster and higher it came.  Not just caught in a bear trap, he figured, but tortured somehow.  The more the screams increased in pitch and intensity, the more frantic Leo felt.

Bursting into a clearing, he gasped to see his brother bent over a small dog, one boot on its hindquarters.  He saw the flash of a knife and a quick spurt of blood.  “Stop!”  Leo shrieked in a high, girlish voice.  But Bull did not stop.  He slashed again, carving deep into the dog’s belly.  Leo kicked the Bowie knife away and slammed his body against Albert’s, powered by adrenalin beyond the strength of his medium frame.  Leo pummeled his huskier brother until Slugger pulled him off.  By this time the dog had shuddered and gone quiet.

“What is the name of this boy, your brother’s friend?” Sheriff Bowen asked the night he picked Leo up.  He spoke in a calm, even tone despite the gory details he’d just heard.   To Leo, his words felt like boulders cracking the sidewalk.

“Sam Tucker, but he tells everyone to call him Slugger.”

“Ah yes, the Tucker tribe.  Time to make another visit out to their place.”

“You won’t say it was me that told, will you?”  Leo’s voice trembled.

“No, son, I protect my sources. But I will be coming to see your folks.  I need to have a little talk with Albert.”

“I was afraid of that.”  Leo blinked back tears.  He suddenly knew that nothing would ever be the same.   My life will never be the same.

 

Review of Colum McCann’s Trans Atlantic

By

columMcCannTRANS ATLANTIC

By Colum McCann
Random House, New York, 2013
Hardback, 305 pages   $27.00

Reviewed by Judith Favor.  Published in Friends Journal, September 2014, pp 42-43

I yearn for writing that is transformational, and this beautifully crafted novel met my longing.  Colum McCann braids together the passions of publicly acclaimed men – abolitionist former slave Frederick Douglass, WW1 pilots Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown and peacemaker Senator George Mitchell—with the private stories of feisty fictional women.  McCann brings his characters to life through exquisite prose, gifting the reader with story lines that arc across the centuries and crisscross the Atlantic, interweaving Irish and American views and values.

Memorable scenes pulse with Quaker testimonies.  In 1845 Irish maid Lily Duggan crosses paths with Frederick Douglass whose integrity and commitment to equality inspire her to escape servitude, sail to America and nurse wounded soldiers on a Civil War battlefield.   The novel follows her daughter Emily and granddaughter Lottie whose journeys mirror the progress and shape of history.   In 1919 they are influenced by two aviators who set course for Ireland, attempting a nonstop trans-Atlantic flight in a bomber they modified for peaceful means, a flight designed to heal the wounds of the Great War.

In 1998 Lottie encounters Senator George Mitchell in Belfast as he labors to negotiate the historic Good Friday Peace Accords.   Mitchell granted the author access to his inner reflections, making para bellum a profoundly moving chapter, worthy of repeated readings.  Mitchell’s inner light shines through McCann’s poignant portrait of the contemporary peacemaker who embodies simplicity, equality and integrity under intense international public pressure.

TransAtlantic is not a quick read.  McCann’s truthful, tender pages invite pauses for deep thinking, remembering past peacemakers and imagining a more simple, just and equitable future.  There is so much goodwill, humor and pure life force in every chapter that this book will lift the spirit of Friends and meet the hunger for transformational fiction.

Judith Favor is a member of Claremont Friends Meeting in Southern California.
Literary fiction seeded with Friends’ testimonies feeds her hungry soul.
 

About My Writing

By

What would you call this category of writing?
The Edgefielders is my great-grandmother’s hidden story. Public records show only birth, marriage and death dates so I composed a biographical novel to knit imagination into these bare facts. I invented scenes and dialogues to illustrate what happened before and during her four years at Edgefield.

How does imagination work with facts?
Margaret Mary was born in 1869 in rural Ontario and erased from family lore after she died in 1938 at the Multnomah County Poor Farm. I’d not heard of her until Aunt Margo handed me a stack of genealogy documents including a death certificate. Place of Death: Multnomah County Poor Farm. What? How could this be? Who sent my elderly ancestor to an institution for paupers?

Stories hold us together but hers had been deleted. I had to find out, even though it felt risky to probe into family shadows and secrets. Remaining elders had erased memories of Margaret Mary and they resented my questions. Shame went deep, it seemed, the shame of allowing Grandmother to end her life on the dole among strangers. I hate to stir up conflict but could not let this go. Someone had to bring Margaret Mary out of the dark and into the circle of light.

What did you hope to accomplish here?
Beyond telling a good story, my real purpose was to capture the truth of Margaret Mary’s soul and to illustrate the power of mutual spiritual care. The Edgefielders’ tales show how each person – no matter how poor – can contribute to compassion and generosity in the wider community.

And how did you do that?
Soul-seeing is tactile so I sat with my dearly departed ancestor and kept quiet, waiting for “something” to arise. The song of a canary evoked one story. The sensation of fingertips on a tiny golden cross brought forth romance. Cold bacon grease beckoned me into her melancholy, keeping watch with Margaret Mary where “the ocean moaned, tossing eternal waves of sadness against the shore.”

Where do meditation and imagination meet?
In stillness. And in love. Meditation offers a way to be with dread and fury, anxiety and confusion, to stay present to all those vulnerabilities we usually try to avoid. Meditation invites us to see through the surface of things to the light source of everything. Imagination arises from the power of love, the force of love between the generations. In this book, meditative imagination is the active, conscious practice of finding my way – with Margaret Mary – to the heart of Presence and recording what is revealed there.

Image link to Powell's Books The Edgefielders order page

Silent Voices

By

Silent Voices bookcover image

But this is not the story of a life.
It is the story of lives, knit together,
overlapping in succession, rising
again from grave after grave.
Wendell Berry, from “Rising”

From the start, the stories of Leo James Wright and Cordelia Davis Wright were never solely their own, but continuations of lives that began long before they were born. And how did I come to discover what happened to my grandparents in events preceding my birth? Where does such information come from?

A curious child, I learned to listen between the lines when the Grans spoke, guessing at what they were trying to hide. I watched the way they looked at each other, held my breath during false starts and sudden silences. I waited patiently for bits of truth, sensing emotional codes hidden beneath the social ones, wondering what was beyond regret. I tried to imagine a family where it was safe to ask questions and to tell secrets of the heart, but that was not the world in which I grew up. Leo and Cordelia maintained order through silence. As a young adult I wished I could be part of a less frustrating family, one with fewer conflicts and hurts, maybe one that knew how to have fun. Over the decades I’ve come to realize that most of us cannot go out and form the kind of family we think is ideal. I have had to accept being part of a long chain of wary ancestors. No amount of wishful thinking can change that. Now that I am growing old, I have also grown more curious about genealogy and genetics, more interested in the forces of history, economics and DNA that shaped my forbears. I see this happening all over America, people my age getting interested in family history. You’ve got to start where you are, with the ancestors you’ve been given. So I asked the Grans for their stories. Leo and Cordelia obliged, offering their lives in bits and pieces, hints and glances.

Silent in life, the Grans now rest in eternal stillness, but in these pages they do not stay dead. As far as Ancestry.com is concerned, the lives of Leo and Cordelia Wright are a closed book, but I brought them back from the grave by “hearing them into speech” and composing their stories from a combination of intuition and imagination. Family memoir, like fiction, requires the reader to act as if things really happened this way and each act of reading SILENT VOICES brings Leo and Cordelia Wright back to life. Essayist James Wood terms it “an allowable resurrection” in his New Yorker reflection titled “WHY?” He insists that it’s never too late to listen for untold family stories and to put them on record even if the writer wasn’t there when they happened. I would add that it’s never too late for compassion, either. If a grandchild can offer any gift to her ancestors, let it be an allowable resurrection.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT SILENT VOICES

 “Silent voices” is a fresh idea, a truth-filled story (almost a long parable) inviting us to really listen to our own families.  Judith Wright Favor made the characters real and the times familiar, reawakening details of food, décor and events with my own grandparents.  Not only did I enjoy accompanying her grandparents through their lives, I made mental notes of what I might say if ever I set out on the same journey.  In the family tree, the seven sections, the reminder that the sheriff is fictional, the influence of dogs and birds, this book modeled a way to write about my own grandparents.

Nan Cooney, Grandmother / Author

I enjoyed Silent Voices because I can envision the people while reading it.  I love that about Judith’s writing.  I was glad to know more of the story about how her great grandmother ended up in the poor house, the difficult decision her grandfather had to make, how he and her grandmother had to live with that decision, and how it affected their lives.  I really look forward to reading more books by this author.

Deb Noll, Pastry Chef

 Reading Silent Voices brought to mind my patrician paternal grandparents behind their polished masks, and my maternal grandmother deserted by her philandering husband and left penniless with four young daughters.  Here Judith Wright Favor has dared to inhabit her own grandparents and those with whom their lives intersected, vividly describing and giving voice to the loves and losses that impacted their lives.  Silent Voices is part memoir, part meditation and part masterful story; I think the author has invented a new genre!

John Denham, Pastoral Counselor, Retired

 I was drawn into this story from the beginning.  Having previously read The Edgefielders, the thread that kept drawing me along in Silent Voices was the author’s unspoken hope for her grandparents.  Near the end Cordelia asks herself “How long does hope live?” then responds “For an eternity.”   The Wrights remind me of my grandparents and leads me to reflect on what may be hidden in the crevices of my own family story.

Joan Stock, Spiritual Director

 

 

Do you think about your relatives and wonder what experiences shaped them and contributed to their particular personality characteristics?  In this engaging story Judith Wright Favor has found a way to understand and develop compassion for her kin.  Drawing upon memory, imagination and intuition she gives Leo and Cordelia Wright new life through poignant vignettes in this highly readable memoir.

Judy Leshefka, Meditation Instructor / Psychotherapist

 

Silent Voices gives a glimpse of the lives of a man and a woman, from their difficult early days, to their coming together in the bloom of young adulthood, to raising their family.  The reader is linked to Leo and Cordelia amidst the story of our nation, Depression, WWII and Hiroshima. It is a captivating read.

Peggy Deal Redman, Professor of Education, Emerita

 

 

I saw this as a story of redemption, was very caught up in it and read the book in one sitting.  I appreciated the author’s desire to speak to the silences and secrets of our lives.  Silent Voices is imbued with the person Judith has become, including her spirituality and her understanding of what people do to make meaning from difficult circumstances.

Lynn Rhodes, Seminary Educator

 

The Edgefielders

By

edgefieldersSlider680

The Edgefielders bookcover imageThe Edgefielders: Poor Farm Tales
of a Great-Grandmother

by Judith Wright Favor (2013)

The Edgefielders tells of a vibrant community of individuals from different cultures and faiths who were forced to live at Oregon’s state-run poor farm during the Great Depression.

Judith Wright Favor, a retired pastor and Portland native, was in mid-life before she came upon a document that shed light upon the dark secret: in 1935 her great grandmother, Margaret Mary Wright, was sent to the poor farm and erased from the family lore. Judith was outraged to learn that her great grandmother died among paupers at Edgefield.

She felt compelled to unravel the mystery. Why did her grandfather commit his mother to a public institution? What were the circumstances that led to this decision? What was Edgefield like during the Depression? Who did Margaret Mary live with in her final home? How did she get along with strangers of different races and religions?

With little to go on but a death certificate, Judith set out to discover the truth. Through the process of contemplative writing, she constructed a fictional story of her lost ancestor intertwined with strands of family memoir. Judith listened for lost experiences, explored layers of inherited guilt and gave voice to women and men whose livelihoods and homes disappeared during the Great Depression.

As the Greatest Generation passes on, stories of the Depression go with them. The Edgefielders: Poor Farm Tales of a Great-Grandmother  keeps these stories alive for future generations.
The times were incredibly difficult, but their fates are not as desperate as you might think. Margaret Mary and her new friends adjusted. Tales of friendship, romance, marriage and even redemption arise from these times of hardship. The Edgefielders bridges this gap, conveying the love of ancestors as it crosses the threshold of time.

Image link to Powell's Books The Edgefielders order pageLook for The Edgefielders, available in print and as an e-book, on CreateSpace and Amazon, or order it from Powell’s!

 

What people are saying about
The Edgefielders …edgefieldersMockover_uprightBold

 

“Sitting on the porch in the spring of 1936, Margaret Mary notices she feels free. Simply free, like seeing the sun after a wild winter storm.” 
Such a sense of “freedom” in a “poor house”
strikes me as an oxymoron. Can one be really free under such dire conditions?   This story is poignant, yet realistic.   It takes sturdy yet delicate writing to capture the challenges of making new friends in old age while wondering about one’s absent family.  This author does a wonderful job describing both!

Joanne Hummel,  Local elementary teacher;  observer of Edgefield Poor Farm for over forty years

This book will be especially compelling for those who  know the importance of shedding light on family secrets,  for readers interested in Oregon’s history, and for those  who are drawn to Edgefield.

Dale Stitt,  co-founder/director

A Journey Into Freedom – “When I listen, my whole life becomes the voice of God,”  says Nurse Rachel.  Judith composed these stories by  listening to her great-grandmother and other inmates as they knitted new lives from tangled ends.  Margaret Mary’s healing begins when a physician honors her goodness and godliness by first sitting with her in stillness, then querying her into self-understanding, strength, and forgiveness.

Charleen Krueger,  Registered Nurse; Knitter

Within a decade or two the Great Depression will no longer be a conscious memory in our country.  We will know it only through the history books. The personal experiences will disappear, except for novels like The Edgefielders. This is a rich and earthy tale of those who came before us.  The author describes the challenges they faced and how they survived that trying time.  This book is reminiscent in time, location, and even style of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams.

                                                                        Tim Sunderland, Writer

The characters are very engaging.  Vivid descriptions brought them to life; each one has such a gripping story.   I can see how this book could be adapted into a screenplay.  With more development of the characters, it could make an interesting television series. It probably wouldn’t sell on the regular networks but would appeal to a public television audience.

                                            Judy Leshefka, Meditation Instructor

Who would have known that a progressive government in Oregon created this “poor farm” to provide housing and work for people like Judith Favor’s great-grandmother during the Depression after her husband walked out and her children could no longer care for her?

The author paints a vivid picture of friendship, romance, creativity, resilience and the mostly-harmonious blending of religions, races and worldviews in this lovely story of Margaret Mary and the Edgefielders.

                                                Claire Gorfinkel,  Activist, Writer

These stories gave me a chance to vicariously experience living in the Poor House, touching into the hardships, newfound friendships and down-to-earth spirituality of the Edgefielders.  This book is a treasure, offering a glimpse into how freedom is discovered in the most unlikely places.

Barbara P. Anderson, Presbyterian pastor

This beautifully written book, with fully developed characters, is a personal story of life beyond economic loss. How many of us wonder where today’s poor, unemployed people go when they “vanish”?

The wondrous building of relationship between fragile economic survivors described in this book leads me to wonder about today’s homeless shelters.   Unlike Edgefield, shelter placements – when available today – are usually transient.  Thus, in our time, relationships between economically disadvantaged people are sadly transient as well.

In describing a hidden, even shameful, secret about residents at a poor farm from the past, I wonder if the author causes us to reflect on the possibility of the community formed at Edgefield.  This possibility of community is mostly absent in our treatment of the homeless today.

An incredibly good read.

Karen Vance, Kindergarten Master Teacher

 

 

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