Judith Favor

Author

Touchstones: “Generational Pain”

By

photo of a Flagstone pathway in a graphic frame

Dear Readers Who Write,
Generational pain prompted my first two books, The Edgefielders: Poor Farm Tales of a Great-Grandmother and Silent Voices. The discipline of discovery writing gave me tools to explore the mysterious forces that tear families apart and the ties that bind families together.
Novels by contemporary authors are reminders that you and I do need not bear generational pain alone. Current fictional favorites include:

  • The Other Americans by Laila Lalami
  • World Light by Halldor Laxness
  • Love by Toni Morrison
  • Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co. by Maria Amparo Escandon
  • Mink River by Brian Doyle
  • Take One Candle, Light a Room by Susan Straight

The colorful characters in my four Beacons novels also support readers who may feel alone in bearing generational pain. Love stories & family sagas forge strong connections with readers, despite diversities of race, religion, class and gender identity. Inspiring memoirists include:

  • Living With a Wild God by Barbara Ehrenreich
  • The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation by Richard Rohr
  • Joy Unspeakable by Barbara Holmes
  • I Could Tell You Stories by Patricia Hampl
  • Sisterhood Heals: The Transformative Power of Healing in Community by Joy Harden Bradford

“We are nervous beings, in nervous nations, at an increasingly nervous time,” writes Jen Soriano in Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing. In the September-October issue of Poets & Writers journal, Soriano’s words shimmer with meaning. “I wrote this” she says, “ … for pearls in their shells seeking conditions to shine. My story is just one ripple in an emerging ecosystem of interdependence, where we don’t have to bear generational pain alone.”

Whose writing helps you bear generational pain?

by Judith Wright Favor

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.

 

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

 

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