Holy Hunger: The Life and Loves of Sister Ruth

"The soul only knows for certain that it is hungry." Simone Weil

The lives of women vowed to obedience, poverty and celibacy within a consecrated female community generate a perennial fascination (Sacred Hearts, Lying Awake, The Spiral Staircase.) How do they do it? How do these women reconcile their desires - for autonomy, for material goods, for physical love? Holy Hunger: The Life and Loves of Sister Ruth, attempts to answer this question.

In the year of the Great Depression, Klara Vogel leaves her family and the small Wisconsin farming town of Prairie Crossing and enters the Motherhouse of St. Francis convent in Milwaukee. She is fourteen years old. A restless, high-spirited girl with a fascination for Christian martyrs and a hunger for holiness, she undergoes an unsparing indoctrination that includes strong admonitions against personal friendships and worldly affairs. In 1937, she professes her vows, takes the veil and is given a new name. Challenged by the ever-changing nature of her calling, Sister Ruth is a woman with a heart cleaved in two as she struggles to satisfy the many conflicting hungers of her body and soul.

A work of fiction, Holy Hunger is narrated in the first person, populated by a wide range of characters, and played out against dramatic historical backdrops. OBEDIENCE follows Sister Ruth's early years, from her internment in a Japanese concentration camp in China in 1939, where she falls in love with the Jesuit, Father Jean Claude, (their love will endure for fifty years) to the spiritual barrens of 1950's North Dakota, where her sexuality is awakened. DISOBEDIENCE occurs in mid-life as Sister Ruth becomes radicalized during Vatican II. Changes in her religious community erupt into a war of sister against sister, and working in Central America during the era of "dirty wars" puts her life in danger. RENUNCIATION brings Ruth to revolutionary Nicaragua. An older woman, she renounces the hierarchical Church, trades in the traditional trappings of religious life for liberation theology and joins the Sandanista struggle for social justice. LIBERATION, a brief epilogue, finds Ruth back in Milwaukee, the day before her eighty-seventh birthday, putting the convent vegetable garden to bed for the winter. She is filled with memories. She has remained faithful to her vows, understanding that in the end, it is love that has been her greatest sustenance.

The Memory Cord

A work of fiction, set in the Midwest prairies and covering a span of 50 years from 1875-1925, The Memory Cord is a rural gothic tale based on the lives of my pioneering ancestors. Secrets! All family histories are riddled with them. Those gaps in the ancestral record were what drove my desire to write this book. What I found when I went looking was shocking, sad, horrible - and full of holes. But here's what I discovered - those patterns from the past have already been woven - the empty spaces, the gaps in the record, the question marks, are apertures through which secrets can still slip through and reveal themselves. Reweaving the web of memory takes imagination and heart. These are the threads that can mend the holes left by history. The Memory Cord is structured chronologically, and told in the first person, from the point of view of each of the main characters. Adam is an ambitious immigrant farmer; Letty, his much younger wife, is prone to fits of temper and visions; Jacob, a child of questionable origins, whom they raise as their eldest son, is a misfit and a loner; and Katharina, Adam's older sister, called Tante Kate, is a stern, German-speaking, maiden lady with a secret past. This secret haunts each of their lives in different ways: as the family unravels, they lose loved ones, they lose the farm and Letty loses her sanity. Towards the end of the book there is a story within a story - a tale of love and loss, wherein the reader (but not the main characters) learns the truth.

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