Kelly Blewett

NonfictionHistory

Stacy Horn

Interview by Kelly Blewett

In Damnation Island, Stacy Horn explores the horrific past of a small island in New York City’s East River, where the “criminally insane” were imprisoned in the 19th century.

How did Blackwell’s Island capture your attention and inspire you to write this book?
I had a vague awareness that the island had a dark past—that something terrible had happened there—but I didn’t know the details. This is irresistible to me. A horrific but forgotten story? I had to recover it.

You researched so many individuals for this book—can you briefly share one story that you find the most affecting?
Adelaide Irving, a mixed-up, headstrong 15-year-old who was sent to the penitentiary for two years for her first offense: picking someone’s pocket. It was an outrageous sentence, and she never recovered. She was dead by the time she turned 23. They buried her in a convict-built coffin on a hill. I was once a mixed-up, headstrong 15-year-old, and I was acting out in all sorts of ways. But I come from a background of relative privilege. There are million safety nets for people like me, and people like me don’t usually go to jail. It was true in the 19th century, it was true in the 20th, and it’s still true now.

Blackwell’s Island was founded with very positive intentions. How and why did things go so far awry?
They wanted to save money. To reduce overhead, they starved the inmates, didn’t properly clothe or house them, and instead of hiring paid nurses and attendants, the administrators employed convicts from the workhouse to look after the inmates in the lunatic asylum and other institutions on the island. (The workhouse was a prison for people convicted of minor crimes.) It was not a secret. The abuses on Blackwell’s Island were regularly reported in the papers, and grand juries would visit and issue damning reports. Priests attending to the spiritual needs of the inmates would alert their superiors. But nothing ever happened. I recognize this paralysis. There isn’t a day that I don’t hear about some horrible miscarriage of justice in America. If I pay attention to the papers and my Twitter feed, I’m reading about fresh new cases every few minutes. We all are. And just what are most of us doing about it? Why is extreme injustice allowed to continue?

What did undercover reporters find when they visited the island?
To use an expression of Emma Goldman, an anarchist who was sent to the penitentiary, they found patients who were “legally murdered,” either by the lack of food, improper hygiene, careless attendants, murderous roommates or by succumbing to lethal epidemics. Police courts would continue to send people to the island even when they knew there was an active disease outbreak.

In what way does the history of Blackwell Island continue to haunt us—either in terms of contemporary New York City or in terms of misguided ideas about the relationship between mental illness and crime?
By throwing the poor, the mad and the convicted altogether on one narrow island they unwittingly reinforced a devastating association which persists to this day. That the mentally ill are dangerous and poor people are thieves in disguise. The priest featured in my book wrote, “The dark shadow of crime spreads right and left, from the Penitentiary and the Workhouse, over all the institutions, the Asylum, the Alms-House and Charity Hospital, so that, in the minds of the people at large, all suffer alike from an evil repute. . . .” Being poor had become a character trait that needed “correction,” like the impulse to steal or cheat. If they were poor it was due to their own moral failing and laziness. The Christian impulse to help the needy had been tamped down and replaced with an inclination to punish them.  

There were so many aspects of Blackwell’s Island that inspire disgust—the food, the shelter, the hygiene, the quickness with which disease spread. What do you think was the worst aspect for those living there?
I always go back to what could I have withstood. Have you ever had an anxiety or panic attack, or suffered from depression? Imagine that instead of kindness you’re thrown into a chair, strapped in so you can’t move or get up, and you have to stay there hour after hour, all day long, without talking, and if you go to the bathroom in your chair because no one will unstrap you, an attendant will likely come along and beat you or drag you to a tub of used bathwater and hold your head under until you’re near death. People could do whatever they wanted to these helpless inmates because they were out of the public eye on this now off-limits island. It’s the same today. Look how long it took people to acknowledge that what goes on in the facilities on Rikers Island is immoral, and to start talking about change. I cried reading a Justice Department report of what happened to teenagers on Rikers Island. What they describe has been going on for centuries. What took us so long?

Why did the people who suffered from the abuses of Blackwell’s Island so rarely have a chance to be heard by people in authority?
I read through a 900-page report from a Senate investigation of the conditions inside asylums in New York. In all those pages there was not one single testimony from an inmate. It’s hard for the poor, the mentally ill and the convicted to have a voice and to be heard and not dismissed today. It was almost impossible then.

Who are the heroes of Blackwell’s Island, if there are any? 
Even though most did not succeed in effecting change, I came across many wardens who tried. They showed up every week, day after day, doing what they could. I don’t know if I could have faced inmates crying to me for help, inmates dying, knowing that so much of their suffering was preventable. I think it would have destroyed me. But they showed up.  

What do you hope readers take away from this book?
I didn’t want to force it down anyone’s throats, but I hope people pick up on the fact that in many ways the same things, and worse, are taking place today. The idea that some people are unworthy and they have all these terrible things coming to them is still prevalent, as is the conviction that the poor are entirely responsible for their financial struggles and that we should not help them.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Damnation Island.

In Damnation Island, Stacy Horn explores the horrific past of a small island in New York City’s East River, where the “criminally insane” were imprisoned in the 19th century.

NonfictionBiography

Maxwell King

Interview by Kelly Blewett

Maxwell King’s The Good Neighbor explores the life and enormously influential work of Fred Rogers, the creator and star of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

You clearly did a lot of research for The Good Neighbor. What’s a fact about Rogers that most people wouldn’t know?
Most people wouldn’t know that, when Fred was about 10 years old, his maternal grandmother bought him an extraordinarily expensive piano. He loved music, and often played for his grandmother on his toy piano, and she told him how very good he was. Finally, she told him she would buy him a piano, expecting it to be a small, modest instrument suitable for a little boy. She gave Fred a ticket for the trolley, and he traveled to the Steinway store in downtown Pittsburgh. Fred spent almost three hours there; when he left, the salesmen chuckled among themselves that the little boy had picked an ebonized Steinway Concert Grand that could have cost as much as $60,000 in today’s dollars—they assumed his family could never buy it for him. When he told Nancy McFeely, his grandmother, she was shocked. But she had made a promise, and she kept it, trusting the child to be worthy of this faith and this investment. The little boy traveled back down to the Steinway store with a check. Fred Rogers kept this piano for the rest of his life, took it with him to New York, to Toronto and back to Pittsburgh, composed 200 songs and a dozen operas on it and played it joyfully for decades. And he let his grandmother know that her trust had changed his life.

What made Rogers such a genius at working with children?
Two things: authenticity and high standards. Children can tell a phony a mile away, and Fred Rogers was the opposite: an utterly genuine person. Rogers’ training under Dr. Margaret McFarland at the University of Pittsburgh gave him the background in child development and early childhood education to set the very highest standards for his programming. And his fierce commitment to excellence enabled him to sustain those standards for decades.

Can you tell us more about Rogers’ foray into programming for adults? Why did he want to do it, and how long did it go on?
After years of programming television for children, Rogers decided in the mid-1970s that he needed a break and that he might like producing issues programming for grown-ups to watch on television. But he never fully engaged or felt comfortable with it, and his technique—so extraordinarily powerful for children—wasn’t as successful with adults. He was relieved in 1980 to get back to his true calling.

What did your research reveal about how Rogers conducted himself as a friend?
Rogers was always concerned about treating everyone with great respect and being a good friend to whomever he was dealing with. In fact, he got up in the early morning each day to pray that he would be as good to the people he would encounter that day as he possibly could. And he readily gave his respect and kindness to everyone, whether they were homeless or the president of a large bank.

Why were puppets a part of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”? When did Rogers start developing those characters?
Rogers began developing his puppet characters as a little boy, performing his puppet theater in the attic of his parents’ home in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. And it was pure serendipity that led to his use of the puppets much later when he began producing children’s television. The night before his first program—”The Children’s Corner”—started on WQED in Pittsburgh, the station manager, Dorothy Daniels, gave Fred a small puppet as a gift. That puppet got used on the spur of the moment on the first program and then became Daniel Tiger, the first of many puppets Rogers would use on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

How did Rogers’ childhood in Latrobe shape his television program?
Everything on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”—the trolleys, the streets, the houses, the shops, the companies—all sprang from Rogers’ recollections of his childhood in Latrobe.

What did the number 143 mean to Fred Rogers?
Two things: his weight, all his life, and the expression “I love you.”

What’s one story you learned about Rogers that surprised you?
Fred got mad—not often, but sometimes. Once, he was so frustrated with a tape recorder—which he thought was going to erase an important consulting session with Dr. Margaret McFarland—that he swore at it and threatened to smash it. His secretary, Elaine Lynch, gently took it from his hands and got it fixed.

Why is Rogers’ legacy particularly valuable in our current cultural moment?
Because of all the stresses in modern life—rapid change, greater and greater complexity to society, the growing presence of technology, globalization—we live in a very tense, sometimes angry and hateful environment. Fred’s messages—there is nothing as important as human kindness, and there is nothing we cannot deal with if we just slow way down and talk to each other—are the most important, enduring truths of our time.

In what ways did Rogers’ faith inform his television program?
Rogers was always guided by his Christianity, and his strong values—human kindness, respect, caring, integrity, duty—all derived from his faith. But he was very careful, while emphasizing those values, never to preach or proselytize on the children’s program. And he became, as an adult, a great student of many of the world’s religions and philosophies. He was very happy to find that the same humanistic values showed up in all faiths.

What do you think Rogers would want to communicate to children today?
Be yourself, be full of love, and be full of the joy of life and learning.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Good Neighbor.

Author photo by Joshua Franzos for The Pittsburgh Foundation.

Maxwell King’s The Good Neighbor explores the life and enormously influential work of Fred Rogers, the creator and star of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

NonfictionMemoir

Sarah Ruhl

Interview by Kelly Blewett

“The great work of our lives is [figuring out] how to tell the story of our lives,” says Sarah Ruhl, speaking by phone from Chicago. Ruhl, a MacArthur Fellow and two-time Pulitzer finalist for drama, knows about stories. Her eye for detail is on full display in her memoir, Smile: The Story of a Face, which explores Ruhl’s experience with Bell’s palsy, a rare condition in which a part of the face becomes paralyzed. “The process of writing the book was cathartic,” Ruhl says, because for the first few years of her paralysis, “I wasn’t able to talk about my face. It was shoved deep under. But astonishingly, it was right on the surface.”

Quick, illuminating turns of phrase like that—shoved under but right on the surface—abound in Smile, which examines the paradoxes of illness, especially as experienced by women. The book historicizes the topic, recalling, for instance, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the short story that Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote after enduring bed rest as a medical treatment. The same doctor who prescribed this remedy for Gilman offered a different prescription for men: adventures on the Western frontier. “The 19th-century response is not as far away as we think,” says Ruhl, who was prescribed bed rest herself during her pregnancy, even though the treatment has had mixed results historically.

“I wasn’t able to talk about my face. It was shoved deep under. But astonishingly, it was right on the surface.”

Ruhl spent her time in bed reading the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, thinking idly that they would make a good play (which she later wrote). She also dove unapologetically into the Twilight series. “We can’t predict how our minds will behave in extremis or when we are ill,” Ruhl says, remembering that when her father was sick with cancer, he read books about sea voyages. “Often you need something deeply plot-driven just to get through the stasis. You’re not able to look at the thing directly when you’re really scared about how your body is betraying you.” The epigraph in Smile, taken from Virginia Woolf, reiterates this point: “when the lights of health go down, undiscovered countries are then disclosed.”

Ruhl’s experience with Bell’s palsy began the morning after she gave birth to twins. A nurse entered her room and said, “Your eye looks droopy.” When Ruhl looked in the mirror, she writes, “I tried to move my face. Impossible. Puppet face, strings cut.” Bell’s palsy is typically a temporary facial paralysis that clears up completely in a matter of days or weeks—as opposed to Ruhl’s experience, which has lasted for over a decade, though the paralysis has lessened over time. Initially it impacted everything from chewing food to pronouncing words to conveying emotion. Writing about it required self-examination as she searched for ways to frame her experience. These framing lenses, which she calls “thinking lenses,” helped her “really feel what I was feeling about my face.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Smile.

For example, Ruhl drew strength from public figures who’ve had facial paralysis, including the poet Allen Ginsburg. The book features a photograph of Ginsburg staring into the camera, forcing viewers to engage what Ruhl describes as “the disturbance” of his asymmetry. She also turned to art history, looking at Mona Lisa’s famous half-smile, a mismatched expression that captured the world’s interest. And, because of her connection to the theater, she examined theories about the link between facial expressions and emotion. “Thank God I am not an actor,” she says. “To have that instrument taken away as an actor would be so demoralizing.”

As Ruhl wrote about her face, she found she had a surprising amount to say—about women caught in ambiguous medical problems, about the face as the part of the body where the soul resides (or not) and about the difficulties of mothering young children while pursuing passionate, consuming work. Often these stories overlap, as in one memorable instance when she chose to breastfeed her child while on a stage in front of 300 people. Gloria Steinem was speaking when the baby began to fuss. Mary Rodgers, who wrote Freaky Friday, was seated next to Ruhl, and as Ruhl began to nurse her infant, Rodgers patted Ruhl’s leg and said, “That’s right, that’s right.” Ruhl excels at exploring connections like these, both near and distant, that help pull us through trouble.

“Sometimes teaching is no more than saying, ‘You can be a writer. Welcome to this secret society.’”

For Ruhl, this includes her connection with her husband, Tony. “My editor always wanted more scenes with Tony,” she laughs. And, indeed, when I talk about Smile with my friends, it’s a story about Tony that comes to mind: how Ruhl coined the phrase “sexy-cozy” to describe her feeling when he cared for her. “Sexy-cozy,” she writes in the book, “is the opposite of dirty-sexy.” Clearly this is a word that should be in wider circulation, one that would probably resonate with many happily married women, which is how Ruhl gratefully regards herself. “There’s something about the narrative of a happy marriage that we don’t see that much,” she says.

Ruhl also credits her teacher, Pulitzer-winning playwright Paula Vogel, for her support. “I wouldn’t be writing plays without Paula,” she says. “I think that Paula tapping me on the head and saying, ‘You can do this,’ was profoundly important. Sometimes teaching is no more than saying, ‘You can be a writer. Welcome to this secret society.’”

Though Ruhl’s journey with Bell’s palsy is not entirely resolved—she says that she is still thinking through how to live in her body, such as deciding whether she is willing to smile at people with her teeth—this warm-hearted, brave and funny memoir is her way of tapping readers on the head, encouraging us. You can keep going. You are part of the club. You are not alone.

Author photo credit: Gregory Costanzo

A playwright with an incredible eye for detail and a searing voice shares her own story of motherhood and facial paralysis.

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