Donna Dufresne
Dear Readers,
Thank you so much for visiting my little “She-Shed”, where I crunch out reams of written word. I finally got around to starting a blog, thanks to my more technically savvy husband. After years of dropping guerilla essays, poetry, songs and fiction onto my Facebook page, or worse, sending op-eds through e-mail at home and school, I have taken the advice of many and created a home for all those words. It is an open house, of sorts and anyone is welcome to visit, ponder, and respond to conversations generated by the writing I share in this living room. I am a prolific writer, willing to take risks with my pen (or the keyboard, as I prefer to write on my laptop). I dabble in many genres, and being a risk-taker, am willing to drop pretenses. This has led me to a more honest (tell-it-like-it-is) voice rooted in my working-class background.
One thing you should know about me, is that I write through the lens of humor and the heart of kindness. This is not to say that you won’t find biting and acerbic commentary about President Trump, or windows into heartbreak and the dark side of these times. You might not find my comments very funny but know this: I take delight in every aspect of being human and having the opportunity to dance on this Earth. I believe that my purpose is to give voice to those who do not have a voice, and to bring light into dark corners, be it through the songs I write, the music I perform, creative non-fiction essays, memoir pieces, fiction, history, and critical analysis about the polity and culture of these times.
Although I am extremely focused and disciplined, I am not one to plod along a single path or genre. I am your typical creative-productive personality, never happier than when I have several pots burning on the stove. Therefore, you will find a variety of posts, as I cull though nearly a half-century of creative work. In some ways, I’ve been successful in actualizing my talents. I’ve recorded five albums of original songs, written two musicals, several one-woman shows of historical characters, and performed with several renditions of a band which has evolved over the years. But I suffer from the peculiar oppression of rural isolation. You will learn through my memoirs that I grew up in a place which felt impossibly lonely, dancing on the edge of an upper-middle class and wealthy neighborhood in a working-poor and uneducated family.
My family thought I was the cat’s pajamas when it came to talent, but they saw no place for it in the world and made it clear that people like “us” did not become writers, singers or actors. People like us work with their hands, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps in the struggle to climb that ladder of security. People like me, got married, had children and…well that was the problem. I wasn’t sure what came after the and. I wanted more than that but lacked the entitlement and the where-with-all to find my proper place in the world. This is what I mean by “dancing on the edge of the middleclass”. I have known people with far less talent and very little to say who seemingly find success through their art with little effort. They travel in circles of privilege, not unlike the college kids who have numerous alumni in their families. The path has been carved out for them without any effort on their part. Just so you know, I am the first college graduate in my family. I mean ever. I have a Master’s in education but would have preferred an MFA. No siblings, aunts, uncles or cousins in my pedigree have crossed the line into that enemy territory of the educated class. I come from that strange rural sensibility that will not trust the people who truck in paper and words for a living. Although they wouldn’t articulate it like this, they see intellectualism as part of the machine that has kept them down. In some ways they are right about the machine. I have spent a lifetime greasing the cogs of that wheel, trying to get it to work for me. I come from the kind of people who voted for Trump, and it infuriates me that they don’t see that he is the machine. I do have to say that my 94-year old father has come around in his old age. He voted for President Obama and refused to vote for Trump by not to voting at all, seeing the Clintons as part of the machine as well. It’s too bad he dind’t vote!
When I was about nine-years-old, I announced that I wanted to grow up to be a writer. I’d read Little Women and was smitten with Louisa May Alcott and the idea that a woman could support her family by writing stories. I had constructed the outline for the kind of book I would have read at the time. Part Nancy Drew, part Little Women and Little House on the Prairie. The plot included some kind of underground tunnel that went from the old Colonial cellar hole which was buried under our driveway and meandered beneath the potato field and the pasture and into Fred D. Whittier’s barn cellar. The detective protagonist (most likely me), would discover artifacts and treasures along the way, which told the stories of people from the past who’d escaped Indian massacres, and slavery through that underground tunnel. Of course, my family was delighted by my stories. I got a used typewriter for Christmas.
Being of the working-class, the pragmatic doers and makers in the world, it seemed appropriate that they would honor my yearning to write by providing me with the machinery that would facilitate it. But the tool was not enough. It didn’t really help me to figure out the mechanics of academia. I was never a good speller and hated school most of my life. The typewriter couldn’t show me a pathway to success. There would be no guidance counselors sending pamphlets home, no college visits. I was way under that radar, and too far out of the box. I was the oddball kid who skipped school to go to the library and work on the family genealogy. But I didn’t go unnoticed.
I won “most talented” awards, had the leads in the high school musicals, sang solos in the high school chorus, and was offered a scholarship to pursue music and drama, which my parents promptly turned down, pushing into marriage right after graduation. People were rather appalled. Teachers, neighbors and a host of visitors came by the house to try to talk some sense into my parents. Mr. Aubrey, the husband of our African American art teacher came by to deliver a tape of Hello Dolly, which he had recorded from the High school musical. I had the lead role. He urged my parents to discourage me from marrying my high school sweetheart. He told them that a girl with my talent should go to college. My mother informed him that I didn’t want that kind of life. I wanted to settle down and have a family. That wasn’t true at all. The last thing I wanted to do was settle down. I just wanted that train ticket out of town that my husband-to-be and his middle-class family might offer me.
But one thing is for sure. That typewriter become my real ticket into a bigger life. The most useful course I took in high school was typing, and though I would have made a terrible secretary, having no penchant for following orders, I can type like a wizard. Finally, I had an instrument that could keep up with my thoughts. No more tedious notebooks filled with words and leaking, messy ink blotches. I made progress over the years from the clunky old Vintage Royal of my childhood, to streamlined portables and into the age of technology when I got my first electric typewriter, then a word processor. I finally landed my first desktop computer when I was putting myself through college (working three jobs, I might add).
Now that I have given you a bit of a tour of my living room, some thoughts and ideas, and a glimpse of who I am, I will leave you on this introductory visit with an “I Come From” poem I wrote many years ago. Please stop by again for a bit of fiction or reflective and creative non-fiction and thank you for dancing outside the box with me.
WHERE I COME FROM
Donna Dufresne
I come from a place where you can hear
The tap, tap, tap of the milkman’s boots on a cement walk
And a whistle fading into the dawn
Telling me my father has gone
Into the world of working men
I come from a place where the screen door slams
And shakes the walls
As mothers step out upon
Their pea-shucking porches to call
And we scurry like tiny denim insects
Out of secret places toward the light of home
I come from a place where bloodlines run hot through my veins
And we are still fighting those Indian wars
Even as our skin begins to fade
And my grandfather’s baseball bat stands
In that corner by the door
Waiting for someone who will dare to cross that line
I come from a place where women pin their dreams on clotheslines hung just so
A color code of hope all washed up and tidy
And yet you know
There must be more to life than this
When you rub your nose deep into crisp cotton sheets
That remind you of the bluest of summer skies
I come from a place where men work hard and close to the earth
Their sweat smelling of diesel fuel and the piston grease of tractors
And you know that they have pulled themselves
Up by their bootstraps every day of their lives
Because they have told you so at the end of the day
By their silent, vacant smiles
I come from a place where you can eat off the floor
In a kitchen wrapped in ivy wallpaper
That hides the angry-fisted walls that were too thin to begin with
And the warm earthy scent of baked beans and brown bread
Dances with my grandmother’s dandelion greens dug up with a fork
And set to boil with salt pork
On the back of a kerosene stove.
I come from a place where my grandfather’s inventor hands
Have fashioned the tools on which factories ran
And Sunday is a day for church and baseball on the radio
Which floats through that watermelon curtained house
Like his dreams
Oh, his dreams of what he might have been
OH, OUR DREAMS OF WHAT WE MIGHT HAVE BEEN .