I Pulled the Ace of Swords

Fresh Starts, Summer 2024

It’s June, and I’m writing to you in the midst of a bunch of new beginnings. According to the amateur tarot reading I did for myself last week, these particular fresh starts are going to be totally fire.

The biggest one is that I have a new day job. I ended a three-year stint of teaching high school English at my alma mater, an all-girls Catholic school.

While at Visitation, I taught in three different rooms. In my high school days, they each belonged to a true teaching icon. Former nun Ms. O’Connor (Room 116) wrote “shat” and “motherfucker” on the board in the first week of my freshman year (something about the precision of language?), right next to a drawing she’d made of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Across the hall in Room 117 taught Mr. Barbeau, who shared a birthday with Elvis and therefore attracted Presley paraphernalia. “If you’re twenty and conservative, you have no heart,” he told us between peppering us with off-beat questions about our lives, “and if you’re forty and liberal, you have no head.”

I ended my teaching tenure at Vis in Room 115, where as a junior, I faced the school’s scariest. Mr. Shandorf parked behind his lectern, hands flat over a triple-underlined novel he’d taught a zillion times before. Once, when someone suggested that the three shots fired at the end of The Great Gatsby might symbolize the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, he lowered his head to his podium and moaned, “This is no way for a grown man to make a living.” I loved him, of course. I thought of him every day as I worked on my first novel, Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes, in which an English teacher becomes a social media target for asserting that characters in The Great Gatsby are gay. (They are gay, I’m fairly certain, though during my student-teaching stint, I wrote to Mr. Shandorf to ask why he never told us this, and he just said, “No.”)

I wish Shandorf hadn’t died before that first book of mine was published. I know he wouldn’t have admired it much—his favorite contemporary novelist was Cormac McCarthy, after all—but he would have liked that I’d written it.

Though I thoroughly enjoyed my time teaching and learning at Visitation, I’m headed back to public school in the fall. I’m not that religious, see, and Visitation very clearly is.

Still, I’m taking one larger-than-life character with me from the convent. In fact, I wrote her right into my new novel, Making Friends Can Be Murder, out June 25, 2025. It’s my senior class advisor, Sr. Marie Therese Conaty. In the book, she has almost the same name, and the two gals have these things in common:

• Favorite quote: “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” That’s Sir Walter Scott, and you should clap rhythmically while you recite it.

• Interest in decorum. Sister was in charge of our dining room manners tips, IRL.

• Optimism and forgiveness applied in school disciplinary proceedings.

• Commitment to prayer. Sister died in 2015, but I can still hear her saying, “Listen to the quiet, Honey,” before entreating our Heavenly Father. She called everyone Honey, both because she couldn’t remember our names and also because she used honey metaphors. My favorite? The St. Francis de Sales quote, which has become a life definer for me: “You catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than a barrelful of vinegar.”

I’m pretty sure the real-life Sr. Marie Therese, unlike the Sr. Mary Theresa in my book, was NOT a former homicide detective who failed to solve the state’s most public kidnapping. But I think Real Sister would have liked the idea. Nothing got past that lady.

And, now this summer, I’m excited for the future. We don’t pull tarot cards in Catholic school because of witchiness, but in my life, I take all of the good signs I can get.

I’m reading a ton this summer! Maybe I’ll post a bonus newsletter with some recs. Would that be good? :)