In her application to the graduate creative writing program, Mary Carter Bishop asked Hollins to unbolt her brain. Writing for newspapers had locked her into a \u201ctight, utilitarian prose,\u201d Bishop says, \u201cand for good reason. Our readers are in a hurry.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Photo](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/bishop.jpg\")
Photo by Bob Crawford<\/p><\/div>\n
For two decades, Bishop had been climbing the journalism ladder: from writing obituaries at The Richmond News Leader<\/em>, to graduate school at Columbia University\u2019s School of Journalism, then to work at the Charlotte Observer, <\/em>and finally the Philadelphia Inquirer, <\/em>where Bishop was assigned to a team of reporters covering the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster.<\/p>\n \u201cOur editors put a small army of reporters and photographers on the story for weeks,\u201d Bishop says, \u201cWe tracked down workers, meeting them at their homes when they got home from work, sometimes in the middle of the night.\u201d The Philadelphia Inquirer <\/em>staff, including Bishop, was awarded a Pulitzer for their work. By 1982, ready for a break, Bishop rented a cabin outside Lexington, Virginia. \u201cI hadn\u2019t planned to stay, but I did,\u201d she says, \u201cand I never returned to big-city journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n When Bishop was offered a position at what was then The Roanoke Times & World-News,<\/em> covering Lexington and surrounding counties, she jumped at it. \u201cI didn\u2019t know much about it, but my savings had run out,\u201d Bishop says. After working for papers in larger cities, Bishop wasn\u2019t sure there\u2019d be much news to cover. \u201cI\u2019d forgotten that wherever there are people, news is all around and lots of it runs deep.\u201d<\/p>\n Bishop ran a one-woman bureau out of Lexington until her move in 1987, which brought her to Roanoke, and to Hollins. \u201cThe reading as well as the writing at Hollins woke me up,\u201d Bishop says, \u201cFrom the back of [Professor of English] Richard Dillard\u2019s American lit class, I marveled at his mind, his wit, and his casual, self-effacing style. In writing workshops with [English professors] Cathy Hankla [\u201980, M.A. \u201982], and Jeanne Larsen [M.A. \u201972], I wrote my first and only short stories.\u201d<\/p>\n Bishop published one of those short stories in Elvis in Oz: New Stories & Poems from the Hollins Creative Writing Program, <\/em>an anthology that featured writing by such Hollins graduates as Annie Dillard \u201967, M.A. \u201968, Madison Smartt Bell M.A. \u201981, Natasha Trethewey M.A. \u201991, Jill McCorkle M.A. \u201981, and Lee Smith \u201967. The protagonist in Bishop\u2019s story, \u201cOfferings to Jackie O,\u201d was inspired by her half-brother Ronnie, a brother she didn\u2019t know she had until she was in her early 30s. While applying for a passport, Bishop discovered her mother\u2019s secret there in the government paperwork\u2014that the quiet, lanky boy who\u2019d once slept in the barn was not a cousin, as she\u2019d been told, but her mother\u2019s first child, conceived when her mother was a teenager.<\/p>\n Ronnie was 10 years older than Bishop and had spent much of his childhood with a foster family or in a boys\u2019 home, but when he was a teenager, he spent some time in Keswick, Virginia, where Bishop\u2019s parents worked in the estates of wealthy heirs and heiresses. Bishop finally reunited with Ronnie during her first semester at Hollins, visiting him in the Vinton barbershop where he worked.<\/p>\n When she returned to the newsroom, Bishop says, \u201cI probably was more observant in my reporting, with a keener eye and ear, than I was before Hollins.\u201d Her career after Hollins saw several highlights: In 1989, Bishop received a George Polk Award for her coverage of illegal pesticide use; in 1995, The<\/em> Roanoke Times <\/em>published her special report on the history of urban renewal in Roanoke\u2014a devastating, blow-by-blow account of a community all but leveled by racist housing policies and displacement; and in 2001, Bishop won a federal grant to do research on eugenics survivors. \u201cI left the paper and never went back,\u201d she says. \u201cI interviewed about 30 survivors and planned to write a book about them.\u201d<\/p>\n But when her elderly parents\u2019 health began to fail, Bishop stepped back from her research in order to care for them until they passed away. When Bishop returned to her work, she wondered where to focus her attention. Ultimately, she settled on Ronnie. \u201cOther people have written about eugenics; if I didn\u2019t write Ronnie\u2019s story, nobody would ever know about him,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t You Ever<\/em> takes its title from the instruction Bishop\u2019s mother gave Ronnie never to call her \u201cmama.<\/em>\u201d And though there\u2019s nothing Bishop could have done to change Ronnie\u2019s fate, she takes responsibility for his abandonment, caring for him in the last years of his life, through a rare hormonal disorder that caused his limbs and his facial features to grow long and distorted (a fact illustrated poignantly by Ronnie\u2019s driver\u2019s license photos, included in the book\u2019s chapter headings, which show his face changing dramatically over time).<\/p>\n All of Bishop\u2019s writing\u2014whether journalism, fiction, or memoir\u2014exemplifies a reporter\u2019s eye for accuracy and clarity, and a novelist\u2019s attention to the psychological import of objects, clothing, gestures, and expressions. These gifts are just as evident in Don\u2019t You Ever, <\/em>from Bishop\u2019s description of her mother\u2019s thick, fleshy ankles and her pronunciation of words like pretty (priddy) <\/em>and sweetheart (swee-dart<\/em>); her father\u2019s droopy eyes, love for animals, and his childhood nickname for Bishop\u2014Pie, short for Sweetie Pie\u2014the nickname Ronnie still used when he and Bishop first reunited in his Vinton barbershop.<\/p>\n Bishop knew her brother for only three years before his death, but his story troubled her own, casting into new light everything closest to her: her home, her family, and her life\u2019s own trajectory out of poverty and the lush hills of Keswick. As she got to know Ronnie, Bishop toed the line between reporter and sister, curious about Ronnie both as a subject and as long-lost family, someone at once totally unknown and strangely familiar.<\/p>\n \u201cIf Mom and Ronnie were here now and read the book,\u201d Bishop says, \u201cI think they\u2019d quibble over details, but I believe they would feel vindicated by their stories being out there. Ronnie would probably say: \u2018Pie, what the hell you writing about me for? Don\u2019t you have anything better to do?\u2019 And I\u2019d say: \u2018No, I don\u2019t.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Bishop notes that her time at Hollins affected her decisions as she crafted her memoir. \u201cDillard back then talked a lot about how American writers are stuck in a structure of the narrative arc in the middle and an ending that neatly ties up all the loose threads. This, of course, is not the way life is lived.\u201d Dillard\u2019s comments were ringing in Bishop\u2019s mind as she wrote the book\u2019s final lines. <\/em>It\u2019s an ending that does not offer any conclusions or tidy lessons but feels true to the way Bishop is still\u2014and might always be\u2014thinking about her family, their story, and her own.<\/p>\n Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. She received an M.F.A. from Hollins\u2019 Jackson Center for Creative Writing and was the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University\u2019s Stadler Center for Poetry.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In her new memoir, Mary Carter Bishop M.A. \u201989 brings to light a family secret and explores the pressures\u2014cultural, religious, and economic\u2014that kept it hidden so long. By Martha Park M.F.A. \u201915 In her application to the graduate creative writing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8284,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[73],"class_list":["post-8245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-summer-2018"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8245"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8320,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8245\/revisions\/8320"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}