Washington College Alumni Magazine Spring 2012 : Page 7
THE WRITING LIFE WWW.WASHCOLL.EDU Faithful Nation BY JOAN SMITH CRAMER Peter Manseau, WC’s Patrick Henry Fellow, writes for a variety of online and print publications; his many awards include a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. O NE OF PETER MANSEAU ’ S EARLIEST writing memories is of an assignment he was given in grade school—a mimeographed picture of a bunch of grapes. He could, perhaps, have written about grapes in gen-eral—what they are, how they grow—or even about himself eating and a former nun, Manseau has written about his parents in an elegant memoir, Vows , that evokes the modern church and its devotees in all of their complexity. But he also taught himself Yiddish and wrote Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, a pitch-perfect novel from the point of view of “the last Yid-dish poet in America” that won the country’s most prestigious Jewish book awards. He co-founded, with Dart-mouth English professor and author Jeff Sharlet, an award-winning online magazine about religion and culture, Killing PHOTO: SARAH MARSHALL grapes. Instead, he imagined what it might be like to be those grapes. “Early on, that’s how I thought about stories,” he says. It is this empathy that has made Manseau one of today’s best young writers. This year’s Patrick Henry Fellow at the College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, Manseau writes about what he calls “the fringes of religion.” But the best writers about religion—the great Hus-ton Smith, for example—knew that faith cannot be properly illuminated from the outside. The son of a Catholic priest SPRING 2012 the Buddha . Their critically acclaimed book of the same name was the result of a year they spent on the road together, studying the varieties of Ameri-can religious experience—from witches in Kansas to a death row gospel choir. Manseau then traveled the world investigating the universal devotion to reli-gious relics in Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead . “When writing about reli-gion, it is not the suspension of disbelief we should strive for, but rather the elevation of empathy over agreement,” Manseau wrote in an essay for The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. In other words, when writing about a woman who espouses witchcraft and believes she was visited by a Norse god, it helps to know that she’d “had her run-in with the cosmic trou-ble-maker Loki not long after she had lost custody of her son.” That intense interest in real people and the specificity of their faith is at the heart of Manseau’s current project—a retelling of the story of America from the points of view of the non-Christian believers who helped create the country. “My previous books each dealt with a particular religious subculture, but now I want to write a book that is relevant to all Ameri-cans,” he says. “I want to weigh in on the question of whether we were founded as a Christian nation, not with a polemic, but with a series of narrative debunkings, using individual stories over a 500-year history to create this mosaic of the full reality of religious diversity in America.” The Patrick Henry Fellow-ship in Chestertown has given Manseau a working home away from the home he shares with his wife, Gwenann Seznec, and their two children, Annick, 6, and Jeannette, 3. They live in a small house they’ve built on the Annapolis sod farm owned by Gwenann’s parents, Jean-Fran-cois ’70 and Thackray ’69 Seznec. On the farm, Manseau writes in a pre-fab shed he bought from Home Depot, which he insulated and wired himself. In Chestertown, he works late into the night in his Custom House office and in the Patrick Henry House on Queen Street. Somehow, he is also com-pleting a Ph.D. in Religion at Georgetown University, where his dissertation examines Ameri-can Yiddish literature from the early 1900s. “Being in Chestertown, a place so thick with history, it’s easy to feel a connection with the characters I’m writing about,” he says. “The house is wonderful. It’s great to have the old oil paintings staring down at you, and even in this unsea-sonably warm weather, there is a distinct 18 th -century chill. I enjoy that about it—I think I’m a cold-weather writer. I feel as if I’m living in a place out of time.” Joan Smith Cramer is a freelance writer in Chestertown. WASHINGTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE 7
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