Alice Fulton

Friday, November 7, 2008

“Troy is where love comes to die….”

Alice Fulton takes Irish Times feature writer Anna Mundow on a tour of her hometown, Troy, New York, which is the setting for her critically-acclaimed story collection, The Nightingales of Troy (2008).
“FOR AN ACCLAIMED poet, fiction writer and Cornell University professor, Alice Fulton is surprisingly considerate. She urges me to eat another muffin, drink more iced tea before we set off to explore Troy, New York, her hometown. She thanks me again for coming here even though hers has been the far longer journey. Fulton has returned to show me the sites depicted in her sublime new short-story collection, The Nightingales of Troy , which portrays four generations of the fictional Irish-American Garrahan family.
She responds plainly, modestly, to praise of her fiction which has been compared to that of Alice Munro, Grace Pailey, Annie Proulx. But she prefers to talk about the past; about the Callahan ("Garrahan") women who inspired her short stories, about the dashing father and vivacious mother who was "the first in the family to go astray by marrying a divorced, Protestant bootlegger, 15 years older than she" and who, at 95, is still cared for by her daughters.
We briefly peruse photographs and yellowed newspaper clippings, many depicting her father's entertainment ventures: the Phoenix Hotel, the Rainbow Gardens, the Ship of Joy, names that conjure up the muted wail of a 1930s dance band. Then a surprise. "It's today," Fulton says, handing me a page from the Troy Record for July 3rd, 1919. "It happened ninety-nine years ago today."
That is strange. The day on which we choose to meet is the date on which Fulton's great-grandmother drowned in the city canal. "It was a perfect night: calm and desolate," Fulton writes in Queen Wintergreen, imagining the fictional Peg Flynn's last moments, "she sat down on the bank, dangling her feet over the darkness like a girl . . . easing herself into the state waterway, which at first felt coldly foreign, then as her skirts turned to fetters, warmer, more familiar"….
The full text of the article is available at http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/magazine/2008/0712/1215725807920.html.

Note: Poet and fiction writer Alice Fulton will visit the Writers Institute on Tuesday, November 11, 2008. She will hold an informal workshop at 4:15 PM in Assembly Hall, Campus Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus, 1400 Washington Ave. In the evening, at 8 PM, Fulton will read from and discuss her new interlinked story collection, The Nightingales of Troy, in the Recital Hall of the Performing Arts Center on the uptown campus.