Michael Patrick MacDonald
Talking with Joe Keohane
Friday, March 14--tomorrow
Commonwealth Museum
220 Morrissey Blvd., Dorchester
7:30 pm, free

Michael Patrick MacDonald doesn't just talk it, he's lived it. He grew up in South Boston and watched members of his family fall under the weight of poverty and violence, an experience he recorded in his first book, All Souls.

His follow-up, Easter Rising, also revolves around MacDonald's life in Boston, but in this book he remembers his discovery of punk rock and the punk scene. Eventually, music became a saving grace, and the book culminates in MacDonald's trip to Ireland. After years of rejecting where he came from, the trip helped him accept and embrace his roots.

Bostonist enjoyed a long chat with MacDonald, who talks about the memoir process and his current work with Roca, a local group that is committed to finding new ways to help young people who have become caught up in a cycle of violence. As Bostonist has said before of MacDonald's work, if you want to learn more about Boston, his books are the place to start.

How is the book tour going?

It's been going great because the conversation's been about some pretty pressing stuff around poverty, post-traumatic stress, and all that kind of stuff. I made a comment about that in the Globe the other day . I mentioned how I'm trying to change the conversation because one of the pitfalls of memoir is that even if you're writing about big social justice issues, as I try to do, because it's memoir people get caught up in your personal stuff, so sometimes the conversation will be like, "How's your mother? Whatever happened to your dog Sarge?" [laughs] And so I've been trying to shape the conversation at the end of my reading to be about young people in poverty and so forth, and talk about solutions to those things. I've been really successful in that. I did two nights in New York, one in Boston, and now I'm in Portland, Oregon, and tonight I'm speaking at Powell's Bookstore, which is such a great bookstore.

I just came from a high school, and it's probably in one of the poorer districts [in Portland], and the kids were really diverse, mostly from poor families. Coming there, I was warned that it's really hard to get them to listen to anybody, but it was great. We had a really good conversation, and they were really attentive and quiet.

One of the things your writing does so well is to connect the personal to the social and political, so other people can feel that their experiences are echoed in your book. Is that the kind of response you've gotten from people?

The culture we live in is so preoccupied with celebrity and keeping stories at the surface so that they're just about the individual, so that sometimes I'm afraid if people have seen all these movies like The Departed and Gone Baby Gone and all these big Hollywood celebrity efforts, then they get caught up in that stuff. That all All Souls is somehow tied into all that or that Easter Rising is tied into all that. I'll actually get the question, "Have you ever met Matt Damon?" That's not really what I want to talk about.

Post contributed by Len von Morze. Image from MacDonald's mySpace page.

I think it's the culture, but it's not really that difficult to take people away from that conversation and bring them back to stuff that matters, so I've been doing that. That's the thing also with memoir in general. I'm always afraid of the whole memoir genre because it often is about the individual who overcame some obstacles, and yay he pulled himself up by his bootstraps to get out of the ghetto. I'm always afraid on the surface of being perceived that way, and people thinking that's the conversation we're gonna have about me. Or sometimes you'll get teachers who come to a reading, or social workers, or people who praise me for having come through something horrific. That's nice. It's kind, but that makes it a lot more difficult to get people into real conversations.

I wrote both All Souls and Easter Rising not to toot my horn for having gotten out of the ghetto but to illuminate some issues around young people growing up in extreme poverty, extreme violence, and trauma. And, in both books, the transformation of pain into something that's useful is probably the main thing. It's an activist thing.

Do you think there's a peril in talking about your writing as a form of therapy? The moments in the book that were really moving are when you get other people to connect to your experience, whether it's Sister Peggy or the psychotherapist that you meet. It's not so much personal therapy, but someone reading your work, that might be their connection to their own experience.

In that case, it's no longer about me. It's "heavy head" all over our country, you know what I mean? There's no peril in that. It's funny you mention those two together because, the other night, even though the Sister Peggy thing is like a paragraph and the other is more like a vignette, it's the same idea, that an adult might cross the line and go against what they're probably told they ought to do professionally. By connecting with the pain of a quote/unquote "client," they were crossing a line that people are trained never to do. In both cases, those were lifesaving experiences that I had with people who taught me that this stuff is real, and we all feel this stuff.
When I talk to people who do direct work with young people, like street workers, what I find is that what transcends everything are these transformational relationships with positive adults. I've been talking about this a lot lately on tour because I've been doing a lot of work in Chelsea, Massachusetts, with Roca, which does a lot of intervention stuff. One of the things that I've seen is that when an adult who works with young people really, really cares, kids know that, and that transcends race, ethnicity, or class that the street worker or the professional comes from. Back in the day, when I was doing activist work in the '90s, I was part of the mindset that young African American males need African American role models, Latino males need Latino role models, that kind of stuff. I'm completely convinced that's not the case. I've found that from Roca, that a blonde-haired, blue-eyed 26-year-old street worker from a pretty middle-class background is loved by some pretty hardcore gang kids.

They work with the kids who are like my brother Kevin was, the ones that nobody wants to work with. They work with the kids that we're all afraid of, and they get kicked out of most organizations or youth programs or whatever because they can't hold on. When the kids act up, they kick them out. One strike, you're out. Two strikes, you're out. Three strikes, you're out, whatever. They have no strikes you're out. They relentlessly keep after young people to help them build transformational relationships with adults. Going back to the situation with the therapist, in a way these were short encounters. They were the kind of encounters that were transformational. I didn't have a relationship with the therapist, it was more of an encounter, but with Sister Peggy ... she was able to tell the truth and interact with me in that way. It's professional people not doing what they're supposed to do professionally but really saving lives.

Do you want to talk more about your work in Chelsea and what you've found there?

I'm not doing any of the direct service work with the kids, but I'm hanging out there for a week out of every month for work on my next book. I consider it the third part of a trilogy because, even though it's not going to be memoir or stories from my life, it works along the theme that All Souls and Easter Rising work from, which is transforming pain into a gift, transforming pain into something that's useful and makes life meaningful. That's what they have in common, whether with All Souls through the movement through all the race and class stuff through being an activist, or Easter Rising, with more personal transformation that comes from observing how my mother deals with pain and how she transforms it into a gift for other people. With this book, we're going to tell the stories of young people who are doing the same thing. At the end of Easter Rising is a scene where my mother models for me what you do with the pain and shows me that the way forward is to work with it, to make it useful and meaningful for other people. That's the root of all my activism and what the books are about. What I've found, and the reason I want to work with Roca and tell the stories of these young people is because it's exactly what they do. They're helping young people who are in a lot of pain learning to transform that pain into a more meaningful life, a positive life, a self-sufficient life.

The most important thing Roca does is that they build these transformational relationships where young people are modeled what you do with all this pain. So, it's similar to what happens at the end of Easter Rising, and they work with a recovery model called "The Stages of Change," and they put the young people through the five stages of change in different areas of their lives: the stages are pre-contemplation ("I'm not even thinking about getting my GED"), contemplation ("I'm thinking about it, but only because my probation officer says I gotta"), planning (when you start to own it, when you start to see if it's something you really want to do, whether it's getting a GED or getting a job or whatever), action, and sustaining.

So they follow young people through these five stages in all the different areas of their lives. You might have a young person who has these really unhealthy relationships, who has dropped out and so forth, and they might be at, say, three or four, they're actually getting their GED and really caring about doing it, but they're still pulled back out into the street, into the gang stuff. This book that I'm working on is really natural for me. This thing around Roca is really natural for me. It's hard to talk about a book when it's not written, but basically Roca is the place where I want to be because on that beam of transformation it's the one place that I see that is really hopeful in helping people who are in the very same situation as people in my family where in to change. In a pretty bleak world these days, with war without end, I love that the one place in the world that I'm finding hope is in one of the poorest cities in Massachusetts, which has one of the highest immigrant populations in the state as well. The population of Chelsea comes from the war-torn countries of the past 40 or 50 years. Southeast Asian to Central American to Bosnian to Rwandan to Sudanese.

With every book you write, you feel like there's something missing, and there's the stories that are not in there yet. I've always thought that I would do a trilogy. When I was doing All Souls, I knew that there were more steps to this. Rather than doing a third book that's about me, that's memoir per se, I want to do a third book that's more about things that are in the other two but dealing with other people, working with young people who are living through the same things today that I lived through.

One of the reasons you can get stuff like this done in Chelsea is because of the large immigrant population. There's an openness that comes with that. The people are more open to these new techniques, restorative justice, alternative sentencing. There are immigrant people who are much more open to the idea of coming to a healing circle or a peacemaking circle or things like that that people in Roxbury or Southie might not come to. There's more of an openness with the immigrant population. The other thing is that, all cities are political, but Boston is so political, and it's really hard to get stuff like this done there. Everybody wants credit, and everybody has ego. If you are really committed to helping young people to change, the one thing you check at the door is ego. In all my years of doing community organizing work in Boston, that was one problem with people who were doing a lot of the direct service work. It was more about them than it was about the young people. In Chelsea, some of the people that I'm seeing who work with these teenagers, the first thing you notice is that even the most hardcore street workers that come from prison and addiction and have been through hell are not bragging to you about all that they've been through because it's not about them, it's about these young people. It's really important to Roca that they hire people who are healthy themselves and able to completely leave their ego behind.

The people who are working with young people, they get to experience their own change as well. It's really important. If you're working to promote change, it's important to understand change in your own life. Whether it's quitting smoking or getting up earlier every day or getting 15 minutes a day of financial organization in your life, the one thing we're all doing is changing or actively participating in positive change in our lives is something that we all do. The more we do it, the more we are of the stages of change in our own lives. Everyone that works at Roca has to look at change in their own lives. It's not like you're pathologizing clients or something like that. We all have to do this. You get so much more out of that kind of work, that kind of holistic way of looking at things, than anyone gets from the work that involves these political alliances and battles and so forth, when ego gets involved.

How was your writing process different with Easter Rising as compared to All Souls?

All Souls was my first long writing project, something I knew I had to stay on for however long it took. And we were hoping that it would be two years. And it was. But working on something that's book-length was completely new to me, and I knew I could tell a story, but how do you tell a string of stories that all make sense and give a bigger picture? Every time I told a story, it was revisiting a lot of trauma, crying a lot, I'm puking, sometimes having to sleep a lot, sometimes not being able to sleep for a few days. A lot of times, feeling really fulfilled with each one because I wrote a story and cried and got through it and came out the other end feeling really good about it. But then the next day you're like, "Holy shit, I gotta tell about 50 more of these."

I think most writers when writing from personal life stories, when you write one story it seems like you know you're on the right path when one story leads to 10 more. I keep a list at the side of my desk of "Oh, shit, I gotta tell this one." Most of it is stuff you're not looking forward to delving into. When you’re reading All Souls, there are occasional humorous breaks, whether you're in the midst of a tragedy, you're at my brother's wake, and Grandfather makes a quip about my brother wearing his boxing rope in the casket. Something funny happens. When I would take the reader from the depths of tragedy to something funny, that was really more for my sake in the writing process. That was really saving me and getting me through it. As it turns out, the writer needs those humorous breaks as much as the reader does. Thank God they're in there.

With Easter Rising, it was much more consideration for the structure. It was more literary, piecing the book together. The first part of the book is these desperate escapes to get the fuck away from this place. It's a jettison out of the neighborhood. The middle parts are the turnaround and some epiphanies. The latter part of the book is the return home and learning to embrace everything you come from. That is universal. There are people that get back whether they come from the Old Colony project or Wellesley. That's the universal basis.

My studies, when I did end up going back to school and went to college, I majored in history and minored in English, the greatest thing I got out of my school time was having these conversations. I couldn't think about writing the way I do if I hadn't had those conversations. There's only so many stories to tell; it's the details that change. But there are only so many types of stories. With All Souls, there was much more puking this stuff out. Easter Rising was much more cerebrally structured.

It does feel thematically structured, from the escape at the beginning and the homecoming at the end. It also brings out the humor, too, because it allows you to respond to the book in a way that's not "Oh my god! He went through all these things!"

When I do readings now, it's more enjoyable for me. All Souls was really heavy. Easter Rising, even though there's a lot of trauma in that, it's dealt with in a much lighter way. When I'm working with audiences, I have a much better time, and we have a lot of laughs. It's like a whole different experience. But I needed to get the All Souls stuff out. I needed to tell the truth about South Boston at a time when nobody inside Southie or outside Southie had ever mentioned this stuff. There was an urgency with All Souls, a moral urgency, truth-telling. I was doing my own Truth & Reconciliation Commission.

With Easter Rising, it felt more like writing. I get much more commentary about the writing, whereas with All Souls, people were so overwhelmed by tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy, this multi-episodic, heavy truth-telling. And people were overwhelmed by the episodes of All Souls so much that they never mentioned the writing. And I was pretty proud of the writing because I found this voice at the pure observation that I had when I was 8 years old or the pure observation I had when I was 12 years old. It was hard to get there. Nobody noticed it because they were sucked in by that voice. With Easter Rising, people are much more appreciative of the actual writing because they've already been through the multi-episodic tragedies of All Souls. They already know that, so they're able to look at it as literature.

What comes out funny and beautiful is the description of the punk scene, how you find something in punk and how it compares to some of the other people you're surrounded by. You're getting something different from what they are, and there's a comedy in that. What did music do for you as a young person?

I always think it's strange that music is probably the most important thing in my life. When I think about what I cannot live without, or if I had to go to the desert island ... it's all about the music, really. And water and maybe some nuts and berries. It's strange to me that music is such a huge part of my life, yet I don't play an instrument because it's really not about that. The other thing is that, initially, with the punk stuff, my first exposure to punk was seeing these really rare, unique individuals downtown that everybody was screaming at who were very proud to be themselves or proud to be whatever they wanted to be. That's what I saw, and that's what I was pulled into. I didn't listen to the music until I stole a Sex Pistols record and brought it home and then heard the music. That helped me imagine something new. At 13, I'm able to imagine only because I'm engaging in the destruction and reinvention that punk is all about.

One of the things I like about nonfiction and memoir writing is that you discover. You don't go into it knowing at all what you're going to discover. The things that the reader discovered are things that I discovered and that I still discover when I read these passages. I was actually drawn to not necessarily punk music. I was drawn to punk attitude. Eventually punk became a genre of music with a capital "P" and a particular sound usually related to three chords, based on the Ramones or whatever. When I think back to the bands I was listening to, whether we were talking about the Sex Pistols or the Clash, Mission of Burma, none of these people would fit into one genre. They didn't sound alike. Nobody looked alike. There wasn't a punk uniform, really. That came a few years later. You'd see leather, but it was like thrift-shop things. The Sid Vicious look, the leather jacket with the spikes sticking out the back, eventually became the uniform, but people didn't sound alike, people didn't look alike, you able to do whatever you wanted, be whoever you wanted to be.

For me, the main thing was escaping normal. The worst thing you could be was normal. For me, coming from Southie, normal was to do drugs, to do pills, to smoke angel dust, and to have no aspirations beyond the block. That was normal, and that's what unfortunately sucked some of my siblings into the grave. And I didn't know what I was doing at the time. It was really an act of desperation. But that magnetic attraction is less about music than it is about something else. It's about finding ways of looking at the world, which all young people have to do. They all have to go through that.

I was asked recently--I hate this question--what's the number-one best album ever. I never trust people who have an answer to that question. That has to change week to week, year to year. I'm thinking of the things that I really love that I'll listen to until the end of my life, and it's usually stuff like Sam Cooke or Nina Simone, some disco-era stuff, some hard-rocking punk. Then I realized that there is one album that allowed that to be, and that would be The Clash's Sandinista. On Sandinista, here you have the Clash, they're rock icons, you put the needle on the record, and you're expecting some hard shit, and they're doing this stuff in weird calypso and reggae and dub and rockabilly. Every genre under the sun, and it was punk rock. That record expanded what it meant to be punk. That was '81. We'd all be hanging out listening to Nina Simone, we'd all be hanging out listening to Jamaican roots or old rock 'n' roll from the '50s or whatever. It was funny talking to my niece who is 19, her age group, when she was in high school, she told me people in high school were much more divided by music than they were back then. The rockabilly kids are different from the indie kids who are different from the punk-rock kids or whatever. The only kind of labeling and rejection we did was the whole New Wave thing, but that was more a reaction to the commercialization of punk because that's what New Wave was.

You show the diversity of punk at that time and how you find something in the Jamaican dub music that's so different from anything you've listened to before but you find it resonates with you.

Coming from Southie, I was especially like, "These are the people everyone at home hates," so I was much more curious. That might have had a bigger impact. And then to explore reggae culture and Jamaica culture, I ended up going to Jamaica a lot when punk was over for me. Throughout the late '80s and the '90s, I went to Jamaica almost every year. I was pulled there by the music. I haven't written about that yet. After my first trip to Ireland, I went to Jamaica, and I had already fallen in love with Ireland, and I went to Jamaica, which was the birthplace of a lot of the music I loved. I couldn't believe how similar it was to Ireland, and how aware people were not only of their own history. That was pretty amazing to me, the working class and poor people, just like in Ireland, were aware of their history, aware of their colonization, they knew what that work meant, but because of the way I looked, they identified me as Irish. They knew more about the colonization of the Irish than Irish Americans know.

It crosses over.

In All Souls, you see it more on the local level, trying to find common ground, between Roxbury and Southie, between black and white. And in Easter Rising, it's still that common ground issue, but it's more between the Irish and other non-white colonized groups. It's the common ground thing and how amazing it is to me that we're so divided and we forget our histories, when we don't acknowledge who we are and where we come from, which is what Irish America has done. On those two levels that's an important awareness for me that's informed all the activism I've been involved in, whether it's in-the-trenches activism or the writing activism.

For the paperback issue of Easter Rising, you’ve changed the subtitle to emphasize the “roots and rebellion” and the cover art: why?

The cover's artwork--it's definitely a younger cover. I was totally in favor of it when they talked about the younger cover. One of the things what was incorrect about the Easter Rising cover is that it's very much like All Souls, so it looks like "All Souls 2." It's important to say, "This is not All Souls." Some people are not going to read it because some people are so attached to All Souls as a book. People get really attached to that book. I know from myself that if I love something and it's a book or a movie and I'm attached to it, I don't want to see "Part 2" because I'm afraid of it fucking with my attachment. Easter Rising is not All Souls. It's a whole different story that's about a different thing. All Souls is more about the family, about the neighborhood, about race and class, about the busing riots, about Whitey Bulger, that's all stuff going on around me. Easter Rising is more personal and it deals more with the issue of how do you survive all that painful stuff, how do you transform it. Easter Rising is more about my personal resurrection, my own transformation from my post-traumatic stress existence to one able to embrace and acknowledge all of that stuff and turn it into something different. They're completely different books. Everyone in the picture on the hard cover of Easter Rising is a kid. But the story of Easter Rising, it doesn't begin until I'm 13.

The subtitle--I love the subtitle, which was the original subtitle I wanted, "A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion." In terms of the artwork and the subtitle, it tells you more what the book's about. There are two different spots in the book--the early punk-rock new-world explorations, the violent break with everything you come from, reinvention. But there's the return to more traditional stuff that's not very radical or rebellious. Both sides of the book deal with roots--in the beginning rejecting the roots that I come from and becoming uprooted. By the time you get to the "heavy head" piece, that's about being completely without roots, completely uprooted. And the latter part of the book is embracing my roots. Both ends of the book also deal with rebellion because the initial rebellion is this punk rock individualist rebellion which did save my life, but the other part of the book, through Irish history and culture, through a real understanding of Irish history, culture, and contemporary politics, I'm able to find myself closer to home in the whole rebellious history of the Irish people.

Where are you with the screenplay for All Souls?

I wrote the really long version of All Souls. I've written the extended version, and it has to be edited down. That was really hard to get All Souls, which is multi-episodic and could be a 10-part series, into 3 hours is really difficult. The Writers' Strike put it on hold, and in the past couple of weeks we've been back to work. I'm editing down, and I've found ways. It's so hard for me because this stuff is my life. It's personal, so it's hard to get rid of stories that I'm really attached to. You just have to find ways to take the most important element of one story and put it into another story. With pencil, I've done that with the All Souls draft, and I've figured out a way to turn it into a less-than-two-hour movie. I'm psyched about that. After I get through the book tour, I'll go to LA for about a month, and we'll work on getting the studios involved, hopefully soon.

So, you're doing a St. Patrick's Day reading in town?

I will be doing a reading and a talk onstage with Joe Keohane from Boston Magazine, and this lecture is part of a series that's going be in memory of Sister Corita who did the gas tanks in Dorchester Bay. There's a little controversy around her back in the day, and younger people don't know about her at all, so this is a way to keep her memory and spirit alive. We want to do a St. Patrick's event that is about what it means to be Irish, to take the Irish pride stuff, but to talk about the best way to celebrate what's great about the Irish. To me, it's to take all of what we know from our history, our historic experiences, the history of colonization and immigration, to be able to apply it and make it relevant to people who are going through all of the same issues. All the stuff that refers to Irish history, it's not to say look how far we've come, it's to talk about how we keep this relevant. We know our history, and we are not those people anymore. There's a new class of immigrants that are the victims of discrimination and hate speech. How do we take what we know when we were in that position and make it relevant to what's going on today, to promote understanding among other groups similarly colonized, also immigrants on these shores, and that's how we keep the conversation relevant.