All Things ASE
From Bath to So Long The Sky… and back to Bath.
Amongst the excellent US faculty coming to teach for us this Summer is Mary Kovaleski Byrnes, Senior Lecturer II in Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College. She is also an alum of ASE.
In this piece from our 2019 Alumni Newsletter she reflects on how her time in Bath inspired her book So Long The Sky.
Emerson College Professor, ASE Summer tutor and alum, Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
When I think back on my time in Bath, I have the same kinds of memories shared by most alums in the pages of this newsletter: I will always count my semester there as among the most formative four months of my life. Everything about that time was inspiring. My housemates at Clarendon became some of my closest friends, and the professors and staff are some of the best people I’ve ever met. I learned so much, and I had more fun than I could have bargained for.
The Spring ‘01 ASE cohort
In addition to all this, my semester in Bath with ASE was also when I learned how to travel. On one of the first weekends, my housemate Kerri came back from the train station with two tickets to Edinburgh, looking for a travel buddy. I jumped at the chance—this was the start of a lifelong friendship (and a lesson in the importance of spontaneity). With all of my housemates, I got the opportunity to discuss how the countries we visited shifted our perspectives and opened our minds to new ideas and possibilities. I also found myself in conversations (usually in pubs and bars) with local people who had no reservations discussing politics and history with me; it was a completely different kind of educational experience. With each of these conversations, I realized how much more I wanted to just keep traveling.
At the end of that semester, Kerri and I put a map of the world on the floor of the living room and promised each other we’d meet up after graduation – in the furthest possible place from home someone might find us somewhat employable. This turned out to be New Zealand. We got work visas, which introduced me to student work exchange programs. From there, I got a job with a non-profit sponsoring international students on work visas to the US, which sent me back on the road again, this time to Eastern Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia.
This is a long way of introducing my book of poetry, So Long the Sky, published in May 2018. In short, this book got its very beginnings during my time with ASE. That’s not to say any of my writing from that time made it to the book. (There’s a special place in heaven for Kieron Winn and anyone else who had to read the poems I wrote in my early twenties.) But the book is concerned with travel, migration, and immigration, and a lot of the poems came out of experiences I had with work I did abroad. My semester with ASE was the precursor to all the travel I did afterward, and to my current job, teaching writing and literature at Emerson College. Having that space for intellectual engagement and travel in the Spring of 2001 was essential for me in starting to understand how I would need to navigate the world with an openness, fearlessness and curiosity if I was going to experience it at all.
From So Long the Sky, by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
LIMBIC MORNING
If smell is the strongest sense connected
to memory, I can find you anywhere.
A city bus, wet woollen coat –
and suddenly I’m back, out of all this,
to your porch swing, lifting over summer’s street, brown bread rising in the kitchen,
mothballs in the lilies to ward off rabbits.
Like this you’re resurrected to my morning.
Uproot with you the long cord of your life: Carpathian mountains, ocean cradle,
children huddled in a bed, babies you’d outlive. Wars and winters, church bells calling up the hill –
time enough and never time enough.
That summer day I asked you, When your husband died, what happened then? You said, Good Riddance, without looking at the child,
maybe thinking I was old enough
to glimpse the deep mine of your truths.
Summer buzzed around us. Your eyes stayed
on the mountains, and I said nothing,
breathed in mothballs, wanted lilies.
Today you’re giving me another chance.
You’ve brought what’s far beyond your grave: vague scents of loam, your mother’s country.
Dirt under nails, rose-petal rosary
between fingers. Who were you then?
You can’t tell me, only whisper words
in a long-lost tongue, and in my mind I hang on
to your steady housedress, your hands
pulling cucumbers, holding a bucket, painting a fence.
Mary will be teaching ‘London Calling/Londyn Dzwoni: Transnational Narratives of Migration and Belonging’ in Bath in Summer 2024. Applications are now open.