Minnesota writer Carol Bly's sense of social concern grew 
out of a wartime childhood holiday she celebrates in a new memoir.

Mary Ann Grossmann/Pioneer Press

That young woman is now Carol McLean Bly, 69-year-old author, ethicist and writing teacher, who recalls a wartime holiday in her bittersweet new memoir, An Adolescent's Christmas: 1944.

``I was terrified of the Gestapo,'' Bly says, looking back 55 years. ``That's when it got through to me that people were tortured and murdered by other people. I couldn't get past it. But my nightmares weren't regarded as serious. The family would say `that was just a dream.' ''

Bly wanted her fears to be taken seriously then, and she wishes today's anxious young people would be taken seriously, too.

``America has a kind of kidding culture, so sometimes young people have no place to go with serious ideas,'' she says. ``Even Anne Frank complained about her family's endless round of jokes. Kidding leaves a child with a slightly nicked feeling. It's hostile.''

Kidding. Bly despises this verbal form of bullying. And bullying is something she despises, too, whether the bully is a creative-writing teacher humiliating a student or a third-grader on the playground.

She can't stand meanness, people who don't tell the truth, and conversation that politely dances around a subject. She believes people can learn empathy for one another, and she thinks writing should mean something and not float on pretty technique. She's bothered by social-class snobbery in America, which she explores in a beautiful essay, ``The Maternity Wing, Madison, Minnesota,'' published in Imagining Home, an anthology of Minnesota writing (University of Minnesota Press).

Bly has been writing about these themes in what one critic calls ``an ethical rage'' since her first book, Letters From the Country, was published 18 years ago. Written when she and her former husband, Robert Bly, were living on a farm in western Minnesota, this essay collection is considered a Minnesota classic.

Letters From the Country and An Adolescent's Christmas should be read as companion books, through which reader can trace the development of Bly's thinking from her teen-age years through her time as a young wife and mother coming to terms with life in a rural community in the late 1950s through the '70s.

This fall, after successfully completing treatment for breast cancer, Bly is looking forward to publication next year of two new books. And she's still either alarming or charming people with the force of her personality.

``With Carol, there's no `How are you?' '' says Mark Vinz, poet, editor and Moorhead State University teacher. ``She gets right into telling you what was bothering her. If you don't know her, it can be off-putting.''

Vinz will never forget Bly's reaction to a poem he wrote about being startled by geese flying overhead.

``Carol liked the poem, but she thought it should have been written in prose, and she wanted to know if I realized those geese could be killed,'' Vinz recalls with amusement. ``She said, `That's the trouble with you poets.' I had tried to capture the moment in this little poem, and she wanted it to be a big poem about geese and their place in the world.''

A few years ago, Bly surprised an audience at a writer's festival where she was going to be on a panel. Striding onstage, without any introduction, she turned to the audience and angrily said, ``Do you know Weyerhaeuser is selling our trees to Japan?'' The college kids loved it.

Emilie Buchwald, publisher of Minneapolis-based Milkweed Editions, has published three books and an essay (``Bad Government and Silly Literature'') by Bly. In March, the Minneapolis-based literary press will bring out a collection of Bly's new and selected fiction, My Lord Bag of Rice.

``Carol's perceived fierceness is in the service of intellectual honesty, which she revers,'' Buchwald says. ``She's never mean-spirited. She checks you to make sure you're not feeding her anything but the truth. After that, there's great loyalty and great friendship.''

Despite the power of Bly's personality, she has an endearing quality that could be perceived almost as shyness.

``As outspoken and opinionated as Carol can be, she is humble and modest in the best Minnesota sense,'' says Todd Orjala, University of Minnesota Press acquisitions editor for regional books. ``That's part of what's so appealing about her personality.''

Carol's strong personality was obvious even when she was a girl, says her brother, Malcolm McLean, former president of Northland College in Ashland, Wis., and the youngest of her three older brothers.

``Carol always had a sense of who she was, of things you can and cannot do. We all knew she was an unusual person of imagination, lively intelligence and wonderful heart and spirit,'' recalls McLean, who lives in St. Paul.

The McLean children often didn't see their mother for long stretches of time, because she had tuberculosis and was in and out of sanitariums. She died in 1942, and Carol tells in her new memoir of half-heartedly trying to keep family holiday rituals going two years after her mother's death.

Carol was a senior at Wellesley (class of 1951) when she met Robert Bly on a blind date. They were married in 1955 and went off to Robert's family farm in Madison, 165 miles west of Minneapolis, ``to live the life of thinkers and writers in a country setting.'' Until 1962, there was no running water in the house. But there was, Carol says proudly, ``a splendid outhouse, spic-and-span clean, with a bookshelf of first books of poetry.''

Life on a farm near a town of 2,242 people was ``an eye-opener'' for the young woman who had worked in New York and Boston after graduating from college.

``The thing I loved about the farm was the un-ironical, unsneering kindness,'' Bly recalls. `'I liked the way people didn't stand around when someone else was working, as the rich do. It's amazing how people pitched in. And I was pleased at the friendliness between men and women.''

Those who knew Carol in those days are amazed at what she accomplished. Besides caring for two sons and two daughters (which included taking diapers into the town Laudromat), she handled the business side of an important literary journal published by Robert Bly and William Duffy, and she sometimes worked in the fields.

``I was strong, and I thought everybody was strong,'' she says simply, looking back on those years. ``Farm work is interesting, and I like hard work.''

Sometimes, Bly must have felt like she was holding open house on the farm, which was a magnet for poets such as Donald Hall and James Wright, as well as young wannabe male poets whom she called ``Robert's groupies.'' Many of them stayed for meals, but they had to do their share of chores before they ate.

One of those visitors was Bill Holm, now a poet, essayist and teacher at Southwest State University in Marshall.

``Carol and Robert's house was filled with books, marvelous talk about literature and high-spirited humor,'' Holm recalls. ``I wrote awful poems, but they never humiliated me. They showed enormous generosity to young people.''

In the fall of 1966, Bly experienced ``a life-changing thing,'' when her husband co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War. ``That was the first time it occurred to me that a person should have a public stance about his country,'' she says. ``I saw that poetry should reflect concerns.''

In the early '70s, Carol was invited to write a monthly column, ``A Letter From the Country,'' for the Minnesota Public Radio magazine edited by Patricia Hampl. These short essays would become Letters From the Country, published by HarperCollins in 1981 and in two subsequent paperback editions.

``I learned to think, to use the writing centers of my brain,'' she says of writing those short pieces about rural life and her neighbors. ``I could write in the study while the children climbed over me.''

Among Bly's proudest accomplishments during her years in Madison was establishment of the Prairie Arts Center in an old church. She points out that Madison is ``the only town in the area'' to have its own arts center, which honored her contributions at a celebration in August.

Since Bly left the farm, she has taught at various private colleges and was 1998-99 Edelstein-Keller Author of Distinction at the University of Minnesota. She spends part of her time at her retreat in Sturgeon Lake, and in summer she teaches creative writing through the University of Minnesota Split Rock Arts Program. Her classes fill immediately.

``Carol is extremely popular with Midwesterners, but she also draws students from all over the country,'' says program director Andrea Gilats. ``Students say she is the best teacher they ever had. That's because she affirms the humanity of the writer.''

Affirming the humanity of writers is the basis for the book Bly is completing, Saving Ourselves: New Ways of Learning and Teaching Creative Writing, to be published next year by Anchor/Doubleday. In it, she again urges writers to pay attention to truth. This is controversial advice in these days when some writers are being told it's OK to embellish something to make a better memoir or poem.

``Lying is very big now,'' she says. ``Literary scholar Gene Bell-Villada points out that you only get art for art's sake in Western industrialized countries in the last 200 years. Nobody else thinks it's OK to make up stuff in an essay or the poem. Poets made up stuff about Auchwitz and Dachau, and now essayists are lying about being Holocaust survivors. You cannot lie. Edith Wharton said we need to write truthfully for those who died.'' 

Return to Holiday Collection