Book Signing Will Be Saturday at Fort Dodge Public Library
By Sandy Mickelson
The Messenger
March 4, 2007
http://www.messengernews.net/Lifestyle/articles.asp?articleID=7715
Memories don't always bring soft smiles and sighs. Sometimes they hurt.
Sometimes when they're gathered, they take on the feeling of fiction. They can't be real — or so it seems.
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Fort Dodge author Janet Clark has published her first novel, "Blind Faith," and will have a book signing at the Fort Dodge Public Library on Saturday. Photo by The Messenger / Sandy Mickelson |
Fort Dodge author Janet Clark has used her memories to create a novel called "Blind Faith," the story of a Roman Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandal as seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy.
But this made-up 12-year-old boy, Jack O'Donnell, is made up of many memories from Clark's life.
"I was sexually abused as a small child by my father and by a priest in Cedar Falls when I was 20," she said. "Eighty to 90 percent of abused children are abused by someone they know and trust."
She said her father, highly decorated for his efforts during World War II, suffered from post traumatic stress syndrome. "He was a gunner and a medic in the Air Force. It was very traumatic for him. He never got the help he needed."
Telling this story wasn't her first thought, she said. She had planned to outline what turns a man into an abuser.
"It just came out of me," Clark said. "It wasn't the book I intended to write. I was thinking more about my father — what would make a person become a monster and do stuff like that."
She had intended to turn young O'Donnell, once abused, into an abuser himself, but said, "during the course of my book, I became attached to him and I rescued him. This being fiction, I could do that. I could rescue him."
Clark worked with 1st World Publishing out of Fairfield to get her novel published. It's self-published, with help from the company.
"I tried to do it the other way and was getting discouraged with how long it was taking, so I went this way," she said. "They really helped me. They recommended where I should cut some pages and they recommended that I put an interview with the author at the back. Those questions could be a springboard for book clubs to talk about it."
Above all, Clark wants people to think about the possibilities and talk about it.
Although "Blind Faith" is not autobiographical, it does carry the feelings of shame, pain and a sense of isolation common to survivors of sexual abuse.
Clark attended a women's spiritual retreat in Cedar Falls when she was 20 years ago. She'd been involved with drugs and alcohol and, already full of self-doubt, she wanted time to reflect on how she could change her life.
The weekend women's retreat seemed perfect. Until her one-on-one time with the priest, that is.
She's past being angry. She's past being hurt. She's in therapy, trying to tie her feelings together in the least-objectionable way. But she wants to let the world know abuse by priests does happen.
"This priest had done it before," she said. "He'd been shuffled around from church to church, and the bishop and other church officials knew before they made him spiritual director at a retreat for women."
She felt violated. She felt used. She felt discouraged that such abuse would be allowed to continue, and that's what she hopes her "Blind Faith" will show.
Show, first, that such abuse does exist — even when it's happened before and could have been stopped. Second, that being abused does something to the psyche, taking away the innocence of childhood and the faith of adults.
Third, Clark hopes to show how such abuse can happen even when those who should protect the child know nothing about it and, by that, make people more aware.
A lifelong reader, Clark said she knew when she was 10 years old that she wanted to be a writer. Anyway, that's what it said in the diary she wrote back in 1968 and '69. Ironically, she said, her father was "quite a writer — a more elegant writer" than she sees in herself.
What happened to her as a consequence of abuse wasn't a nervous breakdown, Clark said. "My therapist says nerves don't break down. But whatever it was, it was real."
She still has flashbacks to being abused at the women's retreat, she said. "It's strange the things that can trigger them."
Contact Sandy Mickelson at (515) 573-2141 or smickelson@messengernews.net
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