Marlboro literature and writing professor John Sheehy is well known in the community for his frank and heartfelt writing style. His writing has once again reached a broader audience in the July/August issue of Eclectica (Vol. 19, No. 3), an online literary magazine for discerning readers. In a nonfiction story titled “To Thee Do We Cry,” John reflects on the life and relationships of his mother, Rita Sheehy, who raised John and his ten brothers and sisters in Montana.
“I cannot account for my mother. She is too many,” writes John. “Rita Sheehy, mother of eleven. She is too many, and I am so far away. If Rita is the sun in my family’s solar system, then I am the most distant planet, the last to arrive and arcing through a cold, dark Plutonian orbit far from Montana, far from the place I have always called home, the place that gave my mother’s life meaning, and far from her who gave it to me.”
“To Thee Do We Cry” is John’s first publication in Eclectica, which is one of the web’s longest-running online literary journals and offers wide-ranging, quality material for the appetites of well-read readers. He has previously published nonfiction in Fourth Genre and Potash Hill, and had a story in the book The Good Men Project. He has been teaching at Marlboro College since 1998.
