Visions of Fanny, a remembrance
whenever I eat chocolate chip cookies and drink red wine, Fanny sits across the kitchen table from me and we clink glasses sharing ideas and plans late into the night.
And Indian Cove where our children ran on the beach together and once we all lived near each other, Sukey and Fanny and I. When we were living it, the days were full of children and writing and helping each other. When we were living it, life was ordinary time, it’s only later one realizes how magical, how full of heaven those days were despite struggling to make enough money, to take good care of the children, to find time to do the work, the writing.
Two women with small children, both having just left a husband, Fanny and I were drawn at the same time to a little seaside town, where her sister Sukey (Susan) was living. I had come a little earlier and rented a thinly boarded grey house on a cove where the sounds of slow waves rolled in the night. Fanny, arriving a few weeks later, found a kind of cabin on Indian Cove, a bit more back in the wood, a close walk to me, facing the sandy beach and the inlet. Susan lived not far away on a small road into the woods. All our young children were close in age. Fanny taught at Columbia in Manhattan and I worked at The Poetry Project on Second Ave and 10th street. We took turns watching each other’s children when one or another of us were at work in the city.
Our rentals not winterized, we both moved into warmer housing closer to the town green. Fanny to Fair Street, a block that claimed more pre-revolutionary still-standing houses than any other street in America. Fanny’s had been converted into an upstairs-downstairs inexpensive duplex apartment. Downstairs her Korean neighbor, a single mother and son, soon formed an extended family with hers, suiting Fanny’s love of living with others, who were in a similar situation, perfectly.
Fanny spent any extra time in those days ardently studying the writing of screenplays, while our children created their own delightful skits and performances, directed by Fanny’s daughter, Ann-Lucien, in an upstairs bedroom. One snowy winter day we took the children back to Indian Cove to play in the snow and Danzy, in full snowsuit, hat, and mittens, walked straight into the sea as we went hollering and dashing after her. Fanny’s young son Maceo took up dirt bike racing on a newly constructed track the town built for the BMX bike kids. She, drawing on her deep roots in happening, daily family life, wrote Race of the Radical, a fast-paced adventure tale set in the world of BMX dirt bike racing for young readers.
My small press, Telephone, published Fanny’s The Amerindian Coastline Poem in 1975, and in 1982 we put her title Alsace-Lorraine together, collating and stapling the pages there on Dunk Rock Road in Guilford, Connecticut in the barn and trimming the books on the gigantic hand-operated paper cutter in the garage that had been donated to Telephone by the University of Connecticut, via the wonderful George Butterick, renowned for his brilliant editorship of The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives at the University of Connecticut Library.
Eventually Fanny moved back to Boston. Our small town difficult for her bi-racial children and more opportunities for work for her in a city. Later, I moved west. We kept in touch always and even when time had gone by in multiples, whenever we met up, as if no time had passed, we immediately connected.
Invited to Houston to read together, we strolled “old town” buying matching friendship rings we vowed to wear whenever our paths crossed. Another time when we read together at Beyond Baroque in LA, Fanny’s devoted friend Rae Armantrout, drove up to the reading through heavy cinders and smoke, fires raging in the hills between her San Diego home and LA. Being barely able to see through the ash collecting on her windshield, she made it to the reading! Memorably, Fanny’s son Maceo and my son Kyran, both youngsters then, were at that reading too, sitting together. A magical night.
In Boston, Fanny would point out her family’s historic presence in the houses and streets, then we’d be laughing and gossiping stories over wine and dinner. The three of us, Fanny, Sukey, and I, reunited at Sukey’s home in Guilford the summer of 2023 for a wonderful spirited get-together. I last spoke with Fanny in late May of this year, 2025, making hopeful plans to visit her in the summer. She had just been to Ireland to see a play by her late mother, Mary Manning, being produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and connected with so many of her friends there, both personal and family.
I sent my love to her via phone when she was in the hospital unable to speak, just short weeks later.