Magie Dominic

WINTER RETREAT FOR WITERS, 2025
with Magie Dominic

"Four Days of Writing Proficiency"
Beginning on Thursday evening, and continuing until Sunday you will learn how to focus and organize your ideas, how to transform a simple writing prompt into a complete story, and how to tap into the world of work submission with hands on experience. You will learn about the three types of publishing and what you need to know, and you will learn how to develop a daily writing routine.

When
Thursday, January 30, 2025
to
Sunday, February 2, 2025

Where:
THE CENTER AT MARIANDALE,
Phone: (914) 941-4455
299 N Highland Ave.
Ossining, New York

#MariandaleCenter #WLUP #MagieDominic #writing #retreat *NY

There's a great review of STREET ANGEL in @AntigonishRevie bit.ly/1P7BqaH
"Dominic writes as Julius Caesar spoke, as Dickens wrote, and.....".

A new, major review for "Street Angel",
http://coastalspectator.ca/?p=4173

"The first thing you need to know about Magie Dominic’s memoir, Street Angel, is that it is a poetic and circular windstorm, both humorous and disturbing. The second thing you need to know is that the tale is steeped in Newfoundland language and sensibility. Third, Newfoundland has been called “the other Ireland.” If you know these things, all else becomes clear".

….” Bonne Bay was our only family vacation. It was the price of a tank of gas, but it was one full week inside the gates of heaven……….”

This is the link for an Op-Ed published in the National Post, November 13.
http://bit.ly/1yDFkgI
It’s about wonderful childhood memories of summer, 1950’s, and the Newfoundland/Canadian landscape.

QUESTION AND ANSWER #1 FROM INTERVIEW WITH OPEN BOOK ONTARIO, JULY, 2014

Open Book:
Tell us about your new book, Street Angel.

Magie Dominic:
Margaret Atwood said in a 1995 lecture; “If you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography -- but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.” At the risk of being accused of one or the other I wrote Street Angel, a memoir. Street Angel tells the story of a young girl in a Newfoundland fishing village in the 1950’s, and chronicles sixty years of a complex, secretive family.

The story begins in 1956. Patti Page and rock and roll are on the radio, and Ed Sullivan is on TV in black and white on Sunday nights. The Russians are sending dogs into space and the dogs have spacesuits and helmets. I’m eleven years old and in the back seat of my father’s blue Chevrolet, on my way to the home of my father’s brother and his wife, where I’ll care for their two baby boys for eight days.

The hamlet is the first time in my life that I’m away from what I call my mother’s affliction- her terror of darkness. My mother blocks doors with furniture, seals keyholes with face cloths, secures curtains with large safety pins, closes her eyes, places blankets over her head and lays motionless. But it’s never enough. She finds temporary solace during the day, alone in her garden, but she sees a terrifying world in the darkness. The hamlet represents my first time away from that world.

Part One chronicles the eight hamlet days and shows, through a series of flashbacks, how important those early years are in shaping who we become as we age and how time seems to speed up later on. The story touches upon the little streets we walk as a child and how those little streets are the universe. I live my life through the radio, Hollywood movies and the majesty of Newfoundland’s wilderness.

Several controversies are expressed in Street Angel including a mother’s hallucinations and schizophrenia; and the violence of the 1950s Catholic nuns towards the children who were put in their care. My mother is Scottish Presbyterian, and my father is Lebanese Catholic, making me, in the eyes of the nuns, the product of a “mixed home” and one step away from living in sin.

The hamlet is an opportunity to think about my life for the very first time. My father’s dry goods store failed, he lost the store and our home and we were forced into the woods to survive and lived in a cabin for two years without electricity, heat, hot water, neighbours or any means of communication. During the cabin years I rode to school with the egg delivery man, in the egg truck. I spent a good deal of time roaming around in the woods, communing with wildlife. Children can quickly adapt to life’s changes, unlike adults who may struggle for years.

Part Two of Street Angel moves with quick brush-stroke chapters to the 1960s in New York with its unbelievable highs and lows, to the end of the seventies and eighties, to the end of the millennium in Toronto, to the present. Time plays a role as the story moves forward and back from the point of narration.

Street Angel chronicles sixty years of a complex, secretive family, in a story about violence, adolescence, families, solitude and forgiveness.