Dave Marnell on Faith Shearin

While researching the personal information of Faith Shearin I have learned one thing for sure, that she would make a hell of a secret agent. So reclusive is any remnant of Faith’s personal life that I would not be surprised to hear that she is deep undercover preparing to thwart a highly intelligent terroristic operation. So anyone looking to steer clear of covert agents, cross Baltimore off your next haven of hate because that is where Shearin is now stationed, accompanied with her husband and daughter.
Faith’s work, particularly the poem’s she presents in The Empty House, her second book of poems, read like a well tuned memoir. What she does amazing is make interesting an otherwise un-interesting life. I felt as if I was being slowly manipulated into enjoying Shearin’s thoughts about naming children, raising pets, and moving before realizing that I did enjoy them. Faith resist the temptation that naturally exists in all writers to exploit certain circumstances by adding some dramatic twists or trying to move readers with some deeply clever metaphorical tie that leave’s the casual reader stuck in an oddly placed knot. She writes what her eyes see, in a very humble, yet powerful tone. This could be the result of her prior job as a high school English teacher.
Faith has a will to feel weird but she does it with such a crystal clear vision that it feels more like a purebred understanding of love and life. Of course understanding such abstract issues is almost an oxymoron, so what I mean by that is she takes us with her in her pursuit of trying to understand such things. The poem Each Apple I think is a prime example of this quest. Reading The Empty House I noticed that Shearin uses a lot of question marks and I enjoyed that because for some reason it gave the book a conversational feel, a necessary tone for her style (or lack there-of), clarifying a more inviting voice then pushy.
Faith won the Swenson poetry Award in 2002 off her first book The Owl Question. The Swenson Poetry Award is a competition open to everyone, whether published or not. It simply requires English text, original poems and a manuscript between 50 and 100 pages, to go along with a $25 reader fee. The winner has their book published by Utah State University Press, which is what happened in Faith’s case. The Empty House is published by Word Press, a company whose publishing credentials appear to be stashed away somewhere in Area X.

My Favorite Quote:

“One of the mysteries in aging for me has been how much I feel like my former, younger self. I am continuously surprised by my image in the mirror…. Young people I meet, I imagine them as peers. I get embarrassed and sad to be reminded of my age.”

http://english.wvu.edu/centers-projects/west-virginia-writers-workshop
- Dave Marnell