Ted Morrissey and his book Aspiring Child A Biography of Mary W Shelley in Sonnets

Jeff Williams:
Welcome to Community Voices, a production of NPR Illinois. I'm your co-host, Jeff Williams, and in the studio today, Ted Morrissey. Ted, how are you doing?
Ted Morrissey:
I'm good. I'm good. I appreciate the invitation.
Jeff Williams:
I think of you mostly as an author. I just thought I'd have you in and tell us a little about yourself, maybe your trip to Baltimore.
Ted Morrissey:
Yeah, I think of myself as mainly an author or writer also, especially a writer of fiction, although I write all kinds of things. Yeah, I was a high school English teacher for 38 years, and I was an adjunct at a bunch of places, including UIS and Benedictine. And then I retired, technically, in 2021, but I'm an awful retiree. I've been almost busier in retirement. I teach online for a couple different universities. And in 2012, I started my own press, in part because I was having so much trouble finding places to publish my books, and I knew other authors were having those same problems. So, I started...
Jeff Williams:
I'm sorry, what year was that again?
Ted Morrissey:
2012, I believe.
Jeff Williams:
2012, okay, yeah.
Ted Morrissey:
I started 12 Winters Press, and so I've been publishing most of my books through that press, but also the books of others. When I did retire in 2021, we added a couple different elements. I added an online journal, 12 Winters Journal, to publish new short stories, narrative non-fiction, that kind of thing. And then also we started a podcast about 3 1/2 years ago, A Lesson Before Writing. So, I was wearing all those various hats when we went to Baltimore last week. That was the AWP conference. AWP is the, I don't even know what AWP stands for. It's.
Jeff Williams:
I looked online to see what it was.
Ted Morrissey:
Well, it's like one of those acronyms where there's actually a lot more letters than three or words than 3 letters. But anyway, it's the big writing and publishing conference that's held every year. And it was in Baltimore last week. And I hadn't been to it since it was in Chicago, I believe, in 2012. But a couple of my authors, my podcast co-hosts, Brady Harrison and Grant Tracy, it really encouraged me to get a booth at the book fair… so I did, and it ended up being a lot of fun, quite honestly. I didn't have super high expectations in terms of enjoyment, but it was great. There were about 13,000 people there, writers, editors, publishers, agents, students, and on and on and on. And it was just kind of nice to hang out with people who are very much kindred souls, can relate to the same kind of experiences that I've had as an author. author and a publisher and a teacher of writing and that kind of thing. Well, I also am a librarian. I've worked for Sherman Public Library as a part-time librarian for 26 years. So, I get a really interesting front row seat to like real readers in the real world, how they react to books and so forth. And quite honestly, my books and the books that I publish are not what would be called popular, but there in Baltimore, I was just shocked at how, I mean, we sold bunches of books. I mean, I had a couple of book readings and both books sold out pretty quickly. One of my authors was there with me and he had a book reading and both of his books sold out. And you get around like discriminating readers who are looking for something a little more than just your typical pot boiler page turner. And they can find some readers and some popularity. So that's encouraging.
Jeff Williams:
That's exactly. It's like all of a sudden, you are in your… maybe not for everybody, but for that niche for YOUR group of people. It's like all of a sudden… wow! Okay, this is cool. These people… MY people, you know? I love it. That's cool.
Ted Morrissey:
I've had the good fortune of being able to travel quite a bit in recent years. And I was invited to speak at a conference in Vietnam. I went to a conference in Singapore a couple years ago. We were in Killarney, Ireland last year. I've been to Morocco, Germany. You know, again, I am very fortunate to be able to do that kind of travel. And I meet all these different writers and people in the profession from all over the world.
Jeff Williams:
So those are all like professional engagements when you're doing those.
Ted Morrissey:
Yeah, often. And it's amazing. I can feel like a closer connection to someone from Vietnam, for example, or Pakistan or India, more so than the average person I run into at the grocery store. No offense to that person… but we just have so much in common. And it just really, especially given our current situation, it just really emphasizes that people can get along and be supportive. It's our governments that are making us clash and, cutting off, making travel restrictions and all these kinds of things. But, especially writers, people who are creative, artistic, musical, whatever you want to say, they're drawing from the same human fountainhead of emotion that we're all drawing from.
Jeff Williams:
Right, I had done one of my more non-objective pieces of artwork.
Ted Morrissey:
Yeah, that was the Necessary Poetics of Atheism, which was a collection of poetry and essays by three authors, none of which were me. But I really appreciate your letting us use that image. You know, it's interesting. My dad was an artist. He went to Chicago Art Institute. He ended up in advertising, so he did mainly black and white stuff. But I've had that sort of strand in my DNA, but I never felt very confident. Not confident about it, because I wasn't myself trained as an artist. So, for the first few years of my press, I designed the books, but I didn't have confidence in like the cover art. And so, I would ask local artists such as yourself or I'd find an image online and I'd request, you know, permission to use this or that. And people were very generous and let me do that. But eventually I thought, you know, I really need to give this this thing a try, this art thing. And so starting with, I think around 2017, 2018, I started also designing the art for my book covers. And I don't have your skill set, I wish I did, but I have some creativity and have made some pretty cool covers if I say so myself. And I just enjoy that aspect of it. And oftentimes when I'm working on writing a book, I'll start to think about the cover design and the book design years before I might finish writing the book. So, it's like, I need to finish this book because I got this really cool cover I want to put on it. Now I need a book to put it in, you know, that kind of thing. But it just, and I'll tell you what happened. We were having, there was an art show, a friend of mine came with me and we were there and a couple artists were sharing their work probably about the time that I had asked you about the gallery piece. That's probably one of the times I saw your piece and they brought out the, I think they had taken like a bunch of, switch plates you would put on the wall, just stacked together, glued them together in a somewhat not straight way. So, they had a little bit of curvature to them, and they had painted them yellow. I said to my friend, I could have done that. And he's like, yeah, but you didn't. They did.
Jeff Williams:
They did, right?
Ted Morrissey:
Oh, that's a great point.
Jeff Williams:
It is a great point.
Ted Morrissey:
And it (can be) just that one little comment even said, (and you start to think…) okay, Yeah, that's pretty cool. I can do that. So, I for my most recent novel, I made a series of sculptures, I guess you would call them. I had a bunch of leftover gravel in the garage for some landscaping I had done. So, I brought it inside, I got some black construction paper, and I just started putting pebbles on the paper to make like pictures. And then I would just take the cardboard, the thing I had on like a clipboard. I'd take it over to where there's good light in my house. I'd use my cell phone camera and took a picture of it and the cover and the other artwork inside came out really cool! It just really opened up a whole new Ave. for me just for my own creativity and things that I enjoy about the whole process. But that particular experience opened me up to other possibilities. What other media, you know, can I use or what other tools can I use to create art? art that isn't just sitting there with ink and watercolor or whatever it is. And so that's, again, been very liberating and just a lot of fun.
Jeff Williams:
So were you from the Chicago area then, Richard?
Ted Morrissey:
No, I grew up in Galesburg, Illinois.
Jeff Williams:
Oh, Galesburg, Knox College and stuff, yeah.
Ted Morrissey:
Absolutely. I was a newspaper reporter for seven years in high school and college for the Galesburg Register Mail of a sports reporter.
Jeff Williams:
Okay.
Ted Morrissey:
But my dad was from Galesburg, but he had gone up to Chicago to go to the Art Institute. And he had us do a lot of artistic stuff growing up. So it was kind of in the background there. It's just I end up going into the writing. You're putting words together. My brother is a musician. I mean, so his creativity came out and guitar playing and writing songs and that kind of thing.
Jeff Williams:
Okay, yeah, nice. Our band opened for the Flaming Lips at Knox College… on the quad. It was cool! I'm actually in Galesburg a good amount… going to the Blick (Art) store up there and getting art supplies. It's kind of cool. It looks like they do a lot for the arts in that community.
Ted Morrissey:
I grew up with the influence of Carl Sandburg. He was from Galesburg. And so, as a little kid, you'd (have these) yearly pilgrimages to the Carl Sandburg home, you know. And I still reference that. My most recent book that came out in January is actually a collection of sonnets. It's called ‘Aspiring Child’, and it's a biography of Mary W. Shelley in sonnets. I mentioned in the book that, I was born and raised in Galesburg, as was Carl Sandburg. So, the important, even though I haven't thought of myself as a poet until more recent years, I certainly always had respect for poets and, what they could add to our, thinking about the world and that kind of thing.
Jeff Williams:
That was the book that you had out in Baltimore then?
Ted Morrissey:
It was one of them. It was one of the book signings that I had. It's, like I said, came out in January and it's just gotten terrific reviews and very, very positive responses, including from some Shelley scholars, you know. And when I first started writing it, was, you know, basically a year ago, it was January 2025.
Jeff Williams:
You started writing it a year ago?
Ted Morrissey:
Well, yeah. And I'd wanted to write some songs. I'd written some sonnets a few years ago, and I enjoyed the process, but I hadn't written any for, I don't know, four or five years. So I was kind of feeling that itch again. So kind of over the holidays, 2024 into 2025, I was just kind of thinking about what, you know, what would I want to write about? What subject would I want to focus on? And my earlier sonnets that I had written were to my father, so they were in apostrophe after he had passed away. But I kind of felt I didn't need to go there any longer. But Mary Shelley has been a huge influence. You're the author of Frankenstein, among other things. And a couple of my novels, well, one is a sequel to Frankenstein. Another is also kind of Mary Shelley based. So, I thought, well, I taught Frankenstein for 25 years. I know quite a bit about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein and some other of her books and letters and things. So, I started writing these sonnets. Originally I was going to write, I don't know, five or six, kind of scratch the itch, send them out maybe for publication and little journals here and there, get back to a novel project that I'd been working on. Well, suddenly, I don't know, five or six turned into... And then soon I had, 30 or 40 enough to think about a chapbook. And then pretty soon 40 turned into 80. And then pretty soon 80 turned into 100. And so, okay, I've got a full-blown collection here.
Jeff Williams:
Yeah, you do.
Ted Morrissey:
And it wasn't originally going to be a biography of Mary Shelley, but that's just kind of what it evolved in over these 100 sonnets. So that's kind of how I ended up titling it and billing it. And then when I So it took me about three months to write them, and then I took another three or four months to revise and to organize them into some order of some sort. And so that's when the idea of the... really turning it into a biography, per se, of Mary Shelley really came to light in the organization of the sonnets. Because I had about 80-some when I started organizing them, and I realized there were certain aspects of her life that I'd paid a little more attention to, and maybe less so in other cases. So I went back and wrote a few more in those areas of her life, the years of her life that I hadn't paid as much attention to, like her childhood, for example. And so I just kind of fleshed out I basically bracketed, and I decided this pretty early on, that I bracketed it between her birth in 1797, and then she wrote Frankenstein, and it was published in 1818, and then she and Percy and her stepsister, and kind of an entourage of people went to Italy for five years. And then she came back in 1823, now famous or if not infamous as the author of Frankenstein, but also now a widow and with one child to raise with no real means of support. So I wanted to bracket it, and she lived to be in her 50s, so she was still a very young woman when she came back from Italy, but I wanted to focus on those years from her birth and to her return to England. finding herself, known as the author of Frankenstein at a very early age. And so that's what I kind of focused on for the book. And now I'm in that really difficult part of the writing process, finding people to read it.
Jeff Williams:
Oh, right, so, where can people get your book?
Ted Morrissey:
Pretty much everywhere. I mean, obviously Amazon, but if you have a favorite indie bookstore, go online. You can find it there too, or should be able to. And so yeah, it's pretty much everywhere. fully available.
Jeff Williams:
And the name of the book again?
Ted Morrissey:
Aspiring Child. If you go to tedmorrissey.com, you'll find more information about that in my other books than anyone could possibly want to know.
Jeff Williams:
All right, Did you happen to see either of the recent films, like either ‘The Bride’ or ‘Frankenstein’?
Ted Morrissey:
I haven't seen The Bride yet. I think it just came out last week and we were in Baltimore. In fact, I tried to find it at a theater in Baltimore. But I did not. But oh yeah, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. Yeah, it's not very true to the book and that's perfectly fine with me. I know a lot of times directors, people who adapt books will get a lot of criticism because it varies from the text. Like, you know what, if you want to experience the text, read the book. This is something else. This is another form of art inspired by the book. I'm interested in seeing what this particular person can do with it. Oh my gosh. And I wasn't surprised. I love Guillermo del Toro's work.
Jeff Williams:
Unbelievable work, yeah, always. I loved that movie. I thought it was so good. But like you said, not true to the book, but it is… Guillermo del Toro doing his thing with it. You know… like (he’s done with) other(s), like the ‘Shape of Water’, and ‘Pan's Labyrinth’ and some others.
Ted Morrissey:
Yeah, he had a series on, I think it was Netflix also, I think it was called ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’. It was like, sure, it was kind of a Black Mirror-esque, but kind of more classic horror kind of things. And that was really, I mean, I think it was only one season, so there's maybe a... Eight episodes or something, but all just real, and he introduces them kind of like Rod Sterling used to introduce the old playlists on episodes.
Jeff Williams:
Yeah, love that, love that.
Ted Morrissey:
Yeah, so it's a very cool vibe, but yeah, just a great storyteller. You know, and I've found over the years that the director or the whoever does the adaptations, the screenplay or whatever, in the process of making some alterations, they can bring out aspects of the original that are so easy to miss. Like, I taught Frankenstein for 25 years, mainly to high school students, but a few times at the college level. And so, you asked me, I figured like I know that book pretty darn well. I wrote a couple of Mary Shelley books of my own. And yet, you get a really intelligent, really cool adaptation. It's like, oh my gosh, I never thought about that character in that way. But, you know, he's absolutely right. You could. You could go there. Right, So it just brings out aspects of the text that even someone who's super familiar with it may not have noticed on their own.
Jeff Williams:
Ted Morrissey, thanks a lot for coming in. The time flew by. I mean, we might have to do another segment at some point.
Ted Morrissey:
I'd be happy to do that, absolutely.
Jeff Williams:
Right on. Well, once again, thank you very much, Ted Morrissey.
Ted Morrissey:
Okay, thank you, Jeff.
Jeff Williams:
Community Voices is a production of NPR, Illinois.