Volume 67, Issue 4  

Visiting Writer Enhances
Book Project with Guest Reading

by Alan Goldsmith

Though this year’s Book Project text is The Plague, by Albert Camus, the Project’s global focus is “Writing in the wake of trauma: responses and responsibility.”  To that end, on October 1st, Yeshiva hosted a reading of “The Resurrectionist,” by Richard McCann, an assistant professor at American University and co-director of the University’s Master of Fine Arts writing program.

McCann’s essay deals with the aftermath and complications of his liver transplant.  Throughout the reading, McCann described the overwhelming, guilt he faced through recuperation.  A desire to understand the liver donor’s life and cause of death resulted in a ‘resurrection’ fraught with conflict.  He wanted to meet her parents, yet dreaded the possibility they might view him as a carrier of their daughter’s body or soul.

“How could I refuse them?” McCann read.  “I owed these people everything.  I was alive because of a decision they’d made while standing in the bright fluorescence of a hospital corridor.  Wasn’t the liver more theirs than mine?”

Despite tremendous illness, McCann wrestled with survivor’s guilt while friends around him perished of AIDS.  Yet while he felt the pressure of surviving while others died, he also felt an odd sense of togetherness after his diagnosis of hepatitis.  “It had been a relief to be diagnosed, to have a progressive disease that threatened my life, to be bivouacked with the others… I’d outlived everyone, even myself.”

The guest reading and question-and-answer session afterwards was well received by attending students.  “It was a wonderful opportunity to hear a writer read his own writing, and hearing his own voice made it all the more personal,” said Yeshiva College senior Matt Schneider. 

Faculty were equally impressed: “The session after the reading was fantastic,” said T. Kenny Fountain, Assistant Director of the Writing Center.  “He didn’t just answer, he also really encouraged questions.  It felt like a classroom environment.”

A main theme of the essay was McCann’s lack of direction after receiving his new lease on life that the transplant provided him.  He compared himself to the New Testament character of Lazarus, brought back from the dead by Jesus himself, yet not spoken of by the gospel after the actual act of resurrection had occurred.  The future was an afterthought, and now McCann had to deal with making the best use of his incredible opportunity, while remaining happy just to be alive at all.

McCann has also published poetry, including the Beatrice Hawley Award-winning book of poetry Ghost Letters.

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