Hi. I’m Julia.
From my first childish scribbling, through my early discarded fiction and trashed poetry, my work as a reporter and a free-lance journalist, and now my fiction and creative nonfiction, I've believed that literary writing had something crucial to tell me about how to live my life, about what matters and what doesn't, and how others live their lives, too. A voracious reader myself, I’ve always longed to share what I thought I knew with other readers.
Photographer: Morgan Triska
I never aspired to become a New York Times bestselling author.
I write much too slowly for that. Like Philip Roth’s infamous doppelganger Nathan Zuckerman in The Ghostwriter, I can spend days ‘turning around’ a single sentence; a week or more on a paragraph. Instead of trying to write books I hope will sell a million copies, I write about the things that matter most to me, compelled by the notion that they might also matter to readers.
I was born in northern Maine in the middle of the 20th century, the second oldest of what became a brood of eight, facts crucial to who I am as a writer.
(It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts. Angela Carter, The Werewolf.)
I was born a searcher, forever in conflict with my rigid Scots-Irish Catholic family. Mysterious yearnings drove me. We moved often through states in the northeast, never quite settling anywhere. Each move was an uprooting. I struggled to find my footing wherever we landed. Coming of age in the late ‘60s, I was steeped in turbulence both at home and in the world. Sometimes I was an unwitting or deliberate provocateur; other times a victim, and always a witness. All of these emerge in my writing.
In my novels, short stories and essays I meditate on the experiences of ordinary people.
I hover deep inside their private lives, lives that almost always mirror larger issues in the world. My characters – like those in my story collection, and the female protagonists of my novels - are multi-layered and contradictory; an amalgam of good and evil. They are often confused about their place in the world and they struggle to find a stable sense of self. They obsess over fraught relationships, moral yearnings, crazy loves and flimsy hatreds. No matter how difficult their situations, they confront experience with sharp eyes, ironic wit, and a potent sense - sometimes furious, other times befuddled - of their own historical matrix.
I grew up in a family without stories, one reticent about its restlessness, its struggles, and its many migrations and also about its hopes and dreams.
In my writing I’ve tried to fracture this long history of evasions and equivocations, secrets and silence. That’s why I write from a place deep inside my heart. Besotted with written language, I began my writing life as a poet and I have worked hard for many years to deepen and develop its use. I hope that my prose glistens with memorable imagery and the patterns of figurative language I have worked so hard to create.
Julia “writes with a psychological savvy and family wisdom few others have. Her words vibrate to the thought waves between sisters, mothers and daughters, parents and children, wives and husbands. Her stories tug at a single threat until a whole fabric unravels, and then they work the miracle of reweaving.”
— Poet, memoirist and mentor, Molly Peacock
Milestones
MacDonnell’s first story collection, The Topography of Hidden Stories, was published in 2021 by Fomite Press. It was a finalist in the 2021 National Indie Excellence Awards, and a winner for short stories in the 2021 Big NYC Book Award. Her second novel, Mimi Malloy, At Last!, was published by Picador in 2014. People Magazine called it, “Cathartic, suspenseful and droll…Mimi offers a hopeful take on both old age and bad blood.” Her first, A Year of Favor, was published in 1994 by William Morrow & Co. Kirkus Reviews praised it as “Powerful first fiction…A convincing evocation of life in a Central American country…and a compelling portrait of a gutsy, post-feminist heroine.”
MacDonnell, born in Maine, has lived in many towns in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island. She earned her B.A. at Stonehill College in No. Easton, Massachusetts, and masters degrees at Columbia University in New York and Temple University in Philadelphia. She is professor emeritus in Rowan University’s Department of Writing Arts where she taught creative writing and journalism for a quarter of a century.
MacDonnell’s various awards and accolades include two individual fiction fellowships from the N.J. State Council on the Arts, a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, a New York Press Club Nellie Bly Cub Reporter of the Year award, a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Excellence in Journalism Fellowship, a N. J. Press Association Public Service Journalism Award, two Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowships for writing residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and three Wall of Fame Teaching Awards at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., where she is professor emerita in the Department of Writing Arts.