Books
Side by Side but Never Face to Face
a novella and stories by Maggie Kast
Greta, the narrator of most of these stories, is wrenched from a tightly circled marriage to Manfred, her Austrian husband. After his death she seeks therapy and battles her compelling attraction to Hal, her therapist, knowing her desire will forever be denied. As love transcends both loss and disappointment, her old ideas of desire dissolve and invite new desiring.
Hal, a scientific-rationalist, meets a Hmong family and is challenged by their animist beliefs and practices, echoing the alienation he once felt from Greta’s spirituality. Love transforms impossible conditions of cultural alienation and creates a new respectful sense of communion.
Questions of “otherness” — the distance it threatens and the connections it promises — are making headlines today. Religion, nationality, culture and age are all bases of otherness. This book struggles with and through otherness, asking, “Can love, the ultimate connection, be found in old age?”
“Maggie Kast has a gift for illuminating her characters’ inner lives, and these beautiful stories, as they shuttle gracefully between past and present, Europe and America, strike a profound and satisfying balance between intimacy and mystery. . .a wise and powerful book about marriage and parenthood, about survival and transformation.”
“From the joy of ‘Joyful Noise’ to the tense marital ambiguities of ‘Side by Side but Never Face to Face,’ these fictions speak to each other across generations, ethnicities, and religious beliefs. Maggie Kast has assembled a resilient and vivid group of characters from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Hmong of Door County, Wisconsin. Connecting all these is the story of Greta, who, attached to the others by heritage or circumstance or love, seeks to understand herself and the ineffable. A gripping and richly thoughtful collection.”
“Maggie Kast’s Side by Side but Never Face to Face is a fascinating and unusual collection. Her fiction is what we might call adjacent to fact – convincing and complex stories spun from but not intended to be autobiography. They combine family and marital history, spiritual longing, profound questioning of boundaries between cultures and, finally, via a beautifully evoked passionate encounter, a reassuring bringing-together of body and soul.”
A Free, Unsullied Land
A novel by Maggie Kast
Nineteen-year-old Henriette Greenberg takes her first steps away from an abusive home on the dance floor of a Chicago jazz dive in prohibition-era Chicago and is enraptured by this new music. Struggling to escape a mother who doesn't like girls and a father who likes young women all too well, she submerges herself in bad sex and political action. She meets and falls in love with Dilly Brannigan, a graduate student in anthropology. Ignoring his warnings, she travels to Scottsboro, Alabama to protest the unfair conviction of nine young black men accused of rape. She adopts Dilly's work as her own. A powerful funeral ritual gives her hope of re-writing her family story but tempts her to violate an Apache taboo, endangering her life, her love, and her longed-for escape from home.
The Crack between the Worlds, a dancer’s memoir of loss, faith, and family
A Memoir by Maggie Kast
A car crashes, and Maggie Kast, at the peak of a modern dance career, loses a three-year-old daughter. Raised without religion and now mired in grief, she senses a persistent connection to the little girl, a love somehow more powerful than the brute fact of death. This awareness leads her, over three years, to the Catholic Church. After the accident, her marriage is greatly stressed by the entrance of religion into married life, and she and her husband each accuse the other of being too religious or too secular at various times. Despite conflict, dialogue keeps the marriage intimate and vital.
Following study of liturgy at Catholic Theological Union, she teaches and tours sacred dance nationally and internationally, exploring the arts as a spiritual path. Moving forward and looking back at once, she discovers early hints of religious experience in childhood celebrations, encounters with art, and marriage. Her husband dies. Now a single parent of a ten-year-old and a developmentally disabled teen-ager, as well as college-aged sons, she continues a faithful search for understanding.