Chicago’s greatest unknown writer is waiting for me at the only occupied booth at Jerry’s Snack Shop on the northwest side. It’s a Thursday afternoon deep in Polish territory, though a flyer posted outside seeks a lost cat in Spanish as well as English and Polish. The greatest unknown writer sits with a soft drink and a library copy of Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, wearing a bright blue T-shirt from last year’s Chicago Public Library program Reading Is Art-Rageous. She works part-time as a page at the Jefferson Park branch, for a couple dollars over minimum wage. She has a BA in sociology from Rosary College (now Dominican University) in River Forest and an MA in sociology from Fordham University, and has completed some doctoral work in anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York (her abandoned dissertation was on the revival of the Irish language). She’s also taught college and served as a teacher’s aide in Head Start, and until recently she was a volunteer cleaner of candle wax–a “handmaid of the altar”–at her Catholic church. She lives in a house near Jerry’s, with two domesticated cats and a feral one that just visits.
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There were eight of us in the group, and on one end were the traditionalists. Scherer was on the far opposite edge, dishing out swoons of language–metaphysical, metaphorical stuff. She played with words like no one else in the group, and you had to use your intuition and not your intellect to understand them. In her writing, what is spoken becomes visible. Her stories remind me of the children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon. Whatever he drew with that crayon became real. In Scherer’s work, words that are trapped inside a person find release. “Where do the words go on a cold morning?” she asks in “The Desired Word: For John, on the Second Anniversary of His Death,” published in the MacGuffin in 1998. “Perhaps they burrow underground in the mistaken belief that dead lips, warm in their graves, will speak them warmly again.”
The story continues: “Pity all the words confined to dictionaries, labeled Obsol., Arch., Dial. For ever so long they haven’t felt a warm mouth around them, they haven’t been bandied on a living tongue for so long. They haven’t been chewed between bites at the breakfast table, rushed out of the mouth on the flavored breath, garbled between mouthfuls, spilled out of full mouths that shouldn’t speak but do. Before the breath has a chance to catch itself. When there isn’t time to be polite. To wait turns. To raise hands as if again at school. Are these the secret pleasures of living words?”
She reminds him of eastern European writers. “Many of them have what we think of as an odd, introverted take on things. They don’t come at anything the way we do in western Europe and America. They come at things weirdly, and so does Cathy. It takes immense courage to do that stuff. People want to be accepted, learn how it’s done, then do it that way. Cathy doesn’t do it that way.”
In another fragment she writes: “I lie on my bed. My dead brother is lying on top of me. He is stiff and cold. He is taller than I.
In our writing group, she was quiet and didn’t say much about other people’s work. She dropped out a few years ago. I asked her why. She said she was intimidated.
