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Despite retirement and a relaxed demeanour, Michael Hennessey is hard at work. Off and on this past year, he has been revising the manuscript of a novel, his first attempt at a longer narrative after a writing career built on plays and short stories. As much as he loves the challenge of making revisions, the work is intense. "I can really work a lather up," he chuckles. "A story is never far from your mind until it's finished. Your emotions are more ready to react . . . and everything around you seems to fit into what you're doing."
In his short story collections An Arch for the King and My Broken Hero, and in plays ranging from "The Lesser Man" to "Legacy," Michael Hennessey's strongest writing is uncompromisingly Irish, Catholic, and Prince Edward Island in outlook. His richest evocations of place evoke the Charlottetown of his youth.
But while his formative years at Queen's Square School provided inspirations for later writing, they didn't necessarily provide encouragement for his vocation. "If anybody at Queen's Square School thought you were writing or doing something creative, you'd probably be beaten to a pulp to start with," he laughs.
Michael didn't talk much about writing; he just did it. He first submitted work for publication while at Saint Dunstan's High School. The literary review's editor's first response was "Where'd you steal this from, Hennessey?"-but he accepted it. Michael would eventually become editor of that publication (the Red and White)-and stayed on at St. Dunstan's past high school, beyond University, to work for St. Dunstan's University and UPEI for 25 years. "I figured out one time that I spent more time on that campus than anywhere on the Island-including home."
Since an early play, "A Well Developed Sense of Guilt," he has not again written about his university experiences. "Maybe my memories of it are too pleasant," he reflects. Neither has he written stories from his seven years in the Navy in the 1950s-and his Navy journals are regrettably lost.
Still, Michael's plays and stories are rooted in experience. "I firmly believe that no matter where you live, all you need to know to write forever is around you, in your milieu," he says. Yet he doesn't downplay the importance of creativity; he says writing is about "creating the world the way you want it to be."
The statement seems strange, given that he has never shied away from writing a darker vision of life in Charlottetown and on PEI. His stories and plays have unflinchingly told tales of grisly murders and of the more ordinary physical and psychic violence that erupts in families and communities. Michael's curiosity as a writer has drawn him to explore the question of evil. "People do awful things. . . . But you may live 60 years," he says, "and one week, or one month, of all those years you do things that are bad-but otherwise you lived as you think you should have lived. As a writer, I try to seek some good in every situation. Some ray of hope."
To whit: his 1983 play, "The Trial of Minnie McGee," based on the infamous murder of six Island children, poisoned by their mother. As "a twist" on the familiar story, Michael focussed on the mother's trial. "I saw in this woman a possibility of winning sympathy," he said. "Here she was-34 years old, eight kids. She saw her husband rarely, and he was not in the best of shape when she did see him. . . . I set up the play to show that Minnie was really trying to poison him." He admits, "It was a distortion of the case." Nonetheless, it offered him a chance to explore that "ray of hope." Recently, Michael Hennessey received PEI's Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literary Arts, acknowledging the significance of his plays and short stories. What he has contributed most to the Literary Arts is an unflagging and unflinching vision of PEI, where, according to him, "There's drama in every life."