The only way people get out of Worcester is in a body bag, people used to say when Mal was growing up in the Main South neighborhoodâcrash-landing in house after house like true wrens, her familyâs nutty avian namesake.
Raising Wrenns recounts her trips back to Worcester after the men in her family lost their lives; first her dad when he was shot, and later her brother who committed suicide jumping off a roof. On these trips she revisits the shoddy apartments they perched in, resurrecting her macabre, sometimes comical childhood memories of the streets where they fought bloody and birdlike for their survival.
The book is cordoned by fantastical and scientific stories comparing her familyâs world and personality traits with those of wrens. It also contains a creative history of Worcester, a former factory town plagued by poverty, addiction, and violenceâa cycle that Mal, unlike her brother and father, was able to escape.
The only way people get out of Worcester is in a body bag, people used to say when Mal was growing up in the Main South neighborhoodâcrash-landing in house after house like true wrens, her familyâs nutty avian namesake.
Raising Wrenns recounts her trips back to Worcester after the men in her family lost their lives; first her dad when he was shot, and later her brother who committed suicide jumping off a roof. On these trips she revisits the shoddy apartments they perched in, resurrecting her macabre, sometimes comical childhood memories of the streets where they fought bloody and birdlike for their survival.
The book is cordoned by fantastical and scientific stories comparing her familyâs world and personality traits with those of wrens. It also contains a creative history of Worcester, a former factory town plagued by poverty, addiction, and violenceâa cycle that Mal, unlike her brother and father, was able to escape.
It is no accident that my familyâs namesake is the wren. Wrens are scrappy little birds renowned for the way they flitter from place to place, building shallow rooted nests wherever they land: in old leather boots, sawed off soup cans, cardboard boxes, or old drain pipes. Wrens are the dumpster divers of the avian world, picking delicacies like caterpillar larvae and beetle meat out of thorny scrub; gnawing down on pebbles and mud. Wrens are sharp-beaked scavengers. They scurry quickly like mice. They are driftless. My family are diminutive, crafty people with an instinctive talent for making ourselves invisible and for quick-witted flight. By the time landlords came to enforce the evictions, all they found was rented furniture and piles of garbage. We pecked at the food other people wouldnât touch; we ate potato chip crumbs from between couch cushions, government cheese, hot dogs charred over cigarette lighters, and waited in line at the soup kitchen. The wren has a specific piercing song that tends to agitate humans. My dad also liked to croon off-colored tunes, half-remembered lyrics passed between men in cruddy bars, where mirrors hide behind plastic containers of year-old pickled eggs. Random listeners passing by may have assumed those songs were coming from tone-deaf men, but my father bellowed them with fierce Irish pride, calling out to the free-spirited birds our ancestors held sacred. The Irish wren is one of few birds heard in the winter, when the snow buries porches and the birdâs body heat plummets. Wren families often roost together to keep warm. This is like the way my twin brother and sister and I used to snuggle together in one bed, especially when the heat and electricity had been shut off. We learned to hug each otherâs bodies lightly, my sister and I ready to jump onto the floor if my brother peed the bed. Poets romanticized the wren for its heartfelt ability to build a home wherever it went. I think they underestimated the memory loss and chaos that occurs from such a crash landing. It might have been nice to have been a wren if weâd had more room to travel, if our parents had coasted on the wind to somewhere exotic; perhaps to the Irish or Swedish lands my parentsâ people came from. But we never flew farther than the two square miles of triple-decker houses we perched in after theyâd been abandoned by former factory workers in the Main South neighborhood of Worcester. We lingered there in between worlds with half-slitted eyes, stuck in those blocks like they were a glue trap. We didnât step too hard because we knew these places might tear up parts of our feet or our bellies. But we never left them. There was something off in Worcester. It was the place we blamed for everything. The lack of jobs and the shitty houses with windows like loose teeth we had to duct tape in the winter were all circumstances of living in Worcester. In Main South people didnât fuss with ambition. They nursed beers in dark, sorrowful bars that smelled like giant ashtrays. They sat on the stoops talking trash and chucking smoldering cigarettes on the sidewalk. They were the working class, the factory workers and bricklayers who lost their jobs when the city started going to hell, who ate fish on Fridays and smudged their foreheads with soot on Ash Wednesdays, who sunk their tiny butts onto barstools and poured vodka onto pavement as they toasted the loss of their friends to knife fights and cirrhosis. My father rarely spoke of his immediate family, whose alcoholic roots twined through their bodies and showed themselves in the burst capillaries on some of their faces. He prided himself on his hearty ancestorsâthe ones who traced their heritage to those who immigrated before the potato famine and dug their spades into rock to build the Blackstone Canal, Main Street, and who laid track for the railroads that turned Worcester from farmland into a city after the famine in 1845. When my parents were married at City Hall on Halloween 1973, when trick or treaters roamed the streets in costumes and bums set fires in trash cans, my mom was already four months pregnant with me. I was born the following February. My mother wanted to name me Danielle, but my father insisted they name me Marilyn, the name of the wife of a friend whom he was not-so-secretly madly in love with. The leap of leprechaun logic that makes you name your daughter after your fantasy wife would escape most folks, but I guess it made sense to my dad at the time. I believe the twins, my brother Davey and sister Lisa who were born just over a year later, may have been the result of an equally dumbfounding sensibilityâa race my father decided to have with his brother over who could have more children. Our existence in any official capacity was short-lived. Our parents never kept anything: not furniture, clothing, birth certificates, or social security cards. Iâve never so much as seen a photograph of the twins as babies. We didnât go to doctors or dentists, and our report cards lingered on kitchen tables for so long that by the time my father signed them they were stained from coffee rims and cigarette ash. We rarely spoke about anything important. After I left Worcester, I found it difficult to remember much about the city. It was as if my memories were somehow still stuck there, clapping between the drafty houses. I didnât want to go back there to breathe in the chemical-laced air, to peck in the rubble for shards of all the bad things that happened, or to have to eat spoiled food again. It wasnât a matter of cowardice. I just didnât see the point of paying such close attention. If I went back there, Iâd be faced with who I really am. I would have stayed outside and airborne forever if I could help it, if the people Iâd loved hadnât remained in that glue trap so long that they started losing parts of their hearts and their bodies. Tragedies occurred. Funerals stuck. One by one, they called me back. Some ancient people believed that the feathers of the wren could save a person from drowning. Sailors took them with them when they went out to sea. Those feathers were of no use in a place that was landlocked.
Told in parts that compare the characteristics of the wren with that of her family, Mal Wrenn Corbinâs Raising Wrenns resuscitates her childhood memories growing up homeless in Worcester, at the time a defunct post-industrial city in central Massachusetts. Out of work and relying on welfare checks to get by, Malâs family were never able to settle down in one place long enough to call it home. They were constantly evicted and her siblings eventually separated through foster care and adoption, with Mal being the only one to set out on her own with a mission to leave Worcester and the lifestyle she inherited behind.Â
Mal describes with directness and clarity the effects of her imposter syndrome when it comes to her desire to belong anywhere, with anyone. She believes this very deeply throughout the book, to the extent that she refuses to impose when friends and relatives offer her a place to stay or take her in when she runs out of options. Yet as she ages and returns to Worcester in a series of unfortunate tragedies, Corbin comes to terms with how one's journey of self-discovery doesn't necessarily end after closing the chapter on a past life.
Corbin's section breaks are where many of her more poignant reflections about the concepts of family and belonging take on a literary shine. Each section margin contains a soft, hand-drawn wren perched over text that compares the bird's traits with that of her family's. She manages to transform the common perception of the wren as a mere pest into a more complexâand even heartbreakingâspecies. Wrens are often particularly possessive, flamboyant, territorial, and unwilling to settle down. No one can say for sure why they go to great lengths to wreak havoc on other birdsâ nests, or why they puncture or displace robin eggs, or why they build âdummy nestsâ they never use. Nor will we ever get a chance to truly understand such behaviors with the same kind of conviction we claim to have for our own species. Corbinâs comparative study between the wren and the Wrenns, however, sheds serendipitous insight on how we can learn more about ourselves from our animal likenesses.
Readers entranced by New Englandâs hold on characters from Ottessa Moshfeghâs Eileen and Jennifer Haigh's Mercy Street will find that Raising Wrenns offers a vivid and stark depiction of how one's sense of belonging can evolve with time and self-acceptance.