Carrying a suitcase-on-wheels, the virgin Mary shows up at a middle-aged writer's home. Mary stays a week. The two new friends visit the mall. In the lingerie department, a mannequin models underwire bras. "Not my type," Mary says. "More suited to that other Madonna, the really famous one." Diane Schoemperlen's "Our Lady of the Lost and Found" (Harper Collins) also muses about Life, Time and History. I loved meeting the Virgin Mary, and although we don't have a spare bedroom, I would gladly shift my writing schedule to accommodate a visit, and could offer our Coleman blow-up mattress.
Since I'm working on a novel about a girl who invokes the ghost of Queen Victoria, I'm drawn to authors' anachronistic characters. Or maybe others' renditions only confuse the writing issues. Either way, when I read Our Lady, I felt like the Virgin Mary was in my livingroom--which in a way, she was.
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