From the heart

Barbara Black

Creative Writing student Karen Rooney has just published her first book. Its style is breezy and confessional, like a long gab with a friend. Although it appeared in local bookstores only three weeks ago, she says readers are stopping her in the street to congratulate her.

In Me and My Two Sons: A Journey of Healing, she relates the story of her tumultuous personal life. Both of her boys had serious health problems at a young age; one had part of a lung removed, while the other had two heart operations. She was in and out of hospitals seemingly throughout their childhood.

The boys had different fathers, which is another part of the story. By her own admission, she made a lot of mistakes. “I lied. I manipulated. I thought I could control everything,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Knowlton.

“Fortunately, I learned from my bad behaviour. I learned to accept things I couldn’t control, to leave them in the hands of God.” She added, “Sorry, I know people don’t like to use that word.”

Rooney has been a Concordia student since 1989. She started in a psychology program and switched to commerce, which is still her major, taking time out when she had to. Then she started taking courses in creative writing.

With a dramatic screenplay in a drawer and two novels in the works, Rooney considers herself a fiction writer, so the inspirational memoir is a departure from her normal practice. She has been a writer “since Grade 6,” and took her first course from the Quebec Writer’s Federation at the Atwater Library.

She says the creative writing courses at Concordia may have helped with her fiction but not with her memoir, except that attending university teaches the discipline that writers need.

Some of her English courses have been intimidating. “The one I’m taking now — I nearly freaked out. The teacher is using words like hermeneutics and semiotics, and the other guys in the class are nodding as if they know what he’s talking about.” But maybe they don’t have a screenplay in the drawer.

Her publisher for Me and My Two Sons is Price-Patterson, a small Quebec press that usually handles local history, such as the biography of Sir William Hingston published last year with input from Concordia’s Centre for Canadian Irish Studies.

Rooney knew how lonely and anxious the parents of sick children sometimes feel, so she started the Heart of Life Fund for the Montreal Children’s Hospital. It has raised more than $800,000 to benefit cardiology patients.

Her boys are now fine. Kyle, who had the heart operations, is 13, and Matthew, who was born prematurely and had a cystic lung, is 21, six foot three and a student in the John Molson School of Business. Rooney’s ambition is to graduate before he does. She’s close to finishing her degree, but she says she’ll always be a student: “I’m a lifelong learner.”