Comments given at the Franco-American Women's Institute site:

--"Si quelqu'un a du respect pour les traditions, on peut prendre ces traditions et creer des traditions nouvelles. Je garde les traditions avec mon metier de bibliothecaire et avec ma poesie."

--"I was born in Quebec in 1958 and immigrated to the US in 1979, all by myself. I wanted to go to California..so I did and I married a Californian. My husband, two daughters and I came to Maine in 2004 and discovered its amazing French heritage. I had come to Maine on vacation every summer as a child, and knew there were some people who had immigrated to Maine from Quec. But when I took a class at UMA on Franco-American culture... I was blown away at the history, and at how much I can relate to it..having been raised in an environment where the French were considered inferior... back in Quec. So this is why I now consider myself a Franco-American."

--"I have lived in the US for 20 years and taught American students for 35 years. I was raised in Europe (Germany, France and feel totally bi-cultural and am bilingual. My daughters have both gone through the US school system and are now in American universities. I teach French culture but preach for open-mindedness, tolerance and acceptance of the "other" culture. I take American students to France almost every year and work daily on preconcieved ideas about America when in France. I will be getting my US citicenship in 2 years and feel very good about it. My family history during WWII is also filled with interesting stories linking US soldiers to French and German members of my family."

--" Hello! First of all, I am so glad that this organization exists and would be absolutely delighted to be a tiny part of it, thank you so much for this opportunity! A little background: I took a class with poet Robert Viscusi of The Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College a few years back, and he talked about why he started the Italian American Writers' Association (www.iawa.net)- he said, "write or be written." I thought, I wish their was something like that for Franco-Americans, and here it is, FAWI, a brilliant undertaking. I offer many thanks and applaud the creativity, emotion, and hard work that sustains FAWI.
I have been to several of the poetry readings that IAWA holds regularly in Greenwich Village...and the poets'(some of them my classmates)pride! It is a beautiful thing to witness the washing away of pain and ethnic subjugation through art and fellowship. The readings were always packed with palpable energy and good will- and not just from Italian-Americans! I also took a class with a linguistics specialist, Professor Roy, (a proud Franco-American from Fall River), and was prompted to look into my own history while writing about the loss of the French language and culture in Maine, and the subsequent pride-filled,(if bittersweet in honest criticism of past treatment), reclamation of both. I thought of one beautiful Acadian lady who touched my life, Mrs. Betty R.-S. who had grown up in Madewaska, Maine.
I was with her son from 15 to 17.(I had dated one guy right before him,Robert, and his WASP mother didn't want to meet me because of my low-rent neighborhood and my last name-unbelievable). Betty's son became my first real love,and he insisted that I meet his parents in the first week of our dating.We had plans to elope the day I turned 18. Betty thought that might be a good idea-and made us all go to Mass together. She was a second mom when I needed one, a genuine and kind woman trapped by difficulty at times with English, and an unfulfilled desire to work outside the home. She sang beautifully and easily in French, often alone at the kitchen table after her Portuguese-American husband had gone to sleep. As she sang, she'd be lost in something magical I wanted to know more about.Unfortunately, my boyfriend was just 22, gorgeous, and desired by every girl in town, he wandered,and I refused to take him back-instead I left at 18 for NYC without any plan-living a bit of a voy
ageur dream.
As life goes, he found me Palm Sunday 2 years ago as I was learning all about Italian-American literature in Prof. Viscusi's class. The old boyfriend held some regrets. He hadn't married, and had struggled, at times,with addiction. He remembered how much promise I had always seen in him. I understood the motivation he had to say hello, and will always consider him family. It hits you in mid-life, what is left behind:loyalty, class, knowing, maybe a cultural and ethnic heritage that could have been continued together. After reading his note, I immediately remembered the smiling eyes of Mrs. R.-S. and my story-weaving father during a long chat they had that led to a passionate discussion of the nuances of being New England (working-class)Franco-Americans. I knew then that I had to write my thesis about it, although I had reservations about whether anyone would be interested. I was going to research Kipling's Kim, or Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, when I read in the school n
ewspaper during a thesis preparation class that the newly appointed, and first female president, of BC was Karen L. Gould: a researcher of contemporary Quebec literature and francophone women writers. I took the news as a beautiful omen.
I started to remember more, all of that past I once thought I could walk away from in the American pursuit of a bland nothing. My great-grandparents worked in the shoe mills of Massachusetts, both my father and grandfather were born in Worcester. Grandpa P. said his father came from France, however, hints say otherwise may be possible. My sister, who lives in NH, tested positive during pregnancy as a carrier for Sandhoff Disease (a French-Canadian Tay-Sachs), so somebody came from Quebec, even if that wasn't the history my grandfather wanted. It was my great-grandmother who had- but the shame Grandpa P. had about being (raised poor, an only child of divorced parents), French! His father might have been part of the Quebecois exodus as well, but saying that one was "European" came off "fancier" back then. Of course, Grandfather P. married a Franco-American woman, a second gen. French Swiss-American, her parents having hailed from the Alps. Grandma P. was raised on a farm in
California, the oldest of 8 children. My grandparents married young, they eloped 6 months after meeting on a cross-country bus.
I perceived his shame at a very young age when we would all visit at the little shoe store he and my grandmother ran together in Littleton, NH. Little things gave him away. He dreamed of being...accepted. And to think, they lived so close to the Quebec border, his ethnicity would have been celebrated not too many miles away. A border existed of virtual, rusted barbed wire on the American side! Nonetheless, his demeanor was entirely Franco-American, and the fiddleheads, dandelion greens, homemade blueberry jam Grandma P. so lovingly made... I was on the receiving end of a lot of prejudice growing up in North Reading and Reading, Massachusetts: poor, shy, French name, and that was during the 1970s and 80s!I can only imagine what my grandfather had to endure growing up.
Ultimately, I think the Franco-American experience is a beautiful story of a beautiful people, and my inner Viking would dare anyone to fathom otherwise! It never fails to astound me how "real" New England Franco-Americans are. They have no pretensions, instead they have talent, sociability, and courage in surplus. They are afraid of nothing, and I love that. I may be the only one of my closest girlhood friends (Franco-American, Irish, Italian, Greek, even English), all working-class, to go to college, but not the first one to leave town alone. My Franco-American friend from the Lawrence projects, did just that at 18, traveling cross-country on a bus with a bag of sandwiches, Kerouac-style. She left Massachusetts for California to marry a local Lawrence boy looking for work out west, and they are still together, their oldest daughter just graduated college.
There is something to the Franco-Am. spirit: knowing what you want right away and not being afraid to live, and, also, sadly, there is some truth in the multi-gen. institutionalized shame that holds too many back, and/or makes one leave their hometown. Both myself and that old boyfriend thought that we were "too stupid" for college way back when. Why? An excuse to stay close to home? Or years of "training"... old stereotypes last...until one realizes that they exist for a reason that has nothing to do with your heritage but myriad outside forces!
Although my thesis is on class and ethnicity vis-a-vis Metalious and Kerouac, I am most fascinated by class and ethnicity as a whole, and how it intertwines with and dictates so much in American experience and literature. My humble story is one of many, and hardly atypical, but, with perspective and time I have come to realize it might offer something, and Franco-Americans have been silent far too long. No, I'll rephrase that. They have been speaking, but not enough people have been listening.Well,that's going to change. Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart for reading all of this. I hope it makes some cohesive sense, and, again, thank you so much for the wonderful Franco-American Women's Institute, I can't wait to share this resource with my Franco-American home girls!"

--"I am a writer. I taught for over 30 years, mostly in Adult Education in Portland, Maine. I've published one book, City of Belief set in New York City during the Vietnam War era. I am currently working on a second novel based in Nova Scotia, Belgium and France. I speak a le francasi Tarzan but I persist. Moi voisins et famille dans Pubnico sont tres gentil avec moi et mon melange de le francais et anglais. I make many mistakes but I love the language.

I will post the membership fee tomorrow and look forward to making connections. I will be in Pubnico from July-September. Have any of you visited the Village Acadien in West Pubnico? It is a gem. Au revoir pour maintenant."