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    Book Talk

    Domestic violence fuels new Houston author's inventive historical novel

    Tarra Gaines
    Dec 5, 2013 | 9:44 am

    Sometimes the story of how a work of art came into being can be almost — though not quite — as fascinating as the piece itself. This is the case of Playing St. Barbara, the debut novel by Houston fiction writer and journalist Marian Szczepanski.

    Working as as a volunteer domestic violence/information and referral hotline advocate at the Houston Area Women’s Center, Szczepanski soon learned that violence in the home does not discriminate. She spoke to very different women from all “walks of life,” yet they were all telling similar stories, and this was a story Szczepanski yearned to retell. Though she knew these tragic stories she was hearing should and deserved to be heard by a wider audience, she fought that impulse to pour them into fiction.

    Speaking to me by phone a day before the official Playing St. Barbara book launch at Blue Willow Bookshop, Szczepanski confessed, “I really wanted to write about a woman in that situation, but something stopped me because I didn’t want to, in any way, breach anyone’s confidence. To write a contemporary story about it seemed to just be hitting to close to the bone.”

    "This is a way for me to explore the issue of a battered woman, but I will be doing it in a different time and place.”

    During this time, Szczepanski happened upon some advice in Poets & Writers Magazine to write what only you can write and it will find a home. She began to think back to her childhood in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The granddaughter of Irish and Slovakian immigrants, both her grandfathers, who died before her birth, were coal miners. She began to wonder about their lives and even more about the lives of her grandmothers about which she knew almost nothing.

    “I was always interested in the women’s lives, she explained. “I heard a lot about the men and the dangers [in the mines] . . . but I didn’t hear a lot about what it was like to be a woman living there.”

    It was at this point that her present experiences as a listener and advocate for the victims of domestic violence and her desire to gain more knowledge about her family’s past came together. And this is when Clare Sweeney, a coal miner’s wife and the mother of three daughters, was created on the pages of Playing St. Barbara.

    “I thought maybe this is a story only I can write, and so when I thought of my main character I thought maybe this is a way for me to explore the issue of a battered woman, but I will be doing it in a different time and place.”

    Forgotten Voices

    Spanning the years between 1929 and 1941, the novel is divided into four sections with each section concentrating on Clare and one of her daughters. They all suffer under the violent hands of Clare’s husband and the girls’ father, Finbar. In another time and place, Finbar might have been a good man but alcohol and the mining company, which controls much of its workers’ lives, robs Finbar of his last strands of self-respect. He takes out his frustration and feelings of impotence on the women in his life.

    Szczepanski set the novel during two decades that many readers will probably feel they know much about. Prohibition, FDR and the New Deal, the months before the U.S entered World War II, are histories recounted many times in nonfiction, fiction, and popular culture, but Szczepanski has found a place in this era that very few readers will know.

    He takes out his frustration and feelings of impotence on the women in his life.

    She went back to Pennsylvania to do research and discovered though there was documentation on the mines and the multicultural communities that sprang up around them, the women’s stories had been almost completely lost in time. One place she was able to find details about these lost lives was in the records of the mine companies’ private police force which used some “very heavy handed tactics” to break up any union activity and keep miners in line, but they also broke up domestic disputes.

    This is when Szczepanski realized: “Domestic violence was not an issue I would have to make up.”

    “So here was my story. I thought, I never got to talk to my grandmothers about it [their lives], but I will probably get to find out what their lives were like by researching and writing the book,” she explained.

    Past and Present

    I asked Szczepanski if she thought of the contemporary women calling into the HAWC hotline as she spent years researching and created these fictional miners’ wives and daughters. She answered the question by going back to Clare.

    “She really believes that he might kill her or one of her daughters in a drunken fit or even if he gets angry enough. That was something I heard off and on: ‘I tried to run away but then I came back.’ There was always this absolutely overwhelming fear that there would be reprisals either to the woman herself or her children,” she said.

    These issues and the women’s belief that they had to keep the family together, stayed with Szczepanski the whole time she was writing the novel. Yet, she also knew she had to give both her characters and readers hope. In Playing St. Barbara there is light at the end for Clare and each of her daughters.

    They are “the little people” caught up in the “sweep of history,” but Szczepanski brings their fictional voices to a larger audience. Perhaps in this way, Playing St. Barbara equally plays tribute to Szczepanski’s grandmothers and all the women who call a hotline looking for a little hope of their own.

    Marian Szczepanski reads at Brazos Bookstore on Jan. 13.

    Playing St. Barbara by Marian Szczepanski

    Playing St. Barbara book cover by Marian Szczepanski
      
    Courtesy photo
    Playing St. Barbara by Marian Szczepanski
    unspecified
    news/arts

    a very fine house

    Pioneering Houston Latino folkart gallery will close next year

    Tarra Gaines
    Jun 5, 2025 | 9:30 am
    ​Macario and Chrissie Ramirez.
    Photo by Agapito Sanchez
    Macario and Chrissie Ramirez.

    It’s the end of a cultural era as Chrissie Ramirez, owner of the Heights gallery and cultural space Casa Ramirez Folkart Gallery, announced that after 40 years she will close the 3,000-plus-square-foot space on W. 19th St. at the end of the current lease period in March 2026.

    \u200bMacario and Chrissie Ramirez.
      

    Photo by Agapito Sanchez

    Macario and Chrissie Ramirez.

    Filled with traditional art, especially paintings and sculptures, the space also showcased textiles, home accessories, religious objects, clothing, literature, and antiques. But it was the husband-and-wife owners, Macario and Chrissie Ramirez, who turned this Casa into a real home for the local Latino community, as well as a cultural landmark in Houston’s art landscape. Macario Ramirez founded Casa Ramirez in 1985 to honor his father, a folk artist and part-time jeweler who had his own business in San Antonio selling Mexican crafts. Over 40 years, Macario and Chrissie's longtime support for Latino artists along with the gallery's culturally rich programming and educational outreach helped to popularize Mexican and Latin American folk art and traditions.

    Chrissie Ramirez continued her husband’s mission after his death in 2020, keeping the gallery and his life’s work going. After five years running the business, she wants to travel and lead a less scheduled live. Houstonians won’t have to say goodbye just yet, as Ramirez says they will stay stay open and continue their annual holiday celebrations and programming.

    “Casa Ramirez will continue to operate as a retail establishment and offer the colorful mix of folk art, crafts, work by local artists and focus on the vibrant culture and traditions of Mexico, Latin American and the Southwest that we are so well known for and held in our hearts for so long,” Ramirez said in a statement.

    Throughout her remarks, Ramirez recalled her husband’s pioneering cultural and civil rights work in the community and his continuing legacy in Houston.

    Prominent Texas author, analyst, radio host, and Nuestra Palabra founder Tony Diaz spoke about the cultural reach Case Ramirez had over the years. Diaz especially credits Macario Ramirez and the gallery for helping to make Dia de los Muertos such an important Texas holiday and for helping to spread understanding of its celebrations in the U.S.

    “Today Day of the Dead is socially acceptable —it’s a movie by Disney. That was not always the case,” Diaz said. “There was a moment in our history when people would see the sugar skulls that are now beloved and they would think that it had something to do with ‘other things.’ You could come to Casa Ramirez, and the street would be full with our gente who knew that it was something beautiful to preserve. And before the rest of the nation caught on, Casa Ramirez was the home for that dear celebration of ours. ”

    Though she might be retiring, Ramirez says she will keep the name Casa Ramirez for future projects and activities in other locations. She also plans to continue her cultural work, with a focus on organizing “the collection of writings, documents, and artifacts” that are part of the Casa Ramirez and her family’s history with a goal to “archive them for their educational and historical value.”

    Ramirez emphasized that Casa Ramirez will remain open until March. She will spend this time “clearing, closing, and cleaning out” the gallery, but has plans for holiday and closeout sales before shuttering the space for good. It will still host traditional annual gatherings and programs for the rest of the year, including Hispanic Heritage Month in September, the Day of the Death holiday celebrations in October/November, and Christmas and New Years programming with special guests and music events in the works. Thankfully, that means Houstonians still have plenty of time to visit and share their own memories of this extraordinary Casa.

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