In Our Own Voices:
Memoirs and Stories of the Sisters of St. Francis in Western Pennsylvania

Featured selection this month:
"A Peach of a Story" by Sister Mary Grace Blum, a member of the Memoir Writing Class. Sister Mary Grace shares a poignant remembrance of a childhood experience. She was raised with a large, closely-knit family in the Mount Oliver section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In this story, we discover why peach season brings back memories of a warm, delightful, carefree time in her life.

"Cigarettes?" by Sister Monica Mary Stefanides, is a story from Sister Monica's past experience working at St. Francis Medical Center in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood. A cold day and walk with a patient truly showed how St. Francis gave the security of large family concern and care.

In Our Own Voices: Memoirs and Stories of the Sisters of St. Francis in Western Pennsylvania is a collection of writings that evolved from a series of journal and memoir writing workshops held in the fall of 2005 and 2006 and the winter of 2007 at Mount Alvernia thanks to a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Walter A. and Josephine Peterson Literary Arts Fund. We hope you will enjoy our writings and that they will serve as a record of the services provided by our sisters. There are memoirs of teaching in the Catholic schools and working in jails and hospitals. They are personal stories of spiritual growth and human service. We will be publishing two or three monthly for the next year and hope to create an anthology of the best memoirs at the end of a year.

We would like to thank Mary Brenholts from the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts for her help in securing the arts council grant and the following workshop participants: Sisters Rosaire Kopczenski, Marie Grace Blum, Kevin Brand, Grace Diethorn, Mary Ann Hornick, Angelita Molina, Andrea Wank, Elise Renk, Lorraine Hahn, Florence Brandt, Marlene Kline, Carmen Puhl, Marilyn Joyce, Lorelda Kilchenstein, and Collette Wintill.

We hope you find these memoirs interesting and encourage you to write down your experiences and memories and join us in the creative writing class that meets every other Tuesday between 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. to add to our project to record the presence of the Sisters of St. Francis in Western Pennsylvania.