Skip to contents
In This Issue:
For local author Maryanne O'Hara, volunteering is a way to "get out of her own head." One afternoon per week, she steps away from the characters of the intricate worlds she has created, and the challenges of her own daughter's struggle with cystic fibrosis, in order to bring comfort to patients at BWH.
O'Hara began offering Reiki therapy to BWH patients in the summer of 2011 after training in the nearly century-old Japanese complementary healing method. She first became interested in Reiki, which uses hand movements and light touch to transfer and balance the body's energy, to help her 29-year-old daughter, Caitlin, heal. O'Hara soon realized other patients might also benefit from the therapy.
"I wanted to help people relax and feel better," said O'Hara, whose debut novel, Cascade, was published by Viking Penguin last month. "We've spent so much time at Children's Hospital and the Brigham managing Caitlin's disease, and are aware of what it's like to be on the patient's side of the door. It's nice to be able to offer comfort to people."
"It also makes me more compassionate and reminds me to be more selfless," O'Hara added.
This sense of compassion also spreads to her characters, whom O'Hara says need to be whole, real and complicated people. Cascade follows the desires and struggles of a 1930s artist in the fictional town of Cascade, Massachusetts, which will soon be flooded to make way for a reservoir. O'Hara credits literary giants Alice Munro, William Trevor and Colm Tóibín as inspirations, and her book has already been garnering high praise of its own. The Boston Globe wrote that "Cascade unfolds like a Shakespearean tragedy, with an ending you won't see coming." People magazine called the novel "gorgeously written and involving" and distinguished it as a "People Pick" earlier this month.
A lifelong short story writer, O'Hara says she never set out to write a novel; however, the Cascade story was bigger than she originally thought.
"I started writing, and the story seemed like it wanted to be something more," said O'Hara, a former associate fiction editor at Boston's renowned literary journal Ploughshares. "I wanted the book to have a lot of layers, and I made many revisions. I was very patient with myself throughout the process. I don't think it will be as hard to write a book the second time around," she said, smiling.
To learn more about the author or Cascade, visit www.maryanneohara.com.