Mara Faulkner

St. Joseph, Minn., author Mara Faulkner has been named one of four finalists for the Minnesota Book Awards in the memoir and creative non-fiction category.

She received the nonimation for her book, “Going Blind.” Sister Faulkner, a Benedictine Sister at Saint Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph, tells the story of her father’s blindness, and of her family’s efforts to conceal his blindness from the world.

Faulkner’s father, Dennis Faulkner, was an Irishman who struggled to raise a big family in Mandan during the ’40s through ’60s. A genetic disease gradually blinded him, but he persisted with the help of his family to keep the debilitating disease a secret so he could continue to work. The book explores the author’s understanding of what blindness means to her and what it was like for her father and family – several of whom have contracted the disease, including Sister Faulkner.

This central narrative becomes a lens for exploring other kinds of metaphorical blindness-refusal to see the truth in a family and, in the wider culture, refusal or inability to see the full humanity of other people because of the color of their skin or their circumstances.

Faulkner, an English professor at the College of Saint Benedict, also explores the linguistic uses of blindness in such common terms as “blind spot” and “blind faith,” among others.

The Minnesota Book Awards is a project led by The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library. The other books nominated in this category are “The Bullhead Queen: A Year on Pioneer Lake” by Sue Leaf; “Holiday Inn” by Kevin Kling; and “The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder’s Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows” by Kent Nerbern.  

The winners will be announced at a gala on Saturday, April 17, in downtown St. Paul, Minn.

-Brian L. Gray