Overview

Free Rose Light is the wide-ranging story of the people and community of South Street Ministries, in Akron, Ohio, told in the style of the ministry--improvisational, risky, and present. As much as this is the story of South Street through O'Connor's experience of the organization, it is also an invitation to the reader by example. There is no set of conclusions or directions provided in this work, save for one: don't let anyone define your story. You claim your own story.

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9781629221274

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Wait ... a Manhattan architect who describes herself as a lapsed Catholic lesbian writing a book about a white evangelical pastor who moved his family into the heart of Akron, Ohio, to share his passion for God's grace ? What kind of equation is that? It is, improbably, an equation for literary alchemy. Mary O'Connor claims to be a first-time author. I'm finding that difficult to believe, because much of the writing in Free Rose Light is beautiful. I can't even begin to count the number of times I backed up and reread a paragraph, not for greater comprehension but merely to revel in the selection, order and pacing of the words. A troubled O'Connor went in search of herself and found the answers in Akron, mainly by immersing herself in the life of Duane Crabbs, a former firefighter who felt a calling to move his middle-class family into a crime-and-drug infested neighborhood on the eastern edge of Summit Lake. This is not, however, just a compelling story about Crabbs and his initially reluctant wife, Lisa, and their South Street Ministries, or even about poverty and race. It is about all of that, but it is foremost a naked journey into the heart of a unique 58-block area of Akron, past and present, an Akron that O'Connor put under a non-blinking microscope to reveal the inner lives of its occupants, in the process reminding us of universal truths. -Bob Dyer, retired columnist, Akron Beacon Journal--Bob Dyer, Akron Beacon Journal

Author Information

Mary O'Connor is an architect who specialized in public assembly spaces in her twenty-five-year practice in New York City. Prior to becoming an architect, she was an aquatic comedian and hostess at Manhattan Plaza Health Club. Her career came to an abrupt conclusion after a near drowning incident during an act that featured diving off the board in a full evening gown. She moves through the world via seven bicycles in four cities. O'Connor is a graduate of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and received a Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in North Macedonia. Free Rose Light was pummeled and shaped into existence through the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program at The University of Akron.

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