A father and two young sons drive north, as they do every year, for Christmas in Rochester. Inside the car, the dad slowly rotates the radio’s tuner, seeking the strongest of patchwork and far-flung radio signals. The oldest son snoozes in the passenger seat. The youngest watches from the back, wrappers of twin Jr. Bacon Cheeseburgers at his feet (always the same Wendy’s on this journey, always the same order), flashlight and road atlas ready for action.
“Even now my dad doesn’t drive with GPS,” said Devin Kelly, the young navigator in this tableau. “He’s wildly savvy. He’s the kind of guy who, it’s like the moment we would hit traffic, he would take the next exit and he’d be like, ‘Alright, open the atlas. Where are we?’”
They were in Irondequoit, or would be. In the final hour of this trip, every year, The Chieftains 1991 Christmas album, “The Bells of Dublin,” skated into the CD player and ferried them over the last leg to join the rest of this extensive Irish family. Into view would come a house that magically expanded to accommodate an influx of uncles, aunts and cousins drawn by the matriarchal magnetism of a small (in stature only) grandmother.
“That drive shows up in so much of my work because my dad is not the most outgoing with his love, but that drive to me was such a symbol of his love for his children – my brother and I – but mostly for his mom,” said Kelly.
Devin Kelly is a writer. The work he alluded to has appeared in “Longreads,” “The Guardian,” “LitHub,” “DIAGRAM,” “Hobart,” “Redivider,” and “The Year’s Best Sportswriting,” among others. Two books of his poetry have been published and his first novel, “Pilgrims,” partially set in the Rochester area, will hit shelves late this summer.
Kelly described the book as a story of two brothers.
One is a monk at the Abbey of the Genesee, a monastery near Geneseo (and, incidentally, the provenance of Monks’ Bread) and the other is an athlete who runs away from home during a cross country race. The monk leaves the confines of his abbey to find the wayward brother with no information on his whereabouts, and the story unfolds as each brother meets people and collects experiences in their respective journeys.
“I see myself in every character, to be honest,” said Kelly. “The two brothers resemble less my relationship with my brother and more my relationship with myself.”
One he described as withdrawn and wary of the ever-increasing speed of the world, while the other immerses himself in language amid an at-times angry struggle with family dynamics.
“One of the most beautiful things about writing a novel is you can pour anything into a character,” said Kelly. “They’re like a mold, and they don’t have to resemble the people you know … You can be like, ‘Oh, I want to use this character to explore my past self.’”
In a separate non-fiction piece, “Something About the Present,” Kelly opens a window for readers to see another bit of his past self:
We walked back inside [the church] and left after mass — it was midnight on Christmas Eve — to sit at my grandmother’s small kitchen table in her small kitchen two blocks from the shore of Lake Ontario, where we ate Entenmann’s coffee cake with our dad before we went to bed. Before my grandmother died, I sat with her at that same kitchen table, watching her refuse to eat a spoonful of peas. My dad asked her to eat them, in what was perhaps the gentlest act I’d ever seen him perform. I’d never heard him whisper until that moment. He asked her softly, and she refused. She was small then, just barely taller than four feet. Life had made her stubborn, then tender, then stubborn again. That is my last memory of seeing her alive. Her face, just above the table’s edge. Like a moon gone down to earth.
His ability to reflect on and draw meaning from a scene shows itself again and again in Kelly’s writing, to great effect. It also likely explains why, in his role as a high school English teacher at Comp Sci High in the Bronx, students write poetry in his classroom during the lunch period, and why a senior’s mom spent two weeks knitting him a sweater.
“I really love working with kids,” he said. “They are surprising, they are hopeful, they are not hopeful, they are everything. When I go to work, I get to experience the whole myriad complexity of what it means to be human.”
Somewhere between the very present, active transformation Kelly sees in his students and the reflection on his own past in his writing, a realization took shape about the nature of our pasts and the meaning we reap from our own stories.
“That lesson has shaped my life, where it’s like, these things that happen to us aren’t static, and the way we feel about them isn’t static either,” he said. “When I was in the car with my dad driving to Rochester, I wasn’t always smiling and saying, ‘What a beautiful show of love.’ Sometimes, I was really bored. Sometimes, I was annoyed. But it took distance. And it took me wondering about it, and it took some of those memories coming back in ways that I hadn’t seen when I was present in them for me to realize how beautiful all of that was.”
“Pilgrims” by Devin Kelly will be available for preorder in the coming months from Great Place Books, and on sale everywhere later this year. devingkelly.com
Pete Wayner is a contributor to CITY.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
