The room is murky. The walls are plastered with paper. She has been visiting for twenty minutes, or maybe just five. A man enters grasping a black snake with white dots. She moves toward him and it stirs—cold fangs pierce the top of her hand. The snake recoils, then strikes again, and again, methodically slicing through her flesh. There is no time to scream.
Hannah Clarkin wakes with a start, still smacking her hand against the wall of her dorm room—just three hours till morning.
Her sleep of late has been erratic, peppered with nightmares and moments of suffocating immobility. “I am a very fearful person,” says Hannah, a 21 year-old senior at Patrick Henry College, a Christian liberal arts institution. “When I was a kid, I thought up all sorts of scary scenarios. I used to imagine my house burning down.”
Hannah grew up in Shutesbury, Massachusetts. Once, when she was twelve, she and her friend Jessica ventured into the logging woods behind her house. Months before, they had discovered a small, seemingly deserted cabin deep in the woods. Although too frightened to inspect it at the time, the girls resolved to come back. Week after week, they crept toward it, each time coming closer than the last; finally they reached its front door. After a few moments of nervous fidgeting, Jessica swung it open, then froze. Hannah felt her body tense in fear; she could not see into the cabin because her friend stood petrified in the doorway. Their minds flooded with tales of rape and molesters they had heard from Jessica’s parents, both psychiatrists. Jessica screamed, “There could be a rapist in the house!”
They looked down and noticed new, empty, beer bottles sprinkled around the cabin. They were miles from town, and that only meant one thing. Somewhere, close by, there was a beer-drinking pervert just waiting for two curious young girls to discover his cabin. At this thought, the girls took off. Looking back on the escapade, Hannah chuckled and said, “It was probably good we didn’t bump into anyone.”
With the exception of several creepy experiences, Hannah has always loved her home by the sea; an eclectic, comfortable blend of eight younger siblings, her striking Italian mother; a calligraphist and artist, and her intellectual father; an electrical engineer. While in Providence for spring break, she wrote:
Despite all you've heard about how many people live here and how noisy it is, most afternoons are long and still. Sometimes the phone rings and every few hours there is the groan of the stairs when Dad comes down to the kitchen to make more green tea. Abby reads Lemony Snicket on the couch, her feet twitching and turning with delight, Andrew and Lydia color at the table, Lydia biting her tongue side to side in delicious concentration, Mom steals a nap in her bedroom.
During the past two summers, Hannah attended the Sanctuary, a Christian worship service, with several of her teenage siblings. “It [the music] starts off quiet,” she says, “and gets very electric and loud.” The room is lit with candles, and in the summer, the shades are pulled so that the candles are brighter. The Sanctuary does not have a pastor; rather, a handful of individuals contribute to each service. “We do lots of different readings,” said Hannah. Poetry is often delivered and now and then an artist paints a picture on glass coinciding with that Sunday’s theme. After services, many remain to pray. “It’s little and organic,” she said, “and it some ways, intellectual.”
Annie Wilcox, Hannah’s roommate, said, “She [Hannah] is constantly striving to know what real Christianity is.” In a recent blog post, Hannah included a quote from Brooks Williams:
“The questions are real. They never stop—like the steady summer rain falling outside my window. I’ve got Miles Davis on the stereo. It’s a “Kind Of Blue” kind of day, if you know what I mean. Some truth is waiting here to be collected, placed on my tongue like a wafer in communion, if only I could ask the right questions. I keep wishing the fundamentalists are right—that everything is cause and effect, black and white. But I stare up into the mystery, and it’s gray and thick like humid summer rain.”
Hannah is a literature major. She admires authors Annie Dillard, Dan Eggars Anne Lamott, J.D. Salinger, and especially enjoys Flannery O’ Connor’s letters and the journals of Sylvia Plath. “She doesn’t mind authors who swear, because that is real,” said Annie. “She realizes there is more to life than just the pretty outside package.”
Each day, Hannah writes for one to two hours on “just about everything”—journal entries, critical essays, poetry— She even brings her slender flesh-toned journal to Theology, each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. When the professor strays from his outline, perhaps digging more deeply into the doctrine of predestination or spontaneous freedom, she leisurely slides her journal over the lecture notes, and writes, hunched low. On March 1, 2006, she wrote,
I've been writing what I want to again. In the margins of my notebooks, in the pages of my journal….breathing prose that curls up off the page like the steam from morning tea.
Though a prolific writer and booklover, it is through music and song writing that her soul is refreshed: a smooth sip of Kim Taylor in the morning, a cold, sour shot of Bright Eyes at noon; before bed, the warm, tangy brew of Over the Rhine.
