Welcome to jeankcarney.com
About the Author
Blackbird Blues is Jean’s debut novel. Before turning to writing fiction, Jean spent eight years as an award-winning reporter and editorial writer at The Milwaukee Journal, covering Children’s Court, City Hall, and Roe v. Wade. She earned a Ph.D. in Human Development at the University of Chicago and trained at a large Chicago inner-city psychiatric hospital. In full-time private practice as a psychologist for thirty years in the Chicago Loop, she saw patients from all walks of life and ethnic backgrounds in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. After her husband died of ALS, she edited his last book, Jewish Writing and the Deep Places of the Imagination, stopped publishing in professional psychoanalytic venues, and turned to fiction. She has since remarried and is the mother of a son and a son and daughter by marriage.
Blackbird Blues
Blackbird Blues is a novel of illegal abortion and child abandonment in the 1963 Chicago world of civil rights and interracial jazz. Voices of two women tell their stories: Mary Kaye O’Donnell, an eighteen-year-old Irish-American aspiring jazz singer struggling with an unwanted pregnancy, and the 1940s diary entries of Sister Michaeline, Mary Kaye’s jazz mentor and guide through the bedlam of Mary Kaye’s childhood.
My Inspiration
The first glimpse I had of what grew into this novel came in 2005. Sitting in the Jazz Showcase in Chicago, listening, watching a particularly vigorous drummer pounding back and forth from drums to xylophone, I was thrown back in time, to a boy who was “making music,” shuffling grit on the floor with his feet and sweeping his hair and hands across the table. I was a reporter at The Milwaukee Journal, visiting the boy in the Children’s Home thirty-three years earlier. He was there because he had picked up his teacher and stuffed her, head first, into a waste basket, snapping her neck. I asked him why. He shrugged his shoulders without missing a beat.
I knew that, other than the judge, the public defender, and the court stenographer, I had been the only person at his court hearing and his only visitor at the Children’s Home. No parent, relative, or friend had shown up.
What struck me in my meetings with him, and stayed with me through the years, was that I believed him when he said that he had no idea why he had killed his teacher. Nobody else seemed to have an idea either. My character Benny does not kill his teacher. But in creating Benny I dipped into my feelings for that boy from long ago.
Eventually, I left the newspaper and became a developmental psychologist, but not before covering a host of other stories that in different ways are inspiring aspects of my writing now, including in Blackbird Blues, my interviews while covering Roe v. Wade. As a novelist, I am constantly struck by the question why the people in my novel do what I find them doing, often to my surprise and sometimes without my agreement.
Advance Praise
“A musical coming of age story lies at the heart of Blackbird Blues’ meditation on race, religion, and gender in midwestern America. At a time of personal crisis in the early 1960s, teenaged singer Mary Kaye struggles to free herself from the orbit of an archconservative Catholic family. Caught between the pull of a convent’s regimented life and her discovery of the expressive freedom of jazz, her muse leads her across racial lines in Chicago’s nightclubs, embroiling her in a web of intimate relationships. The story’s surprising twists and turns build steadily to its deeply-affecting climax—like a masterful jazz performance itself. As Blackbird Blues is true to the sounds of jazz, it is true to the sacrifices of love, family, and community made by individuals who find one another in the jazz world.”
Paul Berliner, Author of Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation