Irene Fick

Lewes

Emerging
Literature: Creative Nonfiction

By: Gail Obenreder

“I love exploring and playing with language, expressing thoughts and emotions I didn’t know I had, and reaching others through my words.”

Irene Fick has been a lifelong writer, penning both creative nonfiction and poetry since she was a child, “holed up in my bedroom with a ruled notebook and pencil – and a flashlight if it was past bedtime.” After graduating from college with a journalism degree, Fick found that her mastery of words shaped her practical professional career: She wrote for newspapers and magazines, journals, businesses, associations, and the health care industry.

Fick was born in Brooklyn, part of a large Italian family, but her parents moved her and her brother to Illinois, “ostensibly for her father’s accounting job but in reality, to get away from family interference!” But each summer, the family “vacationed” back in Brooklyn, where she was enraptured by the street life, her large family, and “hanging out with my ‘cool’ cousins.” Fick has lived in Chicago, Clearwater (Florida) and San Francisco. She moved to Delaware in 1981 where she worked as a free-lance writer and in the state’s pharmaceutical industry.

When not working and raising her son, Fick did some creative writing, but it was when she and her husband retired to Lewes a decade ago that she was able to return to the practice that was her first love. With the encouragement of supportive colleagues, she began to hone her craft by taking workshops and classes and started to submit her work. Her poetry and creative nonfiction has been widely published in literary journals, and two of her chapbooks received first-place awards from the National Federation of Press Women and the Delaware Press Association. Her third book and first full-length poetry collection will be published in March of this year by Broadstone Books.

excerpt from The Greatest Unease (2021)

“I suppose
I am at peace – but oh, what I would give to return to my life,
its uneasy turbulence,
its precious, beautiful mess.”

Read more

Influenced early on by “my immediate and extended family, my overactive imagination, and Nancy Drew,” Fick divides her writing practice between poems and the creative nonfiction essays for which she was awarded the Division’s Fellowship. Today she’s inspired by writers like Margaret Atwood, Ross Gay, and Ada Limon, but she’s buoyed in great part by the “vibrant community of writers” at the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild, whose supportive, non-competitive atmosphere encourages Fick to “devote more time to my own writing.”

She finds it challenging to continue, “draft after draft, until I am pleased with the outcome.” Fick states that she never produces “anything worthwhile” in her first draft, but she has come to love the editing process, perfecting what she wants to express. She’s also challenged by deciding what discipline or format to choose but has discovered that creative nonfiction perfectly blends her journalism skills (“where you focus on other people’s voices”) and her poetry (requiring “belief in one’s own voice” and the art of compression).

It’s rewarding when she finishes a piece that not only reaches a reader on multiple levels but also allows her to “become visible to oneself and … make sense of our lives,” coming to terms with fears, insecurities, and quirks. In this, Fick is guided by an insight from writer George Bernard Shaw: “If you can’t get rid of the skeletons in your closet, you’d best teach them to dance.” And she admits that publication is also a reward. “I don’t write for the desk drawer. I write to be heard, and this is what publishing accomplishes for me.”

Fick is an avid walker and yoga practitioner, and she also loves to sing, a member of a community chorus for fifteen years. An active supporter of animal welfare, she also checks in weekly with the patients and caregivers as a volunteer with Delaware Hospice. Much of her writing continues to be generated by the variety of places that she has lived and worked and the breadth of her experiences. Fick is delighted in and grateful for the Division Fellowship that will “encourage me to further refine my craft and expand my skills.”

 

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