McBride, Regina 1956-

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McBRIDE, Regina 1956-

PERSONAL: Born 1956, in NM; children: one daughter.

ADDRESSES: Home—929 West End Ave., No. 7A, New York, NY 10025. Office—c/o Scribner, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

CAREER: Poet and novelist. Instructor, Hunter College, New York, NY; Writer's Voice, instructor.

AWARDS, HONORS: American Book Series award, for Yarrow Field; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; New York Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

WRITINGS:

Yarrow Field, San Diego Poets Press (La Jolla, CA), 1990.

The Nature of Water and Air: A Novel, Scribner Paperback Fiction (New York, NY), 2001.

Also contributor of poems to journals, including Ironwood, High Plains Literary Review, Antioch Review, and Denver Quarterly.

ADAPTATIONS: Gabriel Byrne acquired the film rights to The Nature of Water and Air.

SIDELIGHTS: Poet and writing teacher Regina McBride had already achieved modest success with her first novel, The Nature of Water and Air: A Novel when Irish actor Gabriel Byrne discovered the book. Byrne contacted McBride to see if film rights had been sold, and when he found out they had not, he bought them himself and began work with McBride on a screenplay.

Published a decade before The Nature of Water and Air, McBride's first publication was a small book of poetry, Yarrow Field, for which she won the American Book Series award. Kay Murphy, a critic for the American Book Review, compared McBride's poems about incest, parental suicide, and shame to the work of poets Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds. Murphy suggested that McBride's first collection of poetry is too melodramatic, adding that "the poet is controlled by the subject matter rather than the other way around." Nonetheless, Murphy wrote that the imagery of Yarrow Field is "viscerally powerful."

McBride's first novel tells of a mother's suicide. The Nature of Water and Air is narrated by Clodagh Sheehy who, at the age of thirteen, watches her mother Agatha, who bore Clodagh and her twin sister when she was a teenager herself, walk into the sea to end her life. The novel traces Clodagh's coming of age, including her talent for the piano, her relationship with the tinker Angus Kilheen, and her gradual discovery of tragic family secrets. McBride merges this domestic drama with Irish myth, connecting Agatha's wildness to the half-human, half-seal selkies.

Critics of The Nature of Water and Air responded to McBride's impressionistic style and the book's melancholic tone, which evokes an almost gothic atmosphere. Emily White, for the New York Times Book Review, said, "Regina McBride writes in a shimmering and often hypnotic prose style, one that's full of incantatory repetition. The story builds like a fugue." A critic for Publishers Weekly wrote that while McBride sometimes "veers into portentous sentimentality," overall the novel is "finely wrought and deeply felt . . . a work of supercharged imagination." J. Uschuk, in Tucson Weekly, called The Nature of Water and Air a "spectacular writing debut."