Megan Brown McClard
MEGAN BROWN MCCLARD was born in 1927 in Hollywood and died in 2023 at the age of 96 in Portland, OR. She attended schools in California, Montana, and Colorado. As a single mother of five children, she began college at age thirty-five, and went on to earn a PhD in English at University of Denver, specializing in creative writing. She taught literature, writing, and women’s studies for many years at Metropolitan State University in Denver before retiring as a professor emeritus. Megan published two books for young people, Hiawatha and the Iroquois League; Harriet Tubman: Slavery and the Underground Railroad.
Megan Brown McClard’s Aristata Press Titles:
LEAVINGS: Memoir of a 1920s Hollywood Love Child (October 2022), 230 pages
ISBN: , 978-1-7362316-3-0 (hardcover), 978-1-7362316-0-9 (paperback), 978-1-7362316-1-6 (eBook), 978-1-7362316-2-3 (heirloom edition)
Description:
From California to Colorado, from childhood to adulthood, Megan is passed among a real-life Dickensian cast of characters. Despite the relentless confusion of her journey she triumphs in discovering where she comes from and who she is.
Leavings begins with Megan’s birth in 1927. She is the love child of a Hollywood screenwriter and director, and a narcissistic married woman twenty-four years his senior. Abandoned in the hospital as a newborn and made a ward of the city of Los Angeles, twenty-one-month-old Megan lands in a stable home with strict Pentecostal foster parents who are dutiful in her care, but not loving.
As a young child Megan has a strong sense of not belonging—at home, at school, or even at church. She sleeps on a cot at the foot of her foster sister’s bed. She is asked to leave first grade after crying for two weeks. She never gets saved at church. Even her name comes and goes, depending on under whose care she falls.
Hers is a life marked by continual searching, and repeated leavings—being left by others and being forced to leave. We follow this odd but lovable child, adolescent, and young adult through a solitary life of acute observation and search for identity, from finding her birth father to meeting her half siblings, an early marriage, children, meeting the woman who will be the love of her life and, finally, divorce and freedom.
Megan’s extraordinary story transports us across many decades and to locations throughout the western United States. Through beautiful prose, she imparts astute commentary on political events with vivid descriptions of the social and moral views of the times. Each encounter shapes her experience of the world, as we witness her journey to a life of belonging and acceptance, a woman who in the end becomes closer to being the person she wants to be.
Reviews:
“I’ve long known how fortunate I was to have Megan McClard as a high school English teacher. She inspired, challenged, and enlightened me in ways that I continue to appreciate four decades later. What I didn’t know until I read her memoir is just how courageous and indomitable her life has been. Leavings is the story of a true twentieth century social pioneer—and in this troubled era, a must-read for anyone who values the equality of women under the law.”
— Troy Denning
New York Times bestselling author of 40 novels of science fiction and fantasy
Other Titles:
Hiawatha and the Iroquois League (Alvin Josephy’s Biography Series of American Indians, ISBN 0382095685 (ISBN13: 9780382095689)
Harriet Tubman: Slavery and the Underground Railroad (History of the Civil War Series), ISBN 0382099389 (ISBN13: 9780382099380)
