Mark Connor – It’s About Time

In this episode of the Journey of My Mother’s Son podcast, I talk with fellow author, Mark Connor.

Mark Connor is a Boxing Trainer and a Writer from Saint Paul, Minnesota. His first book, It’s About Time (Millions of Copies Sold for Dad), is a saga wrapped around a package of poems, guarded by angels. Through an autobiography reading like a novel, he weaves together a story of love, family, and life with twenty poems running through it, sharing his growth in the Catholic faith, the influence of Irish heritage in his hometown’s American identity, his exploration of Lakota tradition within the urban American Indian community, and his understanding of how truth found in different spiritual approaches can lead others—as it led himself back—to its fullness in the revelation of Christ.

Mark Connor grew up in Saint Paul, calling himself the product of a “mixed marriage,” because his father—a combat wounded Vietnam veteran—grew up across the street from St. Columba parish in the Midway district, while his mother—a school teacher who later became a lawyer—came from the Holy Rosary parish “across the border, in South Minneapolis.” Born in Minneapolis and raised in Saint Paul, he began boxing at age 10, at the Mexican American Boxing Club on the city’s East Side, the area of the city from which he formed his understanding of the world, anchoring his perception of direction to the family house and the rising of the sun outside his bedroom window.  He had 102 amateur fights, made it to three national tournaments, and competed against some of the nation’s top world class boxers. He became the Upper Midwest Golden Gloves lightweight champion at 17 and traveled to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, CO, two days after graduating high school, competing in the 1987 trials for the Pan American Games. Raised in the East Side parish of St. Pascal Baylon, where he attended first through sixth grade, Mark’s father, a graduate of [Bishop] Cretin High School in Saint Paul, insisted Mark and his brother, David (13 days less than one year older than Mark), each attend its rival, St. Thomas Academy, in suburban Mendota Heights, from 7th through 12th grade, an all-boys Catholic Military high school. Having begun writing seriously at 16 and starting college at 18, Mark began an internal struggle between the academic path and boxing, spending one and a half years, respectively, at three schools—Regis University in Denver, Co., the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis—earning his BA in English from the University of Minnesota. He was inactive as a boxer for only one and a half of those years, but never felt he was able to reach his potential while emersed in study, so upon graduation, he continued Boxing.

Mark boxed competitively for two and half more years, then, deciding not to follow his gym mates—two of whom became world champions—in a professional boxing career, and believing it was already late in life to join the military, he went on an adventure, driving to Seattle, WA, securing a job on a salmon fishing boat headed to Southeast Alaska. A Year later, instead of returning to the commercial fisherman’s life, he traveled with a friend to a Lakota Sundance ceremony on the Rosebud reservation, leading eventually to a job at Aín Dah Yung (Our Home) Center, a Native American Indian temporary emergency homeless shelter for youth aged 5 to 17, in Saint Paul. Within this setting, continuing to write freelance articles and periodically working on fiction and poetry, he eventually began a personal training service and worked with both competitive and recreational boxers, as well professionals and amateurs, wrote about boxing, and contemplated his faith. While recognizing that truth, goodness, and beauty are indeed present in the faith traditions of the indigenous community of friends welcoming him, as both a guest and a relative, he eventually reembraced the beauty, goodness, and truth of his Catholic faith and has since attempted to responsibly discern God’s will for him, according to his legitimate talents and desires. Within that sincere effort, at the end of September, 2019, his father, who’d been patiently guiding him, died from a heat attack, just before America—and the world—appeared to enter a new era of chaos within which we are attempting to stabilize ourselves.

Mark wrote the first lines of his book, It’s About Time (Millions of Copies Sold for Dad) the day his father died, Monday, September 30, 2019. However, over the next year, as his country went through the impeachment and acquittal of a president, endured the trauma of an economic shutdown over a mysterious virus coming from a lab leak in China, and his beloved Twin Cities blew up in fiery riots, Mark worked when he could (the Boxing gyms and churches were closed due to Governor’s orders), helped his mother who was diagnosed with a fatal heart disease, and daily mourned his father. He helped protect American Indian buildings with American Indian Movement (AIM) Patrol, and he eventually got part-time work as a bouncer, working bar security when restaurants were allowed to reopen. But he didn’t do much until, as Christmas 2020 approached, he resolved that in the coming year he would do something with which his father would be happy. Organizing himself and setting his goal, he began writing the book his father—who’d nagged Mark about always insisting he was a writer yet never publishing a book—was never to see published in his earthly lifetime. Beginning the daily process of writing on February 9, 2021, Mark completed the first draft of It’s About Time (Millions of Copies Sold for Dad) just before Easter on the Monday of Holy Week, March 29, 2021. In this book he tells the tale of his search for a meaningful life, appreciating the gift of God’s love that life actually is, and how he sees now that the guardian angels were always guiding him and his family through it all. A contract with a humble little local publisher was severed over editorial differences on Christmas Eve, 2022, so Mark relied on his father’s gift, his high school education, accepting help from his St. Thomas Academy contacts, specifically his literary advisor, Dan Flynn (Author of Famous Minnesotans: Past and Present) and legal advisor Kelly Rowe, and Mark’s classmate, Tony Zirnhelt, and the book won the 2024 Irish Network Minnesota Bloomsday Literary Award and was published, through Connemara Patch Press, on Father’s Day, June 16. Unfortunately, Mark’s mother, who’d read the manuscript, never saw it in print, having collapsed in his arms and died October 22, 2023. Yet Mark continues on in hopeful and confident prayer that she—Mrs. Nanette Jane Connor—is watching over him, as she promised she would, next to his father—Robert J. Connor—while gazing perpetually into the Beatific Vision of the face of God.

To find out more about Mark, you can check out his website at https://boxersandwritersmagazine.com/.