The Viking Queen in Her Boat
On May 21, 2014 at 5:30 pm at Indy Reads Bookstore, in Indianapolis IN, I will be launching my new book of poems, The Mother Poems – A Memoir:The Warrior Queen Novelist and Her Poet Daughter, published by Chatter House Press. I never planned on writing any poems about my mother, let alone an entire book of them. In fact, at the beginning, I wanted to write anything but poems about my mother. Now that the book has been written, it feels to me like the book needed me to write it from the day my mother told me what a writer was, when I was no more than 4 years old and could not read a word.
The first of these poems (which is now in the middle of the book) came, when – in the midst of writer’s block during and after my divorce – I found myself writing about the scar on my mother’s hand caused by a cooking-accident grease burn. I struggled with that poem for several months. Later, after a visit with her, when I watched her hobbling around with a cane, impatient with everyone who wouldn’t slow down for her, I decided to write about the ways I remembered her moving through the world when younger. For most of her life she was impatient with everyone for being too slow and I was the child hurrying to keep up with her.
I imagined maybe 5 or 6 poems, a short series, and then I could move on to other material. I wrote about my first memory, following her to the pear tree in the pasture beside the first house I lived in. I wrote about hurrying to catch up with her as she charged through the mall when I was a teen. I wrote about her teaching me to brave the monsters in the basement by singing a battle hymn as I marched down the steps. I wrote about how she walked outside to survey the damage minutes after a tornado felled trees in our yard. Before I knew it, images and memories of her in times in between what I had already written also began to speak their way into poems. I found myself filling in the gaps chronologically, piecing a story together that was not only a story about her, but a story about me and ultimately, the story of our relationship.
The first poem about the scar ripped its way out of me in the summer of 2006. In the summer of 2008 I had begun writing about how my mother moved through the world and by the summer of 2009 I had accepted that this writing was going to require me to write about our entire lives, the whole story, from my first memory to her death, which I sensed was approaching faster than she wanted to admit. I did not imagine that the poems would be published. I needed to write them privately, for their own sake. I did not plan on sharing any of them with her. I needed to be as honest as possible, from within my perspective, no matter how painful.
By the summer of 2012, most of the poems had been written and along the way much more than poetry had been created. Unexpectedly, through the writing, I had done a life review of our relationship, and I had discovered my own lifelong love for this woman who could not let herself be loved. I had found forgiveness for her. And gratitude for what she had given me, especially for the love of writing which she passed on to me. In the fall of 2012, I decided to publish The Mother Poems while my mother was still alive and to ask her to write her own response which could be also included in the book. Impatient as ever, her “response” was a brief email to let me know she had read them, found some of them strong, and that she would start writing a response. Then, a few days later, she died, hurrying on to the next adventures of the Warrior Queen.
After her death, I needed to write several more poems. I wrote about her death. I wrote about other memories from childhood that popped up. I realized that I will be remembering and writing poems about her for the rest of my life. But I also knew that I needed to give The Mother Poems to readers now, even though there will be more mother poems for me to write. I have found that every time I have shared a poem from the book, the response is immediate. Women especially have told me that they want to write about their own mothers and that my poems have given them the courage to start doing so. I hope to begin scheduling readings and workshops using The Mother Poems as catalyst to encourage other women – and men – to write about their own complex, unique, challenging, and numinous relationships with their mothers.
I don’t have a preconceived agenda for how and where I am going to do these readings and workshops. I sense that, like the poems themselves, these opportunities will emerge organically. The poems will touch people, invitations will emerge, the poems will continue to take me beyond where I imagine going, and giving much, much more than I expect to receive, tapping for myself and everyone whom they inspire to write about their own mothers, the mythic mother-load of story, memory, creativity, and healing.
If you’ve read this post and would like a Mother Poem reading and workshop, please contact me! I look forward to meeting you on this journey.
Soulfaring - 