A few months ago, Writing it Real subscriber Leslie Wake suggested that she interview me about the writing of my memoir, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief. We began an email correspondence that resulted in the interview we are posting this week. I was honored to be asked to talk about writing the book and very interested in the thoughts and questions Leslie had about my process writing the book and the effects of writing on me. Being interviewed is a growth experience as is writing.

We hope you’ll find the questions and answers informative and helpful as you think about your writing, why and how to offer your experience to others.

Leslie
When I read your memoir, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry In A Time of Grief, I see that you seem to have a very important relationship with poetry. Did you intentionally use poetry as a device to shape your book?

 Sheila
I actually don’t know how I would have learned, felt what I needed to feel after my son died if I didn’t know poetry and love and trust it and resonate with it. I began writing poems, at least starts to them, almost immediately after my son died. There didn’t seem to be any way to live with my sorrow but by watching the sun rise, reading poetry and the words of shamans and then writing poetry as best I could. I had no concrete thought that I was writing a book. What I thought I was doing, and I was, was searching for the answer to the questions “Where has my son gone?” and “How am I to live without him here as my child?” I realized that in some ways, all the work I’d done in poetry was preparation for and even sometimes premonitions about handling sorrow.

Leslie
What do you mean when you say, “premonitions about handling sorrow?”

Sheila
I have found that poetry is predictive. Just as in a certain kind of dream, something in us delivers information into our poetry that the conscious mind is not yet ready to accept or hasn’t really found believable. People write about the end of love before they “know” they are going to leave their spouse. My teacher Richard Blessing wrote about his death months before he suddenly collapsed on a basketball court and was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor. I wrote a poem when my son was six that spoke about my fear that he would die and my hope that we leave this planet forever upward. A few years later, I wrote a poem about “when fear washes you away,” which turns out to have offered solace when he died.

Leslie
Sheila, I get the sense that when you were writing your book, you needed to enter a place where you could visit yourself everyday and hold your own hand. I know that you are an avid gardener. Do you agree tending a garden is much like being a mother where you have a hand in your children’s growth, but you can’t control their destiny? How did gardening figure in your book?

Sheila
I was living in L.A. when Seth died. When we returned there after his funeral, like I said, there wasn’t much I wanted to do besides watch the sun rise, read the words of Shamans and poets, and then, suddenly, make plants grow. We didn’t have a yard there, only a small condo patio, a little balcony, and a roof-top deck. I began planting on all three levels — shrubs and bushes and vines, especially flowering ones. I fostered a Meyer lemon tree and some herbs too. Watering, visiting nurseries and fertilizing soil were never too wearing as almost all other forms of life seemed to be. Soon, we had flowering vines reaching from the street level patio to the upstairs balcony. We had bright bouganvea blossoms and sweet lemons. I agree that tending the plants and doing what was best for them is like being a mother. I wanted to use that part of myself I must have been mourning or afraid of losing along with my son, though, of course, I had my daughter, who was a great support even as she was grieving, too. It seems like wanting to make things grow was a spontaneous outburst of feeling, like poetry.

Leslie
Returning back to the topic of poetry, were there any specific poems you turned to after Seth died?

Sheila
A few weeks after Seth died, I kept a commitment to teach at a writers’ conference. During a one-on-one conference with a woman who brought her poems, I had a significant experience. Her poems were in the voice of a teenaged son who had died and was urging his mother years later to please clean out his room and move forward enjoying her life. “He” was trying to tell her that he was all right and wanted her to be too. In that moment, I knew that I had to return to writing poetry.

I turned to Edward Hirsh’s books because I had loved what he said about villanelles; that they were a way of retrieving loss. In his book, I read “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop and soon I was re-reading Robert Desnos’ strident and rhythmic “The Voice of Robert Desnos” and then Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” I tried my hand at imitating those poets just as I would have encouraged my students to do. I was amazed at what came pouring out. I was raising my voice in howls and wails, as well as peaceful and lulling acceptance. All of it. Over the months and years after his death, I read Christopher Smart and Rilke, especially to receive help with my grief. Each time I read their poems, I was able to hold onto more and more of my experience — the longing to remember my son and the longing to find a way to feel that he was still with me no matter the number of years I’d have to go on without him physically present.

Leslie
I’ve heard it said that poets often write just for themselves. As your book began to take form, did you have an audience in mind?

Sheila
When I am writing poetry, I always feel like I am writing to discover some truth, or some reason for why I am feeling what I am feeling when I start the poem; some reason for why something in particular urged me to speech before I knew what I would speak about. For instance, the image of my husband’s wet bathing trunks showing through his jeans as he drove one day, made me sad; sometimes I can’t stop hearing a phrase in my head, like, “when fear washes you away and the moon is a cold light fading”?

I do believe, however, that when a piece of writing makes contact with someone, and they experience what is in your mind and heart exactly as you do because of your words, you view your experience more deeply and even differently. So, in a sense, because I am writing to discover, I am writing work I think will ultimately make contact with someone other than me.

Leslie
Can you talk about “Wedding Poem,” which you wrote for Kristen Belt”?

Sheila
Kristen was Seth’s fiancé. They were to be married five months after he died in the snowboarding accident. Almost seven years later, Kristen was marrying a man who had been a friend of Seth’s at college. Kristen’s dad asked me to write her a poem for her wedding. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to write for such a specific audience upon a specific occasion. But, I did. Kristen told me when she was back from her honeymoon that she keeps the poem on her dresser and that reading it makes her feel calm. I was very pleased at that effect because I know she worried that “something would go wrong” for this marriage as well.

Leslie
You seem to have a sacred relationship with the earth. In your garden you witness dying and growth. You have also seen this in your life; when there is an ending, there is also a beginning. As a poet, you found the language that helped you write your poem to Kristen about renewal. It showed hope and it also showed that something new has arisen — in the same way a garden receives death but also promotes new growth.

Sheila
I think I was able to do this because I felt a strong connection to Kristen and wanted to understand how I would feel at her wedding ceremony–we were all invited–my husband, my daughter and her family, my mother, my ex-husband and his wife. I am happy knowing that finding out that I felt that her marriage would bring much joy to many was calming for me, too.

Leslie
Did it take courage to open and reveal such a personal story?

Sheila
Yes, it did. Once I decided to do the work of trying to make a book from what I had written, I wasn’t sure I could write a book-length piece of work having come from a background of poetry and personal essay. I certainly wondered if my personal search to understand this loss would resonate with anyone else.

I always tell my students: when you have written your story well, readers will read it as if it could be their story. What is most idiosyncratic in our writing is always what is also most universal; we write from the humble non-righteous part of ourselves and in being simple and true in that way, we are most able to connect with others.

I know that’s true, but it is hard to believe when the story is your own. And I didn’t want to make people sad. Now I am finding out that people find the book courageous and sad but full of love and renewal as well and that it helps them in their lives if they’ve lost a loved one or if they need to feel grounded in an understanding of mortality.

Leslie
Did your peripheral vision as an editor make you pay attention to your writing in particular ways? Were there mistakes you tried to avoid?

Sheila
I have to say that I needed editorial help myself. When I was writing the book, I was trying to find the answer to my questions about mortality, immortality, and how I would continue without my son in the world. One editor told me, “Make your prose as accessible as your poetry.” This surprised me. I didn’t realize that in poetry I was clearer than in prose. Once she pointed this out by editing four pages for me, I was able to apply my own editing skills to my work.

I tried not to duplicate information though my thoughts returned and returned to certain images, memories and events, and I tried to make where I was geographically clear to the reader because I changed locations a lot. I also had to work out how to not overwhelm the reader but stay truthful to how it felt in the days following Seth’s death.

Rewriting, as I did a number of times, always involves developmental editing as well as sentence editing. By the time I was involved in the deepest editing, I had spent six or seven years on the book.

There is really no way to get away from the sadness in this book, but the investigation of the sadness brings acceptance and peace. I do believe that is part of the reason people feel empowered to grieve and to go on after they read the book.

Leslie
What did you learn about yourself during the process of writing this book?

Sheila
Once again, my writing and my poems know more than I do; the words of other poets and the words in my poems resonate from the deepest places in my spirit, and help me live deeply, and more knowingly. I learned again that I can trust poetry, how important that trust is, and that I should continue writing it. Writing prose, I also learned that I can sustain my thinking for pages and pages and that revision is worth it.

For a long while, my working title for the book was Finding Always. I felt the need to know that I could access what exists outside our temporal, quotidian world. I needed to know that my son would be with me always. Though he wasn’t going to age as the rest of us would, I could be in touch with his essence, which was and is always ageless. I believe that I did find always, through poetry, whose words are always an evocation of essence.

This changed me. Not only can I live with grief, I can sense the timelessness that surrounds this life we live in; I can remember the way in which my nervous system was forever changed by the loss of my son, and I can believe in the beauty and value of “seeing” beyond the time limits we operate in.

I am not a traditionally religious person, but the work of writing this book helped me discover a theology, one that poetry was always speaking of to me and one I had long admired, but now is one I have learned to use as a platform for the rest of my life.

Leslie
Your book, though well crafted, doesn’t fit a particular genre. What category do you think your book fits into?

Sheila
People who are in mourning or looking for deeper meaning in their lives, and people who help others through grieving and dark nights of the soul will benefit from reading my book. Perhaps that is what the category is: Help During Dark Nights of the Soul. I can’t quite see a bookstore calling a section by that name, but my book is part art and literature, part psychology and spirituality, and part poetry and lyric prose.

Leslie
What do you do now to remind yourself that it’s good to be alive?

Sheila
I think being alive has a new meaning for me. As much as my sadness at losing Seth and his future family is with me daily, I feel more connected to nature and to creating what will endure. That may explain the huge garden my husband and I have created and now spend time on with our two young grandsons. I find my commitment to being of help to others in my teaching endeavors is something I not only truly savor but have increased energy for.

It is good to be alive — Seth certainly felt that — and so feeling that every day brings me closer to his spirit. When a child dies before a parent, that child becomes an ancestor and I use the wisdom of my ancestor every day. He had lots to tell me, and one of his favorite phrases was, “Chill, Mom.” He had the ability to focus on hard projects and not get flustered or stressed because he knew how to sit in a hammock and enjoy the breeze or kayak on the bay and enjoy the quiet. I strive to be more like him every day.

A note here: Kristen has a baby now, a little boy. She is in love with him and their joy together is a reminder of how good it is to be alive and of the value of the Thich Nhat Hanh phrase I’ve put at the opening of my book, “…only continuation.”

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