Esther Helfgott’s life-long writing habit helped her weather her husband Abe’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and the grief of slowly losing their thirty-year partnership. Using writing as a tool to handle this profound life change, she created the moving memoir, Dear Alzheimer’s: A Caregiver’s Diary & Poems. When her husband Abe died, she began writing the poems that later became Listening to Mozart: Poems of Alzheimer’s, a companion collection those who have grieved cherish.

Sheila
Esther, I know that you did not come to writing in the way many do by earning an MFA. How did you become a writer? I think knowing this will inspire many who are not attending formal programs.

Esther
Writing is something I’ve always done – letters, diaries, notes to myself. I grew up thinking I’d be a special education teacher. In high school I volunteered at a school for the blind. I was influenced by Annie Sullivan and dreamed of teaching at Perkins School for the Blind but emotionally I didn’t know how to get out of my neighborhood (or my room) where I made up stories and engaged in the Cinderella Complex. Meanwhile I observed at a Downs kids’ school and the Rosewood State Training School for Boys where my Uncle Benny lived. I wrote papers on “handicapped” children. My Uncle Benny was “handicapped.” A year into college I married, quit college, got a job in a hospital laboratory running hemoglobin tests and taking blood; got pregnant, quit my job, had my baby and two more, divorced, became active in the Women’s Movement, went back to college, earned a BA, MA and Ph.D. The feminist movement of the early 1970s brought me to consciousness as a writer and a person who lived in the public, as well as the domestic, sphere. It also taught me to teach my children to have professions so they could earn their own living and take care of themselves. I have succeeded on that score.

When I was working on my doctoral dissertation about the poet Irena Klepfisz I took a year-long class in psychoanalytic theory. I was also undergoing a five-day a-week psychoanalysis. For a short moment in time I wanted to become a psychoanalyst so I could bring that methodology to the non-rich; it didn’t take me long to realize that wasn’t possible, given institutional psychoanalytic practice in the United States. I also knew I was a non-fiction writer and poet, more than I was a teacher, though I loved to facilitate writing groups and did a lot of that for over thirty years.

Sheila
How did you come to writing poetry in particular?

Esther
I came to the writing of poetry via the women’s movement and, more specifically, the women’s poetry movement. Anne Sexton, Diane Wakoski, Erica Jong were important influences. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar was important to me, more so than her poems. But my poetry writing emerged as a result of my diary and letter writing, which I’d done since I was a child. The diary form is my favorite of literary forms and styles. I like the honesty and the lack of artifice (usually). Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Anais Nin’s, women’s diaries of the Western Expansion and so forth. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening always read like a poem to me.

Sheila
What were the highlights for you in studying poetry?

Esther
I never trained as a poet, but while I was in graduate school in history, for fun I took a course from Nelson Bentley so I was privy to his night class for the rest of my life, or his. I took a course from Heather McHugh also while I was in grad school and later on from Madeline deFrees at Hugo House. I went to Centrum Foundation’s Port Townsend Writer’s Conference twice. One year I worked with Carol Dukes-Muske and the other Rebecca Seiferle. I also took a class from you when you were over in Seattle. All of these experiences and teachers were stellar. But my long-term academic training was in American history and I got there, as well, by way of the women’s movement.

I fell in love with women’s history as a field but I was not cut out for an institutional or academic lifestyle. The petty politics existed, as I saw it, regardless of field. So when I needed money, as we all do, especially after divorcing my first husband, I worked at Sears as a salesperson and at a chore service company and wrote at night or on my lunch hour, as well as any other chance I got. My one regret is that I didn’t see myself as a writer who shared her work while I was a young mother, as Adrienne Rich did, say, and Maxine Kumin and as young women are doing today. I love that young mothers use their time to write in the world now. The women’s movement, alone, gave me that.

Sheila
Oh, how it feels to be included in the list of the wonderful teachers you learned from!

Let’s talk for a moment about your writing outside of poetry. I know that it includes writing for newspapers and other publications. How do you see that as part of your development as a writer?

Esther
The Seattle Sun and the Fremont Forum, among them. I liked writing up stories that took place in my neighborhood. I’ve written a lot for local newspapers. Many have gone out of business: 

Sheila
Many who write poetry from the stories of their own lives say that poetry is therapy. What are your thoughts?

Esther
People think because I sometimes write about psychoanalysis that I’m a practitioner but not so. Also in the course of my teaching I led writing groups that were therapeutic. That’s what writing does for many. I was invited to apply to the National Association for Poetry Therapy — as a writer — and did start with them, but that organization’s methodology is for people who want to be counselors, social workers, professional therapists, definitely not writers except as what they call muses. I left the program but remained a member for a few years. I also wrote a few essays for The Journal of Poetry Therapy, which helped me appreciate myself as a diary writer. In part, those essays were in diary form and led to Dear Alzheimer’s: A Caregiver’s Diary & Poems, which led to Listening to Mozart: Poems of Alzheimer’s.

Sheila
When did you decide to serve the community via poetry?

Esther
I’ve never set out to serve the community as such; rather, I’ve thought to participate in community building.

I was teaching writing classes for North Seattle Community College. In 1989, I asked Nelson Bentley if my students in North Seattle Community College’s Senior Adult Education Program could read in the UW Castalia Series, which Nelson curated. I was a history grad student, doing poetry on the side, and had been reading for Nelson since taking his class in 1982. Nelson said that only university students were allowed to participate. “Why don’t you start your own series?” he asked; and before I could say anything else, he said. “You can do it!” So I did. I lifted the name from the defunct “It’s About Time Feminist Book Store” on Seattle’s upper University Avenue and “The It’s About Time Writers Reading Series” was born.

The first reading took place at Seattle’s Ravenna-Bryant Senior Center in Jan 1990. I have the video of that first reading and will place it in the University of Washington Special Collection Archives, where I’ve already deposited some of the It’s About Time’s files.

I’m often asked if I had planned for the series to go on for so long. It’s going into it’s 25^th year. Three years ago, I “retired” as curator and turned the series over to Peggy Sturdivant who is taking it into the future. I think if I would have made such a plan, I wouldn’t have managed to bring the series forward at all. So I’m glad I didn’t have one. I would have missed the opportunity to meet some amazing people, up front and in the audience too.

Sheila
The series has certainly served the community of writers and listeners! Can you tell us more about the distinction you see between serving the community and building the community?

Esther
Perhaps it’s just semantics. The word “serve” seems to reflect a politician’s thinking, and I’ve never been a very good politician — socially or politically. For me, community building means helping others succeed in what they want to do, to share space with them, to bring people from different places in the community together so they can trade stories, read and write together and become friends. It’s About Time Writers has been successful in that way certainly. I had wanted to take About Time around town so that a greater number of ethic groups could intermingle. That was hard to do but now Peggy and Georgia McCade have organized an It’s About Time meeting at the Columbia library, which is in an ethnically diverse area of Seattle, and that’s exciting. It’s just what I’ve wanted to happen.

Sheila
What are the poetry and community achievements of which you are most satisfied?

Esther
It’s About Time Writers Reading Series, now in its 25^th year. Jack Straw 2010; Journal of Poetry Therapy. I enjoyed teaching at Hugo House, Cancer Lifeline and, especially, North Seattle Community College’s Senior Adult Education Program. I’ve done a few workshops for Alzheimer’s caregivers and appreciated how much participants got out of those groups, so much so that they could run the groups themselves. Very gratifying, as were the Poeming the Silence classes that I held privately, for I don’t remember how many years — maybe 15.

I also get lots of satisfaction from reading for local independent bookstores.

Sheila
Where were you in your poetry life when your beloved husband Abe was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s?

Esther
I was facilitating writing groups at Seattle’s Cancer Lifeline, teaching my Poeming the Silence classes — yes, I made up the word “Poeming” — writing articles on the history of psychoanalysis in Seattle and developing a couple of books centered on psychoanalysis, which are still in the works.

Sheila
How did the work and poems in your book Dear Alzheimer’s: A Caregiver’s Diary & Poems arrive?

Esther
Dear Alzheimer’s started as a blog for the Seattle PI on-line. I had written a couple guest columns before that paper went out of print. When it became an online publication, I developed Witnessing Alzheimer’s: A Caregiver’s View.

Then, I was at a poetry reading on poetry and hunger and met Doug Johnson, publisher of Cave Moon Press. A couple years before, he had sent me an email to submit to an anthology, which became Broken Circles: A gathering of poems for hunger, but I was too involved with taking care of Abe then to think about anything else. I sent Doug’s email around to other poets who submitted. I went to the reading when the book came out and saw Doug there. He invited me to send him some pages on caregiving and Alzheimer’s. I did; he liked them and offered to publish the work. The title, Dear Alzheimer’s, came from a poem I wrote at a Poetry Therapy conference.

Sheila
Would you share that poem?

Esther

Serendipity at a Poetry Therapy Workshop:

We’re Instructed to Interview the Person Sitting Next to Us

                          – for Norma Leedy and in memory of
                           Jack Leedy, founder of the National
                           Association of Poetry Therapy

There must have been
an angel
sitting here
between us
waiting for our pens
to meet
over husbands’
slipping minds.

Jack’s forty-five years
of patients
and poetry.

Abe’s forty-five years
of oncology and
microscopes –
cell after cell
of stun-
ning
destruction
Two doctors’ wives
reeling.

Dear Alzheimer’s
Why
did you pick our
sheltered
lives
to
visit?

And here’s a piece from “Dear Reader” which serves as an introduction to the book:

(from Dear Alzheimer’s: A Caregiver’s Diary & Poems)

Dear Reader … From an early age, my Diary was my best friend. As an adult, poetry became my friend, as well. Both writing forms became especially useful to me as I sought to understand the progression of my husband’s Alzheimer’s disease. As always writing offered me an outlet for the self-absorption I needed to prepare, on a daily basis, even on a minute-to-minute basis, for the around-the-clock job of caregiving. If I had not allowed myself time to relax into a space that accelerated awareness of my interior life I would not have been in shape to cope with the struggles Abe and I faced as we dealt with this ravaging disease. I thank the diary and poetry for saving my life.

The diary is an especially helpful writing tool because it is geared most naturally to the fragmented life, and I, who have experienced the fragmentary life of motherhood coupled with illness and divorce, still cannot imagine a life more intellectually fragmented than one affected by the throes and challenges of Alzheimer’s. Here, in this diary, which has always been my document of life as battle field, I not only work through conflicts concerning caregiving and self, but I also record my husband’s memories. He and I had, in a sense, at that nadir in his life, become each other’s writing partners. I became his memory and amanuensis and he the one who determined exactly what it was I would write at a given time.

How could I not grab a pen, for instance, and record his thoughts, when he awakened from a nightmare, his brother chasing him in a dream. He is ten years old and in the Bronx. He is not a retired Seattle pathologist looking through a microscope to see if a patient’s cells are cancerous, and I am not an independent poet and writer. My story is his, as well as mine; and my diary holds us both. It is filled with representations of our daily life, representations that may help others understand their own sorrows that are connected to this disease. But mostly, my diary helped me record and remember my husband and me in that scary and very crazy-making time.

Sheila
Esther, this is a tender and moving introduction. I believe that writing makes a deep and lasting difference in our lives, and your writing affirms my belief.

What did you think about as you were writing this book in terms of a future audience?

Esther
I didn’t think of an audience. I just wrote what I needed to write, what helped me get through …

Sheila
What was your process with Listening to Mozart: Poems of Alzheimer’s? Can you share a few of the very moving short poems?

Esther
Listening to Mozart: Poems of Alzheimer’s was inspired by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani’s The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (Vintage, 1990), which I read in preparation for a Jane Hirshfield Salon that took place in my home on July 20, 2013, during a time when I was hosting get-togethers with writers and calling them salons.

I read some of these poems at Redmond Association of Spokenword (RASP), where Michael Dylan Welch, the curator and Tanka guru of the western world!, told me I was writing Tanka and to go home and write some more. I wrote about 50 and found I was able to access feelings I couldn’t before. It was a new way of relating to Abe. I sent some to Kathleen Flenniken, who was Washington State Poet Laureate for her website The Far Field: Washington State Poets and to the editor of Ribbons: Tanka Society of America Journal and received positive response from both. I started keeping a Tanka diary but didn’t write only in that form in the diary or for the book. Then I sent a bunch of pages to Doug and asked him if he wanted them for a book and he said, “Yep!”

Funny how I can’t write in that form now. Even when I try I don’t like what I write but for that particular purpose, to speak with Abe again, it was an important writing moment for me.

I’m forgetting
the Alzheimer’s years—
I’ve gone back to our early days
—you read my work—
all of it—
you knew where
commas went—

…

the knot
between us
cannot be
undone—I know you
more
now you’re gone

…

I didn’t know
I was writing love poems
to you Abe—
I was just writing
and love came out

In Nessa McCasey’s review of Listening to Mozart, written for the International Academy for Poetry Therapy, I especially like what she says about having to “show up” as a writer, which is what I try to do. If I was nervous about giving a presentation or going to a meeting, Abe would say: “You just have to show up.” He was right about that. I also think of putting words to paper as showing up. Just sit down at your desk every day and write what you can write. It might not be what you planned to write, but the habit will keep you in practice and eventually what you want to come out of your pen or computer will.

Sheila
Abe would be very proud of you for showing up and writing these books. I know that both are available in ebook form as well as in print.

Esther
Eventually, Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Convey-Spaulding, co-publishers at Two Sylvias Press, published Dear Alzheimer’s and Listening as ebooks.

Sheila
Were these publications after Doug published the books as print books? Why were there two different publishers?

Esther
Yes, after the print books were out. I was working with Kelli when revising Dear Alzheimer’s and I think I asked her if she wanted to do an e-book version. She and Annette conferred and it worked out. I think that’s how it happened. Then we did the same thing with Listening. The teams on both ends worked well together. I loved the idea of a women’s press, which Two Sylvia’s was at the time. It followed through with my involvement in the women’s movement during the early 1970s. Coming full-circle.

Sheila
Where has the loss of Abe and your recent work placed you in your career and community service?

Esther
The loss of Abe was so profound I can’t begin to explain its impact. I’m a little bit involved with the Alzheimer’s community, not much. I may try to do more. I’ve signed up to volunteer at Mary’s Place, a women’s shelter, to facilitate writing groups if the women want them. Last week, there seemed to be 200 women there, plus children. It’s a crime that in our society and our town with all the money we have people have to go without, not have roofs over their heads or enough food to eat. A writing group may not help them find residences or jobs but it’s the one skill I have so I’ll offer it. It’s so different than the Alzheimer’s community where, for the most part, people have had long lives—homes and employment and then in old age, generally old age, they get sick; but in a homeless shelter one sees young people, young women with children with little or no chance to succeed. It breaks your heart.

I never thought of writing as a career. I’m not very career-oriented. Writing’s just something I do and have always done — letter-writing, diaries and so forth — not until the women’s movement and my return to college in 1970 after years of absence and by then a single-parent with three kids, did I realize people actually wrote for a living; but by then I took the academic track. I was in love with women’s history and research and became a TA. I loved it, and probably should have stayed put. But Academia wasn’t the best choice for my writing personality. I’m also not a very good student. Instead of working on what I’m “supposed” to be doing I write in my diary. My early childhood continues to drive my writing and thinking life, which is the reason for my interest in psychoanalysis. I no longer believe in it as a clinical modality, but for me at least it’s an important hermeneutic tool, a way to relate to the mind and body as living texts that can be interpreted and examined.

Sheila
Who would you say you are today?

Esther
Oh, I don’t know. I just try to get through. I used to write myself through the day; now I just try to finish up writing projects I’ve been working on for years — those two books on psychoanalysis — one the diary of my analysis, the other a biography of the first woman psychoanalyst in Seattle, Edith Buxbaum. She’s not well-known enough, and she did some good work in Seattle, especially with the social work community. (See my articles at HistoryLink.org and my website). Unlike Susan Sontag I’ve never expected to live forever — but maybe I’ve acted that way, in terms of letting projects take so long to finish. I just turned 73 so I guess I better get rolling.

Sheila
Esther, I visited your links at HistoryLink.org under Peoples’ History, I found an article by Marge Leuders about Grey Panther activist Anna Helfgott. There is a photo of her family, which includes you as a girl! And the article ends with a poem written by Anna. I don’t think we can end our conversation without mentioning your family history and the way you have, it seems to me, carried on in your mother’s tradition, using your poet’s sensibility to help bring decency to people’s lives

Esther
My mother continues to be a great influence in my life. She was a simple dressmaker with a heart of gold. She was a leftist from the day she was born. She moved to the Pacific Northwest with me when I got divorced and helped me raise my children. First we were in Bellingham where she was in the Bridge Program also started a Gray Panthers chapter and then in Seattle where she was co-president of the Gray Panthers. In Seattle, she was in every demonstration she could get to until she was 90 years old. Then I gave her a birthday party with 100 or so people. Earl Robinson, the folk singer and writer, came and sang all her favorite workers songs—”Joe Hill,” “The House I Live In,” “Black and White,” and so forth. People came from all over, her sisters from Florida, our Baltimore cousins. All her children and grandchildren were there. That night she had a heart attack. She had surgery and the doctor said she wouldn’t make it. The next morning she was sitting up in bed reading The New York Times! She lived until age 96. Here is her poem that I had engraved on her head stone:

Unity

by Anna Helfgott

   (1899-1996)

Without the farmer
We’d have no wheat.
Without the cowboy
We’d have no meat.

Without the builder
We’d have no house.
Without a mate
We’d have no spouse.

Without the tailor
We’d have no clothes.
Without the actor
We’d have no shows.

Without each other
We’d have no unity.
Let’s work together
For a better community.

Sheila
Esther, thank you so much for sharing your mother’s poetry as well as yours. I know you don’t think of yourself as having a career, necessarily, but the word does mean “an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress,” and your writing trajectory has certainly taken that route as well as carried forth your mother’s love and activism in the way you meld community building and strengthening women with poetry and writing circles.

Esther
Well, the word career is so caught up with money and that’s not something I’ve made much of, either with my teaching or writing. I’ve been fortunate that Abe’s salary has allowed me to work in the world and help where I can help; but looking back I think it would have been much smarter had I learned to work within an existing institution rather than on the outside. One gets a lot more support and it’s much easier than working alone, as I have. So I have counseled my children and other young people to get “regular jobs” so they have their own insurance plans and other benefits from an established company. But we do what we can with what we have at the time. When I got divorced I had only one year of college behind me so my one goal was to see that my three children and I all got a college education. I’m thankful that we were able to achieve that goal. And my mother was able to get her GED and begin writing at the very young age of 70!

Thank you, Sheila. I’m so happy to have this conversation with you. You honor me.

Bio: Esther Altshul Helfgott is a Seattle-based writer of poetry and nonfiction. She earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington. Learn more at her website.