Memoirs are high on my reading list. Memoirs that tell authors’ stories of grieving and healing are at the top. This week, I am posting an in-depth interview with writer Kim Stafford, whose brother committed suicide. As a writer, Kim sets out in his book 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do, A Memoir to explore his brother’s life to understand his actions. Along the way, he must explore his own and the family dynamics with which he and his siblings grew up. The miracle is that in dedicating himself to understanding loss, he gains an understanding of what it means to be alive, to live with passion and authenticity.

Sheila
Your search for learning more about your brother, Bret, to whom you were very close, and what caused him to take his life leads you to discovering what is deepest in you. As I read the book, I experienced the journey with you, and, as a reader and as a mother whose adult son died, I am grateful for your honesty and for your message about honesty. Suffering loss makes so much else unimportant. Through writing, through taking in nature and memory and the words of others, you have learned so much and transmitted that learning to your readers.

How has writing this book changed you?

Kim
By writing this book about my brother, 24 years gone, I have reversed my sense of connection to him. Before I started, I thought I knew him when he was alive, and now he is gone. Now I feel I didn’t really know him when we were together, and now, though he is gone, I begin to know him better.

This reminds me of what my mother said after I left for college: “I never really know you until you went away and started writing letters home.”

The act of writing raises questions, and begs for thoughts, in way daily life, even close family life, may not.

So, I guess my answer is yes—in spades. I have a richer life now than when I was merely suffering, missing my brother, one bout of grief after another.
Now, as I say at the close of the book, though gone my brother is with me every day.

Sheila
What helped you most in the search you were making? Did you trust that writing would get you there?

Kim
I didn’t actually know what the writing would accomplish, but I had to go into it after decades of family silence about my brother. Finally, I realize (the obvious) that there are no answers in the kind of silence we practiced. There is only sustained suffering, dark waters trembling at the brim. Once you begin to write, there is movement, and by attending to this movement, you start to find direction forward.

Sheila
You offer information about your father, William Stafford, a famous poet, in this book and about your parents’ child rearing ideas. Can you address how you made the decision to include the information, how your family reacted, whether you shared the manuscript ahead of time for their opinions and permission to publish some of this information? You are very truthful about some characteristics of your father, in particular, that are the other side of a poet who spoke to so many.

Kim
When I wrote the book Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford, he was a pure hero in my eyes. People asked me if I resented him, felt conflicted about his character and behavior, and I always said no. I didn’t fully understand his reticence at certain key moments in our life, his inability to help me when things fell apart. I felt he was doing all he could, and that was that.

As I began to write 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do, this equanimity in my feeling about my father changed. I began to see his shortcomings more clearly. Why was he hard on my brother in ways he was not hard on me? Why did I seem to be the chosen one, while my brother, older and very skilled in many ways, was sidelined by the great poet? What was the effect on my brother of our father’s preference—and how might this preference have contributed to my brother’s suicide?

I would not say I blamed our father still, nor resented him, but I did begin to see where he might have done more.

And I needed to see this, even to dwell on this, to fiercely focus my gaze on this because now I am raising a boy, and I need to reflect on what I can say and do, even with great difficulty, to help our boy go forward.

Sheila
Another area of personal epiphany that reveals so much about your brother as you are coming to understand him is when you begin to see how hard Bret was trying to be the role model an oldest is supposed to be. Did understanding this alter your perception of him?

Kim
When you write, certain things you have passively noticed become subject to true examination.The fact that my brother was older than me, but not as tall—this began to resonate. What was that like for him? The fact that my brother did some writing, like our father, but did not publish books like I, the younger brother did—this became loud in my thinking. The fact that I left an unhappy marriage, but my brother, the saint, would not do so—this called to my attentive study.

The fact is, if you look closely at a series of events, you see patterns emerge, and these become stories, and before long, you have developed from inadequate materials an understanding you did not have before. Is this story more true? I believe it is worthy of ongoing inquiry, and in my case, this life-long quest becomes my new effort at harmonious relations with my departed brother.

Sheila
What did writing your book and the years you’ve lived with the sadness of losing your brother to suicide teach you about sorrow, about grief, and about living with them? In other words, what is the most important thing about sorrow?

Kim
Sorrow, by itself, does not enhance life. Healing enhances life. A deepening perspective based on engagement with grief enhances life. And healing takes not just time, but attentive work. At least this is my experience.

“As I say in the afterword to the book, “Over time, events become memories, and memories become stories, and in the process we may learn the trick to understand. For it is a trick; it doesn’t just happen.”

I began to see that the twenty-two years of silence about my brother in my family was not helping any of us progress to a new life. I had to do the work of reaching forward, by reaching back. So for two years I took on this work, dove deep into the story, sifted through letters, wrote to friends, read my brother’s master’s thesis and other writings for the first time, and essentially lived with his spirit in dreams and waking hours. And I found that in the heart of my sorrow there were stories that took me forward beyond his death where I had been stalled for decades.

I came to see this: You reach back through the difficult ending to grasp the beautiful beginning, like pulling a venomous serpent inside out.

Sheila
You end your book with a chapter that discusses the short vignettes your book is composed of. They run together inside the parts like small chapters, though there are no page breaks between the titles. It is interesting that the blurbs don’t mention the form you’ve chosen and you don’t until the reader has read the entire book. I like that. I liked experiencing this way of telling a deep and important emotional story with no one pointing out anything about that to me. I’d love to hear more from you on this writing decision.

Kim
All my life writing teachers have tried to convert me to composing “a narrative arc,” to design a plan that could be outlined, that would carry a thesis pronouncement through a systematic design for proof. With the story of a suicide, though, I felt I had to begin by accepting I would never understand this narrative. There were things I would never know. So I had to choose, was forced to choose, devotion to small clarities, loyalty to the way memory has sorted my brother’s story into a series of vignettes—“the time we…” prismatically arrayed like a thousand starry points.
This approach has become something I now offer as a writing workshop: “One can compose a work of any length, given writing solitudes of any brevity, by designing a cell-like structure that empowers steady progress toward a worthy goal.”

What I love about the little chapters is that no one passage needs to explain anything. Each little story just tells itself, and then steps away. Collectively, I feel the eighty-eight little chapters in the book tell a whole story—but each individual story is the salvation of a single memory responsible only for itself.

Thank you for noticing the structure. I am hope this will make the book useful to writers not just on suicide, but on any potentially overwhelming narrative. If you find it impossible to tell a big story, tell one small part with affection and courage…then another.

Sheila
Nature, synchronicity in meetings with people who have wisdom to share, change and transition, knowing thyself, love, family, and contributing — your book is about all of these as much as it is about finding out why your brother had grown depressed. Do you talk about this when you give readings?

Kim
Before the book came out, I was kind of dreading the readings we had scheduled. Who wants to hear about suicide? Wouldn’t these events be downers, piling grief on grief? Would anyone want to be there, including me?

What has happened, by contrast with my fears, is that the readings become celebrations of my brother’s life, expressions of our love, stories of our wild adventures, an evocation of the 1960s and beyond when we thought we knew so much we now have a chance to consider again. I have a chance to know my brother again, I tell the audience. “Here, let me read the story of one of our greatest ventures…!”

Someone said with suicide, it’s as if the love is supposed to stop. You are supposed to hold your breath forever. But with the readings, it’s not like that. People laugh, I laugh, I cry, they cry. We celebrate the beautiful complexity of friendship. We get beyond grief into love.

Sheila
Do you know the work of Dr. Rynearson, a psychiatrist in Seattle whose wife committed suicide leaving him to raise two small children? In his book Retelling Violent Death, he shares the insight that healing comes when we stop writing or telling the narrative of our loved one’s dying but start to tell the narrative of their living. This can be very hard when a person has taken their own life because the what-ifs crowd in–those left behind feel responsible. In your book you recount your life with your brother during your childhoods, college days and marriages. Much of the time you are looking for clues to his later suicide, but some of the time you are writing who he was as you saw him, as he shared some of himself with you. Was there a different for you between these two ways of writing–writing to search for clues and writing an evocation of Bret?

Kim
Dr. Rynearson’s observation that “There is an inherent instability in the very structure of the dying story” is helpful to me. By focusing on the moment of violent death, he points out, the “action of violent dying disintegrates the linear drama of caring.”

I found this to be true. When I focused on my brother’s death, it was as if the love had stopped. When, by writing, I focused on his life, his gifts, and the beauty of his being, I began to breathe again, and to breathe new life into my memory of him. Yes, often I fell into obsessing on my own inability to see and to help my brother in his long struggle with depression. But now by writing I return to him, return to the boy, to the man, to the brother who had this glory of a life.

As one his friends said to me in a letter after reading my book, “Bret should have been a holy man, not a land-use planner.” There is something in that for each of us.

Sheila
Thank you, Kim, for reminding us how important it is to recognize holiness in others and in ourselves. As a writing teacher, what do you believe are the most important things you can offer students?

Kim
Because of what I have been through in life, and because of what I have learned by writing about the most difficult dimensions of that life, I try to provide my students with a safe forum for writing down “what you have been carrying…a story you long to tell, but it seems impossible to tell. Let’s make this class a place where you might begin….”

And the only way to do this, for me, is to invite the class to become a learning community, a guild of seekers, a circle of trust.

Sheila
From your book and other writings, I know that you learn from your students, perhaps as much as they learn from you. How does this dynamic work? What fosters it? What are some of the valuable things students have taught you? How do these things affect how you see your job?

Kim
Last week I found myself writing a poem about this question, after doing a workshop at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle where I felt I had talked too much. Early in my teaching, my motivations were silly things like “I want the class to like me.” “I want people to have a good time.” “I want to get paid.” “I want to get through this.” It was all about some kind of performance by me. But as I stressed, getting ready for class, my wife would ask me (without a trace of sarcasm, bless her) “Will there be some other people in the room? Might they have some ideas about what to do together?” So after my “100 Tricks” workshop at the Hugo House, I wrote:

 School of Magic

For a learner, food is what you don’t know.
Facts and stories, songs and blessings become
your menu of delight. You seek, find, feast.

For a teacher, food is what you can’t know
without the festive hunger of learners. You set the table.
A multitude of hungers there convene.

Among us, may the feast appear.

Sheila
Ah! Yes. I love reading your words about learning and teaching being a special kind of feast that requires both guests at the table.

I see that you are doing more teaching up in Seattle and in Port Townsend. I am glad to learn this. When are these workshops and readings and lectures? What is your 2013 schedule in other parts of the country?

Kim
My teaching and travel are utterly out of control. Here is more than you would ever want to know…

Kim Stafford workshops 2013
River Teeth: Writing the Indelible, 19-20 January, Sitka Center for Art & Ecology
Memoir: 100 Tricks, 9-10 February, Lewis & Clark College
Memoir: 100 Tricks, 21 February, Public Library, Corvallis, Oregon
Personal Voice in Professional Writing, 23-24 February, Lewis & Clark College
Panel: Writing Past the End, 8 March, AWP Conference, Boston
Workshops & Talks, 25-29 March, Nantucket, MA
Writing Fiction, selected Wednesdays, 3 April – 8 May, Lewis & Clark College
Reading, 11 April, Linfield College, McMinnville, OR
Audio Postcards, 6-7 April, Lewis & Clark College
Texas Book Festival, 12-13 April, San Antonio, TX
Readings & Workshops, 23-28 April, Dominican University & Santa Sabina Retreat Center, San Rafael, CA
Readings, 16 May, Hood River & The Dalles, OR
Daily Writing in the Spirit of William Stafford, 18-19 May, Lewis & Clark College
Oregon Symphony in Green, 25-26 May, Sitka Center for Art & Ecology
100 Tricks for Writers, 1 June, The Writers Shoppe in Port Townsend, WA
Digital Storytelling, 24-28 June, Lewis & Clark College
Fishtrap Writers Gathering, 8-14 July, Joseph, OR
Stafford Studies (on William Stafford), 15-19 July, Lewis & Clark College
The Rough Sketch & the Written Fragment, with Ken O’Connell, 20-21 July, Sitka Center for Art & Ecology

To register for classes at Lewis & Clark, please contact: Pam Hooten / [email protected] / 503-768-6132

To register for classes at the Sitka Center (near Lincoln City on the coast),
please contact: [email protected] / 541-994-5485, 56605 Ridge Rd. / Box 65 / Otis, OR 97368 (541-994-5485)

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Here are links at which you can read more interviews with Kim Stafford and more about what people are saying about his work:

100 Tricks notice at Trinity University Press
PNW Booklovers.org
Powells
OPB / Think Out Loud / 18 October 2012
Oregonian profile
Oregonian top ten NW books of 2012
Goodreads
KBOO interview with Dmae Roberts
Eugene Register Guard review
Lewis and Clark January 16 event
Lewis and Clark interview about the book
Amazon author page