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Driving up to Appleton (which is between Green Bay and Oshkosh), I was feeling pretty somber. I first met the woman who had invited me—Faith Barrett—at Berkeley when I was an undergraduate and she was a graduate student. The two of us had shared a campus prize for the creative arts with a third woman who died suddenly a few years back from a brain tumor.
Generally, of course, I’ve been thinking the entire trip about time passing and how people come and go from one’s life. So many old friends I have seen have been jarringly the same but different… things have happened in their lives, they have married and divorced, had children (or not), moved for reasons having to do with both love and hate, money or family, aged (inevitably), & etc.
When I met Faith in the foyer of the main building on campus where her office is, I reminded her of this—the prize, Ann having passed away. Faith hadn’t been aware Ann had passed, and didn’t remember the details of how she and I had met… But before she and I had a chance to process any of this, I had to go to a Q&A with some of the students and faculty of Lawrence University. This was a lively group. We discussed memoir, poetry, editing a magazine. I told them a lot of stories, felt acutely so much time had passed.
Faith and I then went out to dinner with a student and another faculty member. This was lovely—somber light to match the somber feeling. Following this, I gave my reading—both poems and an excerpt from the memoir. I hadn’t read from (or read at all) the memoir for at least three years, so it was interesting to reconnect… it’s a girl’s book… the work of someone in her twenties… It is hard for me to believe I even it wrote it... It was interesting as well to see how sweet and sanguine the prose was. When the memoir first came out, I was completely mortified, feeling it was over the top, too emotional, a mess. I guess, in the end, it was interesting to read it as the work of someone else—to not identify with it so completely anymore. That time had passed.
One interesting feature of the writer's life is overtaking in age writers that one has admired in one's life. Most female poets I know, for instance, really register it when they pass the age Sylvia Plath was when she commited suicide. I suppose this is a feature of everybody's life: taking account of the people that pass, wondering why you lived longer than they did, thinking about what you did with the time, & etc.
The next day, I spoke to Faith’s writing workshop and then went over some student poems. A nice group. After that, I hit the road for a six-hour drive in the rain down to Chicago. Exhausting. I’ll likely write more about Faith later, as she will be introducing me at Woodland Pattern (which is how she found out I was going to be in the area in the first place). Here is Faith:
Some students grabbing coffee and cake after the reading:
Faith again:
I was glad Faith seemed so well.
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