Jun 29, 2023 | Advocacy, Community, Family, Grief
By Jena Kirkpatrick
Jason Edwards grew up in the small town of Graham in West Texas where being gay was not accepted. Pegged as the class ‘gay boy,’ he was bullied relentlessly. His dad tried to spark his interest in sports and Edwards recalled being out on the field spinning around like Wonder Woman. “I was always different,” he said. On June 7, 2000, Edwards’ sister, Bella, was killed in an automobile accident. “It was like a part of me had been cut off—and I was just bleeding,” he said.
Edwards and Bella were queer siblings. They had an inseparable relationship, supporting each other throughout their lives. “I knew if she was a part of my life, I would always be OK. And then, I was not. I was not OK at all,” he shared. Edwards described the physical feeling of his sister’s loss as if his life source had been pulled out of his chest and replaced with an uncontrollable shake. He stopped writing for years, stopped calling his friends and became a recluse. Eventually, he ended up moving to start his life over because he could not handle the memories.
“There was no help for me,” said Edwards. He found his anger and sadness to be something unlike anything he had ever experienced in his life. The Psychological Bulletin reported in November of 2011, “Experiencing the death of a loved one during childhood or adolescence has long term effects on biopsychosocial pathways affecting health.” Navigating this loss was compounded by his schizophrenia. Edwards said he is not ashamed of his condition, but when a schizophrenic experiences a trauma, they need extra help. “It is ridiculous, it is awful. Public healthcare is a joke—you sometimes wait eight hours to see a doctor for fifteen minutes,” he said.
Edwards believes it is a human right to have grief counseling and healthcare. He continues to deal with complex trauma, experiencing a heart attack and multiple heart issues in the last few years. The Journal of the American Medical Association noted, “Sibling death in childhood is associated with a seventy-one percent increased all-cause mortality risk among bereaved persons.”
Edwards now lives in Austin, Texas, with his husband Matt. In June of 2015, same sex marriage was declared legal in all fifty states. They were engaged that month and married in August of 2016. “We felt that we deserved the same right to be legally married as anyone else did,” said Edwards. This Pride Month has been about spotlighting our queer brothers and sisters and continuing to highlight the societal shifts occurring in our country.
However, on June 22, 2022, the Texas GOP adopted an anti-LGBTQ platform declaring that being gay was ‘abnormal’, which opposes all efforts to validate transgender identity. This year, Texas lawmakers passed bills banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender kids and restricting the college sports teams that trans athletes can join. Edwards remains optimistic. “When I am at work, I see parents come in with t-shirts that say, ‘Protect Trans Kids.’ The world is changing, and I think we are winning. It is just an uphill battle.” The fight for bereavement care is an uphill battle as well. Being bereaved with no care only compounds the pain of marginalization.
And there are still so many people who do not understand what it is like to be marginalized. If we all woke up tomorrow and the world was different, men were supposed to be with men and women with women, maybe then people would understand how alienating it feels being the minority. Then people might understand how natural it feels to be with the one you love. Oscar-nominated actor Elliot Page said, “This world would be a whole lot better if we just made an effort to be less horrible to one another.”
Edwards remains optimistic and hopeful that our future has no prejudices, a world where understanding and acceptance replaces hate. He tries to fill his days with beauty, love, friends, art, poetry, music, and good food. “We are all rushing towards death. We just need connection,” he said. “What would happen if we all put our differences aside? We could make real change. If we take the time, we can find something in common with everyone.”
Apr 12, 2023 | Community, Family, Grief
Across America, powerful imagery and musical cadence ring out in coffee shops and onto the page during National Poetry Month. Launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996, the month-long recognition celebrates the poets’ integral role in our culture and society. We are reminded that poetry matters.
Evermore’s very own Jena Kirkpatrick (editor of this newsletter!) has been a poet for over three decades, and when her son, Ellis, died, she was gifted What Have You Lost?, an anthology of more than a hundred poems selected by acclaimed poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Nye called on poets to help answer this question, and for Kirkpatrick, these collected works helped her cope with her pain.
So, to honor our losses and the great poets who help us find words to describe the indescribable, Kirkpatrick spoke with some of the nation’s most distinguished poets — Naomi Shihab Nye, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Beth Wood, Brady Peterson, Regie Gibson, and Nathan Brown to share their thoughts on grief, how it affects their writing, and how poetry can help grieving and bereaved people.
Each of these poets, acclaimed in their own right, generously shared their personal insights following their own losses, their poetry, and the navigation of delicately placed words we choose to honor our beloved.
About Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent more than 40 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspire students of all ages. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Her awards and honors are numerous — among them are the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Prize, and “The Betty Prize” from Poets House. In 2019-2020 she was the editor of the New York Times Magazine poems. She was named the 2019-2021 Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation and, in 2020, awarded the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. Nye is a Professor of Creative Writing – Poetry at Texas State University. Nye is the author of dozens of poetry books that can be found here.
About Regie Gibson
Regie Gibson is a literary performer, songwriter, author, workshop facilitator, and educator. Regie and his work appears in the New Line Cinema film love jones, based largely on events in his life. He is a former National Poetry Slam Individual Champion, and was selected as one of Chicago Tribune’s Artist of the Year for Excellence for his poetry. He has co-judged the Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Competition, has been regularly featured on NPR and has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. He is the author of Storms Beneath the Skin.
About Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Rosemerry lives with her husband and daughter in Placerville, Colorado, on the banks of the wild and undammed San Miguel River. Devoted to helping others explore their creative potential, Rosemerry is the co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on the creative process. She also directed the Telluride Writers Guild for ten years. She has 12 collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in O Magazine, A Prairie Home Companion, PBS NewsHour, American Life in Poetry, on fences, in back alleys, on Carnegie Hall Stage, and on hundreds of river rocks she leaves around town. Beneath All Appearances is a new, collective work of collages and poems by bereaved mothers Rashani Réa, Damascena Tanis, and Trommer; it has been called “a pole star for those who grieve.” This month, Samara Press will release her next collection, All the Honey. She’s won the Fischer Prize, Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge (thrice), the Dwell Press Solstice Prize, the Writer’s Studio Literary Contest (twice), and The Blackberry Peach Prize.
About Brady Peterson
Brady Peterson lives near Belton, Texas, where he worked building houses for much of the past thirty years or teaching rhetoric and literature at a local university. He once worked a forklift in a lumber yard in east Austin, tried to teach eighth graders the importance of using language, worked briefly as a technical writer, and helped raise five daughters. He has run one marathon, fought in one karate tournament, climbed one mountain, failed to make the UT baseball team as a walk-on, and took tango lessons with his wife. He is the author of Dust, Between Stations, From an Upstairs Window, García Lorca is Somewhere in Produce and At the Edge of Town.
About Beth Wood
Beth Wood is a modern-day troubadour, poet, and believer in the power of word and song. Beth has been writing, performing, and creating for twenty-five years. In addition to releasing fifteen albums, Beth has released three books of poetry, Kazoo Symphonies, Ladder to the Light (2019 finalist for the Oregon Book Award Stafford/Hall award for poetry and 2019 Winner of the Oregon Book Award Readers’ Choice Award) and Believe the Bird (Winner of the San Francisco Book Festival Poetry Award). She has been recognized by the prestigious Kerrville New Folk Award, The Sisters Folk Festival Dave Carter Memorial Songwriting Award, the Billboard World Song Contest, The Oregon Book Awards, and many more. Beth lives in Sisters, Oregon, with her rescue dog Hannah and is continuously writing and rewriting her artist’s manifesto.
About Nathan Brown
Nathan Brown is an author, songwriter, and award-winning poet living in Wimberley, Texas. He holds a Ph.D. in English and Journalism from the University of Oklahoma, where he’s taught for over 20 years. He served as Poet Laureate for the State of Oklahoma in 2013/14 and now travels full-time performing readings, concerts, workshops and speaking on creativity, poetry, and songwriting. Nathan has published over 20 books. Most recent are his new collection of poems, In the Days of Our Seclusion, the first in a series, now known as the Pandemic Poems Project, that deals with the year of the pandemic, and a new travel memoir Just Another Honeymoon in France: A Vagabond at Large. Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award. His earlier book, Two Tables Over, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award. Brown’s poem “Nevertheless, It Moves” comes from his book To Sing Hallucinated: First Thoughts on Last Words.
Apr 12, 2023 | Community, Family, Grief
Dear Friends unknown,
We are joined together by so many things in grief. Maybe there’s a luminous cord connecting us through sleepless hours and hardest times. The poet Jack Ridl told me years ago, after my father died, “Grief is an ambush. When you’re least expecting it, it rises up again…”
Poetry is a close focus on something cared about. Whether you are writing or reading a poem, the poem (if you like and relate to it) brings you into an intimate space of details and affections – linkages and leaps. It’s a point of gravity again, stirring the heart.
Loss can feel numbing – a blur of overwhelm and sorrow, profound regret and insatiable yearnings. After our son died suddenly, I found myself wishing I could just turn my mind OFF. I felt an entire loss of meaning and gravity. I couldn’t write anything but tiny thank you notes for food and flowers for more than two months.
A child is the central engine of a parent’s heart. No matter what age they are, or what the circumstances, the child is the connecting thread to time – past and hoped-for future and always, always, present. What are they doing right now? How are they? Where are they? After his death, I missed the easiness of days, every random memory, and all our humor. All the plans. Everything reminded me of him. When scraps of humor started kicking back in again, it was like an old rusty propeller trying to spin.
Reading poetry gave my mind something to settle down inside, in even the worst times – a place to land. I had read Edward Hirsch’s profoundly moving Gabriel years before and went back to it. I read the astonishing Elegy by Mary Jo Bang, which won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award.
I was not terribly attracted to grief and healing books. They have good intentions, but. People will keep writing you, “There are no words” – but there ARE words. There have to be words! We live by words! No, no words will ever fully encompass how sad we are. But there are still words.
When finally, I felt able to write again in the third month, once again the tiniest things seemed most fortifying. This has always been my watchword in writing – stay tiny. No big ideas, only tiny ones please. Attempting to iron a stack of rumpled clothes and tablecloths one day, I heard the hissing of the steam iron and remembered he had once told me it was his favorite sound of childhood. So, the first little poem I wrote was called “Hiss.” It comforted me even to say the smallest thing in honor of him. One poem led to more. I also allowed some emails to provoke poems – here is one of those. I’m sending you some love out there.
About Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent more than 40 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspire students of all ages. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Her awards and honors are numerous — among them are the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Prize, and “The Betty Prize” from Poets House. In 2019-2020 she was the editor of the New York Times Magazine poems. She was named the 2019-2021 Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation and, in 2020, awarded the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. Nye is a Professor of Creative Writing – Poetry at Texas State University. Nye is the author of dozens of poetry books that can be found here.
Resources
Naomi Shihab Nye website
Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation
Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle.
Find Nye’s books in Evermore’s bookshop here
Apr 11, 2023 | Community, Family, Grief
Before my son Finn died, I already had a daily writing practice in place. The day he died was the first night I hadn’t written a poem in over thirteen years. And then I didn’t write at all for the first seven weeks after his death. I suppose on the surface then it would look as if it shut the writing down, but in fact, I believe that this break opened me up. I wanted to be (really more like had to be) open to the pure experience of the wide spectrum of feelings I was having—such devastation, so much love. I found myself meeting life in a porous way—a way beyond understanding or framing. I remember feeling as if my daily writing practice had prepared me to stay curious and attentive during that time, and I needed to simply feel. And then, when the day came when it rose up in me to write again, I remember being so grateful to be able to explore all the nuances of grief through language. Over a year later, I find that writing helps honor all the shades of loss—sorrow, gratefulness, horror, hope, suffering, connection, love, pain, communion. Writing helps me feel more connected to my son through memory, and it helps me explore this new ethereal relationship with him. For the first many months of writing, I could only write about loss (and the love that saturates it)—all writing was through this lens. It almost felt like a betrayal at first to write about anything else. Now I am more at home with the paradox of being full of great grief and great gratitude at the same time—and the poems certainly reflect that. That was the long answer. The short answer: I feel as if meeting Finn’s death has made me a more compassionate, spacious human, and I imagine this comes through in the writing.
There have been several poems that saved me during this time, most importantly this partial poem from Gregory Orr: “Not to make loss beautiful, but to make loss the place where beauty starts. Where the heart understands for the first time the nature of its journey.” The moment I read these lines, I felt so known, so companioned, so guided, so seen, so met. I knew that someone else truly understood what I was going through. This is, of course, one of the great gifts of poetry—it is a language of connection. But it is also, I believe, a language of paradox, mystery, a willingness to engage with uncertainty, to “live into the questions,” as Rainer Maria Rilke said. And that is what meeting the death of a beloved has asked me to do again and again. Poetry doesn’t solve or fix anything, but it does offer open arms to cradle us as we grieve.
About Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Rosemerry lives with her husband and daughter in Placerville, Colorado, on the banks of the wild and undammed San Miguel River. Devoted to helping others explore their creative potential, Rosemerry is the co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on the creative process. She also directed the Telluride Writers Guild for ten years. She has 12 collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in O Magazine, A Prairie Home Companion, PBS NewsHour, American Life in Poetry, on fences, in back alleys, on Carnegie Hall Stage, and on hundreds of river rocks she leaves around town. Beneath All Appearances is a new, collective work of collages and poems by bereaved mothers Rashani Réa, Damascena Tanis, and Trommer; it has been called “a pole star for those who grieve.” This month, Samara Press will release her next collection, All the Honey. She’s won the Fischer Prize, Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge (thrice), the Dwell Press Solstice Prize, the Writer’s Studio Literary Contest (twice), and The Blackberry Peach Prize.
Resources:
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer website
Emerging Form, a podcast on the creative process
Beneath All Appearances by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
All the Honey by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s photo was taken by Joanie Schwarz
Read other acclaimed poets reflections on grief
Apr 11, 2023 | Community, Family, Grief
Losing anyone in your life affects EVERYTHING in your life.
Your perspectives shift. You question your own mortality.
Losing someone close to you makes you feel like a raw nerve in a world of razor-wire. Everything hurts.
Losing my dad just before becoming a father, seemed extra-ordinarily cruel and ironic. But, contemplating that cruel irony eventually led me through the “Why me” of it— to the “Why NOT you” of it! This marked the beginning of a more philosophical, questioning tone in much of my writing; which was previously marked more by highly critical and declarative rhetoric.
As a result of the transformation that profound loss engendered in me, I came to see that the most effective poems are those which help us more profoundly contemplate our place in the world and what we make of it. How we might become better-acting agents in whatever time we have available which, no matter how long that is—loss shows us is not enough?
This poem, by Andalusian poet Adi Al-Riga, speaks so viscerally of grieving. Speaks to how the small and mundane can trigger our grieving— and how that grieving can awaken in us something difficult to name. Poetry helps us name it. Helps us give it language—to call it something. Poetry helps us get a fix on it, shape it— and, perhaps, dialog with it. I am reminded of Billie Holiday— a woman with a voice born of such grief, singing “Good Morning Heartache.” At the end of the song, she asks Heartache to sit down. In this, as in Adi Al-Riga’s poem, I find a solace and a strength in that embracing of vulnerability.
This, to me, is another way in which poetry helps.
Also, poetry asks us to sit and feel, in a world that tells us to flee and forget!
Poetry asks us to slow down and reflect, when modernity demands we speed up and never look back at the emotional road-kill we might have become. It allows us to concentrate on our shared humanity at a time in which we are enjoined to externalize and socially aggress against one another. It demands we wrestle through the complexity of emotional paradox when so much tells us the world is a black-and-white bumper sticker.
Poetry, to me, respects our complete humanity when so much of the public discourse seeks to reduce us to tools of service. It doesn’t treat us as mere means to an end— but may help us determine what we want OUR end to MEAN.
Poetry lets us know that, not only are we not alone in our grief, but we are understood and respected for it! I mean, unless we are sociopathic, if we live long enough and love fully enough, grief is inevitable. So, even though every day we arise with tears, poetry can lead us to both our passion and our compassion— it can help us better decide how to walk through this world as both a metaphor of, and a monument to, the best of what those who have left… have left us.
About Regie Gibson
Regie Gibson is a literary performer, songwriter, author, workshop facilitator, and educator. Regie and his work appears in the New Line Cinema film love jones, based largely on events in his life. He is a former National Poetry Slam Individual Champion, and was selected as one of Chicago Tribune’s Artist of the Year for Excellence for his poetry. He has co-judged the Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Competition, has been regularly featured on NPR and has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. He is the author of Storms Beneath the Skin.
Resources:
Regie Gibson website
Storms Beneath the Skin
Read other acclaimed poets reflections on grief
Apr 11, 2023 | Community, Family, Grief
I lost a best friend, fellow vagabond, and gifted poet to a long battle with cancer. We traveled and performed together for years. We joked over homemade-hotel-room drinks about how the $31 we raked in from the donations for the night’s house concert, or whatever it was we could drum up, weren’t even enough to pay for the liquor we’d bought before the gig. And he walked with me through the shadows of the “relative loss” of my young daughter through divorce. (Although, now in her mid-20s, we are as healed and close as can be.)
Towards the end of his time, we sometimes cried in late-night restaurants about his impending fate — how it would affect his kids, how his wife would eventually have to move on. We sometimes laughed about it all too… to keep from dying sooner than necessary. He had a precocious, and often precarious, sense of humor in the face of last things.
Watching Jim die, so slowly, paired with what I went through with my daughter, had a profound and permanent effect on me. His had to do with: Do this thing. Don’t sit around talking about it. The world needs poetry. The ride’s over before you know it. So don’t mess around. Finish the book. Publish it yourself. The other presses are too slow. Then, get to work on the next one.
Where my daughter is concerned, the effect was even more profound. For, basically, she is the reason I’ve written a poem a day for over two decades. I began to journal, for her, in a way, every day in the wake of her long absences. I wanted a record that she was always in my heart, and on my mind. And that daily journaling habit quickly turned into my daily poem habit, and, thus, 26 books.
Poetry, to me, is uniquely qualified among the written arts to speak to the hearts and souls of those who have lost someone dear. Loss is a time for quietness, a time for speaking softly… if at all. Therefore, poetry’s special gift for leaving out all unnecessary words, makes it perfect for these hurting souls and hard times.
So it is that poetry asks the reader to slow down. Don’t read so fast. Let’s breathe. Our words will be few here. The lines will be short. And all that space on the right-hand side of the page will be the comforting silences between the lines, and between us.
In essence, poetry gets to the point. And, if it’s doing its job, it won’t say any of those stupid, mindless things that too many people too often say to us when we’ve experienced profound and inconsolable loss. My father, a pastor, was an absolute master of quiet poise and what not to say when he showed up at the heartbroken home, the hospital, or the funeral parlor. I believe my poetry carries this quality of his in its toolbox.
About Nathan Brown
Nathan Brown is an author, songwriter, and award-winning poet living in Wimberley, Texas. He holds a Ph.D. in English and Journalism from the University of Oklahoma, where he’s taught for over 20 years. He served as Poet Laureate for the State of Oklahoma in 2013/14 and now travels full-time performing readings, concerts, workshops and speaking on creativity, poetry, and songwriting. Nathan has published over 20 books. Most recent are his new collection of poems, In the Days of Our Seclusion, the first in a series, now known as the Pandemic Poems Project, that deals with the year of the pandemic, and a new travel memoir Just Another Honeymoon in France: A Vagabond at Large. Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award. His earlier book, Two Tables Over, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award. Brown’s poem “Nevertheless, It Moves” comes from his book To Sing Hallucinated: First Thoughts on Last Words.
Resources:
Nathan Brown website
In the Days of Our Seclusion by Nathan Brown
Just Another Honeymoon in France: A Vagabond at Large by Nathan Brown
Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, by Nathan Brown was finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award
Two Tables Over by Nathan Brown won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award
To Sing Hallucinated: First Thoughts on Last Words by Nathan Brown
Read other acclaimed poets reflections on grief
“I Want to Listen to Your Absence”
