For
the rest of the week I'll be writing mostly about survival: what it means to keep writing even if it
looks as if your work will never get published and the difference it makes if
it is or isn't professionally published, self-published, read to a group, or
left in a drawer. It seems appropriate
to start by looking at a forthcoming anthology of poetry (and some prose) by
widows—survivors—many of whom have had no training as poets and are being published
for the first time. The book is called The Widows’ Handbook, and it will be
published in a few months by Kent State University Press. You heard it here first. Putting this book together and getting it
published was an inspiring commitment to survival, particularly considering how
many publishers declined to read the manuscript. The book was edited by two bereaved women,
Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menn. I wrote
some questions for them. Lise answered
first, then Jacqueline.
Bruce: Are you both widows? Do either of you
have experience as editors or creative writers?
Lise: I am a widow; my second husband and I had been
happily married for almost twenty years when he died in October 2006. The other
editor is Jacqueline Lapidus; she lost her beloved partner, but he was not her
husband. Not having the legal status of a widow added in many ways to her
burden. As for my editing experience,
I’ve co-edited some academic books, but this is my first time editing poetry. I’ve published a few poems in collections of
poetry by linguists.
Jacqueline:
Not only that, but there was a wife—the
Lawful Awful, from whom he had been
estranged for years. I have been a
professional editor for 50 years (not counting high school newspaper) and have
been publishing poems in literary magazines since 1963.
Bruce:
How many publishers did you try before finding Kent State Univ. Press?
Lise: Fifteen queries to likely-looking places,
resulting in five submissions, all rejected; that’s not counting the publishers
who wouldn’t look at a manuscript unless it was submitted through an agent. But after we were in negotiations with KSUP,
one of the ones that just didn’t respond eventually showed serious interest.
Bruce:
Did you consider self-publishing?
Did you reject the idea, and why?
Lise: I did consider it, but Jacqueline, who has
been an editor, author, and translator for many years, was unwilling to
consider that except as a last resort. She felt that a work this substantial
deserved to be a "real book." And now we have it both ways, because
KSUP will make it available as an e-book.
Jacqueline:
In fact, I wasn’t willing to consider it
at all—not even as a last resort! Promoting
the book is hard enough without having to do distribution as well, even with
online bookstores available. And I couldn’t afford to put any money into such a
project.
Bruce:
How did you attract manuscripts? Where did you place ads or notices and
what did they say?
Lise: Jacqueline
is very experienced in this area. She placed ads in Poets & Writers Magazine (print and online) and the Seacoast
Writers Association newsletter, worded like this:
WIDOWS:
Seeking women’s poems and short personal essays (max. 500 words) about
experiences of widowhood (de facto or de jure). Bereavement (sudden or
following illness/long vigil), mourning rituals, grieving, other people’s
responses, coping strategies, spiritual resources, support systems (or lack
thereof), evolving social life (isolation, work, friends, dating), rebuilding
(including but not limited to finding new love or focus). We are a published poet/editor and a
scientist/professor, both widowed. Manuscript will be submitted to trade
publishers. Payment: contributor’s copies. Deadline: June 30, 2011. Send with
SASE for reply to: The Widows’ Handbook, [followed by Jacqueline’s address].
Jacqueline
also contacted numerous poet friends and asked them to spread the word. Some of those friends helped put her in touch
with well-known widowed poets (O’Hehir, Gallagher, Gilbert). She also selected a few widows’ poems from the
anthology Love Over 60 (eds. Chapman
& McCormick, pub. by Mayapple Press in 2010—we both knew Robin Smith
Chapman from college and Jacqueline had a poem in that collection) and from
their own books.
Bruce:
Did you rule out widowers, and if so, why?
Lise: Most women who are widowed – especially older
women – face a much harder time financially, socially, and in finding new
partners – than men of comparable ages and personal histories. For many women, the social isolation (because some
married couples stop inviting widows to join them, leaving you not only lonely
but wondering if they ever really liked you at all) and the financial hardship
compound the devastation of losing their partners. My late husband had been widowed twice before
we met – he lost one young wife in a car accident and the next young woman to
breast cancer, and he was deeply traumatized for years by those losses. So I would never consider a man’s grief to be
less deep than a woman’s. But…he found
new partners as soon as he was ready for them, and it seems that people are
always eager to play matchmaker for a nice man who wants a wife. That said, I wish we had included some older
gay men who have lost their partners, because they also often experience social
isolation and a very limited circle of possible new partners, in addition to
their grief. (The "beauty trap"
catches them as much as it catches women.)
Jacqueline:
As Lise says, in our gendered society the
social situation and status of widows differ from that of widowers. There are
other books that include both, but there had never been an anthology of poems
by widows. I wanted to showcase the aspect of widows’ lives that nobody wants
to admit. I conceived The Widows’ Handbook as an anthology of
women’s poems, not an anthology about bereavement or grief in general.
Bruce: Did
you stick entirely to heterosexual relationships? If so, why?
Lise: Not at all. Both Jacqueline and I have strong
ties to the lesbian and bisexual community – my stepdaughter is Susie Bright –
and we included two fine poems that were written by lesbian poet Mary Oliver
after the death of her partner of more than 40 years.
Jacqueline:
We specified “gay and straight” in our
call for submissions, and we didn’t always know whether the late partner or
spouse of a woman submitting her work was gay or straight. I don’t mind mentioning that I was “out and
about” as a lesbian poet and activist for 20 years. When Edward and I got back together in 1995
(we had known each other since 1964 and had a “phase 2” in the 1970s), I had to
“come out in reverse” all over Boston, New York, Provincetown and Paris, a
process that was more embarrassing to me than “coming out” 20 years earlier had
been.
Bruce:
Did you stick entirely to people who were married? If so, why?
Lise: No – as I mentioned, Jacqueline herself was
not married to the man she loved, and marriage was not an option for our
lesbian contributors. Most of the authors
in our volume are in fact women whose husbands had died, but we don’t always know
– and it doesn’t matter. Love is where
you find it.
Jacqueline:
Not quite so—some lesbians have been
able to marry for the past 10 years—but I know I am not the only TWH contributor not married to her
Significant O. For those of us who were
not legally married, the grief of widowhood was compounded by a lack of
“official” social support—and sometimes, by financial disaster.
Bruce:
How is the book a handbook, and how is
it not?
Lise: Well,
I needed psychotherapy for well over a year for help in living with the
terrible, paralyzing sadness I felt when I lost my husband. The title comes
from a day when I was trying to explain to my therapist how overwhelming my
emotions were and how clueless I felt in trying to figure out how to live with
them, and I wailed (there’s no other word for it) at him, “There’s no handbook!” Of course, there can’t be a handbook for dealing
with losing the person you love; no one can tell you how to be a widow – that’s
the irony of the title. (By the way, there are books about the legal and
financial things widowed women need to know, with similar titles.)
But
in another sense, it really is a handbook, because we think that many widows
will find at least some of their own emotions reflected in it, and validated by
it, perhaps despite what people around them are telling them that they ought to
feel. And we also created it for people
– professional counselors, friends, family members – who are trying to help
widows and who need to have some help in comprehending what the widow may be
going through. I guess I imagine a woman
finding a poem here and an essay there that match how she feels, or that she
can use as a point of departure for explaining how things are with her, marking
that page, and saying to her son-in-law or her best friend "look, just
read this, it’ll give you some idea, I can’t say it better than this."
See,
the anthology – it’s got over two hundred poems and short prose pieces – shows a
pretty wide sample of the huge range of emotions that different women in
different circumstances experience – and that an individual woman experiences
at different times (and forget about that "stages of grief" pap). When we made our selection from the 450-odd poetry
and short prose submissions and from already-published works containing poems by
our contributors Mary Oliver, Sandra Gilbert, Tess Gallagher, and others, we
considered not only the poetic quality of the writing, but also the variety of
experiences and reactions. One young
widow was pregnant; several had small children; some women (of various ages)
lost their partners to accidents or suicide; some of the older contributors had
tended their partners through extended declines. Some write about men who were alcoholic or had
treated them badly in other ways; one writes about the death of an ex-husband
with whom she had remained friendly. And
in later sections of the book, some of the contributors write about
establishing new relationships and the paradoxes of wanting to live full lives
again without entirely letting go of what was beautiful and sustaining in their
previous relationships.
Bruce: Does the book have an overall theme, and how
do the parts support it?
Lise: I think the overall themes that emerge are
that losing a beloved partner is devastating beyond what one could have
imagined, and that figuring out how to live again is a long process, whether
one continues alone or with a new partner.
We decided to group the poems this way:
I. Bereft, Mourning; II. Memories, Ghosts, Dreams; III. Coping (more or
less); and IV. A Different Life. So you
might say they are grouped by the acuteness of the sense of loss, which
decreases across the four groups, and by the slow development of ways to keep
on living and even to find joy again, which increases. That’s how the division
into sections makes the themes clear.
But there’s no chronology or set of stages intended. Time does change things, and the acute
feeling that you have lost half of your own self does, mercifully, fade (if you
keep living), but memories and dreams persist, regardless.
Bruce
What did you find of value in the poems by nonprofessionals?
Lise: I’m a non-professional too, you know. I’ve written poetry, mostly for friends and
lovers, and a little of it was published, but I’ve made my living as a
researcher and teacher of linguistics.
The superb professional poets in our collection make blazing leaps of
the imagination which most of us non-professionals can’t match, but the
touchstone we used in choosing among the submissions – and among the reprinted
works by the pros, too – was the sense of truth: This
is the raw emotion, this is the real
thing, this is the voice of the woman
who has been there and who can tell us where she has been. The person who reads this will not have to toss it aside in contempt as a platitude, as
a generalization irrelevant to her own particular anguish, as a smooth oiliness
that some well-meaning fool is attempting to pour over the surface of the
almost-unbearable turbulence inside her.
Jacqueline:
I would have liked to accept one poem by
every woman who submitted her work!
However, we agreed to seek not just feeling but also poetic skill in
conveying the writer’s experience. We
turned down more than half of what we received, largely because it was simply
not very good, however sincere. Some of
the most moving poems in the anthology are by women who have never been
published before.
Bruce: How and when did you get the idea for the
book? Is there any competition?
Lise: I was sharing my collected poems about living
with grief when I was visiting Jacqueline in Boston a few years ago, and she
immediately thought of creating a book, using some of mine, some of hers, and
pulling many, many more from other widows.
There are some smaller books of writing by widows, but nothing of this
scope or professional quality, as far as we know. Our publisher, Kent State University Press,
has a very good reputation among Jacqueline’s friends who are poets.
Jacqueline: I had already sent Lise the poems I wrote
after my Significant O’s death. I don’t
think I would have even had the idea for the anthology if I had been able to
get those poems published in literary magazines. But, they kept coming back—presumably because
the subject was too “heavy” and/or the editors were too young to “get it.”
We
were sitting in a restaurant, waiting for our dinner to arrive as I read Lise’s
poems. Then I opened my big mouth and said, “Oh! you know, this would be a
wonderful theme for an anthology!”
“Sure,” said Lise, “as long as you
do most of the work!” In fact, we
really did share it, 50-50. Lise is as
astute an editor as I am. I received the
submissions, copied each one and sent her packets, periodically, so both of us
could read everything that came in. We divided them into folders: yes, no, maybe, and disagree. Then Lise came
east again and we spent three days discussing the “maybes” and the “disagrees”
(with a little haggling here and there), deciding what we wanted to include. Then I arranged the poems in a tentative
order and sent that to Lise, she commented, then we revised the order a few
times until we were sure it held up as a whole.
We compiled our lists of potential publishers from our own files,
friends’ and contributors’ suggestions, books we liked. Then we sent out query letters, sometimes a
three-page proposal, and on a few occasions when the target press “nibbled,”
the entire manuscript for consideration.
Lise
again: I was trying to write my own first sole-authored book at the time, a
textbook in my field, and I didn’t dare take on another major project until the
textbook went to press. After that, yes,
I did my share.
Bruce:
What exactly do you mean by the placement of the apostrophe?
Lise:
That was Jacqueline’s idea. I was calling my own solo collection The Widow’s Handbook, and she wanted to
leave the original title for me to use.
Besides, the possessive plural emphasizes the fact that many widows –
88, to be precise – helped to create the book, including Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, who wrote the Foreword. But of
course, I'll have to find a different title when I publish my own little book –
there would be too much confusion if the difference between their titles really
depended only on where the apostrophe sits.
Bruce:
This
book shows that writing is good for you and that reading can be too. Rough times demand words even if the pain
goes beyond words. And nonprofessional
poets have as much to say, and often say it as well, as professionals. The images, scenes, and lines in these poems
are strong and come from the gut. They
have that sense of truth of which Lise spoke.
The authors take powerful feelings and structure them, put them in an
order that works: poetry. Even if one is not a widow or another kind of
survivor, the book is intriguing as a collection on a single difficult
topic. In a purely literary sense it is
valuable for putting amateurs and experts together as they all find ways to say
what they must say. I close with some
examples.
Sandra
Gilbert wrote:
Something
turned you into a stone of yourself.
Jessica
deKoninck wrote:
Cancer and infection rot
from inside out. Your organ
donor card's a useless stub.
I did not want to look
at you. Contaminated
not even
good for parts.
Jacqueline
Lapidus wrote:
Imagine
having everything that mattered
imagine
it gone
Elizabeth von Transehe wrote:
We
signed together.
I
don't want it alone.
That
is not the deal.
Christine
Silverstein wrote:
Grief
comes to stay. It is a new emotion, a
new tenant in your heart with a long lease.
Grief is as big and as whole as love.
It commands attention. It can
ruin your day. Grief takes sadness to
new heights and throws it off the cliff.
Tess
Gallagher wrote:
Since his feet were still there and
my hands
I rubbed them with oil
because it is hard to imagine at
first
that the dead don't enjoy those same
things they did
when
alive. And even if it happened only as a
last thing, it
was
the right last thing.
Rosalind
Kaliden wrote of widows:
Undefended.
Indefensible.
Disrespected.
Unprotected.
Laid bare.
And Lise
Menn wrote, in Solving an Astronomy
Problem:
It's
certain, as I had always suspected:
You
were my sun and moon and stars;
Not
one of them rises anymore.
So
then, what is that yellow light that heats my skin
And
which occasionally warms me for a moment?
It
must be someone else's sun that I can see.
It
must be someone else's moon that changes shape.
And
those must be their stars: faint,
blinking, useless.