NIN ANDREWS
Orphans is such a powerful and heart-breaking memoir. I thought maybe I’d start the interview by asking for an excerpt from “No Day Was Brighter:” on page 39, beginning on page 39: “I’ve spent my life trying to explain/my mother . . . and ending with “God stealing her mother in every /face and gesture for the rest of her days.”
I’ve spent my life trying to explain
my mother; she lived in two countries
love and loss_ her mother
the center of both.
Left alone (a child of 6 again)
on the threshold of her mother’s room
watching as death and
God took her mother away.
How does a child
confront that oppressor?
She finds
God stealing her mother in every
face and gesture for the rest of her days.
You were named after your grandmother who died in childbirth when your own mother was six. And you resembled your grandmother. How does one pronounce Siobhan, the Irish name for Joan? Did you feel as if somehow you were her mother? I’m thinking of these lines:
I’m named for my mother’s
mother. Siobhan translated
is Joan. Perhaps
that explains what goes on
between me and my mother.
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
Siobhan is pronounced Sha Vaughn (as Joan tells us in Confessions,it rhymes with fawn.
I felt like her mother in the sense that I felt responsible to make her happy and responsible for her sadness. As a child and as an adult. The lines refer to my feeling that she put all her hopes in me— I was her mother’s replacement so she was particularly possessive of me. With that as a background, our relationship was very complicated.
NIN ANDREWS
When I was reading Orphans, I was so swept up in your telling—it was as if your words were waves washing over me. And in the early section of the book, you wrote about a beach vacation. Did you start writing this when you were in Aruba? How did the book begin?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
The book began with the mother poems –the ones in my voice. My husband and I are great fans of cruises—particularly transatlantic ones. In the presence of the ocean or sea, I often feel inspired. If I’m not writing, I’m reading and vice versa. “Orphan at Sea”– the Aruba poem was written on a Caribbean cruise and is one of the oldest in the book.
I tend to write in clusters of poems. And in both cases, I wrote a great deal when my parents were close to the ends of their lives.
When my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, my friend Karen Chase, suggested that I record her voice and my father’s. I did that. Though unsure of how I would use those conversations, I knew I wanted to write about my parents. At some point. What better way than to let them tell their own stories. My assistant, Donna Rutkowski, transcribed those conversations and I edited them as prose. When the book was 90% finished, another friend, Carol Snyder, commented that someday she’d love to hear my parents’ voices in poems. Needless to say, I couldn’t ignore what I thought was a brilliant idea, so I decided to try. The result are the Mother and Father Speaks sections. That process was amazing. I elaborate on it further down.
NIN ANDREWS
This book seems completely open, as if you are bearing your soul to the world. While writing it, did you ever feel a need to withhold a family story or not talk about a sibling?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
I do feel the pull to withhold family or sibling stories and in fact I sometimes do. The decision is based on whose poem it is. Though I reveal a great deal, I also hold back a lot about my family (believe it or not!) in all of my books, and only reveal the stories that are fundamentally mine. When it came to writing this book, I knew it would not be published until after both of my parents had died.
NIN ANDREWS
There is so much pain in the book, first the pain of being beaten and manipulated by your mother, and second, the pain of feeling responsible for your father’s fall when he was an old man, and third, the general pain and grief after your parents’ deaths and with the recognition of your own mortality. You keep asking yourself, why, as in the poem, “Questions”:
Why
did I coach you to “Trust yourself,
you can do it?” And why did I
go back to sleep that morning?
And in the poem, “What’s Gone,” you write of both what’s gone and what is left, and both are guilt. You begin the poem with a list of nots:
What’s Gone
Is guilt:
Not placing him first
No visiting more often
Not making soup
Not stopping by on my way to East Hampton
Not joining him for a walk
Not being good enough
Not going to mass
Not believing . . .
Would it be fair to say you are very hard on yourself? Was it difficult to write these poems?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
Yes, one could say that I’m hard on myself. And yes, it was difficult to write many of the poems. But I was/am committed to the truth. I’m not interested in distortion particularly in the service of the ego. Pain is a real part of life and relationships and I believe that most people recognize that. It’s natural for a person to question themselves, their motives and behaviors when a loved one dies. Hopefully, we’re assessing these throughout our lives. The good and the bad. That’s one of the reasons I’m so attracted to the Jewish Yom Kippur; a day a year dedicated to facing one’s life and taking stock is worthy work indeed. The speaker in this book is flawed and to tell her story honestly, I had to reveal those flaws.
NIN ANDREWS
I kept calling this book Orpheus instead of Orphans because it read like a trip to Hades and then back again. The difference, of course, is that the singer was not lost in the end.
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
Hallelujah!
NIN ANDREWS
You end the book with the poem with the image of water, and a nod at your childhood home in Edgewater, so the book comes full circle. I wonder if you could post the lovely last stanza here and maybe say a few words about that poem.
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
I’ll need
someone to cover me, find a thick down
blanket to warm my thin and flaking bones.
Don’t forget a pen and my notebook no
use for them. In their place,
unfinished poems, family photos, CDs of David’s music,
a book of Chekhov’s stories
my wedding ring, on my finger please.
And, if possible, the sound of water (if not at its edge).
The poem has gone through a considerable transformation; it was once much longer, more optimistic and separate from the rest of the book as a Coda. As I lived with that Coda for a good while, and shared it with friends and editors, I came to see it as out of sync with the rest of the book. I created this lovely scene at my graveside with my son and daughter –in-law and our wonderful Cassidy Vaughn, their 5 month old daughter; it was Christmas and we were drinking mimosas and eating ice cream; they were showing me their presents and chattering away. It was an idyllic. And a lovely fantasy. But it was not real. I was pushing myself too far into acceptance of my death than I was at the time. I removed the Coda and wrote this poem –which told the truth of where I was emotionally. There are days now when this ending continues to hold true and others when I regress to more of the terror expressed in the poems that precede it. Fortunately, as time passes, I regress less often.
NIN ANDREWS
How long did it take you to write Orphans?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
About 7-8 years.
NIN ANDREWS
Was it more challenging to write this book than others?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
Yes, in that I was dealing with three voices and I was committed to presenting both of my parents in as authentic a way as I could. Finding the form for each of the 3 voices was very challenging and great fun. When I set out to transform the prose into poems, I automatically went to my typical form that uses the whole page as canvas and draws/follows the emotional energy down the page, but my parents’ voices would not speak in my form. They needed their own. I tried several others but was unsuccessful, until I tried simple couplets which gracefully fit my mother’s voice, and I found my father (whose refused to speak in couplets!), spoke most naturally in irregular stanzas of free verse (introduced by a first line separated from the rest of the poem with a space). It was the most amazing learning experience to watch the words insisting on their own form.
NIN ANDREWS
How has your life as a therapist informed your writing?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
I’ve always been fascinated by peoples’ stories and I’ve heard many in my 35+ years practicing. And I’m committed to helping patients face and eventually accept theirs. Without recrimination. That part is the hardest and takes the longest.
Many of us have spent countless years ashamed of who we are. The goal of therapy is to become one’s own good mother. That’s not possible until we forgive ourselves our humanity. It’s the bedrock of therapy—learning to accept and love ourselves with all of our imperfections. Having spent over 30 years in my own therapy tackling just that, I’ve come to a place where I’m no longer ashamed of who I am. That has freed me to write openly. I no longer demand perfection from myself. There’s incredible relief in that. So it was actually therapy–my own and the practice of it– that brought me to writing. And freed me to write the poems I want to write.
Along the way, I discovered Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Wild Geese” which I return to often; it’s the permission that all of us need daily in our quest to accept ourselves, forgive and honor ourselves…
You do not have to be good
You do not have to crawl on your belly…
NIN ANDREWS
What did you inherit from your parents? Do you attribute your life as a writer to either of them?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
Actually, I credit both of them for my writing. Living my life drenched in the music of their voices and their accents certainly nourished my love of poetry and the love of language. I also credit them for my sense of humor and commitment to family.
I credit my father for my spirituality and acceptance of others. And for my commitment to community and ‘loving my neighbor as myself’. And my love of nature and silence.
I credit my mother with my love of home, my quest for education, my ambition and for the importance of ‘keeping something in my own name’; for my interest in fashion, Law and Order Special Victims and Criminal Minds.
I also credit her for teaching me how to carry my height with pride.
NIN ANDREWS
Are there any books or memoirists that serve as role models for you?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Raymond Carver, Steinbeck, Hemingway. All were brilliant psychologists; they knew what it was to be human. I remember being stunned by Chekhov’s liberal use of the word ‘hate’ as in he hated her (or she him). I thought it was too strong an emotion to ever feel toward someone you love. But the more I study that question, the more I’m convinced that he’s right—we humans have within us the potential for the full range of feeling from love through hate. Sometimes with the same person.
So I return to these men periodically. I read them almost exclusively while I was writing Orphans. When one writes in another’s voice, the translation has to be impeccable. I wanted to be fully respectful of my parents. So I gravitate/d toward the masters to study how each created character. Sometimes, I’m honing my skills or looking for some new insight or permission. I’m seldom conscious of doing this, but on observation, I’m convinced I do.
Then there are the poets who so brilliantly illuminate emotion. Start with Whitman, add Brooks, Clifton, Peacock, Gluck (Ararat), Carson, Legaspi….among so many others.
NIN ANDREWS
I’d love to hear you talk about how you balance your life as a psychologist, editor and writer.
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
That’s become more graceful. My life has always been busy with my multiple interests and careers, but I’ve slowed down considerably and look forward to slowing down more. I’m almost retired from my psychotherapy practice. My editing responsibilities are heaviest during our open submissions period (because Teresa, Baron and I read every manuscript); the rest of my editing responsibilities like editing our LaurelBooks selections are spread out over the year as is writing I do for the press—the blog/newsletter etc. My own writing makes its way to the top of the heap when it’s necessary. Unlike so many writers that have an even routine of writing daily, I write when a line, or a poem, or a memory pulls me to my notebook. The pacing of the project becomes that much greater as I move toward a book. At that point, writing is all.
Fortunately, I have my husband and son to remind me when that happens so I can remember that I have many loves in my life. And all deserve attention.
NIN ANDREWS
What do you love most about writing?
JOAN CUSACK HANDLER
The discovery in the poem. I love surprising myself. That said, nothing competes with that magical experience when the poem takes over and I am the medium. It reminds me of a quote of Hayden Carruth. “Why ask what’s the use of poetry?/ Poetry is what uses us.”
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