I am in the midst of a poetry book launch right now, sharing my writing with audiences. It’s a vulnerable, nerve-wracking, and often satisfying emotional experience. And, just like every other stage of the writing process, there is healing and transformation. My published book is giving back to me in an entirely new way.

jinx and heavenly calling––I poached a portion of my mother’s love letters to my father, 1953-1954, my fourth poetry collection, was published in March by Lily Poetry Review Books. As I give readings to audiences and answer interview questions, I’m discovering that writing these poems has fulfilled an unconscious need.

In the late stage of my mother’s life, her late sixties and seventies, she wasn’t particularly well or happy. She struggled with a number of physical and some psychological ailments that made it challenging to care for her. Dementia and COPD made her mood very low and changed her personality. She lost her innate cheerfulness. She was in chronic discomfort and dissatisfaction that we could not solve, as much as we wanted to, as much as we tried. She wasn’t able to keep herself safe or well cared for and we worried about her constantly, and felt helpless much of the time. When my mother aged, we lost her. When she died, we lost her twice.

So, when I found the letters she wrote to my father at such a gorgeous and promising time of her life, aged 26, falling in love with the love of her life, I felt as though I were meeting my true mother for the very first time. Here was the woman I wanted to spend time with.

Her letters were sent to my father during their courtship, from 1953-1954, starting with their first date, and ending soon after they married. Some of the letters were loose––many of them still had their envelopes with canceled stamps so that I could see the exact date the letter went through the post office. Awestruck by this gold mine, I immediately began reading them. First, I did my best to put them in order by date or by weather suggesting a season, or a mention of a holiday. Touching the stiff paper she wrote on with my fingers––moving my fingers over ink from her pen––was a delicious tactile experience.

My mother had lovely handwriting, and I easily recognized it as belonging to her and her alone.  But who was she? This young woman falling in love with the man who would become my father, years before I was born. This woman who wrote, playfully, to the man who fathered me, “You’re just too much for me, I guess,” after spending a weekend with him in Cambridge.

The project I began, erasing her letters to make poems that I published in the collection, was my way of having a whole new phase of relationship with my mother. One that, as a poet, and a daughter, has been entirely fulfilling to me. As a daughter who knows the end of the story––a marriage that endured just over fifty years––I was fascinated to have such a direct encounter with the origin story of their relationship, because, of course, it’s my origin story too. Without the exchange of their letters I would never have been born.

As a daughter, I was personally fascinated, and often surprised, by the emotional narrative of their courtship––its ordinary extraordinariness. As a poet, I was intrigued by the universal story of what Amy Lowell calls, the want of you, in her poem, “The Letter””

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.

My mother’s letters document falling in love in a long-distance relationship, and all the risk, beauty and catastrophe of this archetypal journey. Following in the footsteps of the poet Mary Reufle’s work in erasure, I decided to erase the letters and create poetic experiences of each letter, which is presented on a palimpsest, or background, of some visual aspect of the original letter. My publisher, Eileen Cleary, as dubbed them “epistolary erasures.” 

Now that jinx and heavenly calling is alive in the world, I have a whole new found phase of relationship with my mother, and she isn’t gone. As I share my book with the world, she’s with me every day, very much alive in my creative life. I feel closer than I ever have to the mother she was––and deeply interested in the woman I uncovered.