As I look forward later this year to the publication of my memoir, Divine Aphasia: A Woman’s Search for the Father, I realize that so much of what we suffer in mind and body is connected to loss and past trauma. An MD/Naturopath recently recommended the film, Heal, as a way of understanding how we are impacted by our thoughts and inherited pain. I’ve also found the work of Brene Brown, who invites us to embrace our imperfections and live wholeheartedly. For me, this path involves writing one’s story, be it in memoir or poetry, as a way to confront and embrace what we’ve experienced in our past.

My “trauma” was nothing compared to those with PTSD due to war, sexual or domestic abuse, or issues related to loss such as essential workers during the COVID crisis or survivors of the Holocaust. I did not have a terrible childhood. My sisters, who were older, loved me in their own ways. And, as my recently deceased sister Betty said to me a couple of years ago, “We were lucky. Our parents loved us.”

So in this memoir, a reader will not encounter deep, dark family secrets. Rather, you will see the impacts of a life dotted with constant change and movement. You will watch the narrator grow up with a father, a decent man, who dealt with his depression about the state of the world with self-medication, a man who, defeated, died at age 62, leaving behind his wife of forty years. You will see his youngest daughter, the narrator, move through her life, trying to find her father, one marriage after another marriage, until, living with the one who seemed closest to Dad, she realizes that she cannot save him. She can only save herself.

One more thought. This book will come out in the midst of one of the worst crises of my lifetime: the Coronavirus Pandemic. I find great comfort in the words of Jennifer Horne, Poet Laureate of Alabama, in her poem, “guest house.”

Knowing the day will come
of leaving and goodbyes,

make your art now.


There Was the Book

my lover brought to me, in a women’s ward
of St. Vincent’s Hospital. The book he gave me
before he walked away into the shadowed hallway.

Nuns tended me, looked kindly into my tired face.
Perhaps they knew nothing about the baby.
Perhaps they knew nothing about the father.

There were moments of stolen delight.
There was the church, Anglican, as
Catholic as you can get without being Roman.
There was the defrocked priest who put his hand
down my dress, squeezed my breast
as he tried to persuade me not to leave my husband
for the lover, and there was the other priest
who told us we had to decide.

There was the wife.
She and he sat next to me in the church choir.
After I lost the baby, she told me not to kneel,
to take care of myself.

She knew it was his.

And there was the book of Saint John of the Cross.
I’m told he suffered dark nights without God.
It was a small, gilt-bound volume,
holy, full of anguish.

From Portals: a Memoir in Verse. Kelsay Press, 2019