ÿþ<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3c.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd"> <html><head><title>Therése Halcheid Interview</title> <meta content="Disability, memoir, dementia, anorexia, poetry, disability studies, publishing, literature, writers" name="keywords"> <meta content="Wordgathering in an online journal of disability-related poetry, that seeks work from writers with and without disabilities. It also features comment, book reviews, essays and critiques of disability literature." name="description"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <link media="screen" href="../../../wordgathering_lower.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet"> <script> (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'UA-47050743-1', 'wordgathering.com'); ga('send', 'pageview'); </script> </head><body> <a name="top"></a> <table id="mainTable" border="1" cellpadding="35" cellspacing="1" width="100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td><h1 class="align_center">Interview With Therése Halcheid, Essayist and Poet</h1> <P><strong>WG: Therése, your recent manuscript <em>dear father</em> has a rather unusual structure for a memoir. How did you decide what the form of this work would be? </strong></p> <p>TH: The manuscript <em>dear father</em>, arose out a series of stand-alone essays. Meaning I did not expect to write a memoir, which I think of as a book that spans a life; a body of work that is more often than not chronological, or at least has a distinct plan. I did not have a plan. Having written poetry for a number of years, I entered prose gingerly. Like putting one foot before the other, I wrote one essay at a time, and solely focused on each singular piece, unto itself. In terms of the structure it eventually took on, as pieces came together, I would say this body of work cycles through themes. I wanted to write of my life with my father, who had brain damage for thirty years. I wanted to challenge myself to unveil the first year of his dementia, when I starved myself. And so I plucked jarring moments from that first year, and worked with each one. Memory was an organizing principle. And as we know, memories are less concerned with order. They surface in terms of emotional impact. The same year as my father's unfortunate heart surgery -- during which he suffered a lack of oxygen to the brain -- other tragedies were unfolding down the street from us. Three blocks away, my uncle was diagnosed with arthritis to the arteries of the brain. And so my mother and aunt (they were sisters) became strident caregivers for their husbands who both had active dementia. As a young girl, their behaviors were shocking. </p> <p>As I began to work with the larger story, of multiple family illnesses, I remember saying to someone that I could not fit everyone into a singular piece. This is another reason for story-telling through separate essays. I was aware of taking it slow, unleashing our lives in a way that was safe for me, especially since I was the tattle-teller and felt responsible for the way I was casting everyone on paper. </p> <p>To answer your question about structure, I would like to talk about essay collections as a whole. What I like about them is their selective nature. They work like episodic adventures, and are not bound to telling a sequential story. Take John Haines s collection <em>The Stars, The Snow, The Fire</em>. Haines captures twenty-five years in the Alaskan interior, on his homestead Richardson. Each essay is beautifully contained and successful in its own right. Placing them together, we sense his long time in the wilderness and not by way of calendar years. Incidents are out of order. An essay on snow does not precede the autumnal forest. Each piece focuses on a subject  could be a hunt, could be weather, could be a survival story of someone braving the wilderness and yet, collectively, the body of work gives us the life of a man. I also believe that readers of essay collections already understand they are not moving through linear time. Like a photograph album, each essay is a snapshot of life at large. I will end by quoting Haines. This is from the <em>Preface</em> of his collection: &quot;In itself, chronology is seldom a satisfactory guide to the events of one s life& .&quot; He then adds: &quot;This journey in and out of time cannot be adequately expressed by the sum of calendar years. In the sense in which I write, there is no progress, no destination, for the essence of things has already been known, the real place arrived at long ago.&quot; It seems that John Haines was present to the wilderness he walked through. It was in him to offer perceptions, what he gave and received from the wild earth. </p> <p>To retrace my life with my relatives, I have taken a kind of inward journey. Have sensed memory as places in me that I can be in, and not know of time inside myself. These are mindscapes I navigate knowing as well as Haines knows that &quot;there is no progress, no destination.&quot; There is only a coming to terms with what has been. It is perhaps the most we can ask of ourselves. We come away knowing that moments are more about sensing, more about getting to Haines s &quot;essence of things.&quot; </p> <P><strong>WG: I think you make an extremely important point &ndash; especially for new writers &ndash; when you point out that even in using memory as an organizing principle, one has to remember that memory is episodic and non-linear. Why did you decide to take an epistolary approach to the essays? Shifting the audience from the general reader to your father must have forced you to make quite a seismic emotional shift. </strong></p> <p>TH: That s such an interesting question. In truth, I did not have a sense of readership when I first began writing prose. I wanted to tell the life of my father, our paired illness, and this long story was hard to tell. I suppose it is okay to share that I was raised to be reserved about my father s behaviors. In the 70s and 80s, and even 90s, you did not often see people with dementia, in public. The word Alzheimer s was not known. My father s dementia was not organic; it was from a mishap during heart surgery. And we were pretty quiet caregivers. To reveal what I lived with I worked with the source, I wrote to my deceased father. I now think it was an unconscious move on my part, much like the way a particular poem or story calls for a first person or third person point of view, and the writer lets the muse dictate the way it needs to be written. When writing letter-like essays to my father, I could privately review with him, the life he had lived. Once I did this a few times, I recognized that it was a good form to use for other reasons. One, my father s memory was blown by a lack of oxygen during his heart operation. He had no knowledge of who he was. No short-term memory, and little memory of his past. The epistles were a way to share with him, the life he had on earth, from his daughter s view. For myself, it was a form of closure. Not that my thirty years with him is put behind, or far from thought. Rather, I came to terms with what had happened. And I had epiphanies, realizations when writing to him  that also made me learn things about our lives that I had not thought of before. Using an epistolary approach removed any self-consciousness I might have had, if I had to be aware that I was writing for outside readers. Doing so may have created hesitation or worry about audience. </p> <p>As these letter-like essays were slowly building the larger story, I did some research on the epistle as an art form, and liked what I found. When we think of letters, we naturally think of their having salutations and closings. We think of traditional missives. But epistles are much broader than that. They really cannot be lassoed into a particular structure. For example, there are creative epistles that have titles instead of greetings, such as mine. They can seem more like essays than letters. There are epistolary poems as well as epistolary essays. There are epistolary novels, fictional accounts written through the correspondence of characters. This gave me permission to continue writing to my father, in creative ways. My essays are epistolary in that I am writing to him, not of him. </p> <p>And there are other reasons for writing to the deceased. I have no worry of repercussion. If writing about a jarring memory, when his dementia flared, I could share that moment without concern of a negative response. No hate mail! And in cases where I shared a fond memory of my father when well, I sensed him at times, thanking me from the other side. I feel my father as being more alive now than when he was living a diminished existence, extremely limited mentally and physically. For these reasons, the epistle became a vehicle for telling our story. </p> <P><strong>WG: You mention being able to write to your father without worry about a negative response, but I wonder if other family members have read <em>dear father</em> or parts of it and what their response has been. Sometimes families are the harshest critics. </strong></p> <p>TH: Family members have not read <em>dear father</em>. It has been strange for me, that my extended family has never (or rarely acknowledged) my writing, not even poetry that has neutral themes. I think they shy from my writing path, the way I gave up my apartment and full-time teaching job, and have been writing on the road. I don t know what else to say, except that it has trained me not to seek their approval. So I stay quiet about what I write. </p> <P><strong>WG: Most people who know your writing think of you as a poet, and you yourself described the prose pieces in <em>dear father</em> as lyrical essays. How do you think that your experiences as a poet impacted your writing of the essays? </strong></p> <p>TH: I think because I spent so much time writing poetry, that voice automatically carried over into prose. After all it is my inner voice that speaks. One could call it the soul. And so the soul spoke in the only way it knew to when I expanded into essay. And yet, there is always evolvement. Our writing voices morph. And so I have noted a loosening, and subtle changes from image making to a more narrative voice. This voice is still lyrical. I think that is who I am at my core. But it talks too. Maybe in some strange way this goes hand in hand with permitting myself to write of family illness. As I find words to claim the life I had with my <em>dear father</em>, the pieces are willing to share, converse. </p> <P><strong>WG: Therése, one of the pleasures of reading <em>dear father</em>, and something that raises it above many run-of-the-mill memoirs, is the extent to which literature informs your writing. Some of the influences include writers as diverse as Hemingway, Adrienne Rich and BashM. I was particularly struck by this comment about a poem by Alberto Rios: </strong></p> <p class="indentwhole"><strong>I am not sure why Rios s poem came to me but I rather liked his notion, and I knew how things can build inside, a desolate world. How, over time, the body creates thicker walls to make these cities like fortresses. An impenetrable place, hidden so, so the body will never share. Not a clue through daily speech or postured language, not even the eyes hint at these things a person endured. </strong></p> <p><strong>Can you talk a bit about the Rios poem and its impact upon the essay you were writing?</strong></p> <p>TH: I think it is the nature of good poetry (such as the Rios poem) to transcend the maker, and touch readers at large. Poems have that kind of quality. They resonate on a personal level. The title of Alberto Rios s poem is &quot;Cities Inside Us.&quot; It addresses how the places we come from live in us long after we leave them. I liked the repression Rios speaks of, and the hope that even the sounds of the secreted city, inside us, never come out. This resonates with me regarding childhood. It would never occur to my mother and I to talk to others about my father s active dementia in our home, unless something funny occurred like the time he ordered a room full of light bulbs from a door to door salesman. Otherwise, we were reserved. Even our facial gestures would not offer clues. If you met my mother, you might sense her grace. And while I have learned from her quiet caretaking, and while I deeply respect someone s humility when I meet someone with this quality &mdash; it does not take from the fact that a challenging past is still inside them; vividly alive at times. The essay I wrote &quot;Dog and Different Fields&quot; quoted a line or two of Rios s poem, to mirror how I was revisiting my own memories, those so deeply hidden that not even the outer self will hint at them. </p> <P><strong>WG: As someone who is not only a memoirist yourself but has taught memoir writing workshops, what do you see as some of the ways that potential writers might be able to unlock this challenging past that is still inside of them? </strong></p> <p>TH: The word <em>memoir</em> connotes a chunk of life, an expansive body of work. And that can seem daunting, to think of writing a memoir before you even start. If that is happening, I suggest working with one memory at a time, without expectations, so you at least begin. I suggest not worrying over readership, although the writer might need a faint sense of audience to establish voice, in terms of it being for YA (young readers), or a general audience, or the medical profession, a family member, etc. But at the level of getting ideas down, I suggest steering away from thinking about reactions from others. You should write for yourself. As you write unimpeded, other memories crop up that play off the previous piece you drafted. Those initial pieces can offer permission and direction, even if you discard them later. </p> <p>For myself, I began with fond memories of a well father who was deeply loved. Camping excursions. The ringed smoke signals he made from puffing on cigars. A kind of serenity came over me, and this made writing of the harder times permissible, because I had honored who my father really was. When I began working with harder memories, I read them to myself until a certain acceptance came over me  and they didn t seem so unthinkable, unspeakable. They stopped looming over me and settled down onto the paper. I now see looming thoughts as traumatic experiences that we keep in our head and make big. When you make them visible, on paper, they lose some of the power they had on you, and become more palatable. This becomes not only a writing process but a healing process. </p> <p>As an example, someone who critiqued my manuscript wrote in the margin: <em>You don t mention how many pounds you lost?</em> She was referring to the first year of my father s dementia when I starved myself. As I sat with that comment, I realized I was embarrassed by the amount of weight I had lost, many years ago. I was still uncomfortable with divulging my illness. Months later, when writing a new essay, I included the low weight. Reading it to myself, I realized it allowed readers into the story, so they could actually see the dangerous state I was in. Hard material is not easy. It took four years of writing about my father and I, before my weight was on paper. In the end, there is no one way to write. Each person will find the way that is right for them. </p> <P><strong>WG: Did you find it difficult to reveal that whole episode of your life when you went through the dangerous weight loss to readers? How did it feel as a successful poet and writer at this point in your life to look back on the person you were then and what she was going through? </strong></p> <p>TH: In my essay &quot;Into the Iceberg,&quot; I talk about labeling, and how labels can be as dangerous as the illness itself. In terms of this widely known word <em>anorexia</em>, the label brings attention to the body. We immediately associate the word with how someone looks, when in fact the body is the effect and not the cause. I will always believe that self-starvation is a problem outside the body; the body is where it resides. In my case, it was my father s sudden dementia due to brain damage. </p> <p>And so, yes, at the start of writing about my illness, I found it difficult to talk about the disease: in part because it is misrepresented as being a body thing, in part because of the shame I endured. We looked abnormal, my father and I. The stares and comments are hurtful memories I have to overcome when writing, even this many years later. In another essay, I speak about two seventh grade boys who stood at their lockers, laughing and pointing at me, saying: <em>Here she comes skeleton-face! Skeleton face!</em> And once, in a writing workshop, a person commented that girls are anorexic because they are not comfortable with sex. It s stuff like that &ndash; people projecting onto the illness, or making sweeping generalizations, which makes this disease hard to write of. Believe me, I wish the origin had been something like a young girl s awkwardness with sex. That would have been a fun recovery. But that was not the case. </p> <p>When I feel my inner shame kicking in, I have to settle down inside myself and say like a mantra: <em>tell your truth</em>. Somehow those words help to remove some writing blocks. In the end I will share what I can. I will go deeper each time, <em>hopefully</em>&hellip;And no one can deny a person s truth. </p> <P><strong>WG: Therése, I want to thank you for discussing your thoughts about memoir writing in general, and how you specifically worked through a number of the issues surrounding your work on <em>dear father</em> . Too often people simply approach writing memoir with the idea that because they are writing about themselves the words will just flow naturally and they will have a book worth reading when they are done. I hope that after taking into account some of the challenges that you ve pointed out, prospective memoir writers will think a bit more deeply about what they are about to embark on. Before we close, is there anything you would like to add to what we have already discussed that you think might be helpful to other writers? </strong></p> <p>TH: There are two things. First, I think the writing process is individualized. For some, the story will pour from them. Afterward, they begin to revise. I am thinking of Frank McCourt who wrote his memoir <em>Angela s Ashes</em>. In an interview he said the book was really stirring around inside him for years, so that when he eventually sat down to write, it took only six months. To the other side, there are many who write and revise as they go, like Hemingway who would rise each morning and begin by reading and revising everything he had written from page 1, and then take it another 1500 words and stop; the next day reading/revising everything from page 1 and driving the work further, and so on. His was a tedious process, but look at his accomplished body of work! Many write what they are emotionally able to, and/or when they are able to. There are endless ways of creating, and even within a single writer &ndash; will the writing process evolve over time. So for these reasons, I think it is important not to be hard on yourself for the way you are committing your story to paper &ndash; especially if you are writing about delicate issues. You need to lay it down the way you feel driven. Follow your muse because it is wise. </p> <p>Last, I want to take this opportunity to share that the genres are morphing, and also merging. It s very freeing. And it can also be misunderstood for those who are not aware. Today, there are hybrids such as the prose poem. Likewise, there is poetic prose &ndash; that is gaining much attention as the Lyric Essay. That s the style I gravitated towards in this body of work called <em>dear father</em>. There is much to say about the lyric essay, but in sum it carries a cadence, has often a poetic quality, is artful in delivery. It also takes risks with form, and can cycle through a story rather than use a linear approach. Regarding <em>Nonfiction</em>, I do not often hear categories such as <em>Biography </em> and <em>Autobiography</em>, at least in writing circles. The term <em>Nonfiction</em> is even being replaced with <em>Creative Nonfiction</em> &ndash; which implies what it suggests, that one take a truth and cast it creatively. For some this might involve embellishing. For some it might involve a creative style. <em>Fragmentation</em> is another subgenre. Again, there is much to be said about these forms, but the term implies that you don t have to tell a story from start to finish. As in memory, you can work with parts of the whole and bring these parts together like a collage. The story I have written of my lifelong struggle with family illness, in particular my father s, has been revealed through stand-alone essays, lyric essays &ndash; that cycle through life. These singular pieces use flashbacks rather than chronology, to give you the tale of our lives. </p> <p>PS&hellip;and here s a postscript to thank Mike for the dignity and genuine support he has given so many writers (and readers), especially those who have met with emotional and/or physical challenges. The permission he offers us works like an outstretched hand that says: <em>hey, here s a pen, write it down</em>. </p> </TD> </TR> </TABLE> <DIV ID="footer" DIR="LTR"> <P><A HREF="#top">Return to Top</A> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;|&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <A HREF="http://www.wordgathering.com/index.html">Return to Home Page</A></P> <P><EM>This site is maintained by Michael Northen and Eliot Spindel.</EM></P> </DIV> </BODY> </HTML>