Dear Memory

DURING the writing and making of my new book, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, I struggled through the creative process in ways that I had not experienced with my five previous books of poetry. In the past I worked independently on my poems, at some point accumulating them into a manuscript and eventually showing a draft to friends when I deemed it to be nearly finished. But for Dear Memory that process was upended, and now that the book is “finished,” I’m still not exactly sure what it is that I made. During the process I was forced to stretch myself as a writer, as an artist, and as a person, and I leaned on friends more than I ever had in the past.

After my mother died in 2015, I resisted writing about her, her death, or my grief, but I still ended up writing a book of poems about exactly that; was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Although I knew that grief over the loss of my mother would never diminish, I was hopeful that, at the least, I would stop writing about it. But one day, four years after her death, while cleaning out my parents’ storage unit—a task I’d long avoided—I opened one of my mother’s many boxes and found numerous documents and photos I had never seen before. I found a letter from Ford Motor Company, where my father had worked his entire life, congratulating him on his perfect attendance in 1993. I also found my parents’ marriage license and learned the names of