Once a Poet

The transformation of my writing across genre and time.

The photo was taken in about 1980 after moving into my new Cannon Beach home as a recently single woman. The image doesn’t show the restlessness of that time, only the hopefulness that, at last, I’d be free to write. In truth, I’d arrived from San Francisco into Cannon Beach as part of a family camping trip in the mid-70s where we joined a family of close friends from San Jose. By the end of the two-week camping trip, our two families had purchased a small motel on Hemlock Street with the idea of winter managers and each family as resident managers during the summer months.

In 1976 when the motel was purchased, I was a graduate student in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University. At that time, there were perhaps a handful of such programs across the country, the most famous being the Iowa City Writers Workshop. SF State hadn’t yet instituted an MFA program; a master’s degree was the equivalent, allowing one to teach if desired.

I’d already completed my undergraduate degree in creative writing by my 30s and accumulated significant life experience: marriage, divorce, two young sons, life as a single parent in a world prejudiced against divorce. Stan Rice, my favorite poetry instructor, once asked, “Can you write a poem without being angry, Dian?” From that early period with Stan Rice.

Not until Kathleen Fraser taught me the art of collaging language did I break free. Here is an opening stanza.

But Stan’s question was relevant and transformed into my later work after Richard Hugo.

At San Francisco State, my feminist ideals of the 70s were echoed in the students I met, the classes I attended and my job in the Poetry Center’s archive project. Working on the center’s video crew allowed me to be up close to Alan Ginsberg and his father, to Adrienne Rich (my personal hero) and Galway Kinnell who would later be a guest in my Cannon Beach home. The years that followed the late 70s into the 80s were rich with personal encounters and conversations as I helped host Gary Snyder and William Stafford at Clatsop College, listened with enamored attention to a talk by Oregon’s own Barry Lopez.

At the encouragement of Dick Hugo, I completed my MA and began to teach at Clatsop Community College in Astoria, Oregon. I was hired as a sabbatical replacement along with John Connor from Portland. The two of us joined Anne Klinger’s fencing class and drank too much when off campus. During the five years I was at the college, I made lifelong friendships and enjoyed the rich teachings of fellow instructors. They were good years and full of fun even as my sons graduated from high school and moved on to the University of Washington.

Cover and promo photo for The Double Fire Burning, my poetry book published in 1979. Book cover created by Ken Grant, a Cannon Beach artist.

My poetry began to change. Where once it was at play with language and sentiment, the lines grew longer and became more narrative. One day, I visited a pioneer cemetery with a friend and, as cemeteries often do for me, I began to weave stories about the invisible folks lying beneath the dirt and rain. The poems became imagined stories versus a collage of images. At the same time, teaching seemed to rob my creative energy. With endless papers to correct and students who felt entitled, I began to rethink my career choice.

In the mid-80s, I stopped drinking alcohol to prove I wasn’t an alcoholic. During that year, I experienced an epiphany. Here I was, living in this beautiful home but lonely. Working at jobs that didn’t support me. Isolated in a small town that felt “ingrown” to me. Before long, the poor artists of the 70s and before had bailed as the property became too expensive to live there. It became too expensive for me.

But the epiphany came when I realized that my life wasn’t working the way I’d hoped. Perhaps it was time to “give back” some of the richness I’d been given. But I needed to find work that would suffer from the least amount of ageism if I had to work into my eighties. I returned to California for a long retreat in Lake County. When I left two weeks later, I knew what course I had to take.

On my return to Oregon, I decided between two graduate schools for psychotherapy. One school in Santa Barbara sufficed with low residence—but the focus on Jungian psychology seemed “too intellectual” for me. My previous therapists had never really assessed alcohol abuse for a number of us in treatment. The school I chose, the California Institute of Integral Studies, combined both Eastern and Western psychology, philosophy and religion under one roof. It was the best choice and the place where I finally got sober.

Fast forward into the 90s, I found myself in San Diego working in a consortium of psychiatric facilities. I was an anomaly as a marriage and family therapist in a world of nurses and social workers and psychiatrists. But my supervisors saw something valuable in what I brought. I, in turn, learned more about love and connection than I intended from the groups I led, made up mostly of schizophrenic and bipolar persons, addicts and alcoholics.

My own therapist urged me to return to writing. I did. Studying first with Kate Braverman in Los Angeles, I then worked briefly with Donald Rawley. Finally, Janet Fitch was the mentor who stayed the course with me through the publication of About the Carleton Sisters. On returning to Oregon in 1999, I began studying with Tom Spanbauer and the Dangerous Writers. That’s how I ended up in Portland for these past twenty-three years.

Portland, OR in the late ‘90s. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Novels give me space, an open-endedness that proves inviting. I’d written and published short stories but found the rules too strict and the length too confining. I wanted to “live with” my characters as they emerged, to go down the rabbit hole with them. The therapist in me wanted to know how they got to be who they are/were. The writer in me heard their voices and was led by them. These characters, like humans, were bound to create drama, to be jealous and vindictive, loving and selfish, to lead their lives from whatever wound occurred early in their lives, a world view carved from both love and abandonment. Like Prufrock, I heard them “sing” to me.

It’s not that the poet “went away.” I’d prefer to think that she became more “integrated” into the fabric of the story, the way characters speak and interact, how their hidden motives manifest and drive them forward deeper into the story. And I know I’m not unique. Over the years, I’ve met other novelists who, like me, started in poetry and/or hear their characters speak to them. We start where we start. After all, isn’t that the point? To start.

Where did you begin the journey you’re on today? I’d love to know how those sometimes random beginnings have served you. I’m here, ready to listen.