We the Mourners is a poetry collection with themes centered around grief, love, embodiment, and surviving loss. Was there a particular experience or realization that first led you to write these poems?
These are themes that always seep into my writing life, especially love! One of my favourite quotes, by one of my favourite authors, Elizabeth Strout is: “You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.” (From the book, My Name is Lucy Barton.) I believe my ‘one’ story is a love story. When I write it is often an ‘embodied’ experience, so that seeps in as well!
The particular experience that triggered the poetry in this collection, however, including the first line that repeats (‘We the mourners’), came from an overwhelming feeling of mourning that I felt when I was reading the novel Peggy by Rebecca Godfrey. I’d read that Rebecca had been working on the novel for ten years, and then was hit by the horrors of cancer, and she passed away before the book was finished. While she was in-hospital, she had her husband record her speaking story notes… and then she requested that her friend finish writing the book for her. There was a collective creative completion of this stunning novel… and I felt this deep sense of mourning for this incredible writer who I’d never met but felt so connected to through her writing and her life story. I felt it in my body, in my heart and I used a poem to hold the mourning energy I was feeling.
Your poems suggest that mourning is something we actively do rather than simply endure. Why was that distinction important to you?
Great question! Thank you for deciphering this important point. Yes, I believe that mourning is a choice. It’s an ‘active’ experience we can choose to have on our own and/or as a collective (even between two people!) sacred, spiritual expression. I believe that one way to embrace the power of mourning, especially for global suffering, is to use one’s love ability through the body, to hold whatever pain/suffering they see another experiencing, and use prayer or creativity or crying—an act—to acknowledge and support that pain/suffering. It may sound counter-intuitive, but when experienced, I believe, it puts more love into the world by choosing to face the ways humans suffer, despite the knowledge that we can actually choose not to hurt each other, as one example. Disease, natural disasters, accidents, and other ‘destructions’ that are (more) out of human control also deserve acknowledgement and mourning energy.
The distinction is important because, unlike grief, which is an emotion, an undeniable part of the bodily human experience, mourning comes from a consciousness, an awareness of pain in others, unhindered by competition or ego. It is a language of love.
The book carries a strong spiritual current without belonging to any single tradition. Was that openness intentional?
Oh yes. In fact, I was very aware of how easily my own religious upbringing wanted to sweep in and take the lead on the ‘right’ way to mourn, to pray, to love. I used this dissonance to shake up, loosen and release any ‘single tradition’ of beliefs because so much hatred and death can be a result of traditional religious belief systems. The gorgeous irony, of course, is that love is an integral part of traditional religious belief systems, but the way we interpret these beliefs can become a devastating battleground. I wanted to acknowledge this possibility, and elevate above it by writing peaceful, unconditional-love-centric language. And, suggest (with love!) the, perhaps, radical idea that if we are able to recognize how our bodies use emotions to stay alive, how emotions trigger our nervous systems which affects our choices… that in the same way we can choose to put love in the world towards each other, we can choose to mourn suffering and pain for each other as well. When the love-putting (if I may!) is too difficult or we simply can’t ‘see’ or ‘feel’ it, be then, with the pain and suffering, hold the tragedies, the losses, the sadnesses for each other. I truly believe it matters.
What conversations do you hope We the Mourners inspires among readers?
Hmmm. Another great question! I hope that it inspires conversations about the body, about heart-led choices, about belief systems that are not unconditional… I hope readers give themselves grace as they read, just as I gave myself grace when I wrote to ‘be’ in the powerful, profoundness of mourning. I hope that conversations about the sacredness of being a human ensue! I hope there are conversations about souls and love, and the delightfully terrifying truth that being alive means we are also dying, and quietly, each of us is engaged in the mourning of our own body’s love life. I hope that there are conversations about shifting out of competitive suffering, out of the belief that one person’s pain is different than/more important than/deserves more attention than someone else’s. Even the human being who makes the most horrific choices that result in the deaths of other humans can be mourned. What is that human’s love story? These are difficult thoughts to stand in, to feel in. But, I believe, there are mourners who choose to take on these realities, and hold them. That we can each stand in, and feel, and mourn the extraordinary possibility that each human is here to love and be loved—yet will not or cannot. What then? That’s something to talk about.
