Catherine Graham | Issue 3

On Choosing Subject Matter

I had no plans to be a writer, a poet. The concept was foreign to me. Poets were old men we studied in English class, dead men with white beards.

The deaths of my parents changed my relationship to writing. They died during my undergraduate years: mother, my first year; father, my last. Alone in the world, grief consumed me.

A worried family friend suggested I see a therapist. The therapist suggested I keep a journal. Write out your feelings. Give grief a voice.

It helped but it wasn’t a cure.

One day I began playing with words. Images, the music of words, the silence. I was thinking about the water-filled quarry I grew up beside and the cedar-walled bungalow where I lived with my parents. That house had to be sold after they died.

Absorbed by words and memory, I entered a space both familiar and foreign. Time disappeared and my imagination expa…