Interview
The Aftermath of Tragedy: AN INTERVIEW WITH KATHERINE FLANNERY DERING
BY Julie Darpino, Dylann Cohn-Emery, Kaitlyn Gaffney, & Leo Krischner
March 2019
Making sense and finding purpose after experiencing great tragedy in life is something with which many people struggle. It is not unusual for authors to take pen to paper when exploring pain and grief in such times. But for author Katherine Flannery Dering, family heartbreak provided the opportunity to examine not only the negative, but also the positive of life. Previously, Dering turned the plight of her brother’s schizophrenia and subsequent death into an emotional journey of self-discovery and staunch advocacy for mental illness in her memoir, Shot in the Head: a Sister’s Memoir, a Brother’s Struggle. Now the former teacher, full-time mother, and retired businesswoman explores another family tragedy—the untimely death of her nephew—to reconcile her feelings in her new collection of poetry titled Aftermath (Finishing Line Press). Dering comments that when we are suddenly forced to face reality’s hardships, “we can crumple, or we can learn from it, and grow in wisdom.”
In this conversation with Glassworks, Katherine Flannery Dering discusses how keeping the writing specific and personal leads to greater sharing with her readers, and explains how focusing on unique moments in life and in nature can put us on the road to overcoming grief.
In this conversation with Glassworks, Katherine Flannery Dering discusses how keeping the writing specific and personal leads to greater sharing with her readers, and explains how focusing on unique moments in life and in nature can put us on the road to overcoming grief.
Glassworks Magazine (GM): Given your previous work with your memoir Shot in the Head: A Sister’s Memoir, a Brother’s Struggle, which centered around your brother’s mental illness, why did you choose to write your latest book Aftermath as a poetry chapbook to reconcile your emotions in the wake of your nephew’s passing? What does the genre of poetry offer you in terms of expressing yourself that memoir or other prose writing does not?
Katherine Flannery Dering (KFD): Poetry is a distillation. It has allowed me to share a period of my life with readers, emotion by emotion, without a lot of set up. While writing Shot in the Head, I found myself looking for ways to write more sparingly—to get to the essential emotion of the moment. At times, even in a work that started as straight prose, I found myself opting to write in poetic form. Take, for example, the awful revolving door of mental illness health care. My prose, to me, sounded repetitive instead of emotional. He crashed and became psychotic. He was taken to the ER, they kept him for a few days, they released him. Repeat. Repeat. A reader can’t feel how traumatic that all was. So instead of writing about three or four of those instances, I wrote a poem: “Hospitalization, stabilization, release, decline, / psychosis, fights, rehospitalization or jail.”
The choice of poetry for Aftermath came about very differently. While I was ostensibly working on my mystery novel, which I suspect I will never finish, I instead repeatedly found myself inspired to write a poem about losing Nick. And then, as I was dealing with the emotions of caring for my daughter-in-law’s mother on her last afternoon, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. To process my feelings, I tried writing a poem as a pantoum. The discipline of writing in a rigid form helped me sift through the day. A couple of weeks later, as I was editing that poem, I rejected the form, picked out the lines I liked best, and wrote a different poem. It is that second poem that became part of Aftermath. I took a poetry class at the Hudson Valley Writers Center during that time, and we were asked to write a poem a day. I wrote many poems about death, aging, loss, etc. I became fascinated with “The Cloisters.” I liked several of the poems that came out of all this, but somehow, only a few of them stood well on their own; they worked better as a grouping. I was musing about what to do with them when I came across someone’s chapbook, and I thought—that’s it.
GM: The exploration of death is a common theme found in your work, inspired in part by your personal experiences. How has writing poetry led to new discoveries about death?
KFD: My writing is first of all an expression of what I have experienced or learned, conscious or subconscious. And then comes the further experience of sitting with it, letting it all sink in—the realization that I, too, will die in the not-too-distant future. Back in college metaphysics classes, one professor began each class with, “Why being rather than nothingness?” Martin Buber had his “I and thou.” Victor Frankl wrote of finding meaning as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. As I rewrite, discard, and try again, I ruminate on it all. I read other poets like Rumi or Kabir. I hold in my hand the prayer card from Nick’s funeral or my brother’s funeral and I wonder what I really do believe. So it becomes iterative.
Katherine Flannery Dering (KFD): Poetry is a distillation. It has allowed me to share a period of my life with readers, emotion by emotion, without a lot of set up. While writing Shot in the Head, I found myself looking for ways to write more sparingly—to get to the essential emotion of the moment. At times, even in a work that started as straight prose, I found myself opting to write in poetic form. Take, for example, the awful revolving door of mental illness health care. My prose, to me, sounded repetitive instead of emotional. He crashed and became psychotic. He was taken to the ER, they kept him for a few days, they released him. Repeat. Repeat. A reader can’t feel how traumatic that all was. So instead of writing about three or four of those instances, I wrote a poem: “Hospitalization, stabilization, release, decline, / psychosis, fights, rehospitalization or jail.”
The choice of poetry for Aftermath came about very differently. While I was ostensibly working on my mystery novel, which I suspect I will never finish, I instead repeatedly found myself inspired to write a poem about losing Nick. And then, as I was dealing with the emotions of caring for my daughter-in-law’s mother on her last afternoon, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. To process my feelings, I tried writing a poem as a pantoum. The discipline of writing in a rigid form helped me sift through the day. A couple of weeks later, as I was editing that poem, I rejected the form, picked out the lines I liked best, and wrote a different poem. It is that second poem that became part of Aftermath. I took a poetry class at the Hudson Valley Writers Center during that time, and we were asked to write a poem a day. I wrote many poems about death, aging, loss, etc. I became fascinated with “The Cloisters.” I liked several of the poems that came out of all this, but somehow, only a few of them stood well on their own; they worked better as a grouping. I was musing about what to do with them when I came across someone’s chapbook, and I thought—that’s it.
GM: The exploration of death is a common theme found in your work, inspired in part by your personal experiences. How has writing poetry led to new discoveries about death?
KFD: My writing is first of all an expression of what I have experienced or learned, conscious or subconscious. And then comes the further experience of sitting with it, letting it all sink in—the realization that I, too, will die in the not-too-distant future. Back in college metaphysics classes, one professor began each class with, “Why being rather than nothingness?” Martin Buber had his “I and thou.” Victor Frankl wrote of finding meaning as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. As I rewrite, discard, and try again, I ruminate on it all. I read other poets like Rumi or Kabir. I hold in my hand the prayer card from Nick’s funeral or my brother’s funeral and I wonder what I really do believe. So it becomes iterative.
GM: You strongly utilize nature in expressing your ideas about death, as in your poem “Ebb Tide.” What are you looking to find in nature that would help us better understand death? What do you find rewarding about using nature as a metaphor?
KFD: I think the natural world speaks to all of us on a personal, familiar level. We have all seen trees. We know the beautiful green buds of spring will become dry and brown, then fall in a dead, brown heap. Many of us have stood on an ocean beach and watched waves crash against the shore. The line of rotting seaweed at the high tide line after a storm tells us something about violence and change. We’ve watched a hawk circle in the sky, and we know it looks for its next meal, and that a small animal has to die so that the hawk can live. We feel it—the circle of life—in our pores. Now that I am retired from full time employment, I spend some days just watching nature outside my window, so the metaphors come to me. I hope that most readers will grasp them easily because they, too, have seen something similar to what I have seen, felt the breeze ruffle their hair, watched a small bird seemingly disappear into the sky, or smelled the rank of rotting fish and seaweed.
KFD: I think the natural world speaks to all of us on a personal, familiar level. We have all seen trees. We know the beautiful green buds of spring will become dry and brown, then fall in a dead, brown heap. Many of us have stood on an ocean beach and watched waves crash against the shore. The line of rotting seaweed at the high tide line after a storm tells us something about violence and change. We’ve watched a hawk circle in the sky, and we know it looks for its next meal, and that a small animal has to die so that the hawk can live. We feel it—the circle of life—in our pores. Now that I am retired from full time employment, I spend some days just watching nature outside my window, so the metaphors come to me. I hope that most readers will grasp them easily because they, too, have seen something similar to what I have seen, felt the breeze ruffle their hair, watched a small bird seemingly disappear into the sky, or smelled the rank of rotting fish and seaweed.
"Many of us have stood on an ocean beach and watched waves crash against the shore. The line of rotting seaweed at high tide line after a storm tells us something about violence and change . . . We feel it—the circle of life—in our pores."
GM: In your poems “Lunchtime Carp” and “Solstice, 7AM,” among others, you observe very succinct moments and expand on them poetically. How do you choose which observations to explore in your poems?
KFD: I usually start to write within a few seconds of some prompt. I am busy with this or that, in a bank meeting, arranging for a voter registration drive, whatever. And then I have a few quiet moments and I look around me, hear a cardinal chirping, see a cluster of foot-long carp that remind me of calico kittens nursing, and I jot it down. Later that day it becomes a poem. I am up early with the summer sun and a beautiful goldfinch catches my eye, but flies away before I can take a picture of it. A fawn jumps out into the road and I almost hit it (which prompted a poem not in Aftermath.) Watching TV or sitting through a business meeting doesn’t usually prompt anything. You can’t catch a fish while sitting on your couch. You have to get a rod and reel and some bait, head out to a pier, drop your line in the water, and sit there for a while, see what bites.
GM: What is your intention behind the different structural choices throughout Aftermath, such as in the shaped poem “Simplon Pass” and the use of caesura in “Lost Child?”
KFD: Structure follows content. “Simplon Pass” is a reflective poem written long after the events. And its theme is not only the journey through the mountain pass, but also the concept of before and after, how life changes due to a deeply felt experience. “Lost Child” is that choking, gasping realization of a terrible truth in the moment. The separate sections of the “Labyrinth at Garrison Institute” mirror how my mind wandered as I walked the winding path. Claiming the “sonnet” designation for my at first playful “Ninth Night Sonnet” was a way to telegraph that it would turn in the last couplet.
GM: In “Doric Loop,” you were able to weave a connective tissue between personal despair at a funeral and the themes found in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” Can you talk about how you find such connections between literature and real life?
KFD: I have no idea how that works. Really. I can only guess. Anyone who has ever sat through a three hour wake of a loved one knows the complex emotions felt. Nick’s wake was like an open wound, and my mind wanted to wander. When I found myself writing about it the next day, the connection to Poe started when I looked up the words casket and coffin in a dictionary. It was a little like focusing on the pantoum form that I described in Q1. By immersing myself in definitions I found an intellectual escape from grief—however momentary. The definitions led to the word casque, which led to poor Fortunato, etc. All stream of consciousness. That whole poem is my repeated effort to not face what was happening and being pulled back to the reality of the moment: the closed casket in the front of the room.
GM: In addition to your tragic family experiences, how has your authorial voice been shaped by other things in your life, such as your professional and scholarly background?
KFD: I usually start to write within a few seconds of some prompt. I am busy with this or that, in a bank meeting, arranging for a voter registration drive, whatever. And then I have a few quiet moments and I look around me, hear a cardinal chirping, see a cluster of foot-long carp that remind me of calico kittens nursing, and I jot it down. Later that day it becomes a poem. I am up early with the summer sun and a beautiful goldfinch catches my eye, but flies away before I can take a picture of it. A fawn jumps out into the road and I almost hit it (which prompted a poem not in Aftermath.) Watching TV or sitting through a business meeting doesn’t usually prompt anything. You can’t catch a fish while sitting on your couch. You have to get a rod and reel and some bait, head out to a pier, drop your line in the water, and sit there for a while, see what bites.
GM: What is your intention behind the different structural choices throughout Aftermath, such as in the shaped poem “Simplon Pass” and the use of caesura in “Lost Child?”
KFD: Structure follows content. “Simplon Pass” is a reflective poem written long after the events. And its theme is not only the journey through the mountain pass, but also the concept of before and after, how life changes due to a deeply felt experience. “Lost Child” is that choking, gasping realization of a terrible truth in the moment. The separate sections of the “Labyrinth at Garrison Institute” mirror how my mind wandered as I walked the winding path. Claiming the “sonnet” designation for my at first playful “Ninth Night Sonnet” was a way to telegraph that it would turn in the last couplet.
GM: In “Doric Loop,” you were able to weave a connective tissue between personal despair at a funeral and the themes found in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” Can you talk about how you find such connections between literature and real life?
KFD: I have no idea how that works. Really. I can only guess. Anyone who has ever sat through a three hour wake of a loved one knows the complex emotions felt. Nick’s wake was like an open wound, and my mind wanted to wander. When I found myself writing about it the next day, the connection to Poe started when I looked up the words casket and coffin in a dictionary. It was a little like focusing on the pantoum form that I described in Q1. By immersing myself in definitions I found an intellectual escape from grief—however momentary. The definitions led to the word casque, which led to poor Fortunato, etc. All stream of consciousness. That whole poem is my repeated effort to not face what was happening and being pulled back to the reality of the moment: the closed casket in the front of the room.
GM: In addition to your tragic family experiences, how has your authorial voice been shaped by other things in your life, such as your professional and scholarly background?
". . . we all live in a river of ethnic mores and generational music and gender expectations, as well as poetry" |
KFD: In a poetry class I took years ago, April Bernard, the instructor, began by saying that we all exist in a river of poetry. The words of anyone from Shakespeare, to Whitman, to Paul McCartney influence what we write. I’d expand that to say we all live in a river of ethnic mores and generational music and gender expectations, as well as poetry.
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I attended a Jesuit college, Le Moyne College, where our required curriculum included about 30 credits—ten classes—in philosophy and theology, in addition to my major, which was Spanish. I had originally planned to teach Spanish literature on the college level, but changed my mind and chose a practical career in business to put food on the table. Still, the metaphysical stayed with me. Christian imagery (if not the faith) stayed with me. The desire to read and research stayed with me. Travel influenced me. I lived in Switzerland for two years as a kid, and I studied one summer in Mexico and two summers in Spain, where I worked at a beach resort near Valencia and studied in the medieval university town of Salamanca. On a visit to Istanbul 20 years ago, I came across a gigantic, upside-down statue of the head of the Gorgon, Medusa, buried underwater for almost 2,000 years in a cistern under the city. I was in Glastonbury one summer when hundreds of women in flowing robes celebrated the Goddess with singing and parades. Experiences like these opened up in me an array of interests in art, mythology, and pre-Christian religions, which inform much of my writing, perhaps as a counterpoint to the Catholic world I was raised in.
GM: What about your literary influences?
KFD: On a literary level, I have to pay homage to poets Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Ellen Bass, and Jory Graham, whose works reveal our common humanity through the personal, the everyday, and sometimes our yearning for the eternal. I’m also fascinated by cross genre work. In an MFA class a few years ago I came across Anne Carson’s Nox, which opened my eyes to cross genre writing as well as to the elegy as an art form. In our technologically advanced publishing world we artists can share more than words with our readers. David McCullough’s wonderful book-in-a-box, an illustrated edition of 1776, includes loose facsimiles of original documents he used while researching for the book. It gives readers a tactile feel for the thrill he experienced while doing original research.
When you’re 70 years old, there are so many experiences that influence your writing, it is difficult to pinpoint them all.
GM: Can you talk about your advocacy on mental health and drug abuse and how it connects to your writing? Do you feel like you have a responsibility in enacting social change?
KFD: It’s another iterative combination. When I wrote my memoir about caring for my brother Paul, I had no idea of how many people suffer from a serious mental illness (SMI). I didn’t know that Paul wasn’t someone who accidentally slipped through the cracks; he was one of millions of people with SMI who are ignored by our mental health system. Four percent of our population suffers from SMI—that’s over ten million—people in the U. S. alone. And the problem is worldwide. Every one of these millions of people has a family and childhood friends and long-time neighbors who suffer along with them. I learned about the system as I was writing, then promoting, my book. I realized that I could help. I could connect with people who are dealing with a troubled family member; I could tell them they are not alone, give them courage. I could let advocacy groups use my story to illustrate the problem to lawmakers.
Telling people that 72,000 people died in the U.S. of an opioid overdose in 2017 is just numbers. Showing how that sorrow impacted me and my family helps to put a face on the tragedy that is substance use disorder (SUD) and its aftermath. Aftermath started out simply as one woman processing grief and moving from that to anticipating her own death. But through the particulars of my experiences, I believe others can more fully grasp the SUD tragedy, as well as face death and dying a little more openly.
GM: What about your literary influences?
KFD: On a literary level, I have to pay homage to poets Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Ellen Bass, and Jory Graham, whose works reveal our common humanity through the personal, the everyday, and sometimes our yearning for the eternal. I’m also fascinated by cross genre work. In an MFA class a few years ago I came across Anne Carson’s Nox, which opened my eyes to cross genre writing as well as to the elegy as an art form. In our technologically advanced publishing world we artists can share more than words with our readers. David McCullough’s wonderful book-in-a-box, an illustrated edition of 1776, includes loose facsimiles of original documents he used while researching for the book. It gives readers a tactile feel for the thrill he experienced while doing original research.
When you’re 70 years old, there are so many experiences that influence your writing, it is difficult to pinpoint them all.
GM: Can you talk about your advocacy on mental health and drug abuse and how it connects to your writing? Do you feel like you have a responsibility in enacting social change?
KFD: It’s another iterative combination. When I wrote my memoir about caring for my brother Paul, I had no idea of how many people suffer from a serious mental illness (SMI). I didn’t know that Paul wasn’t someone who accidentally slipped through the cracks; he was one of millions of people with SMI who are ignored by our mental health system. Four percent of our population suffers from SMI—that’s over ten million—people in the U. S. alone. And the problem is worldwide. Every one of these millions of people has a family and childhood friends and long-time neighbors who suffer along with them. I learned about the system as I was writing, then promoting, my book. I realized that I could help. I could connect with people who are dealing with a troubled family member; I could tell them they are not alone, give them courage. I could let advocacy groups use my story to illustrate the problem to lawmakers.
Telling people that 72,000 people died in the U.S. of an opioid overdose in 2017 is just numbers. Showing how that sorrow impacted me and my family helps to put a face on the tragedy that is substance use disorder (SUD) and its aftermath. Aftermath started out simply as one woman processing grief and moving from that to anticipating her own death. But through the particulars of my experiences, I believe others can more fully grasp the SUD tragedy, as well as face death and dying a little more openly.
"Telling people that 72,000 people died in the U.S. of an opioid overdose in 2017 in just numbers. Showing how that sorrow impacted me and my family helps to put a face the tragedy that is substance use disorder (SUD) and its aftermath."
GM: How do you view the role of writers in general when involved with social advocacy?
KFD: There are other people—social scientists, doctors, and researchers—who can write about the facts. And there are wonderful non-fiction writers who can write, and have written, about SUD in America—books like Beth Macy’s Dopesick. And there are wonderful books out there about death and dying and recovering from grief. Some of them started with the desire to advocate for change. I found nonfiction difficult, though, as the temptation to go into didactic rants could be deadly. So I come from the other direction; I call myself an accidental advocate. I write the personal and readers can use it to expand to the universal if they want. I came into adulthood in a Catholic college atmosphere which emphasized the need to give back and help those less fortunate than ourselves. That said, I don’t feel it is my responsibility to change the world, exactly. It’s more of a feeling that I have learned some things from my experiences that will inform, and might help, others.
GM: How did your writing change in the aftermath of those experiences?
KFD: When I was reflecting on that two year period of my life, I realized how different were the aftermaths of a violent, pointless death like a teenager’s heroin overdose, my emotional efforts to comfort my friend Carolyn as she struggled to breathe, and the peaceful death of a man in his seventies with his family at his side. All three died, but under vastly different circumstances. When I tried to write about death in a general way, it brought out some dreadful cliches; I couldn’t delete those efforts fast enough! But sticking with the particulars of individual moments allowed me to help readers into my world so we could share the experiences directly. The emotion follows (I hope). We all go blithely through our early years, believing that we will live forever, despite the obvious proof that we will not. And then something happens that shoves reality right up to our face, and we can ignore it no longer. We can crumple, or we can learn from it, and grow in wisdom. That is the aftermath. And in that aftermath, we find a way to deal with reality.
KFD: There are other people—social scientists, doctors, and researchers—who can write about the facts. And there are wonderful non-fiction writers who can write, and have written, about SUD in America—books like Beth Macy’s Dopesick. And there are wonderful books out there about death and dying and recovering from grief. Some of them started with the desire to advocate for change. I found nonfiction difficult, though, as the temptation to go into didactic rants could be deadly. So I come from the other direction; I call myself an accidental advocate. I write the personal and readers can use it to expand to the universal if they want. I came into adulthood in a Catholic college atmosphere which emphasized the need to give back and help those less fortunate than ourselves. That said, I don’t feel it is my responsibility to change the world, exactly. It’s more of a feeling that I have learned some things from my experiences that will inform, and might help, others.
GM: How did your writing change in the aftermath of those experiences?
KFD: When I was reflecting on that two year period of my life, I realized how different were the aftermaths of a violent, pointless death like a teenager’s heroin overdose, my emotional efforts to comfort my friend Carolyn as she struggled to breathe, and the peaceful death of a man in his seventies with his family at his side. All three died, but under vastly different circumstances. When I tried to write about death in a general way, it brought out some dreadful cliches; I couldn’t delete those efforts fast enough! But sticking with the particulars of individual moments allowed me to help readers into my world so we could share the experiences directly. The emotion follows (I hope). We all go blithely through our early years, believing that we will live forever, despite the obvious proof that we will not. And then something happens that shoves reality right up to our face, and we can ignore it no longer. We can crumple, or we can learn from it, and grow in wisdom. That is the aftermath. And in that aftermath, we find a way to deal with reality.
Follow Dering on Twitter @katforwomen
Find out more about Dering on her website: https://katherineflannerydering.com/
Find out more about Dering on her website: https://katherineflannerydering.com/
