Memoir in Verse or Poetic Memoir - Seems I Have Been Writing Mine For Years Unknowingly
For years friends have asked me when I was going to write my memoir about living and teaching in small tribal villages above the Arctic circle and along the western coast of Alaska. I remember thinking so clearly that I wouldn't be writing about my life from a position of looking back as I had much to write about in the present. I also focused my poetry and art on what was all around me as a way of staying grounded in a life so far from family and long-standing friends.
When I lived above the Arctic circle, the only flowers I saw while out walking in the Spring were dandelions (rare sightings and always near electrical poles), snow buttercups and cotton grass.
There were some hard to find, but there, alpine flowers. I remember an elder once told me to note were I spied caribou grazing, return there later and maybe I'd find some to take home and press in my diary. I came across a patch of Alpine milk vetch one day and was so excited to see a purplish color in the tundra grass.
Although there were no trees (above the tree-line) or colorful flowers lining walkways, there was much beauty there including the sculpturesque icebergs and patterned kuspuks trimmed with colorful rickrack that women wore. Instead of a vegetable or flower garden, locals remarked “The ocean is our garden."
Color was such a rare gift out on the often ice covered landscape that I brought that yellow of the snow buttercups back home to my paintbrush and, too, that wave of white cotton grass. I added lines of verse to my poems that embroidered my life. I wrote about walking for hours along the almost empty beach, coming across caribou hooves sticking up and out of the sand, seal teeth washing in a wave and long pieces of whale baleen.
Was I unknowingly writing my memoir in verse? Now that I have gone back and read all of my poems written while living in Alaska, I have found that I did frequently include lines about one village or another I lived in before the one I was currently residing in. Yet, the only mention of family back home was of my grandmother, Bertha, who had passed away years ago.
While living and teaching in Nome, I wrote about her having glaucoma in a poem based on something one of my second grade students told me. They said their grandmother had a goldfish in one of her eyes and that it swam from corner to corner. You can read that poem, Finn and Gill, here: https://aseaofwatercolors.blogspot.com/2024/01/a-poetry-of-place-nome-alaska-part-2-of.html
In just over two months, I will have been living in Oregon for a year, the first of many to follow. My life has changed much while staying the same in many ways. What has been a dramatic change is the weather and the landscape. Walking in my neighborhood is like walking in an arboretum. The diversity of trees and plants is captivating.
What remains the same is that I am still an elementary teacher working full-time, a poet, a painter and, of course, a mom. Too, I am a wanderer. I am often out taking long walks just like I did when I lived in the Arctic, weather permitting. As I walk, lines of poems dance in my thoughts. I often stop to note them on my phone or record them as I continue down the lane.
I wrote my first poem here three month after I arrived having walked neighborhood sidewalks and parks for hours. Not too far from my home is a patch of milkweed pods which grow in a protected wildlife site nestled between to intersecting sidewalks. Hence I titled that poem Milkweed. It’s already been published by Lone Mountain Literary Society of San Francisco.
The very first stanza speaks of the mincemeat pieces my grandmother would make at the farm. Here she was popping into my writing again. One of my brother's is the family photo archivist. He sent me the one below of her:
I recently started writing another poem. It's about having a stone in my pocket and what that act beckons. I began writing it while I was out walking in a local wildlife refugee. I stopped to pick up a small, reddish stone. As soon as I pocketed it, I said out loud to myself "I have a stone in my pocket like the stone of a cherry pit."
I took out my phone and recorded more thoughts about my frequent filling of the cloth cup of my coat with gathered stones and walking while bearing the weight of them; the weight of found stones. Before I knew it I was back home spending hours writing, erasing and re-writing.
What truly surprised me is that each stanza has elements of the present coupled with childhood memories, something I have not written about since I was myself a child. In the last stanza I write about skipping stones across the pond at the family farm. Here are photos via my brother of that pond:
I have asked myself, "Why am I writing poetic memoir about my childhood and not about the years I lived in the Arctic?" and "Why now?"
My own inner voice has given me the answers. Memories are intertwined, at least mine. Sometimes they are like tangled balls of different colored yarn that you have to slowly unknot to see each clearly.
Too, I am now in a place where I can walk out and about all year long. There is no long cold winter to hibernate for months inside. Instead, I see children outside playing in parks and riding their bikes month after month. Perhaps that's also beckoning my own childhood. Yet, those Arctic memories will find their way into future lines of poetry; the past and the present collectively defining who I am.
I will add that I am a well-seasoned editor so not all childhood memories will make their way into my writing, just a few. What I am also asking myself is how will my memoir in verse affect what I paint, or will it? We will see.
Here is my finished new poem:
Water and Weight
There’s a stone
in my pocket
like the stone
of a cherry pit.
Yet never
staining my
hands red
as those we
filled pies with
and placed
clay crows on
which whistled
with steam
while we
played
badminton
on the clover
flecked
lawn.
There’s a stone
in my pocket,
or was. I have
a hole in the
cup of my coat.
Telling clue;
found quarter
in one of my
untied shoes.
Nine steps taken
before tying the
lace, then about
face. Luck
restored before
I headed for
the door. The
rituals of shoes
my grandmother
knew.
There’s a stone
in my pocket
not a rock like
those I put
inside socks
to carry to
the barn and
form a tower
adorned with
wildflowers.
I was eight and
couldn’t carry the
weight. Rocks
dropped. Socks
worn. I walk
forward bearing
the bulk of my
bones and small
stones
There’s a stone
in my pocket
I’ll soon skip
across the
pond like so
many others
I did with my
brothers at my
grandparents’
farm. A quick
flick of my
wrist and
I’ll watch
as it skips
hoping for four,
daring for eight.
The poetry of
water and
weight.
Susan Slocum Dyer
3/10/26
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