Interview with Linda Greenmun, Author of Wheel of Days

Interview Questions Posed by Emily Grace Fleshman

EGF What prompted you to write poems?

LG Since I grew up with a father who was an alcoholic and who did not have a strong sense of self, my early life was spent in the survival mode, trying to avoid physical/verbal abuse, and prove that I was a worthwhile person. Like others who live with prolonged periods of stress, my energy went into vigilance, avoiding pain, and into pleasing others. Very little effort remained for learning-the only poetry I knew were Nursery Rhymes. Every year or two, we changed schools, since my father was in the military. Because my mother did not like to read, we were not taken to the public library and were not exposed to literature. My mother read magazines, like "Good Housekeeping" and she did not know how to protect her children or to help enrich our lives.

My first memory of poetry was when I attended "Sacred Heart," an English girl's school. At twelve years old, I acted as one of the three witches in Shakespeare's "Macbeth." Two other girls and I cackled above a cloudy-filled cauldron of hot-ice and I still love the words: "When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning and in rain...." This play not only served as an introduction to literature, but allowed me to act out anger in a legitimate way, a strong emotion that I usually kept suppressed at home.

Yet, if poems begin in the mind, I may have started to create my first poem during the first twelve years of my life, the few times spent with my maternal grandmother, Mary Edith Jackson-Daugherty. I was safe with her and, unlike my father, she did not say mean words about others in order to feel better about herself. She loved quiet work in the garden, weeding the zinnia beds, along with the jade-green beans and yellow crook-neck squash-this was a haven from my father's violence. And, since she was the only family member who was brave enough to disagree with my father, she was heroic in my eyes. If he lost his temper with me and was yelling about how I was no good, about how I was only a liar and a thief, she would say, "Now, Louis, you don't believe that!" I don't remember him hitting me in her presence. Though she longed to visit the sea, she never did and we pretended to gather ocean waves, when we were raking leaves-the sounds are quite similar. Having heard water's movement against the shore, I could share this much of it with her. Perhaps, this was the most treasured gift from my father-he had taken me to the beach and I could share it with her.

EGF Who and what have served as poetic influences?

LG Surely grief and a sense of not belonging in a world (of seemingly beautiful and happy people) served as motivating factors in those early years. As an adult, I became a nurse anesthetist-someone who numbs the pain of others. After all, I had learned to numb myself from anxiety-not by using anesthetics-but by running very fast through life. This, of course, does not lead to happiness, and only creates more stress. Psychotherapy for over ten years helped gain some insight about sitting with grief and other parts of the self that we do not like to admit into awareness. My husband, Renny taught me to be more objective and to develop a sense of humor (he had also grown up in a very traumatic environment). Our children, Shaun, Christopher, Christine, and Aaron taught me to love the natural world (my father did not like to walk in the grass because, doing so, would have been to dull his spit-shined shoes). Children really do help us, as the poets say, to see the world with new eyes, to love the caddis fly nymph and the garter snake, to roll down a hill in summer, to love running down the mountain against the flow of air. Then I read Camus: "In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me, an invincible summer." And after Camus, I returned to school to major in English Literature and Creative Writing. I read Freud, Yeats, Auden, and so many insightful writers. Every breath, every step, every word spoken or written comes because all these others exist. Even my father taught me how not to be in the world, not to be an alcoholic, not to be a violent person. And so my poems come, also, from him.

EGF Who are your favorite poets?

LG Yeats, Auden, William Stafford, Nelson Bentley (was my first teacher), Tess Gallagher, Jane Kenyon, T. Clear, Peter Pereira. And Jane Hirshfield is one of my most favorite.

EGF How has music impacted your writing?

LG Rhythm and sound form the basis for poetry, along with image and deep concentration to say something that could not be said in any other way.

EGF What experiences are common themes in your poetry?

LG Celebrating and welcoming whatever comes-including grief and loss-because they help us realize aspects that we did not know and they point, in small ways, to our fullness of being. Like a river, we are a continuous flow of energy, with a wave rising here and there-one wave takes the form of Emily, another the form of Linda-but it is all one continuous flow. Because of death, we have life. To not know happiness is to begin to know.

EGF How has your writing (or that of others) impacted your life-what epiphanies have come to you through the written word?

LG No experience is foreign to us. If one man kills another, I am there with him, in ways I have helped or not helped to create peace in the world. If a woman loves her children, I am there, too, in ways I have nurtured or not nurtured others' growth. Though we are not exactly the same, we are not different. This learning has brought a sense of fullness and continuity to my life. When I die, my energy simply passes into another form or non-form. All that I own came from others and will pass back into other hands. I have grown from a sense of having nothing to a sense of being and fullness, because of writing and meditation-both are ways of deeply contemplating our experience with others and the space that we share.

There is a story of two Lamas (Buddhist Teachers) sitting together under a tree. One hour passes and another until, finally, one leans forward and says. "They call this a tree." For me, this means, how can we even hope to define treeness with one small, four letter word? How do sounds even begin to contain the narrow and wide rings in the trunk that denote the dry and wet years, the branches, the leaves that have fallen each fall and renew themselves each spring? What about the wind rustling sounds there, as it offers shade, and the insects and birds that eat and make homes, as a result of the branches. To know the tree, we must sit with it for a long while and experience it in a way that points to its complexity and its singularity and its part within the whole. Poets point to essence, using specific images-that is they create pictures and evoke experience with words.

EGF How do you know that love is real?

LG I believe love and goodness form the very basis for our nature. This nature is often obscured by wanting this and not wanting that-either something that exists outside ourselves or some very narrow experience within, which is only a very small part of us. The desire and anger is very superficial and, yet, it feels all consuming. By slowing down and sitting with anger or desire, fear or loneliness, we see the impermanence of each feeling, its fleetingness. All the difficulty that we experience only serves to link us with others, who experience the same dilemma. Each time we give space to difficulty and face it, we create more spaciousness within ourselves.

When I forgive my father, my own shortcomings become less important. When you and I write to each other or, when we sit with anyone in a meaningful way, we realize that it is not self or other that is important, but both together. It is what lies between, as if love overflowed and could not possibly be contained by a single mind/body, must be shared with a loved other, even if the other is a flower, a cat, a poem, a tree. Each breath we take and each step, each line written on the paper depends on the papermakers, the tree-growers, the mothers and fathers of these people-really on the kindness of all others. So amazing, when we think of it! How could we do anything but give our best to a poem that we are writing or whatever work we are doing?

EGF Where do you derive hope for the future?

LG I have come to believe that hopes and fears are stumbling blocks, or expectations that may have nothing to do with the reality of the moment. Here is a Buddhist Teaching: if we want to know the past, look at our present (for me, this means that if I have acted in ways to help and not harm myself and others, then I am happy in the present and I do not feel harm, though others may wish this for me); and if we want to know the future, look at our present state of mind (for me, this means if I am loving and kind to myself and others, I will create the future, in which love and kindness are returned). There is a less complicated way of stating this-Buddha has said, "It is the mind that creates the world." Some of us suffer pain and it becomes a great obstacle, a living hell. Others experience the same pain, and learn to find the brief pauses between the waves of pain. What is hell for one is opportunity for another.

EGF What jobs have you found to be interesting in your life?

LG Any situation, in which I have helped someone to help themselves live or die in a more meaningful way-meditation, writing poetry, raising children, working as an intensive care nurse with patients who are gravely ill, facilitating meditation groups in prisons. Any work done with another person opens us, so that the benefit flows in both directions.

EGF What music do you like?

LG Folk music and especially ancient chanting accompanied by a sitar, where the words are sung between the notes.

EGF What do you think would make the world a better place to live?

LG Tolerance of differences-when we tolerate others' views and try to understand the circumstances from which they speak, I have noted that arguments often fall away. I also believe women's more active and public roles are helping to bring balance and wisdom and peace.

EGF What types of surroundings do you think would make a better writer?

LG Reading others' poems and essays and fiction, memorizing poems if we want to be poets, so that the music is imprinted in our subconscious, maintaining a balance of solitude and being with other writers in a writering group.

EGF How do you think poetry should be taught?

LG By exposing the poet to many different types of poems, having her/him memorize work that is personally loved, writing exercises based on paralleling the effort of good poems, not stopping the writing too soon before the poem has taught the poet something he/she did not know before setting out on the journey of writing and exploring possibilities, learning to crop beginning lines that are simply warming us up for the true body of the work, carrying a small notebook or scraps of paper to write down whatever an inspired observance will offer us.

EGF What do you feel is the purpose of religion?

LG To wake us up to our basic goodness that is already there and is only obscured by too many distractions in the world (having too many things, doing too much, trying to fit some socially accepted mold, instead of waking up to our own profound nature).