Somerville writer Patricia Wild: Brings the strands of the soul together in her new memoir.

 

Patricia Wild is a well known and respected writer, Quaker activist, journalist, and community organizer. She is an integral part of the beating heart of Somerville, and beyond. As long as I have known her, she has been a straight ,no chaser sort of woman-- with a built in shit detector. She is also a very spiritual woman, who questions herself and the world around her. In her new book, "Strands: An Apprenticeship with Grief and Loss,"  she goes past the bone and into the marrow of grief, loss, and our very souls. I caught up recently with her for an interview.

You described your new book as an "opus of the soul." Explain…

Sounds a little lofty, doesn't it! But I’m sure your readership knows this phenomenon—but perhaps uses different language. In the zone? Connecting with something greater than ourselves? Connecting with that gift we humans have been given: Consciousness? Our Muse showed up? There’s something about connecting with Truth wrapped in all of this, too, right? And trusting, as a spiritual practice, that the words will come.



Much of your book is centered around Quaker practice. What led you to become a Quaker?

A long story. But a pivotal and conveniently-brief story may explain a teeny bit: On Easter Sunday an elderly Quaker stood: “we don’t know what happened at Easter,” she said. "But we know this: There is Mystery.” I'd loved that!



The title refers to you as an apprentice of grief and loss. When does one move on from apprenticeship?

I wrote Strands during COVID. Subsequently, my beloved sister Deborah and my best-friend brother, Paul have died. So in a sense my immediate answer would be: Um, never? I did bring some gained understanding to these incredible losses in my life; some newly-acquired rituals helped. I freshly understood the importance of friends, community, sharing stories. But I also, humbled and overwhelmed by grief and loss, found a grief counselor.



One of the struggles you have had was around being a woman of privilege. Why couldn't you just accept that and move on?

I’m not wired that way, I guess. (And another reason why I joined a religious community in which folks at least try to walk the walk.) And to circle back to that marvelous thing called Consciousness, doesn’t that huge gift ask our species to be aware of and to acknowledge Life’s deeply-outrageous unfairnesses?



In this day and age, it is hard to find time for quiet reflection. But your Quaker practice involves this on a regular basis. What has changed in you from this reflection?

Um, everything? Early Friends called themselves Seekers of the Truth. My judgey-ness, my relationships, my confusions as to what I’m called to do in this overwhelmingly broken, broken world, how to answer someone’s snarky email; in quiet reflection sometimes I can find my way. I’m gifted with a sense of Truth. And one of the things about seeking is, rarely, rarely are we given The Whole Picture. An early Friend, Caroline Fox (who apparently struggled with depression) basically said, “Live up to the Light and more will be given.” In other words, inwardly ask/seek with curiosity and humility. And keep asking.(“How would my better angels response that snarky email?”) t It’s the process that’s important!



You quote Thomas Merton. Merton talks about mystical moments when he feels connected to all people-- he is part of a larger organism. How often do you feel that way?

Such moments are preciously rare. And, unfortunately, we’re not designed to be able to fully reconnect with such blissful and powerful moments as we did when we first experienced them. We remember them with incredible gratitude but they have faded. So unfair!



I am sure that you agree with Socrates, that the unexamined life is not worth living. Do you think there is a fear if we are in conversation with our soul...we might not like what we hear, and our complacency will be ruined?

What complacency? If we examine our lives fully.

Red Letter Poem #268

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #268

 

 

 

 

Tomatoes


It’s when I hear how one out of every three

Of the first Cambodian grocers in downtown Lowell

Had somehow managed to flee the Khmer Rouge

I think two things: Satanic Boott Mills, where alley

By alley my mother’s father once failed to dodge

The splatter of rotten tomatoes; and volley by volley

Those shooters who somehow missed my village uncle

As he scampered up goat-paths, eluding the KKE.



Row by palpable, swollen-to-bursting row

It all comes back in those ripe domátes my cousins

And I would pack into narrow cardboard cartons.

In my father’s grocery store, I pictured giant

Blood blisters, flush with a little cellophane window.

And elders of legend, running the tribal gauntlet.


––George Kalogeris




“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” A cogent if unsettling observation from novelist William Faulkner who knew something about the power of tribal memory. History and cultural inheritance is a central concern throughout the poetry of George Kalogeris––often delving into the world of ancestral Greece but, more specifically, exploring the mythos of his extended immigrant family that settled on the north shore of Massachusetts. And so it’s not surprising he felt an instant affinity when he learned that fully one-third of all the Cambodian grocers in the nearby city of Lowell emigrated to this country to flee the brutal regime of the Khymer Rouge. He’s heard this story before, in numerous incarnations. In the current political debate about immigration, that fact is too often minimized: the majority of people would never choose to leave their homelands if their very lives were not endangered. Some Americans may regard them as interlopers, come to ‘steal our jobs’; but, far more often, they’ve come to these shores to ensure that their children are not dragged down by political terror or abject poverty. And so the familial connections George teases out in today’s new poem extend beyond blood relations and include a broad range of people who are (as Liberty’s signature poem describes it) “yearning to breathe free.”



I was caught off-guard at first, seeing Boott Mills––a group of Lowell cotton mills founded in 1835––tagged with the appellation “Satanic” (William Blake’s “Jerusalem” suddenly echoing in the back of my mind). But it turns out it was not uncommon, during the early days of the Industrial Revolution, for people to consider this new mechanized production (coupled with the despoiling of our natural surroundings) as being an enterprise in the employ of Lucifer himself. The narratives in this poem are fragmentary, and so we are left to imagine what might provoke the local citizenry to pelt George’s grandfather with tomatoes––though we can easily deduce the message: these streets, these jobs, this freedom is ours, not yours. But quickly, the narrator’s mind skips back to the Greek Civil War, recalling stories of his uncle dodging bullets from Communist squads, high in the Peloponnese. It was yet another example of ideology tearing whole families apart, and bloodshed muddying the earth. And, just like that, the speaker jumps again and presents himself as a boy working in his father’s grocery store in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Clearly, the young poetic mind is already ripening––and as he packs the domátes, he’s able to perceive both sweet sustenance and deep-rooted suffering in what he holds in his hands.



An Emeritus Professor from Boston’s Suffolk University, George is a poet, scholar, and translator––recipient of the James Dickey Prize and the Meringoff Prize for Poetry. His last collection, Winthropos (Louisiana State University), is the inky embodiment of his historical and imaginative citizenship in both the Old and New Worlds. He is a craftsman of great skill and subtlety. Be honest: how many times did you have to read this little colloquial lyric before you realized it was a sonnet, replete with lovely off-rhymes and intricate patterning? But I must add one more detail to this biographical sketch: mere literary distinction does not reflect another, and quite essential quality of this individual and his life’s work: George is a deeply humane spirit who reaffirms the best aspects of our cultural legacy and the elements of its ancient Hellenic roots. And so a moment ago, laying down my pen, I found myself looking out the window at my wife’s garden where squash and green beans are flourishing, and her tomato vines are bent from the weight of the red ripening globes. It’s an image of plenitude which, sadly, is in stark contrast to the grim newspaper headlines I found waiting for me this morning. If we were better students of history, we might realize that, with a more enlightened perspective, our planet’s abundance can still sustain far more than we might imagine––and that our violent protective impulses only engender more of the same. Perhaps there ought to be a corollary to George Santayana’s famous dictum: that those who do learn from the past are doomed––like Cassandra (another echo from the Greeks)––to spend their days shouting out this warning, even when our countrymen seem hellbent on plunging into yet another bloody repetition.

 

   

 

 

The Red Letters

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com