10 Questions for Kathleen Kelley

- By Amal Zaman and Danielle Brown

"When my mother asked me 
what in the world I wanted, we were
driving across the Sagamore Bridge.

I could feel the vibration.
I was ten. My mother 
had never raised her voice before."

- from "The Light, the Bridge, and the Fish" which appears in our Summer 2016 Issue (Volume 57, Issue 2).

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.

I did not give myself over to the writing of poetry until I was well into middle-age.  When I was raising children, the only writing I did was in a journal.  After they left the nest, but before I began writing poetry seriously, I completed the draft of a novel about friendship as well as a book on mindfulness and cancer.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?

The poets who have most influenced my writing are Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell.  I was fortunate enough to participate in several of their workshops when I was in my fifties.  Mary Oliver’s work was also important to me, especially when I first began to write poetry in earnest.  My current favorite poet is Tony Hoagland.

What other professions have you worked in?

My training is in clinical social work, although I started out in teaching.  For twenty years I maintained a private practice, but then became interested in medical social work—primarily the field of oncology, but also several years doing home-based clinical work with the VNA and a year in hospice.  In medical settings, the focus is less on helping people to change and more on helping them cope with the distress that comes with illness.

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?

Neither real nor imagined places have figured greatly in my work.  Of course, the imagination itself is the actual “place” where it all happens.  But I have found myself more preoccupied with internal landscapes—i.e., the human mind and heart, especially my own, but only because I know it best.  Everyone’s life contains enough to keep a writer going: stories and struggle, pleasure and heartache, love and soul and the endless search for meaning.

What inspired you to write this piece?

“The Light, the Bridge, and the Fish” is actually an old poem, but one that, years later, I am still coming to understand.  It is a memoir poem, which I mention only because it is so important not to assume that a poem written in the first person is necessarily about the writer.  In this case though, my mother did, in fact, ask me what in the world I wanted.  We were having an argument, and I was thirty-three years old, not ten.  Her question: what in the world do you want just would not let me go. It deserved an answer, at least an attempt. The child who narrates the poem, at least as I remember her, did not have an answer, at least not one that felt sufficient. Years would pass before I could articulate the kind of psychological and spiritual questions that were stirring in me even at a very young age. Only then could I write the poem, which brought with it a most satisfying sense of completion.

Who usually gets the first read of your work?

I’m part of a wonderful group of women writers, and these companeros get to hear many of my rough drafts and early revisions. My son Michael, who teaches high school English, is a great support to me as a writer, as well as being a terrific editor.

Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?

Writing rituals and traditions seem to come and go with me, except for the consistent presence of a peer writing group.

If you could work in another art form what would you choose?

If I could come back again, I would want to be a conductor!

What did/do you want to be when you grow up?

When I was a girl I wanted to be a nun (and almost did).

What are you reading right now?

Actually, I am in between books at the moment, having just finished a very disturbing book by Peggy Orenstein titled Girls and Sex as well as a second slow, delicious read of Anthony Doerr’s extraordinary novel All the Light We Cannot See.

Currently residing in Florence, MA, Kathleen M. Kelley has received an Anderbo Poetry Prize and a Philbrick Poetry Award for her chapbook The Waiting Room. Her poetry has appeared in Chautauqua, Theodate, Mobius, Women’s Voices for Change, Persimmon Tree, and the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine anthology. New work is upcoming in The Healing Muse.