The Genesis of a Book

Dear Reader,

Sophie Gilbert’s essay, “Margaret Atwood Bears Witness,” (2019 December issue of The Atlantic) opens with the perfect storm of circumstances that led Atwood to publish The Handmaid’s Tale five years later. In this case, it wasn’t a storm but the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State, which cancelled flights on the west coast, which caused Atwood to drive south with poet Carolyn Forché for 11 hours. Conversation included Forché’s descriptions of the horrors she had witnessed in El Salvador. Her book of poems The Country Between Us bore witness to these experiences. Atwood’s take away was to begin her collection of “boxes and boxes of news clippings detailing abuses of power…” The rest is history.

Reading about how seeds of experience grow into books (or poems, musical compositions, dances or visual art) is catnip to creative people. Atwood’s story caused me to pinpoint the event 13 years ago that pushed me to write the biography/memoir of poet Stanley Kunitz’s mother, Yetta. When did it start? In the 70’s when I discovered his poetry? No. Was it hearing him read in Worcester or Provincetown? No.

It was one October day in 2007, the year after Kunitz died.

My husband John Gaumond and I had joined the Worcester County Poetry Association around 1998. We volunteered to room-sit at Kunitz’s boyhood home in Worcester, Massachusetts, built in 1919. I was assigned to the second floor, an apartment under restoration by the couple who had bought the dilapidated 3-story home in 1979. Owners Greg and Carol Stockmal greeted guests on the first floor and were treated to Greg’s telling of the story of their friendship with the poet. Their life’s work of bringing the property back to its original glory was enhanced by a 20-year relationship with its original occupant.

During quiet spells, I read from Kunitz’s book, Passing Through. I had heard people talk about biographical truths of poems such as “The Magic Curtain,” “The Portrait” and “Three Floors.” If where I sat was literally the same as implied in “Three Floors,” the second floor would have been bedrooms for the three Kunitz children, Stanley, Sarah and Sophia. It did not make sense. Why would Yetta and her second husband, Mark Dine, give up an entire apartment for this purpose? My grandparents emigrated from Sicily in the early 1900s and, from what I heard growing up, housing space was tight, and families shared spaces. Allotting an entire apartment to three kids did not seem practical or likely.

That was the seed (of doubt) that found fertile soil when I planted myself in the registry of deeds and the Worcester Public Library to look at documents that told a different story. Thirteen years later, manuscript in hand, I am looking for a publisher.