Miscarriage and the Beauty of the Ordinary with Tonja Robins

"A Letter Home," by poet Tonja Robins, currently live at The Fertile Source, can be read here: http://fertilesource.com/?p=728

Can you talk about the process of writing the poem, A Letter Home? And how you arrived at the imagery?

After the miscarriage I was in Spain and had a chance to spend a week on the southern coast. So the imagery I owe to the landscape: the dark gray rock jutting into the Atlantic, the wild statice, the goats all struck me as beautiful, rugged, lonely. The dead fish reminded me of the miscarried potential life. I made notes at the time but didn't draft until a few months later, back in the US.

Surely recovery from miscarriage entails emotional upheaval and the need for reflection. At what distance from the experience of miscarriage were you able to compose this poem?

It took at least ten drafts, working on it, letting it be, coming back to it, repeating the cycle and finally sharing it with my writing group. They gave feedback which I used to arrive at the final draft. The whole process literally occurred over years, and I feel it took that long to get the necessary artistic distance.

Were there particular writers or written works that you turned to during that time period that you’d recommend to others?

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote some beautiful poems about women's lives I read during that time, and I still turn to her work for inspiration. Anne Sexton is another writer I read during those years. Currently, I'm quite moved by the book Departure by Rosanna Warren.

If you were to give us an overview of the subjects and imagery of your body of poetry up until now, what images would recur? Was "A Letter Home" a change for you in any way?

The subjects that I'm drawn to write about: natural and simple beauty, various forms of love and loss, insider's vs. outsider's perspective, familial relationships, foreign cultures. As far as imagery, nature is my greatest source, and there's a fair amount of water that appears in my work. I like to focus on small details that many might miss because they're looking for something grander. So the imagery of "A Letter Home," while unique to that poem, is still taken from my often used source, nature. There's only the hint of mechanization in the poem.

How would you say motherhood has affected your writing? Was there a certain time in your child’s life when you felt more of your writing self returning?

Motherhood helps me prioritize and appreciate the time I have for my writing. I've found being a mother a deeply gratifying experience that leads me toward greater compassion for the difficulties of being human, dependent, limited. The freshness of children's language and perspective keeps delighting me, and the love they ooze is so easy to reciprocate. Love is a very powerful motivation to write. Once my child reached school age, writing time was easier to find.

Of all the classes you teach on writing, which do you find yourself the most engaged and inspired by? What is the most challenging part of teaching others to write?

The junior high school children I teach a summer writing class for I find much easier than the usual college level writing classes. Kids that age still have a sweetness, have not yet developed an overwhelming desire to be cool. They like a lot of sci-fi, fantasy and heavy drama generally, but they're still open to the unexpected poetic moments in life, even if they would never describe them that way.

Any thoughts you’d like to share with us about your current writing project?

I hope to finish this fall a collection of poems about Cahokia, the largest Native North American city which was active from about 1000 A.D. to 1200 A.D. Its ruins are located in southern Illinois, just across from the city of St. Louis. I grew up in this area and the immense mounds left from their culture, plus their artifacts, have fascinated me since childhood.