Breathe Cry Breathe – From Sorrow to Strength in the Aftermath of Sudden, Tragic Loss, A Memoir – by Catherine Gourdier 

Catherine Gourdier

By Robin L Harvey

Catherine Gourdier feared she’d drown in a torrent of grief and despair after the sudden deaths of her mother, her youngest sister and her father. Instead, she’s written a gripping and raw memoir that shares how the screenwriter and film producer conquered depression and emerges stronger for it.

The book starts on the horrific night in November, 2009, when a car slammed into her 79-year-old mother and youngest sister. Her mother, Neta, died on the road near the family home’s driveway holding a neighbour’s hand. Gourdier’s sister, Julie, so brutally thrown from the car’s she was to many unrecognizable, slipped away cradled in the arms of a pregnant passerby who sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow to comfort her.

Watching this unfold before the first-responders arrived, Gourdier’s 76-year-old father, traumatized yet physically unharmed, staggered helpless from his wife to his daughter. Seven weeks later, he died from what doctors’ call “Broken Heart Syndrome.” In a twist of wicked irony, before trauma unfolded on the road outside their home, members of Gourdier’s large, close clan excitedly worked inside, preparing Julie’s 40th horror-movie-themed surprise birthday party to be held later that night. As celebration turned to devastation, Gourdier found herself at the hospital wearing zombie makeup and half a costume as the family gathered.

“Wanita is dead,” the emergency room doctor blurted out, with little empathy, adding, “Julie has severe head trauma. She may last a couple of hours or a couple of days, but she’s gong to die.”

Gourdier and her traumatized family members bid their rushed and awkward goodbyes to their mother. As she kissed her mother goodbye, Gourdier turned toward her brain-dead sister and saw a nurse insert a morphine drip. When Gourdier asked why her sister needed pain medication if she could no longer feel pain, the nurse replied, “in case she can.” That statement made the family’s decision to take Julie off life support and donate her organs to save other lives more heart-wrenching and complicated.

From this “dead zone” Gourdier writes with authenticity and honesty, recounting her own resentments, as the family bickered over funeral arrangements and staging the memorial reception. All the while, Gourdier’s stricken father faded into a ghost of who he once was. His death weeks later fractured the family and left Gourdier, the eldest child and estate executor, to wrap up painful details cut off from the love and support she craved. Months later, Gourdier was still unable to work. Bleak depression overwhelmed her. She thought her husband had withdrawn into work to avoid her endless pain. “He knew that I was sad all of the time. Why couldn’t he hug me?” she writes. Soon she popped tranquillizers with alcohol to sooth escalating panic attacks.

One night, weeks after the deaths and alone at her lake house, Gourdier fantasized she’d end her grief with a mix of pills with booze. It was the first of many times she imagined suicide. The night those fantasies edged perilously close to reality, the memory of her stylish mother snapped Gourdier to her senses. She realized neither her mother nor her father, or her joy-filled sister, would want her to join them that way.

So, she vowed to fight, rebuild her life and forge meaning from the tragedy. She learned the driver of the car that caused the fatal accident was 85 years old and had promised her children to stop driving by her next birthday. After hearing this, Gourdier lobbied for elderly Ontarians to undergo strict tests when they renew their licences. She also campaigned for the city bureaucracy to install a pedestrian crosswalk near where her mother and sister died.

Most of all, she wanted to keep her sister’s memory alive. Julie had been born with Down Syndrome. She worked at a coffee shop lived a life full of friendship and accomplishments. Julie took great pride in competing in the Special Olympics so within a few years, Gourdier created a scholarship and financed several awards in her sister’s honour. She also staged many fundraisers to help people with disabilities.

Most of all, she wanted to keep her sister’s memory alive. Julie had been born with Down Syndrome. She worked at a coffee shop lived a life full of friendship and accomplishments. Julie took great pride in competing in the Special Olympics so within a few years, Gourdier created a scholarship and financed several awards in her sister’s honour. She also staged many fundraisers to help people with disabilities.

Gourdier had intended to write a self-help book about how faith, spirituality and alternative therapies can help the grief-stricken. But her publishers said a personal story would have more impact, so Gourdier changed her focus. Still, like many grieving people, she’d hired psychics and mediums to connect with her lost family members, and in at least one case, was certain she had. She tried a host of alternative therapies from psychic massage to head-tapping and thought they helped. These efforts, along with counseling and her deepening religious faith,finally freed Gourdier from her personal hell.

Though Gourdier is an excellent descriptive writer, he memoir lacks structure. Her mix of flashbacks, descriptive memories and current-day events can read as jumbled and confusing. An optimist who prefers to keep it together on the outside, while dying on the inside Gourdier’s need to present the shiny side of life at times glossed over the hard emotional truths readers need to be drawn in.

When Gourdier skirts this honest self-reflection, she deprives her readers of a chance to look inside her heart. Two years after the accident, when a friend pressed her on how she was coping, Gourdier realized she’d played “the great pretender” from a sense of duty. Perhaps if Gourdier had given up on duty to reveal more of the fragile, broken woman inside, the book would have rung searing and true.

As is, it’s still a more-than- accomplished contribution to a growing popular genre. More than a decade after the accident, Gourdier has finally emerged from her grief, a stronger, wiser, yet still caring and compassionate, woman. Those traits led her to postpone publishing the book until the elderly driver, whose actions inflicted wounds on many, died. That compassion is the book’s backbone. It gives Gourdier’s intimate and compelling words the power to show other victims of catastrophic grief they, too, can find a better future.

Breathe Cry Breathe – From Sorrow to Strength in the Aftermath of Sudden, Tragic Loss, A Memoir by Catherine Gourdier – Harper Collins – 331 pages –  $23.99

Review of Test Piece – by Sheryda Warrener

By Robin L Harvey

At the public launch of her latest poetry collection, Test Piece, Sheryda Warrener chose to read her poem “On a Clear Day”. It was a kind choice, because of all the poems in the UBC creative-writing teacher and Artspeak presenter’s third book, it was most accessible for any listener’s intellect.

The line, “A clear domestic space is a clear psychic space” appears twice, near the start and near the end of the poem acting as an anchor for the poet’s inner voice. She wakes up “an empress laid out on a marble slab, gold coins over my eyes.” Snippets from the poet’s day-in-the life, like morning coffee and reading, are artfully captured in the phrases, “Dollop of whip in coffee lifts my espirit” and “a little contact high from language.”

Working mothers will all relate to this phrase: “Before: email, class prep, mamahaveyouseenmy??? – I make my move.” Warrener created all seventy-three pages of Test Piece, the five poems and the four palimpsests – photo imagery with text under and overlays – that serve as visual art dividers for the written work.

Her engaging, lyrical imagery enchants throughout much of the book. An example: “flowers whorl on vines like sheets through dryer portals”– a blend of the imagined and mundane that uplifts the reader with an act as ordinary as doing laundry. Nuanced, graceful and precise word choices are part of Warrener’s “collage mode” that reflect the author’s minimalist vision in word and art, her “meditations” that “engage with the process and practice of … abstract minimalist” artists and poets she admires.

Listed among them are Eva Hesse, Anne Truitt, Agnes Martin. Etel Adnan, Deborah Landau, Heather Christle and Mary Reufle. Test Piece reflects the delicate, complex inner musings of a woman whose life and work have split influences, split between the poem’s topics – most from her own life – and her near-obsession with minimalist visual art forms and their visual-textual impact in literature.

The opening poem is the shortest at barely two pages. Entitled Crushed Velvet it reflects on a lack of and longing for connection. “Day’s touchlessness reverse” Warrener writes, when at the pharmacy a staff member applies a product and with “lukewarm water …makes a tidy package with the towel, unwraps the gift of my own hand.”

A Fixed Point, the second poem in the book, is tightly structured linguistically but topically disjointed. It begins well with a visceral reflection on Walker Evan’s photograph entitled Alabama Tenant Farmers Wife.

“Nothing disrupts that level stare,” Warrener writes juxtaposing her own “fraudulent matte-red mouth, thin-ribbed knit” against the weathered fierce intensity of the woman in a “cotton floral dress,” with her “hair’s scattered part, lip bite, hardened brow.”

However, the reader is then jolted through several scenes; a psychic reading, a memory of streaming a film, landing again at a video installation where a “triptych” of teenagers and the poet view an eight-thousand-year-old carved female figure.

In Test Piece the poet aims to inhabit the space where prose intersects with visual expression. Poems like Crushed Velvet and On a Clear Day succeed very well. A Fixed Point has mixed success, and A Blue Filter, inspired by a white glove that sparked a memory of travelling in the Tokyo subway system, has much promise that it never realizes.

The title work, Test Piece after Eva Hesse, is disjointed and elusive. Inspired by artwork that hangs in Washington’s National Gallery that is made of a strip of cheesecloth in gradations of yellow and hung on a dowel, the poem is a version of concrete poetry. At nine pages, Warrener tries to conquer that genre’s limitations by using longer lines, a snippet paste-on from another poem and mirrored, right and left centred typography. Yet the content is overwhelmed and obscured by the layout.

Visual art and artistic presentation can intersect well with style and linguistics in poetry. But making this such a dominant emphasis may be an error. The book has so much blank space, this valuable work appears, at first glance, to lack enough content for a full book.

However well-executed Test Piece’s design, “at first glance” is important for sales. Given its price, readers may link to it online, or pick it up, open it and consider it flimsy. With a unique talent like Warrener, who breathes in the abstract, and, at her best, exhales her creative heart out, this would be a shame.

Test Piece by Sheryda Warrener, Coach House Books, 73 pages, paperback $22.95, E-books, $15.95

  

The Chaos Machine, The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World – by Max Fisher

 Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

 By Robin L Harvey

Max Fisher set out to write the definitive book about the dangers social media has thrust upon the world. Its telling subtitle purports that it is an “Inside Story,” one that Fisher backs up with an impressive 32 pages of page note references.

Fisher has amalgamated the thoughts and theories of many, including social media insiders, experts and academic researchers, along with interviews with whistleblowers and executives from social media. He writes social media platforms, by design, are driven by an irresponsible economic model to seek an ever-expanding and addicted user base to boost profits.

They do this, Fisher says, by preying on instincts and fears bred into humanity over thousands of years. This hooks users with gambling and casino-like tricks that tap into our brains’ chemical wiring for responses to rewards. This never-ending quest for more user engagement, Fisher writes, promotes divisive, inflammatory posts, feeds and content, the more outrageous the better. And, with the advent of AI algorithms, (the workings of which, Fisher says, cannot be fully explained by anyone) human interactions fueled by moral outrage have spawned polarized opinions that can push users to destructive, unthinkable acts.

Fisher concludes social media demonizes differences and creates echo chambers of anger and hate, then amplifies them at lightening speed. The author is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, investigative reporter and foreign correspondent with the New York Times who has covered the social-media beat for several years. Are readers to give his theories credence because of his reputation and the extensive notes at the back of the book?

A good question. Fisher states in the book’s prologue he’s aimed to document a mission “to answer the question” … “what are the consequences of this technology?”  Still, despite his research and the fact that he sheds much light on a pressing social issue, he fails.  Fisher has synthesized an avalanche of disparate events to back up his ideas. He uses his interpretation of the emergence of Q-Anon, racist and anti-Semitic content on YouTube, the Facebook origins of the anti-vax movement, swatting and other dangerous trends that arose on reddit and 4-Chan, as well as the portrayal and treatment of women in video games, to show examples of social media evils.

Social media helped the rise of incel groups, supported by the perpetrator of the 2018 van attacks that killed 11 people and critically injured 15 others in Toronto in 2018, he writes. His list of events linked to social media includes anti-refugee beliefs in Germany that sparked violent riots, violence against Muslims in Sri Lanka that forced the government to shut down Facebook, and the murders of thousands after anti-Rohingya propaganda on social media in Myanmar. As well, social media was crucial in spawning the January sixth insurrection against American Capitol building, he writes. Fisher threads these events with own interviews with experts, social media mouthpieces and whistleblowers, interwoven with his interpretations of social science, behaviour psychology, political science and economics to draw his conclusions.

One of the book’s flaws is Fisher asks his readers to accept his theories as and fact. But often he cherry-picks examples to back up his ideas. And his personal bias overwhelms his approach. Fisher’s intense disdain for Donald Trump and the former president’s right-wing base is palpable, as is his snide contempt for Facebook and its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. This is evident in the number of references in his notes regarding the platform and Zuckerberg (almost 50) and more than most topics by far. At times, Fisher’s writing engages in the same divisiveness he ascribes to social media.

 

His inflammatory language— describing social media engineers as having a “male geek misanthropic ideal” and “Asperger’s-like social ineptitude” … and creating a “digital culture built around nihilistic young men” described as “white, misogynistic geek males,” – goes far beyond commentary. His left-wing bias shows when he documents little about bad actors and events linked to the left. The reader may wonder if Fisher can be objective at all.

Sometimes he conflates correlation with causation – as when he cites research that showed Facebook users’ anti-refugee sentiment in Germany curtailed when the Internet access went down. He stretches the conclusions of teen bullying studies, writing they show teens bullied because their morals had been corrupted. But the studies only looked at how bullying changed when potential teen leaders were identified and asked to model anti-bullying behaviour. They did not gauge morality.

Fisher makes a similar mistake when he cites a Stanford/ New York University economic study that split Facebook users into two groups: one that turned off their accounts and one hat did not. The group that did was found to be happier, though less informed. However, the study had no control group to assess whether or not the changes were due to social media or other factors. Researchers focused only on mood, news consumption, knowledge accuracy and views on politics. Yet Fisher uses this study to build his theory that social media causes such changes in its users.

These two examples alone may make the reader question Fisher’s use of research. And though he poses his burning question about the impact of social media in his prologue, in the book’s epilogue Fisher turns trite. He describes social media as analogous to the computer Hal from the Stanley Kubrick film 2001 and urges us to “rip” social media’s “tentacles from the systems” governing  elements in our lives. Simply and bluntly put, he urges the world to, “shut it down.” This drastic solution would be unworkable and have significant repercussions as witnessed when Facebook, in a pique about government regulation in Australia, shut down its platform to the outrage of human-rights groups, users, and many governments worldwide.

Yes, social media, as Fisher states, has reached much of the planet, and at times substantial-sized groups of users have been spurred to acts of violent moral outage. But like most human behaviour, social media use falls along a continuum. Many social media users, if not most, do not fall prey to conspiracy theories. Their beliefs are not manipulated so they turn to acts of violence.

Sadly, Fisher puts little focus on what many see as the real machine causing humanity’s current chaos – the Internet itself. The advent of the Internet has changed almost every human relationship and interaction, resulting in significant pitfalls and benefits for our societies, economies and governance. Social media is just one part of this sea change.

There are legitimate concerns about interference in democracies by outside governments. But who is naive enough to think that any government or deep state that can, has not and will not try to manipulate social media to force power and politics to its favour? Fisher rightly states that Facebook’s leadership, when warned of potential problems, did little or nothing to prevent them. Its carelessness has sent many government son the path to regulating the platform, and elements of the Internet in general.

Still, we must not forget the tech giants Fisher cites for irresponsible behaviour could not exist without the Internet, a chaos driver and disruptor, opaque in its operation and ever-evolving. As are most social media platforms. Shutting them off is no longer an option. When Fisher suggests this as the answer, his book is  disappoints. With so much research, this talented journalist could, and should have, offered a reasoned and workable solution. In the end, Fisher has fallen prey to many of the ills he attributes to social media. He’s created a divisive book, one that screams through his own echo chamber of outraged opinion.

 

The Chaos Machine, The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher, Little Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group, $37 – 389 pages

Journey into the Shadow and the Sunshine – by Annabel Harz

 

Artwork – Mosaic Tree by Annabel Harz 

By Robin L Harvey

There are two things you immediately notice when you launch into Annabel Harz’s uplifting poetry collection, Journey into the Shadow and the Sunshine.

The first is the colourful cover illustration, comprised of a flower-petal like image in bursts of rainbow hues. In its centre is the a Yin/Yang symbol with the left side half black, and the right, half white. The pencil crayon-like lines used to fill and colour the image are almost reminiscent of childhood scribblings. This combination aptly represents the author’s journey from trauma and depression into a firmly grounded, centred life.

The second thing is the impressive list of presentation testimonials from accredited professionals. Each praises the collection, where Harz documents her evolution from a damaged soul to one in recovery, in large part for its ability to help heal others.

Harz’s poems flow through haunted memories, growing self reflection and knowledge, that finally land her centred in a world of growth and joy. The opening section, entitled Shadow, reflects Harz’s bleak beginnings. Poems like “Dreams of Reality” and “Soul Prison” describe her life before recovery as an “open jail,” where, “… my waking life is as unreal as my dreams.”

“I gave up wishing on moonbeams so many moons ago,” she writes in “Transformation.”

“On Time,” a poem reflects the times the darkness in her spirit almost destroyed her will to live. “I’m weary of this emotional roller coaster. It’s vicious, I want to get off,” the author writes.

“Carefree,” reflects a painful irony in the lives of many trauma survivors, who must hide their pain behind a happy facade. “Look closer: she’s not carefree,” Harz writes. “Her smile is encased in tears.”

The next section, Survival, contains poems that show the author inching toward a better life.

In “Breakdown,” Harz writes of the epiphany that eventually gives her strength. “I know I am slowly but surely digging my own grave.”

“Connection,” is a poignant reflection on the pain and confusion felt when trauma survivor experiences a love for which she is unprepared. Emotions become “a terrifying whirlpool” …  leading her “far, far away, deep within myself, desperately treading water.”

In the uplifting poem, “Yesterdays,” Harz has recovered enough to bid goodbye to suicide – “you were never meant to be one of the options … Nevermore do I want to go back there. Ever.”

Poems in the section entitled Space tell of how her damaged spirit found permission and the inner space to explore and grow as in the poem, “Ghosts of The Past.”  Her she aspires to find, “an opening that allows a glimmer of hope to shine through?”

In the final section, Sunshine, the poet emerges as a woman reborn in recovery, happy and free.

The love poem “Life Force Within” expresses Harz’s readiness at last to connect and be loved. “The world is illuminated by you at its glowing epicentre,” she writes.

“Perceptions,” sums up the author’s journey, when at last, “The good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, the yin and the yang, combine.”

Her final poem, “I Am,” is touching and inspirational. Harz, having reached the end of her journey, looks back on her transformation as, “… a weary traveller arriving home with gladness. I am music. I am poetry. I am art. I am.”

Harz reaches the reader with direct yet evocative word choices. She is a minimalist poet who often uses dramatic narrative and other unique expressive elements of form in this work. While she employs little imagery or stylistic embellishments, the approach works well here as it counterbalances the collection’s forceful and, at times, disturbing subject matter.

The collection’s design – the coloured page backgrounds, the hand-drawn images that accompany each poem – creates a lyrical narrative within a stunning, visual/poetic mix. Take the journey to light along with Annabel Harz. Her poetry’s wisdom and insight, combined with the book’s beautiful artwork, will make you more than glad you did.

Journey into the Shadow and the Sunshine by Annabel Harz, published through BalBoa.Press, a Division of Hay House. Available as E-book and Paperback

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4732974494

https://www.amazon.ca/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B07MMFTL1J?

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Review of PTSD Poems to Slay Demons by Fatima Aladdin

A lovely collection of poems about all that is in us as it takes on the modern world.

A collection of poems that center around some of the most powerful of human experiences, emotions, and realizations.

In PTSD Poems to Slay Demons, the author maintains such a raw, honest, and compelling tone throughout all of the poems even as they vary in the messages and emotions they are trying to deliver. The poems on mental illness and child abuse are written with as much passion and heart as those about healing, letting go, and finding joy, which takes a lot of skill and dedication to pull through.

The author also does not shy away from calling things what they are and calling out society for its corruption, pedophilia, injustice, discrimination, and obsession with social media and fake status and all that is not real and all that should not be so proudly praised.

The poems seem to lack a particular theme, some might find that deterring, but others might find it to add another layer of mirroring what the real world is really like.

The religious and historical symbols used across the poems merge so well with modern hashtags and mental issues, which ultimately seeks to portray the timelessness of human emotions and our connectedness across time and cultures.

The book did feel a bit lacking to me, though, not for any lack of passion or a fault of the author, but the pages could have used some better formatting, or perhaps some imagery or art work could have brought the words to life even more impactfully.

The author has a very unique style, somehow the words feel like they could fit in without any trouble in both an old script or a modern magazine. There is rawness in art, tenderness in anger, forgiveness in accusations, and hope in hopelessness.  I recommend this book to all lovers of modern poetry.

Fatima Aladdin has a master’s degree in English Language and Literature. Her debut novel Strategically in Lovecan be found here https://fatimaaladdin.substack.com/p/links-for-strategically-in-love.

PTSD Poems to Slay Demons available through Amazon, Kindle, Barnes and Noble and Goodreads

Review by author Heather MacDonald-Archer featured in anthology The Whole She-Bang

PTSD Poems to Slay Demons, by Robin L Harvey

This author does indeed slay demons – and perhaps dragons, too – in this collection of poems. She manages to hit the bullseye on the full board of human emotion, tracing the pain of anguish, hurt and grief. Nothing is sacred or safe from her pen when it comes to shaping her words to fit her feelings. It is a joy to read, a roller-coaster of sensations, fear and enlightenment. Her raw emotion is like a surging river; beautiful words of heartbreak and disappointment that speak of dealings with humans that have shaped and affected her life.
There is some revenge in her intent to deal with these emotions, but mostly the work speaks of a disappointment in human nature; poems that speak of unimaginable hurt, longing, love and injuries to the soul.
What better way to tackle the slings and arrows of life’s traumas than through words. In ‘Poems to Slay Demons’ the author has done just that, articulately sharing with us her most intimate raw feelings in tight and sculpted prose. No more words than necessary, just enough.
The book is a look into a soul that has managed to articulate and put into perspective many of life’s nasty surprises and unseen wounds. A most worthy read.

Li Ji FVR Issue VI

 PTSD Poems to Slay Demons in Li Ji FVR Issue VI

Tin Man

Was it a dream, a bump on the head, or true love, this? In the center of the cyclone two hearts as big as houses were swept up in that first kiss, spellbound and smitten by those lusty/rusty lips.

Swept away and up so high over the rainbow Tin Man and I flew until we crashed, smashed to bits on an emerald sidewalk slaked with green grit. There, he crushed my pretty, little heart in his stolen, steely grip. My ruby red lust turned to ice as he cut me paper thin and folded me in pieces to grope my wind-stung skin.

With oily moves so masterful, so shiny and relentless what could I do, an orphan in a threadbare, gingham dress?

With a head spun full of straw and sticks my body welded to his anvil hips spread like candy across the yellow bricks. As the macho, manly, bastard sang that age-old “nympho-slag-slut” slang I became his bitch, his wicked witch until I clicked my heels three times and told that hunk of metal, “Please, I don’t mind.”

All that wild night, red-light, green-light … endless

his fickle fists, his cold caress . . .

lost in a bubble I floated wounded, wan and witless.

For twenty years I bore his blame awash in shame until a world of witches blared my truth thundered in headlines, Twitter, TV, too. Everywoman’s tale told in 60-point wonder: time’s up, sisters, it’s him, not you. Not me? Why not? Because #@MeToo.

And then I knew these Tin Men they don’t want our hearts just to rip our fucking souls apart.

Tin Men, screw you.

 

Them’s Fightin’ Words

Tell me why, my tin star, lover guy, we awake to clear and blessed dawns skin-to-skin with the safety on and you kiss me, hard.
As we tumble bullet-free through fevered musk your breath burns our blistering bullshit crisp and the milkweed wisps of last night’s railings are forgotten dust in the wind.

Until my touch sparks a revenant and once again I’m facing down tombstone eyes deep as the grave gunning for me to start another round. We’re back in the loop, high noon at the “we’re-not-OK Corral” with Annie Oakley and Wild Bill locked and loaded for another go-round.

Enough.
So take your cheap shots, your pot-shots, your please-take-it-back shots. Paint a bull’s-eye on my heart fire off them fightin’ words hit the mark and break me apart. Dress me up in her finery swing me from that hanging tree you’ve strung up in her memory.

Maybe, cowboy, I’ll roll like a tumbleweed happy to dance on your grave.
But before you fire another round check your aim and line up your sights, gunslinger.
I’ve got a Bowie knife and a Colt 45 with her name etched on every bullet.
I’ll cut her down to size, face down all six-foot-four of you, bury that woman in your churlish blues and see her six feet under. Then dead or alive all you’ll see is me.

I will be the wanted one
with my face, my name
posted in black and white
on our bedroom wall.

Interview with Robin Harvey in FVR Issue VI

Introduce yourself; when did you begin writing? When and why did you decide you wanted to share your work with others?

I came from what many would call a horrific childhood. I grew up to become an actor, dancer, teacher, journalist and now, I hope, a decent poet. But I never decided to share my work. That’s always been a part of who I am. My big sister taught me to read a few months before I turned four. I started writing at about age five. By first grade, the school librarian bought me a scrapbook for my poetry and illustrations. In third grade, I wrote and performed plays, made sculptures and art, and wrote poetry, all shared with my school. What’s the point of creating if you don’t share it?

Where do your inspirations come from? Are they musical, literary, ekphrastic or all three?

All three and more. Over my life, I have sketched, painted, taken photographs, acted, danced, and always written. My twisted childhood and genetic legacy inspired the first half of my recent poetry collection about a girl who came to urban, working-poor Toronto, via small-town Newfoundland and was raised by creative, artistic parents with mental-health and substance-abuse demons. My inner-city school designated me as gifted, so I enjoyed creative enrichment programs and read incessantly; the classics, mythology, archaeology and astronomy fascinated me as a kid. I reference symbols and imagery from these throughout my work. Programs in art, sculpting, pottery, music, movement, writing and track-and-field helped me escape my abusive home. At age 10, I’d flee the chaos, hop the subway and hit the museum or art gallery to hang until closing time, drawing and taking notes. I left home at 16 to save my sanity and went to university on a scholarship aiming for a fine arts honour’s degree. By 17, my first mental breakdown forced me to drop out. A few years later, when stable, I studied acting, movement and dance while freelance writing and working as a remedial tutor. Eventually I became a journalist for the city’s daily newspaper. There I wrote about homeless people, pimps, sex workers, and how we mistreat people with mental illness and the frail elderly. All of these were inspirations.

There is one important thing I owe to my parents. My first language was their Newfinese, a patois of Irish, Gaelic and Cornish that still echoes throughout my poetry.

With regards to this issue, how does your poetry link to the themes of courage, power and evil/temptation?

The tale of Li Ji’s sacrifice and plan to vanquish the power-mad serpent speaks to me on many levels. I am in awe of her choice to be a warrior, to throw off the cultural constraints imposed on her sexuality as the “sacrificial virgin,” to defeat evil. Courage and self-sacrifice were the way she stayed true to herself and those she loved. When she sees the bones of the nine sacrificed maidens and wonders if they should have fought, I’m haunted. My childhood was brutal and sexist, and I am a survivor of physical, emotional and sexual assault. When I was nine, in a drunken blackout, my father tried to strangle me. I spit in his eye and told him to murder me because at least then he’d no longer torment my family. (That shook him back to reality.) It was an easy sacrifice at the time as I could endure no more abuse. Still, the abuse continued until he sobered up long after I left home. When I was kidnapped and gang raped, I was a mother who chose to succumb to the evil so I might escape to live for one who needed me. I still wonder should I have fought? Was my sacrifice worth it? Did its impact damage my child? Li Ji also wondered.

Living with PTSD means daily inner battles, courage and honesty, to fight the temptation to give in and numb myself. It’s much easier to lie to yourself rather than confront the evil part of you still believe is within to love yourself. I’ve seen and experienced much evil in my personal life and, as a journalist. Though I try to see complexity behind injustice, entitlement and privilege, I see greed and fear as the root causes. I believe, however, we all must choose to believe in humanity’s goodness because only that will fuel our courage and ensure our survival.

How would you describe your writing process?

I have PTSD and a type of OCD where music is always playing in the back of my head, looping lyrics or notes through my thoughts, an oft-annoying, intrusive soundtrack to my life. Creative expression is my distraction and escape. When I write I am sucked in and so hyper-focused, I hear nothing. The roof could fall in, my son says, and I’d still be writing. My mind never shuts up so I’m always jotting snippets in notebooks as poems bubble up. Some poems write themselves. Others struggle for years to fruition. What’s hardest for me is to narrow my focus to catch the poem “snippets” so they can land and grow.

You recently published a poetry collection titled PTSD Poems to Slay Demons, how would you describe this collection to anyone yet to read it?

The book, PTSD Poems to Slay Demons, reflects my journey to overcome, heal from and live with trauma. It also reflects humanity’s struggle in an increasingly traumatic world. I think the book embodies survival and hope and believe we can all survive to thrive.

What was your favourite poem from this collection to write and why?

That’s unfair to ask, like asking a parent their favourite child. I love and hate them all. If I had to pick today, I’d say Fly Bye-Bye, Mean Girls. That started when I kept hearing the rhythm of girls skipping Double-Dutch. My parents often dumped me outdoors with my big sister for hours. She was a great skipper. I was four years younger and terrible so I got picked on. That memory of the skipping rope sound created the poem.

Free Verse Revolution Review

https://www.kristianareed.com/post/review-ptsd-poems-to-slay-demons

“PTSD Poems to Slay Demons by Robin Harvey is an ode to survival, power and healing. Harvey’s style is sharp and wonderfully rhythmic.”

Katriana Reed  – editor Free Verse Revolution

“let me drown her whispered lies in yellow blooms

so at last I hear my children laugh in sunny rooms

amid the scent of daffodils” [The Genie in My Genes]

A timely read in the month of May, Mental Health Awareness month, PTSD: Poems to Slay Demons by Robin Harvey is an ode to survival, power and healing.

Harvey’s style is sharp and wonderfully rhythmic. These poems are a joy to read and to speak; ‘Fly Bye-Bye, Mean Girls’ is a fantastic tongue-twister of a piece, as Harvey uses internal rhyme to imbue her poetry with a fiery power ensuring the collection as a whole lives up to its fierce title of slaying inner and outer demons with a showcase of bravery, lessons learned and a confidence in self healing.

There are tender moments too; poems which encapsulate the trauma and hurt but without reducing Harvey’s work to a personal narrative the reader cannot relate to. Poems like Daddy (“I think I was born shell-shocked / locked in a war with you”) and Tin Man (“as he cut me paper thin / and folded me in pieces / to grope my wind-stung skin”) employ visceral imagery to illustrate the experiences of a child and an adult in toxic, abusive relationships. Yet, at no point did I feel triggered by Harvey’s work, which, as someone diagnosed with Complex PTSD, I am very grateful for.

It was refreshing to read a collection which undoubtedly deals with heavy subject matter but does so in a way which does not forfeit its readers’ enjoyment. Hence, I loved the wit behind Harvey’s words – “this faithless love suits you to a / t / […] while Mary Maggie, she walks free”. These pieces, in which Harvey harnesses a sharpness and rhythm, were definitely the strongest, making the collection certain to slay some demons. A few were a little reliant on cliché imagery (Dicentra and If I Fall) but several were superb poems that’ll stay with me, such as ‘Tennyson was Wrong’ and ‘Them’s Fightin’ Words’.

All in all, Harvey’s collection is one I would recommend, especially during a month where conversations turn to de-stigmatising mental health conditions, as it provides light and power during a heavy time.

 
 

Reviews are Trickling In!

REVIEWED by Fatima Aladdin

PTSD Poems to Slay Demons

Written by Robin L Harvey

A collection of poems that center around some of the most powerful of human experiences, emotions, and realizations.

In PTSD Poems to Slay Demons, the author maintains such a raw, honest, and compelling tone throughout all of the poems even as they vary in the messages and emotions they are trying to deliver. The poems on mental illness and child abuse are written with as much passion and heart as those about healing, letting go, and finding joy, which takes a lot of skill and dedication to pull through.

The author also does not shy away from calling things what they are and calling out society for its corruption, pedophilia, injustice, discrimination, and obsession with social media and fake status and all that is not real and all that should not be so proudly praised. The poems seem to lack a particular theme, some might find that deterring, but others might find it to add another layer of mirroring what the real world is really like.

The religious and historical symbols used across the poems merge so well with modern hashtags and mental issues, which ultimately seeks to portray the timelessness of human emotions and our connectedness across time and cultures. The book did feel a bit lacking to me, though, not for any lack of passion or a fault of the author, but the pages could have used some better formatting, or perhaps some imagery or art work could have brought the words to life even more impactfully.

The author has a very unique style, somehow the words feel like they could fit in without any trouble in both an old script or a modern magazine. There is rawness in art, tenderness in anger, forgiveness in accusations, and hope in hopelessness. I recommend this book to all lovers of modern poetry.

 https://www.instagram.com/fatima.aladdin/

 

The Soft Zone

People have told me much of what I write is raw and dark so I thought I’d start off by posting one of my few “soppy love poems.” I find them harder to write, I think, because I’m a stressed-out, reactive sort. I have to be centred, settled and soft, and brave to tap into my sentimental side and any experience that evoked it. The Soft Zone feels like a dangerous space because I was molded by a difficult past.

Vulnerability is not my default setting. The fight/flight warrior women who likes to run my life does not like letting down the barriers she fought so hard to build in order to protect me. But without the soft zone, the rest of me could not function, let alone create. To create, you mustbe open and let the world in. A life lived disconnected with walls barricaded shut, shuts off the spontenaity we need to create. So here’s to the Soft Zone, and the soppy poems it make possible.

This Man

this man
lines up so true
in synchronous rotation
his languid kisses linger hot
then fade like the waning moon
the flash of his smile
white lightning in a jar
as his tapered fingers
trace liquid lust
to my event horizon
command me silent
fill the vacuum in my heart
make stars burst inside my mouth
and when I’ve swallowed all of heaven
and our frequencies resound
along a spectrum infinite as explosions
pinpoint the way to love
I’ll know with this man I can take flight
for if galaxies can cluster, if planets can collide
I can spiral in rings and rings
sing his praises until I am dust
for I trust
this man’s the one to live and die for
to soar outside his ambit
a pallasite
at lightspeed
olivine shards
in the orbit
of this man