Edith Pearlman: when prose writers write sentences as crystiline as poets...

Meeting her left an indelible mark on my writing life

As a young poet, I was committed only to the page. This stayed true for the first decade of my writing life. The poetry landscape was different back then. In the 1990's I knew of only one open mic in all of Cambridge, Massachusetts. When you descended into the Central Square bar, your were greeted by an off-duty cop and a drag queen. And as much as I loved attending those underground events, I had no desire to perform at one. Wasn't poetry a private matter?

It wasn't until I started graduate school at the University of Oregon, that I began to understand that poetry was meant to be alive in the air, in a communal setting, maybe as much as it was meant to be a quiet pursuit in the privacy of one's own home.

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Is there anything more life affirming than one's first library card? Not to me. I can still feel the cream-colored cardstock in my hands, my name and address in capital letters, printed in black type as if I were a real person of substance. My very first identity card. I was six.

A few years later, when I was in the 4th grade, Jennifer Markell and I would walk down Washington Street to the Brookline Public Library directly after school. For 2 nine-year-old girls, the weekly pilgrimage was an extremely serious undertaking. Jenn and I carried book bags nearly as big as we were through all types of weather. In my mind, it's always winter and we navigate the ice carefully so as to not end up on our backs like turtles--which I believe happened to me more than once.

As soon as we enter the building, we race to the same corner of the Children's Room (the far left) to grab our next coveted E.Nesbit or another from the Borrower's series by Mary Norton. That night on the telephone, we check-in to see who had finished the most books since returning home. Competitive reading. Hours immersed in magic.

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My first poetry reading was at the main branch of that same Brookline Public Library, a formidable building I have loved forever. In 1994, I was lucky enough to be a featured reader for the poetry and prose series hosted by Edith Pearlman. It was in the fall of 1994 and my father was still alive, but not well enough to come out to his daughter's first ever event. Instead, an angel appeared in the guise of my friend, Michael Sheridan and he came equipped with tripod, video camera, and lights! This was in the day before smart phones or any common mobile phones. Michael, now a documentary filmmaker, was more a brother than a friend. The video meant that my father would be able to see me read my poems afterall, just a day or so later. Not only was this my first reading, but it was being memorialized on tape! 

As Pearlman introduces me to the audience she adds to my name, "a prize winning poet," (reader, I had no prizes, no books to my name). And then she did a remarkable thing, she winked at me. I remember her face so distinctly. White hair, red lipstick, sparking eyes. She must have been in her mid-50's at the time. I had never seen a more beautiful "older" woman.

I knew then that she wrote short stories but I didn't give it much thought. The worlds of poetry and prose, especially in the 1990's, rarely crossed. It wasn't until I heard that an Edith Pearlman from Brookline, Massachusetts had won the National Book Critics Award, that I realized that the mischievous older lady was a nationally award winning writer. I immediately ordered her collection Binocular Vision and fell in love with her story "Self Reliance" about a retired gastroenterologist, Cornelia Fitch, who (spoiler alert) takes her own life in the face of inoperable cancer.

 The story takes place in Godolphin --- the made-up town that is widely thought to be my hometown of Brookline. So dear reader, why I am bringing you a prose writer this month instead of a poet? Because I've learned that exquisite sentences can come from stories as much as from poems; because that concocted introduction for a young girl with only a handful of published poems to her name, changed me; because every year I teach the story "Self Reliance" to my students and let them see what gorgeous writing can do.