Dear Renata (Marie Conlan on Say Mother Say Hand)
Half Mystic Press’ debut memoir, Say Mother Say Hand by Marie Conlan, comes out on April 18. Marie is a Midwest poet living and writing in Colorado, where she is a co-collaborator with the .OFF collective and Nocturne Lucid Writing Workshops. She was named a finalist for the Noemi Press Book Award in 2017 and 2018, a finalist for the Airlie Press Prize in 2018, and a finalist for Metatron’s 2018 Rising Authors Prize. She earned her MFA at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. This is her first book. You can find her on Instagram and at her website. To kick off the blog tour of Say Mother Say Hand, Marie joins us on the Half Mystic blog for a guest post on the creation process of the book.
Dear Renata,
Which is to say, dear grandmother, dear mother, dear sister, dear womb, dear woman, dear reader—
I wrote us a book as grieving. I wrote us a book as healing. No, at first I wrote as running.
Renata, a friend asked, how will you celebrate the birth of your book? I have been hesitant. How to celebrate a grieving? & now, spinning in the center of pandemic, what is celebration in an era of loss? Of isolation? She said resilience. I heard re-silence.
While in a writing workshop, a writer said she buried her book. As closure or lamentation, I don’t know. Renata, this book is a beast grief, a dream body, a gift. Do we need celebration or burial?
Renata, for a long time, I thought this was a book about you. & then I thought it was about my mother. As I wrote, I kept getting the same feedback: where are you in this story? Where are you? I didn’t know I was writing a book. I was trying to find something. You, me.
Renata, were you anything but a premonition? I could feel you in my knuckles, prodding, opening rivers. A chalk divination crumpled into a landscape, a woman said maternal intergenerational trauma. Said, look.
Renata, I am here now, wading the waters of global crisis, of collective pain, and I am thinking about your war. I am thinking about the Holocaust, about dying & suffering, about grief that gets erased. About pain that has no witness, and where it goes to be known. My friend says to me, the property of isolation is magnification. Everything we could stifle, shift, and push aside is now shoved right into our line of sight, so big it nearly obliterates our peripherals. Our time with our thoughts, our minds, our family, our desires, our aches & pains, what is missing and what is overflowing. We are being demanded to pause, to sit up close with the fleeting experience of ourselves, to feel what has burrowed beneath the surface.
Renata, while I wrote this book, I wanted to heal. Not the work of it, but the erasure. I was interested in inheritance because I wanted to know what I could leave behind. This was my trauma response, to bury. When I wrote this book, I learned I had a body. I mean: as I was writing this book, I was learning what it means to have a body. To have a self. To have a history. I was learning how lineage burrows inside of muscle & bone. As I wrote, I unearthed a depth of generations. I gawked, I wept. Renata, you came in many forms, but you demanded pause. You demanded I come right up close to myself. To sit with my own experience, to re-silence, to notice what aches to make noise.
Renata, I wrote us a book as witness. We hold up our hands and they morph into mirrors, glimmering off the curves of the labyrinth of grief, spiraling towards the luminous center of ourselves. Renata, if it’s a burial we need, I hope it is sacred. If it’s celebration, I hope it feels like the best part of the birthday, when the breath is at the top of the lungs and we are looking at a fresh wish still in flames. I hope it is ripe with pause, dangling like fruit at the top of a delicious breath of life.
In infinite gratitude,
Marie
Marie Conlan’s Say Mother Say Hand begins in the wake of an attempted suicide. Nestled somewhere on the spectrum between memoir and dreamscape, the narrator rummages through her maternal lineage and unravels the threads of intergenerational trauma—of the Holocaust, of mental illness, addiction, suicide, what it means to bear witness to what she cannot heal. As these threads spiral into a reckoning with inheritance, the narrator dreams open the unfindable parts. In this stunning debut, Conlan interrogates what is inherited through the body, what connects a lineage, and what is destined to come next in the brutal and uncertain now.
For the next two weeks, Half Mystic is hosting a blog tour in collaboration with eight other blogs and journals, featuring reviews and giveaways of SMSH, interviews with and essays by Marie Conlan, never-before-seen content on the creation of the book, and a virtual launch on the 18th of April—more details forthcoming very soon. SMSH is available for preorder now.