 Welcome to another edition of Into the Issues. I'm Steve Pappas, editor of The Times Argus. My guest today is Karen McAdden, who is a poet and a teacher here in Montpelier. Karen, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. There's a host of issues that I wanna talk to you about because you've written a collection of poetry that I think is very important for people to know about and reflect upon. But I wanna talk a little bit about how you came to Montpelier and how you came to be kind of what inspired you to be a writer and what inspired you to be a teacher. How I came to Montpelier to teach? Specifically because our audience here in central Vermont would probably want to know kind of where you're, where you hail from. Yeah, I come from Lexington, Massachusetts. And I moved to Vermont to go to St. Michael's College and then ended up raising a family in Marshfield in Plainfield. And back when I was 26 years old, I got my job at Montpelier High School as my first teaching job. I fought for it tooth and nail. I was very happy to have it. And I've been enjoying being there ever since it's been 20. It's my 28th year at Montpelier. Congratulations. Thank you. It feels like a big deal. Yeah, that is a big deal. It feels good, yeah. That also means you've figured it all, that you've got all the kinks worked out now. It's all smooth sailing. Exactly. Yes. It's just easy. No problem. And what do you teach at Montpelier? I teach English. I teach a sophomore class called English Seminar and then I teach a creative writing course. Yeah. And at some point in this journey, you started being introspective in your writing and your own personal writing. So you've been teaching writing and teaching others how to do it and something sparked in you. So what was that? Well, I had always been writing poetry since I was like 16 years old. I even actually found an early book I wrote when I was in sixth grade, which was really funny to find in my papers. So I've always written poetry, but I did it kind of privately and then like as a meditation almost and then I had a course that didn't run one year and I said to the principal about almost 15 years ago now, I said, give me a creative writing class. Give me two weeks and I'll find enough kids to start the class and I did and I've been teaching it ever since, but what happened was I would write with my students and then I would pressure them to do something with their work because it was such good work and they said, well, what about you? You know, so they put pressure back on me and I said, you need to do something that sends your work out, you need to. And that was the first year I started sending anything out and I ended up going to Breadloaf to the Writers Conference. That was the first thing I ever sent out was because of their pressure and then I started, that was in 2005. And so ever since then, I've just been moving along, trying to do more and more work as a poet. And what is it about poetry that strikes you as the medium for your message? Like rather than a novel or a short story? Sure. You know, when I was a kid in school, I could always write really well, but I found the organizational systems really challenging and I remember that most of the marks on my papers were that I needed to change my organization and I'd be like, well, why? I like, this is how the ideas need to go together. And years later I realized that was a poetic sensibility, you know? And so I've always really enjoyed the way ideas are associated with one another. And I'm not good at sitting down for a long time to write a novel, that's not in my nature. So I do think about it, you know? I do think, and now I'm thinking about writing some essays about this material. But it's just that long form work has never been my thing. Your first collection of poetry won the Vermont Book Award. Landscapes with plywood silhouettes. It's available in stores all across Vermont. Talk a little bit about that book because it's, or that collection, because it also is a reflection of a time in your life. And it's kind of a really interesting preface into what happens next. Yeah, and there's a poem in this book that could easily have gone in this job book that we'll talk about next. What do I wanna say about it? It was a book that was written, I think sometimes as a poet you don't know what book you've written until you've written it. You know, you're just writing poems. So I think all the work with poetry is with the individual thing that you're working on. You work with one poem until it's done, you put it away, and then you realize at some point you have enough that they might be a collection, right? So I was just writing poems about my life and at the time I was living on a farm in Marshfield. I was, the book is largely concerned with the divorce, right? So a lot of the poems are about, not so much about the divorce, but about the process of moving from one life into another and from one home, like home, concepts of home have always been really interesting to me. So it's mostly processing that transitional space, different landscapes, different voyages in and out of love, I think, yeah. Yeah, and it's beautiful. It really is, I dabble and you're one of the ones I always fall back to, you're one of my go-to reads. And I've also shared your book with, I know a lot of people who have actually, who are really kind of touched by it. So art obviously is an expression of oneself, but it also is cathartic in a lot of ways. And you and I were talking off camera briefly about how it can be part of a purge, it can be part of a, and it sounds like part of what you were doing in the first book was helping yourself get through the transitions. But at the same time that that was all happening, you had something else happening in your life that was even harder. And it's something that Vermont is seeing kind of very dramatically. It's kind of a dark time in our history. And I'm gonna let you kind of explain what's going on and then we can talk about the broader issue of it. Sure. So one of the poems in my first collection is about my brother and his heroin addiction. And I can just talk a little bit about his life, is that useful? Yeah, sure, please. So he's my only, was my only brother, is, was, when I still feel like he's my brother. And he struggled with drug addiction from, he was three and a half years younger than I am, from high school on, basically. And so that was about a 30 year addiction and he was in and out of treatment facilities, first in and out of jail and then in and out of treatment facilities on and off of treatment meds, living in Boston and he was, he had just been weaned off of, let me tell the whole story, is this the we're looking for? Okay. Well, that depends on you. Right, no, I understand it. I mean, I think it's, I think it's, you know, it's a tough, it's a tougher story than it looks like with me telling it on camera, right? It's tougher to tell than it might look like, but I feel like there's so many people in the world who want to hide addiction and sweep it under the carpet. And I feel like the only way to help addicts is to de, not criminalize, but de-stigmatize the illness that attends addiction. And so I feel like I have a story, I'm a writer, I have to tell it, right? Otherwise I'm doing a disservice to his memory. And if I have a platform to tell it, like I do right now, maybe I can help somebody. So he was, he was, I think five years he was on methadone toward the end and he had just been weaned off of it and had recurring neck pain because he had broken his neck when he was younger, which I believe is a big part of the addiction is managing pain for many, many, many people. And we don't know exactly what happened, but he told his roommate he was going to go meet somebody and then she came back and thought he was asleep, but he had overdosed in his bed and it was a fentanyl overdose. So somehow he got his hands on some street fentanyl and was on, was going to see his son that day. You know, that was his plan to go see his son every weekend, but he didn't make it. Yeah, yeah. So the chat book that you have, the new one that's coming out is titled Keep This To Yourself. Yeah. And, but you're not keeping it to yourself. And for the very reason that you just described because and these are, they're all about your brother and they are about kind of different aspects of who he was and his addiction. And I'm gonna ask you to read a few of them in a few minutes, but I guess the big question I have is what was it like for you to go through that process to make that decision that you were going to use your love for your brother and the kind of the admiration for his life even though it was tragic in this way that is very much a lesson to us all. I mean, that's a hefty kind of self-imposed goal that I'm going to, first of all, go through this process of writing about something that's really hard personally. It's really hard for everybody to accept because for the most part, we don't want to acknowledge that there's addiction. Like you said, we want to look the other way, but yet we all know somebody. We've all been touched by this plague. And so talk a little bit about what was that process like for you? Well, I think much with the first book too, any poem that I write and when I teach writing, I talk to students about how sometimes something that's inside you that feels boundless, like there's no edge to it. You don't know how to solve it. You don't know how to understand what it means to you. You can't fix it. You can't organize it even. Those emotional trauma, often based on trauma or any kind of story or emotion that just feels larger than you are, that you almost can't contain it. For me, I think that when I write a poem, in a way, it becomes the thing. It's an emblem of the thing. It may visit the very difficult emotion on you as a reader, but for me as a writer, it's been taken. It's been taken out and built into something that I hope is beautiful, that I hope has some beauty to it. And that conflict of what's terrible and what's beautiful being mixed together. I always end up feeling like poetry and the process of writing it is a little bit like doing algebra where you're solving for X, but you're solving for your life instead. You're solving for what's the unknown. How can I organize the data that I have in myself around what's unknown to create something that's known? And so every time I've written about him, I felt like I'm writing something. I also say often that I think poems are secular prayers. They're like the way that we pray when we're not religious. They're like, they shape like them. They fit on a page and they fit in small books. I feel like I'm naming something I don't understand and solving it and trying to figure it out. I sort of forget what your question was, but I think I'm still answering it. Yeah, kind of the journey. Do you feel better for having written them? No, no, I don't. I feel scared of the poems now. Because of how other people will interpret them? Well, just, it's my family and it's a thing that is so difficult to live with that nobody wants to be the family that says, yeah, one of us is an addict and living on the streets or in and out of court. Like we don't wanna say that and I'm saying it really loudly. I'm saying it like. One of the poems is, I can't remember which one, I apologize, but it's beautifully written in such a way that you're talking about your brother's side of the river and your side of the river. And you're both seeing the same river go by. It's just you're on different parts of it and there's this division between you, but yet there's not. And you can feel that in all of your poems, you can feel the struggle that you have with what happened, but you don't. What's interesting to me is that it's not like you ever are disapproving of him. You are always saying, well, this is who he was. It's not a, oh, I wish he hadn't been an addict. The understatement of it is, I wish he hadn't been an addict, but this is what happened. And I think that's really a beautiful thing. Thank you. I think one of the other things I think about poetry is that you're a journalist, I can't really say this, but it's almost a journalistic art, right? For me, I feel like I'm reporting on something. I'm saying, you know, this is- You're taking a step back. Yeah, like this, yeah, I'm not in it. I'm looking, yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah, I mean, I'd like the book to be about him and to humanize him and to humanize addicts in general, it also is about me because I'm handling the information, but I'm definitely trying to stay back a little bit, but I can't avoid, I think in the book, I don't avoid my own sadness and guilt. You know, I think everybody who's lost someone to addiction feels some level of survivor's guilt. Like, well, what if I had, or how come I didn't? Or what about that time when I was angry about this or that? And like, the many years I felt angry at him, I felt angry, you know, because I didn't understand. You know, that's 30 years of history of addiction, right? So I think now we're coming to a place where we understand more, or at least I see us coming to an understanding more about how people are sick. You know, we don't get mad at people with cancer, you know, but we do get mad at people who are mentally ill or who are addicted, and I think that finding this space where we can just hold them up, you know, this is a person. So that feels like a big goal for me in the book. Well, and to that point, much of the book, even though it is about your brother and it's about his addiction, it's a book about grief. Yeah, yeah. I mean, most of the book is about grief. I wrote half of it within the six months after he died and the other half within the six years before he died. So there was this long period of slowly writing poems about him while he was alive, and then this real flurry, and then I realized one night they were going into another book and they still will into a larger book, but I pulled them out and realized that they were. And then that's how it became a book. I sat at my kitchen table one night and said, let's just see what I've got. And then I realized I could tell his story. Yeah, I don't think it feels good, but I'm really. You don't think it feels good? No, I mean, it's a very poignant, again, I set off camera that I read it in one sitting and I wished that I had it because you almost want to savor each one. And it is an overwhelming sense of heaviness because of the subject matter and the levels of what's at play, but they're so beautifully written. Thank you. And I mean, that has to be, it's nice to know that you kind of can pull the blanket of language up on you and be like, all right, I can kind of hide behind this word and this kind of phrase and use this metaphor. And as you pointed out, it's really hard to make something beautiful out of something that's kind of so ugly and difficult. Would you read a couple? I would. Yeah. And then we'll talk some more. Okay. I'll read some of the shorter ones at the end. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So I won't read this one poem, but I just want to say something about it. Running through the book is this six section poem called Reverse Overdose that takes the chronology of his life backward and it's interspersed with the other poems which move toward the loss. And so I'm interested in how we like to think of someone's life in terms of like a linear progression, but just trying to underscore that it's more of a series of waves, how we move forward through our lives. I'll read two. Okay. I'll read this poem, Losing and then Weeks After My Brother's Overdose. Should I read them both in a row? Sure. Okay. Excuse me. Losing. My brother is lost. I can't find my brother. I say it over again when I lost my brother. A back road I knew once and now can't find a specific wave on John's pond. The last one we saw there, the blue-lipped sleep of overdose. He goes from one office to the next and no one will return my calls. One day he was somewhere. I know he must have been. The difference in weight between alive and dead. Do the old experiment again. Wave the escaped soul. Let it have gone somewhere. Let it have packed one bag. Is my brother any amount of atoms at all, fending for themselves? If I keep saying I have lost my brother, is there a corollary? Do I make wayfinding? A compass? A geocache? A crashed plane on his island? His black box full of laughter? Every next syllable said by everyone is my brother. Silent mouths. These are where dead brothers live. I keep a jar of nails like a bouquet of denial. Life ends with us finding leaves underfoot. Fend for ourselves, I'm saying. There is music everywhere. There must be a bit of his breath left. Put the needle in the track again. My brother somewhere knows the tune. And this is the last poem in the book. Weeks after my brother overdoses, I search Craig's list for sadness. A white couch, the only result. Happiness lands red shipping containers and that's it. I wander through days like an envelope marked, please forward, listen. My brother is a ghost. I keep thinking I am not a sister anymore, though others assure me I still am. Just sister them, builders say, to make a thicker beam or to span a distance. Join the faces of two by sixes with nails. Make more from less, make do. No one will let me have my sadness or tally what I've lost. I make lists like recipes for how to go on alone. I draw his death when I doodle making little crime scenes as if this epidemic were a murderer, a suspect, a criminal. I draw him on every sidewalk to inflate the numbers to give my brother to everyone. Inside the outline, I do some math. I add him to 72,000 and subtract him from me. That number's terrifying to me, 72,000. I know. It's beautiful. Thank you. And I wanna talk a little bit going back to kind of the idea behind writing these and saying, okay, because each one of these is, while the subject matter is the same, it's a very different approach to it. And there is a kind of a progression to it, sort of. And yet you're not re-treading the same thing. It's hard to explain. You'll have to read it. But when did you know that you had kind of said all that you needed to say? And I guess maybe the bigger question is, was there a way that you kind of felt like, well, I feel like I just need to keep saying more? Because you could have just written one of those poems and it would have had the same impact, I think, for a lot of us. But what you've done is this kind of exploration of the grief and some of the details. I mean, it's a very personal collection. And you read the whole thing and you get a pretty good idea of what happened and who was kind of affected by the ripples of it. Did in your mind it have to be, okay, I wrote it this way, now I need to write it this way. Now I need to write it this way. Oh, when I was writing each poem? More after his death, I think. No, well, interestingly, a lot of the poems I wrote after he died are very short. They're sonnets, right there, or they're close to a sonnet form, which is not what I usually do. I don't usually write short poems and they felt like appropriate containers because they are very tight and they're controlled. And I felt like I could, I think a lot of poetry is involved with contrast and tension. So there's tension between the constraint of the form and the enormity of the emotion. So it's a good marriage, a tight form and a wild emotion. So, and also I couldn't bear writing the longer work. I couldn't do it. So they were what I could do. I'm still writing about him. My second, this is a chapbook, so it's a short book. It'll be about maybe 30 pages long. My next full-length collection is close to done. There's other poems about him in it that aren't in this one. Yeah, I ended up with their more imaginative and they've come after putting this together. I think I sort of wanted to freeze the, I don't know, like I wanted to be, I don't know, I don't know the answer. Actually, I don't know. It just felt like it was over. This book felt like it was finished. And then, yeah. So we have a couple of minutes left. How do you teach somebody, students in particular, adult students, young students, whoever the idea of being able to, I mean, what's the advice you give them to be able to take something as big as this and boil it into something as beautiful as that? I think you have to trick your mind into opening it up and often that comes with some kind of constraint or a phrase that you make the person use or something that triggers the poem into being and then you need some kind of pressure to create it. Sometimes that's time. Like see what happens if you write about this for seven minutes and you let yourself write ahead of your logical brain, let it out, let the terrifying thing out and then you let it out and then you shape it. You know, what kind of form might it want? What might, what language is this using? What could you do with the language? Like I think you tinker with the editor's brain after you write with the human heart, right? That wild space we all have in us. You let it out and then you put a nice outfit on it. But you do something to make it a poem. Yeah, so when will this be out and kind of what are the details of that? It, I'm grateful that it won the button poetry prize. So that's exciting. They're gonna fly me to Minneapolis to do a reading out there and it's out in March. And I'll have a book launch on April 28th at Bear Pond Books, my hometown bookstore, which will be a conversation with Dr. Michael Rapaport about his work with addicts in the state. I'd like to really use this book as a way to further public policy and cultural discussions around addiction. Not a grand-ice mouse off as a poet, but bring the story and let it do some work with people. One of my blurbs is from the woman who wrote Dope Sick. Why can't I, Beth Macy. So she's, it was really nice to get that support, so. Yeah. Well, Karen McCadden, thank you very much for sharing your poetry and your story. And I look forward to seeing the book on the shelves. Thank you, Steve. And thank you for joining us for another edition of Into the Issues. Until next time. Thank you.