In one of my earliest memories, I’m leaning against a window in a white-walled room while surgeons removed a tumor from my baby brother’s brain. I assume at least one of my parents was probably also in the room, but in that moment, I remember being alone. During the winter days my family spent in this Kansas City hospital, I began to read Dr. Seuss books and Highlights for Children magazines. For my birthday, my parents bought me the Cat in the Hat stuffy that I had seen during daily visits with my mom to the hospital gift shop where we purchased tiny Tootsie Rolls for pennies. I remember the feel of the cold glass window against my face, the sight of the tiny cars in the parking lot below us, the taste of the Chips Ahoy cookies my father bought for our hotel room treat. Each night he made up stories about jelly beans or teddy bears named Julie to help me sleep. Soon families of my own imaginary animals became my companions in clinics and hospitals, entertaining me with conversations, as my brother’s medical treatments continued. From the beginning, I learned how stories sustain us. 

The world became blurry at a young age. Soon my glasses prescription grew thicker and thicker, because I stayed up too late in bed reading library books, or so my eye doctor said. I loved field guides of North American mammals and Nancy Drew mysteries. In school I discovered that I also loved creating stories, scribbling my awkward handwriting across multiple pages, eager to share with any teacher who would read my imagined adventures featuring puppies or horses or witches. As a young writer, I didn’t believe in mapping plots, only moving paper or pen against paper. I loved alliteration and adjectives, the serial curves of commas, the urgency of gerunds. In math class I made up stories about the numbers. Scientific equations represented relationships. I considered studying medicine. There was a story to explain the large railroad track scar along the back of my brother’s skull. There was a story to explain why my parents divorced but I didn’t know what it was or which parent to believe. I watched my mother immerse herself in psychology books and religion. My father read Russian novels in his new apartment. In the summers, my grandmother brought us to the Pacific Ocean where we marveled over fragments of shells, enchanted by mysteries hidden and washed in salt water.

Looking for stories to sustain me, I read the Bible and devoted myself to following instructions other people had written, seeking connection, hoping for holiness, wanting some revelation or reasons. I fell in love with a man I met at church, and then I devoted myself to my children’s stories. From infancy, I read them books and books, staying home with them for years to turn the pages. Some of the books we read together are still here on shelves — Phantom Tollbooth, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, To Kill a Mockingbird — but the children are suddenly gone, now adults, all three moved out in the past year, living hundreds, thousands of miles from our home on a tiny island in the Pacific Northwest. And now in this transition, in this new pandemic emptiness, it’s my turn to focus on making my own adventures and discovering the stories that will sustain me through this time.

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Julie Jeanell Leung received her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in a number of publications, including Bellingham Review, Blue Lyra Review, and Grist: The Journal for Writers. Her essays have been selected as a Finalist for Best of the Net and as a winner of the ProForma contest and the Living Earth Nonfiction Prize. Julie lives with her husband on an island near Seattle where she volunteers as a citizen scientist and counts sea stars on the rocky shores.

Ahead of the release of What Nothing, her debut poetry collection, Anna Meister spoke with editorial intern Kathleen Gullion. Their conversation centered on the “toolbox” Meister builds to resist and heal. As one item in the toolbox of survival, poetry does the work of acknowledgment and remembrance, and in this way, serves as an instrument of hope for Meister.

Kathleen Gullion: The title of your collection, What Nothing, comes from a line in “Toward Something Hard”: “I know what nothing means.” How do that line and that phrase in particular represent the collection as a whole?

Anna Meister: I think, in some ways, it means I don’t know anything. In this poem, it’s also the speaker’s (okay, the speaker is always some former self, some version of me) realization or recognition, at least after the fact, of the lack of care or substance or accountability in her relationship at the time. Throughout the collection, there’s a lot of reflecting (everything is a memory) and reckoning with feelings of absence and emptiness.

It took years of working on this book to decide on the title What Nothing. I struggle with titles and had various placeholders that just weren’t doing enough to lift and connect the poems. Just a couple of weeks before I sent the manuscript to Sundress, a friend and I went through all the poems searching for words/phrases that felt alive without context. Once I landed on What Nothing, something new clicked open.

KG: Reflecting on the refrain of “if” that appears throughout the poems, what role does the conditional play in this collection?

AM: There’s a lot of doubt and questioning in these poems, with acknowledgment to how connected and domino-like the accumulation of lived experiences can feel. Sometimes I don’t know what to trust. I know, as someone who lives with mental illness, I cannot always trust my mind. My depressed brain straight up lies to me. Too, trauma can scramble, fragment, block. So there’s a conjuring, an imagining of outcomes had life’s events been arranged differently, an attempt to poke holes in what is known. Turning it all over, uncertain.

KG: Can you speak to the themes of memory and forgetting?

AM: Memory is, more often than not, where a poem begins for me. That’s very much what moves me to write, this desire to make sense of what happened, recording what I remember, and just as importantly, what I don’t. Which isn’t the same as forgetting.

KG: Can you speak to the narrator’s persistent tenderness, the pursuit of “reason[s] to stay alive in the world”?

AM: I mean, it’s hard out here. I need to surround myself with all the reasons, to remind myself of them again and again on a daily basis. I need them all in my toolbox, these reasons, no matter how big or small. It’s necessary armor for the brutal world we’re all currently experiencing.

KG: What does being seen mean to the narrator?

AM: Isn’t that what everyone wants, to be acknowledged wholly, to not have to sever or hide parts of oneself in order to be accepted? It’s such an intense desire of mine and it also feels so vulnerable. It makes me think of the meme that’s like, “the rewards of being loved vs. the mortifying ordeal of being known.”

KG: What is the significance of the “bridge” image that appears multiple times throughout the collection?

AM: It’s several things. The bridge is a literal bridge, the site of a physical trauma several of the poems address. The summer of my 18th year, I fell and shattered my lower lumbar vertebrae. The bridge is dangerous because of what happened that night, and also because I live with major depression/intense suicidal ideation; the imagery alludes to that impulse, that type of dangerous thought to which I often return. And yet, I also love what a bridge can represent? A journeying, movement forward/elsewhere, being guided and carried.

KG: “IT HURTS NOT / TO BE BELIEVED” breaks form, inviting white space and a looser use of language—how do these formal choices reflect the meaning of the poem?

AM: The long poem lets everything in. It’s a collage of many different fragments—I wanted it to feel urgent and messy, to mimic a cascade of memories and associations spanning years. It lives smack dab in the middle of the collection, flanked by pieces that look more traditionally organized on the page or are speaking to a singular experience or individual. I like that juxtaposition. I like long poems for the space they dare to take up, for their insistence on taking their time to work through ideas, and for the chance to contradict oneself.

KG: How does putting language to traumatic experiences help or hinder the healing process?

AM: For me, it’s overwhelmingly helpful in my healing, or else I couldn’t do it. Writing is by no means a stand-in for therapy, but there have been times when the work I’m doing in therapy prompts a poem, or even when I’ve written a poem and brought it into therapy like, “This came out and I don’t know what the fuck it means, can we talk about it?” Sometimes you need distance from an experience in order to write about it (I’m thinking about poems I wrote about my rape years before I understood to call it that), and sometimes it’s through the writing that you gain necessary perspective. There are things I haven’t known or realized I knew until writing them down.

KG: How does the body play a role in these poems?

AM: I’m thinking about The Body Keeps the Score, a book about the impact of (all types of) trauma on the body and how we can heal from what we’re carrying. I wish everyone would read it. I’m working on being more present in my body, more integrated, listening better to what it needs and is telling me. So the body (my body) is in the poems because it needs to be, because it’s so connected to and affected by everything that’s happening. Too, I think there’s a way in which a poem’s specificity can also be the key to its universality. Not every reader will have had the same experiences as the speaker, but hopefully the level of detail makes it possible for them to connect to a time where they felt similarly. And so the body can, in that way, transform and be anyone’s.

KG: Even in the final poem, a gorgeously queer ode, there is an insistent reminder that “the tough stuff” will come. Can you talk about “the tough stuff” and how you see it playing out? How does that insistence inform the collection as a whole?

AM: There’s so much tough stuff right now, you know? We’re nine months into a global pandemic, in a time of such major social/economic/racial inequity. I’m staring out my window at the frozen world as my cyclical depression once again begins to ramp up. It all feels pretty bleak and it’s challenging (however, crucial) to imagine the future being different or better. The choice to end my collection with this love poem is a hopeful one. Hope is difficult, but it feels correct here, since I’ve survived and will do my best to keep doing that. Love is not a cure-all; I’m not looking for anyone to fix my brain. Addressing her beloved in this final poem, the speaker is realistic that what has been hard will continue to be so (or will rear its head again), that some struggles are lifelong. Being loved in entirety, because of rather than despite, is certainly a balm and a source of strength in moving forward.

Pre-order your copy of What Nothing today

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Anna Meister is the author of two chapbooks, most recently As If (Glass Poetry Press, 2018). Meister studied poetry/memory/maps at Hampshire College and earned an MFA in poetry from New York University, where she served as Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her poems have appeared in BOAAT, Redivider, Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Des Moines, IA with her wife and son.

In her stunning debut memoir, You Will Never be Normal (Stillhouse Press, 2021), Catherine Klatzker takes a deep dive into her past to better understand her present and future selves. Struggling to come to terms with her splintered identities in the face of a traumatic childhood, Klatzker seeks out meditation and therapy as a means to process “Baby”, “Teena”, “Cat”, “Katie”, and “Cathie”—or the five identities that are housed within adult Catherine.

Klatzker’s story opens in motion: “curious onlookers in 2009 might assume the middle-aged brunette lopsided streak of gray hair chattering to no one in her PT cruiser was on speakerphone—not chatting with her multiple identities, locating them in the carefully constructed house of her mind, setting them up for the day.” From this moment, Klatzker approaches the page with a raw honesty and strength as she details the ways her “parts” were created, what each contributes to her life, and her extraordinary search for a “normal” life through working with “Dr. Lou,” her meditation instructor and therapist. Klatzker sets these scenes against the backdrop of her steady marriage, work as an ICU pediatric nurse, a life filled with children, and a desire to hide her experience—until it becomes inexplicably part of her whole identity.

Klatzker’s book follows a chronological order, reaching into the early 2000s when she began to practice meditation and mindfulness that quickly morphed into traumatic “body memories”—what she refers to as the experiences of her body’s remembrance of the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father as a young child. In confronting such visceral trauma, she writes, “I noted the familiar tingling, but instead of settling into stillness, my voices interrupted, not talking to each other, just shrieking.” Klatzker’s retelling of the first time this happened invites a deep empathy, even for readers who do not share this direct experience. This inherent terror is what leads her to seek therapy, where she eventually accepts the multiple identities that once governed her life and allows them to integrate into one being. Rather than shy away from explaining the tremendous inner work she had to undergo, Klatzker details it vividly on the page, at one point writing, “After those ten weeks working with Dr. Lou in 2002, I still didn’t know the inner structure of the disassociated land I inhabited. In therapy, I didn’t mention my fear of multiple parts and their voices”, but in later chapters, she goes on to reveal full conversations with each voice in a way that feels perfectly natural. Cat, Katie, Baby, Cathy and Tina assume separate identities on the page in the following conversation, which takes place at the gravesite of Klatzker’s deceased parents:

“I remembered the redwoods, the retreat, my howl to matter, and I held Baby and Cathy tightly and told them they always mattered to me, their lives mattered, despite what happened before.

“’I always loved him,’ Katie said, speaking up for herself, also tearful. Other Parts did not and said so.

‘He was danger, we had to guard you,’ Cat said.”

Klatzker does not only focus on her trauma, but allows the reader to bask in the full experience of a life in which she is one of thirteen siblings, becomes a single mom at eighteen, and eventually finds solid footing with her career as a nurse, her adoption of Judaism, and her second husband. She actively seeks to show the full depth of her experience, choosing to embrace the difficult parts and reveling in the joyful: her children’s milestones; the steadfast support of her husband; the work that sustains her. By the end of You Will Never Be Normal, she has reached a new understanding: “…there was no tidy ending, tied up in a neat bow. I would always and forever be multiple.” This is a hard-won truth, sought out and found over years of difficult inner work, and it is a truth that grounds the memoir.

Klatzker’s memoir invites an intimate look into the life and experiences of a person who seeks to live a “normal” life under extreme circumstances, and by the story’s end, she has accepted her struggle and understands that her multiple identities are as much a part of her as her arms and legs. The lived experience she brings to the page is not only encouraging, but astounding and remarkable. Her prose vibrates with life and control as she allows the reader to enter into the mind of an extraordinary woman trying to make sense of a world which few never truly can.

You Will Never Be Normal is available at Stillhouse Press

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Nikki Lyssy (@blindnikkii) is an MFA candidate studying creative nonfiction at the University of South Florida. Her essays have appeared in Hobart, Sweet, and Essay Daily. When she is not working, she can be found in a coffee shop.

In high school, I was asked to write a journal for one of my classes. It was meant to be fairly simple: just talking about notable things that happened to me each week. At the time, I didn’t understand the point of writing down my own memories. It felt strange, like I was just doing it by rote, not learning anything from the assignment. It only took two weeks before I started making things up. I wrote a horror story, starring myself – not a very good one, full of silly cliches and painfully adolescent nonsense, but I wrote in that book every single day.

In retrospect, that impulse set the tone for my entire life going forward.

I’d always loved stories, mainly as a result of living in a home full of English Lit professors, but it was in high school that my focus shifted to creating stories and retelling others’ stories through theater. I loved engaging with fiction in just about every way, and thankfully I had plenty of amazing people both in grade school and my college life who helped me refine that love into something I could actually pursue as a life path. I’m still working on it – I have yet to create anything I’d be confident to describe as “finished”, but I still try to create, retell, expand, or evolve a story every day, and I’m honored to join the Sundress team to help others do the same.

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Gray Flint-Vrettos is an aspiring author and a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University with a BA in English and Creative Writing, and minors in Theater Arts and Film. He has a long history with theater, having appeared in multiple productions both on stage and behind the curtain. Currently, she’s focusing on getting involved with publishing and writing her first book.