Grief and Gratitude: August Newsletter

It’s August! I hope your summer has been treating you well!

Photo credit to the wonderful Mel Nigro!

Before we hop into all things poetry, a bit of news in my life is that I’m now enga(y)ged! Natalie planned a very cute surprise on our last camping trip (that’s the big beautiful Lake Superior in the background). We’ve been together for over eleven years and have considered each other “forever” for many of those years already, but we’re excited to have a big party (some might call that a wedding) after a nice long engagement, one that potentially lasts until we have a new president. For now, I get to have a very lovely ring that is made from amethysts that Natalie and I harvested ourselves several years ago in the Canadian amethyst mines. She sure is amazing, and now I’ll be throwing out the word “fiancée” like candy off the back of a parade float.

WHAT’S COMING UP

Totally free! Here’s the Zoom link to join: https://tinyurl.com/2ht4zfm4 And if you want to sign up to read, you can do so here: https://forms.gle/wSvuNPaLYAEtMJes9

Come write about grief and loss with me! This workshop series is already getting pretty full, so hop on it if you want to join! Talking about death and loss is one of my #1 favorite things, and I’m really excited! You can sign up here: https://buttonpoetry.com/product/button-university-ollie-schminkey-workshop/

September 18th, I’ll be the feature for Re-Verb open mic at Flava Cafe in St. Paul! This is a super cool space where anyone can join the open mic, and you can also request (optional) feedback form the audience. You can also catch me on their radio show on Friday the 12th at 7 pm on 94.1 WFNU Frogtown Radio.

PROMPT

We completed this prompt in my weekly writing circle, and I was absolutely blown away by everyone’s drafts! For this month’s poem, you’ll get to see what I wrote, as a special thank-you for subscribing to the newsletter!

POEM

PETE

On Grief and Gratitude

Like many, I’ve been taking time to reflect, grieve, and honor the poet Andrea Gibson. It honestly feels strange to even use the word “grieve” for someone I didn’t know that well, and I don’t want to be one of those people who is suddenly “best friends” with someone only after they have died. So I’ll try to be honest here, and not overstate anything. Even though our interactions were few, Andrea is someone whose work and person has really impacted my relationship both to living and to dying. (And from what I’ve seen, Andrea and their work had this effect on a lot of people-- I think reaching through all that space was one of their greatest abilities).

It’s also August, and at the end of this month, it will be seven years since my dad’s death. My body is already beginning to hunker down-- I’m moodier, my window of tolerance is lower, and all I want to do is be outside. All of that being said, my experience of grief has certainly changed over time. I don’t think that “time heals all wounds,” but I do feel that each year, I’m able to leave a little bit more of my grief in the past, and I’m grateful for my body’s ability to integrate and move through this loss (which has not always been my body’s strong suit in the past ((ha!)) but such is trauma).

I’m writing about Andrea and my dad’s death in the same mish-mash of thoughts here because Andrea is the only person I’ve ever met who was able to put into words this sense of awe and wonder I began to feel after my dad died. It is something that I have tried vainly to capture in words for years, writing dozens of poems, having impassioned conversations with my friends and gesturing wildly, “But don’t you get it? I know about photosynthesis, but how does a leaf know???” No scientific explanation was ever enough for me, because when it came to the mechanics of the universe, however we might look at them and observe and name them, there was no possible way we could get really get to the heart of understanding them. (The question I was maybe really asking is not “how does a leaf?” but “why does a leaf?” Or maybe even “Isn’t is fucking amazing that a leaf exists at all?”)

My whole world was like this, and honestly it still is. Have you ever truly looked at a flower? They are impeccable beyond belief. Or a grasshopper? They are more stunning than I can comprehend. And don’t even get me started on the river, or a bumblebee, or a thimbleberry-- and the night sky? I think I have to have a lie down. I imagine that this technicolor awe is, in some ways, akin to some peoples’ experience on a mushroom trip (I wouldn’t know personally, but people who do mushrooms sure do like to tell me all about it). I say all of this to say that the feeling of awe that surrounds my daily experience is pretty immense, and it was a huge sense of frustration for me that I couldn’t make people understand. Why couldn’t they see, that everything was breathtakingly beautiful? And why didn’t I see it before my dad died? What was it about his death that cracked the world open, that pushed me to truly notice how unfathomably gorgeous everything is?

I had met Andrea a few times in my late teens/early twenties, since we were part of the same national slam scene. When I was around nineteen, I had the word “Swingset” tattooed on my arm in the handwriting of a lover (now ex) as a reminder that someone could imagine a world where being trans was easy (“And someday y’all, when we grow up, it’s all gonna be that simple.”) Andrea could see a world where I was loved, when I couldn’t yet. Imagining that future, where I could be loved both easily and fully for who I was-- god, what a gift. Andrea was one of the first people I ever knew who experienced gender in a similar way to me, and their love and success was one of my first roadmaps to how to be alive as a non-binary person.

I remember, once, in college, talking to a professor about potentially becoming a professor myself. I liked teaching (I was a tutor for many years), and I personally really appreciated the particular type of academic exploration that my own college experience offered. But I was stressed out-- I had never seen a non-binary professor, and I was worried that I would not be accepted into the professional sphere because, at the time, they/them pronouns were seen as inherently “unprofessional.” This was before a lot of awareness raising campaigns, when non-binary people faced even more erasure and ostracisation than we do now. What if no one respected me? What if they thought my gender was “fake,” and dismissed me entirely because of it? My work could never be good enough if I wasn’t a real person to them. And that professor (who I loved and trusted) looked at me with pity and said that she thought I was correct, and that the only place for me would likely be teaching LGBTQ studies, and even that would be a struggle. (I was not a Gender Studies major-- I double majored in Creative Writing and Studio Art). I decided not to pursue a master’s or a PhD.

I don’t blame that professor-- I think she gave me the best advice and reflection of the world that we actually lived in at the time. But the truth is, that world sucked. And although I’m ultimately grateful I didn’t continue in academia and get a higher degree, I’m also very grateful that Andrea’s work was a different kind of mirror: one that showed not what currently was, but what was possible for the future.

Andrea showed me that it is possible for a non-binary person to be widely beloved, and a poet (which I was and am!) no less. (This was also before the YouTube slam poetry explosion, where slam poetry was just a weird hobby that a bunch of hot nerds were overly enthusiastic about, and the general public didn’t seem to care much at all).

Many years later, after listening to a podcast interview that Andrea had done, I felt an almost spiritual pull to message them. In the interview, they talked about awe, about wonder, about that technicolor feeling that I had spent years struggling to convey. And, of course, they had all the words for it that I had not been able to find. I have never in my life, before or since, been seen so clearly by someone who was not even trying to look at me.

Of course, I did not expect a response to my Instagram DM-- Andrea was one of the most famous poets ever, and surely very busy, and going through chemotherapy. (I am none of those things, and I sure as hell don’t respond to my DMs.)

But Andrea did, and said things about me and my work that will live in my heart forever. As it turns out, unbeknownst to me, Andrea had actually been following my work for a while-- and y’all, on receipt of that message, I sang (by which I mean, I ran screaming into the other room to show my partner). When I imagine Andrea appreciating my work in any kind of way throughout all of those hard you-can’t-be-a-professor years, through the years of my father’s illness and death, through the years I struggled to articulate my awe, I feel what I imagine other people must feel when they talk about a guardian angel. Through all of those years that the world was not on my side, Andrea was. And I imagine them there, while I was writing sad poems, they were writing poems that I would get to live in once I could be happy.

They say never to meet your heroes (and I often extrapolate that in my own life into “don’t have heroes.” Everyone is just a person, and no one can live up to the parasocial relationships we project onto them over the internet.) But if your hero was Andrea Gibson, I hope you got to meet them. And if you never got to meet them in person, I hope your heart got to meet their heart through their poetry. And more than anything, I hope you now carry around at least a little bit of their well-articulated awe.

Love,

Ollie

OLLIE SCHMINKEY

Grief and Gratitude: August Newsletter