- [Announcer] By The River is brought to you in part by, the University of South Carolina Beaufort, learning in action discovered.

The ETV Endowment of South Carolina, Community Foundation of the Lowcountry, strengthening community, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB, The Pat Conroy Literary Center.

- [Holly] Natasha Trethewey was born to write and make a difference.

Pulitzer prize winner Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th poet laureate of the United States.

Her memoir "Memorial Drive" is a compelling and searching look at a shared human experience of sudden loss and absence.

I'm Holly Jackson, join us as we bring you powerful stories from both new and established Southern authors, as we sit By The River.

(upbeat music) It's a beautiful day here at our Lowcountry Studio.

Thanks so much for joining us.

I'm your host, Holly Jackson.

You know, this is our show where we bring you powerful stories from both new and established authors from right here in South Carolina and all across the Southeast.

And we are just really thrilled today to have a special guest.

This is the author of "Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir", Natasha Trethewey.

Thank you so much for making the trip here to South Carolina.

I know you had some time in Charleston and here today in Beaufort, how has your time been?

All those short and sweet, I imagine.

- Well, it's been full of both rain and sunshine and a feeling of joy.

Whenever I get to come back to a region that feels like my part of the country, I was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, and Spanish Moss is everywhere.

I'm happy.

- So you feel like your home?

- Yeah.

- We love that.

- Yeah.

- We're thrilled to have you here.

We're certainly here to talk about the book, but I do want to start off by talking about your trait as a poet.

And the title we were just speaking of, being named the US poet laureate, tell me about that experience for you.

- Well, the US poet laureate is supposed to be a lightning rod for poetry.

Once giving an interview, I embarrassed myself by getting very excited and saying it was a cheerleader for poetry.

And because I think that, you know, people think, well, that's not exactly serious, but I was a cheerleader in college and so it just came right back to me.

- Right.

- What you're supposed to do is get people enthusiastic about poetry, and to try to bring poetry to as many people as possible.

I served two terms from 2012 to 2014.

And during my first term, I decided to move to Washington and hold office hours at the Library of Congress, which allowed me to speak to Americans who came from far and wide about poetry and our shared interest and love for the art.

- It must've been a really wonderful experience for you.

Let's shift now to the book "Memorial Drive".

Certainly a difficult read, had to be a very difficult write for you.

Why did you think that... Why did you feel like it was time to write it and get it out?

- Well, you know, after some of my own success, and more and more after the Pulitzer, after being named poet laureate, I was being written about in newspapers and magazines.

And whenever I was written about, my mother's story was often mentioned, with her as just an afterthought.

And it became part of my backstory and she was rendered merely a victim and not the woman who is responsible, I think, for making me the writer that I am.

Both living with her and the impact in the aftermath of her tragic death is what made me a writer.

And I decided that I needed to be the one to tell that story, to tell her story.

- Right.

Let's back up a little bit and just talk about who you are, the unique way you were brought up and about the tragedy that led to this book.

- Well, as I said, I was born in Gulfport, Mississippi.

My parents married in 1965.

It was an interracial marriage.

They met in college.

My white father was down from Canada to attend college in Kentucky.

Their interracial marriage was illegal in Mississippi and Kentucky and around 20 other states in the nation at the time that they got married.

So they had to cross the river into Ohio, into Cincinnati, in order to be married.

- Okay.

And then they were married, you were six years old.

- They were six years old, when I divorced, - [Both] When they divorced.

- Right.

- And my mother and I moved to Atlanta, she was going to go to graduate school to get her MSW in social work.

- Okay.

- And in Atlanta, she met the man who would become her second husband.

- Okay.

And then of course, that led to, unthinkable tragedy.

If you could briefly explain what happened and what readers will find in the book there.

- Well, they were married for about 10 years during which part of that time he had become increasingly abusive with her.

She had sought marriage counseling.

She did all the right things that one does in such a situation.

Until it became clear that she needed to escape.

The violence was escalating, and she wanted to save me and my brother.

So during my senior year of high school, we ran away.

She went to a shelter for battered women, was able to get a divorce and was divorced from him for nearly two years.

But he continued to stalk her, until he found her and killed her.

- You were at what age at that time?

- I was 19, was a freshmen at the University of Georgia.

- And whenever you decided to put this story down on paper from start to finish, how long did that take?

Well, was there a lot of putting it down and saying, "I don't know."

Or were you committed whenever you realized, "Hey, I don't want it to be just a blurb.

I want it to be more."

Was it a fast ride or was it a lot of putting down and second guessing?

- A lot of putting down or a lot of just avoiding picking up in the first place.

I said that I was going to write the book in 2012, and I actually began writing the first chapter, which is a chapter called Another Country.

It's a chapter of so much joy, because I'm still in Mississippi with my maternal grandmother, and my mother and father and extended family in a very close knit community.

Those years in Mississippi were ones that I didn't want to leave.

And so, in writing the book, I found myself staying in that chapter.

I didn't wanna leave that chapter.

I think I could have stayed there forever so as not to move to Atlanta in the writing.

Because when I do that, I have to tell the rest of the story.

So I avoided that for a long time, until my editor kept asking me for the book.

And I knew that it was...

I was running out of time.

It took me seven years to write it.

- I thought it was so interesting.

I'm one of those people who I believe, you know, oh, this was supposed to happen these moments in time.

And that was certainly what I thought whenever I got to the part about the restaurant, whenever you run into the police officer who happened to be the first on scene for that event.

And it was 20 years later almost to the day, I believe, because they were just about to get rid of the records.

Talk about that time there and whether you think that was, this was supposed to be kind of moment, and what it was like to speak to him.

- Well, Louis Pasteur wrote that, chance favors the prepared mind.

And so I suppose in many ways, I'd been preparing myself, without knowing it by doing research for a previous book that led me to return to some of these places that I had left behind.

And then when I moved back to Atlanta to take a job at Emory University, I put myself in the proximity.

It felt accidental to me then, but I lived in walking distance of that courthouse, where he was sentenced.

I lived within five miles of the place she was murdered.

And so, I placed myself there and it did feel serendipitous.

Chance favors the prepared mind.

- Talk about your relationship with your mom and how, if at all, it differed whenever she realized and I think you heard through the walls, her telling your stepfather she knows whenever she knew that you knew that she was going through that abuse.

Did that bring you two closer together or did the relationship change at all?

- Well, I think, you know, she was deeply worried about the impact that my knowing had on me, which is why she gave me the diary, so that I might have a place to contend with the things that I was feeling.

I think she made sure that I had as many opportunities to do the kinds of things I wanted to do.

I was frequently away from home because I was in so many school activities so that I didn't have to come home from school.

But there's a scene that I write about in the book that I think is one of the most meaningful to me.

I've been writing, I've started reading a lot of short stories, I've joined the Literary Society because of a short story that I wrote, and I'm so excited that I wanna tell my mother about it instead of waiting until we're alone so as not to provoke him in any way, his jealousy, but I can't wait.

So at the dinner table, I announced all of this and I say, "I'm going to be a writer."

And he looks up barely and says, "You're not gonna do any of that."

And my mother, I see her grip tighten around the fork she's holding and she speaks almost through clenched teeth and she says, "She will do whatever she wants."

She wasn't going to let what he was doing affect me even as it was affecting her.

- Let's go now to the relationship you had with your biological father.

Growing up, whenever you were six years old, it came to less frequent visits, right?

It were summertime, and just periodic visits, but he was a poet.

And I remember, I think it was very early on where he told you, you are going to be a writer because you're gonna have a lot to tell.

Did you think of that a lot as...

I mean how strongly did those words play on you as far as that's what I'm gonna be because that's what dad says I need to be or do you think it was just natural for you?

- Well, I think I believed that I was going to have something important to say because of my experience.

I think he was right about that.

Growing up black and biracial in the deep south, the experience of that, starting in 1966 when I was born, it is the first existential wound that I felt.

And if all writing begins as in an existential wound, that was my first one.

And it is the wounds of history, of our shared history as Americans, rooted in one of our original sins of white supremacy.

I encountered that all the time as a child.

And that's what my father was saying.

My white father understood very well what I would have to contend with.

- And talk about your relationship with him and especially after your mother's death.

- Well, you know, my father, as you mentioned, was a poet.

He was also one of my first teachers and I don't mean in the informal, you know, parent and child way, but actually in graduate school.

I got my MA at Hollins University where my father was on the faculty, and the first poetry class that I took, because I never managed to take one as an undergraduate, was my father's poetry workshop.

- How cool!

That had to be very neat.

- I think it was really odd for the other students because, you know, I'm a Southern woman, I still call my father daddy, and they would hear me call Professor Trethewey daddy in the hallways and that would seem very odd.

- Right, right.

I'm amazed at how much you remember in, I think, it was fifth grade, so much was happening, so much deep, strong stuff for you to go through.

And I have a rising fourth grader.

So I'm thinking, wow, she's gonna remember all these things that are happening in her life.

After the book's been published, and so much of this came out, have you made any connections with those people who were part of your life in that time?

I'm talking about the kids who would come over and things like that.

Has there been any kind of connections?

- I've heard from people that I went to high school with, but, before that, I think that this is a little bit more meaningful to me, and that is that, I was giving an interview in which I finally said my mother's name.

This was when I was in my first term as poet laureate and I was in Washington.

And some people in Ohio heard me, they heard me finally say my mother's name and realized that the woman that they had known, with her maiden name, was my mother.

They were Mennonites who came to North Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 40s and 50s to kind of do various kinds of service in the community, and they ran a camp that my mother attended, and they had also stayed briefly with my grandmother.

So, they all remembered my mother, and my mother had attended the Bluffton University in Bluffton, Ohio, her freshman year of college.

So, one day in my office hours, all of these people, these Mennonites showed up to have a meeting with me and they had brought playbills and photographs from yearbooks and other documents that brought this part of my mother back to me.

And then they invited me to do the annual peace lecture at the college exactly 50 years in 2013 since my mother's freshman year in 1963.

And there were still professors there who remembered her.

- That had to be so special.

How do you want your mom to be remembered?

(breathes deeply) - You know, that's one of the hardest things for me to answer.

So I'll say this, there's an epigraph I use in the book from Shakespeare, Sonnet number three, "Thou art my mother's glass and she and thee calls back the lovely April of her prime."

I was born in April of my mother's prime.

I am her glass, her mirror.

So, everything that I've been able to do, is evidence of who she was.

- We talked about people who knew your mom, how about strangers, readers who've read this, who have experienced some of this own, their own tragedy in their lives?

What kind of stories have you heard?

- Oh, that's been one of the most rewarding things.

Being able to hear the shared stories of others who've had similar experiences, survivor stories, also, stories from people who may not have experienced that kind of tragedy, but who find themselves transformed through the act of empathy of knowing someone else's story.

- What do you hope that those people, all readers really, take away from the book?

- That, as the Poet Rumi wrote, "The wound is the place where the light enters you, that you may carry a wound like this, but it can be filled with light, and that light you can share with the rest of the world."

- After getting this out, which had to be so extremely painful for you, now that it's out, do you find that you have changed at all as a person or as a writer?

- Oh, well, I think the biggest change is that I spent so much of my adult life trying to forget the most difficult parts of growing up, but now I've had to contend with them.

And to go back and remember those difficult things makes it all much more on the surface, which is why it's hard for me to get through talking about it without weeping, but it has reinforced something for me that I've always believed, and that is that joy for me is so much sweeter for having known such sorrow.

I feel that even more now.

- What are you writing now?

- I'm trying to write a little bit about my father, and also hoping to get back to another collection of poems.

It's been awhile since I've had some good time to work on poetry.

- Tell us a little bit about your father.

What was he like?

- Oh my goodness.

Well, I suppose I'm also a mirror of him too, because my father... You know, I found this book a few years ago in the grocery store checkout line, one of those little golden books and it was called "Natasha's Daddy."

- Oh my!

- And I bought it for my father and it made him so happy because in this book, Natasha's daddy recites poetry, he sings and dances, he's big and strong, he's everything that my father was.

And the last lines of the book was, "Natasha's daddy was the best daddy a little monster could have."

- Aw!

- He loved that part because I became the monster in it.

(Holly laughs) If you'd asked my father what he thought of me, he'd always say, "She's my best poem."

- Oh my goodness.

That's beautiful.

What qualities do you see in yourself that most, a lot of times I'll find myself saying, "Oh my gosh!

I'm being my mom right now."

How has that with you?

And what things?

- Oh my goodness!

Well, I think, you know, my mother was, she was kind of fierce and resilient and no nonsense.

She...

There was a kind of directness and matter-of-fact-ness about her that was a remarkable sort of balance to just how lovely she was too.

I think sometimes people think that if you smile a lot or you're very friendly, you're not also tough.

That was not the case with my mother.

And I remember thinking when she died, and I was 19, that all of that fierceness and fearlessness transferred directly to me.

- No, you give that off, pretty good.

Is there any last things you want to share with our viewers now?

It's been a great conversation, I can't believe it's already almost over.

Is there anything else that you wanted to say?

- Oh Holly, this has just been so lovely.

I would say, to quote Percy Bysshe Shelley, two things that I think we should remember, poetry is the mirror that makes beautiful that which is distorted, and also poems are records of the best and happiest times in the happiest and best minds.

I say that, and of course he's talking specifically poetry, but I'm thinking that about all art in general, that the making of art is the most hopeful act.

It is the triumph over despair.

The book, the poem, the work of art says, "I'm still here, I've survived this, and I can carry it."

- Very good.

Thank you so much for joining us.

It's been a real delight to talk to you.

We appreciate your sharing, I know it's not easy, but it's important and we appreciate you sharing with our viewers.

And thank you all for joining us here on "By The River."

I'm your host, Holly Jackson.

We're gonna leave you now with a look at our Lowcountry Poet's Corner.

We'll see you next time, "By The River."

(soft piano music) - Three weeks after my mother is dead, I dream of her.

We walk a rutted path, an oval track around which we are making our slow revolution.

Side-by-side, so close our shoulders nearly touch, neither of us speaking, both of us in our traces.

Though, I know she is dead, I have a sense of contentment, as if she's only gone someplace else to which I've journeyed to meet her.

The world around us is dim.

A backdrop of shadows out of which, now, a man comes.

Even in the dream I know what he has done.

And yet, I smile, lifting my hand and speaking a greeting as he passes.

It's then that my mother turns to me, then, that I see it, a hole, the size of a quarter, in the center of her forehead.

From it comes a light so bright, so piercing, that I suffer the kind of momentary blindness brought on by staring at the sun, her face, nothing but light ringed in darkness when she speaks.

Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?

I know I'm not meant to answer, and so we walk on as before, rounding the path until we meet him again.

This time he's come to finish what he started.

Holding a gun, he is aiming at her head.

This time, I think I can save her.

Is it enough to throw myself in the bullet's path?

Shout no?

I wake to that single word, my own voice wrenching me from sleep, but it's my mother's voice that remains.

Her last question to me, Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?

- [Announcer] By The River is brought to you in part by, the University of South Carolina Beaufort, learning in action, discovered.

The ETV Endowment of South Carolina.

Community Foundation of the Lowcountry, strengthening community.

OSHER, Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB.

The Pat Conroy Literary Center.