Sharon Berg Interviews Molly Peacock

(Norton, 2024)

Molly Peacock

​Sharon Berg:                First, thank you, Molly, both for agreeing to this interview and for writing The Widow’s Crayon Box. Your book definitely reveals something different than many others that focus on grieving.
 
For instance, moving from After to Before in sections of The Widow’s Crayon Box, one is touched by your use of colour as an emotional bridge between the living and dead. Some concepts stay with us from childhood to old age, while others seem to develop during particular periods in our progress. It seems so natural to your language in these poems to parallel colour and emotions. Have you always felt that colour spoke to you as emotion?
 
Molly Peacock:          Colour has always spoken to me as pure feeling, probably from the first time I held a crayon. When I started the sonnet sequence “The Widow’s Crayon Box,” the title poem of the book, I was distraught. My husband of twenty-eight years had died about a month earlier. We had known each other since we were teenagers, though we didn’t get married till we were forty-five. I was fragmented and wobbly, experiencing so many contradictory emotions at once: from relief, to fury, to bleak loneliness, to gratitude and joy. It was a fully adult experience of mourning, emotions overlapping—not the basic eight-colour pack of crayons, but the entire 152. That became a metaphor for the entire sequence, and then, as other poems accumulated, the entire book.
 
The sonnet sequence (naming as many of the crayon colors as I could, from aquamarine to lazer lemon) was a counterpoint to the black-and-white of having to prepare our tax spreadsheets—something my late husband always did. In the first sonnet I call out to him:

​Hey, get back here! Help me do our taxes.
Your mourning widow never relaxes.
 
The eight child-colours of crayon boxes
are far too basic and behaved—I feel
the one-fifty-two emotional shades:
a rose one fleurs before a peach one fades.

But other colors gave individual surprises. What’s the colour of surprise itself? Hot pink maybe? No uniform answers there. We don’t always agree on what colours connect to which feelings.
 
SB:        In this book you present poems that—while intensely personal—are deeply resonant with the thoughts of anyone who has lost a loved one. Part of this has to do with the way you recall specific moments in the relationship that repeat as observations further on. This speaks to the growth of familiarity with one’s partner over time. Indeed, you present your unsanitized, full self by mentioning memories of previous sexual encounters and your wish for a return to the ‘prior normal’. How important was that honesty in your poetic voice to your personal journey of healing in The Widow’s Crayon Box?
 
MP:       Candor is the core of my poetic philosophy. Because the human situation, the details of human life, drive my poetry, I felt I had to be unsanitized! I feel I must find ways to let the reader enter the emotional territory of my marriage and my role as caregiver. And I had to risk revealing times when, inside my overarching love of my husband, I had moments of frustrated hatred—of him, and of his situation. He was inside his illness, shut down. I felt him in some place where only the dying go, that as the living I could not follow. Yet I was next to him. The loneliness of this double situation is almost inexpressible, but as a poet I had to find ways to express it—through moments, situations, and color: about sex in our seventies, a drug trial I despised, our badminton games, our crazy-dance walks around our apartment during Covid, our dinners, and our childhoods that re-emerged in the atmosphere of that great unpredictable parent, cancer. It is the candor of poets (from Catullus resenting that someone had stolen his napkin in ancient Rome, to Li Ch’ing Chao worrying about her eyebrows even as she must flee a political reversal in 10th-century China; from Sappho stepping on a hyacinth to Edward Thomas in the mud of a World War I trench, to Elizabeth Bishop recreating a bus that stops for a moose in Nova Scotia) that allows us access to their voices and situations. And, with the vivid, individual language that only belongs to them, this access creates handfuls of lines that reach across cultures and centuries to us.
 
From Sonnet 15 from ‘Notes From Sickrooms’:

​Once I faked with efficiency,
like a stout cup, a thick glass, empty inside
and never realised I was an invalid
surprising myself by hating you so much.
 (Pure love I wanted, not love and illness mixed!)

​And from ‘In the Mood’:

Then we have our triumph:
blasting In the Mood as we step-glide
two thousand steps around our suite.
 
                                                     Our oomph-
alos: the bed! We reach for one another...

SB:        You’ve examined how the duty aspect of caring for someone with illness can reveal a love/hate relationship between wife and husband once that illness is deemed terminal. This seems a point of honesty that it’s necessary to address, no matter the damaging backlash from a society that sees nursing and mothering as natural to females. Your poetry suggests that even someone who dedicates themselves to ministering care can find that it’s a socially restricted position to be in. Can you comment further on this?
 
MP:       I adored my husband. We were synced as a couple. Boyfriend and girlfriend in high school, we were each other’s first lovers. When he died, I had known him over half a century, except for the hiatus of nineteen years after we broke up in university. Those were the years when we became ourselves and began our careers and were also married to other people, then divorced. When we got married, he had already survived two melanoma cancer recurrences, beginning at the age of thirty-three. Cancer was simply a fact of his life—and mine. He lived with it as a chronic disease, like diabetes. Because he was so strong—a marathon runner and a vigorous, distinguished internationally-known James Joyce scholar—I didn’t realize what I was signing on for. Because of his stoic attitude—he just put his head down and went to his clinic appointments and barreled on—I became the emotional register, the holder of all the contradictory feelings in our marriage. That led to the complex cloud of feelings I lived in. Hate inside love. Fury inside concern. Feeling so exhausted I wished my ill husband would die just for sheer relief. And pride in him. Profound respect that he chose the MAID process (Medical Assistance in Dying) that allowed him control of his life at the end.
 
During our three-decade marriage, we lived life on two tracks: the life track, where you buy life insurance, and the death track, where you buy a funeral plot before any of your friends are even thinking about that. About every six years he had a recurrence. And a crisis ensued.
 
But the last six years of his life required more extreme health measures. Then I became not only the emotional caregiver but the co-participant in medical appointments. In Emergency rooms, in hospitals, the sexism put onto female-identified caregivers reaches the point of the fabulous. A caregiving man can stop at Tim Horton’s, then bring his ill wife in the hospital a cup of coffee—and the workers on the floor will beam. Wow! Look what that guy did for his wife!  But a caregiving woman, bringing that coffee every day, day after day, is unacknowledged. As a matter of fact, if she’s late to an appointment on the hospital floor, dripping in spilled coffee, she can even be classed as a difficult problem.
​
From ‘Deciding to End Your Life, You Thank Me: MAID: Medical Assistance in Dying, Toronto:’

​When you looked up and said, ‘Thank you,’ I saw
your gratitude rise over us like rain...
 
It swept through like a front—one thanks enough
to drench everything...

SB:       Titles for books are often difficult to come up with, though some authors seem to begin there. What was your experience in developing a title for The Widow’s Crayon Box?
 
MP:       The minute I initially titled the sonnet sequence The Widow’s Crayola Box, I knew it would be the title for the whole collection. But Crayola is a brand name. I raised the issue with my publisher, and my brilliant editor at W.W.Norton, Jill Bialosky, offered a much better alternative: The Widow’s Crayon Box. Crayons are for everyone. Thus, an all-too-specific brand name departed from the title. Now I can’t imagine calling it anything else.
 
SB:        Is this a book that seemed to fall onto the page quickly, as if it were channelled, or did you need to put a lot of effort into its structure? Was there a developmental process? Please elaborate.

MP:       I wrote the poems in The Widow’s Crayon Box in the year or so after my husband’s death, and those poems fell out of me. I was alone and without overwhelming responsibility for the first time in years, and I climbed into bed with my cup of tea early every morning, feeling so grateful I could process my life through the marvelous activity of making lines in that half-state between waking and sleeping. 
​
From ‘The Fawn’:

...When I opened my eyes in this dream of waking

I could only have had when asleep, it was dawn.

The fawn’s nose was black and wet, its tongue

a forest pink.

                            It filled me with a speckled softness.

You’d been dead nine months.
​
My new life licked at me...

SB:        Readers are often interested in knowing how much of a work is invented and how much is autobiographical. Would you care to share your approach/thoughts on this aspect of your readers’ curiosity?
​
MP:       I invented nothing!  My task was to get at the emotional reality of a 21st century experience of marriage, illness, dying and mourning. What you could call invention are the metaphors I used. The actual experiences are literal. The comparisons and descriptions of feelings are imaginative. The poems live where reality and imagination meet. In ‘Where Does It Live?’ objects become: 

an unhinged storm:

knives leapt from drawers,

extension cords

pliers, screwdrivers from cabinet doors:

bowls, pots, towels
​
paperclips, Band Aids…

Of course, they didn’t really leap from their places, but the poem imbues them with psychic power. However, I didn’t invent those domestic objects. They were really there. Yet Mike’s last emergency felt to me like the whole household, even pliers and paperclips, were energized into a frantic life of their own. 

SB:        Many authors say a writer never feels they are finished with their work, that they would always wish to adjust and tweak their writing. Do you feel that way about The Widow’s Crayon Box? What would you change?

MP:       I could not possibly change the poems in The Widow’s Crayon Box. They were written in an emotional state that I cannot recapture now that I am three and a half years into my widowhood. The book focuses on a long, intensely lived, expressive year of my husband’s death. It follows me into a new state of mourning and the emergence of a new self that reconnected to the self I had before adult love relationships. Unlike adjusters or tweakers who presume a poem is timeless, I think of my poems as part of a historical record. I resist going back and changing them because they are a document of emotions in time, and interfering with them puts current responses into the mix, disturbing the chemistry of what was.
 
SB:       If The Widow’s Crayon Box were chosen for the list in a graduate course, what discipline would it fit into? (i.e., history, politics, social change, philosophy, other) Would it be used to describe a particular taste in writing, a genre, a literary style or ___?
 
MP:       The Widow’s Crayon Box would fit into marriage studies, illness and disability studies, women’s studies, end-of-life studies, death and mourning studies, psychology, literature, poetry, social history, and aesthetics.
 
SB:        Please describe the central idea linking the sections of this collection and why you felt it was important to address this in contemporary times? Or was this book more connected to your own personal time and place?
 
MP:       The Widow’s Crayon Box is connected to my personal time and place, but it’s also deeply part of contemporary times. Marriage is personal, but death and dying in the 21st century are unique contemporary phenomena that work throughout the book. ‘The modern way of velvety agony,’ I write in ‘Tinkerbell and My Husband’.
 
SB:        How did you describe this book to a potential publisher before you began to work on it? Or did you complete The Widow’s Crayon Box before you began approaching publishers?
 
MP:       I have learned the hard way that my imagination does not work off an initial proposal very well. As I write the book, I discover what it is. Only when it’s finished do I submit to my publisher. 
 
SB:        How does this book fit it the stream of your literary works? Is there a fundamental difference between The Widow’s Crayon Box and your prior work?
 
MP:       The Widow’s Crayon Box seems a logical extension of my previous work, because it follows yet another life development, and it takes all the formal devices I’ve used in the past but expands them. Though I’ve written sonnets in earlier books, I never managed a whole sonnet sequence, and there are two in The Widow’s Crayon Box. Though I wrote unpunctuated lines much earlier in my life, I took them up again here for leaps into a new mental state. The book takes me forward as a poet by building on the craft I’ve worked on over time. I’d love to end this interview by quoting from the last poem, ‘Honey Crisp’, which unfolds the story of my late husband’s last apple, an apple I just couldn’t throw out for more than a year:

Hello wizenface, hello apple
understudy in the fridge
since March (it’s September)...
 
You were earmarked for the date
he slipped from my arms & we both
slid to the floor, red angel, are you
listening? 911, hospital, hospice...
 
 —would you rather have been eaten
and lived on as energy?
Not yet, not yet my pomme.
Hello soft wrinkled
face in my palms.

​SB:       Thank you for sharing your observations within and, indeed, outside of the poems in The Widow’s Crayon Box through this interview with me, Molly. There are ways that, in doing so, you have allowed readers—as the saying goes—to walk a mile in your shoes through poetry. 

​Molly Peacock, founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series, is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Widow’s Crayon Box (W.W. Norton and Company). She also authored two biographies about creativity in the lives of women artists: The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 and Flower Diary: Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door.  After her husband of 28 years died, she began the poems in The Widow’s Crayon Box, surprised by the variety of emotions she experienced—from adoration to outrage—and realized the colors of feelings after a beloved partner dies is far more than the 8-color crayon box—it’s the whole 152.

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​Sharon Berg attended the Banff School of Fine Arts Writing Studio in 1982 and was accepted to Banff’s Leighton Artist Colony in 1987. She is also an alumni of Humber College’s Writing Program. She did her B.A. in Indigenous Studies at Laurentian U, followed by her B.Ed for Primary Education at U of T. Her M.Ed focused on First Nations Education at York U, and her D.Ed focused on Indigenous Education at UBC. She also received a Certificate in Magazine Journalism from Ryerson U. Sharon founded and operated the international literary E-Zine Big Pond Rumours (2006-2019) and its associated press, which released chapbooks of Canadian poets as prizes for the magazine’s contests. She's published five full books and three chapbooks, working in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her work appears in periodicals across Canada, the USA, Mexico, the UK, the Netherlands, India, Germany, Singapore, and Australia. Her 3rd poetry collection Stars in the Junkyard (Cyberwit 2020) was a Finalist in the 2022 International Book Awards, and her narrative history The Name Unspoken: Wandering Spirit Survival School (Big Pond Rumours Press 2019) won a 2020 IPPY Award for Regional Nonfiction. When she retired from teaching, she opened Oceanview Writers Retreat in Charlottetown (Terra Nova National Park) Newfoundland.