“At first, everything was just ugly and scary:” A Conversation with Amanda Quaid

Playwright, poet and essayist Sarah Ruhl (Smile: The Story of a Face, Love Poems in Quarantine) sits down with Amanda Quaid to discuss her debut poetry collection, No Obvious Distress, a memoir-in-verse about mortality, marriage and motherhood in the midst of serious illness. Over the course of their conversation, they talk about Buddhism, the healing potential of writing, bad doctors, and navigating the intersection of art and motherhood.

Sarah Ruhl: How did you start writing poems? What led you to poetry, just in general?

Amanda Quaid: When I was diagnosed with cancer, I knew I had to work creatively with it in some way, but I didn’t feel I like I could write a memoir with a tidy beginning, middle and end. I didn’t want to write a play because I didn’t want to be dependent on anybody else’s collaboration. And I thought, I’m looking for a form that can allow me to hold opposite things at the same time.

One of my early poems (“Patient and Daughter Appear Closely Bonded”) was about a talk I had with my daughter about death. She was three years old at the time, and it was that conversation that made me want to turn to poetry, because how else could I describe this encounter that was so sad and yet so beautiful at the same time?

Ruhl: It’s a beautiful poem. There’s something about the transparency of how children speak and think that I see throughout your book. And the situation of motherhood, where you’re writing from afar, trying to make sense and observe, but also you want to be in the scene, because you’re the mom.

Quaid: It does feel that way. I’m part of the scene, but I’m also observing what the scene might be like without me, in the same moment. It’s a strange way to parent and to be in a family.

Ruhl: I feel like writers in general do that: picture themselves in the scene and not in the scene. But you’re dealing with all these medical challenges. It gives it a different cast. How does writing help you through?

Quaid: It’s helped me show up in a different way. At first, everything was just ugly and scary, but if I knew that I could turn an experience into a poem, I had to force myself to look at what could be beautiful, or what at least could be interesting about what I was going through. I believe that the opposite of fear is curiosity, and showing up in that way kept me in curiosity. I had to stay in that open place.

Ruhl: How did you structure the book? At what point did you realize it was a book?

Quaid: I had a lot of poems. My teacher Sharon Dolin suggested I take a stab at ordering them. It’s memoir structured, so I did it chronologically, and then I used erasure poems made from my medical charts as interstitial, thematic introductions.

Ruhl: When did you start to read your charts?

Quaid: They’re all available now in these portals. I mean, you could have an MRI, then 20 minutes later, get a little ping. Your doctor won’t look at it for days, but you can look at it and find out you have a metastasis. You’re just in your living room with your kid running around, like, oh, I guess I have stage four cancer.

I started reading them out of necessity, because I needed to go into these meetings prepared. And because my heart would pound so much when I looked at them, I thought, what great raw material for erasure, to just take charge of them and turn them into self-portraits on my own terms that are ridiculous and funny and absurd. That’s been very therapeutic.

Ruhl: I was struck by the rhymes and the chewiness of sound in the poems. I think it’s brave to play with rhyme and form these days, because a lot of poets don’t.

Quaid: I love the pleasure of rhyme! We have a very rhyme-happy household. My daughter, she’s eight now, she just discovered my rhyming dictionary, and we’ll have little rhyme-offs where she’ll open it up, and we’ll try to compete with each other to see how many rhymes we can get. It’s such a pleasure of English, because it’s not like French or Italian or Spanish, where there are so many built-in rhymes, right? It’s more of a hunt.

Ruhl: Has your daughter read any of your poems?

Quaid: She’s heard some of them at readings. I read her “Patient and Daughter Appear Closely Bonded” to ask her permission to read it at my book launch, which she would be attending. And she said no, she didn’t want the attention on her in that way.

That’s actually something I wanted to ask you about: the ethical question of using one’s children in one’s art. I mean, she was three when we had that conversation, which is different than eight. I think now, if she were to say something to me, I would feel the need to ask permission to put it in a poem, but I didn’t when she was three. But it’s out there, and I have to grapple with how she might interpret it later on.

Ruhl: It is interesting. I do think it’s probably something to do with them getting to reading age. I have quoted my kids a lot in essays, and I don’t think I asked their permission. I guess when I don’t ask their permission, it’s because I feel like they’ve said something to me, and in that sense, it feels like a part of my story.

However, if something happened to them apart from me, or that I think would embarrass them, I would never put it in. But I do think it’s an interesting conundrum for mothers, and for fathers, I suppose, because it is your material, it is what you spend your day on. I think of Sharon Olds as the first person I saw who was allowing that voice to come through. And for me, that was so important, as a woman writer, to see her own all of that experience.

Quaid: Yes.

Ruhl: I wanted to ask about Buddhism. Can you talk about whether that practice has informed the writing for you?

Quaid: I think, because my meditation practice has an emphasis on sitting with a feeling, sitting with discomfort and not needing to change it, it’s helped me to sink into experience and see it more clearly for what it is, and to be comfortable holding opposites at the same time.

Ruhl: I do think there’s something about meditation creating an ability, or not creating, but honing an ability to sit still. And writing is partly just the ability to sit still, let’s face it, like all the time, it’s half the battle.

I remember reading something by Chekov years ago where he said, “When I became a doctor, my writing became more objective.” And I remember thinking, what objective? There’s no objective, there’s no such thing. But then I thought, oh, maybe he means something about not being in a subjective emotional field when he’s writing, but instead really observing and watching human behavior.

I guess I think of that with meditation, that there’s something about it for me that gets me out of a lyric emotionality—where I’m trying to observe the emotion, instead of just vomiting it forth on the page.

Quaid: I heard a poet say that there’s the level of poetry where you’re describing the feeling, or you’re describing what’s happening, and then, as he put it, there’s also the final element, which is looking at it almost as an alien would. That alienation I think takes a poem to a different level— observing from a distance, as opposed to embodying it.

Ruhl: Have your doctors seen the book?

Quaid: I’m going to give it to him, my main doctor. I did give it to a chaplain. When I was last in the hospital, I was really bored, and I just started asking for every chaplain to come by and talk. I spoke to one whose background was in Zen Buddhism and “Earth worship.” And I said, “Do you mean Druidry?” And she said, “Yeah, Druidry!” I told her I’d practiced Druidry for a long time, and she lit up. So I gave it to her. She took it to the meeting of the chaplaincy and shared it.

I actually just found out it’s going to be part of the Yale Narrative Medicine program, so doctors-to-be are going to read it. That’s been really satisfying, because doctors I think can have such a barrier to understanding the patient’s experience.

Ruhl: I’m so happy it’s getting into those hands. When I was going through Bell’s palsy, and my diagnoses, the world was divided for me into good and bad doctors, which is quite a binary black and white thing to say. But I had these heroes who I felt were very attentive to narrative and very attentive to letting the patient teach them the diagnosis by listening carefully. And then I had other doctors who didn’t believe me, discounted me, belittled me, yelled at me, said my condition didn’t exist.

There are so many ways to be a doctor and to be a patient. Do you find you have these hero characters and these kinds of less heroic people?

Quaid: Yeah, and I’ve stolen your line [from Smile], “The Upper East Side: the land of bad news.” I use that all the time. I had a doctor who took out part of my lung who really cared. He cared about my whole story. He remembered my kid’s name. I trust him with my life. And then there are others where you just feel like somebody on a conveyor belt.

Ruhl: I think the other thing poems do is slow things down, slow down time. Doctor speed can be very fast.

Are there things that you want the reader to know, in terms of thinking about a frame for it, or do you feel like the poems speak for themselves?

Quaid: I think the cover does amazing work, because it’s not a sad book. I think you hear it’s about cancer and parenting and facing mortality, and that feels extremely heavy. But it’s bright.

The way they do the cover at [John Murray Originals] is they put it to a contest of graphic design students at a university in Leeds. So I actually got to see these young people respond to the book in dozens of ways. This one stood out.

The images are the result of the artist [Lydia Shaw] reading the name of the diagnosis into an audio-visual program. Several times in the book, I mention how alienating it is when friends or even doctors won’t bother learning how to say it. So it was her way of learning how to say it visually. And I love it because it conveys a soul’s journey. You see the sun, you see positivity. You also maybe see a radiation beam. It does a lot of work to convey the tone.

Ruhl: That reminds me of my former student, the poet Max Ritvo, who had a great image about radiation being like a just-for-you soup can. He said the first time he heard the beam, he was like, “They made it just for me, just for my tumor.” He had this ability to see the surreal and the magic, I suppose, even in medical technology. His book, Four Reincarnations, like yours, you might not expect to be full of humor and sex and revenge. It’s very much about being alive, not about being sick.

And [illness] can make you feel more alive in the sense that everything becomes quite precious. Not precious in the bad poetry way, but precious in the in the way of Our Town and Emily saying, “Every, every moment. If we could only appreciate every moment.” And then the stage manager says, “Well, saints and poets maybe, they do some.”

Quaid: And why not end on Our Town?

Ruhl: Why not?