Shame and the Slow Dance with Fear // Meaghan Quinn

Meaghan Quinn writes about overcoming fear and connecting to others through poetry as part of Lauren Davis’ guest month, “Writing About the Living.” 

To write fearlessly has always been hard for me, but it’s becoming easier. One year ago I left my position as the Chair of the English Department at a school I respect deeply, so that I could seek treatment for substance abuse. And in the past year, I’ve had to get real about who I am as a person; this stare-down with reality has now translated into my art. Recently, I have been revising and writing new pieces for my first full-length, Slow Dance, Bullets, forthcoming from Route 7 Press, a press I’m enamoured with and thrilled to be working with. While I now live and write as a woman in recovery, most of the poems in Slow Dance, Bullets were written prior to recovery and were cooked in bouts of euphoria and physical anguish, and in the fear of exposure. Although I’ve always written about personal pain and former lovers, my beloved and often the speaker go nameless. The shroud of secrecy hangs heavy. But I also employed secrecy and fantasy, often in the form of the collective muse, out of “necessity” as artists often do—to protect jobs, loved ones, personas. In chewing on this, I think of Eliot’s fitting quote, “Where is the Life we have lost in living?” And because of this mentality, I lost a great deal. I was too concerned with the veneer, bogged down by the grind, and drifting further from my hope—to understand more intimately the human condition. And poetry was the space I felt enticed to explore this and myself, as so many others have done before me. Aside from addiction, it has been an equally grueling task to accept my sexual orientation as queer, and this sexual tension, this push-pull is also on the page. It is no surprise that I was drawn to the works of classic lesbian poets. In my early twenties when I was first accepting my sexuality, I was captivated by the way Judy Grahn, June Jordan, and Adrienne Rich wrote about their private lives, especially during less progressive times. I admired their sensuous, pioneering verse. As a former Catholic and a teacher, I was reticent about publishing about both substance abuse and loving women. Writing is one thing. The real fear came from throwing it on the Web. What if a student sees? What if my content disturbs or disrupts personal relationships? What if I’m unable to convince even myself of the distinction between speaker and writer? But although poem-making is a solitary act, poem sharing and experiencing and relating is a public one. And to miss out on that troubled me all the more. For example, I was overjoyed to post on social media that my poem “Act of Contrition”—a poem about sleeping with a woman for the first time in tandem with the holy sacrament of confession—found a home in A Portrait in Blues, a print journal. When I uploaded a pic of the poem to social media, I actually covered up the feminine pronouns and blocked out the lines “Because I had met a young woman/ who made me think I might love/ women” and “Dickinson verse tatted across her forearm/ my cig breath, our legs swooped like drowsy vines” with my fingers. I was slow dancing with fear in life and on the page. Yet clearly I yearned for agency and ownership. Now, that shame is a far, far thing, but nonetheless, its ghost lingers. As writers, especially in this age of hyper-confessionalism, we constantly examine our past. Our truths. Often while simultaneously running from both. And in looking back at this past decade, my addiction was lonely and messy, destructive and costly. But if there weren’t literary voices who had experienced similar woes, I’m not sure I would have been able to forge forward. Driving around listening to Mary Karr’s brutally honest memoir Lit carried me. Reading Kaveh Akhbar’s Portrait of the Alcoholic was a moment of great identification, an exhalation, a hope that maybe one day I, too, could embrace acceptance and reach others via verse. Reading Nick Flynn’s Some Ether for the fifth time in treatment made me feel less alone. These are the voices that breathed life back into me. For me, it verifies that the risk is worth taking. That writing about the living in a public age is part of the art form. On this topic, my friends encouraged me to do the 30/30 Tupelo Challenge about two years back. I was struggling pretty hard at this point. I convinced myself I didn’t want to be with women. I convinced myself I was okay. And so when I went to write one of the daily poems, I had had enough. In this poem “What Makes Elephants Sleep,” two “characters” have a conversation about using and the desire to recover. Though the poem calls on a muse, it is also a conversation with myself. And yet at the same time, I invoked the muse of a former girlfriend, with whom I am still very close. Because of the shifting roles of the speakers and the stigma of the topic, the “characters” go nameless and somewhat genderless. The collision of fantasy and fear is something that came naturally. In retrospect, there is incredible freedom in the fluidity of invoking, becoming, or making an amalgamation of the muse in order to barrel the art forward. What I’ve learned of writing about the living—and to do so publicly—is that I am not that unique. And that one has to be committed. Entirely. To commit to the verse. To own the words. And to do right by our fellows. By doing so, the reader can rub up against their own joy and suffering on the page alongside the poet. In looking ahead, I will find my way back to teaching. Of this I have faith. But for now, I’m walking forward.

Meaghan Quinn is the author of Slow Dance, Bullets forthcoming from Route 7 Press. She holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College and has studied at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. She has been nominated for Best New Poets and the Pushcart Prize and is a recipient of the Nancy Penn Holsenbeck Prize. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Impossible Archetype, Off the Coast, Heartwood, r.kv.r.y., 2River, Adrienne, Free State Review, and elsewhere. She resides on Cape Cod.