My letter to the author Fanny Howe (and her response!)
Photo of Fanny Howe from the Harvard Review.
I love the author and poet Fanny Howe and am especially fond of her nonfiction work (The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation is a favorite). She passed last year, and I was thinking of her this morning and went back through my old emails to find an email I’d sent her five years ago this month.
I had done some internet sleuthing and found a listing she had on Poets and Writers where she had an old AOL email address. So I tried it and it went through and she replied! (I highly recommend writing to the writers you love—as Fanny shares below, it can mean so much.) I then tried to follow up with a question and didn’t get a reply, but thankfully, I didn’t take that personally, and I imagine she just wasn’t that interested in my question at the moment (and/or it was too big of a question) or she was hard at work on her final book or perhaps I just needed to sit with my own question for a while.
But I thought you might appreciate this correspondence and if you have any thoughts on how bewilderment and coherence work together in this life, I’d love to hear! I’m still sitting with this question.
Take good care,
Brianna
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Apr 7, 2021, 3:40 PM
Wow, I searched for your name and found a listing in poets and writers online with your email address. I’m not sure if this will reach you or if this is still an email address you use. Fingers crossed!
Ms. Howe, thank you for your words, for your books, and for your poems. I just finished The Winter Sun and am reading about bewilderment and fairies in Wedding Dress and I can’t believe your spirit exists in this world! I feel as if we’re all in better shape because you have lived here and written here. Thank you.
You give me courage to pursue my own vocation as my own weird version of a writer/seeker/teacher. I’ve been studying with the Christian mystic/teacher Cynthia Bourgeault (you two seem like you’d be kindred spirits) and she has been teaching on Jacques Lusseryan. When a book appears twice, it’s time to read it. So now I’m reading And There Was Light—what a gift!
I have written my first poetry collection about the sun and rituals and womanhood and motherhood and God. Ha! Can’t narrow it down. I’ve just started sending it out—we’ll see. What a lonely process.
Anyway, you’ve given me such a surge of energy to know a writer like you exists. Your life and your poems and your words have touched me deeply over this past strange year.
With gratitude,
Brianna
Apr 8, 2021, 10:04 AM
Dear Brianna, what a beautiful letter! Thank you for stopping to express all that out of the blue. It makes a huge difference in daily survival, in fact part of the spring blooms that we forgot about for so many months.
I am very taken with Cynthia Bourgeault and wonder where and how you study with her. It's strange to me that anyone on earth ever heard of Jacques Lusseyran. I love the writing style of those French, War thinkers, Camus, Weil, etc even as they are in translation.
Well, I wish you a lot of luck with your work and life and can see you are following a beloved, familiar route now, while you are setting off to the Poetry World.
Yours,
Fanny
Apr 9, 2021, 3:20 PM
Oh, I'm so glad you received my email and thank you for writing back!
...If you have time to answer a question, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the connection between coherence and bewilderment. I resonate deeply with your poetic vision of bewilderment and the wonder and humility that accompany bewilderment. As you write, "There is a Muslim prayer that says, ‘Lord, increase my bewilderment,’ and this prayer belongs both to me and to the strange Whoever who goes under the name of ‘I’ in my poems—and under multiple names in my fiction —where error, errancy, and bewilderment are the main forces that signal a story."
And I also resonate with an impulse for coherence in my life and in my poems. I was reading Tony Hoagland's essay collection Twenty Poems That Could Save America and in one of the essays he said he'd spent a lot of years in confusion and disorder and doesn't want to be led into a poem that will only do more of that. He writes: "To make even a small amount of sense, to represent the world in a coherent, resonant manner that is not reductive seems to me a great athletic achievement."
So my question is how/where do you see coherence and bewilderment connecting?
Grateful,
Brianna