A Writer’s Essentials: A Writing Friend       

Over lunch with three writers, one said, “Don’t you love writing prompts, like ‘the first time you got drunk.’” We were off and running, telling the story of the chocolate martinis, or being carried out of a Mexican bar at 18 after two shots of tequila. I leapt on the idea, “This would be a great focus for our summer invitational poetry reading.”

In the next breath, Linda said, “Intoxication.” Yes! That word carried the concept of the prompt out to such rich dimensions. Turning flashes of creativity into community literary events has been one of the hallmarks of our writing friendship.

We have joked that it’s too dangerous to put us in a car together. Not that we drive fast, no. Over the years, as we drive to a poetry reading in Bangor or Blue Hill or Machias, we start planning events. By the time we arrive, we have mapped out the next Belfast Poetry Festival, or a writer’s retreat on an island, a writing in nature class, or talked about where we are with our own writing.

We are sure our state has the most poets per capita than any other state, and they even sell buttons at our local food coop that say Belfast: Poetry Capital of Maine. Linda and I were emerging poets for a long time. We read a poem or two at readings and brought out small chapbooks collections we shared with our friends. As my kids grew and left home, and after Linda’s husband died suddenly, we both started writing steadily. I self-published a book of poetry, started the Illuminated Sea Press for Maine poets, and began giving readings.

Linda said, “I want to publish a book too. How do you do it?” I gave her the run-down about printing, copy editors, designers, bookstores. I said, “The only requirement of my press besides having a solid collection of poems is that the cover is beautiful.” Linda created a beautiful book.

When both of us had poems read nationwide on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, we were suddenly seen as poets around town. In the 2000s, we would both serve as Poet Laureate of the City of Belfast, promoting poetry in the papers, readings, and the festival.

When I decided to deepen my writing skills, I started the Stonecoast low residency MFA. A year later Linda asked, “Tell me about Grad school. What has changed in your writing?”

I said, “I don’t write poetry anymore, I’m writing prose.”

“Really?”

I added that I couldn’t imagine anything more important at this point in my life than making this commitment to my writing. She went home and started her application. After one semester, Linda said, “I remembered I’ve always wanted to write essays.”

She asked, “Tell me about your memoir.” I was writing intense memories about my father. Linda grimaced, “I don’t want to go near anything about my father.” Months later, she said, “This writing is all about my father.”

We were both Daddy’s girls whose father’s disappeared from alcohol or mental illness when we were in our teens. The parallels were uncanny. We both had heart issues and surgery, her’s as a girl, mine as an adult. As we wrote we discovered how pivotal our mothers were, and how they had saved us. As we read each other’s work, we saw parallels and pushed each other deeper in our inquiry.

Her father was an engineer in Space Coast Florida in the 1950s and ‘60s, and she grew up watching rocket launches, immersed in a language of the new frontier of science and technology. My father was a radical modern architect in Ohio and I absorbed the language of modern design and aesthetics. We each made research trips (s to Cape Canaveral and I to Cincinnati). We compared notes on how the radical cultural changes of the 60s lifted us like a tidal wave out of our childhood identities and carried us out into the world.

We wrestled with big questions. What is the Spine of our Story? How do we thread various themes in through lines through the chapters and essays. One day Linda announced, “I think these essays are coming together and I’m writing a book. What do you think?”            

We were poets studying the necessary skills of prose to build a book-length compelling memoir. We wrestled with dialogue, constructed scenes, learned about a narrative arc. We learned to imagine ourselves into a moment in the past. We could hear our family speaking, heard their cadence, their phrasing. We discovered we could dismantle old poems and use them for parts in chapters.  

Linda said, “I’m really becoming a writer. I’m learning the moves, the decisions, what is needed next, how to structure and when to weave in dialogue. I’m so excited.” We both kept at it for years, reading each other’s work as we continued to revise, restructure, and edit our memoirs. We kept organizing events, gave readings and talks.

In my twenties, I had envied writers in Paris or Bloomsbury. I wanted a writer’s world with colleagues to talk to about my work. I suddenly realized that in Belfast, Maine, we are doing that. We are growing into the writers we dreamed about becoming as kids.

In 2018, both memoirs will be released: Elizabeth Garber’s Implosion: A Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter in June from She Writes Press, and with Linda Buckmaster’s hybrid memoir, Space Heart: A Memoir in Stages, in November from Burrows Press.  

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Linda Buckmaster has lived within a block of the Atlantic most of her life, growing up in “Space Coast” Florida during the Fifties and Sixties and being part of the back-to-the-land movement in Mid-Coast Maine in the Seventies. Her poetry, essay, and fiction have appeared in over thirty journals. Her essay, “Fallout,” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2017, and one of her pieces was listed as a Notable Essay in “Best American Essays 2013.” Linda has held residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Obras Foundation, among others, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast program of the University of Southern Maine. www.lindabuckmaster.com

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Elizabeth W. Garber is the author of Implosion: A Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter (2018) and three books of poetry, and Maine (Island Time) (2013), a collaboration of her poetry and essays with paintings and photographs of Michael Weymouth.  Three of her poems have been read on NPR on The Writer’s Almanac. She was awarded writing fellowships at Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Jentel Artist Residency Program in Wyoming, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine. www.elizabethgarber.com.

About IMPLOSION: A Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter

What could be cooler, thinks teen Elizabeth Garber in 1965, than to live in a glass house designed by her architect dad? Ever since childhood, she’s adored everything he loves—his XKE Jaguar, modern art, and his Eames black leather chair—and she’s been inspired by his passionate intensity as he teaches her about modern architecture. When Woodie receives a commission to design a high-rise dormitory—a tower of glass—for the University of Cincinnati, Elizabeth, her mother and brothers celebrate with him. But less than twenty years later, Sander Hall, the mirror-glass dormitory, will be dynamited into rubble.

Implosion: Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter delves into the life of visionary architect Woodie Garber and the collision of forces in the turbulent 1970s that caused his family to collapse. Soon after the family’s move into Woodie’s glass house, his need to control begins to strain normal bonds; and Elizabeth’s first love, a young black man, triggers his until-then hidden racism. This haunting memoir describes his descent into madness and follows Elizabeth’s inspiring journey to emerge from her abuse, gain understanding and freedom from her father’s control, and go on to become a loving mother and a healer who helps others.

About Space Heart: A Memoir In Stages

In 1962, as John Glenn orbits the earth and sea turtles lay their eggs, as they have for millennia, on wild Florida beaches just miles from Cape Canaveral, eleven-year-old Linda Buckmaster becomes one of the first children to successfully undergo open-heart surgery. Encountering more of a problem than they anticipated, surgeons improvise a solution using Teflon, a material developed for the space industry.

Through the eyes of an alcoholic rocket engineer’s daughter, Space Heart paints a picture of an era of endless optimism and television cowboys amid the looming Soviet threat. Combining prose poems, narrative memoir, and history, Buckmaster juxtaposes the natural world of Space Coast Florida in the 1950s and 60s with the cutting-edge technology of the early days of the space race.

As a young adult, Buckmaster emerges from this landscape in search of independence, road-tripping like the Beats, finding herself at Woodstock, and eventually settling in Maine as part of the ”Back to the Land” movement.In the final stage of the memoir, Buckmaster returns to the Space Coast with her troubled brother to explore the remnants of an industry in transition and to reckon with the memory of her father.

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Category: On Writing