Authors: J. A. Jance
After the Fire
DEDICATION, FIRST EDITION:
FOR J.J.T.J.
If it weren't for the rocks in its bed, the stream would have no song.
DEDICATION, SECOND EDITION:
FOR W.A.S.
Thanks for making the second half of my life happy. It turns out there are still songs, even when there are no rocks.
DEDICATION, THIRD EDITION:
FOR ALICE.
Thanks for bringing it home.
Preface
This book of poetry is also a book about addiction and the insidious way in which it destroys relationships. On the surface, one might think it is only about my first husband's eventually fatal relationship with alcohol. But it is also, just as clearly, the story of my own addictionâthe one that linked me to my husband and to my own unwavering determination to save him from himself, whether or not he wanted to be saved. It is a story of hurt and loss and betrayal. It is also a story of hope.
It was 1968 when I first began writing these poems. I was a twenty-four-year-old newlywed who had written a children's book that garnered a kind letter from an editor at a New York publishing house. The editor told me that if I was willing to make changes in the manuscript, she would consider publishing it. Thrilled, I showed the letter to my husband, expecting him to be as happy about it as I was. Instead, the letter provoked a firefight. My husband, who had been allowed into a university-level creative writing class that had been closed to me, took a dim view of the possibility that some of my work might be published.
“There's only going to be one writer in our family,” he told me. “And I am it.”
The way he said the words made it clear that if I wanted to preserve our marriage, I would put my writing ambitions away and leave them there. Which is what I didâfor the next fourteen years.
In a way neither of us understood, my husband's “one writer” statement was correct. There would be only one published writer in our family, but he wasn't it. Although he wrote constantly, scribbling columns across page after page of graph paper, nothing that came from his hand ever made it into actual print. He was content to imitate Faulkner and Hemingway primarily by drinking too much and writing too little, but at the time he laid down the law, I was still utterly dazzled by his self-proclaimed potential.
The one thing that separates writers from other people is that they write. From 1968 to 1973, my husband and I were teachers in Sells, Arizona, on the Tohono O'odham reservation west of Tucson. He taught high school English and Spanish while I was a Kâ12 librarian. We lived in a little rented house on King's Anvil Ranch, thirty miles east of Sells near the community of Three Points. The closest neighbor and/or telephone was literally miles away.
On those long, solitary evenings, after my husband fell asleepâNo, wait. What's surprising to me is that even all these years later, my first instinct is still to minimize how bad things were back then, but that's how denial works. What I should have said is: On those long, solitary evenings, after my husband passed out in front of the blaring television set, there was no one for me to talk to and very little to keep me occupied. Married but essentially alone, I turned to writing poetry. Initially I thought what I was doing was art, plain and simple. Poetry offered a way of looking at ordinary objects or events and turning them into something beautiful. That's how the poems in this book startedâas “art.”
The poetry was written over the course of several years. The various verses were jotted down on stray pieces of lined yellow paper and tossed into the strongbox that also held our birth certificates and marriage certificate. Eventually it would hold our children's birth certificates as well. At that point in my life I was incapable of seeing that I was using poetry as a prism through which to examine what was going on in my own life. The artifice of “art” allowed me to maintain emotional distance. I could look at what was happening without ever having to come to terms with what was going on in my marriage. It spared me the harsh reality and hard work of actually doing something to change our disaster-bound direction. Looking at my poetry with the benefit of hindsight, I see how, as early as 1968, a part of me understood that my marriage was doomed, even though I was a good twelve years from admitting it or taking appropriate and necessary action.
Eighteen months after I finally got a divorce, within a few minutes of midnight on New Year's Eve 1982, my first husband died of chronic alcoholism at age forty-two. His death sent me back to the strongbox, looking for those important pieces of paper death requires: birth certificates for him and for our two children, along with our marriage certificate and my divorce decree. There, lurking among those official documents, I found the collection of scribbled poems. Reading through them in 1983 was like seeing my life in instant replay. I could recall where I was when I wrote each individual poem and what events had provoked it. Other people reading the poems urged me to try to publish them, and I did.
After the Fire
came out in 1984 under the auspices of a small Seattle-area publisher.
In June 1985, I did one of my first poetry readings at a retreat sponsored by Widowed Information Consultation Services of King County (WICS). It was there that I met a man whose first wife had succumbed to breast cancer after seven years of debilitating illness. She died within a few minutes of midnight on New Year's Eve 1984. Her grieving husband and I struck up a conversation based on the shared coincidence of having a spouse die on New Year's Eve. Our similar experiences with a dying spouse led quickly to an extraordinary closeness. Six months later, to the dismay of our five adolescent children, we told them, “You're not the Brady Bunch, but you'll do,” and we got married. That was twenty-eight years, several weddings, six grandchildren, and many dogs ago. But it's why I consider
After the Fire
to be my most important bookâthe one that changed the course of my life for the better.
In the years since then, while writing and publicizing my mysteries, I've squeezed in a few poetry readings along the way. At readings I've tried to give my audience the background stories and to tell them where I was and what was going on in my life when I wrote the various poems.
People often tell me that the poetry has touched them and that my story has spoken to them and resonated in a very personal way. They confide that many of the same things happened to them. Several have even written to say that
After the Fire
inspired them to make much-needed changes in their own lives.
Several months ago, the latest version of the book went out of print and all rights to it reverted to me. Since that time any number of people have asked when the poetry would once again be available; a version with the background stories brought current seemed to be in order.
The poems here are, with one exception, arranged in chronological orderâthe way I wrote them and the way I lived them as well. I have written some poetry since 1984, but not much. For one thing, I've been too busy and far too happy. For me, writing poetry and being happy don't seem to mix.
If there's a message in all this, I want it to be one of encouragement to those who are themselves caught up in impossible relationships. I hope the book speaks to some of those folks who have lost all hope and who believe that, for them, nothing will ever be better. Ozymandias may have said, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” I say, “Look on mine and know things can be better.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was caught up in the women's movement. I read Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem. I also burned a bra, but that's another story. At the time, it was easier for me to be mad at all men in general than it was for me to take a close look at the particular man to whom I was married.
While I was working on the Tohono O'odham reservation, a friend and I drove more than two hundred miles after school one afternoon to hear Gloria Steinem speak. She was funny, intelligent, and witty. Throughout the talk, my friend, a Native American and the mother of five, a woman who had never lived off the reservation, laughed at all the jokes and nodded in agreement.
When we left the hall after the speech, my friend turned to me and said, “I always thought it was because I was an Indian.”
As we used to say back in those days, “Click!”
To speak, to hear, to know
For the first time that the problem
Is not to be Black or White or Indian
But to be woman, female,
And all the other ugly epithetsâ
Broad, bitch, whoreâ
That go with being born
Without a penis.
There is strength and hope
In knowing that the common denominator
Is, in fact, a caprice of nature,
A simple matter of plumbing.
And once the knowledge that the problem
Is not singular but is the birthright
Of half the world's populationâ
Once that knowledge sinks inâ
What follows will make
The shot heard round the world
Seem a mere firecracker.
My husband was a beginning high school English teacher and I a school librarian. There wasn't much money to start with, but my husband drank prodigiously, which made our financial situation even more precarious. For me, staying home and raising kids was never the same kind of option that it had been for my mother, who, it turned out, had managed to stay home and raise seven kids on even less money, but with a husbandâmy fatherâwho wasn't a drinker and who brought his paychecks home instead of cashing them at bars. Years later, on a Sunday afternoon, my five-year-old son would ask, “But, Dad, why don't you go to a bank to cash a check?” It was a good questionâone I should have been asking my husband a long time earlier.
As a relative newlywed, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be able to stay home and look after children. Since such an existence didn't seem to be in the cards for me, I managed to convince myself that I wouldn't be any good at it. Besides, I was a college graduate. Wouldn't my education be wasted if I did nothing but stay home? It was what my mother did, but she had no more than a seventh-grade education. Certainly her headstrong daughter could do better than that!
For years I prided myself on the fact that, since my daughter was born at the beginning of Christmas vacation, I missed only three days of school due to childbirth. Forty-plus years later, I no longer see that in such a positive light.