“Our hopes for healing must be bigger than ourselves”: An Interview With Poet Eugenia Leigh
April is National Poetry Month, so my boss—in the Gchat space labeled “Silly Room!” as a catch-all for anything non-work-related—asked people to share favorite poems. Hafez and Mary Oliver and William Carlos Williams made appearances. Good poems with a throughline of uplift.
I shared Eugenia Leigh’s “The First Leaf,” which is the second poem in her new collection, Bianca (Four Way Books). It includes the lines, in reference to a parent, “And I / think how for decades, I was grateful you never killed me. How / that was enough to make me think you loved me.”
The line that got me, though, was in reference to the narrator’s own child: “The distance between him alive and him dead / is how well I am.”
Then it occurred to me that I’d just shared a poem about parents murdering, or potentially murdering, their children in a space where the worst crime, so far, was the theft of plums from an icebox.
I was briefly consumed by a feeling that pervades the pages of Bianca, which is about generational trauma and bipolar disorder and mothering and grace and healing and sometimes not healing but fighting not to die. It was the feeling of being too much for the room, of being drama, of being a type of Bianca, the name Eugenia gives to her youthful alter ego who is always stirring up trouble. But it is the exact kind of poetry I need these days.
When I met Eugenia many years ago, she was an intern at my office, a different office, and there was nothing overtly Bianca-like about her. Neither of us were parents yet. I still hadn’t discovered the depths of my own rage and grief. But we were both already writers, already navigating the world via language that was more intense, perhaps, than our day-job personas allowed.
Reading Bianca was like being lit on fire and given the salve all at once. Interviewing Eugenia, on the other side of so many words and life experiences, was an honor.
CK: I was struck by how multiple generations are present in so many poems. I’m thinking especially of “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with Han,” in which you write “To be Korean / is to house rage…. I, too, / want to believe my violence / isn’t all mine.” How does a multi-generational understanding of trauma, mental illness, and collective suffering help the healing process?
EL: I think a multi-generational understanding of trauma complicates the healing process. Whether this means it helps the healing process is hard to say. Growing more aware of the generational trauma we’ve inherited on top of our lived trauma reminds me that healing on an individual level is not enough. Our hopes for healing must be bigger than ourselves. Healing must happen on a communal level for true, effective, long-lasting healing to happen at all.
You wrote that powerful essay for Time about parenting with mental illness, which feels like a companion piece to Bianca. I think of poetry as the language of the soul—it translates raw emotion in a way that straightforward prose can’t quite touch. For example, the line in “June Fourteenth,” “I scan the day for traces of soot / sullying this honeyed life” nails PTSD, that feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop (in this case, after a miscarriage). This is a long lead-up to asking, how does poetry help you process things or arrive at truths that might otherwise feel out of reach?
Thank you for reading that essay and linking it to Bianca. I do think poetry can give us a quick, direct injection of emotion and experience that is harder to accomplish through prose. “The economy of the line,” poets like to say. Poems can distill a whole lifetime of feelings into a single image or line that stays with us and reverberates until we, the readers, find ourselves writing in the rest with our own histories, our own pain. Poetry gives us both the room and the push we need to arrive at the hard truths we’ve been avoiding or haven’t had the space or the quiet to acknowledge and move through.
What was most exciting to you about writing this book? What was hardest or scariest?
The most exciting thing was coming to the realization that I was writing a book at all! For a long while, I didn’t believe I had a second book in me, and the thought was both terrifying and demoralizing. After a first book, there is a lot of fear. Partly because you lose or outgrow the voice of that first book and confront the reality that you must face the blank page again and find your next voice.
After my first book was published, the earliest poems I wrote sounded like bad parodies of myself. I was trying to be “Past Eugenia Leigh” without the faintest idea of who “Future Eugenia Leigh” was, and I was unprepared for how distressing that liminal period would be. I found my current therapist during the lowest moment of that low, and she relentlessly reminded me of the cocoon metaphor, or rather, cliché. I was in the cocoon, she insisted. And the butterfly stage would come. I would write again. But I remember thinking she couldn’t possibly know this with such confidence. I thought it was utter crap. I’m glad to see now that she was right.
How has being a mother impacted your writing (both in terms of content and process)?
Before I became a mother, I was someone who’d spend hours “preparing” to write before actually writing. I would migrate from coffee shop to coffee shop until I found the right ambience, I would scan Spotify for hours to find the right song to loop, I would doomscroll through the news. My son was nine months old when I finally invested in childcare so that I’d have time to write. We found a lovely woman who could care for him ten hours a week. The first time I sat in a coffee shop (the closest one to my apartment) as a mom, I cried for most of the five hours I had because I knew that wasn’t enough time to find a song and doomscroll, let alone make a poem. How was I supposed to write without my weird rituals?
The second time, I forced myself to purge those anxieties into a journal quickly. Then I did some math. I had ten hours a week and only 52 weeks in a year. If I didn’t force myself to write during the little time I had, it would never get done. That pressure somehow evolved into a discipline. Then six months later, I lost my childcare. Then just as I was about to search for a new person, the pandemic hit.
But the discipline stayed with me, and I found myself able to squeeze in a bit of writing during naps or in the evenings in a way that simply hadn’t been possible before. I’d heard those legends about poets such as Marie Ponsot who had seven children and supposedly wrote poems in her car during the ten minutes she had while waiting to pick up her kids from school. And I never believed those stories. Now I do believe them. She was a mother. Mothers can do inhuman amounts of work during tiny scraps of time. But it takes a while for us to recognize this ability in ourselves.
In terms of content, becoming a mother gave me access to a lifetime of repressed rage. Those mama bear metaphors are spot-on. I will do anything to protect my child. And now, I’m finally pissed off at all the people who did not protect me.
We talked a little bit about this over social media, but your book was really an arrow to my heart in the best way. I had my first serious mental health crisis after a miscarriage in 2011, and was unpleasantly surprised to have a repeat of post-traumatic stress, intense anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive intrusive thoughts after we adopted our second baby last summer. When you write about fearing that your husband will fall off a stepladder and leave you a widow, it resonated so much—that kind of anxiety/depression is like a black light illuminating all the possible things that could go wrong. So first, thank you for writing this book. And second, what helps you tether yourself to the present and climb out of those thought patterns?
I really appreciate you sharing about your journey and your own struggles, Cheryl. I’ve always admired the way you can be so forthright about the three-dimensionality of your experiences—how you articulate the hopeful, the good, but also the ugly. It’s also always helpful to know I’m not alone in those anxieties, so thank you.
I think what helps me ground myself and pull myself away from those thoughts now is deepening my understanding of how, when, or why my past traumas manifest in the present. In other words, becoming more aware of my “triggers.” My therapist occasionally likes to practice Internal Family Systems, which uses the idea that we are made up of many parts and that all these parts are welcome.
And when a younger, abused part comes to the surface, we say she is “flooding the system” and demanding to be heard. She will react disproportionately to an event because of a fear related to her experiences. Like when I freaked out about my husband climbing a step stool. So when I am worked up and experiencing this rush of anxiety, I’ve learned to ask, “How old do I feel right now?” And then I try to connect that age to an unprocessed negative memory from that time. But the key is for me to locate my 2023 self, the “Higher Self,” so that she can be the one to reassure that younger part that I am actually safe now. There is no danger here. And once that conversation begins to happen, my younger self gradually becomes separate from my present-day self, and I’m able to return to the present. It’s not always this simple or this easy, but it’s the most effective tool I have so far.
I loved these lines in “Matrescence”: “When I fear I am / the kind of mother my mother was, / I have to keep in mind / the end: she did eventually take the three of us / and flee.” To me it speaks to how having grace toward yourself is inherently intertwined with having grace toward others. How do you try to model this very hard-won worldview for your son?
Oh this is so hard. I do think recognizing our own humanity and imperfections helps us to be more gracious toward others. My son has always been very hard on himself since he was a baby. Just truly unable to face the possibility that he might have been wrong or might have made a mistake. So we love talking about the value of mistakes in our home and have amassed a fat collection of picture books about making mistakes. “Mistakes help us learn” is our mantra, and if he catches me making a mistake, I make a huge deal about it and celebrate. I think when people fail to extend grace toward others it’s oftentimes a reflection of their own self-condemnation or, on the flip side, their inability to see their own flaws in the first place. I hope that as my son learns to accept his mistakes, he will grow up to be a person who is not judgmental but is gracious toward the humans around him who are mistake-makers, too.
Anything else you want to add about the process of writing this book, or what you hope readers will take from it?
I hope readers will give themselves permission to be angry about the injustices in their lives and in the world. I want everyone to know it’s possible to be hopeful and to move toward healing while still holding your rage close.
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