I regularly attend a poetry critique group in Ann Arbor, MI called the Crazy Wisdom Poetry Circle, named after the bookstore and tea shop where we used to meet before the pandemic. The experienced poets there have come to accept the sad and overly personal poems and flash pieces I write and help me craft them into something that sometimes almost sounds like real writing. One of them once told me “You always write from a place of longing. That’s a good place to write from.” I realized he was right. I find it hard to share what I write with the people I love. When I am in a good relationship, I write about bad ones; when I love someone, I write about missing them.
When I read Ben Teasdale’s piece “Exit Wounds,” I realized that even though Teasdale is less than half my age, he was writing from that same place of longing. In his story the narrator fears breaking up with his lover because he still longs for her half a world away, just as he longs for the father he never really had. His father’s woundedness inhabits the piece, haunts it and brings it to life. We learn that this piano-playing unemployed construction worker with a missing finger seems to fail miserably at being a father. He loses his job, attempts suicide and is in and out of psych hospitals. Yet he fathers from his very pain and from his humanness, his love is as palpable in the story as his failures are.
My own non-fiction narrative “Legacy” is about wounded fathers and wounded sons. Like Teasdale’s piece, it is about redemption through love. Fathers can never be the fathers they want to be, at least I never could. They can only love from their woundedness. Sometimes that seems like so very little, but for Teasdale and for my son maybe it can be enough.
Greg Mahr is an academic psychiatrist in Detroit. He has published poetry and flash fiction in a number of journals, including Intima, CHEST, Flash Fiction, Third Wednesday and Peninsula Poets. His non-fiction book “The Wisdom and Science of Dreams” will be published by Routledge Press early in 2022. His essay “Legacy” appears in the Spring 2021 Intima.