Suzy Harris

Oyster River Pages: How has your writing or art changed over time?

Suzy Harris: I had my first poem published when I was in college and then nothing for 40 years while immersed in work and family. I came back to writing from a much different place in my life. My college poems were angsty, free form, and kind of opaque. Now I like more structure, more narrative. I am more interested in clarity than in self-expression; I am more aware of voice, tone and balance. There are some advantages to life experience!

ORP: Do you consider your writing/artistic time to be work or play?

SH: Play for sure. I like to play with words, play with watercolors and oil pastel crayons. I like how this play takes up all the space in my mind and body.

ORP: What’s next for you artistically?

SH: I like the concept of embodied poetics as it shows up in the work of poets like Tess Gallagher, Paulann Petersen and Claudia Savage. I’d like to explore this more in my poetry writing and reading. I want to start taking Feldenkrais classes and find out whether being more aware of movement changes the way I write.

ORP: How does this work connect to your personal experiences/identity?

SH: It’s an odd story. I never met my maternal grandfather. By report and photos, he was a handsome man, impulsive and overreaching with his money, perhaps a ladies’ man. As a young man, he came into an inheritance when his father died, and spent the money on a horse farm in Wisconsin, bringing race horses over from Ireland, buying a lake house. I believe this was also the time he bought some part of the Big Mar as an investment. He and my grandmother divorced when my mother was 13. Not long after, during the Depression, he lost the farm and the lake house, but somehow hung on to the Big Mar. (Or possibly he bought it later – the records are obfuscated.) He was friends with Selma Moss, a successful business woman in New Orleans, who bought an interest in the property from him. Or perhaps they were investors together from the beginning. When my grandfather died, his share of property went to my mother and her two siblings, and when my mother died, her share was divided between me and my six siblings. There are now more than thirty people with “undivided” interest in the property, which is almost entirely underwater.  About five years ago, I connected with a grandson of Selma Moss who lives in Baton Rouge and has the biggest share of ownership of the Big Mar property. He took my husband and I out on a jet boat to show us. He was the one who told me about the 1927 flood. The damage of Katrina was still visible everywhere. This was in 2015, ten years after the hurricane. There was something about vulnerability and tenacity, the value of sediment in a watery place, resourcefulness, loss and renewal – it was my first experience in the Delta and it spoke to me in a visceral way.

Suzy Harris is a retired attorney. Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Rain, VoiceCatcher, Windfall, anthologies published by the Poetry Box, and an anthology called Come Shining: Essays and Poems on Writing in a Dark Time. She has several poems forthcoming in an anthology called Body Politic: Illustrated poems about the body and disability. She lives in Portland, OR. Read Suzy’s poem in our Delta issue here.