Some pieces of writing feel less like craft and more like excavation. This one has been the second kind the entire way through.
Finished, properly finished, a long poem I have been working on for close to eight months now, about my grandmother’s emigration from Germany decades ago, a piece that has felt, the entire way through the writing process, considerably less like ordinary creative craft and considerably more like a genuine, slow excavation of family history I only partially understood before actually sitting down to try to put it into verse.
I started this poem, if I am honest, expecting it to take a few weeks, a fairly straightforward attempt to capture a family story I had heard fragments of my whole life into something more permanent and more considered than the scattered oral version passed down across dinner table conversations over the years. Eight months in, I understand now why that original estimate was so wildly, almost comically wrong. Writing about a family member’s genuine historical trauma, however many decades removed, requires a kind of careful, patient attention that simply cannot be rushed without doing real disservice to the actual weight of what happened.
I interviewed my mother extensively over these eight months, extracting details about my grandmother’s journey I genuinely had never heard before despite having grown up hearing some version of this same family story my entire life, small specific facts that only emerged through patient, repeated, deliberately gentle questioning rather than any single dramatic conversation. The poem, in its finished form, is considerably longer and considerably more specific than I originally planned, incorporating details about a particular train platform, a specific piece of luggage that apparently survived the entire journey and still sits, to this day, in my mother’s attic, details that transformed the piece from something fairly generic about emigration broadly into something specifically, irreplaceably about this one particular family’s actual experience.
Now that it is finished, properly finished, I find myself genuinely unsure whether I am ready to actually let anyone else read it yet, a hesitation I have not felt nearly this strongly about any of my previous work, including considerably more personal pieces I have shared without much difficulty in the past. I think the difference here is that this poem is not really only mine to share, in the way my own personal experiences generally are. It belongs, in some real sense, to my grandmother and my mother as well, and I feel a genuine, weighty responsibility to get its eventual public life right, to make sure it honours what actually happened rather than simply serving my own creative ambitions at the expense of a story that was never solely mine to tell in the first place.
I showed my mother a draft last week, the first person outside my own head to read any version of it, and she cried, reading it, in a way that genuinely unsettled me in the moment, uncertain whether the tears meant I had captured something true or had somehow gotten something important wrong. She told me afterward, once she had composed herself properly, that it was the first version of her mother’s story, in any medium, that had ever actually made her feel like she was standing on that train platform herself, which I am choosing to take as the single best review this poem is ever likely to receive, regardless of what happens with it publicly from here.
I do not know yet where, or whether, I will eventually submit it anywhere. For now, I am simply letting it exist, finished, private, sitting in my own notebook while I figure out what kind of public life, if any, feels appropriate for a piece that carries this much weight beyond just my own individual creative ambition. Some poems, I am learning, genuinely need more time to settle after they are finished than the actual writing itself required, and I am trying, for once, to be genuinely patient with that specific process rather than rushing toward publication the way I usually do.
I called my grandmother’s remaining younger sister, my great-aunt, who still lives in Germany and who I have spoken with only a handful of times over the years given the distance and the language barrier neither of us has ever quite fully bridged, specifically to ask whether she would be willing to read the poem once it felt ready, translated as best I can manage with my own fairly limited German. She agreed immediately, with a warmth that genuinely surprised me given how infrequently we actually speak, and mentioned, almost in passing, that she has her own memories of that same emigration I have never properly heard, an entirely different vantage point on the same family story that I am now, cautiously, beginning to realise this poem may need to eventually grow to include.
That conversation has left me wondering whether eight months was ever really going to be the true endpoint of this particular project, or whether I have simply finished the first proper draft of something considerably larger than I originally understood myself to be writing. I do not know yet. I am trying to hold that uncertainty loosely rather than letting it become its own separate source of pressure, but I will admit the poem feels, tonight, considerably less finished than it did even a few days ago, before this particular phone call reopened a door I thought I had already carefully closed.
More from this author at Lotte Heidenreich, prat.uk.