Laura Read is the author of The Serious World (Boa Editions, 2025), But She Is Also Jane (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023, winner of the Juniper Prize); Dresses from the Old Country (Boa Editions, 2018); Instructions for my Mother’s Funeral (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Dorianne Laux), and The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You (winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award, 2011). Laura has been teaching creative writing, literature, and composition at Spokane Falls Community College since 1998 and poetry in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University since 2021. She served as poet laureate for the city of Spokane, where she’s lived for most of her life, from 2015-2017.
Boa: Where did the idea for a book of poems that features Sylvia Plath come from?
Read: In March of 2020, I had just finished teaching The Bell Jar to my Women Writers class when Covid hit. In April of that year I wrote an article for a local alternative weekly, The Inlander, about the students in that class and the quotes from the books we’d read the quarter before that I hoped were sustaining for all of us in quarantine. Many lines from The Bell Jar are with me always, especially during the pandemic when I and so many people I knew—and people I didn’t—were suffering from depression. One day during that spring, I remember wondering what Sylvia would think if she knew that her bell jar had descended over all of us, and I wanted to write to her and tell her. And then I realized I had many things to tell her, across the chasm of time and of not really knowing each other at all, so I started writing these poems.
Boa: Sylvia Plath has both a scholarly and a cult following. How/what does this book add to the conversation about her work that we’ve been having for 60+years?
Read: I think the poems speak to how important Plath has been to many people over the years, especially to young women. I first “met’ Sylvia Plath in a Women Writers class I was taking as a senior in college in 1992, and I felt like I’d found an important friend in her, someone who could be honest about depression, who could find humor in it, and who could make something of it in writing that could make other people feel seen and understood. In Frances McCullough’s preface to the 25th anniversary edition of The Bell Jar, the edition I teach, she says that the book endures because generations of young women still find it relevant to their lives and also “surprisingly undepressing” because of Plath’s honesty, humor, and voice. I wanted to put my voice in conversation with hers, discussing the landscapes of our different yet similar worlds, the advancements that have been made in therapy since her death, and the persistence of the devaluing of women or female-presenting individuals in our culture.
Boa: Can you talk about your choice to include Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir along with Sylvia Plath?
Read: In 2021 and 2022, I took two classes at The Brooklyn Institute on Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras, respectively. I was working on another book at the time in which these women’s writings and ideas play a role, so I wanted to study their work more deeply. Reading and discussing their work gave me ideas for poems. I didn’t know at that time that the Duras and Beauvoir poems would be part of the same book as the Plath poems, but I wondered if they could be. One day I was talking with my friend , the writer Kate Lebo, about how they might go together, and she said, “Oh yes, of course, you needed someone with whom to grow old.” Yes, that was it. Sylvia couldn’t be the listener for everything because she had died so young. After I started putting the book together, I combined the women more consciously, especially in the last “Dear Sylvia” poem.
Boa: This is a book about mental illness and health, particular to, and transcendent of, this specific moment in history. What insights into depression and recovery does it offer?
Read: What I tried to do in these poems is explore how deeply an early loss can affect the course of a person’s life, which was true of Sylvia’s life and has also been true of mine, how difficult it is to get over childhood trauma, and the possibilities therapy offers for this, especially EMDR. I tried to write about the importance of thinking and writing as well, about how the three women in this book, the woman who wrote it, and the people who will read it, have won wisdom and courage through putting words on difficult things.
Boa: The book is dedicated to Gail Reid-Gurian and Grace Abigail Wahlman, and several poems refer to these women by name. Can you talk about how/why they’re important to the story these poems tell?
Read: The dedications in this book are particularly important to me as they’re part of the story of the book. Gail Reid-Gurian was my therapist for over a decade, and I wrote about the EMDR we did together in these poems. Gail retired in March of 2023, and at my last appointment, we said we’d see each other again, but we never did because she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer three months later and died in August. Gail changed my life. I wouldn’t have been able to write these poems about depression had she not helped me to understand it in the ways she did and to escape it to the extent that I have.
The book is also dedicated to Grace Abigail Wahlman. I teach part-time in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University, and Grace was my student there, and my thesis advisee. During the 2023-24 academic year, we met every Thursday afternoon for coffee to go over her poems and talk about books and life. Grace died by suicide on April 28, 2024. I wasn’t going to include any of the poems I’ve written about and for her in this book, but then at the last minute, I did. This is a book about depression, something that sometimes people die from. Grace was important to me, and I wanted to honor her life and be honest about her suffering and her death.
