In 1989, a year into my judgeship in Denver County Court, I began writing at night about the last week of my father’s life—trying to understand his absence from it after my interracial marriage. How could he let me go like that? The sentences I wrote, their rhythms, their flats and sharps, gave form to something I could not otherwise hold. Within months, I had a hundred pages. The grief had not disappeared, but it had shifted.Article continues after advertisement
The following summer I drove four hours to a writers’ conference in Aspen, where I enrolled in a nonfiction workshop to work on my manuscript. On the first night, the faculty poets read their work, and the room was full of anticipation and excitement. First, Carolyn Forché walked to the podium, her chestnut eyes gleaming. She spoke into the microphone with a slight whisper, describing her latest work. “It’s an anthology of witness,” she said. Witness—the word resonated with me. It was a judge’s word. She read poems that had been bottled and buried by political prisoners, or scratched onto paper and sent flying over borders by the exiled, or memorized and recited by those crazed from war and repression. Next, Sharon Olds, with her fierce intelligence, read poems of raw, domestic interiors. Finally, Bin Ramke, Denver bard and teacher, offered poems that seemed to expand outward from restless thought.
