Excerpt from an interview with Kathleen Ellis conducted at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, Portland, Maine, November, 2007.

Kathleen - Vanishing Act is actually about, it’s about the death of my mother, remember she’s a Christian Scientist. Christian Scientists believe that the physical body is not a reality. And that something that my mother had to deal with as she got older.

Rob – What’s the relationship between writing this book and your mom’s passing.

Kathleen –When she died I had a few dreams in which she visited. I wrote those down. And, then, she died in the spring, and that summer a hundred poems, probably, a hundred poems just came. Just came and came and came. This is only probably fourteen fifteen poems here out of all the ones that came. There wasn’t anything else I could write about.

I’ve talked to a to of people about this and who have had the experience, this was the second parent who died. That condition of loosing both parents is a little bit different. I think in both cases, the year after, there’s both, there’s a kind of, you are in a state of numbness. If there was any kind strong relationship whether it’s, whether you were tightly connected or obliquely connected, that you go through this strange, hallucinatory stage. Many people who have lost their parents tell me this. I’d gone through a decade and a half of not being in touch with my parent. Fortunately in the last fifteen years of their lives, we reconnected which was wonderful. And, so when I lost my mother, she haunted me.

But this, this was like an overload. Definitely like an overload. And I wanted them to go away!! Actually. There were too many of them. I said “Enough! Enough!” This theme has been carried to its extent. But, they wouldn’t go away. They wouldn’t go away. And I have a writing partner, Candice Stover. Every Friday morning we talk on the phone and we workshop each other’s poems. And she said, “No, no Kathleen. You have to just keep letting them come, letting them come.” I thought, “Oh my goodness. This is gonna go on forever.” They were invasive like an exotic species. They kept invading and invading. I was reluctant to write some of them down. I just said. I can’t keep on writing these. It was a strange thing. I did feel like they had taken over my life a little bit. On the other hand, I was glad to be continuing to write. And sometimes I felt as though I was writing the same poem over and over again. I worried when I came to put them into a collection that they wouldn’t all sound like the same strand. Now, and Candice said it is like one poem but there are divisions. I am not a narrative poet. I am definitely a lyric poet. I didn’t want them to sound like a story either. I would say that they were truthful reactions and responses to the haunting that my mother was doing for that six months or so that I wrote them without stop.

TWO MOTHERS: A BRIEF EXEGESIS
OF MY LIFE AS A CHRISTIAN SCIENTIST

After Mrs. Eddy fell on the ice
in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1866
she “doubled up like a jackknife.”

Two days later, she arose and walked.
This is the story the mother told:

“Mind is All; Matter is not Mind;
therefore Matter does not exist.”
So in the beginning, we had two mothers.

The first was a body without a head.
The other, a head estranged from the body.
And mother number one believed

in number two, each day
retreating into her room of silence
and then returning as a ghost.

This is the matter that still endures:
we hear it pounding in our temples.

This is the mother who denied the world,
And this is the other we called Mummy.

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