Q&A: Lisa Couturier

An Interview With the Author of "The Ways I Know Her"

by Jackie Brennan

If you’re like me, “shaggy” is a word you reserve for endearing, docile creatures like Old English Sheepdogs and Scottish Highland cattle. In the beginning of “The Ways I Know Her,” Lisa Couturier uses the word to describe a barn spider. The first confrontation in the essay is between a caterpillar and a black spider—the one with the proportionally longer abdomen writhing as the other injects it with venom. The haunting image becomes an entrée for a hairier subject in the human realm, with her daughter as a focal point.

Couturier is a Marylander and a decorated poet and essayist. Her 2005 collection of essays, The Hope of Snakes was praised widely, and her essay “Dark Horse” won a Pushcart Prize in 2012. Her poetry chapbook Animals / Bodies won a New England Poetry Club Chapbook Award for the club’s centennial year in 2015. Couturier has also been recently selected to teach at the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop this June.

One of Couturier’s calling cards is her keen ability to observe wildness, even in its subtlest cameos. The skill earned her a place alongside the work of many celebrated writers in the prestigious Sowell Collection, and she draws upon the technique incisively in “The Ways I Know Her.” Prior to the May 2018 release of Grace in Darkness, Lisa answered some of my questions about her larger body of work, and this new essay—which has received two Pushcart nominations.

Jackie Brennan: How would you compare this essay to your existing work?

Lisa Couturier: I was telling a writer friend of mine, Leslie Pietrzyk—a fiction writer and so good with dialogue—that it’s probably the most human-focused essay I’ve written, since I write primarily about the nonhuman (which requires a lot less dialogue!). At the same time, the essay includes material about bats and horses and a spider and a caterpillar, all of which figure into the narrative because the nonhuman world is of course interconnected with the human. There is pain in both worlds. Loss. Hope. I always see parallels. In fact, I don’t differentiate between the two. They inform each other and move together. Though I think we sometimes forget it, the act of giving birth—which comes up as a prominent and pivotal point in this essay—crosses all boundaries regarding human and nonhuman. In this case, the paradox is that the birth of my daughter was treated so “unnaturally” with all the arrogance of supposed human knowledge. And in the end, the way she was born contributed to the loss of a natural defense system.

When I think of the essay as a whole, the “questions” really don’t differ much from my existing work. Questions of life—of how we live in the world, of how we are connected, of relationship, of ethics and responsibility, brutality, hope and love—these are the eternal questions for me, questions that play out in the lives of every living creature.

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JB: Bullying, which is central to this essay, is also in an essay you included in The Hope of Snakes. In the earlier essay, it’s from your perspective as a sister dealing with your brother’s experience. How was going through it again as a parent different?

LC: I think the biggest difference between those experiences is that through my daughter’s experience, I actually “grew up,” or “saw the light.”  And it wasn’t a good light. When I was a kid trying to protect my brother, the entire experience was insulated in the world of children’s minds and activities—and I didn’t question adults who responded one way or another. I just did what I could do to help him, which wasn’t much.

With my daughter, I came to understand that some adults really don’t care if children are bullied. They say they do, but they don’t. They look away, thinking they are encouraging their kids to be strong, resilient, and tough by allowing them to “work it out for themselves.”  I saw this attitude from nursery school right up through high school, even though, so often, our kids need, and really do want, more guidance than we give them regarding their social lives and relationships. The perfect example is that one of the girls in my essay came back into my daughter’s life years later. The girl’s mother took me aside and said something like, “Now I know what you were going through…and it’s so hard because now my daughter is experiencing it in high school.” I wish she could’ve given my daughter that empathy and understanding when she was little.

Also, of course, bullying is pervasive in our adult lives at every level. Political. Social. Cultural. Environmental. We are bullying our way through life, destroying other humans, other cultures, the environment, wildlife. Our president is a bully. It’s at every level of our lives and it seems to be getting not only stronger, but more acceptable. And it starts with our children. Even our little girls, which is also partly what I’m trying to get across in the essay—the idea that even the most seemingly innocent among us are playing out their life circumstances, and if they’re not stopped or redirected, they will continue to do so when they grow up.

JB: How long has natural science and observation been pervasive in your work?

LC: Natural science and observation have always been a part of my work, only because I like to try to see below the surface of things. I think that, ultimately, “natural science” is another form of mystery or magic. And I, myself, tend to think in emotions rather than logic. I feel that what is underneath the words of science are the inner-conflicts that are part of a feeling way of being in the world.  Really, “natural science” is a just human term for “life”—the way that we and the nonhuman world live and function together.

JB: In that vein, talk a little about your take on the label of “nature writer” and how you think it implies a false dualism.

LC: In the past “nature writing” may have focused mostly on male writers heading out “into the storm,” so to speak, on their adventures to grand and beautiful places. This genre has evolved though, so much so that it’s not just nature writing, but life writing, and it’s not just the stories of men anymore! I keep coming back to this divide between what is nature and what is human. This is the problem with the word Nature: If we keep seeing it as other, we keep having this divide, putting it beyond us rather than as part of us.

And speaking from the publishing side, having been in that industry for a long time as a magazine editor in Manhattan, I can tell you that editors go where the wind blows. They are a ravenous bunch, always looking to be ahead of the curve. If you think about it—with everything that’s happening in “nature” right now—global warming, ongoing massive storms, advances in physics, loss of species—these aren’t just metaphors for the human condition; they are the condition of the world. These are the stories that interweave in our relationships, in what we love, in who we love, in how we love, in how long we might love, in how long we might face loss, and so forth. Editors are looking for these narratives.

JB: Did anything uniformly guide your choices with section headings and tense in writing this essay? How did it come together?

LC: This essay covers a long span of time—from my daughter’s preschool years to high school. And of course as writers we must choose what events and scenes tell the story. I kept thinking back to scenes that really haunted me—scenes that, if I could, I’d do over. I had tremendous regret over a lot of decisions I’d made as a mother, and I still do. Probably all mothers do. We don’t know what we don’t know, until we know. And then it’s too late and the child is grown. Some section headings came after I wrote the scene, some before, as a way to guide the writing. There are tremendous jumps—both forward and backward in time—where I have to trust the reader’s ability to go with me, as I go back and forth, to piece together what happened to my child, and how I came to understand it all. Phillip Lopate says an essay is really just the tracking of the writer’s mind. That sounds easy enough until you try to follow those tracks and transform them into words, sentences, paragraphs. Some experiences seem, at first, beyond words, in that they are so deeply emotional. 

My initial drafts included a lot more research, especially in the birth and bullying sections. In a sense, I wanted backup. I wanted my daughter’s story to be part of the larger stories of bullying and birth. Eventually, the research weighed down the narrative. I didn’t see that initially. It’s kind of like going swimming, at first, with a raft. You want to float because you aren’t sure you can swim in those deep waters. Slowly, you slide off the raft and see that the water isn’t as deep as you thought. You can swim there. In fact, you can swim through it. That’s kind of how it felt to write this.

JB: This essay parses out some clinical diagnoses for readers. I assume some diagnoses are riskier to name than others for a lot of reasons. Did you have any misgivings in that area?

LC: Perhaps, at first. But I don’t see my child, or any child, as only their diagnosis. A diagnosis can be a double-edged sword; I understand that all too well. Yet at some point, when a child’s life is so disrupted due to the actions of others, then a diagnosis makes the invisible suffering visible. It gives you a word that makes your struggle meaningful. It gets you help. When you get help, you learn to move beyond the diagnosis.

JB: Your daughter’s trauma in this essay is heart-rending. But when I read it a second time, I was also affected by your concurrent struggle as a parent reckoning with this awful cycle you couldn’t stop. How challenging is that to write or talk about? 

LC: My background is in journalism and women’s studies. So, some of the biggest forces that drive me are justice, truth, integrity, and ethics. The paradox is that I was never a good journalist because I was NEVER objective enough. Eventually, in college, the newspaper sent me over to the editorial page to work because I had too many opinions.

At the same time, I’m a great sympathizer. I can see both sides. And there is always more than one truth. This puts me in a quandary most of time, and I had to get beyond that to write this essay. I had to speak my truth, regardless of the others in the story. This is how the research that I previously mentioned kind of floated me for a while. Eventually, I had to choose—yes, the decisions that were made during the birth of my daughter led to where we are now; the bullies who tormented her led to where we are now. All of it is a journey. And as I began to see my daughter as the hero of it, it made reckoning with it easier—easier to go back into those dark woods, so to speak. That she is an exceedingly talented artist and musician (who, by the way, now has many decent and good girls in her life) became the light I kept walking and writing toward.

I may not have been able to stop the cycle when it was happening; but I saw that in writing about it I could find a way to stop it by telling the truth of it. Writing gives you a way to re-live, to connect, to see the patterns and the larger scope of events in a life.  Those weren’t things I could see as they were happening, in real time. I had to wait until now.