In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jana-Lee Germaine

“February at the Johnsons’” is about a woman going through a divorce. Where did this poem come from?

I was right out of college when I married for the first time. It was a disaster, an abusive relationship. That didn’t make leaving any easier, though, because I was still in love with the person he had been before he started to hurt me.  

The end of a marriage is difficult regardless of the circumstances; when we were splitting in two what had been a whole unit, there was incredible pain. The physical act of dividing up joint property was a reflection of what was happening on the emotional level.

I found comfort in repetitive movement and routine—packing and repacking boxes, running the same circuit every day, repeating a scripted prayer for help. It was incredibly hard to stay still. I craved movement, but movement that didn’t require deep thought, because at that point merely existing took up all my emotional and mental energy. 

Penelope showed up in a very early draft—she who is the literary symbol of the faithful wife, undoing all her work at night to postpone a forced marriage to someone else. I began thinking of the alternative Penelope, no longer a wife, unpacking and repacking the same few boxes every night as she sought to be faithful to herself, now, instead of to a philandering (or in my case abusive) husband.

There’s so much beautiful specificity surrounding the division of the kitchen items; why did you choose to focus on that part of the house in the first half?

I chose it for several reasons. First, for me, the kitchen was a symbol of his controlling nature. I was a vegetarian when we got married, but he didn’t allow me to do the grocery shopping and forced me to eat meat during our marriage. So there was a lot of emotional weight around kitchen items in particular. 

There is also something so intimate about a kitchen and the importance of sharing meals together. As a picture of the excruciating nature of divorce, it works really well: you take something that had been a symbol of family and fellowship and start ripping every piece of it in two. 

Then there’s the idea of “equitable division of property”—rigorously dividing everything in equal portions. It served as another tool of punishment for me, but there was also an element of the ridiculous in the midst of the sadness of dividing a kitchen full of tools. Counting out forks to make sure each person gets exactly half. Taking turns picking the unique or singular items: I took my favorite dish towels, he took the big, manly carving knife. Good riddance to the knife; I had gone vegan when I first left him anyway. 

While there’s the tension between this woman and her husband, there’s also this looming Other Couple—the Johnsons. Can you talk about how you find that their presence influences the text?

In terms of the narrative, when I left my husband, I lived for six months with a married couple whom I had known since childhood. It was one of those incredible situations; I was living halfway across the country from where I grew up, and it just so happened that these friends had bought a house half a mile from my apartment. So it was a safe space—they had known me before the abuse but also knew the self that I had lost under the abuse. I trusted them in a way I couldn’t trust myself at that time. They were incredibly kind and loving. And yet, I was an extra in their lives—the long-term houseguest. I lived in the back spare bedroom, cooked in a kitchen that didn’t belong to me, and used their utensils and furniture while everything from my marriage was boxed in their basement until I figured out my next move. I was never completely at home because it wasn’t my home; it was their happy house and full lives, and I carried my brokenness around with me as I tried to figure out how to begin healing. Their life wasn’t my life, their friends weren’t my friends; I had to figure out who I was and what my life was going to look like now. I lived in fear, too, as a result of the abuse; it’s why I wouldn’t answer the door if I was home alone unless I knew the caller. 

The use of couplets in the poem up until the end when the couplet is split have such a wonderful significance, punctuated with, “learning to divide a life.” When did this structure appear in your editing process?

Unless I have a specific form that I’m writing in, I tend to write my early drafts in one big block and worry about stanza lengths and breaks later in the process.  I focus more on line breaks first. When I write, I allow myself to overwrite to begin with, adding anything that feels like it might fit into my early drafts, and then spend my revision process ruthlessly cutting out unnecessary lines, images, and words. Once I feel like my lines are set, then I start thinking about how stanza lengths and structure will deepen the poem, and where those breaks are needed to slow the poem down or add breath.  

I also tend to write slowly—it can take several years, sometimes, to finish a poem. Most of my poems go through many, many drafts. This allows me the freedom to experiment without losing an earlier draft that may have something I want to return to. 

This was one of those poems that took me a long time to get right. It wasn’t until draft 24 that I split it into couplets—prior to that I played with varying stanza lengths and with only the last line dropped down alone. But it never quite worked. Once I split it into couplets, though, the whole thing opened up for me—I saw the couplets as the married couple and then the split couplet at the end as mirroring the impending divorce. It took me a long time to see that in the poem. It’s why I’ve learned to trust my subconscious; it so often leads me to the right solution in a poetry problem before my conscious mind can figure it out. People call it trusting the poem or trusting your instinct, but what it really means is that your subconscious mind has been working away steadily on something—for days, or months, or years—and will provide you with the answer when it’s ready if you can get the part of you that wants to force things in a certain direction out of the way and trust the process. 

What themes do you find that your work revolves around?

My first manuscript, which I’m planning to finish this fall, centers around the long road of healing and recovery from that abusive marriage. For a long time after I escaped, I thought I’d never be happy again, but I did heal; I found that I’d grown in ways I’d never expected. It was a horrible experience, but I don’t regret it. It’s shaped who I am today. However, it took me a good ten years to have enough emotional distance to be able to start writing about that period of my life. “February at the Johnsons’” is in that manuscript. 

I’m also a mom of four, and so motherhood themes enter into some of my work, especially recently. Although I don’t write specifically about my kids a lot, my worldview is filtered through the identity of motherhood. I also have a relationship with God, and so spiritual issues find their way into my poetry. I love being outdoors; the natural world has a huge presence in much of what I write, particularly in the way it can layer meaning into our human experience and emotions. My husband sometimes rolls his eyes and asks, “another bird???” when he reads a new poem draft. Birds do seem to find their way into my poems. I love to feed the birds, too, but if I forget to bring in my bird feeders at night in summer, I discover I’ve been feeding the local black bear instead. 

What stories inspire you? Who are some of your favorite authors?

I love stories of hope, stories of redemption. Stories that make me remember what a gift our lives are. Stories of forgiveness—of choosing life over bitterness or hate. I love well-written novels because they are a counterpoint to poetry for me. I cried when I read Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country; it was incredibly powerful and beautiful. I love Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey Maturin novels—I read all 20 of them in the space of a couple months; I couldn’t put them down. The friendship between Jack and Stephen is one of the most inspiring and deeply true friendships I’ve ever read. My top books of all time include Middlemarch, War and Peace, Les Misérables, The War of the Rings trilogy and Watership Down. I’ve also got a bucket list of great classic novels I’m slowly working my way through. It’s about 5 pages long, so it’s going to take me years. When I need to laugh, though, to exult in amazing sentences and plots so twisted up it seems they could never untangle, to forget the seriousness of life for a while, I pick up P.G. Wodehouse. He’s my happy place. 

In terms of poetry authors, I’ve too many favorites. Don’t we all? But who I return to over and over – that’s Marianne Boruch, Franz Wright, Lousie Glück. Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars, Joanna Klink’s The Nightfields, and the anthology Joy: 100 poems edited by Christian Wiman. I recently finished Pablo Medina’s Sea of Broken Mirrors and have almost every poem in there starred as a favorite. I know that will definitely become one I return to often. 

What are you currently working on?

I’ve been working on my first manuscript for ten years. As I said, I’m a slow—or as I like to think of it, patient—writer. I plan to finish it this fall. I’ve also started working on poems that I know will be in a second manuscript. Those are poems that fit in a different emotional space. It feels good to stretch out into new areas and energies of writing after spending so long focusing on the themes of my first manuscript. I have a triptych of peacock poems from the two years we lived in a tiny village in England—one was in Iron Horse last year, the other two will be coming out in Poet Lore this fall. I’m writing more about challenges surrounding my elderly parents. I have a goal to write a short poem—half a page or less—that really works. I find short poems so difficult to write well. I keep thinking each new poem I start might be the one, but recently everything I’m completing ends up in the 2-3 page range. I’ll keep trying, though. 

Jana-Lee Germaine is senior poetry reader for Ploughshares. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Bracken, Chestnut Review, Tinderbox, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, EcoTheo Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. She earned an MFA from Emerson College. A survivor of domestic violence, she lives with her husband, four children, and four rescue cats in semi-rural Massachusetts. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for her local public library, and she can be found online at janaleegermaine.com.