Love, Cinema, Writing, Race, & Death

By Prageeta Sharma

It was my birthday this past weekend and I'm recovering from a busy trip to Butte, Montana where I was hosted by poet and scholar Isabel Sobral Campos, at Montana Tech, and was invited to talk about writing in the West, particularly to talk about race and creative writing. I handed out poems I knew from the Poetry Foundation website by Sherwin Bitsui, Bhanu Kapil, M.L. Smoker, and Claudia Rankine. And told the group about a conference that Joanna Klink and I hosted on race, creative writing, and literary studies. It has since turned into an association—with an incredible board of writers, scholars, artists, and thinkers—and I will talk more about that in another blog. Upon arrival back to Missoula, I had a party on Friday and was surrounded by an astonishingly kind and spirited group of friends. I feel blessed by it. And given last year's birthday was the worst of my life, I'm shocked by how different one year can be. I feel some lightness that I never thought I could feel, followed (naturally) by the painful awareness that it could not be shared with Dale, but I'm trying to understand that grieving creates this thought process and a set of feelings that work this way.

During the first several months of grieving I would have despised and loathed anybody who wrote about feeling lightness after death, but I am doing it now because I think it's important to document the truth of what death and widowhood does. It takes you down a hole of hell. It changes you and it might change you to see or endure in ways that feel raw and complicated, and maybe you never get out of the hole, that happens for sure. But you can also feel its deep pain—feel humiliated by how your feelings about the world shift, change, obstruct, and teach you about how you learn to measure time.

Read the full essay on the Poetry Foundation website.