Storyteller of the Week

 Martha Deed

 

 

 

Martha Deed is a retired Psychologist whose father, an editor of Young America Magazines, would take her to his office in midtown Manhattan. There, before age 10, she sat at a typewriter writing her stories while her father wrote his.  At home, if you wanted to write, you would be excused from drying dishes. In 1958, as editor-in-chief of her high school newspaper, she promptly had her first editorial censored.

Her maternal grandmother was an early teacher.  Daughter and granddaughter of The Long-Islander publishers with close connections to Walt Whitman, this grandmother wrote news features in the 1910s but was primarily a well-published poet and essayist when she taught me how to craft my writing into stories others would read.  

College followed as a history major at Carleton College, a psychology major at The New School for Social Research and a PhD in Psychology and Pastoral Care from Boston University.  At Carleton, Reed Whittemore, later poet to the Library of Congress, accepted her for individual teaching, a seminal experience in her development as a writer.  During college, she published ten class-assigned history and psych papers along with a few poems.

For the next 30 years, she wrote professional and freelance stories on child custody, family violence for newspapers and professional journals and presentations, keeping her practice small enough to accommodate half-time writing.  She was active in professional affairs, serving on national task forces and as president of the New York State Psychological Association’s Clinical Division.

Martha has been writing full time since 2001, has published 10 nonfiction and poetry collections, collaborated with her daughter Millie Niss (died 2009) on award-winning web art and videos, seven chapbooks and individual poems in dozens of publications. Most recently:  New Verse News, ONE ART, BlazeVox Journal, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Unlikelystories, Earth’s Daughters, The Skinny Journal.  

FootHills Publishing has published her collections Climate Change (2015), Under the Rock (2019), Haunted by Martha (2023).  Her fourth collection, The House on Sweeney Street is forthcoming from FootHills.  Sweeney documents the history of her house and the land beneath it on the Erie Canal in North Tonawanda, NY.

By Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

Martha Deed’s skill as a storyteller is evident from the first line of these historical poems.


Aunt Flora's Letter

Stony Brook. Jan.24.1910
 

Dear Marian.
You will be surprised
to learn that Uncle Ernest has gone
to the other world

It's like the hawk that sweeps through the yard each day
too swift to be named ‒ a constant ‒ now in one tree
now in another, but invisible ‒ until ‒ almost by accident ‒
it appears in your glass ‒ perched in a tree ‒ flies ‒
in your glass ‒ a Red-tailed Hawk

It's not about x's and y's
or even exes and why's
(although that comes close)

or the inconsistent nature of orthography
and punctuation a hundred years ago

It's about scratching 200 years of mold
off gravestones by the sea ‒
with your fingernails ‒
in a place you never heard of ‒ before ‒
in a place you've never seen or visited

It's about scraps of truth scattered
across decades of familiarity by familiars
who did not know
they were writing in code

You tell me their words mock ‒

If you were writing to “Dear Marian”
would you sign your postal with your
birthplace and birth date
your parents' names and census code?

Did you mean to be obscure
when you told her the surprising news
of Uncle Ernest's death at the TB camp
before you had the chance to visit
and say good-bye?

Did you expect a future reader to understand
that “Aunt” my not be Aunt
“Uncle” might not be Uncle
but rather ‒ honorifics bestowed
upon grown-up intimates when affection
made “Mr” and “Mrs” a formal comedy?

Did you care that someone down the line
(although maybe not down your line)
would be enlightened by your hints?

Your vivid description of his dying
at odds with custom of the day ‒
deaths “duly noted” ‒ the burial notice
nothing more ‒ then gone

It turns out that you were a nurse
and that explains everything you detailed
like the nurses in our family who carry
medical discussion along with turkey and pie
to the Thanksgiving table

Actually, did you even think
in your grief
anyone else would read your letter
a century hence?

There was no need to explain yourself
between your tears and your precise detail

and Marian would keep that letter
crisp ‒ clear as the day it was written ‒
through dislocations and other deaths
and why we may never know

It's about looking for the bony truth in the weeds
knowing when you have found it.

 
 
A Dilapidated House in Cheerful Light

1

The houses in the Village
are all here, she says
your 2nd  and 3d  great-
grandfathers' newspaper office
the baker's house
the lawyer's house
(on the harbor near his yacht)

the great-grandmother's house of your grandmother
and the father's house of your grandmother ‒
all in smart repair
(though two take boarders now)

two centuries worth of family houses
for you to see  ‒ save one

I am so sorry to tell you
it is under the parking lot
between New and Green Streets ‒
the house, the barn, the fruit trees
the gardens kept by your aunts and 2nd
great grandmother for family use ‒
gone ‒ scraped flat ‒
the only greenery those imported
planter trees among the cars,
the only animals, that Cedar
Waxwing stretching in the sun
atop that phony tree

the loss of your family's first home
only heightened by the yellow house
still standing across the street ‒
a yellow house with gray steps
a metal overhang that is surely new ‒
Old Mrs. Silliman's house until
 ‒ too old to live alone ‒
she moved across the street
and down the block
to the house that disappeared

so sad, but the cars came
and money with them
we had to find a place for them
after all these years

our ripening economy
has spoiled your first visit

2

The house that Mother Silliman left ‒
described on a Building-Structure Inventory
Form in September 1979

3 bay, 2 ½ story sidehall entrance house with deep
fascia board.  Doorway has sidelights and transom
flanking pilasters; pilasters supporting cornice
surrounding all

It is one of the earliest houses still standing
in the neighborhood

and her daughter's house you cannot see described
in February of 1872:

I don't see much prospect of Father
selling his land, and seems so dreary this Winter
in Huntington.  We all Grand Mother included
want to go to Brooklyn, but I suppose it will be
impossible for Father to go, and perhaps
I do wrong in being dissatisfied   
what encouragement is there in staying
in such a dilapidated looking place
as this is I try and brace myself up
and look at things in a cheerful light,
but I get so low spirited

to erase this house
it is neither onerous nor expensive
when there are roads to be built
and traffic jams to be relieved in 1934

there are no buildings upon this land
which would great simplify the costs

3
         
that the recommendation for the demolition
of the old editor's house is printed in the old
editor's newspaper which has long survived
both the old editor and his house causes
the Good Wife's ghost to

look at things in a cheerful light

The Cannonball Poems

1

The rock garden was made of boulders
lush Maryland ivies and mosses
under oaks and maples
located in the curve of a driveway
shaded place to sit on one of those boulders
to read, to think
undisturbed

I chased a baseball in there
reached into mud
and found
a cannonball
a spring thaw had thrust
up
into my hand

I let my father
authenticate it
at the Smithsonian

I let a big girl
8th grader
take it to school for Show and Tell

and
the cannonball fell out of her desk
(this is what she said)
and her teacher took it
until the end of the school year
she said

and never gave it back
and my parents made no protest
and I lost a piece of history
and faith in my parents' protection

it was the first theft


2

This grudge I have carried for 60 years
it is no weightier than that cannonball
memories spiced with the ground pepper
of parents' failure to protect their children
from bittersweet cruelty and greed
(the sweet pleasuring only the tongue of the thief)

This grudge has caused me little trouble
I water it with memory from time to time
I sigh over it
I wish it sat by my fireplace
where I could study it for clues

Which side was it on?
Did the man or boy who shot it
survive that war?

3

    Virginia Man Killed in Civil War Cannonball Blast
    – Associated Press, May 02, 2008

Cannonballs explode!
Who knew?
The father who loved birds
but would not permit his kids
to pick up feathers
(lest they catch some dread disease)
didn't know.  He drove my rock garden bomb
in our 1948 gray Mercury Coupe with the shelf
in the back for a spare brother
into Washington, DC for authentication
before the days when such things
were tested radiographically
for a cache of shrapnel made fragile by time. . .

. . . could explode on a classroom floor
or near the Capitol or White House
ninety years after
the Rebels failed in their attempt –
it could have killed a Union man

Did it fall on the classroom floor
of a school built on a Rockville battleground?
Or did the thief – child or adult –
make up that mischief
take it home to sit on his/her
fireplace hearth
the fire heating it?

Those parents who failed to protect
a child's treasure
through submission to a stranger's
covetous intention
may have/might have
saved her life

And so the old woman
who was their child
forgives them
posthumously


Interrogations

She rides her pony bareback and bridle-less across the fields of Barberry Bend named – she believes – for the turn in the road on Rt 97 as it passes the four towers that mark the curved driveway to the house with its generous porches to catch Summer breezes on hundred-degree days and wide enough for games of Monkey in the Middle when it rains and this nine year-old girl can scarcely believe the freedom of 80 acres of woods and streams and fields to roam, her parents fortunately clueless to the dangers of the land, although they warn her not to mention the Civil War, the White Only toilets, the segregated schools, they tell her that Maryland acts more Southern than Georgia because Maryland is on the border with the North and that is why they speak with more drawl than a Virginian, and furthermore, the Civil War has not ended here, because the South has not yet won, so it is fine to play with the sharecropper's daughter who shares her first name, but best not to talk politics with her either, and what can be said and what can be done is flipped on this farm, because in her Hudson River village, her parents understood the dangers of the streets and cars and nasty people, but you could say what you liked and bring children of other races and cultures home to play or go to their houses to play, because after all, the War was just over and there were refugees and everyone knew how bad leaders could get in 1948, but they did not consider the dangers of riding alone out of earshot on a pony on a farm, though they lectured on the dangers of riding bicycles alone on empty streets in the village, because if you fell you could cut yourself or worse, but they did not imagine the actions of the child on her pony fording creeks or jumping over branches and boulders, hitting the ground five times in one afternoon, after the riding instructor said if you fall off a horse five times, you will be a good rider, and she wanted to get it over with.