Manspreading by Mickey Schommer

Alison

by Adrienne Pine

Alison revealed her past to me one April morning in 2015, as we ate a late breakfast in the elegant Georgian Room of the Fairmont Olympic Hotel. I had accompanied my husband to Seattle, where he was to receive an award at a professional convention. Except for the awards ceremony, my days were free. Alison had come to meet me in Seattle from her home in a small town in the middle of the state of Washington where she had established a psychotherapy practice. I was touched that she had planned a stopover on the way to see her mother in Portland, Oregon, to coincide with my visit.

For the previous five years, Alison and I had participated in an online group of women poets. Once a month, we shared poems and offered comments and suggestions about each other’s work. We were all older women, we had been writing poetry for years, and we had no axes to grind. There was little backand-forth, and we were free to ignore each other’s comments. Privy to each other’s themes, language, and concerns, we connected entirely through the written word. Until this breakfast with Alison, I had never seen any of the other poets or spoken with them.

Alison instructed me to meet her on a street corner between our hotels. We identified each other right away. She was small and slender, with wavy dark blond hair cut across her forehead in a bang and curling softly below her ears. Through the translucent skin on her face and hands, I glimpsed the blue traceries of veins. She looked somewhat frail and was dressed warmly against the April chill.

We shared memories of our days at Columbia’s School of the Arts. The year after I graduated, she arrived, so we had not overlapped. In the late seventies and early eighties, the faculty was nearly exclusively male, and we recalled the sexist atmosphere. I remembered only two classes taught by women, both fiction-writing workshops. Poetry was strictly in the domain of men, and some of the teachers preyed on female students. Indeed, I witnessed such behavior in a future Nobel Prize winner. I complained to the department about an unpleasant encounter I had with another poetry workshop instructor. It took guts for me, because the office administrator who received the complaint was the instructor’s wife. She didn’t seem too surprised. Not long after that, she left her husband for the director of the department, another poet.

That was the way things were in those days. At its worst, the culture was predatory, abusive, and soul-destroying. In between was a whole gamut of behaviors.

Alison and I went on to talk about how our lives had evolved. She opted for adventure and freedom, and I chose stability and security. My husband and I got married the year I graduated from Columbia. We still live in the same neighborhood, where we raised a daughter. While I am happy with my quiet domesticity, I found myself drawn by the romance of Alison’s life.

During her years in New York, she lived with her boyfriend, a corporate lawyer, in a high-rise apartment on the Upper East Side. Although he supported her, she paid in other ways. She was his arm candy, obliged to attend functions in which she had no interest. She came to feel she was living in a cage, and she resented his social expectations of her. One day she woke up, and she knew that she didn’t want to live like that anymore, and her boyfriend wasn’t right for her. In a matter of weeks, she departed for the West Coast, where she had grown up, and where she had always intended to return.

After Alison left New York, she found a ramshackle home in an artists’ community in Seattle. While living there, she got involved with another writer. Together they shipped out on a fishing boat up to Alaska. Back then you could get seasonal work on the boats, she said, and a lot of artists did it. It was a way to see some of the most spectacular scenery you could imagine and get paid for it. However, the relationship with her boyfriend soon frayed. Their writing territories infringed on each other. Suspicion and competition divided them.

On the boat, Alison met another man, a visual artist. He was strikingly handsome, and they fell in love. She left the writer for the painter. Their turbulent romance lasted over a decade.

Eventually Alison married a photographer, became a psychotherapist, and established a clinical practice in a small town in the middle of Washington State. She settled there because her husband was drawn to the beauty of the valley. Eventually he succumbed to a chronic fatal disease, leaving her a widow.

Alison’s poetry was unique, elliptical yet piercing, philosophical and sensual, abstract yet concrete. It jumped from subject to subject, showing the workings of an agile mind in pursuit of its inner logic. Her poetry did not apologize for its difficulty, and it was difficult, not a poetry most people had patience for. I admired Alison for that, even as I responded to the challenge of reading and commenting on her poetry.

* * *

Imagine an insular artistic community in a town surrounded by the Cascade Mountains, where, night after summer night, people gather in a pub as high as a barn overlooking a river. This was the town where Alison had lived for twenty years with her photographer husband, stricken with Huntington’s disease: “that wolf,” as Alison wrote in a poem, “that tore into his brain and body,/then stalked us here from Alaska/south through Canada,/settling on the mountain crests above our hidden valley.”