Joshua Marie Wilkinson on “Meadow Slasher”

On "Meadow Slasher"

I wrote the bulk of my book Meadow Slasher in Chicago, seven years ago, when I suffered what I'll call for the sake of simplicity a nervous breakdown. That's a sort of shitty, generic term, I realize. What it looked like was a lot of crying. Intermittent bouts of wanting to cut myself open with a kitchen knife and then, you know, just giggling. Interrupted now and then by pacing around in my underwear to ask my dog sophisticated questions like, "Are you here with me?" and "Can I be alive, too?"

Basically, I was hearing voices. I was fielding spooky inquiries. And I was listening closely to what either was or—more likely—was not there in the apartment with me. Either way, though, I was deep in a hallucinatory fit. There were no pink elephants or flying saucers. There was just—I later identified—the voice of my father, furious with me when I was a little kid. It had come loose in my brain after all these years.

What happened to get this all started? To this day, I don't entirely know, except that I'd just broken it off with the woman I was dating about two weeks before I'd promised to join her down in Athens, GA, at the end of the semester. And I stood idiotically at the front window, where I could no more pack up the car and drive 800 miles in a southerly direction than I could tear off a big swath of toilet paper to wipe the tears and snot from my face.

I do not remember bathing or eating the four days I wrote the book. But I managed to get myself dressed. (Or maybe I didn't get undressed?) Though I had to have fed my dog, I know that—because she'll come over and sit next to you and sigh endlessly if you don't. Somehow I walked the long, single block up Hollywood Ave in Andersonville to this coffee shop on Clark Street, where the barista would let me sob in the far corner for hours as I transcribed the poem from my head onto my yellow legal pads. She played Beach House's Teen Dream over and over again, her entire shift. I guess nobody complained, or if they did, she didn't give a shit. And if you know that album, it's the perfect moody, wall-of-synthesizery-sound for letting fly what you can no longer bear keeping at bay.

I'm pretty sure that hearing their song "Silver Soul" about one hundred times saved my life. And it helped me to do something I'd not been able to do as a writer: catch hold of the voices. To copy down what the chatter and excoriation and goading was telling me. Instead of running from it—or pouring cold beer on it, which still sounds preferable, actually—I started to transcribe it. That invective, I mean. Every passing castigation, every sneering rebuke.

My dad? He wasn't a violent person, especially. His rage, though, could come out of what appeared to me like nowhere at all. And I spent most of my childhood tiptoeing through his house, concealed by my big brother's shadow, and hoping not to gain dad's notice, which might at any moment be a prologue to his wrath.

So, let me put it like this: picture a child sitting on the shore of a pond. It's a nice day, and the child is absorbed by the reflection of the trees and houses and sky on the pond's tranquil surface. Now, a man carrying a rock appears. This rock, it's the size of a big present, let's say. And the man pauses just behind the child, who is so engrossed by the stillness and beauty of the pond that he doesn't even notice the shadow of man with the rock. After a deep breath, the man heaves the huge rock over the child's head and it hits the water, splashing the child's face and body, soaking their clothes. The child gets up and turns around terrified, and the man says, "Why did you do that?"

I did grow up on a pond, but my dad never threw a rock over my head. So, that's not what my childhood was like. But this story is what my childhood felt like. Yet I told myself for three decades the following thing: can't you see how in the story nobody got hurt?

In other words, if you would've asked me what my life was like growing up, I would've mentioned the pond: Rain. Bullfrogs and turtles. Green grass. Jumping off an old rowboat into the water, swimming around with my brother all summer. That's just what I told my wife after we met one afternoon in Iowa City. I said, it was like a nice pond. Lucky for me, she asked again later what it had felt like there, down on the nice pond. And out came the rock. Up came the shadow.

I don't know what happens to a can of Pepsi if you don't open it for thirty years. But I suspect it's similar to what was going on inside my brain. So, here's my best guess: in the can of soda, the bulk of the carbonated fluid's probably vaporized to sticky dust. I'd bet there's a layer of syrup coating the inside of the aluminum. And I'd bet the can's metal is weaker, more bendy, easier to rip. (Sure, I can look it up on YouTube or whatever. But it's my metaphor, and maybe I need to be wrong to be able to make it work.) Anyway, what I'm saying is that my dad's voice is like the sickly syrup remnant in the can. It's not even sugar and water anymore. It's just a shadowy stain of whatever chemicals they've deteriorated into.

And, look, it's desolate stuff—Meadow Slasher's a single, long poem carved into aborted sonnets, eleven lines apiece, with no turn. No volta, in the parlance of prosody. Meaning the sonnets don't twist back and offer the reader some clever witticism about what led there—they just keep plodding through the dark wood, deeper and deeper.

So, what are we doing when we are writing? I do not know. I'm not being coy. I really don't. But it leads me to consider what thinking about the past actually is. Which brings me to a couple of quotes I can't slip free of. Not sure if it was Winnicott or R.D. Laing who said most of what we are doing when we're thinking is talking to other people in our own minds. That still doesn't seem wrong to me at all. And lately I like Charles D'Ambrosio's sentiment that "all thinking is a kind of homesickness." That little gem probably haunts just about everything I write these days, too.

I'd been snapped out of the trance—by getting every shred of the poem out of me, then by reading it back aloud to myself, and, most likely, by blabbing to my therapist Garry about it. Then my old friend Solan came to Chicago for a visit from Alaska, and he let me read the whole thing to him.

Pretty soon, I was like that kid in high school who had finally composed his own histrionic piece of shit opus on acoustic guitar and made you to sit still and listen to it for the longest twelve minutes of your life. Many friends obliged. I should thank them by name, but other than John Cleary and Lisa Wells, they declined to have their names associated with it here. And fuck it, I mean: who could blame them?

Not long after, Solan composed a pretty haunting little banjo score to it and we took Meadow Slasher on the road that fall—for about twenty readings from Atlanta to Seattle—with some poet friends: Abraham Smith, Mathias Svalina, and Jaswinder Bolina.

One night, we performed it in Boise, Idaho, and a young woman in the front row wept through the whole reading. When I recited a big hunk of it in Tucson, the poet Jane Miller cackled sporadically throughout—two hundred other people seated around her were stone silent. These both felt like the moment in Good Will Hunting when Matt Damon says to Robin Williams "I read your book last night" and Williams says, "So, you're the one." I had two people who got it. One sobbing, the other laughing. And I mean this in all seriousness: thank you. Maybe Meadow Slasher will land somewhere for you when you need it. For your sake, I hope not. But if it finds you, may it hit the surface a little further out, lest it graze your head.