Damian Rogers pursued a vibrant career as a poet and poetry editor, working at various magazines in New York City and Toronto. Born in Detroit, Michigan, she received her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and then her MFA in poetry from Bennington College. Her editing and writing earned her notable positions in places such as at House of Anansi Press and The Walrus, to name only a couple. Rogers has published two books of poetry: Dear Leader (2015) and Paper Radio (2009). Most recently, she has written her first full-length prose book.
An Alphabet for Joanna (2020) is a memoir about her relationship with her single mother who has dementia. In light of her new diagnosis, Rogers’ mother Joanna designed a project for herself; she was to memorize a list of one-hundred-and-fifty animal names. In the face of watching a loved one’s memories fade away, Rogers bravely captures and pieces together the fragments and harsh realities that represent a life after a dementia diagnosis. She refuses to hide from the truth, even when it becomes frightening. In the fall of 2019, Ryerson University welcomed Rogers into the Department of English. White Wall Review was fortunate to meet with Rogers and discuss her process of dealing with love, fear, and loss when encountered with an unfamiliar and ever-changing illness.
WWR: Tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming a writer.
R: I’ve been writing my whole life and it was always central to how I organized my days. I filtered most of my experiences through writing and telling stories from a very young age. I made a little one-page newspaper for my fifth-grade class, where I wrote all the stories and drew a cartoon. My grandmother was an amateur writer and my mother was very literary, so I grew up with this idea early on to be a writer, but it hadn’t really occurred to me that a job as a professional writer was an obtainable goal. That continues to be something I feel – doing this professionally still sort of feels like a fantasy.
WWR: When did you know that you wanted to become published? How did you translate your dream into a tangible goal?
R: I always fantasized about publishing when I was growing up, but I didn’t understand how publishing worked for many years. And for a long time, I was very nervous about sending my work out. I earned an MFA in poetry after moving to Canada, and even then, I think I was confused – my ambition for my work was very high but I was a little bit conflicted about what a professional writing career might look like for me. I was terrified of making mistakes in public. That was a nightmare of mine: revealing myself to be this total fraud. When I first started publishing as an arts journalist at the now-defunct Toronto paper Eye Weekly, I immediately started making mistakes in public, and it was actually a relief. I was embarrassed, but I survived. And that was a liberating lesson.
WWR: How did you pursue your career as an editor?
R: I started working as an editor in my twenties — I was the assistant editor at Poetry magazine in Chicago in the late nineties and then I moved to New York and became Copy Chief of CosmoGirl! for two years, and then I moved to Toronto and became the arts editor at Eye Weekly. All of these jobs were about working with text, but it was certainly not a classic trajectory. I bounced from a literary journal to a teen fashion magazine to an urban weekly. It was kind of like playing pinball —but there’s nothing wrong with finding different directions if one doesn’t work.
WWR: You’ve done a lot of work with poetry, but An Alphabet for Joanna is your first full-length prose book. What made you decide to go from poetry to prose?
R: I never had any intention of writing a memoir, but the material insisted upon the form. I’ve written about my mother’s illness in poems, but I had not yet thought through the way in which my mother’s illness had completely reorganized my life. I felt I needed to write my way out of the hole it put me in. It was just so all-consuming as an experience and there was nowhere else to put it. When you’re experiencing an on-going crisis and watching a loved one fade further away, there is a slow-motion quality to the way time moves that is very numbing, and writing is the only way I know how to process things that are too large for me to easily assimilate into my daily life.
WWR: What made you decide that you needed to translate your experiences with your mother into a published book?
R: I was already taking notes all the time. There was this re-doubling of experience; I was managing it, then I was already translating it into this story, trying to transform these events into something containable. I just needed to do this; I felt compelled to write this book. But I don’t know what it’s going to be like once it’s out there. I’ve been very focused on making it and showing up to answer the needs of the book, and that has not been easy. I’ve had to walk away and come back to it, and rethink and restructure, and allow it to be what it is. Poetry has prepared me a little for this relationship between a reader and their own experience with my personal story, but I have a feeling that this is going to be different. There’s no veil.
WWR: How do you feel when writing about your mother? Does it bring you closer to her to write her memories?
R: I was becoming a mother and I was reviewing my life with my mother and how her role shaped and affected me. I don’t really have a strong relationship with my father, and I don’t have any family in Canada, or regular physical contact with any family, so then my mother is my only close family member and she’s institutionalized. My husband’s family is great – they’re vibrant, active participants in our lives – but my mother is kind of a ghost to my son. I wanted to be able to get her story as clear as I could because I have this real sense of the cost of her completely disappearing. She has a particular story, like we all do, and I wanted to try to document it, or at least, my version of her story. I’m telling secrets that I wouldn’t be telling if she were well enough to be hurt by the process of bringing them into the light. I believe this is a healing act, but I’m aware too that it’s possible not everyone will see it that way.
WWR: Has writing the memoir changed your approach to writing in anyway?
R: Yeah, I’m a completely different person. A lot has changed alongside the writing, and the way I think has changed. There were several times through the process where I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish. I felt like an imposter, alone in various rented rooms, pretending to write a book. It wasn’t like I refused to do it; I lost faith in my ability to do it. As it turns out, these crises of faith are not uncommon for writers. You figure out how to write your way out of it.
WWR: Tell us about your writing process. You explain your memories about your mother as fragmented. What was it like piecing them together? How did you decide what to write?
R: I am really interested in structure and piecing together fragments. Even within the specific focus of a chapter, there were many different stories I wanted to share, but I had to let go of finding the perfect way to fit everything in. I learned to trust what was there. That’s when editors are helpful, they can tell you what isn’t working and when it’s good enough.
WWR: Did your experience as an editor make you more confident about writing?
R: The only thing that’s made me more confident about writing is writing. I actually think working as an editor can sometimes increase one’s resistance to completing your own work, because editing is satisfying in a straightforward way that writing is not. When you’re editing, you’re solving puzzles from the outside. Writing is not like that at all. It’s not that it’s easier to edit than it is to write, because editing requires a lot of creative energy, but it can be challenging to shift from that space where you’re closing loops and then live in the mess of making. It’s uncomfortable. But finishing feels great!
WWR: Now that you’ve completed your book, do you think it has changed your memories or relationship with your Mother?
R: It has allowed me to see certain patterns in my own life and certain echoes that might have been otherwise lost. I think being able to spend this much time combing through all my stories about my mother helped me recognize what I wanted to preserve. My mother and I were always compared to each other because she was young when she had me and she looked younger than she was; she was a single mother and I was an only child, and we looked alike, so there was this blurriness, and we were very close. There was an intimacy that was sometimes overwhelming, and I think the process of writing this also helped me draw a line between us.
WWR: Has writing helped you face any of your own fears about getting dementia?
R: The fear was already there, it’s in the stark facts of my genetic predisposition; not only the fact that my mother and her brother were both diagnosed with dementia, but I also got tested so I know that I carry a gene that makes me more likely to develop dementia. So that’s terrifying. My mom was very healthy; she did all these things that people say to do to protect yourself, like she did crossword puzzles and ate fish and exercised. Whatever they told her to do, she did it. I want to be motivated to make preventative lifestyle choices to decrease the risk but it’s all just a bit of a dice roll, really, as everything is. We can’t know our future. I could get hit by a car, but I probably won’t, and I probably won’t get dementia. I think in writing about it, I had to examine that anxiety, but I’m definitely not as preoccupied with it as I was a year or so ago. I’m no longer looking for the signs that I’m going down with the ship on a daily basis.
WWR: Has writing the book helped you face your mother’s diagnosis?
R: Part of the pain for me with my mother’s illness was that she was understandably terrified. That’s why I chose to be tested, I wanted to be proactive. Writing the book has helped me understand the difference between the things I can and can’t control. I’m a big believer in problem-solving and gathering information. I have escapist fantasies as well, but ultimately, I want to know the truth. That feels like a more engaged and powerful position to inhabit, to be the person who faces hard truths. My mother blocked out upsetting news, and it’s understandable with her life story why she would need to do that, but it has been important for me to not look away. One of the other reasons I’m a writer is that I want to figure something out. No book I ever write will be as difficult as this one. I feel like I’ve slain a dragon.