Debut author! Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn, LOOSE OF EARTH: A Memoir
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens, and I am the host of this podcast, Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:07]I am also a newly minted USA Today best-selling author of the novel, Blake, and created
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[0:26]or join the community at ZippyReaders.
[0:31]Kathleen Dorsey Blackburn is the author of Loose of Earth, a memoir.
[0:36]Kathleen teaches in the University of Chicago Creative Writing Program.
[0:39]She is a push guard prize nominee, whose work has appeared in Colorado Review, Guernica,
[0:44]Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and Swamp Pink, and was listed as a notable, in Best American
[0:48]Essays.
[0:49]Welcome, Kathleen.
[0:50]Thank you so much for coming on Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Loose of Earth
[0:55]a memoir.
[0:56]Thank you.
[0:57]I'm delighted to be here.
[0:59]I've just been so excited.
[1:00]I love the podcast, and it's sort of a dream just to be in conversation with you,
[1:06]and I'm so grateful for all that you do for books and love your work, so thank you for
[1:11]this conversation.
[1:12]Thank you for saying that.
[1:14]I read your book in basically one sitting, and at the end I was crying, and my kids
[1:21]came over, and were like, Mom, are you okay?
[1:24]And I was like, I just had to sit there, and I was like, you guys, I just read the
[1:28]so sad.
[1:29]I mean, it's happened, I was like her, you know, or I mean, it's not a spoiler to say
[1:33]your dad died, and that's part of the book, but it was so moving.
[1:38]I just, I haven't cried, like, physically cried at a book in a long time where I just had
[1:44]to sit there and like kind of recover, and not to say it was all tear, you know, not to
[1:49]say it was like, you know, an unpleasant reading experience, you know, it just was so moving.
[1:55]Anyway, you're a beautiful writer, and the book was so moving, and oh my gosh, anyway.
[2:02]Oh, that means a lot to me.
[2:04]Thank you.
[2:05]You know, one of my writing heroes and teachers was the great writer, Dennis Covington,
[2:11]and he said when he would lose kind of hope in the manuscript he was working on, but if
[2:17]he picked it up and it made him, it still could make him cry.
[2:20]There was something there.
[2:22]So I think of tears as one of the, it certainly wasn't, I didn't want to manipulate, you
[2:27]know, in any way, but I do think I take tears as a compliment.
[2:32]If I can see you, yes, it is a compliment, it is a total compliment, and your writing is
[2:38]so beautiful.
[2:39]I mean, I know I just said that, like maybe I could read a few passages as we're talking,
[2:43]but just the way that you explain even the most ordinary things.
[2:47]Like I was thinking about it after, like what did you do?
[2:50]Basically you told the, well, you should describe it, but the way you told about a period
[2:55]of time in your life, which could have been told in eight million different ways, right?
[3:00]But you told it through like the beauty of language and all these specific little details
[3:05]and moments, but then you used words to make it like art.
[3:11]Anyway, wow, that's beautifully.
[3:13]Thank you.
[3:14]Tell everybody about the book and I'm sorry for just, you know, dumping this.
[3:18]I just, it was just very, very moving.
[3:20]Oh, oh my gosh, no, everywhere you've shared as a gift, I'm grateful to you.
[3:26]You know, I'll talk about what the book is about, but I also just want to quickly say that
[3:32]I feel like the only way I got through writing it was just by holding on for dear life
[3:39]to the language and to the sentences and the craft of working on those sentences.
[3:45]So it means a lot to hear you say that this is a memoir about growing up in West Texas.
[3:53]I was 12 years old, the oldest of five kids.
[3:57]My family were white, evangelical, conservatives.
[4:02]My parents homeschooled, they extended that skepticism of public education to a lot of
[4:10]institutions, including the medical industry, even though they themselves had backgrounds
[4:16]in the sciences.
[4:17]My dad was a pilot, a former Air Force pilot gone commercial with a bachelor's in civil engineering
[4:24]and my mom was a veterinarian.
[4:27]My dad was also really robust, a marathon runner and about six months after he completed
[4:35]actually the New York City marathon with an average of an eight minute mile pace.
[4:41]He was suddenly and shockingly diagnosed with late stage early onset colon cancer and given
[4:47]a very short time to live.
[4:50]And this diagnosis kicked our beliefs into high gear rather than following the medical
[4:57]advice to start rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, which the doctors said might extend
[5:04]his life a little bit, but we're talking at the months level.
[5:09]My parents wanted a cure and when the doctors couldn't offer that, we started seeking
[5:15]out faith healers all across West Texas, of which there were no shortage.
[5:22]What we didn't know at the time was that my dad, like I said, he had been in the Air
[5:29]Force.
[5:30]He was third generation Air Force.
[5:32]He had grown up in and around military sites most of his life and in researching this
[5:39]book and writing it, I discovered that the groundwater, which was the source of the drinking
[5:45]water at most of the military sites where he lived and worked, had been contaminated
[5:51]by really dangerous amounts of carcinogenic chemicals that don't break down once they enter
[5:58]the environment called PFAS or forever chemicals.
[6:01]So this is a story about my family's desperate attempt to save my dad's life, but it's
[6:10]also about this environmental context that we had no idea about and sort of, you know,
[6:17]I think doing what a lot of us do as we become adults, we try to make sense of a past
[6:24]that didn't make any sense at the time.
[6:28]And the environmental element to the story was just the, like the, the, the straw that
[6:35]broke the camel's back, you know, that this could have been prevented and then to extrapolate
[6:40]and think, oh my gosh, how many families went through exactly what you were going through
[6:46]with this 38 year old dad, I mean, she was so young.
[6:50]Yes.
[6:51]Yes.
[6:52]I know.
[6:53]I'm 39 and in that age, I was talking to my aunt, my dad's sister who was really instrumental
[7:00]issues of character in the book and she was at very instrumental in me kind of finding
[7:05]this larger context of my dad's life and story.
[7:09]And I said to her the other day, the older I get, the younger he gets, he just turned
[7:15]70 and she said, tell me about it, you know, yeah, it was, that was part of what was shocking.
[7:20]It was that he was 38.
[7:22]I was 12 and our, my youngest sister at the time of his diagnosis with just one year
[7:29]old, you know, this was not how he saw his life going.
[7:35]You're right that, you know, part of the really overwhelming at times and troubling part
[7:41]of the PFAS story is that we, I mean, this is, you know, there's a lot of more coverage
[7:46]of this now, but there are millions of people living in the US who have been exposed
[7:53]unknowingly to PFAS that have been released into the environment with impunity.
[8:00]And so there's, you know, there's a lot of work to be done to address the issue.
[8:07]So one thing that you did in the writing was from time to time, you would take your
[8:12]dad's perspective, even though it was a memoir, right?
[8:15]So you have seen like where he is looking at himself in the mirror at his at your grandparents
[8:21]house and reflecting on, you know, why is he bleeding and did it, you know, what are these
[8:27]symptoms?
[8:28]Could he keep ignoring them and realizing that, you know, his, his sometimes even
[8:33]verging on, you know, husky if he didn't watch it body was actually for the first time
[8:39]thin and realizing, oh my gosh, I think something's actually wrong with me.
[8:44]And you're not even in that moment, like that's just a moment with him, himself, like,
[8:50]and yet it becomes a piece of the narrative that deepened sort of all of the suspense
[8:55]because even though you tell it from you as a child, there are so many scenes where we
[9:01]have this sort of older person's narrative and, you know, different viewpoints.
[9:06]So talk a little bit about that.
[9:08]Yeah.
[9:09]Oh, I'm so glad you asked about that.
[9:11]So, you know, one of the challenges of writing about him is that he had been gone 19 years
[9:19]when I started this book.
[9:21]It's now been 25 years.
[9:24]And I wanted to honor the reality of his life.
[9:30]You know, I think sometimes grief can create a sort of glowing nostalgia around a person.
[9:36]They can take on sort of mythic proportions.
[9:38]And my dad's certainly did, he was, you know, talked about as almost like an angel.
[9:44]And he, any was a very gentle kind person, but certainly had his flaws.
[9:52]But one of the ways of exploring him on the page was I thought I became so curious about
[9:59]just the reality of...
[10:00]was living in his physical body.
[10:03]And what was it like for him to feel physically
[10:09]and witness in all the ways we are aware of our own bodies,
[10:14]the changes that were happening,
[10:16]even as he was claiming God is gonna heal me, I'm not dying,
[10:20]which was the dissonance that he was living in
[10:24]because of the way my family decided to pursue
[10:28]like this idea, honestly, of a literal miracle.
[10:32]So, you know, I don't know about you, Zibi,
[10:36]but when you have a family,
[10:38]sometimes the only private place you can find
[10:41]is a bathroom.
[10:42]I didn't know when I was, you know,
[10:44]I have a two-year-old now.
[10:46]And I was the oldest of all those five kids.
[10:49]And, you know, sometimes my only alone time,
[10:52]anyone in our house had was in a bathroom.
[10:56]If you were lucky, you know,
[10:57]if the toddler didn't follow you in.
[11:00]And so I wanted to, I thought,
[11:03]what were those moments in the bathroom like for him,
[11:07]where he had to face the symptoms of his cancer
[11:11]and look in the mirror and see the changes
[11:13]that were happening?
[11:15]What did he tell himself in the privacy
[11:18]when he didn't need to be strong for my mom,
[11:21]or for my siblings and me?
[11:24]And I gave myself the creative license
[11:27]that a fiction writer gives themselves
[11:30]to use the imaginative act of storytelling
[11:34]to empathize with my father, to think about it.
[11:39]And I definitely let the reader know,
[11:41]you know, this is something I'm imagining.
[11:44]But I felt that it was one of the ways I could honor
[11:48]the texture of him actually having been alive
[11:52]and not just this golden boy memory.
[11:55]What's physicality of being alive and inhabiting a body?
[11:59]And I'm just, I'm just thinking about those ways
[12:02]we are in private where the contradictions we hold
[12:06]can really surface.
[12:08]And I think that I can't help but think
[12:10]that must have been happening there.
[12:12]And my his sister told me that occasionally he would call
[12:17]her privately while he was looking in the mirror
[12:21]and say, you know, I can see that I'm changing.
[12:24]So that helped to give me a window
[12:26]into exploring that, you know,
[12:29]even though I can't verify that's exactly
[12:32]what was going through is, oh my gosh.
[12:35]You had one passage where you say that until you wrote
[12:40]about it, you hadn't even thought about it.
[12:42]And this is the whole coding scene
[12:44]which I know is just very powerful for you and everything.
[12:47]Can I just read these two paragraphs?
[12:49]Is that okay?
[12:51]You wrote, I will never know if my father took the coding again.
[12:54]I hope that he did that when I think back,
[12:56]remembering signs of his physical discomfort, I doubt it.
[12:59]The answer is locked within the privacy of my parents' marriage
[13:02]where I wish the question had stayed from the start.
[13:04]Within an hour of my calling her that wretched afternoon
[13:07]my mother came home.
[13:08]I remember seeing her stand next to dad
[13:10]and I can recall the two of them murmuring together.
[13:13]My father nodding wildly, though who was reassuring whom
[13:16]is unclear.
[13:17]As adults, my sister Carson admitted to me
[13:20]that in her memory, mom once told her
[13:22]the dad asked her to hide the coding from him
[13:25]knowing his temptation would become too great.
[13:27]The two versions don't seem irreconcilable to me.
[13:30]20 years passed before I could put language
[13:32]to that afternoon.
[13:33]My shame has been so great.
[13:35]I was at work on this memoir for a year
[13:37]before I could write about it.
[13:38]I can look back now and see that denying my father relief
[13:42]from his pain was an inevitable consequence
[13:44]of my beliefs at the time, though this recognition
[13:46]offers little comfort to me now.
[13:48]It is ironic, though, that by completing
[13:50]a test of my faith without wavering,
[13:53]I felt the first cracks in my identity
[13:55]as an evangelical Christian, though the fissures were subtle
[13:58]and the breach would widen slowly over time.
[14:01]When my father was not healed that afternoon,
[14:04]I began to view the reality of my situation
[14:06]with dual vision, seeing that he was dying,
[14:08]allowed me to recognize he was full of life.
[14:11]I should have been filled with fear,
[14:13]but instead I felt for the first time in a year,
[14:15]the comfort of my father's presence,
[14:17]though I continued to speak the script of healing
[14:19]as needed, mystery, found room, next to certainty.
[14:24]Oh, so good.
[14:27]Thank you for sharing that stuff.
[14:28]So good.
[14:30]So interestingly, not only did you decide to put this in
[14:34]and you can talk about the scene with Cody
[14:36]and why this was a point of shame for you,
[14:39]but then you were reflecting the memoir itself
[14:41]about thinking about it in the memoir
[14:44]in this very sort of meta moment.
[14:47]Talk about both sides of that.
[14:49]Yes, I will.
[14:50]You know, I think that I think it was Freud
[14:54]that said that, you know, in dream interpretation,
[14:59]the interpretation that you most resist
[15:03]is the one that holds the most true.
[15:06]And this memory around denying my father
[15:11]coding, because I loved him.
[15:14]You know, he was my safe person.
[15:17]We had a good connection.
[15:19]One of the things that filled me with a kind of terror
[15:23]about this story and about myself
[15:27]was the ways in which there are moments of tenderness
[15:31]in the story, but there are also moments
[15:34]where we see people denying the people they love the most.
[15:40]Acknowledgement of what they're going through
[15:42]and relief from their pain.
[15:44]And so like, you know, the passage that you just read,
[15:48]I can, what I believed, what we believed was that
[15:52]the cancer, the cancer symptoms were actually symptoms
[15:56]of like a spiritual test.
[16:00]And that we just had to face them and deny them
[16:04]and it would save his life.
[16:07]So I was, as I wrote the story,
[16:10]I could feel the gravitational pull
[16:13]that absolutely the narrative was heading toward this moment
[16:18]that I least wanted to go.
[16:21]I, this is the place I least wanted to go.
[16:23]And then as I say, took me such a long time to write
[16:27]or to even talk about, but it was crucial.
[16:30]It was crucial for making sense of what was happening
[16:35]at that time.
[16:37]And it also like just it happened.
[16:40]You know, it was, it happened.
[16:42]And it belonged in the story.
[16:45]That was part of my contract and honesty
[16:48]and embarking on this memoir in the first place
[16:51]was being willing to go anywhere to me.
[16:54]So the meta sort of quality, that reflective quality,
[16:59]the most interesting tension to me in any memoir
[17:03]is attention between the past and the present.
[17:08]I'll read something that has the most dramatic material,
[17:13]but what I'm looking for is that tension
[17:15]and I'll read quiet memoir.
[17:17]And that's what I want is that they wanna know
[17:20]how are you making sense of the past?
[17:23]In the early drafts of writing this,
[17:27]I didn't have the reflection.
[17:29]I just had to write the scene and spend kind of some,
[17:33]sit in and see how long I could sit in.
[17:35]And with each sort of, I revised a lot.
[17:38]And so in each sort of revision,
[17:40]I'd expand the scene more and more.
[17:43]To me revision and for a lot of writers,
[17:47]it's a process of discovery.
[17:50]So it wasn't until I got that coding chapter fully
[17:54]on the page that I could even know what to reflect upon.
[17:58]Oh, so that reflection came in really much later.
[18:03]In the writing process.
[18:06]And it was not a reflection that would make everything
[18:09]that happened, okay, individually to live with.
[18:13]And it was my editor, the brilliant Casey Catrell,
[18:16]who invited me further.
[18:19]He said, you know, can you talk about
[18:22]what this memory means to you now?
[18:25]Because we're also only doing that at very key moments
[18:27]and then a little bit more.
[18:29]So not only did I sort of flinch it
[18:31]writing the original memory,
[18:33]I was really uncertain of what the reflection would be.
[18:39]But that's what the page is there for.
[18:42]And uncertainty is part of memoir.
[18:45]And you know, we don't have to write.
[18:48]We don't have to write with certainty.
[18:51]So, yeah, that's how I thought about that part.
[18:54]Another piece of the story that I was struck by continually
[18:59]is how much responsibility
[19:00]you were given at such a young age for all of your siblings.
[19:04]And when your parents had to go to the hospital
[19:07]for the diagnosis and when they were in the NICU
[19:09]with your sister and just all these periods of time.
[19:13]And they're like, okay, you're in charge age 11.
[19:16]You know, and I'm like, oh my gosh, you guys here.
[19:20]Like my I have a 10 year old.
[19:21]I'm like asking me for Cheerios.
[19:23]I'm like, seriously, like get your own.
[19:26]I'm not getting you Cheerios anymore.
[19:28]And laying down the law, you can do that yourself.
[19:31]And you are taking care of an army of children.
[19:35]And they're not listening to you.
[19:38]And you're so frustrated.
[19:39]And you're just like, I can't.
[19:41]And you keep calling the NICU to be like
[19:43]bratting on your siblings because you're a kid.
[19:46]So the contrast of that and like putting such an
[19:50]outsized responsibility on someone so young
[19:53]and bearing the weight of that.
[19:55]And then also contending with the fear and.
[20:00]unknown of all the big deal grown-up things that were
[20:04]First in the hospital and then literally brought into your home in a way where you experienced it so much that your sister became a nurse
[20:10]I mean, it's a lot. I mean, how do you how do you how do you think about that now?
[20:16]And I know you you reflect on it in the bug, but you know now you have a kid like how are you thinking about that?
[20:22]Oh, well, well, I'm going to be completely honest having a kid at the age of 36 and actually being his mother has been a lot easier
[20:35]I can't imagine what
[20:40]No, you know, there was just um it was so interesting. I felt and I know
[20:48]You know talking with so many women who have kids or care for
[20:54]Someone else. I know that this is not a unique feeling. I felt
[21:00]Like I was failing at every turn as an 11-year-old and 12-year-old with with my siblings in terms of just
[21:10]Because I wasn't their mother and you know, and I now know that even if I had been they wouldn't have listened to me
[21:15]But you know at the time and it was there was no way to succeed. There was no way to
[21:22]Give them everything that they needed and before I
[21:27]Had my my son
[21:30]I started to feel a lot of fear
[21:34]The failure that had that I had experienced as I said having such a large care-taking role in my siblings lives
[21:41]Extended into what kind of mom am I gonna be and it was really strange. It was like I had this thought like I'm gonna fail again
[21:50]I now know like that accompanies motherhood this
[21:54]Fear of failure this endless and bottomless love for another person
[22:00]That it again it goes back to this theme in a way of like how can we love someone
[22:06]So so much and still be inadequate in moments for them
[22:10]And that to me. This is one of the conundrums of of motherhood, but I felt it pretty
[22:17]Early with my siblings. That said
[22:21]They were the best part of my childhood to we were friends
[22:27]I had just you know three sisters and a brother
[22:30]And we played together
[22:33]We also seriously bonded
[22:36]And we lived just kind of by comparison with some isolated life, you know
[22:41]We were all from schooled and we learned everything together
[22:46]Writing about them in this book
[22:50]Was such a joy. I loved remembering. I laughed thinking about my sister who's two years younger than me
[22:58]Telling me she was not going to help set the table because and only because I asked
[23:06]And I loved remembering what it felt like to sleep next to them at night their warm bodies
[23:12]So it was really it's really been an it was really interesting to kind of hold the fact that this was a it was hard
[23:20]And I I wouldn't
[23:22]Raise my kid this way and yet some of the most sacred beautiful memories. I have are from
[23:29]The closeness and care. We had for one another. You know
[23:35]What has happened in your life between
[23:38]Then and now I mean there's kind of some blank spaces
[23:42]Yeah in the narrative
[23:45]So what happened after you know in the yeah, I mean in the immediate aftermath
[23:49]I feel like we get a glimpse, but yeah, did you end up doing
[23:53]This such I mean there's a there's such a that's such a good question and with the original
[23:59]Manuscript actually went several years beyond the point where my father passes away as you say
[24:06]I've like this epilogue that leaps more to the present day and I try to catch people up to speed to an extent
[24:13]But there is you know, I do think that the story raises this question of
[24:18]What's going to happen to this family now?
[24:21]It doesn't feel auspicious
[24:24]deals, it there's some
[24:26]What does a family do when they have completely built themselves around a belief system and that thing they were believing for
[24:36]Doesn't come through
[24:38]So I am and working on
[24:41]The next memoir that is about that aftermath about grief
[24:46]Well, it did to my family. You know that there's a the first line of the last chapter is when does faith come to gree
[24:55]It's thinking about that. It was hard. You know that we we clung to each other
[25:01]My my like I said, I'm the age that my dad was when he died. I'm the age that my mom was when she became a widow with five children
[25:09]and she lost the love of her life
[25:12]and
[25:13]You know, I was traveling with my two-year-old and his dad couldn't come and he kept asking where's where's dad?
[25:21]And I thought so much about my mom the grief. It was an unbelievable blow
[25:27]So and and just like in this story there were moments. I think
[25:31]profundity and there were moments of
[25:34]Of a brutality. I know that's a little vague
[25:39]But that's that's sort of what happened. We're all in touch now
[25:43]We love each other. We have varying degrees of relationships to the past
[25:48]I left West Texas when I was 25 years old for graduate school
[25:52]My sisters felt like I was abandoning them. I felt like I was abandoning them
[25:56]And that was at the age of 25
[25:59]I mean that the bond
[26:02]was complicated but very strong. I will say this my father has felt closer
[26:08]in the
[26:09]last six years of working on this book and in the 19 years prior
[26:15]So you left West Texas
[26:17]You went to the Red School for writing. I'm assuming
[26:20]And then what did you do?
[26:23]I went back
[26:25]Okay, I was homesick and I thought you know
[26:29]I thought I you know to vote but cliche. I thought I could go back
[26:34]So I moved back to West Texas. I moved back to Lubbock
[26:37]There was a man in my life at the time that gave me a good reason to do so
[26:42]But the reasons were way more complicated
[26:45]Than just a bad relationship. They were they were of
[26:49]They were about that was the beginning of kind of sort of feeling the true severing of my presence self
[26:56]For my past self and when I moved back to West Texas
[27:00]I felt like I was inhabiting the ghost town of my childhood if that makes sense
[27:05]I could like I could remember parts of myself that were attached to different places
[27:11]But I myself
[27:13]Was changed to some extent. I didn't feel that I belonged there in the same way
[27:19]I still think of it as home
[27:21]But yeah, I'm in a purely practical sense. I lived there for two years
[27:26]At the person who is my husband now and then we moved to Chicago and we've been there for eight years writing and
[27:33]Starting a family together amazing
[27:35]Well, I could talk to you all day about this book. There's so much. I feel like we just scratched the surface and
[27:40]You know
[27:41]Congratulations on writing it. I hope it was helpful for you. It's gonna help a lot of people
[27:46]I didn't I couldn't find you on Instagram, but I there is a book
[27:49]By Genevieve Kingston about losing her mother at age 11
[27:52]And I want to put the two of you in conversation together because you are very different perspectives
[27:57]but both had to deal with terminally ill parents and
[28:01]And that sounds like a wall thing good time, but I really do think it would be an interesting conversation
[28:06]And the two of you would have I would love to be in touch with her
[28:10]You know, I think it's amazing. I know you've been experiencing this with your movement through the world that the way that when you tell a story
[28:19]You hear other people's stories our stories start to resonate together and form a more complete picture
[28:25]And that's the power of it. So yeah, I would I would love to meet her and then I'm at the quiet wildlife
[28:32]That's my Instagram handle wildlife. Yes. Yes. All right. I will find you
[28:37]Well, thank you so much and we'll be in touch. Thank you so much. All right. Bye bye
[28:43]Thanks for listening to mom's don't have time to read books
[28:47]If you love it, please leave a review and follow us on social at city Owens and at city readers