For Betsy Bonner, driving along the Oregon coast is “almost dangerous” — she can’t keep her eyes off the ocean. It’s electrifying. At high tide in Yachats, where the water spouts and sprays against the coastal basalt at landmarks like Thor’s Well and the Devil’s Churn, the ocean is even frightening.
It’s an emotional place for Bonner. When she knew that novelist and essayist Paul La Farge was sick with colon cancer, she took a trip to the coast. La Farge had been a good friend of hers for 20 years. He helped her when she began writing her memoir. After he passed away on Jan. 18 at age 52, she went back to the coast.
“Something feels connected to grieving in a way that feels healthy to me, going to the ocean,” Bonner said when we chatted in her office in late February.
Grief is a major theme of Bonner’s work. Her mother and her sister, both deceased, are at the heart of many of the poems in her debut collection “Round Lake.” Publishers Weekly wrote that her poetry “functions as a cathartic outlet and serves as a comforting map of emotions for anyone that has felt unnavigable sorrow.”
Despite Bonner’s concern with grief, she doesn’t seem to wallow in it. Her writing succeeds in avoiding the sensational and overly sentimental, and it shows great admiration for those who are no longer with us. Bonner carries these ghosts with her, intent on sharing their beauty and brilliance.
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It was the stirring poems of “Round Lake,” “beautiful for their elegiac tone,” which won Bonner a job teaching at the University of Oregon, according to Daniel Anderson, poetry professor and director of UO’s creative writing program. Since September, Bonner has been working as a visiting assistant professor, filling in for poetry professor Geri Doran, who went on a yearlong sabbatical. Bonner has been teaching intermediate and advanced poetry courses as well as graduate workshops and conferences.
Anderson described Bonner as lively and energetic. As a teacher, Bonner is wonderful, warm and welcoming, said Kait Leggett, MFA candidate in poetry. Bonner took the time to individualize the books that she shared with Leggett, to make sure they spoke to Leggett’s own voice as a poet. One of the books Bonner recommended, Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets,” was one Bonner herself read in grad school, and Nelson would later be an influence for Bonner’s memoir.
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Bonner hadn’t really aspired to write a memoir, but she had to find a way to tell her sister’s story.
On June 20, 2008, in a hotel room in Tijuana, Mexico, a woman died from a heroin overdose. The body didn’t match the ID in a purse nearby. The ID belonged to an Atlantis Black, who was none other than Bonner’s sister, who had disappeared fleeing felony charges in California.
Bonner hadn’t been there in Tijuana. All she had was report after report. So she was left wondering: what really happened to her sister?
This story grew into Bonner’s memoir, “The Book of Atlantis Black: The Search for a Sister Gone Missing.” It would become one ofVanity Fair’s best summer reads for July 2020 and forNPR, one of the best books of the year. Eventually.
It began with her trying to write the subject into a poem, an attempt to see through her sister’s eyes in that hotel room. But the two women in her writing group helped her realize that this story might not fit into a poem. At the same time, Bonner was struck by childhood memories that were coming to her in sentences, not lines of verse. There was so much she couldn’t understand, but prose could at least seem sensible, more sensible than poetry.
“The content dictated the form,” Bonner said. “It’s not really that I set out to write a memoir. It’s more like it was not gonna work in poetry, the narrative itself.”
It took Bonner years of building, of learning how to write a chapter. But she had support: her editor, Masie Cochran at Tin House, and her agent, Mary Krienke at Sterling Lord Literistic. She also had New York City. She let herself work at the beginning and the middle of the day and spent the end of the day attending readings and seeing friends.
“I think it would have been much more isolating if I hadn’t had a community to see,” Bonner said. “And even if I didn’t know someone, I met my partner, for example, by going to a reading in Brooklyn at a bookstore that used to exist called BookCourt. It was so wonderful.”
It was hard, writing the memoir, Bonner said, but she feels lucky. Years later, she is no longer teaching herself to write a memoir but teaching others.
Since March 2020, Bonner has been teaching a remote memoir-writing class through the 92nd Street Y, New York, a cultural and community center which offers a wide variety of classes remotely and in person. There were some students in their 20s in her class, but others were in their 60s, 70s and 80s, some cancer survivors, people who’d lived in this world a long time.
Bonner has taught people of all ages — she taught K-12 for two years at the Pierrepont School, a private school in Westport, Connecticut, with classes sometimes as small as four kids — and she has taught all over the world. Her first teaching job was on the Greek island of Paros.
She owes the opportunity to the late poet Linda Gregg. And she owes that opportunity to Marie Howe.
Howe, the author of the powerful 1998 collection “What the Living Do,” was Bonner’s poetry teacher when she was an undergraduate studying English and film at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Howe changed Bonner’s life. She recommended Bonner apply to Columbia University’s MFA program, and Bonner attended from 2000-2002. There, she took a workshop with Gregg. Bonner had worshiped Gregg’s work — she had photocopies of Gregg’s poems up on her walls as an undergraduate.
“Fellow students,” Bonner recalled, “my classmates asked me, ‘Betsy, you’re gonna have this workshop with your hero — what are you gonna do if you don’t love her? What are you gonna do? ‘Cause it’s dangerous to meet your heroes.’ And of course, I had no answer.”
Bonner met her hero, and she was fine.
Later, when Bonner was working as an administrator at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in 2007, she and Gregg had a fateful conversation over the phone while planning a dinner honoring the poet Jack Gilbert.
“Linda [Gregg] and I connected,” Bonner said, “and she asked me, ‘What are you doing? You’re a poet, and you’re administering all this. Are you writing?’ And I realized I’ve been so busy I haven’t really been writing. I’ve been doing the community thing and organizing events and organizing classes for students. And she said, ‘I really think you should get a sabbatical and teach in Greece.’”
Bonner took the chance. She taught a poetry seminar to junior-year abroad students from about 30 different institutions through Hellenic International Studies in the Arts. She also worked on manuscripts for students as a writer in residence at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts.
When Bonner had a free weekend, she wrote and she toured. As much as Bonner loved New York City, Paros had a different energy. She swam in the Aegean Sea with the sun on her skin. She felt the presence of the ancient world still there. She also visited Turkey, toured the remains of the ancient city of Ephesus.
“I had more time,” Bonner said of Greece. “I perceived that I had more time because we don’t actually ever have more or less time, right?”
Bonner wasn’t paid to teach in Greece. Only her housing was covered. But she had saved enough working at the 92nd Street Y that she wouldn’t go broke. She wanted to teach so badly that she didn’t mind being frugal. She’s been teaching ever since.
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Bonner grew up in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, a semi-rural township about 40 minutes from Philadelphia. Even in her youth, she knew she wanted to write and teach, but she also loved acting (despite having stage fright) and film. She did theater through high school, and she worked as a film projectionist at a local AMC and in college. She even worked a summer at a Blockbuster.
Bonner owes much of her creativity to her mother Marybeth, or Beth. Bonner and her sister were mostly raised by their father, as Beth was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and she attempted suicide when Bonner was just 2 years old. But she was brilliant. She studied mathematics at Dickinson College and worked in computer systems as a means to take care of her family, being the eldest of four, since her mother was busy working as a nurse and her father died of a heart attack when she was 12. Beth loved literature.
“Her books had annotations,” Bonner said of her mother, “and it was one way that I could connect with her. I knew that my mother was so smart.”
Bonner read those annotated copies of 19th century classics like “Wuthering Heights” and “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” and they became Bonner’sfavorites to read and read again. Bonner saw her mother writing on the sofa during periods when she couldn’t work. Bonner saw her mother’s typed drafts of short stories. It inspired her.
“Sometimes I’ve wondered if I chose poetry because, on the one hand, I wanted to connect with my mom,” Bonner said, “but it’s something that she couldn’t really criticize.” She laughed.
Beth passed away in November 2008, the same year as Atlantis Black. Although Bonner might not think about her mother every day, 14 and a half years later, her mother doesn’t leave her mind.
“I miss her. She gave me a lot,” Bonner said.
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Bonner writes a lot out of emotion. Her readers seem to like her sad poems better, she said, as an elegiac poem might be easier to appreciate than a humorous one.
“To just be playing with language and words — I do love words — that’s thrilling,” Bonner said. “But achieving emotional insight or arriving at something that comes out of passion and intensity and intense emotion, I think that’s where I feel the most satisfied.”
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This spring, Bonner will continue to teach advanced poetry and oversee independent graduate studies. Once her nine-month appointment as a UO professor is up in June, she’s off, back to teaching remote classes through the 92nd Street Y and back to Vermont, where her partner lives with their two feral-born, bonded sister cats, Maggie and Murphy.
Bonner is working on a novel and another poetry collection too. There’s no certainty when those will be published. Bonner isn’t ashamed to revise. (Herpoem “Stopping on Delos” took five years.) She learned that as a student of the late Marie Ponsot, who would revise hundreds of times, Bonner said. It’s something Bonner will teach to another generation of students. That’s her job, it seems, remembering the dead, passing their books and their lessons on to the living. Her work is an act of memory, connecting her to everyone who has taught her something, to everyone she loves.
