Author: Dana Henry Martin

Intergenerational

Family trauma is passed down genetically and epigenetically, through family stories and family preoccupations, through family experiences, through details like tones and inflections and mannerisms, through what’s focused on and what’s omitted, through place and what place means and has meant to the family, through hand-me-down memories, through objects and their cultural contexts—what they are and what they represent. And more.

Trauma isn’t the only thing passed down in these ways. Beliefs, values, biases, violences, and more move from one generation to another in this manner. We are haunted. The ghosts are inside us. The shadows, as Jung would say. Long shadows. Dark shadows. Shadows inside of shadows. But also light. Light, too.

We are intergenerational beings. Our becoming grows out of pasts we never lived but that we know, ones that lie beyond language and personal memory. We feel this. We struggle to understand it. We can lose ourselves to and in it. This is eternity, the feeling of eternity, of ongoingness, of neverendingness. Our neverending family and what it’s experienced, what it’s done. The hand we raise that is the father’s hand, the grandfather’s hand, the great grandfather’s hand. What we do. How we move. The who what where when why of us. What we’re from. What we’re for.

And what we’re against, up against, not only now but in those layered pasts. What we want and need to break free from. Those histories that riddle us like lead ammunition that can kill us quickly and also kill us slowly. Those wounds. Those poisons.

Dana for Mayor

My day hasn’t gone as planned. I went to get lab work done early this morning only to find out the orders were never placed, which means I won’t have results in time for my appointment with the specialist who (should have) ordered them. This is the doctor who, in part, is following my cancer status, so the labs are important.

I came home to an attempted identity-theft scam that Jon and I both had to deal with immediately. Things like this are happening more frequently, and they’re harder to identify. Someone tried to hack one of my online shopping accounts just three days ago.

I commented on a story in The Salt Lake Tribune in support of a gay mayor in one of Utah’s cities. Someone else in the queer community, another Utahn, saw my comment and thought I was saying the opposite of what I was saying. Their response was to tell me that I’m attacking the mayor based on his sexuality, that I’m not being Christlike, and that I’m so ugly-looking that they’d never live in a city where I was the mayor. Humph. I have many grumpies around that set of assertions.

My Fitbit died. I have no data whatsoever, and I rely on that data for my health and mental health.

I drove half an hour each way to see my therapist, where I hoped to talk about the parts involved in my strong feelings about the SLT commenter calling me an unattractive, unkind homophobe, but the therapist forgot my appointment, which means I drove for an hour for no reason and have three exiles I need to deal with on my own now rather than in therapy. (Exiles are a type of part in the Internal Family Systems framework. It’s not ideal to be exploring them alone.)

These are all small problems in the larger scheme of things, and they’re counterbalanced by an incredible conversation and connection I had with a fellow poet today. We talked about organization, one of my favorite topics, and poetry and community and dogs and mountains. I mean, it was good stuff.

Also on the plus side, there’s my sweet dog. And my relative ability to handle all these relatively small problems. And my view of the laccolith, which I can see now that the clouds have started to dissipate or move on or whatever clouds do.

Oh, and someone ran over a raccoon in our neighborhood, so there’s also that sad occurrence. That’s another item for the negative side of today’s +/- list. I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been making that fruitless round-trip drive to see the therapist.

You can file this under grumpy with a lower-case g or grumpy with a capital g or dumpy if you also think I’m so unattractive you would never live in a city where I’m the mayor. The last part of that sentence was written by one of the exiles. She was called ugly by her classmates almost every day of her life from preschool until she was well into puberty. We’re working through it.

Fundamentally Defective

I got a notification from Ancestry that information about my brother had been added to the site. Of course, I followed the trail to the information because that’s what I’ve always done where my brother is concerned, even now that we’re not in contact (see Marie Howe’s poem “The Boy” for an explanation of what I’m talking about).

What I found about my brother wasn’t interesting, but there were dozens of new pieces of information linking numerous relatives on my father’s side of the family to the Civil War, where they fought for the Confederate States of America. One of them was a prisoner of war and died inside the camp where he was held.

My lips are numb. I don’t know how to process all of this. This awful history is in my family, in my epigenetics. It’s been handed down and down and down to me. This is only four generations from me.

It didn’t stop with the war. My grandparents on my father’s side were racist, as was my father. One of my most traumatizing and painful moments occurred when I was very young and witnessed my grandmother and my great aunt treating a Black woman with extreme disrespect before turning away from her and calling her a racial slur. They didn’t know I was in the room where it happened and that I saw everything they said and did to the woman.

I think that experience was more painful than the sexual abuse that occurred later. There’s an exiled part of me who’s still in that room feeling shock and terror and sadness all at once. That’s when the feeling of being part of an evil family started, of being from a family that was more monster than human. It started that day, not the day my father began abusing me. What he did only reified those feelings, setting them like grout in tile that’s already been laid.

Those are the feelings I would eventually turn inward on myself, believing that I was a monster, that I was evil. Or, put a more sanitized way, that I was fundamentally defective. Fundamentally meaning essentially, systemically, absolutely, irreparably flawed.

It wasn’t just my father who made me feel that way. It was his whole side of the family. I was of them. I was of all of them. Who they were and what they did ripped through me like lead bullets, like death, like the only thing worse than death, which is pure hatred.

Family can bite me. That half of my family can bite me.

Deep Clean

It’s been rainy and dark here for days, and I love it, but I always find myself feeling low in this kind of weather, which is pretty much how I felt one-hundred percent of the time when I lived in Seattle. To get motivated today, I had to come up with a project that would raise my dopamine levels enough to make getting out of bed worth it.

The first thing I tried was organizing all the nuts we just bought from Costco in large mason jars. That was exciting and all, but I needed something bigger, something more substantial. So I removed everything—including the furniture—from my writing and weaving room, did a deep clean of the carpet and walls, and placed the furniture back in the room in a different configuration, one I’m really excited about.

And because that still wasn’t quite enough, I organized all my books by subject, then arranged them by the author’s last name. This was thrilling. THRILLING. I’ve always arranged my books by height, which is only a little less ridiculous than sorting them by color. The particular part of me, let’s call her Particular Dana, likes the orderliness of books arranged from tallest to shortest or, in special situations, from shortest to tallest, but it was getting really hard to find what I was looking for. Turns out, I have duplicate copies of several poetry collections for this very reason. I’ve known my system was a failure for a long time, but I’m a creature of habit, and this undertaking seemed like too much work and too much change all at once—a combination that could lead to overwhelm, as the pop-psychology folks say.

I’m digging my books this way. Each row looks a bit like a cityscape, which is as close to a city as I’ll get these days. Plus, my two desks are now back to back and floating in the middle of the room. One side is for writing, and the other side is for weaving. Both desks can be raised or lowered, which is also thrilling.

I am winning this dreary day. Winning against whom? Myself. Against myself, namely the part of me that wanted to stay in bed and not even look across the creek to marvel at all the puffafuff clouds that have pulled off the biggest magic trick ever, which is making the world’s largest laccolith disappear entirely.

Selves and Others

Richard Schwartz, creator of the Internal Family Systems model, says some people are more easily activated in their relationships because they’re more dependent on those relationships to heal the most wounded parts of themselves. One of the goals of IFS is for folks to focus more on themselves for healing and less on others—that is, cultivating secure attachment with our internal parts.

I would add that this goes back to attachment traumas early in life. In my case, I have insecure attachment, which means I had my needs met some of the time but not consistently. There’s a lot more to it than that, but this brief explanation suffices for the purpose of this post. Having folks around me who have secure attachment is helpful. Having folks around me with insecure, avoidant, or disorganized attachment isn’t helpful. That’s because I haven’t developed secure attachment yet. IFS is one way to address that internally so I can bring my own secure attachment to my relationships with others.

Outside of IFS, being around those with secure attachment is the best way to learn secure attachment. This can happen over the course of about five years, for example, if someone with insecure attachment is in a relationship with someone who has secure attachment. The problem is only a subset of adults have secure attachment, and those with attachment trauma are often in relationships with partners who have attachment trauma. Pairings between those with insecure attachment and those with avoidant attachment are common, as is the case in my marriage. (My husband has avoidant attachment.)

The pandemic and moving to a rural area have made it even more difficult to interact with those who have secure attachment. I no longer work in a workplace, and I’m not around people on a regular basis. I spend more time with horses, cows, and birds than with human beings.

I need to work out how all of this maps onto the way I navigate and experience poetry spaces both real and virtual. Coupled with traumas I’ve experienced in poetry, the prevalence of insecure attachment styles among poets concerns me, especially when it’s not examined and when certain behaviors occur as a result, including those I witness that are directed at others and those that are specifically directed at me.

Questions I’m going to be asking myself as I work on IFS with a therapist and attempt to be less activated in my relationships with poetry and poets include: how can the behavior of a poet or group of poets have less of an emotional effect on me, how can I more effectively address issues I see in the poetry community in ways that feel less emotional, how do I cultivate relationships with poets who are aware of their own attachment styles and are also working toward or already have secure attachment, how do I measure progress to assess whether my efforts are working, and what decisions do I make if I don’t make progress (e.g., where else can I practice relating to others in ways that are less activating, how can I limit my exposure to interactions that aren’t helping me heal)?

I’m also not a fan of endogenous social networks, which I’m certain stems from my early traumas. I’ve always felt safer in exogenous networks where most of my friends and connections don’t know one another. You can’t get much more endogenous than the poetry community, where everyone seems to know everyone else and gossip runs rampant, especially in the social-media age. That’s a different issue in some ways, but developing greater security in my attachment style should help me navigate tighter social networks.

If things work out with this therapist, we’ll also be doing IFS-informed EMDR work. Or maybe it’s EMDR-informed IFS work. Either way, the work will address complex trauma as well as parts and attachment style. All of this matters: these intersections of self and self, of self and other, of self and community.

Always the Water

I dreamed about all the ways children experience pressure and coercion around sexuality and gender, as well as the sexual abuse and violence many children also experience. The dream went on and on. It was personal and universal. It was in the past and present. Everyone I know was there. We were a traveling circus going from place to place and weaving through time with our pain and our healing in tow. We were helping. We were trying to help. Children grow up but don’t stop carrying what harmed them when they were young. At one point, the dream was so profound it exploded like the big bang then sucked back in on itself until it was the size of a marble. That marble contained the experiences, the suffering, the worlds of the collective. I held it in my cupped hands. I carried it into the night.

Let my life be a study in benevolence and compassion, for the environment, for the land, for all living creatures. Let me life not be any other story.

Some things are cute, but they’re not real. Other things are real, but they’re not cute. When things are cute and real, they’re puppies.

I picked up some collagen today in the hope that it will make me look a little less like a piece of corrugated cardboard.

Quit trying to outrun your life. Outgrow. Outgroan. Outruin. Outmode. Outmine. Quit it all. Put out of mind this notion of escape, of lamentation, of destruction, of obsolescence. Run it down, your life. Don’t run ahead.

I want Dark Woke to be like Dark Green environmentalism: systems-oriented, comprehensive, and thoughtful. I don’t want it to be snapbacks designed to get media attention and that, often, resort to hateful language that’s sexist, ableist, sanist, or some combination of the three.

I’m reading Allisa Cherry’s An Exodus of Sparks and Derek Thomas Dew’s Riddle Field today. I’ve pulled other books close: ones I’ve read or need to read again or need to read more deeply. My only distractions are wind and cloud, horse and horse, laccolith and barn.

My husband and I were into some really kinky stuff when we were young, like sleeping in on the weekend.

Since I’m apparently busy naming all the things this morning, I think there should be a graphic-novel character named Dark Woke and a punk-rock band called Keto Crotch.

Is there a poetry collection or anthology titled Gripe? Because there should be.

Why does Facebook think I want to buy spare tires for a Tesla?

When a door closes, you have to open a window. That’s how God works—through you and the choices you make.

Three nights ago, I dreamed about letting my kuhli loach down, the one I had twenty years ago. In the dream, I gave him to a man who killed him because I was careless, because I didn’t know any better, because I didn’t see how dangerous that man was.

The turkey vulture forgives the living for being inedible and praises the dead for being life.

I’m trying. Those are my two words for today.

I’m devastated. I sat here for an hour and could only come up with those two words.

Writing poetry has little to do with my brain, much to do with my body, and everything to do with my mind.

People are kind to me in the way that they feed a dog scraps while leaving her outside chained to a fence without any shelter.

Hell is that I woke up. I woke up to hell.

Where you saw someone who needed hating, I saw someone who needed help.

People leave when you have cancer, too, not just when you have trauma. I’ve had both. I know the taste of emptiness, the shape of it. Praise be this silence, this bell with no to tongue, this bird with no song.

Belonging and understanding are two things I will never have.

I just unfriended and reported a Facebook friend for swearing at and bullying the poet who’s having a mental health crisis. He did this even after reading my posts about why that type of behavior is harmful and could contribute to a disastrous outcome. Shame on him and everyone who insists on behaving in this manner.

Every time I accomplish something, it feels like a funeral for a part of me that feels like it’s died. A funeral in which I speak for that part, I honor that part, I remember that part. I did what that part wasn’t able to do.

The innocence of a cat living in the mouth of a god.



I have as many questions and concerns about poets and the poetry community as there are bees in my blooming purple robe locust.

I like the town I live in because it almost has queer right in its name. Toquerville. See?

The bees and the flowers are one thing. The bees and the flowers and the trees and the air and the soil and the water. Always the water. Nothing about water without water.

The war was and is and remains a long poem. — My misreading of something Matt Jasper wrote

Today, I feel grief, which doesn’t surprise me.

Carry poems in your mouth like fertilized eggs until they hatch. Then set them free or eat them. It’s your call.

Butter Recall Over Feces Concerns is not the headline I wanted to wake up to today.

I’m tired of standing up and saying folks like me are human only to see others continue to dehumanize folks like me.

It’s amazing how long a bell can ring—longer than some lifetimes.

It’s hard to erase history when folks keep making history.

We will not yield.

There’s so much we can learn from each other, much of it wrong.

On Poetry and Healing

I don’t approach poems as therapy. I just come to them as myself.

Poems allow us to reclaim our stories, understand trauma and survival, realize that growth and healing are possible, lessen shame and embarrassment, and give us a sense of belonging.

The hippocampus, which situates our memories in time, doesn’t function properly under stress or during trauma. My poems are an external mechanism for placing traumatic events in time, which keeps them from feeling never-ending and ever-present. I think of it as a kind of assistive technology, like a keyboard for my dyslexia or glasses for my farsightedness.

Poets use the beauty intrinsic to poetry to shape their experiences and change the way they live in the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allows us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

I see great value in dreams and writing about them, not only because dreams are where we do unfiltered processing of our experiences without the imposition of an artificial sense of time or an enforced rigid inner governance but also because we can more freely make leaps when talking about dreams, since that’s exactly what dreams do. Injecting a bit of the surreal into the poem can help us bring our dream wisdom into our waking lives—and therein lies not just surviving, but the ongoing work of healing.

Poetry’s concision and beauty allow me, as a writer and reader, to enter into myriad experiences—some like mine and some unlike mine—and to see common human impulses at work. A collective psyche emerges—a collective conscience and collective unconscious—as a backdrop to the individual experience. Poetry has taught me a great deal about my own psyche, my own mind, my own impulses, and my own needs. But it’s also contextualized all of that within a larger environment and larger swaths of time than a single human timespan. Poetry approaches the archetypal, the mythical, the things that lie deep in our ancestry: things we can’t, and shouldn’t, ignore if we’re going to survive on this planet and help this planet survive.

Stephan Torre says that, for him “… writing comes when it must, when it’s too hard to hold in the joy or grief without blurting it out.” I love that way of approaching poetry, but I personally don’t wait until the point of bursting. I try to do the work every day of cultivating making music out of noise, as Kim Addonizio writes in her poem “Therapy.”

Gregory Orr talks about something similar, which is that the act of writing a poem gives the poet more control than they had at the time of the traumatic event they’re writing about, which in itself is empowering and healing.

And then there’s all this beauty intrinsic to poetry, which the poet uses to shape the experience and move it into a different part of the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allowing us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

More Than Noise

Stephan Torre says that, for him … writing comes when it must, when it’s too hard to hold in the joy or grief without blurting it out. I love that way of approaching poetry, but I personally don’t wait until the point of bursting. I try to do the work every day of cultivating making music out of noise, as Kim Addonizio writes in her poem “Therapy.”

Gregory Orr talks about something similar, which is that the act of writing a poem gives the poet more control than they had at the time of the traumatic event they’re writing about, which in itself is empowering and healing.

And then there’s all this beauty intrinsic to poetry, which the poet uses to shape the experience and move it into a different part of the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allowing us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

Poems as Time-Stamps

During Saturday’s Utah Poetry Festival panel discussion on Poetry As Survival, if there’s time, I’d like to talk about why trauma is a wound of the present and how poetry (and other forms of art) can help with processing those wounds.

One of the reasons trauma from the past plays such a role in the present is because our brains don’t time-stamp traumatic events properly. The hippocampus, which is responsible for encoding and storing dates for our memories, can’t do so when levels of arousal or stress are too high. Instead, memories are recorded in great detail but without a time-stamp associated with them. That’s why there’s an always-ness to traumatic memories, an endlessness, a nowness.

The first way poetry addresses this issue is by allowing us to move time around as we write. As Gregory Orr says, this gives us more control over a situation we may have had little or no control over when it was happening, which in itself is empowering. The very act of writing about the experience is an act of survival. But the act of writing also gives us a past, a present, and a future—that is, the sense of time and its passing that’s missing in our encoded memories about what happened.

Even if we write about an experience in the present tense, the act of putting that experience in writing, moving it from the body to the page, from feeling to language, helps us do the time-stamping necessary to process what we’ve lived through. That’s what I believe anyway, as a poet who lives with trauma but who’s not a psychologist or neuroscientist.

The second way I believe poetry is helpful is that it serves as a creative historical record that we can revisit anytime we want and reinforce what we’re learning as we heal. I realized this last fall when I was looking through my older poems. Together, they serve as a network of external time-stamps that reinforce an “I am here” as opposed to “I am still there” message. I can read my poems and situate them in time in a way that helps me make sense of my past and my life as a whole. This thing happened. Here is when it happened. Here is when I wrote about it. A year ago. A decade ago. A week ago. Not now.

And that’s the point of time-stamping: to know what was then and what is now, as well as what isn’t now.

I’ve had similar experiences when I look at photos I’ve taken, but the time-stamping isn’t as strong for me as it is with poetry, probably because I just point at things and click. I don’t put artful effort into my photos the way I do with my poems. I’m also not stepping into parts of my life or into the world itself in photos the way I do—or the way I hope to—when I write a poem.

I love language in ways I can’t properly articulate. I’m dyslexic and had extreme difficulty with reading and writing when I was young. It was poetry that allowed me to enter into language, not dull language but magical language that gave me access to worlds outside my family, my home, my town, and what happened there. I have a strong time-stamp associated with the first real poem I read. It was in a children’s book tucked on a shelf in what was once my sister’s room, but it wasn’t a nursery rhyme. I found it, and I loved it, and it was mine. I know where I stood when I read it, how the paper felt, what it did in six lines, and how I came alive reading it. Fully alive. Fully present. I had no idea at the time what a gift the poem would be or how it would shape my life and my healing.

For me, healing is a process and there will always be an ongoing-ness to it. But the poems I write are essential parts of my mind at this point, externalizations of what my hippocampus can’t do as readily as someone who hasn’t experienced trauma. I hope I also create beauty, at least sometimes, in and through my writing.

I’ll close by saying that I’m not talking about poetry as therapy. I approach poetry as an art, and I also recognize its healing powers, which for me are rooted in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and spirituality.

Poetry As Survival

During Saturday’s Utah Poetry Festival panel discussion on Poetry As Survival, if there’s time, I’d like to talk about why trauma is a wound of the present and how poetry (and other forms of art) can help with processing those wounds.

One of the reasons trauma from the past plays such a role in the present is because our brains don’t time-stamp traumatic events properly. The hippocampus, which is responsible for encoding and storing dates for our memories, can’t do so when levels of arousal or stress are too high. Instead, memories are recorded in great detail but without a time-stamp associated with them. That’s why there’s an always-ness to traumatic memories, an endlessness, a nowness.

The first way poetry addresses this issue is by allowing us to move time around as we write. As Gregory Orr says, this gives us more control over a situation we may have had little or no control over when it was happening, which in itself is empowering. The very act of writing about the experience is an act of survival. But the act of writing also gives us a past, a present, and a future—that is, the sense of time and its passing that’s missing in our encoded memories about what happened.

Even if we write about an experience in the present tense, the act of putting that experience in writing, moving it from the body to the page, from feeling to language, helps us do the time-stamping necessary to process what we’ve lived through. That’s what I believe anyway, as a poet who lives with trauma but who’s not a psychologist or neuroscientist.

The second way I believe poetry is helpful is that it serves as a creative historical record that we can revisit anytime we want and reinforce what we’re learning as we heal. I realized this last fall when I was looking through my older poems. Together, they serve as a network of external time-stamps that reinforce an I am here as opposed to I am still there message. I can read my poems and situate them in time in a way that helps me make sense of my past and my life as a whole. This thing happened. Here is when it happened. Here is when I wrote about it. A year ago. A decade ago. A week ago. Not now.

And that’s the point of time-stamping: to know what was then and what is now, as well as what isn’t now.

I’ve had similar experiences when I look at photos I’ve taken, but the time-stamping isn’t as strong for me as it is with poetry, probably because I just point at things and click. I don’t put artful effort into my photos the way I do with my poems. I’m also not stepping into parts of my life or into the world itself in photos the way I do—or the way I hope to—when I write a poem.

I love language in ways I can’t properly articulate. I’m dyslexic and had extreme difficulty with reading and writing when I was young. It was poetry that allowed me to enter into language, not dull language but magical language that gave me access to worlds outside my family, my home, my town, and what happened there. I have a strong time-stamp associated with the first real poem I read. It was in a children’s book tucked on a shelf in what was once my sister’s room, but it wasn’t a nursery rhyme. I found it, and I loved it, and it was mine. I know where I stood when I read it, how the paper felt, what it did in six lines, and how I came alive reading it. Fully alive. Fully present. I had no idea at the time what a gift the poem would be or how it would shape my life and my healing.

For me, healing is a process and there will always be an ongoing-ness to it. But the poems I write are essential parts of my mind at this point, externalizations of what my hippocampus can’t do as readily as someone who hasn’t experienced trauma. I hope I also create beauty, at least sometimes, in and through my writing.

I’ll close by saying that I’m not talking about poetry as therapy. I approach poetry as an art, and I also recognize its healing powers, which for me are rooted in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and spirituality.