Hymns to ordinary life

Hiestand honored for writing that transforms speech into song
By Eric McHenry, poet, professor, critic
first published in the BU Bridge

“When Emily Hiestand (GRS'88) started going to an all-black church in Cambridge, she did so "with a self-conscious, walking-on-eggshells politesse" that made her somewhat awkward. At one point, standing to sing, she accidentally grazed the back of an elderly parishioner's head with her hymnal. "Holy moly," Hiestand writes, "I have hit an elderly black man on the head with a hymnal!" The man turned around just as she leant down to apologize, and was startled to find "an unfamiliar White face looming just inches from his own.

"He visibly jumps in the pew," she writes. "His startlement startles me, and I jump too, and no one near us fails to see this scene."

Hiestand ultimately redeemed the scene by making it the funniest and most tender anecdote in "Hymn," a consistently funny and tender essay for which she and The Atlantic Monthly received a 1999 National Magazine Award. It was a fitting fate for both the author and her beatific prose, in which things that might at first seem humble and ephemeral — a convenience store, a stop sign, a leaf — are shown to be dignified and lasting. Her faithful exaltation of the world has earned her a little worldly exaltation.

"Rounding the corner into the mall, a teenager with a hood pulled low looks surprised when our eyes meet, then grins," Hiestand writes in "Errand," an essay that appears alongside "Hymn" and 12 others in her most recent book, Watershed and Other Domestic Travels (Beacon Press, 1998). "A look can pass between strangers, kin to the look countrymen may give finding one another in a far place. My, my; you as you, me as me. The recognition goes so unremarked as not to exist in any official account. It has taken me most of my life even to notice the look, which happens, I suppose, in the interstices of everyone's life."

"That piece," Hiestand says of "Errand," "is the piece that more than any other carries the ethos of the book -- that there is enormous pleasure in ordinary life that can be had simply by walking down the street.

"Angela has sometimes been described by reviewers as a kind of memoir," she says, "but I think of it more as a collection of stories about people, communities, and places that, for me, embody an aspect of authentic wealth — by which I mean the forms of wealth beyond the nice but rather narrow definition offered by consumerism."

Hiestand's alternative definition of wealth adds resonance to the title of her first essay collection, The Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece (Beacon Press, 1992), which the San Francisco Chronicle-Examiner named one of the five best travel books of the year. Its four long essays reveal a similar devotion to minutiae, and to philosophical thought applied at the most quotidian levels — what Pulitzer prize-winning poet Jorie Graham calls Hiestand's "radical trust in description as a guide to the moral life."

Graham, as it happens, is referring to yet another book, Green (Graywolf Press, 1989), which she selected for the prestigious National Poetry Series. Anyone familiar with Hiestand's rich, vivid, lyrical essays will nod at the news that their author was first an acclaimed poet. Hiestand's poems, in turn, are the products of a sensibility that had made her a successful visual artist and graphic designer long before she turned seriously to writing.

"There is a way that aesthetics is not merely visually appealing or decorative," Hiestand says. "but consonant with the moral life. Stabilizing and illuminating kinds of experience can be discovered via the visual intelligence. I think that Jorie Graham was right that my writing mind works like a visual artist's mind. I'm engaged with color, texture, and shadow, form and composition."

Hiestand was "a child writer" in Oak Ridge, Tenn., but as she got older she began turning her creative attention to the visual. She took a degree from the Philadelphia College of Art with emphases in graphic design, painting, and photography, and in 1970 moved to Boston. For the next 15 years, she built a successful graphic design business, working principally to promote cultural organizations such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and grassroots political causes such as the successful Massachusetts Equal Rights Amendment campaign.

But in the early 1980s, she noticed that the Charles River, viewed from the window of her Cambridge business office, was beginning to provoke words rather than images. She showed some of her writing fragments to a friend who'd studied English in college. "I asked, 'What do you think these are?' And she said, 'I think they might be poems,'" Hiestand recalls. "Turning to writing wasn't so much abandoning graphic design as being kidnapped by language."

Hiestand soon found herself in writing workshops at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, then in literature courses at BU's Metropolitan College. One of her MET professors steered her to the graduate Creative Writing Program, where she audited several of George Starbuck's poetry workshops before closing her graphic design firm and enrolling full-time. Starbuck, who died in 1996, "was a monumental figure in my life," Hiestand says. "He really took me under his wing. I owe my life as a poet to him.

"He was a master of American talk, the person who taught me that there's a whole philosophy, a worldview, in every diction. I enjoy the great spectrum of language, from Southern colloquialisms to mandarin, Jamesian constructions, and it was George Starbuck who gave me permission and encouragement to juxtapose those different ways of speaking."

Evidence of this influence pervades not only her poetry but her essays, which celebrate the eccentricities of spoken language. In "Store," from Angela the Upside-Down Girl, she savors a Haitian shopkeeper's ascription of a masculine pronoun to something as decidedly non-gendered as soup: "'You should taste joumou before you cook him,' he called out. 'You might not like him.'"

Hiestand's enthusiasm for speech is perhaps most pronounced in "Hymn," the essay about her experience at Union Baptist Church in Cambridge.She turns a sensitive ear to the sounds of the black Baptist sermon, with its ability to accommodate simultaneously the spiritual, the casual, and the purely practical:

"Lucid and subtle on the significance of Job's suffering," Hiestand writes, "bracing on the nature of courage, passionate on the supreme importance of nurturing children, Reverend Jeffrey Brown usually manages to work into his remarks how fine someone looks — or how fine everyone looks — and the fact that Bible study is at 6:30 Wednesday night."

Black churches , says Hiestand, is "are places steeped in respect for elders, in courtesy, and in a tradition of overcoming suffering. It's also an amazing place for a poet, because of black sacred oratory, which to my mind is among the most magnificent and beautiful linguistic traditions in America. The power of the black intellectual tradition has been an important, ongoing part of my education."

About Eric McHenry Eric was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas. He earned a BA from Beloit College and an MA in creative writing from Boston University. His first collection of poetry, Potscrubber Lullabies (2006), won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Other works include the poetry collections Odd Evening (2016) and Mommy Daddy Evan Sage (2011). McHenry’s writing appears widely in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, Salon, and Slate. His awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize and a Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest. He is a professor at Washburn University and served as poet laureate of Kansas from 2015 to 2017.