Barbara Leonhard : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

As a child of eight after recovering from measles encephalitis, I started writing short poems and stories. The encephalitis burned away some memories of my years before age 6 and created challenges with focus and learning. I’m surprised I turned to writing at all because of the after effects of the encephalitis Instinctively, I must have felt that writing poems provided an outlet for my feelings and helped me to construct thoughts. Possibly it helped my neurons create new pathways. Some studies show that writing by hand aids learning and memory. The body knows how to heal. As I related in my answer to another question in this interview, poetry is a healer. 

I used memo pads for the poems and stories, and my parents would ask me to read them to dinner guests. The positive reinforcement kept me writing over the years. I also kept a list just of titles that occurred to me, thinking I could write poems for them. I lost my memo pads long ago. Wish I still had them to look back on that time in my life.

Another impetus for writing poetry at that time of my life was the near-death experience I had while in a month-long coma from the encephalitis. Although I was paralyzed and unable to speak, I found myself with my dying grandfather, who was in the same hospital. I was standing by his bed, and we were laughing and talking (which would have been impossible). There were others in the room, tall figures in white, who said I couldn’t go with grandpa. I argued with them, but they insisted I return to my room. Then I awoke from the coma, able to speak but not to walk. I feel that those beings were a spiritual counsel and that a wager was made to spare my life as it would have been too hard on my father to lose both his father and daughter. His mother had died the year before. I went on to teach myself how to walk again at age 7. This experience was profound, so I see now how creative writing helped me heal from the trauma of childhood illness. It took me years to understand my last visit with my grandfather and the gifts I received from nearly dying. (I address this experience in my poetry collection, Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir, which is forthcoming from IEF-Experiments in Fiction this fall.)