Susan Tichy lives life to the fullest. Besides writing and teaching, she holds a strong sense of belonging to nature, Scottish culture and community activism. Born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Maryland, she left college to work in a community clinic and an inner city high school before finishing her BA in 1975, at Goddard College in Vermont, and her MA at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1979. Her first book, The Hands in Exile (Random House, The National Poetry Series, 1983) was inspired by her four months’ stay on an Israeli kibbutz on the Golan Heights, where she also picked fruits, painted fences and herded cattle.

She married Vietnam combat veteran, Michael O’Hanlon (also an active mountaineer) in the early 1980s, and together, they built and lived in a cabin for six years — without electricity, running water or telephone — in a ghost town of the southern Colorado Rockies. Later, they also owned a bookstore in the nearest town, Westcliffe, and co-founded the world’s smallest Amnesty International group in 1983. Her second book, A Smell of Burning Starts the Day was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1988.

Since then, Tichy has taught at George Mason University, but never separates herself from the mountains. For more than a decade, she has been working on a book-length project, Trafficke: An Autobiography, a mixed-genre meditation on family myths, history, and words. In 2001, she embarked upon Bone Pagoda, revisiting her experiences and accounts of the Vietnam War, a war she considers to have shaped her life. Gallowglass, her new title, was just released from Ahsahta Press in March 2010. With San Isabel Land Protection Trust, she continues to contribute actively to the preservation efforts of open spaces and wildlife habitats.

Your poems expand skillfully on collage techniques from different approaches. How do you deal with Time as a unity when writing a poem that consciously weaves (and rejects) contesting as well as associative imageries, narratives and spaces of memory all on one page?

I try to honor the Taoist concept of reality as additive and interactive, in which each of “the ten thousand things” retains its own integrity and fullness, though always defined by movement, change, and transformation. In terms of poetics, this means respecting the image or phrase — the thingness of the thing — while not allowing it to repose in stasis or isolation. The important time in the poem is the time of writing and reading, the movement of mind, sound, and rhythm, which mark the transitions and boundaries among and between the fragments. I like to say a reader should run her hand over the surface of the poem and feel for the bumps and gaps, the changes in texture, size, or weight… which is another way of saying she should read aloud. The metaphor is spatial because the time of the poem is the present: I rarely work in any kind of fictional projection of my mind into other times or characters, and in recent years have not felt much interest in constructing a narrative unity. Narrative enters in fragments, as would any other element, personal or collective.

I try to honor the Taoist concept of reality as additive and interactive, in which each of ‘the ten thousand things’ retains its own integrity and fullness, though always defined by movement, change, and transformation….

As a poem develops, I establish a time (and sometimes place) of meditation, from which my gaze extends and into which I gather the fragments, from past or present, that become the speech of the poem. As in any meditative poem, keeping that center constant is important in holding the poem together, even when its location (or even existence) is not apparent to a reader. At the same time, challenging that position, via contradictions of various kinds — tense, register, historical sources of the images — keeps the speaker implicated in the instabilities of changefulness, keeps us mindful that point of view defines each and every piece of language we encounter.

Bone Pagoda, a strong book of poetry — your third — appeared after a long lapse of silence. Why so?

It was a lapse of book publication, not a period of silence. I published individual poems and mixed-genre pieces in those years, some of which won awards and so forth. I did write three books in the interval, all unpublished. Two will remain so, as I now no longer want to see them in print. The third, Trafficke, is a monstrously large (and monstrously strange) mixed-genre project in which I try to sort out and reconcile, recombine and re-complicate the various strands of my maternal grandmother’s family history. I finished it once, about ten years ago, then set it aside because I knew other people were researching related questions that could turn the book on its head…. which, in fact, has happened, so I am now tearing the book apart and re-making it.

Susan Tichy
BY Terra-Raye Carter

Trafficke was instigated by the life of Alexander Magruder, my earliest immigrant ancestor, a Scotsman who was transported to Maryland as a prisoner of war in the 1650s, and sold into indentured servitude. He died twenty-five years later, owner of 1200 acres of what had been Native land, four indentured servants, and one slave. His descendents were slave-owning tobacco farmers — but that part of the story played no part in my childhood, because his descendents also invented a different, more legendary past, attaching themselves to the most Romantic and storied clan in Highland history, Clan Gregor, victims of the most severe genocidal laws ever enacted in Britain. You can read a few pieces of Trafficke online, in its earlier iteration, though some of the “facts” therein are now under revision.

Would you consider Bone Pagoda a “ghost book” of Gallowglass?

Your phrase is evocative — but I think, rather, the two books are close companions, almost one book in two parts.

Both Bone Pagoda and Gallowglass contain overlapping themes of war with cross references from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Why (and how) is this overlap in the two books important and meaningful to you? How do you relate this overlapping to your personal memory of similar events?

This is hard to answer without a sense of diminishment — by which I mean the two books, especially Gallowglass, would be my reply — but I’ll do my best.

I had just begun Bone Pagoda when the 9-11 attacks took place, so, though its subject is Vietnam, it was, from the start, overshadowed by the current wars. There’s a long history of writing about current events in the guise of historical subject matter, from “Flowers of the Forest” — an 18th century Scottish Jacobite lament, ostensibly about a 16th century war — to Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant — a film dissecting the ethics of guerilla tactics employed by the British during the Boer War, released in the aftermath of American (and Australian) involvement in Vietnam. I wasn’t exactly doing that — my book really is about Vietnam and I had been preparing to write it for some time before September 2001 — but I could hardly avoid the parallel. Later, there was a period when I was finishing Bone Pagoda but had also begun Gallowglass, so of course there were questions of boundary and inclusion. I think the difference between the two books is one of foreground versus background: Bone Pagoda is a book about Vietnam, written in the presence of our current wars. Gallowglass is not quite the opposite, because its other unifying subject is my husband’s death, but it is a book about the present, into which the past is inextricably woven.

Politically, and even militarily, the parallels between the Vietnam years and now are too obvious to enumerate. America’s hubris is tragic in the classical sense — a blinding flaw in an otherwise useful and admirable character…

Politically, and even militarily, the parallels between the Vietnam years and now are too obvious to enumerate. America’s hubris is tragic in the classical sense — a blinding flaw in an otherwise useful and admirable character, which demands catastrophe and suffering as its wages. Too bad we always excise the last act, in which the protagonist learns from his mistakes. For myself, Vietnam was the war that shaped me, and then haunted the quarter century I spent with my husband, a combat veteran. Because I had been an anti-war activist, and he a reluctant but deeply embedded participant, there was never a single version of the war in our household. However, through abiding anger at the war’s proprietors, sorrow for its victims, and gradual self-forgiveness, we did, over time, evolve a shared and reasonably stable analysis of its political and ethical meanings.