An Incomplete Mentorship

Although we didn’t realize it at the time, Ellen made space for generations of younger female writers to present themselves as unapologetically well read and serious. A strong female leader of a program makes the way for the women under her to expect to take their rightful place in the literary conversation. This expectation was possible because Ellen demanded our intelligence, and because she did not sexualize us or build a program based on proffered sexuality, which, in the late twentieth century, was still common. When I did experience this kind of par-for-the-course sexual violation by a male teacher who came on to me, Ellen defended him, saying that I should give him a break because he was going through a difficult divorce. She did not believe in “rescue,” and both her bearing and her poetics were a stay against self-pity, where, as she wrote, the will is set against the appetite. In that moment, she taught me not to make my story out of some moment of harm but instead to return to the poems, where more complexity could arise through the nuances of language. That was a good life lesson. That I could stabilize myself through the work of writing. That my own thoughts and poems were more interesting than the old story of female diminishment and unsolicited lust.

It was also a failure of mentorship. But I understand this moment now not simply as a personal shortcoming but as a poignant reminder of how imperfectly we women have met and mentored one another across the generations. Ellen was one of the best and most revered literary mentors of our times, and mentees all over the country are now writing tributes to her, including in this publication. But she was also a human being of a specific generation, and what I experienced as a sexual “violation” registered as next to nothing to her, given her time.

Because of how much has changed for women decade by decade, this has meant that being a mentor to younger women has meant preparing them for opportunities that the older generation did not have. It has meant learning that whatever the mentor accepted as commonplace is no longer deemed acceptable by the next generation. It has meant that younger writers take for granted access that was hard-won, and was itself a correction to what came before. This generation gap can often make older women seem too hardened and younger women too soft, turning us into imperfect mentors and friends to one another.

But there were enough of us learning under Ellen’s wing that we could begin to create our own culture of women writers supporting other women writers, which was still an intentional, countercultural decision at that time. Warren Wilson was the first place where I felt I had finally found my people, friends capable of the intellectual rigor and honest dismantling of self-protection that happens through serious writing. These writers were kind not in spite of being smart, I realized. They were kind because they were smart, because their constant reading, writing, and revision had made them curious. Staying in flexible relationship to our writing made us aware that we are each unfinished, each in process.

This was a revelation to me. And so was the place itself, a kind of summer camp for writers tucked into the Blue Ridge Mountains. Warren Wilson was a place where literary friendships could flourish across gender, generations, and backgrounds. There was an effervescent excitement in the way women and men argued literary points, shared poems, danced for hours, took walks, played baseball, and talked about books together, so I know that Ellen would disapprove of my emphasis on the “female” aspect of this culture. It wasn’t a feminist program, and Ellen was against any predictable form of segregation.

But while Ellen claimed to do away with gender fixation, she wrote honestly and tenderly about her life as a woman—as a daughter, a mother, a wife. The personal disclosures in Ellen’s poetry seem almost amazing to me now, in this age of self-presentation. Rereading her poems, I am struck by the bravery of her honesty, her verbal mastery, and her human presence on the page, especially since she was essentially a public figure for us, at the center of a culture. I knew Ellen as a leader and teacher. I think now that I didn’t spend enough time getting to know her as a writer.

The breach in our personal relationship happened when Ellen invited me to return to Warren Wilson as an alumni fellow, an honor that was extended to her closest acolytes. It was bad timing. I was in the blown-open experience of grief, which made me unfit for the intellectual conversation and verbal sparring that had made the program so invigorating. The best part of the week was having one-on-one time with Ellen. One morning, she was stung by a bee and rushed to the hospital, and I was glad to be with her. I loved her. I felt that mix of protection, admiration, and adoration that we feel for our mentors. I felt like I was apprenticing with her not only as a teacher but as a leader of a program, a job that I had inklings of doing myself one day.

But at one point, she and I went out to dinner together. My first manuscript—the thesis she had advised and guided—had not found a publisher, and my second book had come to me in a very different way. This was a book voiced from the afterlife by Mary Magdelene—embarrassing for me, at first, but a process that felt involuntary and propulsive as I traced an archetypal energy and attempted a cultural correction around female wisdom. Ellen had read the new manuscript, and it had infuriated her. She pounded her fist on the table and told me that I had to stop with the mysticism because it was making my writing worse and I was going to back myself into a corner. Then she called the waiter back to our table and changed my order. She told him that I needed to have the tuna, rare, that this would be better than the vegetarian dish I had ordered.

Today that scene strikes me as so dramatic as to be funny. But back then it shook me deeply because it was so disempowering. I detached and listened from a distance. Ellen was right about my poetry. The more I got into spiritual territory, the more the verbal textures of my work blurred, became less distinct, less accomplished. But I did not want to stop the flow of this new channel of awareness. And I had learned well from her. I protected the space of my writing with ferocity and without apology. Not even to her.

After that week together, we never spoke again. Ellen never again recommended me for anything. And I never reached out to her. I think I felt that to maintain the relationship, I would have had to become ingratiating and a little false, and she had taught me not to be false. My commitment to my writing did not wane, but I did not remain in that community, which would have allowed me to better my craft as a poet in conversation with other serious poets. And now I am feeling what this loss has meant to my life and my work.

Rereading Ellen’s poems now, I understand that our dinner conversation was not just about me but about her own path as a poet. In her early poems, I can see Ellen’s conflicted relationship with the vatic aspect of poetry—the prophetic strand, the knowing that comes through other voices, the weird feeling that you are tapping into some realization that is half on earth and half in conversation with the dead.

Here is the beginning of Ellen’s poem “The Medium,” from her second book, The Forces of Plenty, first published by Norton in 1983. It is a persona poem, written in the voice of an old woman medium that begins:

Diminishing cupfuls. Trenches emptied into the palm! Even when writing about the abstraction of mediumship, Ellen was brilliantly, sonically embodied. The poem seems to foretell an alternate life of vatic knowing, and in it, Ellen pounds her fist on the table in a vehement NO against this other way of writing and being. She chooses life, life, life, not these strange companions.

The next poem in the book, “The Gymnast,” about Nadia Comǎneci, sticks a midpoint landing on this line:

Magic is not earned and is not fair.

That line is not enjambed and is end-stopped, which means that Ellen wanted us to feel it as one of her declarations. Magic is not earned and is not fair. I remember that this idea of something being “earned” or not earned was the phrasing that Ellen taught us to use in our workshops. We were taught to build the material world of the poem with specific sensory details before we could “earn” a line like this one. This is good advice, and I use a version of it in my own teaching. But now I can see how integrally this idea connected to Ellen’s worldview. It connected to her choosing of life, in all its textures and tenderness, over any leaping magic.

As I reread this early work, I can’t help but think about the tensions between being a teacher and being an artist. One requires grounded responsibility, the other an occasionally reckless leaping. I also can’t help but think about Ellen’s relationship with Louise Glück, which was a long literary friendship of mutual respect. And yet there is always that uncomfortable moment in a literary friendship when you realize that one of you is going to have much more vaulting success than the other, that your gifts are fundamentally different and your paths will diverge.

I wonder if Ellen felt, at times, that she was too grounded. Her role as a teacher and leader required her to become the foundation from which so many others would fly. “The Gymnast” ends on this note:

I wish Ellen and I could have had an honest conversation—maybe even a laugh—about that doomed dinner all those years ago. I wish I had known her in her later years. I wish we could have mapped the relationship between the material and metaphysical strands in poetry, and between the alternate demands of teaching and writing. I wish we could have talked and even argued about all of this, because I know that I would have been improved by her intelligence. And because one thing I know now, after mentoring so many younger writers myself, is that true mentorship runs in two directions. You are always learning from the next generation, even as you’re teaching them. It is humbling, to see what they expect that you did not know how to expect. But that is the very expansion we have made possible through our teaching, our writing, our lives.

I think now that true mentorship is a relationship that continues to evolve even after the mentor is gone—one that presupposes that truth is worth pursuing, and that only by articulating the truth can we get to the next iteration. Ellen had the courage to keep changing. And she wrote about this multigenerational awareness and the sense that the work continues in her early poem “Alba”:

We keep teaching as a way of staying in relationship with the future. And we keep writing because everything we write about ourselves remains woefully incomplete—we are each more complex than any small story we could tell about ourselves, and certainly any story we would dare to tell about anyone else. We keep writing because this process allows us to meet the stranger in front of us and within us, to articulate the next perception and slip the limitations of our current awareness.

I like to think that it is this work that apprentices us to the later metaphysical work that happens when we walk to the edge of the field and welcome the next meaning, the next meeting.

With gratitude to Ellen Bryant Voigt.