Music Credit: “Annibelle June,” written and performed by Abigail Washburn, from the cd The Appalachian Picking Society. <Musical Excerpt> Seema Reza: “Instructions.” Be brave. Do the things you were afraid to do, do them alone. Listen. You will learn the most before you’ve said anything about yourself. Be patient. Do not dismiss anyone for a single act of unkindness. Remember how little you know about where they have come from. Remember that nothing anyone does is actually about you. Be cautious. Not everyone has your best interests at heart. This is not paranoia. Be kind. It is through kindness that you will scrub away at the surfaces of people and reveal how much they are all the same, how much they are all like you. It is through kindness that you will overcome your loneliness. Be grateful. Do not take any smile for granted. No one owes you anything. Be grateful. There are many other lives you could be living. There have been many opportunities for the life you are living to end. Be grateful. At the end of the day, when your hands are caked in paint and your heart is heavy with stories, know that you have spent the day wisely. Do it again tomorrow.

Jo Reed: That is Seema Reza reading “Instructions” from her book, When the World Breaks Open and this is Art Works the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts I’m Josephine Reed.

Seema Reza is a poet and essayist whose first book, When the World Breaks Open is an unflinching investigation into the dissolution of her marriage, the death of her second child and her father, her coming into herself as a sexual woman and single mother, and her work as a coordinator of arts programming for military personnel. Having said all that, let me assure you, while being heartbreakingly sad at moments, it is not grim. Seema Reza may examine herself ruthlessly, but she’s too engaged with life to be mired in narcissism or, least of all, self-pity. She owns her sorrow but she’s fierce and joyful. Her words positively sing off the page whether she is writing poetry, essays, or fragmentary observations—as she does throughout her genre-bending book. When the World Breaks Open is a daring and sophisticated work that “turns jagged truth into art” with a lyrical power. Seema began to discover that lyrical power in her writing as a young mother attending community college in Maryland.

Seema Reza: I had my older son when I was 19 and I lived right behind Montgomery College and took lots and lots of classes, and there was one semester where I was taking a chemistry class, a painting fine art class, and a creative writing class, and of the three things, the only thing I was a perfectionist about was writing. With painting, I was, sort of, happy with how it turned out. With chemistry, you know, I guessed, a little-- I would've made a terrible chemist. Jo Reed: <laughs> Seema Reza: I enjoyed chemistry. Of course, there's a sort of poetry to, like, how chemistry works. But when I realized that the only thing I'm, like, really a perfectionist about was making sure a sentence turned out the way that I meant it to turn out, I realized that this must be the thing—the thing that I needed to do, whether or not I, sort of, achieved success. Jo Reed: Tell me about your background. You were born in the U.S. Your parents came from Bangladesh? Seema Reza: Yes. Jo Reed: And you met your husband in Bangladesh? Seema Reza: Yes. So I was born here in Maryland, and my parents had migrated here 10 years prior, during the Bangladesh Pakistan War. And when I was 16, I was a real handful, and when I was 16, I was sent back to Bangladesh to live with my grandmother, to get, I don't know, straightened out or to be separated from American culture. You know, a lot about separating us from the bad influences of our... Jo Reed: Absolutely. Seema Reza: friends, but the thing with immigrant parents is that they think, like, "If you've been raised back home, everything would be different.” But it was, like, no, Bangladesh had changed, as well, and actually, the kids were way worse there than any kids that I knew here. Jo Reed: And that's where you met your husband? Seema Reza: And that's where I met my ex-husband was just through friends there. Jo Reed: And you married very young? Seema Reza: Yes. I mean, I had turned 18, like, two months before. We got engaged when I was 17. Now, looking back, it's absolutely nuts. We were in the kind of love that you can only be in when you're 17 and 20, you know? And I really wanted to escape, you know? I wanted to escape the cultural and religious pressure of my family, and getting married seemed like a certain path to adulthood. If I could have just lived with him for a little while, I am certain I would not have married him. But that wasn't an option. I was in this pretty religious Muslim family and that was my way out. Jo Reed: And you had your first child when you were 19? Seema Reza: Yes. Jo Reed: You worked college in as a mother. Seema Reza: Yes. And it took me a decade to finish college. Right? I was 30 when I graduated from undergrad and divorced. I don't think I could've studied all of the things that I wanted to study, go down all of the paths that I went down, if I was in a traditional four-year college-- like, there's a traditional way that the kids go to school. So there's a benefit. I studied astronomy. I took photography classes. I took all of these classes, and then, would feel like it was too much. I wasn't giving my family enough, and then, I'd take a semester off, and so that was my-- that whole decade between 20 and 30. Jo Reed: When the World Breaks Open is the name of your book, which is an evocative title. Tell me how you chose it. Seema Reza: Oh, it was a question that my younger son asked me. We had gone, the three of us, myself and my two sons, on the first vacation I'd ever taken them on alone. And we went to the beach and my father had drowned in the ocean just months before, and I was terrified, and I took them away, and I was, like, "No. We're going to have a vacation. I have you for Fourth of July. We're going to do this.” And we went to this very mediocre hotel in Virginia Beach-- after this, you know, day of feeling capable; right? It's so terrifying to leave a marriage when you haven't lived as an adult, at all, ever. And so I'd spent this day, like, taking the kids to the beach and going to dinner and doing all of these things that now don't seem so scary, but then, were terrifying. Every step of it, I was, like, "Oh, my gosh, there's nobody here to help me.” And at night, the boys have this habit, still to this day. They're 12 and 18 and they still have this habit of bickering at night before bed, just like their nightly bicker, and they were having their nightly bicker and it was driving me nuts. We were in the hotel room. I was in one bed. They were in the other, and I was reading, and I was, like, "What's going on?” And my older son was, like, "He's asking questions that make no sense.” And so I said, "Ask me, then.” And he said, "Mama, isn't it true that when the world breaks open, God comes out?” And I was, like, "Yeah.” I think that's exactly how I feel right now. And it's been my experience through all of these really, really difficult, terrible experiences, is that, like, at the bottom, you know, when you just feel like the fabric of the world has, kind of, torn and you see that, "Oh, my goodness.” It feels like the grief is going to swallow you whole; right? Like, this train coming at you. The next feeling, if you can just, sort of, white knuckle it through that feeling, is like, "Oh, my gosh, it didn't swallow me whole. I can survive that.” So that's where the title comes from. Jo Reed: Well, the book details-- well, it details a lot. It talks about your marriage becoming undone and of the loss of a child and being a single, and a sexual, woman, and the death of your father, and so on. I mean, it really tells a lot. Why the decision to write the book? Seema Reza: I couldn't write anything else. It was just my first semester, when I had-- after that semester where I decided on writing, I applied to Goddard College's BFA program. It's a low-residency BFA program, and I'd seen a poster for it at the community college, and got into the program, and that first semester-- the first residency was the week my marriage-- just, like, it started Thursday. I realized I could not sustain this marriage anymore. And I had applied to write young adult fiction is what I had planned to write, and of course, I couldn't. All I could think about was, like, "What have I done? What am I doing? What really happened? What didn't happen?” And to really rigorously examine that, I needed to be, at least, as hard on myself and as honest about looking at myself as I was about the other, sort of, characters in the book, and so that self-examination, while I was writing it, was never intended to be published. <Laughs> You know? I wrote it because I really wanted to understand, like, "How did I get here? I know I played a role in this, and what was that role?" Jo Reed: Can you read a poem, "Sanity?" Because I think that, kind of, speaks to this. Seema Reza: "Sanity.” We restrained in a way that made my teeth hurt. I reached out in little unreciprocated gestures, favorite dinners, and funny stories. I came home one night and his posture flipped a switch in me and set my insides on fire. When I opened my mouth, I reduced him to ash. It was more than I'd meant to say, but I couldn't stop. And when I saw how wild I was being, rage of that caliber is an out of body experience. I surrendered to it completely. I lay my arms down, clenched my fists, and let it pour forth. When I was done, he began. His insults weren't eloquent, but he slammed pots and kicked cabinets and jabbed me in the ribs and collarbone with his finger, for emphasis. I was relieved that he was crazy, too, and I thought it would be over, that enduring his crazy would serve as penance for my own. Late that night, I went to deliver an apology wrapped in forgiveness to smooth things over. He was sitting in the corner of the couch watching television with his brows furrowed, the remote poised in his right hand. He lifted his eyes briefly when I entered the room. I delivered my speech, familiarly specked with ardent defenses and wan confessions, and he said, 'I think I want a divorce.' Eventually, after much cajoling and rephrasing of questions on my part, he admitted that he didn't want a divorce. He wanted sanity. 'Sanity. Sure. I can do that,' I said. He finally accepted my apology, refusing my offer of forgiveness, and returned my kiss with a disdainful peck. I was trembling and giddy, like someone who has narrowly escaped a falling object. I resolved to do sanity right, this time. We pulled a crisp sheet over our anger and tucked the edges in. For a time, we were again polite paper dolls. Jo Reed: I think, you so nail what happens when a marriage falls apart. It's, both, so specific and so individual, as it is for all of us, but there are feelings around it that are just universal. And that's what art teaches, no? It's in the specificity we find the universal. Seema Reza: Oh, totally, totally. I always give this advice at the beginning of my writing workshops, which is, you know, there's three rules to good writing, and of course, it's my workshop so I can say that there are rules. Jo Reed: <laughs> Seema Reza: <laughs> Of course, there's many more rules. You know, one is honesty of voice, not writing in someone else's voice. If you curse, curse. The second is that specificity of detail, and the third is like a willingness to change your mind, over the course of the writing. But that specificity of detail is so important because we have to pay attention to what we paid attention to. Right? To get, like, a clue to our minds, to what it is that's sticking for us.

Jo Reed: The book is put together quite unusually. You have narrative chapters. You have fragments. You have a recipe, and poems. Let's talk about the structure and why you structured it that way. Seema Reza: Part of my undergrad thesis was about this relationship between form and content, and how the form changes the content and how certain content needs a specific form, and I think that's true of just all kinds of information; right? There are multiple kinds of knowing and there are multiple ways to represent that knowing, and usually, you need to know things in several different ways. And for me, for writing these pieces, most things I wrote in several different forms before I found the right one. Or I found the right-- the thing I was trying to understand, and so I'd go back and forth, and I'd write it as prose and it would be, like, "Oh, the connective tissue is getting in the way.” Or I'd write it as a poem and I'd be, like, "No. This needs more context.” And Red Hen was so generous with me about that. They were, like, "Yeah, do it.” You know... Jo Reed: And that's your publisher? Seema Reza: That is the publisher. And that was really freeing. You know, I was doing this process really of investigating how I came to the place that I came to. What things had I learned about love or had I been taught about love that allowed me to accept this as my life? What had I learned about my father that made our relationship what it was? And so in this process of investigating, I was using all of the tools, the poetry and the prose and, you know, the straight, like, reading about the history of Bangladesh and just trying to think about, "Why were they the way they were, my parents?" Jo Reed: Yeah. Seema Reza: And so, being able to present that information in all of these different ways felt like the only way to tell the story, as completely as one can. Jo Reed: Seema, read the poem, "Fathers like Giants." Seema Reza: Sure. "Fathers Like Giants.” Our fathers were way above us, higher than the clouds, taking care of things, taking care of our mothers, like giants who would catch us if we fell, though we did not notice them until they were gone. They took us to see things we didn't want to see, protected us from things we wanted to do. Once, at a fair in Dhaka, a young man purposely bumped into my sister. My father, walking behind, bumped into him with the girth of his belly, sending him askew and when their eyes met, my father said, 'I thought you liked bumping into people.' And just as we had forgotten he was there walking behind us, we sometimes forget now that he is not. Jo Reed: What a lovely tribute to your father. And as mentioned, he died while your marriage was unraveling and you were divorcing your husband and he drowned while he was swimming. Seema Reza: Yeah. He always wanted to take one last dip. I don't know. I wonder how much money he spent on swimming trunks because he would always take one last dip on the morning of departure from an oceanside vacation or any kind of waterside vacation, and my mom would be, like, "What are we going to do with these wet swim trunks?” And he would just throw them away <laughs> and that would make her even madder. So he'd gone for the one last dip, and my mom had gone for her one last shopping trip, on this visit to Fort Cochin, in India, and he never came back. Jo Reed: You detail many difficult times, in the book, and as you say, you interrogate yourself pretty harshly, too. It's so personal, and you directly address your decision to put it all in the book and at exactly the point where I was wondering, like, "I wonder what her kids think about this?" Seema Reza: <laughs> Jo Reed: But were you ever wary? Or was it as straightforward as it comes across in that chapter in the book. Seema Reza: I think that the secrets we keep hold us hostage, and the only way to overcome shame is to lay it out there to the people in your community. Of course, my community is a little bit bigger now, with the book. And so for that there was no question, this was what I needed to do. There’s that voice in your head, if people really knew you that can make you just feel like total crap all the time if you let it just sort of fester in there, and not that I don’t struggle with that still, but this is my way of speaking to that voice. All of this writing is my way of speaking to that voice. The places that are uncomfortable are the places we need to go in art. But when it comes to my sons, man, parenting is just a great experiment. I thought really deeply, you know, over the course of doing this investigation about what caused my grandmother’s secrets, and my mother’s secrets. Not even straight up secrets, even, but, like, this dishonesty about, almost gas lighting about, like, “No, everything’s fine.” And it’s like, no, everything is clearly not fine, and what harm that caused our relationship, and that is one thing that I cannot bear to have with my boys. You know, they can become whoever they want to become, but I’d like to know them, and I have to model that. Jo Reed: And you want them to know you. Seema Reza: Right. Jo Reed: Yeah. Seema Reza: Yeah. I want them to know me and love me anyway. Jo Reed: You write in the book very honestly about your husband being abusive and the stories you would tell yourself. “Well, I’m not bruised. I’m not bleeding.” I mean, and all those stories. Seema Reza: Yeah. And you know, there’s that, and then also I’m not the kind of woman who would be abused. There is a deep, deep shame to being weak. And still I feel, you know, a certain little kernel of, like, I can’t believe that that’s part of my history, you know, because you want to be tough. Jo Reed: And invulnerable. Seema Reza: And invulnerable, and fierce, and you want to believe that the person you’re with loves you, and that that is enough. Right? We’re told that love can conquer anything. Well… Jo Reed: There’s another poem I want you to read about your youngest child. Seema Reza: “February 13^th. The night before you were born I lay in the bathtub on my side, too swollen with baby to be submerged. Your father sat beside me awake with us both, pouring cups of warm water over the loaded barrel of my belly. That kind of love is where the roots of this family are, and it is our work to convince you and to convince ourselves of the irreconcilable truth. Love like that existed once, and we are all somehow better off now.” Jo Reed: I thought that poem was beautiful. And what a gift to your son, because both of your kids you know they lived through the fighting and they lived through the divorce and to remind them that there was a great love there as well I think is really a lovely gift. Seema Reza: Thank you. Yeah. You know, I loved their father so much, and he loved me so much, and so often we feel, like, to be loyal to ourselves we have to throw out the good. And to move forward sometimes you kind of do. There are definitely periods where I had to be fueled by rage in order to, like, pack my stuff up and leave. But also I learned a lot about being loved during that time, too, and if we discount that about everything we have to leave, then when we take the sort of stock of our lives everything looks like it was really terrible, but it wasn’t. There was laughing at the grocery store, and there was all of this beauty. Jo Reed: And two lovely boys. Seema Reza: Two lovely boys, and a lot of really beautiful experiences, which is why I stayed, which is why we kept trying to make it work, even though the broken places were getting more and more broken. Thank you for asking me to read that. Jo Reed: Oh, no, not at all. Like, I really liked it so much. You write in the book about turning jagged truth into art, which is something you certainly have done in your own life, but you also work with veterans and service members to help them do that as well. And the NEA has funded art for veterans and service members for years, art therapy and workshops, so I’m very curious and eager to know how you began that work. Seema Reza: I started this work at an arts and crafts center that was attached to the old Walter Reed, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the Army had set up these arts and crafts centers just before we were entering World War Two for morale, welfare and recreation. I got there in 2010. It was my first, full time, out-of-the-house job, and when I began working there, I got involved with doing sessions at the main campus, not just at the Center, and what people wanted was community. You know, I would just set up a table in a public space, and we would make art, and we would do paintings, and we would do wood burning, and we would have drum circles, and we would do all of these things, and it would be this sort of really, broad group of people. There’s a lot of hierarchy of injury in the military health system, I think, and so this was a sort of, like, flattened hierarchy where we would have family members, and somebody with an invisible injury, cancer, or posttraumatic stress, or neurocycle social issues, and people with visible physical combat injuries all at one table teaching each other things, and creating things, and that’s what a natural community is. Right? A natural community isn’t everybody being the same. It’s this sort of range of, you know, abilities and strengths so that we can fill in for each other, and that sort of emerged there. You know, recognizing this need, we founded a nonprofit with several veterans and several community building artists, called Community Building Art Works and we are working to fill that gap for people who maybe didn’t see themselves as artists before, and discovered the art through these art workshops that are not therapy at all, but they’re about creating art and supporting them through these sort of phases of, like, being in treatment, and then being an outpatient, and then being a veteran, which is a very different experience. When you hand people these tools to develop their own emotional vocabulary, they realize they’ve been looking for it all along. Jo Reed: I want you to read “Bad Guys.” Seema Reza: “Bad Guys.” “You think I’m good. I’m no good guy.” He is clicking his pen, elbows on the table, his composition book open in front of him. He is the only person in my writing group today. He is tall, broad, with short hair and glasses that are tinted dark. He is kind, and gentle, and intellectual. He has done terrible things on his five combat tours. He is one of the best people I have ever met. “You want to know the truth about good guys and bad guys,” he asks me. “There are no good guys, only bad guys, and other bad guys, and innocent people caught in the crossfire.” I think maybe there are only good guys, all caught in the crossfire. Jo Reed: And the last line just sums it up, I think. Seema Reza: Yeah. I think it’s that shame thing, of course, and we create these barriers around, like, what type of person would do X or Y, and we don’t have, like, a practice of forgiveness, I don’t think, in the modern world, or, like, there isn’t, like, a lot of space for that, but when you sit with people and you make space for them, they usually think their way to really good things when they are in a space with unconditional, positive regard, but it means that you have to also allow space for them to say things that challenge you and your capacity for love because usually somebody will say something really, really harsh or Islam phobic, or sexist, something designed to make me flinch just before they tell me something that’s real and vulnerable. Just before they’re willing to write something real, they check if I’m trustworthy, if I can handle the real truth. And it’s not for everyone. But for me, I feel like I’ve done some pretty terrible things and I would prefer for people to see through that to what my intention is today, you know. Jo Reed: I always think I really do not want to be judged by the worst thing I ever did, and try to remember that when I’m looking at other people. Seema Reza: Oh, amen. Yeah. And learning self-forgiveness, not that I’m done with it, but it is the most essential life skill, and teaching people how to, like, work towards that means that you have to hold the table steady while they shake it. Jo Reed: What has working with veterans and service members taught you about people and about art? Seema Reza: It has taught me so much about art. One of the main places that there is sort of overlap between veterans and artists, I think, is that, you know, military training trains people to observe really carefully as does art training, right? When you’re drawing a thing you have to forget what you thought you knew about what it looks like and break it down into what you’re actually seeing. Similarly, when you write about something, right, we’re writing these specific details, and really trying to see beyond what we thought the story was and paired with the sense of, like, nothing makes sense, and so I better make sense of it. And that’s true for artists, and I think it’s true for most people who join the service, is there’s something in the world that doesn’t make sense that they’re trying to change, so learning to sort of lean into that observation more as an artist, myself, has definitely been a benefit of this work. Jo Reed: Poetry Out Loud, you are a judge this year. You were a judge last year. Tell me about that experience. Seema Reza: Oh, my goodness. So last year was my first year, and I didn’t quite know what to expect. I thought it would be really, really difficult to judge children, and I’ll confess to you, and everyone else, that it was not. I warmed to it, because they took it so seriously. You don’t think of them as kids when they get up there and they’re really doing this work so professionally. And one of my favorite parts is receiving the packet of poems. We receive the poems before the kids read them so we know what they’re going to read, and we can familiarize ourselves with the text. And it’s often like favorites, and then so much stuff that I haven’t read, so it’s always this, like, new bank of awesome poems, and that’s very exciting. And, you know, I do most of my professional work on the other side of the funnel, when adults who didn’t learn this poetic practice as a way of seeing the world, an alternate view of the world. So it’s really heartening to see kids who make this kind of effort to memorize poems, understand them. That emotional work of understanding a poem is maybe harder than writing a poem, I think. And it makes me really hopeful for the future, which I am always in need of. Jo Reed: As we all are. Do you find that there’s a particular resonance when you’re actually hearing poetry as opposed to reading it? Seema Reza: Definitely. I think poetry is meant to be experienced aloud. I believe that that’s what breaks are for in poetry. And when you read a poem aloud from the page, I think that the writer is training you when to breathe and when not to. But, right, you’re trying to control the flow of somebody else’s breath when you put in these breaks. So having read the poem and then having it read to us, and matching up those experiences, I think there’s definitely a huge advantage. People should come to see the performance, because it’s amazing. Jo Reed: Tell me what you’re working on now. Seema Reza: So I am working on a collection of poetry that will come out in 2019. I’m very, very excited to get a book of just pure poetry out, and I’m also working on a collection of non-fiction essays about the different ways that we know things, and who gets to claim knowledge. Jo Reed: Seema, thank you so much. I really appreciate it, and I thought your book was wonderful. Seema Reza: Thank you so much for reading it and for this opportunity. Jo Reed: Not at all. Thank you. That is poet and essayist Seema Reza. Her book is called When the World Breaks Open. And as you heard, Seema is one of the judges at 2018 Poetry out Loud competition. The finals are on April 25th at 7pm at the Liner Auditorium here in Washington, D.C. Go to arts.gov for more information about this free event. And if you can’t make to the Liner, we’re live-streaming the finals at arts.gov. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. You can subscribe to Art Works where ever you get your podcasts, so please do. And leave us a rating on Apple—it really helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. <Musical Excerpt>