Type the phrase, “Woman drops child off bridge,” into an online search engine and a startling number of news stories pop up. Sometimes — not always — the woman jumps too. Sometimes either or both die; sometimes either or both survive. The stories are haunting because, perhaps more than any other crime, a mother choosing to kill her own child seems incomprehensible.
Ware poet Andrea Stone read an account of an incident that occurred in 1999 on the Capilano Suspension Bridge, a sightseeing bridge that hangs 100 meters above the Capilano River in a forested park in Vancouver, Canada. In that story, the 18-month old girl lived. The mother was acquitted.
Stone, who grew up in Ontario, was haunted by thoughts of this mother and what might have driven her to take such drastic action. And she was equally haunted by the little girl.
A story — distinct from the one in the newspaper — began to take shape in Stone’s mind, fueled by questions: What if the mother fled, crossing into America? What if the father kept the story secret from the little girl, and from her baby sister whom he’d been carrying in a backpack that day on the bridge? What would it be like for the girls to learn of it from newspaper clippings after he died, decades later? And what if the mother were to return, seeking her grown daughter?
These are the questions that Stone’s book, “American Spelling: A Story in Verse,” explores. The book is just out from Hedgerow Books, the poetry imprint of Leveller’s Press in Amherst. Stone will be reading at a book launch on Saturday, April 16, 4:30 p.m. in the Browsing Room at Smith College’s Neilson Library, along with Joshua Michael Stewart, whose book, “Break Every String,” is also newly out from Hedgerow.
Stone’s book, one long poem in 50 parts, reads like a novel. It has fully developed, though mostly unnamed characters — mother, father, two grown daughters and a husband of one of the daughters. And it has a novel’s urgency — that sense, on the reader’s part, of being pulled along, needing to know what happens next. Stone set the seminal event of her story in 1974, to distinguish it from any actual news account, and set its present time 38 years later. She created a scenario in which the family had been visiting the Capilano Bridge from their home in Toronto.
Stone says she thought about other forms — a short story, a novel, a play — but finally settled on writing the story as a series of poems that shift from the mother’s to the daughters’ points of view.
“I think it made me distill each scene to where I wanted it to be,” she says of poetry. “Giving a certain amount, holding a certain amount back.”
At the suggestion of Hedgerow editor Diana Gordon, Stone did write the pivotal scene on the bridge in prose, “Because I felt I needed to have, for myself, a fuller narrative of what that day was like.
“But it was very interesting because the fun part was making the poem out of it,” Stone adds.
With her hands, she plucks imaginary lines from the air, demonstrating how she chose bits of the prose to rework into a poem. The compression of poetry seemed suited to the story’s prevailing sense of trying to figure out something elusive.
“Not that you don’t concentrate on language when you’re writing other things, of course you do,” says Stone, an assistant professor of literature at Smith College. “But I wanted to say as much as possible in as few words as possible, and hoped to create an effect through that that laid attention on the words that I thought mattered most.”
Flirting with American spelling
In the excerpt printed here, the mother, freed from jail, slices a peach and contemplates writing her story as a way to free herself from it.
“I flirt with American spelling for a change,” the mother narrates.
She’s talking about the conversion of French-influenced words that in Canada, would be spelled, ‘colour’ and ‘favour,’ to their American counterparts: ‘color’ and ‘favor.’ The dropped ‘u’ in these words, reminds the mother of the dropped “you” of her child.
Stone says, “I like the idea that she’s almost trying out a new way to think and a new way to get this down … This idea of not so much using a different language but using a different spelling to get at what she hasn’t been able to understand.”
Throughout the book, there is surprisingly more love than blame. Stone resists easy explanations or pop psychology diagnoses of any of the characters, especially the mother.
“I wanted it to be something that she experiences internally that is not easily explained,” Stone says. “It’s something that she can’t manage, she can’t control, she can’t even really figure out. And it’s not a result — as far as she can tell, anyway — of external forces or demands. There’s just something in her that she can’t really know.”
Ask for “American Spelling: Story in Verse” by Andrea Stone at local bookstores or order from Collective Copies in Amherst at: store.collectivecopies.com/store/show/Lev024
To learn more about Hedgerow Books, visit: hedgerowbooks.net
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. Crapo is seeking published poets and writers for her column. She’s interested in books written by Franklin County poets and writers and/or published by a Franklin County press. She can be reached at: tcrapo@me.com