Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? Some of my answer to this question is below because my process is directly related to where I was when I began writing. The first stanza or so was written while I was in the passenger seat of my minivan, my late husband driving. Later, I would type the beginning into the computer, opening with what had been drafted on glovebox scrap paper. The poem was drafted and then revised, not always saving each revision individually. Drafting on a computer, unlike the days of typing up poems, means that I might go through multiple revisions before saving a draft. My hand doesn’t move as quickly as my mind, so I hardly ever handwrite drafts of poems. I do now, however, sometimes draft in the notes section of my cell phone. Once I had a revised draft of this poem, I shared it with my writing circle. It began with the simple title, “Family Trees,” was workshopped as “Ghost Limbs,” and then one of the significant revisions to come from that workshop was the change of the title to “Phantom Limbs.” It is no surprise to me that suggestion came from a biology colleague. It is the perfect title for this poem. After finalizing the poem, I submitted it for publication.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I began writing “Phantom Limbs” while my late husband was driving our white Toyota minivan between Quincy, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri, one winter while our son was still in elementary school and our daughter just a toddler. Our son was being asked to create a family tree for school and didn’t know what one was. I was sitting in the front seat, he and his baby sister in the back, trying to verbally explain. Realizing my explanation needed a visual, I pulled a piece of scrap paper out of the glovebox and started drawing one for him.
The last of my immediate birth family members died when I was thirty-six, our son was three, and our daughter was not yet born. I lost one of my brothers when he was twenty-five and another when he was forty. Neither of them had married or had children. My mother died when she was fifty-one; my father was sixty-eight. They were also divorced. My father’s family was small, and my mother was a foster child, and I never met her parents. As I sketched the tree for my son, I was able to fill in his dad’s side of the family tree but mine was either empty or deceased. My son lost interest and leaned back in his booster seat, but I was left feeling forlorn. What kind of a family tree was this to hand to my child? I flipped over the scrap paper and began drafting what would eventually become the poem, occasionally glancing out the window at the nearly blurred barren trees we were passing by at seventy miles an hour.
Five years after losing the last of my family members, my husband who was driving, the children’s biological dad, was diagnosed with the terminal illness ALS.
I have since written a memoir about him and our experience with his illness, Find A Place For Me, forthcoming from Pact Press (an imprint of Regal House), forthcoming, 2022. We lost him within a year. In this poem, he is still with us.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? I don’t remember precisely but it must have been the winter of 2011 given the time stamp on the earlier drafts. I have always thought (and have earlier written) my son was younger by a few years, but this interview made me realize he was not.
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) I am guessing at least a dozen, but I do not have evidence of all the drafts since I often make corrections multiple times without saving each one.
Deirdre, her daughter, and her husband during his illness. Copyright by Deirdre Fagan.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? “In the quickly passing landscape, the tops of other trees/ Display branches that optimistically stretch skyward.”
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? The phantom limb sensation is described by those who have had a limb amputated but feel as though the limb is still there. Losses of all kinds leave us with metaphorical phantom limbs.
While I never uttered the last line to my young son, I think there is something to be said for being aware of our family’s past and remembering. There is a sense in this poem that some information needs to be doled out as we grow and are able to better manage it. In this way, the poem gestures towards Emily Dickinson’s, “Tell All the truth but tell it slant.” While this poem was born of personal experience, my hope is that it resonates with readers’ own experiences of loss.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The first draft was the most emotional to write because I wrote it from the sudden realization that this was not only my family tree, but one I would be passing down to my as yet not fully aware children. It was most difficult to find the words to express how each branch was broken off the tree. One of my brothers committed suicide intentionally through hanging, the other unintentionally through drink. My mother died of terminal illness—cancer—my father suddenly of a heart attack.
https://www.familysearch.org/campaign/familytree-tp
Finding metaphorical language for each also opens the wound. As the poem went through various revisions, the ending became more haunting. When I share these multiple revisions with my creative writing students as a teaching tool, I remind them that poetry is always in some fashion fiction, even when born of truth. The more we revise, the more we manipulate the literal—what happened—even when we have begun with autobiographical elements. I tell them I would never actually speak to my son in the way I do in the poem at the end. Those lines were designed to make a better poem. Now that my son is eighteen, I am more aware he will someday read this poem. I hope that he, too, understands, that poetry is a craft and in this way a fiction, not a personal journal or translation of facts.
Has this poem been published before? And if so, where? “Phantom Limbs” was only my third published poem. It first appeared in Boston Literary Magazine in 2011.
https://www.facebook.com/Boston-Literary-Magazine-101873784519047/
It has since been included in my chapbook, Have Love, from Finishing Line Press, 2019.
https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/have-love-by-deirdre-fagan/
“Phantom Limbs”is also the title poem of a full collection of poetry in progress.
Deirdre Fagan is a widow, wife, mother of two, and associate professor and coordinator of creative writing in the English, Literature, and World Languages Department at Ferris State University. Fagan is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Find a Place for Me, Regal House Publishing (2022), a collection of short stories, The Grief Eater, Adelaide Books (2020), a chapbook of poetry, Have Love, Finishing Line Press (2019), and a reference book, Critical Companion to Robert Frost, Facts on File (2007). She is a poetry Pushcart nominee and her poem “Outside In” was a Best of the Net finalist in 2018. Fagan is the poetry editor for Orange Blossom Review and has also written academic essays on poetry, memoir, and pedagogy.
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