BRATTLEBORO — On Oct. 10, Brattleboro-based poet Diana Whitney's new collection, Dark Beds, was released by June Road Press. This Friday at Epsilon Spires, Whitney will read from that collection at the 2023 Brattleboro Literary Festival.
The publisher's media release describes Dark Beds as "an anthem for the 'sandwich generation' caught between demands, yearning to reclaim desire and find fulfillment, maybe even some magic, in the everyday. These poems shimmer with longing and infuse the fatigue of caregiving, motherhood, and domesticity - and the rugged landscape of rural Vermont through the seasons - with new meaning and beauty."
Whitney was born in England while her father was doing graduate studies at Oxford; she was then a youngster in Washington, D.C. and moved just before entering sixth grade to Williamstown, Massachusetts, where her father taught at Williams College. Attending the local public high school was a bit of a nightmare, she says, both because she was the new kid and because she secretly identifed as bisexual.
With a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College, Whitney earned a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at the University of Oxford, where she earned a Master of Arts degree in English literature.
She then moved to Vermont's Northeast Kingdom and studied at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She is currently finishing her degree at New England College in Henneker, New Hampshire.
She came to southern Vermont with her husband, Tim Whitney, where he - now a therapist - taught history and coached rowing at The Putney School while she taught literature there and coached both the cross-country ski and rowing teams.
What started as a temporary stop, ended up as home: "We fell in love with Brattleboro," she says.
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A prolific writer in a range of genres, Whitney's work is frank, witty, intelligent, and informed. She writes about subjects others might not touch; she opens doors many would like to look through.
Her essays, op-eds, and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and the Kenyon Review; in Glamour and Ms., and in other top publications.
She's been poetry critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and an editor and book coach, as well.
Whitney compiled the bestselling anthology You Don't Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves (Workman Publishing, 2021), which won the Claudia Lewis Award, a prize bestowed on poetry books for young readers.
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A poet first, Whitney says she hadn't created any poems of note since the birth of her first daughter in 2005.
"There was a long silence: motherhood had rendered me mute at first," she says.
What actually "broke the silence," she says, was not poetry, but a column on parenting - "Spilt Milk: Making a Mess of Motherhood" - which she wrote every other week for the Brattleboro Reformer.
From 2009 to 2013, those regular musings - candid, insightful, irreverent - made readers laugh, wonder, ponder, and breathe relief. Eventually syndicated, it ran as a public radio commentary series and became
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The collection of poems in Dark Beds, she explains, "is the poems I've written since Wanting It."
Though she's been working on a memoir about motherhood, sexuality, feminism, and breaking patterns of female silence while also producing this collection, she quips about the time it took to produce.
"You know the 'slow-food movement'? I'm an aficionado of the 'slow-writing movement.' This book took a long time to come into the world," she says: one can't help but think of gestational time.
In fact, Whitney says, "there's a lot about motherhood in it. The second poem, 'Velvet Rocks,' is about my second daughter" - and, apologizing for what might seem cliché - the miracle of her birth:
§with amber suspended between two states
§of matter between out and in
§between here and there S-curves
§of current shifting alluvial silt
§filtered through algae
Whitney's mother, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 2013 and died this summer at age 78, figures prominently in her memoir-in-progress, as she does in Dark Beds.
In the poem "The Long Goodbye" - its title also common parlance for Alzheimer's disease - Whitney's addresses the reality with honest poignancy:
§Run your fingers everywhere.
§Danger is the size of a sesame seed,
§a single brain cell, smaller.
§If I could I'd make my mother walk and talk
§again, but what do I know of magic
§or redemption? Only the long goodbye.
§How tired we are of doing our best.
"That goodbye was 10 years long and now it's over, so there's a lot of sadness and also relief that my mother has been released," says Whitney, pointing out "a bittersweet quality to launching this book a few weeks after my mom died."
Her mother, she says, is captured "in my writing, in my daughters, in the poems about motherhood, in the poems that are really struggling with motherhood, and in the poems about marriage. My mom was in a very long marriage, and it wasn't easy."
Dark Beds, Whitney adds, is about "coming into my own creative power, watching my daughters grow towards and in adolescence as I watched my mother descend into Alzheimer's and eventually into silence."
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Scoping feminism, desire and longing, motherhood, depression, sexuality, grief, longing, limerence, and other private struggles, Whitney's diction is as lean as she is.
A yoga teacher and athlete, she writes sparingly, with allusions to the classics, with an abundance of images from the natural world, and from a deeply rooted, intense sensuality.
Dark Beds digs at all it is to be a woman - her ranging sexuality; her being a daughter, mother, lover; her being a voice yearning to be heard.
"There are a lot of different layers of the book," she says, including "marriage, infidelity, betrayal, and healing, and what it takes for a long marriage to survive."
She credits Esther Perel for inspiration. The author of Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence and a psychotherapist known for her work on human relationships, Perel has posed an essential question: "How can we want what we already have?"
It's a question aimed at figuring out the feeling of emptiness, the sadness of loneliness versus the satisfaction of being alone, of the desiring of ever more beyond what's abundantly at hand.
"Dark Beds was me wrestling with Perel's question and writing my way towards an answer," says Whitney, who says she looked within herself for answers and not outward.
The collection charts "a woman's quest for selfhood" and her struggles with creative and erotic power, with "a longing for the other; a longing to be seen, to be heard," while forging resilience along the way.
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Whitney also writes the newsletter Girl Trouble, where she shares insight about her favorite books and feminist heroes. She was awarded a 2021–2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for a collection of the same title, about "girls, rape culture, and excavating female adolescence."
An ardent feminist, an advocate for abuse survivors, and a potent voice for reproductive rights, she has also received grants and awards from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Women's National Book Association, the Vermont Arts Endowment, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center.
Having served on the Brattleboro Literary Festival's poetry committee for a handful of past years, Whitney is now a featured poet in the 2023 event.
"I'm honored and humbled to be part of it," she says, calling the event "the quintessential Vermont experience."
"It's peak leaf season in a charming small town filled with writers and readers and lovers of books. We get the most wonderful authors," she says. "It's really extraordinary that people come from all over to Brattleboro to hear them read."
Whitney's reading on Oct. 13, which she shares with Cate Marvin, acclaimed feminist poet from New York City, begins at 7 p.m. at Epsilon Spires, 190 Main St., in Brattleboro. It'll be followed, Whitney says, by a launch party at 8 p.m. in the venue's intimately lit and trendy gathering space.
"There'll be music, food, drink - a party," she says. "Everyone's invited to celebrate Dark Beds."
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Dark Beds is available at Everyone's Books, 25 Elliot St., or and directly from its award-winning publisher, June Road Press (juneroadpress.com).
Annie Landenberger is an arts writer and columnist for The Commons; she also is founder and artistic director of Rock River Players and is one half of the musical duo Bard Owl with partner T. Breeze Verdant.
This The Arts column by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.