46. A Grief Sublime: Beth Robbins

BIO: I am a writer, teacher, director, and editor. And now I am a widow. I was married for just under thirty years to Steve “Sproutman” Meyerowitz. Originally from NYC, we moved to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts where we raised our three children: Gabrielle (31 years old), Ari (29 years old), and Noah (20 years old). The summer after Steve’s death I attended Oxford University. It was there that I found my voice as a writer. Or, perhaps, rather, recognized it. I began to play with form. I discovered the permeability of once-perceived boundaries. I began to put my voice in conversation with John Keats, with Walt Whitman, with Emily Dickinson. I began to explore in my writing the liminal. The difference between an intellectual or emotional response to a work of art, and an imbibing of it––this is not only possible but necessary. In 2017, the Bread Loaf Journal published my personal essay––“Fragments in Liminality: A Lover’s Discourse.” This has since been expanded into a book, A Grief Sublime, published in December of 2019 by Keats & Company Publishers. I have been a high school English and drama teacher in a Waldorf school for the last 15 years. I have worked as an editor for a small publishing house. I have always believed in the necessity for an authentic engagement with literature and the development and validity of every one’s voice. My work with my students has been punctuated by dialogue and passionate debate, and with a focused effort on crafting writing that speaks both to the texts studied and in a voice that is true to the student. In our increasingly fragmented chaotic world, connection is ever more important. The fragmentation of our world begs for conversation, reconnection, dialogue. I have developed curriculum around the Romantics and Transcendentalists, among many other subject areas including Beowulf and Chaucer, Dante and Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, and many others. Keats and the Romantic poets have always been favorites, but after my husband’s unexpected death I entered into Keats’s poetry and the notion of liminality in a life-changing way. From that moment, romanticism and liminality have been touchstones for me, informing my work in my teaching and in the projects I’ve done at Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, and subsequently. This became the way I moved from incomprehension and confusion to some sense of peace and acceptance. Or, at least, an ability to live, as Keats would say in his so-called Negative Capability letter, “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats helped me remain somehow if not content, well then at least okay with half-knowledge. To be with what was rather than what was not. I have discovered a vibrant living experience of literature. I have learned to quiet the self to allow the truth of the other (whether living or nonliving) to speak. Words and experiences become portals to transformation and, possibly, reconfiguration that renews and recreates. https://www.keatsandcompanypublishers.com/books