Last night was the reading and book signing to launch my new collection of poems, Against My Dreams, written in the voice of my grandmother, a Norwegian immigrant. Sharing my poems and the stories that surround them was a profound experience. So many people came out to support me--a full house. After the reading, people shared stories and memories of their own ancestors, some by speaking to the whole group, others by speaking informally to each other or to me, still others by sending an email my way today. The air is still alive with the spirits of all our ancestors, with the family secrets that can direct our lives unseen, with the healing that comes from recognizing who we are and all that made us.

Uncle Ollie and Aunt Ellie had a farm. Ollie was my uncle, not by biology, but by commitment. Ollie's parents took in my father's whole family following my paternal grandmother's death in 1922, when my father was only five. Combining families allowed my grandfather to continue working. So my father and Ollie grew up as brothers on the two-family farm.

When I was a girl, Uncle Ollie and Aunt Ellie bought 150 acres and a herd of holsteins, and my family spent countless weekends and summer holidays there. During one summer visit, Ollie's brother Herbie stopped by. Herbie was an avid hunter, and he brought with him the spoils from his latest hunt, including the bear suit in this photograph.

My father, Uncle Ollie and Herbie concocted a practical joke. They recruited me. My job was to run out screaming each time a car approached, with Herbie in the bear suit lumbering behind. Ellie and Ollie's farm was on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, so the number of passing cars was minuscule, and they crept along to keep down the dust. Still, I'm sure my mother and Aunt Ellie cringed each time I went running into the road with the bear in pursuit. 

Even with the low volume of traffic, we managed to stop three or four cars before Herbie nearly passed out from the heat. I never thought about where that bear suit came from. I was too taken with getting real bear hugs and experiencing the peak of my acting career.  
 

I met my cousin Kari when I traveled to Norway to do research for my newly-released collection, Against My Dreams, poems written in my grandmother's voice. Kari's mother and my grandmother were sisters.

During the weeks I spent with her, Kari drove me all over the countryside to show me the farms where my ancestors lived and to share cultural museums and other relevant sites. She made a photo album and written history of my family for me. She fed me, listened to me, told me stories, gave me space to wander and write.

Kari died this spring while I was working on publication of this book. But I can still hear her earnest voice that day in her apartment when she pulled me into the hallway to show me a photo of my great-grandparents. 

"One day before you came, I walked by this picture and I heard their voices," Kari said in her lilting English. "They told me to be good to you, because you are the one who cares, the one who will tell the story." 

I grew up in a small town in central Connecticut, where fields of nursery seedlings, herds of grazing dairy cows, and acres of net-covered tobacco plants defined the landscape. When I was a little girl, my family shopped for everything from hardware to housewares to clothing at Oberg's Store. I remember trying on a pair of red Mary Janes and prancing across the wooden floor to show them off. But my most exciting shopping excursions were the ones that happened when my grandmother came to visit. She'd take me by bus all the way to Hartford to visit G. Fox & Co., a huge department store and place of wonder. I rode my first escalator and elevator there, and I was entranced when a clerk rang up a sale and sent the sales slip and cash through a vacuum tube to some mysterious destination with a whoosh. In the Toy Department on the 11th floor there was a stuffed giraffe too tall to fit in my house. These shopping trips happened once or twice a year, when Nana would buy me an outfit for Easter or a special hat and coat for winter. One spring we boarded the bus home with a big white rectangular box and a flowered hatbox, containing my bright green coat, with its fashionable three-quarter-length sleeves, and my glorious white organdy hat, with its filmy brim and gossamer rose. I'm the age she was then. I hope I said thank you. 

With my new book coming out, Against My Dreams, I've been thinking about my grandmother a lot, because the poems in the collection are written in her voice.

As I was preparing to go to press, I had a revelation that came in the form of a question: What if the heroic stories we grew up with, the ones we learned in school, the ones that provided the underpinnings of history, were stories of people like my grandmother?

She grew up in a poor family on a small mountain farm, emigrated from her homeland as a young woman, was widowed in the Great Depression and raised two children on her own, spent her whole life working as a domestic servant, never owned anything except some clothes. 
What if her story and the stories of people like her defined heroism, rather than the stories of generals and diplomats, presidents and industrialists, inventors and explorers? How would American society be different if lives like hers were honored and celebrated? What values would emerge? How would we see each other?