It's no surprise that the topic of grief is being written about a lot these days, even as we start to emerge from our year of hibernation. I feel fortunate to have so many seasoned writers around me, with varied perspectives and experience, who are tackling this subject and helping me (us) to make sense of it, to understand this terrain more fully and deeply.
One of these voices is a long-time, treasured member of the Unlocking Your Story workshops. In fact, Chanel Brenner used to host the Santa Monica group at her home before we went online. Her new collection of poetry, Smile, Or Else, is the winner of the 2021 Press 53 Award for Poetry and follows her ongoing grief journey after the death of her son, Riley.
Chanel is fearless on the page, something that I admire. In turn, she gives other people permission in our workshops to be bold and brave, too. Her writing awakens me to parts of myself that I didn't know existed, until her crisp language and piercing insights somehow find their way in.
Below is my interview with Chanel, where she shares how alternative forms of meditation help her to channel her ideas and poems.
Chanel Brenner's poetry has been widely published. She is the author of Vanilla Milk: A Memoir Told in Poems (Silver Birch Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the 2016 Independent Book Awards and honorable mention in the 2014 Eric Hoffer awards. Through poems and vignettes, her debut commemorates her son’s death. Kirkus called it, “A noteworthy exploration of a parent’s grief.”
Her new collection of poetry, Smile, Or Else, is the winner of the 2021 Press 53 Award for Poetry, and traces her and her family's ongoing journey toward healing.
“Clear and cutting as glass, Chanel Brenner’s poems will challenge everything you think you know about grief.”
—Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies
”Chanel Brenner’s poetry stirs, provokes, elevates with its precision and insight. These poems are expertly crafted and beat with a true poet’s heart.”
—Emily Rapp Black, New York Times best-selling author of The Still Point of a Turning World
KARIN GUTMAN: Congratulations on your new poetry collection! I just got my copy and love the cover image. Are you happy with it?
CHANEL BRENNER: Yeah. I'm thrilled with it.
KARIN: What does this image mean to you, a candle that's extinguished?
CHANEL: I don't necessarily see it as extinguished. I still see the ember there. And, so for me, it's about light and dark and having hope in the darkness. That there's still a spark there. That there's still a little bit of light.
KARIN: I recognized a few of the poems as I was reading.
CHANEL: Some of them have come from your class, or in pieces that I've read in class when I was mixing the poetry with the essays. I know Dead Child World came from one of your prompts.
KARIN: Dead Child World is one of my favorites.
CHANEL: That was my first draft. My first draft was written in my journal in your class.
KARIN: Amazing.
So, both of your poetry collections, Smile, Or Else and Vanilla Milk explore grief after your son Riley died, correct?
CHANEL: Yeah. The main difference is all the poems in Vanilla Milk were written in the first two years after he died. This new collection is everything after year two, for the most part. It's more of the later grief.
KARIN: How has your perspective shifted over time? Do you see it reflected in the second book of poems
CHANEL: I think this new collection is mostly about falling back into that early grief. How it's never really gone. Even though the time has passed, and yes, I'm healing, that really early grief is always there just below the surface. It's about how it gets tapped into.
KARIN: Do you think of poetry as telling a story?
CHANEL: The poems in a collection tell a story, I think. I don't know if there's a story arc like there is in a memoir, but I think that you can tell the story that way. Also, each individual poem has a beginning, middle and end and tells a story of a moment.
KARIN: How do you start a poem? What triggers ideas for you?
CHANEL: Poems have come from something that somebody said to me. Sometimes it's hurtful things after Riley died, that I felt caused me pain. Or something I would see. In our workshop, I was working on a poem about the woman whose daughter drowned. There was something about the interview on The Today Show that haunted me, and I was so obsessed with it. Sometimes it’s news stories, sometimes things that people say to me, sometimes something I'm dealing with like [my son] Desmond, or something that stuns me and really sticks with me, and I just keep going back to it.
In the beginning, I was just writing things that would come to mind in a journal. Sometimes I didn't even feel like I knew how to write a poem.
KARIN: Are there certain tried-and-true principles of poetry?
CHANEL: I always want to be surprised when I write a poem, and I don't want the ending to be forced. I don't want to know the ending ahead of time. I want to feel like it's a journey and when I get to that point where something truly surprises me and I'm just like, “Wow. Where did that come from?” That's when I usually end.
For me to write a poem, it has to be something I want to know more about or work through. So, I follow that curiosity.
Sometimes I will abandon poems if I am forcing an ending. Sometimes I can just cut the bottom of the poem and end it at an earlier point. But to force an ending feels very crafted or just not authentic.
KARIN: How do you take care of yourself when you're writing about painful topics?
CHANEL: I think I've told you before that I feel the writing saved me. It was a lifeline. However, there were some parts that took me a long time to be able to write about, like the night of Riley’s brain bleed, and it wrecks me when I do. I do need to have some self-care afterwards.
KARIN: What is your version of self-care?
CHANEL: Walking away from it and picking it back up when I'm ready; not forcing myself to continue to work on it. Then just doing something fun, like we used to go to Benihana's a lot, drinking some champagne, doing things that make me happy, that kind of stuff. Definitely walking, exercise, and now I even meditate. I started meditating over this stupid break.
KARIN: Why do you roll your eyes when you say that?
CHANEL: Because I never in a million years thought I would be the type of person to meditate, other than the meditating I do when I'm out on a walk. Claire Bidwell Smith has this little grief meditation course. What drew me in was each meditation is six minutes long. Right away, I thought, “My gosh, this really helps me.”
I also started taking a class with my sister with a medium. Her name is Medium Fleur. She has a bunch of very cool meditations, these grounding and centering meditations. They really work. I wanted to figure out how I channel because there have been poems—even Dead Child World to some extent—where I feel something else takes over. I don't feel like I wrote the poem. I feel like I'm pulling from whatever you want to call it—the collective, the universe, whatever term you want to use. I wanted to figure out what I'm doing when I do that. And so I've learned, when I'm on a walk for example, why poems come to me. She was talking about how when you're in a trans-state, when you're doing something repetitive, then you're more open. I've found that very interesting. Kind of out there.
KARIN: That liminal space.
CHANEL: Even when I sit and put on makeup. I get a lot of poetry ideas and ideas that come to me while I put on makeup. So, it's an important part of my day. Not just sitting at your computer or sitting with the pen and paper trying to write. It doesn't come to me that way, at least not usually for a first draft.
I think meditations help you be in your body. You can't channel if you're not in your body. I'm hoping when I go back to writing in the workshop, that I'll be able to shift into that more easily. Get out of my head into my body more.
KARIN: You say that writing saved you. But how can that be when the material, I imagine, can bring up so much pain?
CHANEL: I felt I could go one way or the other. One was very destructive: screaming, pulling my hair out, breaking things, throwing bottles. Many destructive things went through my mind. Or I could listen to the voice that said, sit down and write. I chose the latter and it prevented me from doing other destructive things. I listened to my intuition and learned how to write poetry. For me, it was a new talent, a new thing to work on. So, I think each poem and each thing I wrote created hope.
KARIN: Is hope something that you discovered through the writing process?
CHANEL: Yes, just by writing about Riley, I'm giving life to him. I always feel like the editing process is even more healing than the writing the original draft, because here I am polishing it off and making it into something that is beautiful. And I think there's always some light in the poems, even the darker ones.
In the editing process, too, there's the reframing of it. I try to look at it from an outsider’s perspective, from an unemotional point of view. That's when I'll sometimes make changes. I like that I have the power to change whatever I want about it. It's not big things, not the emotional truth, but a little this or that. To make it flow better, for the sounds of the words, for the image.
That always feels cool to be able to go in there and think, “This can be whatever I want it to be.”
Buy the book!
To learn more about Chanel Brenner, visit her site.
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