Siri Pierce joins Maine Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum in conversation and to read her poem "Plastic Palaces" featured in A NEW LAND, a poetry anthology from The Telling Room. Stuart and Siri discuss writing about seriousness and shock from the imagination of youth and the memories of today, the details of fantasy and mortality, and writing in isolation and sharing darker themes with trusted readers in a workshop environment. Siri is currently a student at Brown University.
CW: Suicide, depression
Listeners for whom these are difficult topics may choose to skip this episode, which touches on the story of an individual who lived with depression and died by suicide.
Voices of the Future is hosted and conceived by Stuart Kestenbaum, produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects, with help from Carly Peruccio, mixed by Merritt Jacob, and music by Jordan Kramer. Voices of the Future is curated and distributed by Molly McGrath and Rylan Hynes of The Telling Room. This series is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
To learn more about The Telling Room and its programs, visit www.tellingroom.org.
Siri Pierce: So much of writing is for yourself because most of the writing you do, no one else ever sees. So deciding what is for yourself, and what is for the world, and what is actually a valuable asset in the world, is sometimes hard.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Welcome to Voices Of The Future. I'm Stuart Kestenbaum. In this series, I'm interviewing young writers and poets from Maine, all of whom have participated in programs of The Telling Room, a nonprofit writing center in Portland. The Telling Room's mission is to empower youth through writing and to share their voices with the world. All of the authors in the series are featured in A New Land, and anthology of 30 poems written at The Telling Room. When I read or hear the work of these writers, I am moved by their enthusiasm, skill and courage. Some of them were born in Maine, others have come here from Africa and the Middle East. All speak with urgency about their lives and their futures. Siri Pierce graduated from Casco Bay High School, and now she's a student at Brown University. In this episode, Siri and I talk about using poetry to grapple with mortality. First, she reads her poem, “Plastic Palaces.”
Siri Pierce: My name is Siri Pierce. “Plastic Palaces.”
One summer
I met a seventeen-year-old angel.
She had a halo of burnt red hair
and wore a green and gold bikini.
She pressed a button and the garage door to heaven
creaked upwards and away.
Inside were bins of dolls and clothes,
plastic palaces,
and a big, shiny Suburban.
Everything I wanted
when I was eight.
Together we fought sandstorms,
became mermaids,
and drank peach iced tea.
One day, I made a ferocious tiger
out of orange marker and black velvet.
I bedazzled the bluest waves of the bluest water
on my mosaic.
Another day, I got a book and read it to the last page.
I never finished books
back then.
I was in the land of yeses.
I knew the angel for a week.
My mom called it “Babysitter Camp.”
After that I almost forgot about her.
Third grade came.
Sparkly jump ropes, albatrosses, cursive,
and capitalism.
I still played with the dolls
she gave me,
but I had moved on.
I didn’t hear about her again
until sixth grade.
The news came in a text.
A whole life gone,
captured in the ding of a cell phone.
Plastic palaces collapsed.
I had always known she was
an angel,
with her halo of burnt red hair.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Thank you. So how old were you when you wrote that?
Siri Pierce: I was a freshmen in high school.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Where did you go to high school?
Siri Pierce: I went to Casco Bay High School.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And this was based on a real life event.
Siri Pierce: Yeah, it's based on a week I spent with my babysitter when I was eight.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And she dies.
Siri Pierce: Yeah, she actually committed suicide. She suffered from depression, and I'd known that she had suffered from depression when I was with her that week. I mean, this whole poem is kind of about, even though I never directly talk about the fact that she committed suicide, it's kind of, I don't know, it was just a pivotal moment for me in my life and kind of the transition from youth to taking everything more seriously, and going from kind of the plastic palaces and the fantasy and the imagination that comes with youth, and transitioning into middle school.
Stuart Kestenbaum: I think you really capture, a older kid is like a different species almost.
Siri Pierce: When I was first starting to think about it, it was just a week that had stuck with me so much. And so when the news came, it was so shocking to me. I kind of had to grapple with both experiences, both finding out and the week itself for a really long time, and I had to write about it. It was like there was something that I had to work through and process through writing. And the whole central theme of the poem, kind of addressing how, in some sense, I never saw her as a real person. So what was so shocking to me is when I found out she was real, almost when she passed away. Even though I knew she was a real person, like I knew the struggles she was going through, my parents had talked to me. I remember during the week she'd had, I'd stayed with her mom while she went to therapy and things like that. So I had tiny glimpses, like out of the fantasy world that I was living in, but I kind of ignored them in a sense. So I think I really had to come to terms with reality and see not just the halo of burnt red hair, but see the actual complexities of her life and complexities of being in the world.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Right. Did you write that at The Telling Room?
Siri Pierce: I wrote it independently, but I edited it with The Telling Room.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Did somebody give you a writing prompt or you just knew you wanted to write about this?
Siri Pierce: I was actually in response to The Telling Room's theme of encounters. Every year, they put together an anthology centered around a theme, and the theme that year was encounters. And I remember wanting to submit something to the anthology and play around with that theme. And I was thinking about it for a while and trying to think about meaningful encounters that I'd had. And I think when I hear the word encounter, I very much associate it with brevity, even though that's not necessarily always the case. Encounters can be long and in depth, but I was just trying to think of someone or something that had come into my life and then exited it just as quickly. And so it became very clear to me that this was what I needed to write about.
Stuart Kestenbaum: So once you heard the theme, it was like, you knew. What was that journey like, do you remember?
Siri Pierce: Yeah, I think why this poem is so focused on images is because that's very much how my memory works. I have moments that I see very clearly, and I think there were some images from this week that still to this day, like when I read it, I can see what it was back then when I was actually there. There was so much newness in the week. She exposed me to a lot of, I don't know, like how we watched Aquamarine, a movie about mermaids that I'd never seen before, and it was maybe a little older than what I would have watched with my parents. She wore a bikini, which was this, “Oh my goodness. Like she's a teenager!” Like something that, I mean, these were the days of when I was watching Disney Channel and watching all these older girls walk through life with confidence and kind of this aura of just, angelic. Angelic aura. So spending a week with her, everything was new and exciting. She had a sister and a mom and they had dolls that I'd never seen before. And they drank peach ice tea, which I'd never had before. So there was so much newness and so much excitement in all the objects, the physical objects, and also the experiences that I had that week. Those were the first things I processed when I was writing it.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Did the details come to you as you were writing?
Siri Pierce: Yeah. It's funny. I mean, this poem still, as I read it, I'm like, oh, it's very listy, which I tend to do when I write which I'm trying to work on. But I very much go through the details in my mind and see, oh, first we have, I remember the mermaids from Aquamarine. And I remember the little collage I made out of sparkly blue squares. And I remember Charlie and The Chocolate Factory that I read with her. So I think those images are where I started and then the story came from there. I mean, the central image of plastic palaces started as just describing what was in the garage. And then I realized that it captured much more than just being a physical object, but it captured the fantasy and the temporary nature of everything.
Stuart Kestenbaum: It's one week, but it's like all the details really give it a presence. And then that it ends in mortality and somebody's death, at a point in life when that's not supposed to happen. And it makes all those details lpoignant, because they're gone because you're older, but they're gone because she's dead too. In some ways, it’s like a vanished world all around. Did you read this poem to a group at The Telling Room? Do you remember like what kind of response there was or what it was like?
Siri Pierce: I've actually never read this poem or performed it in any setting. I mean, all of my poems, not all of them actually, but a lot of them, are nonfiction, if that makes any sense. I tend to stay on the plastic palaces side before the plastic palaces collapse. So this was definitely a poem where I challenged myself to deal with darker themes, and I was a little nervous about sharing it with anyone. When I sat down with Molly and a few of the publishing workshops students, and they were all incredibly kind, and I think the poem had resonated with them, it was more specific linguistic details that we went through.
Stuart Kestenbaum: What would be a process like for them? They'll critique it or they'll make…?
Siri Pierce: Yeah, they had made their notes and suggestions kind of on their individual sheets, and then I sat down and they all kind of went around and offered feedback. I mean, it was definitely an interactive, it wasn't just receiving feedback. I would talk to them, ask them questions, go through line by line. Then I'd deal with some of the more nitpicky things, like is that a period or a comma? But also talk about structure. And they definitely helped me organize it in a more logical way than it was.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And do you like the critique process?
Siri Pierce: I think my parents would say that I rely too heavily on the feedback process. I'm definitely someone who doesn't trust her own writing like as it stands. I tend to never share anything with anyone until I have a second pair of eyes on it, which can sometimes be a good or bad thing. I really enjoy receiving feedback, I definitely am working on not just taking feedback passively, but kind of actively considering what my intention was before just taking the feedback, so my voice stays. This was definitely an experience where I felt like their suggestions really were beneficial to the writing and only strengthened my voice rather than diminished it.
Stuart Kestenba…: Yeah.
Trusting the writing is always harder, especially when you branch out and try new styles and try new techniques. Then you have to reevaluate your writing in a different way. And definitely there are doubts in there. Especially when so much of writing is for yourself, because most of the writing you do, no one else ever sees. So I've written a lot of things that I've just pushed to the side and said, that's not for me anymore. And deciding what you show to the world and what you share with the world. I mean, The Telling Room's great at providing platforms for students to share their voices, whether on podcasts or through performances or through their anthologies, so deciding what is for yourself, and what is for the world, and what is actually a valuable asset in the world, is sometimes hard.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And so you're going off to college, going off to Brown.
Siri Pierce: Yes.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And so you wrote that four years ago.
Siri Pierce: Yes.
Stuart Kestenbaum: So what kind of writing have you been doing since then?
Siri Pierce: I definitely don't write as frequently as I did back then, which has been difficult for me because I really rely on it as an outlet. Recently, I've been writing less poetry, which is what I did for a really long time and more personal narrative and personal essays.
Stuart Kestenbaum: So have you been writing since the quarantine in like mostly a narrative?
Siri Pierce: Yeah, it's funny. It's hard to run in isolation, even though that's when I do my best writing too. I'm always by myself. I like writing at the physical Telling Room, but I'll always prefer writing, like in my own space. It's been a little more difficult, even though there's so much to process in the world and so much to write about. It's equally difficult to continue to expose yourself to what's going on. And so I find myself leaning towards finding different forms of escape, because instead of forcing myself to confront some of the things that have been going on and have been making life so much more difficult for so many people, sometimes it was easy for me to escape in different ways. I also dance. So that tended to be my preferable form of escape during quarantine, or I started running, things like that, where I was very far removed from some of the anxious and sad and frustrating thoughts that were going on in my mind. I tried to write and most of my writing had nothing to do with what was going on and was just kind of… It's funny, I did a lot of looking back versus looking at the present and looking forward.
Stuart Kestenbaum: It's hard to even know what to look forward to.
Siri Pierce: This poem, particularly like I was forced to work with something in my past that I hadn't necessarily actually processed in my mind, but I had to process it on paper. So I think writing really gives the opportunity to work with different things that are happening in the world around you and process it for yourself.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Voices Of The Future is hosted and conceived by me and produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects, with help from Carly Peruccio. The music in this episode is by Jordan Kramer. The series is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. To learn more about The Telling Room and its programs visit tellingroom.org. I'm Stuart Kestenbaum. Thanks for listening.