Check out the circuitous career path:
This Northern California native graduated from Harvard in the '70s, earning
a degree in folklore and mythology. From there, she traveled halfway across
the world to Norway, where she studied Norwegian sweater patterns — and
collected a few folklore stories.
It seemed like a logical progression in her mind to come back to America and
sell handmade sweaters in Cambridge, taking the old Norwegian designs and
giving them a slight twist, such as substituting pterodactyls for traditional
reindeer.
Six years after running her successful sweater business, she returned to school,
this time earning a master's degree in business. In business school, she realized
that most of the recruitment came from bankers, so she became a banker.
Soon bored with banking, she held a plethora of odd jobs and found herself
back in California in the '90s, trying to figure out, once and for all, what
to do with her life.
That one-time banker with as many interests as degrees is practically a household
name in Nevada County: poet Molly Fisk.
You may have seen her poetry books around town or in major-market bookstores.
Perhaps you heard her read the moving poem she wrote especially for Child
Advocates of Nevada County. Or, you might have caught her on KVMR, reading
her articulate NPR-esque essays on topics great and small.
Despite having heard and seen her, many people here don't know what happened
to Fisk during the gaps in her resume — those years in the '90s when
she inadvertently entered into a personal quest that proved both terrifying
and liberating — and culminated in Fisk, 50, becoming a published poet.
"I was planning three months in California. My family had an apartment in
Stinson Beach, so I stayed there," Fisk said. Everything was fine, relaxing
even, for the first two weeks of her stay. Then the nightmares began.
"I started having weird flashbacks ... like nightmares in the daytime. I thought
I was cracking up," Fisk said.
Her father had lived in Stinson Beach. People in the small beach town approached
Molly Fisk and told her she looked like him. As Fisk remembers it, she had
"gone back to the landscape of my childhood."
That proved prophetic. There was a reason for the day-and-nightmares. The
landscape she returned to contained a time bomb from Fisk's childhood: she
had been molested. By both her father and her grandfather. The source of her
nightmares had a name, now — incest.
"I started to remember — and then I started to write." Fisk had never
been a writer before, but her discovery prompted her to write. What follows
is the beginning of a poem she wrote in 1991, called "On the Disinclination
to Scream."
If I had been a ten year old stranger and you had tripped me in a dark alley,
say, downtown, instead of our mutual living room I'm sure I would have screamed.
As Fisk wrote, not just about the incest, but about life and nature and other
things, she found a voice. The writing led to classes, and workshops and studying
with other poets — including Dorianne Laux, who had some of the same
issues emerge in her writing as Fisk did. They worked together as student
and teacher for four years, with Fisk taking classes in Laux's living room.
"She pretty much taught me how to be a poet," Fisk says.
The realization about what really happened in her childhood led Fisk to confront
her mother, which didn't go well. They were estranged for years. But Fisk
gradually rebuilt her relationship with her mother and took care of her —
during her battle with ovarian cancer — until her death.
The following is one portion of the poem "Little Songs for Antoinette," which
Fisk wrote about the experience.
Now every dream is of my mother
carrying the years she'll never have, her hair
grown in and whiter, approaching rooms
she'll never enter now, and then leaving them
to stroll down avenues she'll never see
because she is almost finished with us
and lies asleep after another dose of morphine
and some chipped ice. I look twice
to make sure she's breathing and the quick
pulse in her throat has not stopped.
I sit beside her crying. The room's temperature
has dropped: she is no longer always cold,
she who will be so cold soon, awake now, briefly,
looking out the window at a new moon.
"Little Songs for Antoinette" won Fisk the 2005 Robinson Jeffers Tor House
Prize for Poetry. She has received fellowships in poetry from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council and the Marin Arts Council.
She has also won the Billee Murray Denny Prize and the National Writer's Union,
Santa Cruz/Local 7 Prize.
Lately, she has been involved with her Poetry Boot Camp, a computer-based
program where she works with eight to 20 people a month and asks them to write
a poem a day for six straight days. That pressure is the "boot camp" part
of the training.
"It's exciting. Everyone gets everyone else's work, and I critique every poem.
Many people repeat; I'd say 60 percent of my students are repeats."
She said she promotes the Poetry Boot Camp (www.poetrybootcamp.com)
by "guerilla marketing" the concept to poetry groups, Internet sites and bookmarks
that are placed in poetry books in bookstores around the country using stealth
techniques. Her latest work is a CD of her radio essays called Using
Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace.
Her books include Listening to Winter, Terrain
with Dan Bellm and Forrest Hamer, and Salt Water
Poems.
Fisk lives outside Nevada City with her four cats — Bella, Sid, Angus
and Gracie.