Last year, I went to a launch party of a local magazine where I heard Marilyn Krysl read an
excerpt from her book, Dinner with Osama. I fell in love with her work. A couple of months after that, I
emailed her and she invited me to her house. Marilyn Krysl, aside from being a brilliant writer, is a
woman who is easy to talk to, hospitable, and generous. She has mismatched furniture, beautiful plants,
and large windows. She has statues and pictures of various gods, Aphrodite, Buddha, and the Virgin
Mary. Marilyn keeps in touch with herself and the environment around her. From the moment I entered
her house until I left, she made me feel comfortable. She really is the writer next door.
What sets her apart from other writers is that Marilyn is an activist. Her accomplishments are
not just words on a piece of paper but are tangible products changing the community for the better.
Some of her accomplishments include serving as an Artist in Residence at the Center for Human Caring
in 1986, and serving as a caregiver in Calcutta, India for Kalighat’s Hospice for the Destitute and Dying in
1994. Marilyn helped form the foundations The Lost Boys of Sudan and The Community of Sudanese and
American Women here in Boulder.
What follows are some of the highlights of a wide-ranging conversation we shared on October 9th, 2009.
ST: Can you elaborate on your experiences at the Center for Human Caring?
MK: I hadn’t really spent time in the hospital except when I had my appendix removed and it
wasn’t even an overnight thing. But when I was going around with the nurses; you could just
sense this atmosphere of how cold, official, and busy the doctors were and the whole separation
between the doctors and nurses.
ST: Why would they call a poet not a journalist or columnist?
MK: Jean Watson, at the time she was the Dean of the School of Nursing in Denver and ran an
institute in Denver called the Center for Human Caring… wanted to make nurses proud of their
profession and call attention to the great care nurses give. She really understood poetry is about
the hidden world of emotions and feelings. That is what’s so intense for both patients who are
trying to recover from a big surgery and the people who have to take care of them. Caring for
other people is very much a heart activity not a head activity. She intuitively thought poetry
would be the best medium to address it with.
ST: What are some of the differences between your experiences in Center for Human Caring in Denver
as opposed to in India?
MK: One of the reasons I went to India was because I hated all the coldness of the machinery:
buzzers and drips. I flipped on TV one night, and came across a half hour documentary on
Mother Theresa. I was looking at it and seeing the place she had in Calcutta that was really
simple. There was no technology and no money. There were rooms with little cots to take care
of people who were probably not going to make it; people who were probably going to die. I
had this intuition that the bottom line in all that would be love – a person to give them love
before they die. Technology at that stage is pointless. I said to myself, “I’ll just go there and see
what that is like.” I had been observing nurses and a part of me just wanted to play nurse for a
while. There were some moving times and also some hard times when I didn’t like it. However, I
really value that experience – even though it was a short time.
ST: How do you define culture and hospitality?
MK: When I worked in Sri Lanka for 4 months, when I went back at other times to visit friends I
had met to stay longer – even in Colombo where I was more around people who are upper class
– they were very hospitable and welcoming. When I spent time in Eastern Sri Lanka on other
occasions where it was mostly little villages and towns – if you went anywhere people really
welcomed you and they would immediately give you food to eat – children would come and
gather around you. There was this physical closeness I really liked. Children wanted to come,
hang out, and sit in your lap. There was intimacy; people opened their homes and their lives to
strangers. I don’t think it happens a lot in American culture. Here we are so disconnected; I think
it is in the foundation of this country. You should be self-reliant and be able to pull ourselves by
the bootstraps; you are supposed to do things without help from anyone else. This is an
exclusive idea. The whole world is a mesh of connection; you can’t live without all the
connection around and if you think you can you are just deluding yourself.
ST: How did you come to be involved in the community of support for the refugees from Sudan?
MK: In 2000, 40 Sudanese boys came to Boulder. People in the community came together and
adopted all of them and helped them get settled in, go to school, and find them a place to live. I
did that because the novel I started to write, before they came here, was about Sudan. Part of
the reason was that I saw this horrendous photograph in the newspaper (she shows me a photo
of a little child who had died of starvation in her mother’s arms) and I could not get this
photograph out of my head. Then, I researched all about Sudan’s complicated history and
eventually went there for a month or so. At some point after that, the Lost Boys came to
Boulder. I thought to myself,” I am probably… one of the few people who know anything about
this country” because I had read all about their history, civil wars, and culture- and that is how I
got involved with them. A couple years went by and 40 more came; … most of them live in
Denver now. During that time, some of us decided that we should really try to bring some
Sudanese girls here because it is very hard for girls to get out of the refugee camps; the reason
for that is girls who have lost their families are adopted by other families to be married off
because those families in return are paid off with cattle. So, there was this old exchange thing
going on. I helped found this little organization called Communities of Sudanese and American
Women. That was the last big thing I did and then I let younger people take on this organization.
ST: How do you write stories?
MK: Whatever I am writing, I don’t have an idea of what I am writing. You have to sit there and
wait until some language comes. I know writers talk about writing as though they think it out or
plot it out first – maybe if you are writing a novel you might have to do that…. however, when
you are writing paragraph by paragraph you don’t know what is going to come sometimes you
do a lot of waiting. I figure my job is waiting. I was born in Kansas in this rural area. I spent time
with my grandparents who had cattle and a corn farm. I spent a lot of time outdoors. I had this
idea that words came out of the ground and the wind blew them into people’s mouths. Then, I
was taught that was wrong but to tell you the truth I now believe that again. We think we are
making it up but we are just aperture. It has to be that way because of the interconnection
between all things. We are not separate from the earth – we are a part of it – even though we
like to think we are separate from it. I think writers are not the ones who write but they receive.
ST: When do you become a writer?
MK: As long as you write; you are writer and you will know when you earn that title. When you
stop writing and decide to do something else you lose that title. Richard Rodriguez says,
I write things, but I don’t write them. They write themselves. All the metaphors that
writers use imply that the writer is more passive than active agent in all this: Holy Ghost, the
muse, the graces….you are forced to just wait there like an idiot….
He has written twenty books.
ST: What would you recommend to our SASC writers?
MK: If you are a reader as a kid you have a higher chance of growing into a good writer. The
reason for that is you have to be a lover of language, sentences, and sounds. You just must have
a love affair with words. If you don’t have a love affair with words, you will drop it, and find
something else you are interested in. Even if you are only an English speaker there is a big
difference in the kind of language used between people who don’t read anything but a
newspaper and people who read only novels from the 18th century or history books. These
audiences and their vocabulary are completely different. Reading and loving reading is a crucial
piece for someone who is interested in being a writer.
ST: Who would you identify as your audience?
MK: I graduated from high school and started college. I did my undergraduate degree and then
did my graduate degree in the 60s. That was when the Vietnam War was going on and protests
against the war on college campuses were happening. At the same time, the first women’s
movement was starting. I was young at that time, and was automatically a part of that. A lot of
my work through the decades was work in different ways … about being a woman. It is not just
that but that was and is a big piece of my writing. I was really encouraged by other women
writers.
ST: Who were your role models?
MK: For writing fiction – I loved …South African writer Nadine Gordimer, who was the second
woman to ever win the Nobel Prize. Her novels are about the struggles in South Africa against
apartheid movement. I learned so much from her. I like reading works of writers who are odd,
strange, and not mainstream. One of my favorite books is by Gabriel Garcia Marquez titled
Autumn of the Patriarch; it is a dark satire on Latin American dictators. Part of the satire is that
Latin Americans hate dictators; however, they have always been ruled by dictators. Dictators are
hard to get rid of. In the novel the dictator is 100 years old and the public hasn’t managed to kill
him yet. The dictator is always trying to protect himself with bodyguards and he has people
killed in fear that they want to kill him. He has one pleasure in life which is to look out the
window of his palace out to the sea. He really likes looking at the sea. His country gets into a
terrible debt; they owe the United States all this money. Suddenly the debt is due; he can’t pay
off the debt. Americans say, “We are sending the Marines down there.” They come and cut the
ocean into strips and roll it up like turf and they take it away. So, the one thing he really loved in
his life is what they take. I tend to have favorite books rather than favorite authors. For poetry,
in high school, I was introduced to Dylan Thomas who writes “do not go gentle into that night,
old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light”. As soon
as I was in college, I read all kinds of contemporary writers. I went to the University of Oregon.
Now, I really like the work of Alicia Ostriker.