An Interview with Susan Scheid

Susan Scheid is the author of After Enchantment, which was inspired by beloved fairy tale characters. Scheid’s poetry has appeared in The Southern Quill, Blue Heron Review, The Mid-Atlantic Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Burgeon Press, Gargoyle, About Place Journal, Truth to Power, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Little Patuxent Review, The Sligo Journal, Silver Birch Press, Tidal Basin Review, and other journals. Her work is also included in the anthologies Poetic Art, Enchantment of the Ordinary, and Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic. Scheid served for a number of years as the Board co-chair for Split This Rock. She lives in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, DC.

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Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

This question is hard. I have been engaged in creative writing as far back as I can remember. I’ve always had an active imagination and I’ve often said that I write to quiet the voices in my head. But I think I would pick three early influences on my writing.

First and foremost is my father. My father read to me a lot when I was growing up. He often read me poetry and fairy tales at bedtime. In fact, I still own The Golden Book of Poetry, which he used to read to me and is one of my most precious books. My dad was also the consummate storyteller, regaling me with tales of being in the army hospital during World War II in England and either reading poetry to his mates or spinning shaggy dog stories.

Secondly, I would say my Aunt B—yes, I had an Aunt B. She was one of the most creative people I knew and was often my co-conspirator in various family pranks. I have her “portable” manual typewriter, which sits next to my writing desk. She used to type up silly stories and illustrate them with pages from a magazine. Aunt B was the family correspondent and her letters and cards were little mini-tales of life as she saw it. She was also the person who would tell me about our family history.

The third person is my Honors Humanities teacher in high school, Ms. Manghelli. She asked us to keep a journal every day where we could write anything we wanted. She collected them every so often and gave us encouraging remarks. I could let my imagination go wild and she would laugh or make funny comments or tell me to keep going. That journal writing became a habit that has lasted most of my life. I found my way back to writing poetry as an adult and discovered worlds of poetry that echoed my thoughts, my feelings, and my style of writing.

What inspired you to start writing this book?

During the pandemic, I had been writing and exchanging poems with a friend. I amassed a small collection of poems I thought could be a chapbook. In the fall of 2022, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities awarded me an Individual Artist Fellowship Grant, which provided me with funds for a writing residency in early 2023. I printed out every poem I could find that I had written over the last 10 or more years and decided to spend some time with my own work to see what might emerge. A week on the side of a mountain in Virginia, overlooking the James River, hikes in James River State Park, nights filled with amazing stars, and mornings ablaze with fiery orange sunrises all fed my spirit and gave me the space to compile a draft manuscript that eventually became this book. Those pandemic poems became the framework for the book and I found they were in conversation with older poems I had written to make a cohesive manuscript.

Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

Some people think the book title, True Blue, came from my blue hair, but it’s more complicated than that. I am terrible with titles! I started with the title of a poem in the book, but feedback from a fellow poet on the title was “it sounds like a musical,” so I scrapped that idea. After some serious editing and reorganization of the manuscript, I still felt like the title should reflect the title of a poem in the book. So I taped the manuscript in sections onto a bookcase in my dining room and covered it with post-it notes of potential titles. In addition, I asked friends and family to suggest titles to add to my post-it ideas. Then I waited to see what felt right. I got to “Bluest Blue” from a poem in the book, but it did not quite resonate. Through much thought and many post-its later, I landed on True Blue. I liked the association with my hair, but when I began to study the etymology and connotations of the phrase “true blue,” it felt like a perfect fit. True blue is what you call someone or something that is genuine, unwavering, loyal, and authentic. I feel like the poems in this book are some of the most authentic poems I’ve written and truly represent my voice. So, True Blue it became.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

This question makes me feel like a cat with nine lives! I have worked for the last 30+ years as an Executive Legal Secretary in a white shoe law firm. I have supported lawyers practicing energy regulatory law—a job that has been stressful, rewarding, stable, and through which I have developed creatively and been able to raise a family. I originally studied to be an archaeologist and hold a BA in Anthropology. I worked for three summers in the Shenandoah River Valley, near the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, on archeological sites dating back 12,000 years. It was back-breaking and tedious work, nothing romantic like the Indiana Jones movies. In addition, I helped open a community-owned cooperative grocery in my neighborhood after the last grocery moved out. I love dance of all kinds and every summer I attend the Noyes School of Rhythm, a women’s dance and art camp that was founded in the early 1900s by Florence Fleming Noyes, a contemporary of Isadora Duncan.

What books did you read (for research or comfort) throughout your writing process?

While I was on my writing residency, I began re-reading Krista Tippett’s book, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, and working through The Book of Forgiving by Desmond Tutu. I was experiencing a difficult time in my personal life, and I used these books as spiritual guides to help me get grounded. Nuggets from those books seeped into my work in ways I only just realized. Until I was away from everything and everyone I saw daily, I had not been able to admit how much pain I had been carrying from the pandemic and other life events. The days of my residency were structured by free writing, reading and categorizing poems, editing poems, hiking, cooking, and reading these two books. I would read Krista Tippett in the morning before diving into my poems. Then I would read Desmond Tutu’s book in the evening with a cup of tea and work through some of the exercises. I would also turn to some of my favorite poets for inspiration: Ross Gay, Wislawa Szymborska, Elizabeth Bishop, Joy Harjo, and many others.

What’s one thing you hope sticks with readers after they finish your book?

You are not alone. I remember reading Jane Kenyon’s book Constance for the first time and feeling like she had described my own struggles with grief, depression, and the loss of dear friends to HIV/AIDS and cancer. Her poems made me feel less alone and gave me a thread to stay anchored (and reeled me into more poetry). I hope my readers will see that we all have struggles but we also have resilience and strength and that joy can be found in the most mundane and overlooked places.

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