An Interview with Thomas A. Thomas

Thomas A. Thomas was born in Illinois to a medical-doctor mother and a ballet-dancer father, and spent a lot of time off by himself in the woods, prairies, and fields, day and night, in all seasons. Thomas found his way to the University of Michigan (U.M.), where he studied with Donald Hall and Gregory Orr, and workshopped some poems with Robert Bly. He won Minor and Major Hopwood Awards in Poetry, and his poem “Approaching Here” was choreographed and performed at U.M.

Thomas worked as Detroit Correspondent for a St. Louis-based rock and jazz magazine, Concert News, covering many of the major acts of the mid-1970s. After a couple of years of madness in New York City in the late seventies, he camped his way west to Washington state, where he has happily made his home for more than forty years. He now serves as a Board Member for the Olympia Poetry Network, and is active in numerous online poetry and photography groups.

His poems, photographs, and video recordings appear in print and online, most recently in Gyroscope Review, Blue Heron Review, Cirque Journal, FemAsia Magazine, TheBanyanReview.org, and Vox Populi, as well as in English-language anthologies and in translation to Spanish, Serbian, and Bengali. In 2022, his work was nominated for Best of the Net and for the Pushcart Prize.

Thomas is the author of Getting Here (Trafford Publishing, 2005), a collection of poems and photography; and My Heart Is Not Asleep (MoonPath Press, 2024), poems that delicately reconstruct moments from a decade of caring for his wife, as she gradually succumbs to early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Learn more at thomas-a-thomas.com.

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

When I was about twelve years old and spending my paper route money on vinyl 45s and sci-fi paperbacks, I accidentally came across something I had never heard of: a living poet, from the US, writing in blank verse… Lawrence Ferlinghetti! I spent a whopping $1.25 for “A Coney Island of the Mind” and I was forever changed. Then I was assigned to Miss Eileen Driscoll in high school, and she opened the heavenly gates of literature. Not only did she instill her love of those great fires for this wide-eyed student. She let me know that mere mortals such as myself were actively contributing to the human story, and I could add to it myself. I have been writing ever since she sparked my soul with such hope.

What inspired you to start writing this book?

In particular, it may have been Gregory Orr’s “Poetry As Survival” which came along as my deeply beloved wife was sinking beneath the waves of what we would eventually learn was dementia, specifically Alzheimer’s, though she was a brilliant and talented teacher, working on her PhD in Education, beautiful in her early fifties, with two young children and me, her new husband.

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

My manuscript had a number of “working titles,” of which the most memorable was Evidence for the Soul, which was shortened from Evidence for the Soul in Dementia Patients. It wasn’t until I had been working with my MoonPath Press editor, Lana Hechtman Ayers for weeks or months before we brainstormed the current title from an epigraph to one of the poems, by Antonio Machado. We decided it captured something of hope and resilience, despite the incredible grief, pain, and daily struggle of my wife’s and my journey, through over a decade’s worth of years.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

Great question! “From the Beginning” by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Sade’s “Soldier of Love.” “Please Forgive Me” by David Gray. And most of the soundtrack of the late sixties and early seventies… Jimi Hendrix, Motown, Eagles, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Ohio Players.. this music was the last of memory to go…

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

Besides paperboy, pizza delivery, and rock & roll and jazz music writer, I had something like a real career in helping differently-abled people learn activities of daily living at home, and vocational skills on the job. The years doing that grew my heart, and my patience and resilience, things I would sorely need on the path I would take with my wife.

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

Ann Hedreen’s “Her Beautiful Brain” was an early inspiration. Poetry As Survival as mentioned above. Kabir, Rumi, so many others. I read plenty of self-help and guide books on coping with ALZ, but it was the poets throughout the ages that kept me alive and loving.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

My book is about standing in the fire of grief, and loving anyway. One can swim in the abyss of despair and futility, and still look up to find joy. This is not a morose elegy of my dying wife, it is a celebration of the full catastrophe—of staying present to everything life brings us, beauty and sorrow, joy and love. Dark depths and dazzling moments of light.

Are you a writer, too? Submit your manuscript to Atmosphere Press.