The following is my reading from Mary Ann’s memorial service:
A Variation on the Ordinary
I met Mary Ann in the mid 90s through Margo LaGatutta when I attended the readings for the anthology Variations on the Ordinary. I thought Maryann was amazing. To me she was the Queen Bee and the Bees Knees.
The first time we got together outside of readings was after she’d workshopped with Thomas Lux. She called me, and said “Let’s have lunch, I want to tell you everything I learned.” I was flattered and grateful, too, and we soon became fast friends. What cemented our friendship was her generosity, her sense of humor, and love of poetry.
The big time
Doing anything with Mary Ann was an adventure . In 1996, she won a poetry chapbook award from Heartlands Today, out of Bowling Green University, and I won the following year, so the editor Larry Smith invited us to Ohio to give two readings and then a workshop the next day at a women’s center. And he put us up in a hotel. Well, we were both absolutely geeked, like we’d made the big time. We were just about screaming from excitement as we drove to Ohio. The car didn’t need gas, our adrenaline could have fueled us there.
We went to readings, workshops and conferences together, like Western Michigan University and Walloon Lake, and I can’t tell you how many times we got lost trying to find a coffee shop in Plymouth or cross the border into Canada. It became running joke between us—we even got lost in a university parking lot—how one day we might end up in Grand Rapids instead of St. Clair Shores.
Permission to be outrageous
The great thing about Mary Ann was how she gave me and everyone around her opportunities to grow. She was instrumental in recruiting poets into the Detroit Working Writers. Years ago they had fancy luncheons with white tablecloths and long-stemmed water glasses and speakers, and everyone would get dressed up to attend.
You may have heard the quote “Everyone needs a friend they should not be allowed to sit next to at a serious function.” That may as well have been us. At one such luncheon, Mary Ann had just returned from the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey, where she’d heard and met dozens of well known poets, “famous” poets who were in Norton anthologies. Clearly she was still high from the experience. As she was telling everyone at the table about the festival, she kept saying, quite loudly, “We were sluts for poetry.” It was so funny– I wanted to shush her because some people might be offended, but her excitement was palpable, and she simply wanted to share it with everyone. And that willingness to be outrageous was of the things I adored about her.
The kindest people
Yet while she was undergoing chemo, she confided she felt uncomfortable when people said she was brave or had so much courage. because she said she was terrified. That kind of honesty was remarkable. She once said poetry saved her life.
These are not my words, but they sum up Mary Ann and her writing: You should dance with the skeletons in your closet. Learn their names, so you can ask them to leave. Have coffee with your demons. Ask them important questions like, “what keeps you here?” Learn what doors they keep finding open, and kick them out.
We had many long talks, and we often cried but somehow we always ended up laughing. I always felt comfortable confiding in Mary Ann because she really listened. She didn’t hurry conversations, She didn’t jump in with her own stories or opinions or advice. She listened and she empathized.
The kindest people are not born that way, they are made. They are the souls that have experienced so much at the hands of life; they are the ones who have dug themselves out of the dark, who have fought to turn loss into a lesson. The kindest people soften where circumstance has hardened them. They choose to believe in goodness because they’ve seen why compassion is necessary. And that was Maryann.
Her stunning poetry
In addition to her poetry chapbook award, Mary Ann has won several poetry prizes, and a Pushcart Prize Nomination, and has been published in numerous literary journals such as Rattle, Clackamas, Sweet Annie Review, The MacGuffin, and The Paterson Review. Her poem, “Mason City Ladies’ Sewing Circle,” was selected as the 2001 Touchstone graduate poetry contest winner:
Mason City Ladies’ Sewing Circle
Fiddle fern hangs near corner porch column, scent
Kansas State University’s Literary Journal Spring 2001, Volume 33
of Honeysuckle suspends in air, swing sways
at porch end, lemonade pitcher, glasses,
sliced lemons, plated ice-box cookies set on
wicker serving table, calico cat naps
on railing crook, rainbow glints off cut glass framed
in Grandmother Susan’s mahogany front door,
baskets of mending sit near rattan rockers,
flashing in and out of fabric, needles spark
like the bullfighters’ sword, the Spanish dancer’s
stiletto heels. The sewing club murmurs,
Ronnie’s croup, Ellie’s scars from pox, how
their garden grows, soon pokeberry jelly time.
Some quiet complaint how hard husbands’ work at
not working, and they sew Heels and toes of
socks woven in and out, knees of jeans, blue
chambray elbows, christening gown buttons, fine
stitches on collars of Sunday church-going dresses,
the flour sacks are last,
pick up the sacks and sew hoods. The hoods fathers,
husbands, and sons wear when they pound flaming
crosses in yards at night. They sew hoods for sowers
of corn fields in Iowa. With stopped up throats
they sew hoods, murmur about the boy strung up
in the willow country road outside Mason City.
For Don who sweeps the grocery store after school each
day, Susan sews a hood. The grocer laughs with men
who sit near the pot bellied stove, cold in May,
laughs as they brag about a night they dragged that nigger
roped behind their truck, left him by the river,
served him right, opens the cash box hands the boy
a dime. Grandmother Susan, father used
her name with a god-like reverence, he’d look at me
and say no one could match my mother, she was
a saint. Grandmother Susan saved her flour sacks,
sewed my father’s hood, placed on his head, carefully
felt with fingers, so as not to hurt her first
born’s eyes, marked with pins where to cut the sockets,
sewed the hood. Whose car did he ride in, who could
possibly catch him? His father, county sheriff
and game warden, threw his rifle alongside length
of rope, fishing gear, and the hoods in the trunk. Late
summer nights, too hot to sleep, Grandmother
Susan sits with her daughter on the porch swing,
they count fireflies, admire her moon flowers.
A familiar car drives by, filled with men and boys
wearing hoods, what’s that caught in her throat as she
turns her child’s head, Look, the moon is full tonight.
Her Website:
Many years ago I helped Mary Ann set up a free WordPress site. It’s still there, unedited. She changed the password, so unfortunately I can’t update it. Just the same, I love that it exists with her bio and links to her books!
Books:
Walking Through Deep Snow
“Even the title of Mary Ann Wehler’s ‘Walking Through Deep Snow’ alerts us that this is a book about hard movements through difficult terrain–complicated family webs, tundras of illness–but new awakenings too, and better weather soon, and through it all, some light shining, brightening the snow, in this one strong womanès voice, singing.” ~Naomi Shihab Nye–Poet, The Language of Life–a Festival of Poets
Throat
“Throat comes from that deep place of knowledge and extreme. Wehler is a wayfarer–she has moved in and out of the desolate and light, often in a world that, had the temperatures been taken, would have seem far below normal.–yet it’s her life, and all of ours as well. This is so well-written, the reader must take it on as a second skin.” ~ Stellasue Lee, Queen of Jacks
About Mary Ann
Mary Ann Wehler (September 13, 1933 – March 24, 2021) was born and raised in Detroit. She raised five children alone after her divorce while she earned a teaching degree, and went on to teach for thirty years. When she was an elementary school teacher, she met and then married the love of her life, Jim Wehler, a widower with four children. She was Assistant to the Director of the Writer’s Voice of the YMCA of Detroit and Poet in Residence at the Troy Public Library where she taught creative writing. Her MFA in Poetry is from Vermont College.
“Writing saves my life, week after week. I scribble on paper to clear my brain, lighten my heart, figure out which path takes me out of the maze. When I read a poem and see understanding in someone’s eyes, I can move on–dancing.”
Thank you for visiting Linda’s blog.
Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist.
Learn more about her award winning novel, In the Context of Love.
Learn more about her picture book, Gordy and the Ghost Crab.
Learn more about her poetry chapbook, Security
My condolences on your loss. Mary Ann sounds like she was an incredible person.
Thank you, Lydia. She was all kinds of special. 💔
What a lovely friend and poet you have lost, Linda. Her poem creeps up on you with a wallop.
Thank you, Barbara. She told me that amazing poem came from the simple question “Who sewed the hoods?”