They say that 1.3 million American marriages end in divorce every year. In 1996, Meg Campbell’s marriage became one of them. Her story might have ended there, in the mounting ash heap of terminated relationships.
But Campbell, an educator from Boston, did something unexpected. She wrote “Solo Crossing,” a book of poetry about her separation and divorce, although she had never been a poet. In the process, she not only reinvented her life by discovering a new metier but may have produced an overnight hit.
The book was published two months ago, and “it’s just taken off,” says Campbell’s publisher, Cynthia Navaretta of Midmarch Arts Press, a small New York publishing house that specializes in books on the arts. “The book is selling better than any book I’ve ever had.”
Last October, Campbell was the featured poet on www.PoetryCentral.com–a New York-based Web site promoting poets and poetry events–and it resulted in “this incredible word-of-mouth networking,” says Campbell, still dazzled. “It’s really feeding on itself.”
Almost instantaneously, she started getting invitations to give readings around the country, including New York, San Antonio, and–Campbell is ecstatic about this one–Blytheville, Ark. The bookstore owner in Blytheville, Mary Gay Shipley, was featured in a New Yorker article in October that described her Oprah-like prescience in anticipating books that will become hits.
“We are just so excited,” says Sherrie Casteel, who is coordinating the reading for a monthly poet’s group that meets at That Bookstore in Blytheville. “Her poetry is beautiful and it speaks to everyone, whether it is my 14-year-old daughter or the 58-year-old retired English teacher in our group who is African-American and writes his poetry in Zulu,” she says. “I read the book and said, `Yes, this is wonderful.’ “
The Internet bookseller Amazon.com has ordered Campbell’s book in quantity and made it available on 24-hour shipment. Campbell says she now receives e-mail every day from enthusiastic readers. There was the woman in New York who had been married for 40 years and divorced for five who “told me she thought she’d put it all behind her but was sobbing reading my book.” That same day there was a note from the African-American woman in San Antonio who “said she felt it was her story.” And there was “some guy in Chicago” going through a divorce who read excerpts of the book on the Internet and said he needed the rest of it–immediately.
“A number of people have told me, `I don’t like poetry but I like your book,’ ” says Campbell, 47. She describes the book–a modestly designed, softcover collection of 61 poems–as a “memoir of separation and divorce, the new life beyond, and the whole range of emotions in between.”
Like rage, for one:
Now we are separated
eight months. You live
with another woman,
take her to your uncle’s wedding,
tell me
you have an open heart
about us.
What heart?
And loneliness:
I understand
this is my life.
Swimming
alone.
Tired. Afraid
How much longer can I last?
And starting over:
Even temporary celibacy, I’ve read,
promises clarity, calm.
Feelings pristine, detached.
Then why am I undressing
the Saturn repair associate
or the man who comes to give my garden a bid?
“I have published much more intellectual poets and those with bigger reputations,” Navaretta says, noting that Campbell’s book sold about 600 copies in the first five weeks, “which is a phenomenal number for poetry.
“This poetry reaches people. It is easy to read. It is from the heart. And there is an audience out there, which is apparently not a poetry audience, of people who are attracted to the subject. After all, the experience (of divorce) is so common now.”
Few would have predicted an unknown poet could have generated this kind of response, least of all Campbell, who graduated from Radcliffe College to go on to a career that has included many occupations, none of them poet. She has been a community organizer, Massachusetts Senate legislative research director, teacher and school administrator. Currently she is a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and executive director of Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound in Cambridge, Mass., a comprehensive reform school that uses the teaching methods of the Outward Bound wilderness programs.
The mother of two daughters, both in college, Campbell declines to discuss specific details of the dissolution of her nearly 20-year marriage, except to say “the breakup was not my choice” and to make reference to her poem called “Court Date,” which suggests there had been another woman in her husband’s life.
The end of her marriage was utterly “paralyzing. There is a lot of shame associated with separation and divorce,” particularly, she says, for Catholics like her.
“When I was growing up, divorce simply just wasn’t an option for Catholics,” she says. “It was unthinkable. I knew one divorced family in my elementary school, and the father was alcoholic and the mother had to go to work. It was like something out of Charles Dickens.”
After Campbell and her husband separated, she was consumed by “shame, guilt and failure. I had been a very proud person. This whole experience was very humbling. I cried every day for the first year.”
She writes in the introduction to her book: “Succeeding in marriage was vitally important to me. I failed. I would have done anything to spare my children pain. I could not. Dating in my forties was not in my original life plan, nor was living alone with a vociferous cat.”
But eventually, she says, she discovered that “life surprises and teaches.” She sought help from many sources–her Catholic faith, therapists, loving friends and family, books, a divorce support group–and unexpectedly, a catharsis came in the form of poetry.
“I’d always kept a journal, but suddenly it was like a volcano, and I started pouring forth stuff.” Dream fragments and poems appeared in her journal. When she showed the first 10 to friends, they encouraged her to keep writing. Some 50 poems later, she had “Solo Crossing.”
And there is more to come. With a friend in New York, William Duke, she is working on an anthology of poems about divorce, called “Split Verse: Poems to Heal the Heart,” which will also be published by Midmarch. She believes it is the “first-ever anthology of poems about divorce,” submitted by poets around the country in response to an advertisement in Poets & Writers magazine.
What has she learned from this whole experience? That “your disability is your opportunity,” says Campbell, quoting Kurt Hahn, the founder of Outward Bound. She is happier now than she has been in years, having discovered the support of a “large, wonderful extended family who was totally there for me.”
She also has learned–from her new cadre of readers and from the profuse interest in her anthology from other poets–that her solo experience has been shared by many.
“The reality is that we all feel vulnerable,” Campbell says. “Everyone in a way is on a solo crossing. But we all have safety boats behind us even if we can’t see them in the fog. And poetry is a wonderful way for all those powerful emotions to be compressed and distilled.”
