Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2008-04-23 07:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

When Katherine Cottle was a little girl in kindergarten and decided to run away from home, a wonderful thing happened. She wrote a farewell note and discovered a different kind of running away. She landed in a valley of words, which placed her closer than ever to her whole family and led to a lifetime’s devotion to writing.

Now she’s written “My Father’s Speech,” a collection of poems that reaches back beyond her own kindergarten days to her grandparents’ hardscrabble years as West Virginia coal miners. To read the poems is to taste the dust of the mines. To write them was a journey that took Cottle to the darkest corners of the earth: not only the bleakness of the mines, but also sometimes the darkness of the human soul.

The poems have a kind of wonder about them. Last weekend, at the CityLit Festival at the Enoch Pratt Central Library, Cottle spread several old family photos across a table. They’re the kind of snapshots every family collects through the years. But, for Cottle, the shots from the old mining camps were part of the inspiration for her work.

She writes, in “Lee Hall, Retired Coal Miner, Camp Branch, 1983:”

“His mouth, caved in/from the lack of teeth/puckers behind prickly stubble./His left eye/his only eye/looks straight on/at the camera,/stern amid the landscape/of wrinkles and scars/carved deep into his face.”

Each photograph and each conversation with a grandparent relating tales of the mining days, reminded Cottle of the distance traveled between their lives and her own. But, in a very real way, it also drew parallels between the work of miners and the work of writers.

“There’s a very concrete quality to what they talked about going underground, living in darkness under the earth that people can’t see from above ground, that they can’t see what’s going on underneath — and that’s poetry, too,” said Cottle. “It’s very parallel to what writers try to do, find the nuggets in the dark.”

Cottle, 34, married with two children, grew up in Baltimore County and graduated from Dulaney High School. She got her bachelor’s degree from Goucher College and her master’s from the University of Maryland at College Park.

Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals through the years, and “My Father’s Speech” has been released by Apprentice House, the publishing arm of Loyola College’s Communications Department, which recently declared her the winner of its first Apprentice House Poetry Chapbook Contest.    

“And, really,” she was saying this week, “my writing began with that kindergarten note. I was mad at my parents. I went into my room and wrote the note and realized, you know, life’s not so bad. And I also realized I can run away in my writing. Writing gives you a sense of another place you can go. And it’s ironic how I run closer to my family now. I guess you can never quite get away.”

There she was, Tuesday morning, rushing to get her children off to school. She thought about conversations with her grandmother, who had two children by the time she was 18. She did her own cooking and canning and cleaning. She had to keep her children from putting pieces of coal into their mouths. Her father still has a scar on his hand from touching a hot stove when he was a boy.

“There’s an authenticity to that life,” Cottle said, “and you want to connect to it. Good or bad. And I’ve tried to say that, that it’s not always going to be a pretty connection, but I need to admit it and find a place for it in my life. Everybody has flaws, everybody has skeletons.”

She touches on such things in “What I Don’t Talk About,” including:

“My great uncle/and the two shots into/his own brother’s chest,/the way his brother’s mouth/puckered just like their father’s before dying,/and the next six years in prison,/waiting for cancer/to slowly finish the revenge.

“What I intentionally leave out/is my great grandfather/the rumors of white sheets/and missing nights/of bloody pants/and an early death/in the hills of West Virginia. But the person who unnerves me/the most is the poet — /her fear of the truth/and her need to open/only the good quiet sores/onto the page.

“What I don’t tell people/is her own secrets — /her need to love more people/than there is room for,/to let difference take her life/down a path she would/never expect.”

On Saturday, Cottle will appear at Ivy Books, Falls Road at the foot of Lake Avenue, between 1 and 3 p.m.        

     

Michael Olesker can be reached at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com