Hiestand honored for writing that transforms speech into song

By Eric McHenry

When Emily Hiestand (GRS'88) started going to an all-black church in Cambridge, she did so "with a self-conscious, walking-on-eggshells politesse" that made her somewhat awkward. At one point, standing to sing, she accidentally grazed the back of an elderly parishioner's head with her hymnal. "Holy moly," Hiestand writes, "I have hit an elderly black man on the head with a hymnal!" The man turned around just as she leant down to apologize, and was startled to find "an unfamiliar white face looming just inches from his own.

"He visibly jumps in the pew," she writes. "His startlement startles me, and I jump too, and no one near us fails to see this scene."

Hiestand ultimately redeemed the scene by making it the funniest and most tender anecdote in "Hymn," a consistently funny and tender essay for which she and The Atlantic Monthly received a 1999 National Magazine Award.

It was a fitting fate for both the author and her beatific prose, in which things that might at first seem humble and ephemeral -- a convenience store, a stop sign, a leaf -- are shown to be dignified and lasting. Her faithful exaltation of the world has earned her a little worldly exaltation.

"Rounding the corner into the mall, a teenager with a hood pulled low looks surprised when our eyes meet, then grins," Hiestand writes in "Errand," an essay that appears alongside "Hymn" and 12 others in her most recent book, Angela the Upside-Down Girl (Beacon Press, 1998). "A look can pass between strangers, kin to the look countrymen may give finding one another in a far place. My, my; you as you, me as me. The recognition goes so unremarked as not to exist in any official account. It has taken me most of my life even to notice the look, which happens, I suppose, in the interstices of everyone's life."

Emily Hiestand Photo by Vernon Doucette

"That piece," Hiestand says of "Errand," "is the piece that more than any other carries the ethos of the book -- that there is enormous pleasure in ordinary life that can be had simply by walking down the street.

"Angela has sometimes been described by reviewers as a memoir," she says, "but it is not a memoir in any usual sense. It's really a collection of stories about various people, communities, and places that, for me, embody an aspect of authentic wealth -- by which I mean the forms of wealth beyond the nice but rather narrow definition offered by consumerism."

Hiestand's alternative definition of wealth adds resonance to the title of her first essay collection, The Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece (Beacon Press, 1992), which the San Francisco Chronicle-Examiner named one of the five best travel books of the year. Its four long essays reveal a similar devotion to minutiae, and to philosophical thought applied at the most quotidian levels -- what Pulitzer prize-winning poet Jorie Graham calls Hiestand's "radical trust in description as a guide to the moral life."

Graham, as it happens, is referring to yet another book, Green the Witch-Hazel Wood (Graywolf Press, 1989), which she selected for the prestigious National Poetry Series. Anyone familiar with Hiestand's rich, vivid, lyrical essays will nod at the news that their author was first an acclaimed poet.

Hiestand's poems, in turn, are the products of a sensibility that had made her a successful visual artist and graphic designer long before she turned seriously to writing.

"There is a way that aesthetics is not decorative at all," Hiestand says. "It really is in some way consonant with the moral life. You're looking for these stabilizing and illuminating kinds of experience through the visual intelligence. I think that Jorie Graham was just right: that is a way that I proceed. My writing mind works very much like a visual artist's mind. I'm always engaged with color and texture and shadow, form and composition."

Hiestand was "a child writer" in Oak Ridge, Tenn., but as she got older she began turning her creative attention to the visual. She took a degree from the Philadelphia College of Art with emphases in graphic design, painting, and photography, and in 1970 moved to Boston. For the next 15 years, she built a successful graphic design business, working principally to promote cultural organizations such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and grassroots political causes such as the successful Massachusetts Equal Rights Amendment campaign.

But in the early 1980s, she noticed that the Charles River, viewed from the window of her Cambridge business office, was beginning to provoke words rather than images. She showed some of her writing fragments to a friend who'd studied English in college.

"I said, 'What do you think these are?' And she said, 'I think they might be poems,'" Hiestand recalls. "Turning to writing wasn't so much abandoning graphic design as being kidnapped by language."

Hiestand soon found herself in writing workshops at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, then in literature courses at BU's Metropolitan College. One of her MET professors steered her to the graduate Creative Writing Program, where she audited several of George Starbuck's poetry workshops before closing her graphic design firm and enrolling full-time. Starbuck, who died in 1996, "was a monumental figure in my life," Hiestand says. "He really took me under his wing. I owe, I think, my life as a poet to him.

"He was a master of American talk, the person who taught me that there's almost a whole philosophy, a whole worldview, in every diction. I really enjoy the spectrum of language, from Southern colloquialisms to mandarin, Jamesian constructions, and it was George who gave me permission and encouragement to juxtapose those different ways of speaking."

Evidence of this influence pervades not only her poetry but her essays, which celebrate the eccentricities of spoken language. In "Store," from Angela the Upside-Down Girl, she savors a Haitian shopkeeper's ascription of a masculine pronoun to something as decidedly nongendered as soup: "'You should taste joumou before you cook him,' he called out. 'You might not like him.'"

Hiestand's enthusiasm for speech is perhaps most pronounced in "Hymn," the essay about her experience at Union Baptist Church in Cambridge. She turns a sensitive ear to the sounds of the black Baptist sermon, with its ability to accommodate simultaneously the spiritual, the casual, and the purely practical:

"Lucid and subtle on the significance of Job's suffering," Hiestand writes, "bracing on the nature of courage, passionate on the supreme importance of nurturing children, Reverend Jeffrey Brown usually manages to work into his remarks how fine someone looks -- or how fine everyone looks -- and the fact that Bible study is at 6:30 Wednesday night."

The black church, says Hiestand, is "a place steeped in respect for elders, in courtesy, and above all in a tradition of overcoming suffering. It's also just an amazing place for a poet, because of this magnificent black sacred oratory, which I think is one of the most beautiful linguistic traditions in America.

"George Starbuck was not the only one with that ability to mingle the most serious matters, the things that have the most gravitas, with humor," she says. "The power of the black intellectual tradition has been an important, ongoing part of my education."