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Poet Dianne Hicks Morrow used to worry about her son Jacob's comment, "Your poems are too easy to understand, Mom." Today, she feels vindicated as she points to the back cover of her debut poetry collection, Long Reach Home, where Newfoundland writer Bernice Morgan has praised her poems as "deceptively simple." Dianne says, "I'm looking, at mid-life, at extraordinary things I'm just coming to see as extraordinary now. I had always thought they were just normal."
Most extraordinary, perhaps, is what Dianne has called "the unspoken theme of disability" in her family. "One important theme [of Long Reach Home]," says Dianne, "is my realization as a child that my mother couldn't see. No one had ever told me that. It was important for her to lead as normal a life as possible, and I helped her to do that." In a section of her book called "Polio Kick," Dianne also describes how she herself has been challenged by aftereffects of childhood polio.
How did the unspoken theme of disability come to be spoken, then? "If it weren't,t for the various guides along the path, it wouldn't have," Dianne says, appreciatively. Years ago, a new friend recognized Dianne's desire to pursue a Master's degree as a thinly veiled desire to write. Dianne started with a story initially, and only began to write poems in the hopes that it would help her tighten her prose. "It seemed like it was meant to be a detour," Dianne says, but ten years after her first published poem, her first book has been published, and she hasn't completed a short story since the first.
She credits the PEI Writers, Guild and her writing group, "The Ladeez Ox" (for "Auxiliary"), for "gentle prodding," and she is thankful for a nurturing environment that provided her with opportunities to find her voice. "We're so lucky to have such a supportive and dynamic arts community on the Island," she says.
Despite the support, Dianne hemmed and hawed for some time over the possibility of sending her substantial manuscript to publisher Laurie Brinklow at Acorn Press. "At first I thought, Laurie's my friend-she can't afford to lose money on poetry books!" Dianne acknowledges. "It's not easy to publish poetry these days." But, again, the Island literary community came through, and Acorn accepted her manuscript.
The responsibility of finally speaking her own and her mother's stories-as well as those of her father and other family members-may have held Dianne back, she admits: "One reason I hadn't actively looked for a publisher was I was concerned about ethics-in a way, I have no right to appropriate the story of another family member." After asking other writers how they dealt with the conundrum, Dianne concluded, firmly, "You do have the right to your version of your story." Her book is dedicated to her parents: "It's a testament to the amazing strength of their relationship."
It is, perhaps, the strength of her parents' relationship that has led to Dianne's other interest, her plan for her "non-fiction bestseller" about kindred spirit relationships: "I want to ask: Can a kindred spirit relationship exist in a couple situation? . . . Can it survive the mundaneries of life, living under the same roof?" She has conducted about twenty individual interviews, but has yet to interview a couple: "I'm beginning to think it's so rare to find kindred spirit couples that I want to get the best out of it when it happens."
But the future, for once, has less lustre than the present, as Dianne turns to the front cover of Long Reach Home. It features a batik by Sylvia Ridgway depicting a riot of cosmos in front of a shingled farmhouse. In its colouring and situation, the image on the cover is close to her own Covehead farmhouse. Inside the book's cover is something else close to home.