Rayanne Haines, "What Kind of Daughter" (Frontenac House Press, 2024)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Rayanne Haines, "What Kind of Daughter" (Frontenac House Press, 2024)
Host: Holly Gattery
Guest: Rayanne Haines
Air Date: December 3, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this profoundly moving episode, host Holly Gattery interviews acclaimed poet and hybrid author Rayanne Haines about her latest book, What Kind of Daughter. Blending poetry, lyrical essays, and fragments of memoir, the collection explores themes of daughterhood, anticipatory and experienced grief, familial complexity, and the enduring strength and contradictions of women. The conversation offers listeners deep insights into the book’s motivations, structure, themes, and the powerful, visceral language that defines Haines’s style.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Motivation and Origins of the Book

(03:36-06:39)

• Rayanne Haines wrote the book in response to her mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis and her struggle with private, anticipatory grief.
• She notes that society rarely allows for open grief before a death, necessitating her private reckoning and turn to writing as a means to process these emotions.

“We exist in a society that does not allow us to really grieve publicly when someone is still living... So I turned to writing because that's how I tend to process the things that I'm moving through.” - Rayanne Haines (04:36)

• The book evolved into an exploration of intergenerational trauma and the burdens placed on women as caregivers and grievers.
• Formally, Haines’s choice for a hybrid structure reflects the unpredictable, complex nature of grief: “I really didn't feel I could force the book into one particular form, that I really needed to allow it to take its own shape...” (06:24)

2. Embracing Contradictions in Familial Love

(06:39-11:48)

• Gattery commends the book's refusal to tie up messy, contradictory feelings into simple resolutions, especially regarding the mother-daughter relationship.
• Haines elaborates on honoring the “firestorm” complexity of her mother: “If I was going to be as vulnerable as I knew I had to be, I also had to be as truthful and as authentic as I could be.” (08:28)
• She discusses the importance of writing the whole, messy reality, balancing admiration and annoyance, love and frustration.

3. Poetry as a Vehicle for Grief and Memory

(11:48-16:02)

• The poetic and fragmentary forms are seen as inherently suited to exploring grief’s unresolved, cyclical nature.
• Haines speaks to how language and imagery are often rooted in the body and instinct: “I write to take things out of my body because holding it in my body is far too difficult. And so I imagine that element of the body... when I'm thinking about the imagery or the visceral reactions...” (14:04)
• She emphasizes reading widely, especially poetry, as key to crafting evocative writing.

4. A Reading from “What Kind of Daughter”

(19:45-21:53)

• Haines chooses to read the poem “in lieu of flowers,” transporting listeners into a palliative hospital room with sensory-rich, fragmented details of her mother’s final days, underlining the collision of the mundane and the profound in the face of loss.
• The reading is praised for its vivid, immersive, and authentic details.

5. Hybrid Form and Editorial Process

(21:53-23:57)

• Haines praises her editor, Micheline Mailer (Frontenac House), for fully supporting the book’s hybrid structure: “She understood that the book asked to not be one thing, that the intention, because as we move through grief, it's so many different things.” (22:59)
• The publisher’s commitment to experimental, formally innovative writing was crucial to the collection’s final form.

6. Sequencing and Structure – The Seven Stages of Grief

(26:31-29:05)

• The collection is intentionally sequenced according to a personal concept of the “seven stages of grief,” marked by one-line poems that punctuate and organize the book thematically rather than chronologically.
• Haines reflects that neither grief nor memory are linear—so neither is her book.

7. Writing about Family: Ethics and Repercussions

(29:05-32:08)

• Haines candidly addresses the recurring dilemma of writing about family, foregrounding her responsibility mainly to younger family members, less so to adults.
• She writes “with care” but does not ask for permission to tell her truth, even when it involves traumatic experiences: “If they are... come, they do the thing, then I can write the thing.” (30:23)
• She never writes with the intention to harm, but maintains the prerogative to tell her story.

8. Another Poem: “It’s the Dead He Can’t Sit With”

(33:44-36:20)

• Haines reads this poignant poem about her father’s complicated grief after her mother’s death, touching on themes of hoarding, memory, family dynamics, and the unease of letting go.
• This provides listeners with another window into the book’s deft handling of familial loss and emotional inheritance.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the need for truthful writing:

  “We are human beings, are nuanced, we are complicated, we are complex... we have to write about those complexities and those challenges.” - Raeanne Haines (08:28)

• On poetic language and the body:

  “I write to take things out of my body because holding it in my body is far too difficult.” - Raeanne Haines (14:04)

• On the authenticity of grief:

  “It wouldn't have made sense for the book to be a chronological thing, because grief is not much like I couldn't write the book in one particular form. I couldn't write grief in a particular linear timeline either.” - Raeanne Haines (28:55)

• On writing about family members:

  “My belief has always been that if a family member is a child...it's my responsibility to take more care... An adult, I don't have the same sense of responsibility...I don't feel the responsibility to ask permission.” - Raeanne Haines (30:23)

• Memorable exchange about tearing up while reading:

  “My oldest son came in and said to me, mom, why do you read books that upset you? And I said, her mama died. And he just said no and gave me a hug.” - Holly Gattery (36:57)

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Key Timestamps

• 1:31 — Podcast proper begins
• 3:36 — Haines discusses her motivation for the book
• 6:39 — Conversation on contradictions in relationships
• 11:48 — Exploration of imagery and poetic process
• 14:04 — Haines on writing through the body
• 19:45 — Haines reads “in lieu of flowers”
• 22:59 — Editorial support for hybrid form
• 26:31 — Sequencing the book via grief’s stages
• 30:23 — Ethics of writing about family
• 33:44 — Haines reads final poem about her father
• 36:57 — Emotional resonance and final reflections

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Episode Tone & Language

• Intimate, raw, and conversational
• Both host and guest lean into vulnerability and candor
• Emphasis on honesty, complexity, and acceptance of emotional messiness
• Deep respect for the craft of poetry and the authenticity of lived experience

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a layered, heartfelt exploration of What Kind of Daughter and the challenges of writing—honestly and artfully—about grief, family, and self. Haines and Gattery both invite listeners into uncomfortable, universal truths of love and loss, making the episode as memorable and emotionally resonant as the work it discusses.

“What Kind of Daughter” is available through Frontenac House Press and wherever books are sold or borrowed.

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Transcript

[Holly Gattery]

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[Raeanne Haynes]

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[Holly Gattery]

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[Raeanne Haynes]

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[Holly Gattery]

Oh, sorry. Namaste.

[Raeanne Haynes]

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[Holly Gattery]

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[Raeanne Haynes]

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[New Books Network Host]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Holly Gattery]

Hello everyone and welcome to nbn. I'm your host, Holly Gattery and I am really excited and not the kind of exception that feels like it's just sitting in my chest. Excited to talk to Raeanne Haynes today about her really beautiful book of poetry and little mini essays, Memoir, Fragments. It's a whole different dimension of book. What Kind of Daughter, which was released with Front Neck House Press. Rayan, welcome to the show.

[Raeanne Haynes]

Thanks so much for having me. Holly. I equally am thrilled to be talking to you.

[Holly Gattery]

Oh, thank you. That's so nice. I live with teenagers. I don't hear that often. Thank you for listeners. Just a little bit about the book. I wanted to just read one of the blurbs off the bat by Jacqueline Neforge, who is the author of Danger Flower. So I really love this description of it. I think it was so beautiful. A sinewy exploration of daughterhood and the weight of grief. Haines moves deftly between prose and verse, between memoir and fragments of memory. Her meditations cut to the heart of things. They're complex and always dripping with what's real. The speaker's voice radiates power and vulnerability in equal measures. She's willing to look truth in the eye, even if that means staring down the illusions we cling to in order to survive. This is a book about cancer, about culture, about nature, about loss. It's about control and the lack of control. Death is everywhere in these pages and yet the reader is left with a hopeful spiral of life goes on, a loving gesture towards infinity. That's just a gorgeous description. I love that A little bit more About Rayanne Raan is an award winning hybrid author and pushcart nominated poet as well as a cultural producer of films, stage shows and panels. Ran has penned three poetry collections, the Stories in My Skin stained with the colors of Sunday Morning and Tell the bird your Body is not a Gun. That's a great title which won the 2022 Stephane G. Stefanson Alberta Literary Award for Poetry as well as being shortlisted for both the BPAA Robert Crouch Award for PO and the National Roulette Award for Poetry. So Rayanne, I want to dive right into this book and for someone who's read the book like me, it feels fairly self explanatory. Perhaps what could have been your motivation for writing this book? But I'm interested to hear about it because I have absolutely been off on my guesses of what somebody's motivation for writing a book was before. I mean way off that I wasn't even a distant blip on the radar of where they were coming from. So I'd love to hear this in your words. What was your motivation? Where did this book come from? Because as mentioned, it is a very much a hybrid form and there's it feels like there's a mosaic quality too. And there's so much going into this really rangely and also really distilled collection.

[Raeanne Haynes]

Well, thank you for saying those kind things about the book. So my mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer, ovarian cancer, and I in trying to process the inability to grieve with her, I had to grieve privately, which led me to start writing the book. We exist in a society that does not allow us to really grieve publicly when someone is still living. And we knew my mother was not going to survive this, but there was no capacity to share in grief while she was still with us, if that makes sense. And so I turned to writing because that's how I tend to process the things that I'm moving through. And as I was writing through the collection and processing through the grief of, you know, losing mom or coming to losing Mum. Of course, the book became about me also then looking back at my own, you know, my growing up, the burden that is placed on women when we think about grieving and caring for those who are in times of turmoil and those kind of intergenerational traumas that feed into all of the ways we then carry grief. And so the book really kind of became that. And then in terms of the movement between, you know, poetry, very sparse, short one line poems to larger essays, I felt like there was kind of so much nuance within that grief and that anticipatory grief, and also the thinking back and looking forward that I really didn't feel I could force the book into one particular form, that I really needed to allow it to take its own shape in whatever shape that was. And so that meant that it became just authentically or instinctively, a hybrid kind of text.

[Holly Gattery]

Thank you so much for that brilliant answer. One of the things I appreciated the most about your book, as someone who is a mother and is a daughter and who finds my mom sometimes to be a bit of a pain in the ass and whose daughters find her to be a big pain in the ass, how you do not try to reconcile these feelings that are really messy. Messy and contradictory. There is one piece in your book, and it's prose, more of a prose piece or a prose poem, even, where you write. I don't want to watch her die. I want to bitch about how she interrupts and never listens and spends too much money at garage sales and Dollarama. I want to bitch about how she always suggests Kentucky Fried Chicken for lunch. Even though I'm a vegetarian. Doing these things feels normal and healthy. I don't want to talk about the one round of chemo that made her throat close so she couldn't swallow water and had to be put on intravenous fluid so she wouldn't die. And it goes on. And when I read that, I was thinking a lot about, like, it hit hard, it resounded hard, like a thud in the chest. And I was thinking about how my mom does so much stuff that annoys me, that knowing I'm allergic to avocado but still saying that sushi with guacamole. And it isn't guacamole, it's stuff of wasabi and it's fine to eat. And then me vomiting. So I didn't think you were really allergic to it. It's like, ma, yes, I'm allergic. And I know I do Stuff like that to my own daughter. I'd love to talk for you to talk a little bit about holding space for these contradictions and not giving us easy answers or even any answers. And I love that you push against that expectation. I love it when women don't do what people expect us to do in general.

[Raeanne Haynes]

Yeah. I mean, my mom was a firestorm of a woman, and also a woman that didn't have a chance to be the firestorm often because of her life situation. But she really embedded that in me. Right. Like, she was a farming woman, a hard woman, and soft and beautiful, and all of those contradictory things that we are as humans. And so I think when I started writing about her, I had to honor those contradictory things about who she is and was and, you know, and so I didn't think if I was going to be as vulnerable as I knew I had to be, I also had to be as truthful and as authentic as I could be. And that meant being truthful about the kind of relationships that we have in this world. And like, to be very clear, I had an absolutely amazing relationship with my mother. I think she was, like, the most impactful, incredible woman. And I have always said if I could be the kind of mother she was, that I was, you know, reaching for the stars. So. But also in all of that, like, we are human beings, are nuanced, we are complicated, we are complex, and we have to. I think we have to write about those complexities and those challenges. And, yeah, like, my mom was God. She was the garage sale queen. And it drove me nuts. And after she passed, and after my dad passed, as we were cleaning out their house, and there's boxes and boxes and boxes of, like, broken garage sale items. It was frustrating and also just made me love her more because that's, you know, these are the parts of who she was. So, yeah, all of that to say. I think we have to write the reality of the thing in order to write truthfully. And for me, writing vulnerably and truthfully is, like, the only way I know how to write.

[Holly Gattery]

Another great answer. And I really think there's something in poetry or poetic form or poetic prose or this. This hybrid form you're working with that allows for more of that. I. I'm just speaking from personal experience, but anytime I've written fiction, you know, I have wonderful beta readers I trust, but there is a certain tendency in fiction to, like, at least gesture towards some kind of closure. The end. And I'm like, that's not what happens in life. You don't get that.

[Raeanne Haynes]

And we all, we all have our own. We all have our own memories of intergenerational trauma. And in my home, it did exist. That was absolutely a part of my growing up as well. Right. So, you know, to write about my mother's passing and my own movement through grief, I had to also be willing to, like, open up to thinking about how that, those, Those difficulties growing up shaped who I am and also shaped who my mother was. Right. And, and also I, I just want to clarify that my mother was the biggest supporter of my writing and my expression. And so, you know, for her, and she did read much of this before she passed. For her also, having that truthness and that authenticity was, Was really important in the writing and the thinking.

[Holly Gattery]

There's also the really devastating, important, beautifully rendered scene where you're talking about your mom not being ready to die. You know, this kind of myth that when people, when it's people's time to go, they're ready. You're like, nope. And I love that your mom disrupted the narrative too. Your mom's actions disrupted the narrative of what was expected. Like, oh, she, you know, at a certain age, and your mom wasn't that old at all, you know, you should be ready. And I, I found that horrifying and in a way, strange way comforting to know that there was just this honesty and that there was still this rallying. And I think it was like such an important thing to be put in the book. So my next question is actually about your, Your imagery specifically, because there are lines in here, images. I dog eared so much of your book. And I don't care, I don't care what anyone says, because that's my book. I'll do what I want. You may have written it, but it's mine now. And I can't. I didn't dog ear this specific place, though. But you might know what I'm talking about. There's a, A, an image in the book where you're talking about being with your niece and your niece and thinking about your mother, and, you know, your niece is missing her grandmother. And you say that either the feeling or the sob is like wet cement in your chest. And I have felt that a thousand times in my life. And I consider myself an okay poet, but I have never been able to describe it so perfectly. That was just like, like just that sharp intake of breath that you do when you read something that is so viscerally accurate. I would love for you to talk about your process of capturing these images I mean, maybe they just come to you like that, but. And distilling the language down until it is exactly not necessarily what you think, since poetry in particular is not always a representation of thought as much as feeling. But I'd love to hear about your process of kind of culling language.

[Raeanne Haynes]

Oh, that's such a hard question. Yeah. Because I'm trying to think. If I have a process in that kind of formal way of thinking about it, the first thing I'll say is, I read so much, so much poetry, so much prose, and I do believe that in that reading, in that taking in, that it absolutely informs my writing and the craft of the language that I share. So I want to acknowledge that. That I don't think I could be even a decent writer if I wasn't an avid reader. When I think about. It's interesting because I often say that I write this kind of work. And my previous book, Tell the Birds yous Body Was Not a Gun, was also a work that really dealt with grief, but a different kind of grief and a different kind of thinking through Trau. That I write to take things out of my body because holding it in my body is far too difficult. And so I imagine that element of the body. I think maybe just instinctively when I'm writing and when I'm thinking about the imagery or the visceral reactions or whatever, they're always kind of connected back to the body because that's what I'm trying to excise. And so maybe some of the process is coming from that. But to be really honest, a lot of the time I don't know where it comes from. It just kind of arrives. And thanks for picking up on that particular imagery, because I do. It is like such an immediate thing, like that heaviness, that weight in your chest, that can only be that feeling of like if a block of cement was on your body, you're trying to remove it. I don't know if that answers the.

[Holly Gattery]

Question fully, but fully it answers it honestly. Trust me. If somebody asked me the same question and I happen to ask that question, like, I don't know, but I'd like to see if anyone else has a more think. I think we do know intrinsically, but, like, logically enough to, like, come out in coherent sense, at least for me. It's difficult for me to do, but like, you, and I love that answer of reading a lot of poetry. I. You know, it's my advice to everyone. I went into a class to talk about flash fiction class at Trent University recently. I talked to creative writing students about flash fiction. They're like what's your best advice? And like, read more poetry. You want to like do more in less space. Read poetry. No amount of reading fiction is going to get you where you need to be. That's my advice. So I and reading poetry is just a such a beautiful meditative out of body experience in general. More in my opinion, more so than any other form the holidays have a.

[New Books Network Host]

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[Raeanne Haynes]

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[Holly Gattery]

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[Holly Gattery]

So with that in mind, with out of body experiences in mind, no pressure. I'd love for you to read to us from your book now.

[Raeanne Haynes]

Yeah. Okay. So do we want me. Is it okay? I'm just trying to think about which one Helle. Do you want me to read one or two poems?

[Holly Gattery]

You can read as many as you want. But did you want to start with one and then we'll talk about it? Maybe we'll do what we call on the show very affectionately now, the Kirby Sampler. We know, you know, kind of peppering people with poems throughout the interview and then, you know, read talk, read talk, read talk.

[Raeanne Haynes]

Okay, well then I am going to start with this one. And it. It is in lieu of flowers. Today, on the cusp of autumn, I am watching my mother transform from wildflower to sunset. The sheets on the bed she lies on are an unassuming hospital blue. Each nurse, kinder than the one before, wears pins of Fallopian tubes on their scrubs. There is love in this sterile room as we become something else. I am 48 and my mom will be dead soon. The walls in this room are not white and not cream, but something lacking a color. My mother's silver hair glistens against the wall. There is a double bed for those keeping vigil and a black pleather couch for those who come and go. My sister is 50. She will take our mother's place as the matriarch in our family. Helen Reddy is playing quietly in the background and we don't know how to fill the silence. When we laugh it hurts my ears. There is sun shifting through the streaked window. There is too much food in the room. There is not enough of anything to satiate us. My mother is dying and her skin is silky and her hair is soft. Her pale heaven eyes are open and she is telling us she loves us. I want everyone to leave, but without my family I fear I will become translucent. I am thinking too much and it hurts. And my mother is beautiful and she does not want to die. But she is dying and the people in the room are talking about her in memories. There is a mask stuck in the tree outside the streaked window and I can't stop looking at it. The leaves are yellowing. Fall is mum's favorite season. She will not live to smell it. The chemo at least did not take her hair and this makes us glad for her that she is dying with her hair, that everyone who visits can see how beautiful she is with her silver hair in her blue bed.

[Holly Gattery]

Thank you so much. I just, I love how the cadences, I love how it's just like being there for those of us who have been unfortunate enough to be in a one hospital room at the end of their lives and which I unfortunately have. And you're just taking in things and these fragments, you're, you know, there. I never at least found there was any kind of stillness. I felt almost frenetic, eyes darting around, observing everything. Those details she picked out were really just beautiful. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the more, I'll say, the more prosy pieces. I know that is super, super detailed of me, that's super professional. But the prosy pieces, because when I, whenever I see books like this, and maybe it's because I work in the industry, I always think I love it, I'm here for it. I wonder what the editor had to say. Was, was there pushback? Was there like, oh, more pros, move all completely to poetry? Or was it a complete initial understanding and gelling of intention between you and your editor?

[Raeanne Haynes]

Yeah, the second one. So my editor is Micheline Mailer and she, I think she just understood immediately what I was trying to do. And I had had again in the previous book, tell the Birds. I had a couple of prose pieces in that, not to the extent that I have in this one, but Michel and Frontenac are very, very supportive of their authors doing what they want to do. Right. Like our books are our books and they have a mandate to kind of support more experimental writing. And so I think for Micheline it was just. She understood what I was trying to do. She understood that the book asked to not be one thing, that the intention, because as we move through grief, it's so many different things. And so the book itself to be so many different things. And Micheline really got that and supported it a hundred percent.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah, shout out to Micheline. I've been privileged enough to speak with her a few times and she's definitely just an incredible. She has an incredible eye, incredible ear. She's great. So, yeah, everybody, you know, support incredible small presses like Crotnac and all the hard working people behind the scenes like Micheline Mailer. So my other question for you about the form, and particularly in the prose pieces was to talk about how I, I really found it interesting. And maybe it's because I've. I live with, you know, two daughters who just are so big on spilling the tea at all times. Every time I get home from school, it's tea Time we're talking, I was really fascinated by the. The elements of this book that talked about your relationship. I think I'm pretty comfortable saying your relationship with your husband. Like, you know, in some. There's the poet, a poetic voice, but this is very much your life. And I feel okay saying that in this case. But your husband and then your, Your. Your first husband and these really touching details about your, Your current husband, which if he's listening, I'm not implying there will be another one. That's terrible. Your. And then your ex. Your ex. And I was. I felt the, the webbing of how all of this was connected. Your grief with your mom, the. The. The grief of your, Your first marriage, finding that soft landing place with your current husband. And what I've found to stop saying current husband. I'm so sorry. Just thought. Doug, I'm so sorry. I know better. Yeah, I know he has a sense of humor, but I was thinking about the, the sequencing of the pieces. So when we read this collection, at least when I read this collection, other readers can disagree with me and I'll fight them on it, but I felt like the sequencing of the pieces between prose and poetry, because it's not like you're getting, you know, half of the book is more prose poems or experimental, and the other is more traditional in quotes poems. They're. They're. They're cycling in no particular pattern, but cycling. And it felt like there was a very intentional sequence, but a sequence that did not have anything to do with chronological order, but it felt thematically sequenced. And I'd love to hear about your process of sequencing these poems and how that web of all the thematic connections played out. That is a massive question. I understand.

[Raeanne Haynes]

Yeah, but it's a great question. And I actually really love that you kind of picked up on that. And so I said at the beginning that, you know, this book was about me kind of moving through the processes of understanding grief, that anticipatory grief. And then, you know, mom died as I was writing the collection. And so it moved into the real grief of her loss. And then through that, thinking backwards and forward, all of these memories and traumas, you know, marriage, family, etc. Came through. And so I actually set the book in what I would call the seven stages of grief. There are seven one line poems throughout the book that kind of place hold those next stages of grief. And I'll just look at them as I'm saying this out loud so that I know. So step one, you know, there's. Let me go to the page.

[Holly Gattery]

Sorry.

[Raeanne Haynes]

So step one says, you know, walk into the ocean and drown yourself. Become your unspilling. Step two, go to page 20. Here is, you know, contemplate her aliveness as you wish for beautiful things. The bluebird plucking worms from a rainstorm garden. She is going to die, et cetera. So the themes came through, I think, in that my. My intention was to look at each of these pieces and thematically move them through the book through those. My own personal concept of the seven stages of grieving. And sometimes that meant looking back at how my divorce and the very terrible ending of my first marriage moved me through that stage of grief. Or, you know, thinking about the instances of abuse as a child, that moved me through that one moment of grief, et cetera. And, yeah, that was again, me thinking about how do I process all of this? And it became in that way, and I don't necessarily a lot of the time. And so it wouldn't have made sense for the book to be a chronological thing, because grief is not much like I couldn't write the book in one particular form. I couldn't write grief in. In a particular linear timeline either.

[Holly Gattery]

Well, it felt very authentic to me. I mean, I find, and I'm sure a lot of people who experience grief find that, you know, not that you ever think you're over it, but you think today and then a smell or the way a toddler, you know, runs up to its mother or something, and you. Something, you're a puddle. You're a puddle. Like you're just back there 100% again. And that it felt very authentic to. That. This is a question I like to ask people who write about family members, particularly family members who are still around and perhaps even curious enough to read their books. And I asked this question perhaps just out of personal, you know, research for myself, because my first book was a memoir. And I was asked this question a lot. And I don't know if it annoyed me, but if it did, maybe I just want to annoy other people. I. And quite. I'll think on my own motivations later, but I am generally curious, too, is how did you write. What was your approach to writing about people in your lives, your life, who would maybe be reading this book, and even people who may never read this book. So, you know, maybe an ethical or moral kind of code you had. And did anybody read of family members or people in the book read the book?

[Raeanne Haynes]

Yeah, like you. It's a question I get asked often, and I'm not sure that My answer is one that people love. I write about family and extended family a lot. My belief has always been that if a family member is a child or, you know, not of age, that it's my responsibility to take more care with writing about them and to ensure that they are aware of and okay with that. An adult. I don't have the same sense of responsibility. So, you know, I wrote about my mother. I didn't ask her permission, but also knowing how much support and belief my mother had in me and that she was, you know, okay, she would be okay with this regardless. I didn't ask for my father's permission. There's a lot of stuff in the book that details traumatic experiences with my father. And I felt that, you know, if they are. Come they do the thing, then I can write the thing. I don't feel the responsibility to ask permission. Yeah. So that. That's my pretty basic answer, though I always do write with care, you know, I don't intentionally write to harm anybody, even those people who may have harmed me. You know, in writing about my ex husband, I did not seek permission. I felt that this was a thing that had happened, an act that had happened in the real world, and I can write about it in the real world.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah. I think it was Anne Lamont who said, the American memoirist author that said, and I'm paraphrasing very poorly, so please forgive me, Anne, if you ever hear this for people who know, Anne, that if people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better, which is kind of something I. I adhere to. Like, I. I adhere to a point. I also need to live with myself, and I don't want to encourage, like, litigious action against me. So, you know, I think leading with grace and compassion is always there. And I mean, yes, what you were saying about your father. I mean, I was. I read this book a while ago and then I reread it in anticipation of our conversation today. And I will say that, I mean, yes, there's definitely, you know, ample evidence that your father was a difficult person. I didn't ever feel like there wasn't love, like immense love everywhere. And I mean, I. I know books are mirrors and somebody else might have a completely different reading, but I also grew up with a rather difficult father who I love intensely, so I'm willing to see that. To end our conversation, I was hoping maybe you could read us one more poem.

[Raeanne Haynes]

Sure, sure. Okay. And I'm trying to think of one that will kind of work with the conversation. We've had. Do you know what? I think I'm going to read the poem about my father then.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah. So this is.

[Raeanne Haynes]

It's the dead he can't sit with. 1. After my mother died, I wore her hoarding like a veil so I wouldn't have to see a future without her.

[Holly Gattery]

2.

[Raeanne Haynes]

My father is living inside her leftovers. 3. My siblings and I let him purge because we want to hold on to everything. He doesn't take back the things we bought her from trips both abroad and closer to home. We claim child rights so he doesn't pitch her chipped china set out the back door with the other broken things covered in dust and her thin thumbprints. We are in part fueled by anger and sorrow and also for a desire to finally now control what we couldn't before. I brought Mom a magnet to add to her collection whenever I traveled on the fridge. Scenes from Athens, Peru, the Galapagos Islands, Rome, Sevilla, Sardinia, Santorini, Costa Rica, Ecuador. Told places or told tales of places she'd never see. I bring dad one from my latest trip to Scotland because I wear tradition like a veil as well. He tells me he's planning to throw out her magnets right there at his granddaughter's junior high school concert, which is the place I tell him about my gift in between the profoundly terrible Acts 2 and 3. As my mouth hangs open, he says, unless you want them, you can come have them. And I must reconcile right there during my niece's solo song about loving God that some pieces of Mum must be let go. 5. At the back of the freezer, we found one unsmoked cigarette frozen in Saran Wrap. She quit smoking 30 years ago. Kept the trophy. Always said I might start again. I haven't decided. 6. Undecided on where her final resting place will be. Us siblings carry Mum's urn from house to house to house, holding her in stasis from month to month to month. Dad, unable to sit with the dead, leaves her with us. 7. Still, he cares about living things. The dogs, two fish tanks full, the ancient horses in the back pen, the mausoleum of pigeons. He started hoarding.

[Holly Gattery]

Thank you so much. I think that is such a perfect, beautiful, complicated, glittering poem to end on. And I want to thank you so much for joining me today to talk about your really astonishingly beautiful book, what Kind of Daughter Again, that's by Raeann Hines. And you can get this book wherever books are bought and borrowed. It's published by Frontenac House Poetry. Rayan, thank you so much for joining me today.

[Raeanne Haynes]

Thank you, Holly. I really appreciate the deep reading that you did of the book in order to facilitate this chat.

[Holly Gattery]

Yeah, it was a pleasure. I was crying. My. My oldest son came in and said to me, mom, why do you read books that upset you? And I said, her mama died. And he. He just said no and gave me a hug. So he got it. He was like, no, like, such a thing cannot be possible. And I agree. Such a thing should never be possible. So I do want to thank you. Your book even got me a hug from my teenager. I loved it. Thank you. And I hope everyone picks it up. It's gorgeous.