Transcripts

DAN GUNDERSON: In the early 1980s, David Mason was staying with his great aunt in Los Angeles, while he worked for a film company. One day, she presented him with a box of yellowed papers containing the collective stories of a Civil War hero, John Mitchell. Mitchell was famous for his role in helping Union soldiers escape a Confederate prison. John Mitchell was also David Mason's great great grandfather.

Mason says he knew he had to write the story, but wasn't sure how to tell it. Then he discovered letters written by John Mitchell's daughter, describing the turmoil as the family moved west after the Civil War. Those two characters form the basis of a narrative poem.

DAVID MASON: The two voices are, on the one hand, a robust, adventurous man and a rather strong but diffident and tenuous woman. And her interior voice is juxtaposed to his very adventurous and exterior voice. And what I hope happens is a kind of musical counterpoint in the stories so that the two stories actually find moments of connection, of lyrical connection, as they move back and forth. And I hope they come to a climax which is both dramatic and lyrical.

SPEAKER 3: I had bad dreams-- And I am not a man who dreams-- of water boiling up from down below, a shaft of moonlight turning it to blood. I dreamed of cannon fire, 1, 2. The guns pounded like that, 1, 2, 3, 4. I saw my first-born buried on the farm and prayed that I would live to see my wife.

I started coughing blood out of my lungs. The rebel doctor said I had pneumonia. When I heard that, I thought I was a goner. Tried to sleep and stop the dreams from coming, but when your fever is high like that, the mind plays tricks on you. My breath came in great heaves, and the strangest dreams kept floating in my head.

SPEAKER 4: I was alone. I was alone, and it was more than I could bear to lie there, listening to that driving rain. Maybe that is why we go on talking, always trying to show someone we're here. And look, I have a past just like you do. A stream of words that fills the empty night and sweetens troubled dreams, or so we hope, and tells us not to linger long on bridges, staring at all the water passing by.

I thought my whole ambition was to make the past and present come together, dreamed into a vivid shape that memory could hold, the way the land possesses rivers. They, in turn, possess the land and carry it in one clear stream of thought, to drink from, our water gardens with.

DAVID MASON: When she says, I thought my whole ambition was to make the past and present come together, dreamed into a vivid shape that memory could hold, the way the land possesses rivers, she was actually describing exactly what I'm trying to do in this long poem. So there's a sense in which her voice enunciates exactly what I had hoped the poem would be able to do. And that was entirely unplanned. It just happened as I was writing it.

DAN GUNDERSON: Mason says the two characters, a commanding, at times, overbearing war hero and a strong but tentative woman who sought the independence women didn't have in the 1950s, embody a common theme.

DAVID MASON: And I do think perhaps that has ramifications that reach beyond this poem into our society. Perhaps there are families in which daughters have difficulty creating their own lives distinctly from the influence of their fathers, just as sons sometimes have difficulty having some autonomy from their mothers.

And it does seem to me that though this father and daughter have a deep bond, though they're thinking of each other almost constantly at their different points in history, the need of the daughter to separate herself, to work free of the father's influence, actually to escape from life with her father, as if she were escaping from a prison, very much like the prison he's escaping from in the Civil War, that kind of impetus forms a lot of the dramatic nature of the poem, I think.

DAN GUNDERSON: A Country I Remember was recently published by Storyline Press. I'm Dan Gunderson, Minnesota Public Radio, Moorhead.