Home		Martin Lammon Nel Mezzo del Cammin di Nostra Vita
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		As I write these words, I am astonished to count back and realize that our colleague and friend, Susan Atefat-Peckham, died in a car accident less than eight months ago. She and her husband, Joel Peckham, were teaching as Fulbright scholars in Amman, Jordan. Their two young children, Cyrus and Darius, accompanied them. Susan’s mother was also visiting when the accident happened. Late one evening, returning home from a weekend excursion, Susan and Cyrus died when their van collided with a maintenance vehicle parked on the road. Susan was thirty-three years old. Cyrus was six. Susan’s mother and little Darius (three years old) were slightly injured. Joel’s injuries were more serious but not life-threatening. Everything that happened that night is impossible to understand or explain. On the cover of this issue is a short passage taken from an on-line interview with Poets & Writers (www.pw.org). Susan’s observations were made in the context of coping with the events of September 11, 2001. Ironically, on that date one year earlier she found out that her first collection of poems, That Kind of Sleep, had been selected for a National Poetry Series award. In this passage from the interview, Susan continues: “I remember hearing on television a woman from New York saying, ‘I will never watch another country terrorized without understanding what it feels like.’ Human empathy is the role of art. Art can build bridges for people from very different places.” Susan was truly a citizen of the world, born in New York City to Iranian parents. She had lived in Paris, Switzerland, Iran, as well as Texas and Nebraska, Michigan and most recently Milledgeville, Georgia. She was a painter, musician, and photographer, as well as a poet. She was thrilled to have the opportunity to live and teach in the Middle East, to have her family with her on that adventure. There is no consoling anyone after the death of a small child, or after a young woman’s prominent life has ended so prematurely. In the weeks after her death, I tried my best to talk to her students, to listen to them, to accept their anger, disbelief, horror, and grief. For many of them, this was the first time they had ever lost anyone, let alone a beloved teacher who dies suddenly in the middle of her life’s way. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, Dante begins his Commedia, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura. None of us knows when we will be lost in that “dark woods,” and no matter whether we are thirty-three or sixty-six years old, it is always “in the middle of our life’s way In this issue, poet Alice Friman remembers Susan for all of us. Alice had joined our community in the fall of 2003, moving to Milledgeville with her husband, Flannery O’Connor scholar Bruce Gentry. When Susan departed for her Fulbright to Jordan, we were fortunate to have such an accomplished poet (and delightful colleague) to help us while Susan was away. And then, of course, the situation changed horribly. Alice had been using Susan’s office, and after February 7, found herself surrounded by photographs of Susan’s family, toys her children played with, even the lingering scent of her perfume. In her short essay “The Office,” Alice remembers Susan in a way that is touching and sad, and somehow, for me, her words bring a kind of consolation. This issue also commemorates Donald Hall’s visit to Milledgeville this fall. His essay “The Grandmother Poem” is from a forthcoming memoir about his life with the poet Jane Kenyon, who died from Leukemia in 1995 when she was only forty-seven years old. Many of our readers will already know the work of these two exceptional poets, and also know their tragic story. But for those who do not, I’ll offer a brief account. In the early 1970’s, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon left Ann Arbor, Michigan, for Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire, the place where Donald Hall spent his childhood summers with his grandparents. For twenty years, Don and Jane lived “A Life Together,” the title of a 1993 Emmy award-winning documentary about their life by Bill Moyers. Around that time, Hall was diagnosed (again) with cancer and doctors removed two-thirds of his liver. Yet Don beat the odds and survived. Soon, however, Jane had leukemia. In the spring of 1995, there was hope that she had passed the “hundred days” threshold, after which patients sometimes go into remission. I remember a letter from Don, telling me how they had traveled to Boston to see Jane’s doctor, and how the doctor had given them the bad news. Her cell count was irremediable. She had perhaps two weeks. They should go home, prepare what they could, and say good-bye. Don’s books of poetry Without and The Painted Bed focus on these years after Jane’s death, and the second part of his memoir Life Work addresses his own battle with liver cancer. But I think that his biographical work on the life of Jane Kenyon will be his greatest gift to her, and to those who appreciated her life and work. This issue of Arts & Letters is dedicated to Susan Atefat-Peckham. With this issue we try to move on, for not only have we lost Susan, but we’ve also bid farewell to our colleague and friend, Ruth Knafo Setton, who has moved back to Pennsylvania. Our masthead changes with this issue to reflect our new editorial staff. But our fall 2004 and spring 2005 issues will reflect mostly the editorial work of these two fine writers and teachers, Susan and Ruth. This year we welcome to our community Karen Salyer McElmurray, our new creative nonfiction editor, and Allen Gee, our new fiction editor. And I offer special thanks to Alice Friman, who takes on the hard task of assuming the duties of Poetry Editor. I am blessed to work with these people, along with drama editor David Muschell, and all of our editorial staff. Finally, this issue also presents the work of our 2004 Arts & Letters prize winners in fiction and poetry. Final judge Molly Peacock chose poems by Tenaya Darlington, whose first book of poems (like Susan’s) was a National Poetry Series award winner. Final judge Kelly Cherry chose Deborah Schwartz’s story “Orrin in Exile,” our winner’s first published story. In Life Work, Donald Hall talks about the “best day,” a long day filled with writing, reading, baseball, and time with Jane. But he also writes that the “best day has its corollary,” and the “worst day is the day when grief or sorrow overcome you.” After so much grief, Don ends that book admonishing himself to focus more on the present, to put aside “long projects,” to work each day as he always has, because there is “only one long-term project.” I also believe Susan is right, that “art and empathy” can help us prevail in times of grief. I hope today is one of your best days. But if not, I hope this issue of Arts & Letters may help you find “something good…even if it seems impossible.”
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