Amy Lin Looks Into the Silence
"I felt something slip away from me— disassemble. And it was that belief, that the dead can speak to us."
Hello friends!
We took a little time off to eat blackberries and regroup before beginning a new cycle of episodes, starting today with a stunning conversation with the poet and author Amy Lin, who writes
.Amy’s debut book, HERE AFTER, offered a reading experience I haven’t had in a long time: I stayed up way way past my bedtime because I didn’t want to put it down. HERE AFTER is what you might describe a lyric memoir — roughly 180 fragments that, assembled, tell the story of her relationship with her husband, Kurtis, and his sudden and unexpected death at only 32, when he collapsed running a half marathon. The fragments swerve all around in time, their chronology is shattered, which mimics the disorienting effects of grief: on one page, Kurtis is full of life; on the next, he’s gone; on the next, he’s singing; then he’s gone again. There’s something poetic about the way the book is structured and formatted, with lots of white space around the text— like the effects of the language are so intense that it requires emptiness for company. Or, as Amy put it, so there’s lots of silence around the language.
Silence was central in my conversation with Amy, who wanted to talk about her relationship with ghosts or spirits — how she’d always believed in them because there’s a long tradition in her family of openness to the spirit world. And then how, on the afternoon that Kurtis died, she reached for that world and was met with silence.
That’s the kind of person Kurtis was: He would never leave without saying something. I really believed that. I thought “Well, if the spirit world is a threshold that the dead can reach us from, then Kurtis will… I felt something slip away from me— disassemble. And it was that belief, that the dead can speak to us.
Something unusual happened during this interview. We recorded it remotely (which we often do) and so I was alone in my room and Amy was at her home in Canada, and we couldn’t see each other. As she was telling me about Kurtis, I started to hear this thumping noise. Every thirty seconds or so there would be this low bump-bump steadily under her voice, like maybe someone was playing music with a low bass somewhere near her house, in the rhythm of a heartbeat. I stopped her, apologizing, and asked if she could hear any music near her. She couldn’t. And actually, she couldn’t hear the sound I was hearing. Our producer, Drew, came on and he couldn’t hear anything either. I took off my headphones and the sound disappeared. “Okay, it’s not on my end either,” I said, but when I put my headphones back on it came back.
“Okay, let’s just keep going,” I said, and listened as Amy kept talking so beautifully about grief and love and eternal silence, still hearing this untraced heartbeat sound all the time, feeling sort of unsettled about it.
Of course it was my own heartbeat. My pulse was thudding in the headphones. I swear it had sounded like it was coming through the monitor.
I felt dumb for having interrupted the recording about it, and for having been lightly disconcerted about the presence of an untraceable pulse during a conversation about receiving signs (or not) from lost loved ones. But also, in retrospect, I liked that while I was listening to Amy talk about her love and heartbreak that I had also accidentally and cluelessly been listening to my own heart. That’s very much what I want reading or talking to someone to feel like, and what it felt like to me to read and talk to Amy: hearing a story about her heart and hearing yours unexpectedly thump along in response.
Coming Soon:
We are back with a new seven-episode run that’s going to take us through the (IMO) very best months: end of summer (last-splash-in-the-lake, sticky-peach-juice weather) and into the school year (buying pencils, cracking books weather). Upcoming guests include
(who’s new novel Housemates you should read in advance for extra credit), Sigrid Nunez, Maya Binyam, Wallace, and more. Stay updated, subscribe, and listen along at our website.That’s all for now. If you like what we’re up to here, please share the newsletter and the podcast far and wide — it really does help.
Til soon,
Jordan
