Interview with John Ridland

John Ridland taught English at UCSB from 1961 to 2005, publishing several books of poetry and translation. He and his wife, Muriel Ridland, wrote And Say What He Is: The Life of a Special Child (MIT Press, 1975), about their son John, who passed away. Their daughter, Jenny, lives in England and son Michael in Southern California. I recently interviewed John Ridland about his latest book, Epitome and Epiphany.

Epitome and Epiphany focuses on a time in your life that was both incredibly painful and yet full of joy — the six years you had with your special-needs son, John. Isn’t it difficult to revisit these events? Yes, it was difficult, but writing from outside of our individual points of view, which was what we had done in the earlier book, made for a further liberation from the sorrows. The joy in the writing sought to equal the “gay intensities of joy” in his life. Throughout both parts of the new book, the intensity of poetry lifted the personal difficulties of the subject matter aside.

The “Epitome” section of the book makes use of not only prose memoir but also poetry, your wife Muriel’s journal entries, letters, doctors’ reports, and the recollections of caregivers. How did this multi-genre approach help you to tell Little John’s story more effectively? In And Say What He Is, whichever source made the sharpest, clearest evocation of any given moment was the one to choose. If the original words in those forms you mention were better than a narrative summary of them might be, they stayed. In the “Epitome,” the narrative summary by a third-person, impersonal voice takes over, though still incorporating some of the other voices, which were too good to lose. For example, the young girl helper’s recollections, and the reaction of the scrap-metal dealer father of another helper.