My dual roles as poet and psychologist prepared me well to confront my own and my parents’ love and loss, joy, resentment, anxiety, dependency, tenderness, and terror. All collided in what may be considered the most vulnerable of adult life stages: when we all become orphans. (more…)

Political poetry, the poetry of nature and the poetry of ideas have long been well regarded and published. Not so, however, with what I call personal poetry ( often mistakenly referred to as ‘confessional’ poetry) which focuses on the emotional/psychological fabric of the individual that dictates who...

I’ve been asking myself why I wanted to revitalize this blog. There were several reasons for my disappearance, not the least of which was the loss of a devoted friend who was my partner when I started CavanKerry Press. Absorbing all of my focus, my life-giver in the face of this loss became my latest...

I posted this East Hampton Star review last week. What follows is my response to a question raised in the first paragraph (I’ve included it below) which ultimately concerns all of us and I’d love to hear your thoughts. While it is a truth that anyone who lives to old age will experience inevitable deterioration,...

An Unexamined Life Stage by Joan Cusack Handler, Ph. D.| April 18, 2016 I’ve been a psychologist in clinical practice for more than 30 years. Not surprisingly, I’m also a writer who focuses on the emotional and psychological underpinnings of human experience. Committed to meticulously preserving client...

In The Dry Months By Lucas Hunt| June 23, 2016 – 11:58am Joan Cusack Handler Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. — from “Gerontion” by T.S. Eliot While it is a truth that anyone who lives to old age will experience inevitable deterioration, the facts...

Now that Orphans is published and no longer mine alone, I’m feeling a bit lonely. I don’t have my ‘baby’ to tend to anymore (and that truly is a loss after so many months/(years!!) of obsessing,) and I certainly don’t have my next project in mind nor do I have room for it emotionally–that will...

NIN ANDREWS Orphans is such a powerful and heart-breaking memoir. I thought maybe I’d start the interview by asking for an excerpt from “No Day Was Brighter:” on page 39, beginning on page 39: “I’ve spent my life trying to explain/my mother . . . and ending with “God stealing her mother in every /face...

I can count on my one hand the women I know—friends or patients—whose relationship with their mothers is not the root of their most troubled selves. Virtually every woman I know has a complex relationship with her mother. (The same is true with men and their fathers, but it’s mother and daughter that...