Author Description

Margaret Van Every's book, Saying Her Name, is a poem memoir about significant passages in her life. The poems keep the reader moving between tears and laughter, portraying the joys and sorrows that color every life. In that way, the memoir also serves as a mirror for the reader. She is an honest woman who has lived much and is unafraid to open her heart. Her aim is to provoke discussion about experience that binds all women in universal sisterhood—stumbling through adolescence with no information, unwanted pregnancy, childbirth, earning keep, the alienation of failed communication, the aging process and dying. At the same time, she stirs up repressed memories in the many who have suffered certain indignities in silence. Her voice evokes both humor and pathos, a combination that saves the more painful poems from sentimentality. Margaret’s mother died when Margaret was 10, leaving her to discover life pretty much on her own. She sees all life as a journey that presents trials to be overcome but which ultimately lead to a higher understanding. The poems serve as a testament to the clumsy times during which the poet came of age. Her mother died in 1951, before Hospice or grief counseling. Loved ones died out of sight in hospitals without the comfort of exchanging final farewells. The book’s title comes from a poem that describes how after the funeral, the family went home and never mentioned the mother’s name again. Saying Her Name After our visitation at the mortuary; after the eulogy was done; after the lid was shut and the pall borne out; after the hearse transported the box to Memorial Park and the box was dropped in its bed and covered with clods and a blanket of flowers, we returned to the home she had made and never uttered her name again, as though her leaving was something unspeakably heinous for which there was no forgiveness or recompense. Or did we guess that if we spoke her name it would break the spell; our grief would spill like the riotous heads of cond