Theology Descending: Franz Wright and Mary Karr in Conversation (Special Feature) (Discussion‪)‬

PJC: Good morning. I've been asked to moderate a conversation by two of the best poets in America--Mary Karr and Franz Wright. I don't get far in a conversation without bringing up my favorite novel, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. I've been teaching it, and I learned on the way over that Mary Karr loves the book and Franz Wright wrote a paper about it in high school, so I feel comfortable bringing it up. In the novel, there's a wonderful line by the elder monk Father Zosima, who says that even from a really disordered, painful family life, you can glean some precious memory. You can find something that was good and that was precious. And both Mary and Franz have written about their childhoods in memoirs and poems, and I guess the question I wanted to begin with is do you think that's true? I mean, do you think it is a sentimental thing to say that even in the most difficult childhood you can find some precious memory? And has your view of that changed at all in the last few years? FW: It's very interesting that you would ask that because I've recently been trying to work on a--and I can't finish it for some reason--but I've been working on a poem that has a line that goes through it like a refrain that goes something like, "Strange how we always remember the good things about the most terrible times." And I've asked many people, "Do you have this?" And I think it's human, it seems to be something that many people have in common. You think back on horrendous, terrible times in your life and you've blocked out a lot, and you remember some little, exactly as you said, some little thing that was precious to you. Maybe because it helped you survive. I don't know.