Last May, I dialed my father’s high school alma mater with a simple question. Was the poetry prize I’d set up two decades ago still operating?
“I must be fully transparent with you,” a woman who now runs the contest says. “There’s been a firestorm on social media out here about the library.”
Twenty years ago, at the same time that I’d created the poetry prize, his Midwestern hometown had renamed its high school library for my father. So I wonder immediately if she might be talking about my two-year-old memoir, in which I revealed my father’s molestation of me when I was 17. The coordinator wastes no time telling me the school no longer wants my father’s name gracing its library. They’d like to maintain the poetry prize but rename that as well.
“The school board’s decision was unanimous,” the coordinator says. “They stand with all children and adolescents who suffer harm done to them by others.” She pauses for what seems a long minute before asking, “How do you feel about this?”
I think as fast as I can before responding. I want to rise to her candor and answer her direct question. I want to grasp the closest rung of this ladder she’s laying down across our telephonic crevasse. Her voice conveys compassion and empathy, and I trust her immediately. I sense my response will be as important to her as her news is to me.
“We’ve been trying to locate you to let you know.”
It’s true that I’d moved the prior year, and there was COVID before that. I hadn’t been in touch for a few years.
“It’s not what I expected when I called,” I say, stalling. “But I’m glad the prize is still popular and that it will continue.”
“I support the board’s decision. It’s the right thing,” I add. I fiddle with a pen. “But it’s complicated for me.”
What I don’t say is that it’s never been easy to square the impact of my father’s legacy, forever complicated by countervailing emotions.
Courtesy of Gretchen Eberhart Cherington
My father, Richard Eberhart, Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. poet laureate under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, was born in 1904. He grew up hiking a Midwestern river that runs through endless miles of rolling prairie. He graduated from high school as…
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