About Sharon Charde
My parents did not agree on many things,…
but on one, they did concur. They both were certain I should become a writer. To be able to place that label squarely on my life, I’ve traveled many paths. How good it is to feel finally an occupant of the true home my mother and father imagined I would someday inhabit, one I’ve labored to find and create for myself over my many years of living.
In high school and college I dove into writing—academic papers, articles for the school newspaper, essays and years of creative writing classes, in which I crafted poems and short stories for weekly assignments. Then came a short-lived job as a high school English teacher before having our two sons. With a medical student husband and later resident and pediatrician who was rarely able to be home, we both felt our kids needed a consistent care-giver; that was me. With no regrets at that choice, but a strong desire for a next step, I eventually enrolled in graduate training to become a family therapist, and practiced in that profession for twenty-five years. I loved my work and thought it would be my life’s career.
But in 1987 my younger son was killed in a shocking accident, a fifty-foot fall from the wall by the Tiber River in Rome, on his junior year abroad. In the years following this monstrous loss I began to question everything in my life. I sought healing and solace for my grief, and knew I had to find a way to keep my son’s spirit alive. A friend told me about Natalie Goldberg’s workshops in Taos, based on her book, “Writing Down the Bones.” and I began traveling out to the southwest to study with her. Newly energized by this method of writing, I wanted to maintain it back in New England, so I began my now almost thirty years of women’s writing retreats, first in my therapy office and then in my home and on Block Island.
Slowly, I returned to my early love of writing poetry. It felt like the best way for me to capture the inchoate feelings of loss and despair spinning and whirling inside my mind and heart. I studied with many excellent teachers, Sharon Olds, Brenda Hillman, Marie Howe, Ellen Bass and Eileen Myles, all who were encouraging, inspiring and tremendously helpful. I began to submit my poems and chapbooks for publication and met with success and many awards, five chapbooks, a full-length collection and another to come out in 2021.
I discovered mindfulness mediation practice, and many retreats and daily practice have been enormously supportive and helpful. But something was still missing. The solitude and reflection as well as the somewhat solipsistic experience of creating poems and sitting on a meditation cushion needed balance with action, I thought. The asymmetrical relationships of my therapy practice were of course appropriate, but I craved more abundant connections. A friend told me about a new facility for teenaged delinquent girls in a town forty-five minutes from my home called Touchstone. Since I’d just read a book called “Ophelia Speaks,” filled with the stories of young women’s struggles in their own words, an idea came fast. Why not try volunteering there to form a writing group, get the girls to tell their stories?
The rest is history. Later, I created a collaborative group with The Hotchkiss School and after sixteen powerful, poignant years, I have moved on, though holding cherished memories of my time with these fierce and compelling young women. I’ve written a book, “I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent,” about my years of teaching at Touchstone and Hotchkiss and how it helped to heal and change us all; Mango Publishing will bring it out in June 2020.
At nearly 78, my life is rich and full. Blue Light Press will bring out a new poetry collection next year, “The Glass Is Already Broken,” and I continue to write poems and essays, mostly at the wonderful residencies I have been awarded for the last fourteen years. I live with my husband of fifty-five years in an old farmhouse surrounded with trees and flowers; my surviving son, his wife and their three boys are a vibrant part of our lives. And through my writing, Geoff’s spirit continues to reach out to others, and stays lodged firmly in all of our hearts.
