Elizabeth Bishop and Patricia Dwyer Knew Something Needed to Change

Patricia Dwyer had been a nun for almost 20 years when she encountered the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. She writes about the work and writing that followed and preceded, and the places she's been drawn to and lost, this week at Lit Hub. "For some reason, turning 40 became a threshold, a line I could not cross without figuring out who I was. And so at 39, I have decided to take a leave of absence from the Sisters of St. Joseph." More:

My decision has not been made lightly. Counseling and prayer, long discussions with dear friends. Like Bishop, I have come to my own breaking point, or perhaps a break through. My own carefully patterned villanelle disrupted. My personal version of “Write it!”   

I sit on the bed in my small room at a convent in Georgetown, now without the slightest resemblance to the lived-in space I have occupied for the last 18 months: photos of family are packed away; the empty desk is almost unrecognizable without heaps of books and articles to be read; a poster from an Elizabeth Bishop conference in Key West, carefully wrapped in brown paper, leans against the wall. Outside my bedroom door, I hear the Sisters light chatter about the upcoming Parent-Teacher meetings or lunch with a friend; I smell the cinnamon as one of them bakes muffins in the kitchen, a batch promised to me as part of a farewell gift. Today is the day.

Bishop, at 40, also knew something had to change. Leaving stuffy D.C. bureaucracy for Brazil’s exotic Amazon seemed the perfect antidote. How could she ever have imagined that while traveling on the Amazon, she would suffer a severe allergic reaction to a cashew, resulting in an extended stay under the care of an acquaintance, Lota de Maceda Soares, a Brazilian aristocrat and architect who later became her lover? Bishop stayed with Lota in Ouro Preto, Brazil, for 17 years. She wrote some of her best poems here...

Read the full piece at Lit Hub.