Portland poet Floyd Skloot’s newest collection of poetry, “Dancing in the Cosmos, New & Selected Poems, 1973-2024,” covers the span of his career, including the best of his previously published poems and a section of new poems about his experience living with Parkinson’s disease. We spoke to Skloot along with his daughter, the author Rebecca Skloot, in front of an audience at Powells.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re coming to you today in front of an audience at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland, spending the hour with the writers Floyd and Rebecca Skloot.
[Audience applause]
There is no father-daughter duo in Oregon quite like the Skloots. Floyd has published nearly two dozen books, including the memoir “In the Shadow of Memory,” the novel “Summer Blue,” and the poetry collection “Approaching Winter.” He writes with clarity about mortality, and loss, and love. Most of his books came out after a series of viral brain infections, starting in the late 1980s, damaged his motor skills and memory.
Meanwhile, Rebecca was not going to be a writer at all. She planned on becoming a veterinarian before veering into an award-winning career as a science journalist and essayist. And then her debut book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” became an international bestselling phenomenon.
Rebecca and Floyd Skloot join me now to talk about his latest book – and the one he says will be his last. “Dancing in the Cosmos” is a collection of some of his poetry spanning more than 50 years, much of it previously published, along with a section of new poems about his experience living with Parkinson’s disease for nearly a decade. Floyd and Rebecca, it’s an honor to have an hour with both of you. Thank you.
Floyd Skloot: It’s great to be with you, Dave.
Rebecca Skloot: So excited to be here.
Miller: Floyd, I thought we could start with one of the first poems in your new book. It’s called “Hazards.” It was published in your collection of “Music Appreciation” that came out in the ‘90s. But reading it, it seems like this is from maybe 20 years before that.
F. Skloot: That’s correct. It was, I would say probably 1973. And it’s about Rebecca, who never stopped disliking being the subject of her daddy’s poems.
R. Skloot: Not true, not true. Not true. I did stop disliking eventually.
Miller: You had to stop disliking. OK, we’ll get to that.
R. Skloot: [Laughing] I had to stop.
Miller: Let’s first hear one of the early poems.
F. Skloot: [Reading the poem, “Hazards,” from his collection of poetry, “Dancing in the Cosmos: New & Selected Poems, 1973-2024”]
Miller: What’s it like for you to read and experience that poem now, 50 years later?
F. Skloot: I keep waiting to change and to stop being afraid every time she makes a move.
Miller: That doesn’t go away? I ask this as the parent of much younger children than a 50-year-old. So it hits hard hearing now and I guess I’m hoping that it changes, but you’re saying it doesn’t.
F. Skloot: It didn’t for me. I always imagined the worst, and as I said, playing left field instead of watching the action I was in the midst of. I was watching her as she sat on the blanket and making sure there was nothing happening out there that was going to endanger her life. Yeah, she got a special kick, I think, on one of those bring-your-parent-to-school mornings when she was in elementary school, when I read that poem – she got a real kick out of that.
Miller: Rebecca, what is it like to hear that poem now?
R. Skloot: My whole life has been in poetry in some way or another and also in his fears of what might happen to me. So, when I was young, hearing the poems about me was just so cringe inducing and I would just want to writhe in my chair. He would come and, like you said, read poems at my school. And I would just go like, oh my God, and my dad, and he’s reading about me, and I would just shrivel in my chair.
And now, I mean, I have so many different thoughts. And I think what I was thinking of when you were reading it then was, he was 25 when I was born, right? So [you were] almost maybe 26 when you wrote that, and how terrifying, of course, to have a child, and a child like me, who was ricocheting off everything as she could move. So I think I experience it more in the abstract now, than being about me, and at least in this moment I did.
I mean, every time I hear these poems or read these poems, something different happens for me. It’s like people have photo albums, some people have videos of their childhoods. I have those things and also I have all of these poems, and they create memories in my brain. I actually have memories of some of these moments even though I obviously can’t remember them, just because I’ve read them and heard them so much. So it’s like, yeah, it’s so much a part of the fabric of me.
Miller: Were there times in your life, early on, when something would happen and you’d say, “Ugh, this is going to be a poem” –
R. Skloot: Yeah. Totally.
Miller: – or, [with more excitement] “Ah! This is going to be a poem!”
R. Skloot: And it was not that. [Laughing] It was the first one!
Yeah. I think I was probably maybe like 5 years old when I started to sort of understand in any way that there were poems, and that I was in them … maybe a little bit older. But I remember the real reality for me was, third grade was the first I remember with him coming to visit and me thinking, “oh, everything I do might be a poem,” and becoming conscious of that.
And that basically happened up until … I think one of the last poems of that experience is, I’m 16, and it’s basically a poem about a picture of me, and looking at a picture of me, and not knowing what I was doing, and not being able to have access to the things going on. So he was writing about the picture, wondering what was really happening in my life. And I felt that as well. I was like, “Nope, you get the picture, you’re going to write about the picture. I get my life.” And there was a sort of separation that happened.
Miller: Floyd, were there negotiations that you remember about that? Especially, I mean, you can’t really have a contract with a toddler in that sense. “How do you feel if I write about my fears, my terrifying fears of what could happen to your tiny body?” But you can talk about that with a 15-year-old or a 16-year-old. Did you?
F. Skloot: Well, yes, I did; but not to say, “Are you OK with this?” Because she had already made it clear that she wasn’t. [Laughter]
I think there were a couple of breakthroughs for me. One is the realization that I’m imposing my own experiences as a child and as a young adult on Becca. And that lent a feeling for me, after a while, of inauthenticity in the poems. I needed to get closer to my own experience and not impose it upon the character called Rebecca in the work.
Miller: It is worth saying that in that poem we heard, it’s not about Rebecca. It’s about a terrified father for whom one form of love is that terror.
F. Skloot: Yeah, and even walking, stumbling like a toddler would as we walked into the backyard was fear-producing for me. I was run over when I was a 6-year-old, fleeing my Brooklyn apartment, where my mother was chasing me, and being run over by a 1962 Packard, I think it was – 1952 Packard. So I was imposing my own experience on her. What if what happened to me all the time happened to her? And I finally, I think, understood this is a hole I’ve dug for myself, and if I wanna grow as an artist, and if I want to be a good father, I ought to find another direction.
Miller: For people who are not familiar with your work, can you tell us – you’ve written numerous books about this, so it’s in some ways an unfair question to ask – the short version of what started happening to you in 1988?
F. Skloot: I was diagnosed with post-viral encephalopathy – sort of like what’s now known as long COVID. I had a series of viral-borne episodes.
Miller: Rebecca, what do you remember about that early diagnosis in those early years?
R. Skloot: It was terrifying. I was 16 when he was diagnosed. He went from marathon-running, really healthy, fit, active, full-time work, writing in his spare time, to completely incapacitated. He, really overnight, lost a lot of his memories; he went from being that really active person to not being able to get out of a recliner in the living room, basically. The house kind of turned into a hospice.
It was like it rewired his whole nervous system. It was like his fight or flight system, everything got reversed. So if he got stressed out, he would get very tired. And he was hypersensitive to sounds, and smells, and tastes. So nothing could happen in the house. And as a teenager, seeing that, it was terrifying to see that happen, and it really was. He went on a trip. He got on an airplane, got sick. He got to the hotel – it was in Washington DC. He woke up in the morning, couldn’t lift the blankets off of him, and then was never the same.
And he had to relearn how to walk, how to write, how to do everything. And he became a completely different person. It’s interesting talking about … his writing changed completely, too, and the way he sort of looked at the whole world. That was when he started writing essays instead of poems more, and the content changed. But yeah, everything in our life changed overnight. And he walked with a cane; he was just completely disabled for well over a decade.
Miller: What did you feel like was your job, or your responsibility, as a teenager and a daughter?
R. Skloot: Yeah, um – [Laughing]
F. Skloot: Go ahead, say it. Say it.
R. Skloot: I mean, we’ve always been very close. I think I was able to see the reality of his illness, even as a kid, more than he was in that moment. He was younger than me; you were what, 10 years younger than me now when this happened? And he was just, “I’m fine. I just have to go run. I have to just put on my clothes. I have to go run.” And I would come home from school and find him; like there was one time he actually crawled up the stairs to the upstairs part of the house and put on his running clothes. And I had to go, “Dad, no, you got to take your running clothes off and you got to go get back in the chair.” So I, overnight, also became that kid who was really sort of taking care of him and also just couldn’t have a regular kid life anymore in the house. I couldn’t have friends over.
But yeah, I felt very protective of him and also just terrified. This was 1988. AIDS was everywhere and nobody knew what it was. We’re like, is this some weird form of AIDS we haven’t seen yet? Is this some kind of cancer? Everything sounded terrifying and nobody took it seriously, right? This was the yuppie flu; this was chronic fatigue syndrome. And now, people who are being diagnosed with long COVID are still having … I mean, now at least there’s some acceptance of the fact that there is such a thing as a long viral syndrome, and there was not then. This was in his head.
I had just gotten my driver’s license. And one of my jobs became, drive dad up to OHSU four times a week for a clinical trial he enrolled in and to do various neurologic tests, because the insurance companies thought it was in his head. And they would do things like put him on a treadmill and make him try to walk until he collapsed to see what would happen, and made him crawl around the floor. He just went from being my very strong, active dad to being someone who was a shell of himself, and also that nobody believed this was really real. And I watched him fight that for a decade.
Obviously, this shaped me a lot. I was just graduating, getting ready to graduate from high school and I would do my homework in the setting up at OHSU while he’s involved in studies. And, shockingly, I went on to write about research participants who [had] bad things happen to them in research trials, like not a huge leap to wonder how that shaped me. So it was sort of everything.
Miller: In “A World of Light,” which came out in 2005, you wrote, “I can’t make things cohere, so reality often seems crazed, explosive, riven, and I must abandon the impulse for order. When perception is in tatters and time sundered, it’s hopeless to seek coherence. I’ve learned to savor the fragments themselves and to live in the moment.”
You wrote that a few decades ago now. Has that lesson lingered?
F. Skloot: I think it has. I think it has. There are still so many things that, for me, just don’t cohere, don’t make sense.
Miller: Could you give us an example of that, so to help us understand what you mean, and in a mundane way or a profound way, of things not cohering.
F. Skloot: I guess the first thing that comes to mind is a series of doctor visits, because I was developing an entirely new array of symptoms that were unfamiliar to me and didn’t bear any resemblance to what I had been going through since the mid-‘80s. And then I was told by the wonderful Delaram Safarpour that, “You have Parkinson’s.” And that just … it didn’t cohere. I’ve already had everything you’re supposed to be able to have and now I’m supposed to be getting better. And the fact that I can’t keep up with Becca or my wife, Beverly, when we walk on the trails in the woods, the fact that my voice no longer is loud enough to be heard, none of these things can possibly be another illness, this has to be something else.
I don’t know if that is enough to answer the question, but every time another one of these things happened, I kept looking for what did I do wrong? If it’s not viral, how can I have Parkinson’s? I’m too busy taking care of, recovering from the viral stuff. So I’ve never stopped trying to make my experiences cohere. And the only way I ended up being able to do that is to write about them.
Miller: What does writing help you do?
F. Skloot: It helps me clarify, to some extent, what’s happened to me. And it’s helped me feel less alone to see how many other people have horrible illnesses, and it’s given me purpose. After one of my books came out, one of my prose books about living with brain damage, I did a reading in Bellingham and sat down, ready to start my reading. I was introduced, and there was, as I remember, two people there at the time the thing began, because there was another reader on the campus at Western Washington and everybody was there.
Just as I was sort of ready to either cry or leave, the door opened and two busloads of people who belonged to a group of neurologically impaired people came in and sat down, and I read to them. And they were so grateful because – and I wasn’t quite sick enough to be unable to do the writing – no one had been able to talk from the first person point of view for them.
I don’t know how to say this, because it sounds so cliched – I felt gifted by this disease or by this condition that I had. That there was a point, there was a purpose, and in this case, I was supposed to be a spokesperson and say what they couldn’t say.
Miller: Rebecca, you’ve been itching to join in.
R. Skloot: One of the things that I think I feel like I’ve seen with you and your writing, and this making sense of things, and what you get out of it, is drawing, is making connections between things that feel otherwise so disparate and hard for you to wrap your mind around. Sometimes that’s drawing connections between things that happened to you when you were young and things that happen now. Sometimes it’s drawing connections with other people. But sometimes the writing would come in these flashes of like, there’s a story here, and a story there, and a story there, and how do these all connect? And then somehow getting them out of your brain onto the page, let you kind of then move it around and make sense of it as a narrative, which I feel like really helped make sense in some ways of your life, right?
And then, yeah, this had this amazing side effect of – we used to joke, he was just like the famous brain damage guy. And people would reach out to him, they would come to his events, they would email, they would send letters saying, like, “I give your book to everybody I know because it’s what’s happening inside me. I can never explain it to people.” That was something, you were writing to make sense of what was happening to you, and it had this side effect of being a voice for everybody else who had some experience like that.
Miller: You’ve both said that you really value the other as a reader of your work. I wanna go back and forth and hear what you most get from the other as a reader, or editor, or sounding board. Rebecca, could you go first?
R. Skloot: Yeah, when I was writing the first book in particular, but everything I’ve written, sometimes it was, I wrote a sentence, and I would call him, and I’d read it, like, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” or a paragraph. And in some ways, in that point of my writing, he’s my cheerleader, right? Everything I wrote was the best thing anyone’s ever written and I should keep going – which everyone should have that experience when they’re tortured writers, sitting there, trying to figure out if they’re doing something well.
So I had that, sort of the ultimate cheerleader, but also a really critical reader. He spent so much of his writing career writing book reviews and was really a very widely published book critic. So he is very good at reading and analyzing big picture of a book, also sentence by sentence.
So it was very helpful with that, with the added piece of being the guy who wrote that “Hazards” poem. So every word in my book was a potential pop fly from left field that might hit me in the head, any critic who might read my book someday and pull out, cherry pick a couple sentences and be like, “Look, she said this and this is terrible.” He found every one of those. So that was, in retrospect, not at all surprising thing, but he did that. [He] was like my cheerleader, my really critical reader, also … I mean, God, how many times did you read the manuscript of the book while I was writing? I mean, dozens?
F. Skloot: Six.
R. Skloot: More than six. I guess if you count the full finished book, but like every chapter multiple times. It was just my sort of constant sounding board. He was just really in it with me the whole time, and then celebrating it with me the whole time, too. And the moments when I was just like, “I’m never going to finish this thing and this is so hard.” And he’d [say], “Yes, this is, you are, and this is how, and this is why, and you’ve got this.” I don’t know that any writer has been quite as lucky to have that particular set of skills in a parent and a reader.
Miller: Floyd, what about you?
F. Skloot: I could not finish this one essay called “The Measure of Acceptance,” which was about my being challenged by the Social Security Administration Disability Department – “Are you really disabled?” Which culminated in a scene where, since they put me through every other test, the final test was I had to crawl across the room, as though that somehow would be indicative of whether or not I could do the job as a budget analyst.
I had written all the scenes, I had written some of the analysis, and I didn’t really know what to do to find my way through this. I was so angry and so hurt, and struggling to make sense of anything anyway. So I asked Becca if she could spare a little time, just give me a couple of suggestions. Structure is one of her many strong suits. She read it, called back, said, “This goes here, this goes here, start over here, do this, do this.” And it won a $10,000 prize and was included in the best American science writing of that particular year by Oliver Sacks. And it was because of Becca. I mean, I had the raw materials down, but she saw what to do.
Miller: Could you read us another poem from this collection? It is called “Approaching Winter.”
F. Skloot: We live in a condo right on the south waterfront, so anything that happens on the river has to go by my window. There are many poems in my collected works that are about sick artists, sick painters, sculptors, sick writers, sick baseball players. There is a connection even I could make on that one. This one is called “Approaching Winter,” so be on the lookout for Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway in this. I had really interesting visitors.
[Reading the poem, “Approaching Winter,” from his collection of poetry, “Dancing in the Cosmos: New & Selected Poems, 1973-2024”]
Miller: It is called “Approaching Winter.” I’m so moved by the middle passage, where you talk about, essentially, the simultaneity of time. Your long dead father is alive, your adult daughter is a baby. You’re very-much-alive wife is her own age with you. But it’s past, present, and it also feels like death, future death is hovering there too; it’s all happening at once, you’re experiencing all of it at once. Is it overwhelming?
F. Skloot: I think if I couldn’t write about it, it would be overwhelming. I think the writing saves me, nutty as it may sound. That statement, but also the work – that’s what I would find overwhelming, being silenced – which is what I thought was happening each time I got a new illness, that this is the one that’s gonna silence me.
Miller: And when you say that – the silencing – is part of what you’re explicitly saying, that not being able to express yourself … I mean, it’s that literal silence, not just in quotes, “death,” but a tremendous fear of not expressing yourself.
F. Skloot: Yeah, that’s the one thing I think I couldn’t come back from. And I’m terrified that whatever illness comes next is the one that’s going to push me over the line. I’ve had so much help, so many gifted physicians, many of whom are here. A wife who has stood by me for 32 years and helped me with every one of these challenges. And if I didn’t have that, I just know I’d be long-gone.
Miller: I’m glad you mentioned your wife. I made a partial accounting of some of the poems you have about her in this collection – so many lovely poems about watching her, about watching her watch a butterfly, play violin, knit a sweater, paint, do yoga, sleep, call to an owl.
F. Skloot: She’s very entertaining.
Miller: What’s the connection for you between writing about somebody and loving somebody?
F. Skloot: Hmm. Well, when I write about people close to me, people who I love, there is no disconnection. They may not see it this way, but to me, it’s an act of loving, to know that you’re seen. But that’s not why I do it. I. But I think that that might be there. Becca had perhaps a different response.
Miller: You were nodding. It didn’t seem like you have a different … Does it feel like love?
R. Skloot: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, yes, like age 1 through 15, it felt confusing. It did feel like love in some ways; it also just felt awkward and confusing. But yeah, I treasure everything that he’s written about me, and it feels more and more like love. The older I get, the more I engage with it. There’s the poetry. I appear in a lot of his nonfiction. He’s written fiction, where some of the central characters are very me doing things that he worried I might do. And it isn’t something that I … I mean, I treasure every bit of it now and I see it as a, not just an act of love, but also this kind of really trying to make sense of life, and parenting, and love, and everything else.
Yeah, I think it does feel like being seen, even if he was seeing a different version of me sometimes than I saw myself. And yeah, I think the version of me that I think … One of the very first essays I ever wrote was about him coming to my school as a young person and the experience of him reading a poem called “My Daughter Considers Her Body.” It’s about me as a young, naked, very tiny person on a beach, sort of looking at the wrinkles on my body and bruises, and it’s very sweet, but as fourth-grader –
Miller: It has the word “body” in it.
R. Skloot: It’s a story about me looking at my body, and I’m naked, and he read it in an auditorium full of my students and other students. And I got teased relentlessly for it, right? Like, not the greatest thing. But also, that poem – I love that poem. I have it framed on my wall in this beautiful calligraphy now. But I think the version of it in that first story that I wrote, I was like, “Dad, I … ” He was the first reader of that. And, I think that stuck with you as a bit of a, “Oh God, she was really hurt by that.”
But I’m in my mid-50s now. That was actually a tiny sliver of my life. And the majority of my life, I’ve had a very different relationship with his writing.
Miller: Floyd, you mentioned having a lot of poems about sick or dying artists – which is true – but you also have a ton of poems about artists at play. I made another partial list here: Samuel Beckett throwing out the first pitch at a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game.
F. Skloot: That should have happened.
Miller: [Laughter] All of these should have happened. Some of them actually did. Well, I don’t know if this one did: Walt Whitman stepping up to the plate at a pickup baseball game at the edge of a Long Island potato farm; George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers playing badminton on a beach; and Vladimir Nabokov as a soccer goalkeeper. But all of them at literal, physical play. What attracts you to this?
F. Skloot: Well, two things. One is, if you can guess which one of those that he just mentioned is actually something that happened, then you get a prize. But I think being able to run faster than anybody else, longer than anybody else, catch more passes, tackle bigger guys – for me, being able to be an athlete meant whatever happened to me, I’d come back, I’d be there next year, whatever. It was terribly important for me to see myself as an athlete, as a person who would heal and go on to face the next thing that happened, whatever it be. And come through that as well. I think that’s what–
Miller: As you mentioned earlier, or as is very clear now, that part of your life is gone, that you were a great athlete and your disability has meant that that’s no longer the case. But sport isn’t just about that. I mean, the freedom and physical joy that’s also a part of sport, do you still feel that now?
F. Skloot: I do. And with Parkinson’s and being 78, Beverly still takes me down at the – when we’re at our place on the coast in Manzanita – to the basketball court, and I have basketballs in both cars, and I have emergency air pumps, and I shoot hoops. It took almost a year for me to get a shot that I could finally get over the rim and into the basket. And now I can swish. Look out, Damian Lillard because I’m here, I’m only 78! I only have Parkinson’s! [Laughter]
Miller: Could you read us a portion of it, near the end of the book? As I mentioned at the beginning, a lot of these poems are from previous collections, some of them no longer in print, and some of them at the end of the book are in print for the first time. You have a long poem called “Parkinson’s,” and it’s very much related to what you’re talking about here: going for a walk. Could we have just the first part? It’s a multi-page poem, but if you don’t mind reading the first page?
F. Skloot: I was shocked. I was hoping I could get to read this poem, and when I realized it was eight pages long, I thought, well, maybe some of it. So thank you.
[Reading the poem, “Parkinson’s,” from his collection of poetry, “Dancing in the Cosmos: New & Selected Poems, 1973-2024”]
Miller: Rebecca, is that something like the way you remember it, on a walk, reaching out for him, and then being one of the people who said, “This is what’s happening to you?”
R. Skloot: Oh yeah. There had been something going on for quite a while and I think we were all sort of trying to figure it out. And it really started with his facial masking. We now know there are sort of a lot of different kinds of Parkinson’s. He doesn’t have the standard tremors, what you kind of imagine them to be. So there was this like, are you depressed? What’s going on? So there’d been a lot of paying attention to his face.
Yeah, we were on a hike in Forest Park, and I had been thinking about what was going on with him, and I’d been noticing he was shuffling a bit. As an aside, I’m working on a book about animal research and I was actually in the middle of researching and writing about the history of research with Parkinson’s – which is just a tremendous story in the history of animal research, in terms of both the progress made with science and the controversy about it. So I had been watching animals that had Parkinson’s as part of my research and also had been watching old videos of Parkinson’s patients, and I just saw it immediately, from seeing these animals in these videos and of the humans.
Miller: So you were at home, or doing research, and you saw these videos, and there was a part of you that said, “I see my father.”
R. Skloot: I was in the books. I was in that moment of the book, really deeply. I was actually just visiting town, then I was visiting at the Oregon Primate Center. So I was just thinking about this stuff a lot and also had been really concerned about what was going on with him.
We were walking in the park, and he shuffled, he stumbled, and I went, “Oh God.” And I just saw it immediately. I knew he had Parkinson’s. And I didn’t think, metaphorically, the reaching out in the park and saying Parkinson’s – that didn’t happen. But I saw it in the park, and then later said, “I think this is what’s going on.”
It took a little while for that to really land, but it was within a couple of days that then he and Beverly were both like, “Yeah, I think that’s probably real.” And then started the process of going to doctors.
Miller: Floyd, you had said earlier, when you were talking about the unfairness of this, of Parkinson’s after a viral brain infection, how it’s sort of impossible to make sense of it. So maybe you partly answered this question, but are there ways in which dealing with that disability for decades prepared you emotionally for this new disease?
F. Skloot: That’s a really powerful question, Dave. In one sense, I don’t think that anything could have prepared me for the words, “You have Parkinson’s.” Dr. Safarpour, when she diagnosed me, said, “You have Parkinson’s. I will walk this walk with you.” And you have. And I’ve been so fortunate in that, in all the support I’ve gotten. But it was beyond shocking. Like any good Jewish boy, “It’s enough already! What! I gotta …” [Laughter]
Miller: There’s a book my parents had: “Why Do Good Things Happen to Bad People.”
F. Skloot: Yeah. I did go down that path, and needed counseling. And still need counseling – please.
Miller: All of your practitioners are in the audience. [Laughing] There’s no civilians here.
F. Skloot: I think I’ve come to understand that if I ask myself the questions I’ve been taught now to ask myself, “OK, where’s the evidence that it happened to you because of … ?”
Miller: And that’s sort of the order-seeking part of you, that you were talking about before. What difference would that make in terms of the way you live your life, to have that kind of clarity or answer? I mean, do you think it would change your experience of life, to say 72% of this is because of the hits I got on a football field in 1957? And not to be flippant about it, but I’m wondering how you think about this point, because you brought it up a couple of times?
F. Skloot: Yeah, well, you listened well. Well, the beginning of it all, for me, was the abuse that I experienced at the hands of my mother. And when I was running out of the apartment building in Brooklyn and got run over by the Packard, that was to get away from her latest physical onslaught. And I got hit with – even more powerful than my mother – a Packard. Fortunately, we were right across the street from King’s County Hospital and I survived. But I think that started the way.
I am absolutely convinced that my brain, in some senses, is the weakest part of me. And viruses and other sorts of attacks – [they’ll] go for the easiest, most available to penetrate with the least effort spot in my body, which is my brain.
Miller: Rebecca, I was trying to figure out your face when your father said that. How do you think about that phrase, when your father says, “My brain is the weakest part of my body” – the brain that has written all this amazing prose and poetry, fiction, nonfiction, can talk so eloquently about love, and illness, and disability, and ability. It is that brain. How do you think about this as a daughter?
R. Skloot: Yeah, I can’t make sense of that. I understand the feeling of that, but of course his brain, it’s always been one of the strongest parts of his body. And the experience of him – when I was a teenager, and he got sick and he was like, “I have to learn how to read and write again.” People would meet him, talk to him and be like, “What is he talking about?” He’s got this encyclopedic knowledge – whether it’s baseball statistics, or poetry, or literature, or history, or anything. And he can engage in all these things. He noticed the difference, obviously, and I knew the areas where he had had deficits that he didn’t have before. But it’s like a Porsche – you got a few pounds of pressure out of the tires. Yeah, so when I hear those statements, I just want to be like, “No, that’s not actually what it is.”
The question of making sense of the illness and what would that change, what would that do? I think that’s part of being the writer that you are, and I am. I mean, it’s like a blessing and a curse. Because you’re always like, what’s the thing that’s going to make this story make sense? How does this story fit together? And if I can just figure out how to structure this thing, and where does this part of the narrative fit with this part of the narrative, then I can just be done with the story and move on. And I sort of feel like the trying-to-make-sense-of-it is that; like, if I can just find all the pieces of the story and make them fit together, then it will make sense, and I can stop trying to figure out why it happened.
We know why it happened in a sort of literal way, I think. There’s this history of brain trauma, but also there’s a lot of science now that shows that [with] long viral syndromes, there’s some people who they affect their brains and their neurologic tissues, and that there’s a direct connection with Parkinson’s. There’s now research that’s looking at connections between COVID and Parkinson’s. The earliest connection between long viral syndromes and Parkinson’s is from the 1918 flu. Like, this is just a thing. But still, there’s this question of – especially for the poet – but why? So I see both of those things at play in his writing and in the questions about trying to make it fit.
Miller: Rebecca and Floyd, thank you so much.
F. Skloot: Thank you, Dave.
R. Skloot: Thank you so much.
F. Skloot: And thank you for coming, everybody.
[Audience applause]
Miller: Floyd Skloot’s new book is called “Dancing in the Cosmos.” It has collected poems from 1973 to 2024. Thanks so much to our audience here at Powell’s and to Kevin Sampsell and Jeremy Garber, who helped set up this event.
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