Free After the Fire by J. A. Jance

Preface
    This book of poetry is also a book about addiction and the insidious way in which it destroys relationships. On the surface, one might think it is only about my first husband’s eventually fatal relationship with alcohol. But it is also, just as clearly, the story of my own addiction—the one that linked me to my husband and to my own unwavering determination to save him from himself, whether or not he wanted to be saved. It is a story of hurt and loss and betrayal. It is also a story of hope.
    It was 1968 when I first began writing these poems. I was a twenty-four-year-old newlywed who had written a children’s book that garnered a kind letter from an editor at a New York publishing house. The editor told me that if I was willing to make changes in the manuscript, she would consider publishing it. Thrilled, I showed the letter to my husband, expecting him to be as happy about it as I was. Instead, the letter provoked a firefight. My husband, who had been allowed into a university-level creative writing class that had been closed to me, took a dim view of the possibility that some of my work might be published.
    â€œThere’s only going to be one writer in our family,” he told me. “And I am it.”
    The way he said the words made it clear that if I wanted to preserve our marriage, I would put my writing ambitions away and leave them there. Which is what I did—for the next fourteen years.
    In a way neither of us understood, my husband’s “one writer” statement was correct. There would be only one published writer in our family, but he wasn’t it. Although he wrote constantly, scribbling columns across page after page of graph paper, nothing that came from his hand ever made it into actual print. He was content to imitate Faulkner and Hemingway primarily by drinking too much and writing too little, but at the time he laid down the law, I was still utterly dazzled by his self-proclaimed potential.
    The one thing that separates writers from other people is that they write. From 1968 to 1973, my husband and I were teachers in Sells, Arizona, on the Tohono O’odham reservation west of Tucson. He taught high school English and Spanish while I was a K–12 librarian. We lived in a little rented house on King’s Anvil Ranch, thirty miles east of Sells near the community of Three Points. The closest neighbor and/or telephone was literally miles away.
    On those long, solitary evenings, after my husband fell asleep—No, wait. What’s surprising to me is that even all these years later, my first instinct is still to minimize how bad things were back then, but that’s how denial works. What I should have said is: On those long, solitary evenings, after my husband passed out in front of the blaring television set, there was no one for me to talk to and very little to keep me occupied. Married but essentially alone, I turned to writing poetry. Initially I thought what I was doing was art, plain and simple. Poetry offered a way of looking at ordinary objects or events and turning them into something beautiful. That’s how the poems in this book started—as “art.”
    The poetry was written over the course of several years. The various verses were jotted down on stray pieces of lined yellow paper and tossed into the strongbox that also held our birth certificates and marriage certificate. Eventually it would hold our children’s birth certificates as well. At that point in my life I was incapable of seeing that I was using poetry as a prism through which to examine what was going on in my own life. The artifice of “art” allowed me to maintain emotional distance. I could look at what was happening without ever having to come to terms with what was going on in my marriage. It spared me the harsh reality and hard work of actually doing something to change our disaster-bound direction. Looking at my poetry with the benefit of hindsight,