Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Elisabeth Eliassen (b. 1961) has lived and worked in the greater San Francisco Bay Area all her life. She is a musician who has performed regularly as a soloist, chamber and church singer since 1982. Ms. Eliassen is a wife and mother to a girl/boy set of twins. Additionally, she is a certified Reiki Master Practitioner, and is currently involved with a fledgling project of the United Nations Association of San Francisco called Artists for Global Peace. A diarist for more than a quarter century, inspired continually by the music of life, as well as by philosophical, environmental and spiritual concerns, it was only recently that Ms. Eliassen decided to publish a collection of poems extracted from her diaries. This collection was published this year, and is entitled Songs of a Soul Journey.

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Pageonelit.com: Where did you grow up and was reading and writing a part of your life? Who were your earliest influences and why?

Elisabeth T. Eliassen: I was born and raised, indeed have lived all my life, in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Once I learned to read, reading was always a very important part of my life, and continues to be so. I was a slow learner, however; I can still remember looking at the squiggles on the blackboard without comprehension. My second grade teacher told my mother I needed help, and so my mother spent at least an hour with me everyday just on reading skills. The reward was that I got completely and irrevocably hooked on the vicarious pleasures of reading. Music, literature and art always had a strong presence in our home and in our family activities outside the home. My parents always conversed with their children in an adult way, cared about sharing ideas and exploring new things with us. Aside from the influence of my parents, I would say that other early influences came from exposure, via television, to the teachings of three individuals: Kenneth Clark, Jacob Bronowski, and James Burke. The serial programs presented by each of these men ("Civilisation", "The Ascent of Man" and "Connections", respectively) had a profound influence on the way I approached my continuing education. Unfortunately, building bridges between disciplines is not a strength of American education. I mean, how many average American high school students would know that Galileo and Shakespeare lived in the same generation, let alone were born in the same year?

 

Pageonelit.com: Why do you write?

Elisabeth T. Eliassen: Writing is a compulsion, I think, but a healthy one. I write to gather my thoughts and fine tune them. When I write poetry, I take a notion that strikes a chord in me and try to explore its shape, inside me or outside me, whether or not the chord finds a resolution.

 

Pageonelit.com: Tell us about SONGS OF A JOURNEY -- This is a personal diary of poetic verse. How did this book come about and why did you publish it?

Elisabeth T. Eliassen: When I was a child, I wanted to keep a diary, but I was not disciplined enough to write in it everyday. And when I looked back at some of the entries, they seemed so mundane, it hardly seemed worthwhile. Well, after all, I was only 9 or 10 years old. Then I started collecting quotes of people from history. Somewhere along the line, it occurred to me that my own diary entries might not be so mundane if I were not merely reporting. So I began to take notions, ideas or happenings and developed them into verses. I never wrote with a thought to publishing, but people with whom I had shared pieces over the years would sometimes drop a hint that they would like to see more. At some point, I took a long enough look back at my journals to realize that it was a meaningful body of work. This collection is an odd sort of record, and a celebration, of the many journeys that I have taken in my life that have made me who I am now.

 

Pageonelit.com: Do you prefer (writing and reading) poetry over fictional literature? Why or why not?

Elisabeth T. Eliassen: My reading takes me across many disciplines: philosophy, science, comparative religion, music and other performing arts, epistemology, history, fiction in novel and play form, poetry, child development, holistic healing. Reading leads to more reading, and authors point readers to specific works outside their own. I have been led to more interesting literature merely by reading the mystery stories of Dorothy L. Sayers, which is my way of confessing a fondness for detective fiction. Reading is an exploration of the web of human knowledge. And yes, I also love to read poetry, in English and other languages (I love dual language collections; translation is in and of itself an art form). My love of poetry comes from a combined love of music and words, and the recognition that language is primarily a music. When I am particularly busy, I tend to read more poetry, as its small doses are heavily concentrated. Although I also write in the essay form, I prefer to write poetry for the same reason as I read it; it condenses much thought into a little space.

 

Pageonelit.com: What makes good poetry? What is a poet?

Elisabeth T. Eliassen: Poetry is a very personal expression of one's innermost thoughts and feelings. The use of language in poetry has a voice that is unique to each poet. Poetic thought travels in a landscape between waking and dreaming: vivid, if sometimes archaic; archetypal , yet grounded in actual experience. Poetry is the vehicle by which the inexpressible can be distilled into metaphor that we can grasp in the moment as universal truth. The poet is one who is willing to traverse the uncharted landscape of the inexpressible and return with hopefully enough wits remaining (and wit) to run the experience through the still. Poetry is not essentially about style, nor is it about being sensational for the sake of sensation. Poetry is about the experience and authentic expression of truth.

 

Pageonelit.com: Reading from the poem EPIPHANEIA from SONGS OF A SOUL JOURNEY -- "Brought to this and every shore, On waves of gladness evermore. Light may never burn so bright, As the lamp which lit that sight." Where were you when you wrote that and please explain what you are describing.

Elisabeth T. Eliassen: EPIPHANEIA is one of many gift poems I have written, and is a gift poem for Christmas. I was trying to imagine what it was, in particular, that made the birth of a baby named Jesus such an earth shattering event in the lives of those who came upon the scene. Finally, what emerged from the story was an atmosphere. When earth shattering events occur, what lives with us, as much as the fact of the happening, is the atmosphere left in the wake of the happening, or our remembrance of the atmosphere during the happening. Light and hope seem to be the predominant atmosphere surrounding the birth of any child, and so that is the atmosphere that took shape in this poem.

 

Pageonelit.com: What has been your feedback from readers? What do they say to you about their interpretations of your book?

Elisabeth T. Eliassen: Feedback from readers has been wonderfully gratifying. What I hear most often is that one or another particular poem was moving to the reader because the feeling the poem evoked was one that the reader had experienced in a real situation.

 

Pageonelit.com: Who are your favorite writers and why?

Elisabeth T. Eliassen: I have so many favorite writers that it would be ridiculous of me to list them all. However, I will name a few names. I already alluded to the influence of Dorothy L. Sayers, whose scholarly approach to the mystery genre has really been unequalled, on my reading list. The writings of Ken Wilber have inspired in me the hope that Science, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Commerce can meet somewhere in a cooperative way to create a workable model for living. T. S. Eliot's farewell to poetry in the FOUR QUARTETS had a profound and lasting effect on me. The short fiction of Jorge Luis Borges explores life in such unexpected ways.

 

Pageonelit.com: What's next?

Elisabeth T. Eliassen: Well, all I can say is this: a soul journey continues. (Who knows, maybe that will be the title of the next collection.) I continue to write. The constraints of parenthood can sometimes keep this from being a specific daily event, but my diary continues to grow by the addition of new poems, comments on daily happenings, even short essays or stories. I try to handle it, as Anne Lamott has said, "bird by bird." But there is a manuscript in the works, working from the notion that if, by the end of SONGS OF A SOUL JOURNEY I had arrived at some specific point, where would I go from there, and what would I encounter, and how would what I encounter change me? So, really, the question "what's next?" is the the answer to your question...

 

Pageonelit.com: What was the last book you read?

Elisabeth T. Eliassen: I have a huge stack of books on the dresser by my bed (and under the bed and under the dresser...); these constitute my current reading. I usually have several books going at the same time. The books I finished reading most recently were these: BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS by Dai Sijie; COLLECTED FICTIONS and ATLAS by Jorge Luis Borges; two books on Reiki. These are what I am in the process of reading now: ELIZABETH I: COLLECTED WORKS; THE VISIONARY EYE by Jacob Bronowski; THE BIJAK of Kabir; Poetry by Wang Wei.

 

Pageonelit.com: Do you have any hobbies? What are they? How do they enhance your writing.

Elisabeth T. Eliassen: As the mother of two toddlers (twins), it is nearly impossible to have any hobbies, apart from the reading I am able to squeeze in before I retire for the evening, or otherwise collapse at the end of the day. At the risk of sounding trite, I think that it is by living as fully as possible and by reflecting on the experiences of life through living that the fertile ground is tilled, from which anyone's thoughts can take root, grow and flower. I am a musician. I practice a healing art called Reiki. I enjoy good books, good food, good conversation, learning and playing with my children, sharing quiet moments and laughter with my husband. Somewhere along the line, all the things I am, and what I love, as well as all the things I am not, and what I don't appreciate, come out in my writing.