In a forthcoming memoir, a Kansas writer sees the land and herself anew

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The home of Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and Ken Lassman can be seen from a field to the southwest. Kansas. In her recent memoir, Mirriam-Goldberg writes of the effort to preserve their 130 acres near Lawrence. (Ken Lassman)
It's a rainy June evening and I'm on the phone with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg to talk about her new book. On my end in Emporia I can hear the steady drum of rain. Caryn is at the door of her home south of Lawrence, about 80 highway miles from me, and she's looking out at the land that is largely the setting for her true and personal tale of survival.
I ask her to describe what she sees.
'What I can see right now is this incredible lush, green upon green upon green,' she says. 'You know, I've been looking at the colors a lot in different ways. I've started drawing and painting. And there's probably half a dozen shades of green, some very close to each other. We have very large cedar trees just off, kind of on the edge of our yard. We have a, let's see, Ken, is that a dying elm tree?'
She asks her husband, Ken Lassman, who is nearby but not on the phone, to identify the tree. After a moment, Caryn reports.
'The tree that's dying is an ash,' she says.
I think of Yggdrasill, the sacred ash of Norse mythology.
Death in the midst of life. Life amid life.
Caryn is legally blind in her right eye. She sees the world blurred as if in watercolor, the result of an ocular melanoma, a rare and particularly aggressive form of cancer. Diagnosed in 2019, just in time for the pandemic, and after having survived breast cancer years before, the eye cancer might have killed her. But she received treatment and surgery and now counts herself among the lucky. She took notes through it all, and the result was a book not just about the ordeal her body and mind went through, but about Ken and their children and good friends and that 130 acres of land.
'The Magic Eye: A Story of Saving a Life and a Place in the Age of Anxiety' will be released in July by Mammoth Publications, a small California press. Caryn is a former poet laureate of Kansas who has published a couple of dozen books, both fiction and poetry, but 'Magic Eye' is unlike anything she's written before — memoir, yes, but also a kind of found poem in the dust bin of the universe.
Caryn is a survivor but don't call the book a survivor's story, because it's really about the interconnectedness of people and places. She is philosophical that death is not so much to be beaten but something we must all come to terms with, whether soon or late.
In a chapter titled 'I Don't Want to Die,' Caryn leads with the following:
What do you do with old fear, the kind that sets up a cot in the basement of your psyche, somewhere between boxes of essays you wrote in college and a giant pressure cooker you'll never use?
Just how lucky she is, at least statistically, Caryn doesn't dwell on because she avoids searching online for the cancer and the survival rates. But according to the Ocular Melanoma Foundation, in about half of cases the cancer spreads to other parts of the body, particularly the liver, and is often fatal. Ocular melanoma occurs in about one in 100,000 individuals and typically is diagnosed in persons between 55 and 60. Caryn was 59 when diagnosed. There is no cure, according to the foundation, but there are treatments.
Among the treatments Caryn underwent was ocular brachytherapy, in which radioactive gold seeds are surgically attached to the eye to reduce the tumor. The patient remains hospitalized in radioactive isolation during the treatment, which was successful.
When I ask if people have told her she was brave, she takes time to compose her reply.
'It's easy to appear brave when you are surround by loving friends, including my husband and family,' she said. 'Plus, when it comes to serious illness, people often equate bravery to doing the next step and the next because you want to live. When I think of bravery, I think of a close friend who lost his wife and still, missing her terribly while having to re-do almost everything in his life, gets out of bed in the morning and works in the garden.'
There is much more she could say about bravery, she said, in this time of anxiety. Relationships are inherently brave, she said, and when she feels the most terrified is when she's dealing with other people. It's terrifying to be deeply intimate, she said, to be honest, to put yourself out there, to be vulnerable.
And that's not even taking into account the times in which we live.
'There's so many emergencies right now,' she said. 'I think it's a peculiar balance point with what you open your eyes to take in, your relationship to it, and how do you keep from going out of your mind?'
Part of what has helped, she said, is working with therapists and acknowledging the spiritual part of the journey. She also said she was lucky to have married somebody who had a 'pure, clear relationship' with the land.
Mammoth, publisher of 'Magic Eye,' is owned by another former Kansas poet laureate, Denise Low. The house specializes in the work of indigenous and regional authors.
'My health is good,' she said. 'You know, I'm legally blind in that eye but it's not like blind blind, it's just a different way of seeing. It is certainly not precise out of my right eye. And I continue to do follow ups. Each time I get a clear report, I'm very relieved, and the further out I get, the better. But then again, none of us exactly know what's coming down the road.'
The specter of uncertainty is woven through the book, linking COVID and tornadoes and the vagaries of fate. Caryn grew up in Brooklyn and found herself staring often at whatever sliver of sky she could find as a child. She describes a household where her grandmothers cried out in Yiddish at the death of an infant brother and where she carried her bruises from an abusive father to high school.
'I turned to poetry as my saving grace,' she writes. 'But what my poetry was always about, is still about, is the earth and sky.'
She came to Kansas for college, originally studying journalism.
She met Ken in 1982 at the first Kansas Area Watershed Council, a 'deep ecology' group. She was 22, he was 27. A fling turned, three years later, into a marriage, where a quote from environmental writer Wendell Berry was part of the ceremony. In marrying Ken, a fifth-generation Kansan and now an occupational therapist and nature essayist, she also married the land. They vowed to protect all of his family's original acreage, which was tied up in a complicated inheritance worthy of Shakespeare.
It took 35 years to untangle, she said.
During our talk, I betray a bit of land envy. I say something — or I perhaps mumbled it — about my family never having land beyond the footprint of whatever house we lived in. I'm also thinking about how private land is a religion in Kansas and how the state ranks dead last in public land. But then I realize the kind of ownership Caryn writes about is not so much acquisition as a kind of transcendence.
How are we made? Caryn asks in the book. From stardust and dirt, s*** and bones, climate and climate change, toxins and medicines, the damage and the cure. Healing is part of us and the earth, made of ordinary and rare time, weather, and place. Replant what was once a native tallgrass prairie and let the rotation of the earth for 12,000 years do the rest, whether or not humans are here to witness it.
The land and the sky belong to everyone, she says.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.