When Shelburne Falls resident Maria Williams was writing her newest poetry collection, “White Doe,” she often found herself wondering “Who do you become when the trappings of your life fall away?” This question was influenced by her experiences with her father, who had recently been diagnosed with dementia.

Now, approximately eight years after she began writing it, “White Doe” has won Verse Daily’s first book award, along with a $1000 prize. By way of the award, “White Doe” will be published through Dogs Heart Press, who specialize in books of poetry and children’s books, by the end of this year.

Williams recalled her father’s role in her life before dementia. “He was a big personality in our family,” she said. Her father, Peter Williams, was a chemical engineer who built computers, space suits, and helped solve acid rain. As the disease progressed, he became quieter. In this way, Williams felt the man she had once known as her father was gone.

Underneath the boisterous personality and immense intelligence, there resided a man who was constantly generous. Even when dementia had erased most of his memories, Peter Williams still remembered to feed the birds and squirrels in his yard – every single day. “What a beautiful thing to remember when you can’t remember anything,” recounted Williams.

Williams began to document her feelings and experiences with her father’s diagnosis through her poems right around the time that he was diagnosed. Her poetry directly reflected what she was watching her father go through and how it impacted her family.

When Peter Williams lost his ability to produce coherent speech, Williams wrote fragmented poetry, scattering words across her pages like snowflakes. She began to look for meaning in silences, in the spaces where words are left out. However, she also paid attention to the few words that her father did say. Sometimes, they seemed nonsensical, but they stuck around in her mind.

“I began to see words as lots of single things floating in the air,” she claimed. In a 15-page poem titled “Snow,” she wrote single words falling in different patterns on the page, requiring the reader to put them back together. According to Williams, this poem functions as a metaphor, as the reader must make sense of nonsense, just as Williams did while listening to her father.

“White Doe” is named after a metaphor that came to Williams during snowy nights spent with her father. In the opening poem, a doe is lurking outside of the speaker’s home, waiting to take the man inside the home away with her. Williams described the doe as an “angel… coming to take my father home.”

Though the initial inspiration for “White Doe” was the diagnosis, the book is more so about “loss and longing (and) what it’s like to look at someone in this particular way,” according to Williams.

While her family was grappling with her father’s condition, Williams found out that dementia often breaks families apart. She could feel this happening in her own family, and therefore many of her poems focus on the ripple effects of her father’s diagnosis as well as her relationship to him during this time.

After things in Williams’ life had settled down enough, she began to send out the manuscript for “White Doe.” Despite being a semi-finalist for several prizes, she was rejected by around 40 publishers, according to her. Still, she persevered.

During the pandemic, Williams sent out “White Doe” again, and found a prospective publisher. She had even signed a contract when she suddenly received an email from Verse Daily, a daily poetry publication website and archive, informing her that she had received the award for the book prize. Along with $1000, this meant that the book would be published through a publisher associated with the award, Dogs Heart Press. Williams agreed, and “White Doe” will be officially published in late 2023.

About “White Doe,” Verse Daily editor and founder of Dogs Heart Press, JP Laughing Bear, wrote, “After reading this book, everything else felt like reading the newspaper”.

]]>