Suzanne Kay Miller

Biography:

            Suzanne Kay Miller has published one book of poems, Storage Issues, as well as numerous poems and other written works in publications such as The Mennonite, Mennonite Life, Mikrokosmos, Women of the Plain: Kansas Poetry, and The Gallery. She has received awards for her poetry from The Associated Church Press Association, the Evangelical Press Association, and the Winfield (Kan.) Arts and Humanities Council.

            Miller was born in Indiana in 1956. She first studied at Hesston College, where she received an Associate’s Degree in Liberal Arts, but later changed her course and enrolled in Kansas City School of Watchmaking. She eventually transferred to Tabor College, Bethel College, and ultimately to Wichita State University where she received a B.A. in English and later a M.F.A. in Creative Writing.

            She was married to Kurt Lawrence in 1977 and has 4 children with him, whom she raised while earning her multiple degrees. She and Kurt divorced in 1996, and in 2007, she married Jim Buchhorn in her car in Las Vegas. Her book, Storage Issues, is a culmination of poems she has written from 1988 to 2008. She now teaches English at Friends University, in Wichita Kansas, and is working on her next book of poems, which deal largely with Miller’s departure from the Mennonite Church.

Bibliography:

Miller, Suzanne Kay. Storage Issues. Telford, PA: DreamSeeker, 2010. Print.

 “Breaking Bud,” The Mennonite, May, 1995.

“Come Close,” The Christian Leader, December 1993; Voice, January-February 1995.

“Dreamers,” Christian Living, January-February 1992.

“Four Sticks,” Festival Quarterly, Fall 1991.

“Girls Playing Church,” Mikrokosmos, Spring 2003.

“Grandma,” Lines, 1991; Voice, May 1994.

“How Can We Know?” The Gallery, 2007.

“How Much More,” The Menonite, May 2, 2000.

“In the City at Twenty,” the Mennonite, May 24, 1994.

“It was the Kind,” Porcupine, Winter 2006.

“Knowledge of Birds,” Women of the Plains: Kansas Poetry (anthology), 1995.

“Leaves on the River,” The Mennonite, October 4, 2005.

“Leaving Wichita Late,” Mikrokosmos, Spring 2003.

“Living under Authority,” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, October 1995.

“Old Story,” Window to Mission, October-November 1989.

“On Entering Grandma’s House,” Lines, 1991; Voice, May 1994.

“Prelude,” Mennonite Life, September 1992 (“Photographs”).

“Prodigal,” The Penwood Review, Spring 2007.

“Riddles from Mary,” Window to Mission, Winter 1996.

“Shingles, Socks, and Photographs,” The Mennonite, October 11, 1994.

“Silence,” Voice, April 1995.

“The Matchbox,” The Mennonite, December 22, 1992.

“The Old Land,” Festival Quarterly, Fall 1991.

“Thy Waves,” Women of the Plains: Kansas Poetry (anthology), 1995.

“To My Daughter Jailed in Chicago: 3/20/03,” The Mennonite, November 4, 2003.

“Try This,” Lines, 1991.

“Vision,” Mikrokosmos, Spring 2001.

“We Place These Stones,” Voice, May 1991.

“We Wait For Words,” Mennonite Life, September 1992.

“Wheat,” The Mennonite, June 14, 1988.

“Yggdrasill,” The Gallery, 2007.

Online Works:

“Aubade,” The Mennonite, April 20, 2004.

            < http://www.themennonite.org/pdf/magazine_pdf_74.pdf>.

“Leaves on the River,” The Mennonite, October 4, 2005.

            <http://www.themennonite.org/attachments/pdfs/0000/0041/Issue19-8.pdf>.

Miller, Suzanne K. "Living Under Authority." First Things Magazine Oct. 1995: n. pag.FirstThings.com. First Things Magazine. Web. 17 Oct. 2013. <http://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/09/003-living-under-authority-48>.

 “To My Daughter Jailed in Chicago: 3/20/03,” The Mennonite, November 4, 2003.

            < http://www.themennonite.org/pdf/magazine_pdf_63.pdf>.

Interview with Suzanne Miller:

Tuesday, October 15, 2013 7:56 PM

1. I know from your biography that you pursued higher education for quite a period of time while also beginning to raise a family and take care of kids. What motivated you to continue your education during this time of starting up a family?

I wanted children, and I wanted knowledge and credentials.

2. How many of your poems would you deem 'Mennonite Poems'? And how important is being Mennonite to the way you write?
Although I was raised by Mennonite parents and was a Mennonite church member when I wrote these poems, I no longer hold or identify with Mennonite beliefs. A friend who recently read the book said she could see signs of my transformation already in these poems. So, my former worldview, although disintegrating, was Mennonite, and worldviews are always important.

3. This project is for a Mennonite Literature class. How do you feel about your poetry being labeled as Mennonite poetry, and you being labeled a Mennonite poet? Do you think the title accurately represents you?
I do not think Mennonites feel very good about it, and I can see why. It is not an accurate title.

4. In your poem "Conservative Bodies," you write about your "training in defenselessness." Is this poem a representation of a long-standing rebellion you have felt against the ideas of non-violence in the church?

I respect all grand traditions involving nonviolent solutions to conflict. But I have always felt that silence as a solution to abuse is a continuation of abuse.

5. In the same poem, you write about your mother being a woman who apparently wore short dresses, which is clearly contrary to Mennonite custom. Was your mother a non-Mennonite, or what reason was there for people to judge the way your family dressed?

My mother and her mother-in-law were different kinds of Mennonites: GC and OM. This was before your time.

6. You organized your book of poems alphabetically instead of by theme, as in most other poetry books. Was this a play on the theme of Storage Issues, or an afterthought, or a personal preference?
I like to alphabetize. I wanted to throw readers off their paradigms.

7. What are you working on now? Current projects? Will you stick with themes you have developed already or venture into new territory?

I have a manuscript of poems overtly related to leaving the church. And I have a short story in verse, a fiction based on the true story of my great aunt’s suspicious death. These have not found a publisher. I have not written anything else new, but maybe that’s because of my bout with cancer this year. If I write again, I hope for new ideas. I am taking art classes and enjoying that very much.

8. Anything you would like to say about what formed you as a writer or why you chose this career path?

I like the care with which words shape or hold images, sounds, and ideas in thoughts and on pages.

All other known reviews or interviews:

Various. "June/July Letters." First Things Magazine, June-July 1996: n. FirstThings.com. First Things Magazine. Web. 17 Oct. 2013. <http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/10/junejuly-letters-5>.

Storage Issues Essay

            Suzanne Miller writes in a variety of fashions throughout her short book entitled Storage Issues, utilizing various forms such as sonnets and quasi-pantoums as well as free verse. In the free verse poem, “Storage Issues,” the book’s namesake, Miller begins with a quote from Viktor E. Frankl: “For, in the past, nothing is irrecoverably lost, but everything is irrevocably stored.” This quote sets the tone for the poem, a tone of over-the-top, pack-rat-style storage.

            In the first line, Miller sets up a symbol for the “storage issues” she presumably has—a cemetery—and immediately relates it to “her ancestors’ upstairs bedrooms.” She lists all the numerous relatives buried there in “orderly rows.” In the second stanza, line two, Miller poses the question, “For whom and what are these kept?” Through this set-up, Miller raises the question of how everything is stored so neatly for the future, her relatives examples of stored things no longer needed. In line four, Miller mentions the “others of the congregation,” in an apathy that strangely contrasts the usual heavy focus on ancestry among those who are culturally Mennonite.

            Throughout the poem until the very end, Miller consistently refers to the human idea of storage, order and control. In the second stanza, Miller describes the woman in the poem selling her relatives’ possessions at an auction. Her vivid imagery here, “boxes of gloves missing fingers” and “unpatched overalls,” brings the reader into the lives of those who have passed. Through this, Miller conveys an attitude of triviality to storage, asking the question, “For whom and what are these kept?” and later answering that everything is “sold or scattered into deeper storage.” Why store things when no one needs them and they end up lost anyway? In the third stanza she references not knowing where “that book that should have saved her soul” is. The questions of this stanza introduce the reader to the idea of needing the past but not having access to it, to answer questions from the past or relive an important moment. She ends her poem with a vivid image of the moon—of nature—followed by the final question: “She wonders what she may need and has not kept.” The reference to nature in the last stanza is significant as the only reference to nature in the entire poem. This final juxtaposition shows a glimpse of the other point of view, that of wild and free nature, with no attempts at organization or control. She questions whether selling all the possessions was positive in the end. Will she need something she’s lost?

            Overall, Miller asks the reader to think about the plethora of items and people we store throughout our lives and questions the necessity of its organization and structure. She compares this human element to nature, free from such structure and labels, but in the end questions whether she has stored enough—if she may need some now-lost object or memory to complete her as a person. Using this contrast as inspiration, I wrote an imitation in the perspective of how nature’s beauty can never be preserved well enough without such storage systems.

Storage Issues

-A Suzanne Miller Imitation-

The forest he jogs at dawn surrenders damp chill

like his mom’s carpeted bathroom after a cold shower.

The young squirrel, the aged deer, The murder victim,

the lonely turtle, the burnt oak and birch saplings,

Yellow ducklings who no longer follow their off-white mother,

Lie scattered unevenly under the rotting earth. To whom do these

Matter? He collects and cleans what he can:

Freckled flowers on looming brown branches, carbon-color sleek stones,

Unkempt vines tangled together, glistening bones, spread handfuls of tender water,

Two-note melodies, double rainbows, citadels of seed grain, tired goose feathers,

Mud-spun twig nests: nothing compliant to a form or a memory, misplaced

In lack of proper storage. Where is that wild onion now that should rekindle

Her soul? Where is that evergreen meadow that should shield her?

Under the sun’s arduous downpour, he wonders

What he may need but cannot hope to keep.

~Original in Storage Issues, page 82.