Imagination as Survival: Stephanie Clare Smith’s Undrowned Memoir
In a candid conversation, the author of Everywhere the Undrowned reveals how she transformed childhood abandonment into a powerful memoir.
The term “survivor” needs an overhaul. Especially when it comes to sexual trauma.
It should always be an affirmation: you survived. But often it seems to be taken retrospectively, with the door open to questions. The imagined why did you let it happen? The spoken why didn’t you scream? fight? run? speak out sooner? And the misguided expectation or advice, let it go.
For survivors, myself included, the past is not something to be abandoned. The self who experienced trauma is here, now, walking beside us, waiting for our care. What we need to let go of is the rule that permeates our culture, telling us we should forget, should abandon the self who suffers.
North Carolina-based poet and memoirist Stephanie Clare Smith reclaims her past in her exquisitely lyrical new memoir Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination. In it, she describes her summer-long abandonment at age fourteen in 1973 New Orleans, her abduction and rape, and through its pages she brings that child forward into the light of her considerable awareness. Her memoir is the first published by Great Circle Books, a new series from The University of North Carolina Press dedicated to literary nonfiction.
“From the first moment we opened Everywhere the Undrowned, it wouldn’t let us go,” says UNC Press editor Catherine Hodorowicz, who worked most closely with the book. “Steph calls this book a love story, and it was impossible not to fall in love with her writing. There was no question this would be the first book in Great Circle, and we’re especially proud to publish a first book by an older writer.”
Reading another’s trauma can be a minefield for me and other survivors. You hope you’re in good hands, sensitive hands, hands like Smith’s. Her memoir uncovers the traumas, which were many, of her summer-long abandonment. Watching her mother leave for many weeks of off-the-grid camping with her boyfriend. Nights spent in fear, completely alone, with an envelope of cash and no one to turn to. Her abduction off the street by a stranger, his knife, what he did in his truck, how her death loomed close. How the one person she tried to turn to, her summer school teacher, told her, men can’t understand rape, and then walked away. Then later that summer, her sexual abuse by a streetcar driver who had become her one friend. And the acute effects of these ordeals on her fourteen-year-old self and beyond—the long, tangled tentacles reaching through five decades.
At the same time, Smith’s memoir reveals expansive strengths of imagination as this utterly alone young girl attempts to care for herself and even, in absentia, for her mother. Throughout the narrative, Smith’s sensitivity and lyricism became my trusted guides, holding my hand as I read. All of my long-lingering feelings in the wake of immersion in this story—heartache, kinship, wonder at the strength through imagination, hope for all survivors—are imbued with gratitude. What galaxies of courage and compassion are traveled in this work.
Running through Undrowned’s paragraphs—through the mind of this fourteen-year-old girl—are many seemingly disparate thoughts: algebra, Jane Eyre, birds, kung fu, the moon landing, tiny objects, trees. These and other thought-friends offer this young girl sanctuary as she navigates her physical days and nights, her imagination her only company. If you wonder why the book’s subtitle contains the word imagination, this is why. It was her ally. It was the safe place she found nowhere else.
My mother didn’t know that I wrote my name and my favorite number eight in black Magic Marker on the bottom of her shoes…. I may not have had a number to reach her, but I was sure that she could feel me.
—from Everywhere the Undrowned
Everywhere the Undrowned has drawn glowing reviews from the likes of Lee Smith, Robin Hemley, Abigail DeWitt, Craig Nova. British writer Emma Brocke likened it to “Sylvia Plath at her sharpest and most bleakly funny.” It received a starred Kirkus review and accolades in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Psychology Today, and the Wilmington Star-News.
Smith’s poetry is revelatory in its own right, and it’s like a trail of stepping stones leading to the memoir. All of her writing is testament that our pasts walk beside us, that we can listen, feel, and offer care now, as we make ourselves whole. Here is an excerpt from her poem “Small,” originally published in 2023 by the journal iamb.
Sleep is my friend, I tell myself.
I don’t believe myself. I need more friends.
What I have is Joni Mitchell songs stuck
in my head. I really don’t know love at all.
I make shapes with my body
under the covers as though I am falling
from a plane in the sky—a fetus,
a windmill, a steak knife. Which shape
survives a long-distance drop?
I began having conversations with Smith after reading her memoir. She said it had its beginning as a lot of poems, which keenly interested me because I’m doing the same thing as a comparatively indirect way of touching trauma. Smith described how she eventually “spread out” the poems, relieving them of line breaks, and realized she might have something else, something that, all together, would flow. And flow it does—like a life-river, with rapids and eddies and plenty of rocks.
Smith’s life has flowed from her New Orleans childhood with the single mother she adored, through the abandonment and trauma of that fourteenth summer, through decades of not revealing any of it—at first largely to protect her mother and preserve her own constructed image of her; then because the times she tried to talk about with someone left her feeling worse. She moved away and progressed through advanced education, becoming a social worker trained in mediation, which led to her serving for thirteen years as a mediator in the Child Custody and Visitation Mediation Program in Wake County, North Carolina, then becoming manager of the statewide program in 2023. Along the way, she was her mother’s caregiver during the final year of vascular dementia—a very physical bringing of the past forward.
Growing up, as touched on in her memoir, Smith was already in some ways her mother’s caregiver as a willing, dependable helper, from watching over siblings to serving as the whole family’s morning alarm clock—and not calling the police after her abduction and violation and threat to her life, to protect her mother from being labeled an abandoner; to protect herself from losing her mother.
She was fascinated by her beautiful, vivacious mother whom everyone loved, who sang and danced with her and made her laugh. And forgot to pick her up, even from some nighttime activities. And left her over the long summer, alone. Smith’s reconciliation of the fantastic mother she needed, believed in, and loved with the neglectful mother who abandoned her began only after her mother’s death. This reconciliation work led Smith to write her self-revealing poetry and then this intimate memoir.
I first met Smith at the Table Rock Writers’ conference in western North Carolina, where I heard her read some of her poetry. Then, after publication of her memoir, I found in it an ally—a kindred spirit—in my own survivor’s journey. I became so interested in Smith’s views, her writing, and her courage and generosity in offering her story to others, I hardly knew where to start in our conversations. But Smith was disarming and down to earth; she made it easy.
Tell me if you’re going to call the cops …
I wouldn’t I wouldn’t I wouldn’t. Why would I? The way the policemen would want to reach my unreachable mother. The way we miss our only worlds if they’re taken away. The way Alan Shepard cried when he stood on the moon and looked back at Earth.
—from Everywhere the Undrowned
When Chuck Reece here at Salvation South offered me the opportunity to write this profile and interview her, Smith and I had met and talked several times, in person and not, and I had sat with what she had said, and I had read more of her poetry, and I was clearer about my questions. She and I agreed to first sit down for a wide-ranging interview and then, given the sensitive nature of her writings, make use of email to assure (me, mostly) that I’m not taking any liberties of interpretation.
Laurel Ferejohn: Your young self, as depicted in your memoir, has an amazing imagination and uses it in so many ways, to feel safe, to feel companioned, to acknowledge beings and objects—I saw them as “thought-friends”—and to grow your connections to them. Do you have a sense of how your imagination developed as it did, and how it may have supported your journey through sharing your story in memoir?
Stephanie Clare Smith: I think part of the answer is that I came into this life with a good dose of imagination. My mother was a dancer, and I think I inherited her sense of creativity. The rest of the answer lies in your description of my imagination and “thought-friends” as methods I used to help me feel safe, to feel connected. Precisely! The circumstances were challenging, and, without many allies, my sense of imagination grew into those empty spaces.
My birth created a mental health crisis for my father. My mother said that despite the chaos surrounding my birth and my first year, I was the most contented baby she or the pediatrician had ever seen. She said I slept all the time. She had to wake me to feed me. At first she thought something might be terribly wrong, but the doctor told her I just liked to sleep. I think all this “contentment” was a coping mechanism. I simply disappeared into my dream life from the beginning and found comfort there.
LF: In one of our conversations you described “spreading out” your poetry, and how that became your memoir. To me, that was a revelation and a gift! And you have navigated that flow so beautifully, in a kind of poetry-prose continuum. Can you talk about how you make use of poetry and prose, and their overlap, to offer your experience of life to your readers?
“We’re all channeling each other. Even though writing can feel like such a solitary art, and life can feel so solitary, our roots are connected underground like the trees that feed each other across big distances.”
SCS: Bear with me while I riff on this theme of the prose-poetry continuum. I really like that phrase! I’ve been watching educational videos about the space-time continuum as research for another writing project. They explain the difference between the four dimensions. This made me think about poetry and prose as being different realms—except they exist side by side as opposed to one being better or richer than the other. I was deep in the poetry realm before this book took any real shape. In that world, sounds and the meanings of each word are more amplified. Call-backs and patterns rise to the surface before thirty seconds have passed. Line breaks are granted freedom and power, like jokers in a deck of cards.
I’m not as fluent with the laws of existence in the prose realm, but my poems seemed to want the time and space that comes with that landscape. And I had nothing to lose, since most of the time I was writing, I had no thought that anyone would ever see the story. I could open what was jam-packed in my tight poetry packages and let it breathe. And I allowed my words to expand and the storytelling to slow down, to explore more of the sensations and details of the memories I carry.
LF: You’ve mentioned how as a kid you walked into presentation spaces at Tulane University to attend talks by some literary luminaries, and in some cases you met them and even gave them your poetry. And you’ve talked about drawing inspiration from the work of two writers in particular: Maggie Nelson’s lyrical memoir Bluets and Marie Howe’s poetry collection What the Living Do, both of which I’ve now read, too. Can you talk about how those writers have spoken to you? And what you’d like to say to them?
SCS: I'd like to say thank you! In my book I ask, after reading Bluets—are we kin? Turns out we are. We’re all channeling each other. Even though writing can feel like such a solitary art, and life can feel so solitary, our roots are connected underground like the trees that feed each other across big distances. Different books and poems and people have fed me at different times and across time periods. People I will never know, but am still better for knowing their words.
LF: In Everywhere, you tell of a particular time when as a mediator you worked with a young girl in whom you saw echoes of yourself and your ordeals at a similar age. Given these kinds of echoes, what was it like working in your field while writing your memoir?
SCS: Before I began to understand my story more deeply, I think I was unconsciously trying to heal by providing others with what I wished I'd been given. This is not really unusual.
But after my mother died and after I began deconstructing the view I'd created of her, it was much harder. A layer of skin had been peeled off, and when my colleagues described the complications of neglect or what a child needs to feel safe or the long-term effects of child sexual assault, it was intensely painful. I felt I was on the wrong side of the table. I wished I could go back in time and have a team of people searching for ways to help me the way I was on a team trying to help a family.
At the same time, it's profoundly poignant to interact with families and offer support. Poignant to be involved in the giving. Painful to know how hard I tried to get help as a kid and was refused.
LF: How has your memoir been received by those in your field and in other parts of your life—family, friends—and by people you’ve never met? You’ve mentioned some unexpected responses. What has that been like? In what ways have you been moved to respond—or not?
SCS: I had no idea the book would be so well received, so I had no idea people from my past would find me through it. And I had no idea journals would ask me for poems or essays. It's all been surreal. I’m still getting comfortable with what feels to me like exposing and betraying my mother in public. I love my mother. I needed a certain view of her in order to function. And my mother's many wonderful qualities allowed my view to stick. Then, after she died, that construction wobbled. There was a lot of pain in deconstructing that view—which I did with each word I wrote. I could only do the work with help, with the support of a wonderful therapist. If you're going to descend into a canyon, you need someone minding the ropes.
Nowadays, I try to explain to people how complicated people are, how complicated neglect is and love is. This helps me feel less like I’m betraying my mother and more like I’m describing the canyon. I also explain to people how complicated grooming is, how complicated my relationship with the streetcar driver was.
Some people tell me how “seen” they feel by the book—not just survivors, but other readers, too, who understand the terrain of childhood, of loneliness. I have other readers tell me how much they see me. This is also a very new experience.
I was so focused on whether the writing was good and whether readers would understand the lyricism. And because the challenges I survived are so familiar to me, and because I've spent most of my life completely normalizing my experiences, it was very surprising to me to hear reviewers and readers describe the events of my memoir as something unusually horrible.
“The trauma mentioned in reviews is the set of events around which the story unfolds, but it’s not the main character: imagination is. My hope is for the power of imagination and connection and love to carry the reader forward.”
LF: What would you like to say to your readers? To survivors who may find support in your willingness to share your story? To those who work with troubled kids?
SCS: Throughout the book, I remind readers that the story is a love story. The trauma mentioned in reviews is the set of events around which the story unfolds, but it’s not the main character: imagination is. My hope is for the power of imagination and connection and love to carry the reader forward. This is particularly important for survivors to know, who might be concerned about reading this book.
People who knew me in the past, before I came forward with this story, are sometimes regretful that they didn’t piece it together and offer me more support. But the power of the kindnesses they showed me—even without knowing my story—can’t be underestimated. They were present for what I was able to show at the time.
Survivors often carry shame, self-doubt, and more. Part of the love story I write about includes bringing pain forward to a place where one can tend to it better. Even if it takes a lifetime.
We are in this together, whether we know it or not. The power of kindness—it matters.
About the author
Laurel Ferejohn is an independent editor of fiction and memoir and former senior managing editor for journals at Duke University Press. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in theThomas Wolfe Reviewas winner of the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize,Southeast Review,Quiddity,Flash Fiction, and others. She is currently seeking a publisher for her first novel.
Everywhere the Undrowned shows that trauma can be dealt with poetically, gracefully, and even humorously. Having spent the past several years working on poems about abduction and the aftermath, “it is in the telling” is a phrase that strikes me. You are damned even if you survive – not to drown meant a woman was a witch. The mixed messages of such a determination, the archaic result of then being burned alive, leaves the modern survivor with a lifetime of burning and coping. However, this book is not just the practice of a coping skill. It is art at its elevated best.