Now the Day is Over

by Joan Fiset

Blue Begonia Press, Yakima

What is it like to be a member of an alcoholic family in which your father’s addiction determines the emotional quality of your daily existence?

What is it like to be part of a household where liquor is God and ordinary activities such as tying your shoes and taking a bath are performed against the backdrop of drunken stupors, lost jobs, and broken promises? This zigzag kind of a life stays with you no matter how far in distance or time you roam.

How does your past contribute to your writing habits? How does the past affect the content and style of your work? Let us look at Joan Fiset’s memoir, Now the Day Is Over, to explore some of these questions.

Joan Fiset is a writer-in-residence at Richard Hugo House, the non-profit community center for literary arts in Seattle. She taught English for twenty years and is also a practicing therapist, working with Vietnam vets and specializing in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Fiset has been writing all her life. Perhaps writing has saved her life. At least it has provided her with an outlet and a means to recover from old wounds. Most important, writing has given her a way to achieve something like wholeness. The events surrounding her childhood have not kept her from sharing her life through her work.

Now the Day is Over is a series of prose poems and vignettes about life in an alcoholic household. Fiset selected the title of the book from a hymn that her father, a Bellevue minister, sang to her as she fell asleep at night. There is also a poem by the same title in the collection. Like many of the pieces, it is a memory entwining her current relationships with those of her youth.

Fiset’s work is a father/daughter story. Her mother and sister are visible but quietly so. It is clear that Fiset’s mother is a steady and organizing force in the family.

Fiset’s relationship with her father, Ben, seems to be the one that inspires her to become whomever she wishes to become.

In “Zero Hour,” Fiset’s father attempts suicide. Fifteen-year-old Fiset calls the police. Four men carry her father out on a stretcher. “He is in a straight jacket. His arms are crossed and you can’t see his hands.” Fiset and her sister turn up the radio, put their fingers in their ears “until it is quiet and lights from the ambulance blink red on the wall.”

Nevertheless, Fiset feels close to her father. She said she was a cherished child, a daddy’s girl. Her father nourished her, and so did her mother, especially when it came to words. Despite the drama of her childhood, she felt a sense of permission for whatever she wanted to do. Writer William Stafford said that permission and receptivity are two of the most important ingredients in becoming a writer. Despite all the brawling and drunkenness in her home, she was able to develop the courage writers need to follow through with their work. Many of us do not get this encouragement, so we must find other avenues of support—in each other and in works by poets such as Fiset.