Q&A with Cyra Sweet Dumitru

 

 

Cyra Sweet Dumitru is the author of the new memoir Words Make a Way Through Fire: Healing After My Brother's Suicide. Her other books include the poetry collection Elder Moon. She lives in San Antonio, Texas. 

 

Q: Why did you decide to write Words Make a Way Through Fire?

 

A: When I started writing in my mid-30s what now has become this book, my purpose was to recover memories of my eldest brother, David. Because of I bore traumatic witness to the means of his death, his suicide obscured his life for me.

 

Narrative writing was my way of asking questions: “Who was my brother in the fullness of his life? What do I remember? Is there a path I can find that led to his suicide? Was I somehow responsible for his death?”

 

Since my college years, I had been writing poems about the impact of this loss and trauma. These poems reflected my intense desire to heal my wounded, fractured self. I needed to learn to trust myself and the world again.

 

Writing poetry, along with keeping a journal, gave me a practice of holistic listening: hearing my heart, body, and soul speak. This practice eased my inner turmoil, clarified my thinking, connected me spiritually to a transcendent presence I call Voice.

 

The more I wrote poems, the more I wanted to integrate the poems with an ever larger story of remembrance, thus giving David another life and giving my life coherence. My spiritual life deepened as I wrote.

 

Meanwhile, I was raising two children, teaching writing at the college level for 20 years, becoming certified as a practitioner of poetic medicine, publishing books of my poems, and assisting my elders as they faced complicated health issues. My need to write the larger story persisted throughout these years, so I kept returning to it.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: For a long time, the working title was My Brother’s Cup, which echoes the title of a poem included early in the book. I had already identified the photograph that I wanted on the cover: one that my father took of David and me when were small children.

 

If a reader pays close attention to the photo, they will realize that I am leaning my head on my brother, feeling connected to him. David holds his head steady, even as he reaches for something beyond the photo’s edge. I find this moment to be profound and portentous of our lifelong bond.

 

Once the book was being designed, my publisher observed that a reader unfamiliar with my story would not know what the story was about from the working title. Though it took me a few days to accept this, I saw her point. Then it was a matter of modifying one of the publisher’s suggestions to arrive at Words Make a Way Through Fire.

 

For me, this title emphasizes my journey of transforming trauma, loss, and complicated grief into a flourishing life—all of this because of creative language. Writing can be a powerful healer, especially writing poetry and stories.

 

One by one, my poems, my chapters helped me transform traumatic energies, untangle my feelings, recreate a loving relationship with my brother, grow more intuitive and faithful, and become someone who finds great joy creating spaces where other people can discover writing as a healing practice.

 

Q: How would you describe your relationship with your brother?

 

A: Our relationship has continued to evolve, long past David’s death. When he was alive, he was my eldest brother who introduced me to parakeets and the ukelele. When we moved to a home with a big backyard, he got all four of us siblings outside playing frisbee pickle.

 

Then David became a teenager, searching and restless and not quite figuring out where he fit. He became increasingly remote and unreachable, while I was increasingly involved in school, volunteer work, and friends.

 

As the person who witnessed his act of suicide, I absorbed the sensory details of his suffering The violent nature of his dying preoccupied my attention for years. 

 

At first, I felt shock, horror, and fear. Sometimes I was angry at the harm he had done to himself, our parents, our two brothers, and to me—even though I understood that depression caused his suicide. I also held myself responsible for not being supportive and compassionate enough, for not taking his depression more to heart.

 

Once I worked through layers of horror, anger, and self-blame with help from a counselor, I could focus upon David’s life—who he was as my living brother. That was when our friendship really intensified.

 

I believe David’s spirit actively sought to help me heal. Periodically, he appeared in my dreams; we would return to our childhood beach in Greenwich, Connecticut, and have a wonderful time. I would awaken feeling joyful and reconnected. I feel very close to my brother David now, grateful for our friendship.

 

Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

 

A: I grew into a mature, empowered woman as I wrote this book. When I started writing elements of the larger story, not knowing it would become a book, I was a sophomore in college. Another wave came when I was newly married, and working as a poet and medical writer. Again, when I was a young mother. 

 

I returned to the story as I taught college writing and became certified as a practitioner of poetic medicine in mid-career. The final phase was completed during the pandemic, and my 20 years of college teaching came to an unexpected end. When my parents died in 2024, I added two final letters to David.

 

As I stayed listening through the years to what this book most deeply wanted to say, I have healed my traumatized, teenaged self. I trust myself and guidance from Voice. I have become an accomplished poet and passionate practitioner of poetic medicine.

 

I have learned how to help others nurture their creative energies and experience spiritual growth and healing. I have come to cherish creative process as one of the greatest gifts to human beings from our Creator. We are designed to transform our lives and our world in beautiful, loving ways.

 

As for my readers, I hope they will be inspired by the power of poetry to heal emotional and spiritual wounds. If the reader struggles to live with their own traumatic experience, I hope they will seek creative, cathartic expression as well as emotional support from a counselor and friends, family.

 

If the reader knows a family who has experienced the loss of a loved one through suicide, I hope that they will be moved to offer them sustained, nonjudgmental emotional support.

 

Finally, I hope that readers will be intrigued by Voice, and find themselves listening inwardly a bit differently for the luminous voice within themselves.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am constantly writing poetry, and often leading therapeutic writing circles.

 

From a publishing standpoint, I am preparing a manuscript called Drought in the Time of Dementia, compiled from poems I wrote during my parents’ final years. Both my mother and father, who were no longer married to one another and living in separate cities, lived to be 96. Both struggled with dementia.

 

Highly intelligent individuals, they were aware of how the disease eroded their cognition and independence. These were hard years for them and for us all who loved them. Once again, poetry writing helped me keep my heart open and stay grounded while witnessing their prolonged emotional suffering and erosion of their personalities.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: For anyone curious to know more about poetry as medicine or about my books of poems, I invite you to visit my website: www.cyrasweetdumitru.com. The expressive arts, such as poetry and music, dance and visual art are not luxuries. Rather they are necessary to our wholeness as individuals and as a society.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb