You Can Be Family by Heart if Not by Blood

Follow your passions to be less alone

“You are not alone,” poet Annie Lighthart, shown in the photo, repeated throughout her keynote speech to a roomful of poets on Saturday night. “You are not alone. You are part of the company of writers.” “It takes just one reader to know you are not alone.”

Lighthart’s talk capped two days of communion with poets at the Oregon Poetry Association conference in Newport.

I was on the committee that put together our first in-person conference since before COVID. At the registration table, I greeted one poet after another, some I knew in person, some I only knew from meeting on Zoom.

It felt like a family reunion, but this was a family who understood each other, who knew the soul-trashing pain of rejection, the joy of publication in an obscure literary magazine or a slim chapbook, and the satisfaction of being able to put into a few power-packed words something so big you can’t even hold it in your heart.

We welcomed our new Oregon poet laureate Ellen Waterston, and we listened to football player turned poet Marcus Lattimore give one of the most powerful, poetic speeches I have ever heard. We read poems to each other, wrote, ate, and walked the beach together, and we were not alone. Even those few who were too shy to talk were surrounded by love and poetry.

Packed together in hotel meeting rooms, young and old, purple hair, gray hair, and no hair, faded jeans and fancy dresses, I swear it felt like church. We were not alone. Everywhere I looked was someone I knew, many of them well enough to hug.

I didn’t know who had partners and children and who lived alone like me. It did not matter. In that setting, we were all poets.

Back home, members of my family gathered for a birthday party I didn’t even know about until I saw pictures on Facebook. Most of them have never read any of my books. Some may not even know I’m a writer, but here with my poetry family, I was known and seen.

I have felt this before. At the California Coast Music Camp, which I attended for several years, we were all musicians, lugging around our guitars and fiddles and mandolins, our cases stuffed with sheet music. The world we left at home did not matter.

For fourteen years, I sang with a traveling choir called the Valley Chorale. Those people were my family, too. When you spend so much time together with the single purpose of producing beautiful music, when you change clothes together in kitchens and bathrooms, eat together, party together, and sleep on a bus together, you become a family.

My church is like that to a certain extent, too. We spend so much more time together and have so much more in common than my biological family.

When you get together with people who share a common passion, you are not alone.

You may only interact with people at meetings and such, or you can extend the friendship into your everyday life. It takes courage, but it can be done. Say, “Hey, would you like to have dinner after this?” or “I would love to get to know you better. Would you be interested in lunch or coffee?” or, “Can I call you sometime?” or “May I friend you on Facebook?” And then do it.

At the conference, I felt acquaintances turning into friends. We might not get together. We’re people who treasure our writing time. It’s up to us to make it happen.

Not having a traditional family does not mean we have to be alone, at least not all the time. Even if we can’t leave the house, we can connect with other people online. It takes courage. It takes stepping out of our comfort zone. It takes trading the “poor me, I have no one” attitude for “I can find new friends who like the things that I like.”

A word of strategy:

I volunteered to staff the registration table because 1) I would have a place to be and a task to do rather than awkwardly milling around, and 2) I made contact with lots of people right away. Friends knew I was there. People I’d never met put a face to my name, and strangers got a friendly first impression. It was exhausting but worth the effort.

Volunteer. Organizations for every interest need help. Jump in, and you’ll find yourself surrounded by people who care about the same things you do. Our biological families might think we’re weird, but our passion families understand.

Whatever it is you do, there are others doing it, whether it’s writing, quilting, gardening, antiquing, singing, loving dogs or cats, or watching “The Bachelor” (hello, Bachelor Nation). When it comes to living with other people or relating to a birth family, you may feel like one daffodil in a field of roses. Find your passion family and you will be surrounded by daffodils just like you.

There’s nobody at my house today. I don’t expect anyone. No one called while I was at the conference. I don’t mind. I don’t feel alone. We poets are all back home, working with our words, trying to express how damned good it felt to be together.

Have you found a similar family feeling among people who are not your actual family? If not, have you considered giving it a try? What holds you back? Please share in the comments.

P.S. A pet therapy group was meeting at the same hotel over the weekend. I saw many great dogs and got to pet a few. I’m ready to find my new canine companion. I’ll keep you updated on the search.

P.P.S. If you’d like to read some of my poetry, I have three chapbooks, Gravel Road Ahead, The Widow at the Piano: Poems by a Distracted Catholic, and Blue Chip Stamp Guitar, and a full-length collection, Dining al Fresco with My Dog all available wherever books are sold.

---

How did I end up alone? I didn’t have any kids. After my husband and I retired to the Oregon coast, far from family, he died of Alzheimer’s. You can read our story in my new memoir, No Way Out of This: Loving a Partner with Alzheimer’s, available now at your favorite bookseller. Visit https://www.suelick.com for information on all of my books.