A few weeks ago, Dean Kahn from the Bellingham Harald wrote an article on the Victims of Ted Bundy: Washington State and Oregon. Dean Kahn is a good writer and a thoughtful individual. He interviewed me thoroughly for the article. One of the questions he asked, gave me a great deal to think about. The question was this: Has anyone been offended by the poems? Has anyone questioned the poems?I am paraphrasing only because I am terrible at remembering exact quotation.

At the time I scoured my brain for an answer. Once someone cried in the audience at a reading. However they came up afterwards and thanked me. During a workshop one poet took offense to the use of the word drunk in a poem, because she felt that placed the blame on the victim. I thought of these examples and I told Dean of them. But I still felt that somehow I had missed a major point.

A few days later the answer came to me. I ran into a friend and an acquaintance together on a walk. The friend started telling the acquaintance about my chapbook. The acquaintance looked at me and said “Why would you write about something so twisted?”. This is a question I have gotten numerous times. In fact when I was first writing the poems as a class project my own mother was upset by them. After she read them her whole opinion changed. She ended up  supporting me in the project, even driving across Florida in a terrifying rain storm in order to take photographs.

I looked the acquaintance straight in the eye and explained the purpose of the project to him, that I wrote about women. Women that lead compelling, interesting lives. Some were  cautious, others hitchhiked. Some were well educated, others focused their attention elsewhere. Many were still figuring out their lives, but several had established careers. They all had different stories but the fact is, all of us were denied the opportunity of knowing them because of Bundy’s actions. That my book was about the names we should know, not Bundy’s but the victims names, Donna Manson, Brenda Ball, Susan Curtis . . .

The acquaintance looked at me again, and said “It’s too dark.”

I have had variations on this conversation on numerous occasions. However the fact remains that whenever I do a reading no one says anything like that. After they read the chapbook even the most skeptical individual appears to realize what the book is about. It is controversial only up to that point. However that is a significant hurdle to cross.

I have thought a great deal about re-titling the manuscript as a whole. Removing Bundy’s name from the title. So that you learn about the women before you learn about him. There are several problems with that. The first being that there is no obvious second title, the only thing that the women really had in common is that they were all under 30 and they had hair parted down the middle (which was the style at the time). The second is that even with another title the fact remains that Bundy is the one thing they all really, unfortunately, have in common, so his name inevitably comes up in a description of the book.

I am not a dark person. I close my eyes when movies get too bloody. I try to avoid news articles about murders. The only movie about a serial killer that I appreciate is Zodiac, because it is essentially about research. I do not swear. I started this project because I thought culturally speaking the attention was placed on the wrong person, in terms of crimes. We almost always focus on the perpetrator instead of the victims.

I know that I will probably always have to deal with peoples presumptions about my project. I will always try to mitigate their reaction, but in the end I really think the poems speak for themselves. That anyone who is judging a book by the cover should open it up and find out what is inside.