Meet our writers - Diane Klammer

 

 

 

 

 

 

Primarily, if you asked me what my craft is, or what my practice is, in a spiritual sense, it’s poetry.  That’s what comes to me the easiest, and I think I’m more dedicated to that than anything else.

Diane has been published three time in Open Minds Quarterly over the years.
Summer 2009 OMQ

Summer 2009: Click on the cover image to order now!

Spring 2010 OMQ

Spring 2010: Click on the cover image to order now!

Winter 2010 OMQ

Winter 2010: Click on the cover image to order now!


Interview by Kenneth McCormick

In late NoveDianne Klammermber of 2013, Kenneth McCormick came into the Open Minds Quarterly office to conduct his first of four telephone interviews with some of the contributors to OMQ’s anthology of writings, In New Light:  The many paths of identity, struggle and mental illness. Kenneth’s first interview was with poet and mental health counselor, Diane Klammer, California-born and now living and working in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and two children. Diane taught biology before becoming a counseling psychologist and working with the mentally ill, individuals on probation, kids in trouble and the elderly. She has had an ongoing diagnosis and treatment for major depression for many years. She currently works as a naturalist for Boulder County Open Space and is a musical therapist for seniors in adult care. Diane contributed two poems to the In New Light anthology:  “Ordinary Nevermore” and “Rattlers”.

Ordinary Never More – Diane Klammer

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Bless Me O Doctor – Diane Klammer

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[Kenneth McCormick]:  It is a pleasure to speak with you.

[Diane Klammer]:  It’s a pleasure to be asked, and an honour, actually.  Especially from Canada.

[KM]Open Minds Quarterly started in Canada.  How did you first hear of it?

[DK]:  I saw it as one of the journals that takes poetry, in a few journals in the United States – I can’t remember the names of them – and I actually have four or five poems that have been published in it, including the two that are in In New Light, and I did start getting the magazine, and I was just really impressed with the way it was handled.  I haven’t seen anything in the United States that’s quite like it, the way they wrote it to put both mental illness and the arts together in such a way.

[KM]:  How did you discover poetry?

[DK]:  Poetry–if you look at it in the triangle of writing–it’s the little tip at the end. There’s so much more prose, and that’s the bottom, and fiction’s in the middle, and poetry’s that little bit at the top, in terms of consumption of the written word.

But I started writing poetry when I was very small, and as soon as I learned to rhyme, I actually started writing some very simple songs.  None of them really amounted to much, but I just liked rhyme, and I liked metre.

It was college, I was taking advanced composition, and somehow my instructor got a hold of my poems, or a few of them, and said, “You know, you really need to keep doing this, you should be writing a poem a day”.

I became a counselling psychologist, and then for some reason, I really started writing poetry when I got home from work.  Just to relax, you know.  Back then, I didn’t have a computer, I had a little Corona, because computers were not part of the household yet.  So I would just go and bang a few poems down on the “computer”, as my son would say.

Because of this enthusiasm, I got my clients involved at work, and I worked in three different agencies – similar missions, slightly different – but I was able to talk my supervisor into letting me teach poetry classes.  It was a lot of fun. [continued]

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