"One Day's Notice" by Kenneth Chamlee
– We’ll call you.
Having a child one day had an entirely new meaning.
Kenneth Chamlee’s work has appeared in three previous Personal Story Publishing Project collections, and his poems have been in The North Carolina Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Cold Mountain Review, Pinesong, Kakalak, and in many other places. He is a 2022 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the North Carolina Poetry Society and teaches regularly for the Great Smokies Writing Program of UNC-Asheville. A book of poems, If Not These Things, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2022. Learn more at www.kennethchamlee.com and @kenchamlee on Twitter.
Author’s Talk
Kenneth Chamlee
I write mostly poems, lyrics and narratives. Lyrics capture moments and beauty, and narratives condense events into a tight rendering. But a narrative poem isn’t always the right medium for telling a long story, especially one that plays out over years (I am not thinking of epics like the Iliad here, but one-to-three page accounts). This story about adopting our son took over six years to unfold, and fitting just one day of it into 800 words of prose still required summarizing and skipping large parts, both for editorial limitations and for private memories. Both of my wife’s parents were dead by the time of our son’s placement. The loss of her mother just two years earlier was very hard, as the world lost a woman absolutely meant for grandparenthood.
Whether this prolonged episode of my life will ever get full exploration in a memoir or extended personal essay, I cannot say. But drawing moments and vignettes into poems has proved manageable. In my collection If Not These Things, I have poems that focus on specific moments: the shock of a doctor’s conclusion, watching my son absorbed in a Disney movie, seeing him off to his first day at school. And still some memories defy artistic recreation and just sit on their own—my wife wrote three single-spaced legal pad pages of instructions for our first babysitter a few weeks after the adoption. This was not for a novice teenager down the street, but for an adult friend with children of her own. You just have to smile.—Ken Chamlee
