Shellback
by Writers Room Member Jeanne-Marie Osterman
“Set against the brutal backdrop of war, this is an emotionally perceptive, poignant, and thoughtfully nuanced examination of the father-daughter relationship.” – Kirkus star review
“With often haunting imagery and carefully clipped lines, [Osterman] memorably portrays a man, his era, and a daughter’s unstinting love.” – Gardner McFall, On the Line
“Jeanne-Marie Osterman toggles between nightmarish scenes her father witnessed during World War II and the smaller but no less affecting traumas of his final months in a nursing home. Her language is spare and colloquial, with moments of irony and deadpan wit that illuminate every detail.” – Mark Bibbins, 13th Balloon
“Marked by candor and clear-sightedness, these poems resist soothing resolutions and easy solace, which is why they are sure to ring true to readers.” – Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Letters from Limbo
About Jeanne-Marie Osterman
Jeanne Marie Osterman grew up in small town, midcentury America, and as E.B. White said of so many New Yorkers, she came to New York in quest of something.
She was born in Everett, Washington, a rainy mill town. Her father was a combat veteran of World War II, her mother a housewife, and the most interesting place in town was the library. Those years in the stacks motivated her to be the first in her family to go to college, earning a BA in literature from Gonzaga University, and an MA in linguistics from San Francisco State. The highlight of college was her junior year in Italy, which was life changing. It was as different from Everett as possible, and inspired her to move to New York City where she worked as an advertising copywriter for over 30 years.
Since retiring from advertising—and joining The Writers Room—Jeanne-Marie has firmly established herself as a poet. Her poems have appeared in journals, including 45th Parallel Magazine, Borderlands, Cathexis Northwest, New Ohio Review, What Rough Beast, and California Quarterly. In 2018, her first chapbook, There’s a Hum, was published by Finishing Line Press. Shellback, released in 2021 by Paloma Press, is her first full-length collection. And Jeanne-Marie’s new manuscript All Animals Want the Same Things won the 34th Annual Slipstream Chapbook Competition. It’s out now.
A finalist for the 2018 Joy Harjo Poetry Award and 2017 Levis Prize in Poetry from Four Way Books, Jeanne-Marie is also poetry editor for Cagibi, a journal of prose and poetry.
She and her husband Harold Pearson live in Manhattan. Jeanne-Marie has been a member of The Writers Room for seven years.
Jeanne-Marie, age 10, growing up beneath the tall trees and rainy skies of the Pacific Northwest.
Writers Room Executive Director Donna Brodie recently interviewed
Jeanne-Marie Osterman
DB: What inspired Shellback? And what’s a “shellback”?
JMO: Shellback was inspired when I learned about my father’s experiences in World War II. He served on a battleship in the South Pacific and fought in the Battle of Okinawa. This was the largest battle of World War II after the Normandy invasion—150,000 were killed. My dad survived a kamikaze attack, and his ship was pummeled several times by gunfire from shore—yet he’d never spoken to me about any of this until a few years ago when he was in his nineties.
I was stunned by his descriptions of deafening gunfire, the kamikaze that whirled through air aflame and crashed on the deck of his ship, missing him by 20 feet. He told me what it was like to be shot at, and of the bodies he helped bury at sea. But I was even more shocked realizing he’d been carrying these memories deep inside for decades, never saying a word about any of it. Like many combat veterans, I think he just wanted to come home, get back to normal, and forget about war.
Speaking of coming home, that’s when he became a shellback. It’s the name given to sailors when they cross the equator for the first time, and for which there’s a traditional initiation rite. What today is a mostly fun ceremony, as late as World War II it could take the form of a brutal hazing. Unfortunately, that was my father’s experience. He was forced to eat a box of laxatives and crawl through ship’s garbage. And he was shocked with an electric rod until he passed out—this after serving his country in battle!
When he told me of all he’d been through, I’d been a member of The Writers Room for about two years, trying to be a poet. (laughs) Up to then, most of my poems had been generated by workshop assignments. My father’s revelation gave me a more meaningful task. I couldn’t let these memories be lost. I had to write about them.
DB: One review says Shellback “reads like a novel.” You call it a “poetry-memoir.” Can you comment on that?
JMO: The book consists of mostly narrative poems. The first ones are about my childhood with my father—little moments growing up with him in the Pacific Northwest. He wasn’t easy to get to know, and I tried to get close by being a tomboy. There are poems about us watching football on TV, floating down a river on a rubber raft, a trip to the city dump. The second part flashes back to his war experiences, where I hoped to honor his war service, and shed light on the deep reserve conveyed in those childhood poems. The last part of Shellback flashes forward to his years in assisted living, when I was traveling back to Everett, sometimes several times a year, to visit him when he was failing in health. I was also with him the week he died. I think Shellback does read like a memoir—it would be an awfully short novel! Someone told me they couldn’t wait to see how it would end. Unusual for a poetry book I’d say.
My three themes—the love between parent and child, the tragedies of war, and caring for a parent in old age—are themes I think a lot of people can relate to. To help the manuscript hold together, I made them my focus.
DB: How long did it take to write Shellback, and find a publisher?
JMO: The poems took two years to write, and it took about a year to find a publisher. Your question takes me back to a day at The Writers Room. The words just weren’t coming and I was thinking to give up. I looked around and saw all the fingers flying across keyboards, faces intent. And there’s that display of published books in our entry. That got my fingers moving, too—a word, a line, a stanza at a time. I get that kind of inspiration here.
DB: When did you start writing? And why poetry?
JMO: During my advertising career, I wrote for other people—all the while longing to write for myself. To feed my dream, I took a night class in poetry writing at the 92nd Street Y. At the first meeting, someone read aloud Philip Levine’s, “They Feed, They Lion,” a poem about Detroit auto workers. That little collection of words knocked me off my chair! I thought, If I could write like that for just one sentence, it would be worth a lifetime of effort. Well, here I am at The Writers Room, trying to do just that.
I’ve had little formal education in poetry, so I kept going to workshops—in New York, I’ve had the opportunity to study with some terrific poets. And I keep teaching myself by reading other poets. Current favorites are Kevin Young, Ellen Bass, Larry Levis, Cornelius Eady (a past teacher and fellow Writers Room member), and still, yes, Philip Levine.
When leaving my advertising job, a friend recommended The Writers Room. With my lack of literary credentials or publication at that time, I wondered if I could get in. I’m so happy I tried. Here, I’ve found the time and space I need, and an inspiring community of writers. Taking a seat among them…the energy I get from that…is palpable.
Kirkus Reviews selected Shellback as one of the top 100 Indie Books of 2021.
Click here to read the review.
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