Excerpt: Poetic License by Gretchen Cherington

You may not be familiar with author Gretchen Cherington (whose essay “Maine Roustabout” was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize), but her father Richard Eberhart was a household name whose literary career spanned eight decades, including his roles as poet-in-residence-turned-emeritus professor at Dartmouth, U.S. Poet Laureate under Eisenhower and Kennedy from 1959-1961, and winner of the Bollinger prize in 1962, the Pulitzer Prize in 1966, and the National Book Award in 1977 (with an additional 5 nominations).

Cherington grew up in a home dedicated to hosting the brightest literary minds of the day: Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, Dame Edith Sitwell, Denise Levertov, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, and Allen Ginsberg, to name a few. To the world, her father was untouchable, a revered celebrity talent. But to Gretchen, he was just her beloved dad. Until he wasn’t.

In her intimate and elegantly told memoir POETIC LICENSE (August 4, She Writes Press), Cherington speaks truth to power, owning up to her own collusion in the systemic conspiracy of silence over the decades, for the sake of her family of origin, for herself, and especially for her father. Aided by research in her father’s extensive literary archives at Dartmouth and sincere conversations with the poets that had become family to her, Cherington candidly retraces her past to interpret the context of her abuse, finally finding happiness, freedom, and her voice in the formative months of #MeToo.