Editor’s note: Many of our readers will already be familiar with Susan McCaslin—and with Thomas Merton. When we received this interview between Chris Beuker and Susan, we were delighted to share it with our readers
Chris Beuker (born 1946) is a Dutch artist, retired lecturer, and independent writer whose work explores the intersections of culture, belief, history, and social thought. He studied Drama and Theatre at the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht (1972–1978) and later taught drama and related disciplines for many years at Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen. His published works include Etty Hillesum, haar verwevenheid met het communisme (2020), an exploration of Etty Hillesum and her relationship to communist thought and action, and Voor Elkaar Met Elkaar (2022), a study of some of the underlying intellectual, social, political and religious roots of Black Lives Matter in the United States. A lifelong reader of Thomas Merton since the age of sixteen, Beuker shares with Susan McCaslin an enduring interest in Merton’s life and work.
Susan McCaslin is the author of eighteen volumes of poetry and eleven chapbooks. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia in 1984 and taught in the English and Creative Writing departments at Douglas College in British Columbia from 1984 to 2007. Her recent poetry collections include Consider (Aeolus House, 2023), Sentient Stones (Raven Chapbooks, 2023), and Named & Nameless (Inanna Publications, 2025). She lives in Fort Langley, British Columbia, where she initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project as part of a successful campaign to protect a rainforest near the Fraser River.
Chris Beuker: Would you please briefly describe your life and work? Could you share an insight into who you are as a person and how you came to write poems and other works on a range of themes that (intensely) occupy you?
Susan McCaslin: When I was a child I enjoyed reading books, some of which my aunt on my mother’s side provided. After her husband died, she moved to a smaller place and asked my parents if she could store her books in our basement. My parents put the books in a wardrobe with a mirror in the panels. I liked to read myself to sleep so I would sneak down into the basement and bring up a book that I would read with a flashlight under the covers. One set of books is Journeys Through Bookland (1922), beginning with nursery rhymes and moving through stories like Little Red Riding-Hood, Cinderella, and Hans Christian Andersen. There were nine volumes altogether moving into excerpts from epics and more sophisticated poems. The other set of books from my childhood is titled The Treasure Chest of my BookHouse, Edited by Olive Beaupré Miller (1920).
In grade seven, when I was only 12, my teacher of literature asked each student to write a short poem and bring it to read to the class. I wrote a poem titled “My Cat” but when he read it he thought I had plagiarized it. I assured him I had written it by myself and he believed me. He then suggested I should be the editor of a poetry column in the student newspaper where I could publish other students’ poems as well as my own. At that point I believed I would be a poet.
Here’s the poem he thought wasn’t mine at first:
Our Cat
When our cat lies before the hearth
She’s quite a merry sight.
Her toes will curl and touch her nose
With evident delight.
Her body reaches for the warmth
The fire blaze doth give.
I’m sure that she must think it is
A wondrous joy to live.
Her eyes are closed and she may dream
Of years so long ago
When she would jump and pounce on mice
In fields where daisies grow.
I’m sure no-one can wake her
As she purrs with deep content,
But then she smells an odour,
A tantalizing scent.
It rouses her from dreamland
And brings her to her feet.
She’s going toward the kitchen
To get a piece of meat.
I should note that I later learned to avoid archaisms like “doth,” and poetic diction derived from the poets I was reading at the time such as James Whitcomb Riley and other turn-of-the-century authors. At the time I thought genuine poetry had to have meter and rhyme but now I write both form poetry and free verse.
I was writing poems in my undergraduate days and some of my professors encouraged me about my poems. When I was doing my Master’s degree at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, beginning in 1969, my thesis professor was Robin Blaser who was a poet himself. He too gave me feedback on my poems. Then when I was doing my Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, Lee Johnson, my thesis advisor, also valued my poetry. After I graduated Lee became friends with my husband and I.
Later I met a well-known professor and poet who had taught at The University of Alberta for decades named Ted Blodget. It turned out our respective poetry books were published by the University of Alberta Press in 2011. My book, Demeter Goes Skydiving won first place. It turned out when I got home Mark and I discovered Ted and his wife lived not far from us and we all became friends. When Ted died, I edited his final manuscript titled Walking Into God and set up readings for him and several of my friends.
CB: When, how, and why did Thomas Merton come into your life?
SM: Thomas Merton came into my life the last semester of my undergraduate education in 1968. I purchased his famous book, The Seven Storey Mountain, in a bookstore. I was so taken by Merton’s autobiography that I continued following his work and became a lifelong Merton scholar.
CB: Where does his inspiration lie for you?
SM: What inspires me about Merton is his ability to have been a monk at Gethsemani as well as a proponent of interfaith understanding by exploring other religions.
CB: Which important moral questions and feelings does he evoke in you? How do you live with the questions and feelings that Thomas Merton evokes in you?
SM: The moral questions Merton raises deal with his ongoing development. He worked to combine solitude, prayer, and love of nature as well as dealing with political issues and connections with other poets including poets from South America, Europe and other places.
CB: What inspired you to write a book about Thomas Merton together with J.S. Porter?
SM: I met John Porter in Vancouver, Canada, decades ago when he was delivering an essay on Merton set up by the Thomas Merton Society of BC. Recently that Society closed down because there weren’t enough people to organize the meetings. John lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where I have gone to read with him many times as well as in Toronto. We are close friends and both of us are Merton scholars. Our book, Thomas Merton’s Dance with The Feminine: Superabundantly Alive (Wood Lake Publishing, 2018) was a cooperative venture. It contains my poems. I found it most interesting to write the poems in “A Grotto of Sophia Poems.”
CB: Which themes and thematics in Thomas Merton’s life and work intrigued you, and are you still interested in them?
SM: I am still thinking about how Merton could combine both solitude and an active life. After entering Gethsemani, Merton wrote The Seven Storey Mountain and continued writing for most of his life. I too try to balance the two.
CB: How do you experience your connection with him?SM: I have studied much of his work since I was seventeen and I am a Merton scholar. After reading his journals I drew even closer to him because he is so truthful about his life and experiences. For example, he writes about the affair he had with a young woman who was his nurse. He was honest with her but, in the end, the relationship wasn’t resolved. As the Merton scholar Christopher Pramuk writes, to which I agree:
That “tearing” him up is what comes across to us as we read his various journal entries for the next several months. His “deep emotional need for feminine companionship and love”—a most natural and understandable need for most men—conflicts with the monastic vows he has made, which apparently shut the door to such a need. He struggles with how to reconcile the “emotional need” and the vow.”
[See: Pramuk’s Sophia: the Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton]
CB: Can you let him go, or will he continue to fascinate you throughout your life?
CB: Can you let him go, or will he continue to fascinate you throughout your life?
SM: He will still continue to fascinate me throughout my life.
CB: What moral message and perspective would Thomas Merton have for today’s turbulent world, given his engagement?
SM: Merton wrote much about the danger of nuclear weapons and argued for peace. I’m sure he would be speaking out against Trump. Perhaps at this time he would leave the monastery and work with other activists. I am sure he would continue writing.
I often wonder what he is doing now in the life beyond death.
CB: Do you recognize yourself in Thomas Merton when he writes about silence: “There is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question”?
SM: Yes. I have mostly been a quiet person and I do require silence and times in nature. Yes, there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. I can be articulate in my writing but I need time to ponder what is most important.
CB: How important is silence to you and your poetry?
SM: In my poems I leave caesuras and other spaces for silence. For me a poem is a union of both words and silences.
CB: In your collection A Plot of Light, you share your pilgrimage to Thomas Merton’s birthplace with the reader. Has this pilgrimage brought you enlightenment?
SM: It was a pilgrimage indeed. It was helpful being together with Merton fans and Merton scholars. The focus was on his childhood near the Pyrenees. I learned that his father Owen Merton was from New Zealand and his mother Ruth was an American Quaker. They met in an art school in Paris. She died when he was only six. This pilgrimage did bring me enlightenment and I became closer to my Merton friends and to people I didn’t know before. I learned many things about Merton’s (“Tom’s”) childhood.
CB: Do you think contemplation and poetry go together?
SM: For me pondering things, meditating and sitting in silence is good for me. Sometimes it wakens me to what I might write about, or sends an image or unusual thought to pursue later. They are like yin-yang as they reinforce each other.
CB: Would you mind writing a brief summary of the book Superabundantly Alive: Thomas Merton’s Dance with the Feminine?
SM: Well, I’ll tell you this: as you know, Superabundantly Alive: Thomas Merton’s Dance with the Feminine has two authors. Both John and I were interested in Merton’s relationship with women, particularly Margie Smith, but also his mother whom he lost when he was six. Yet she haunted him in his dreams. I found the poems I wrote combined with images worked well and John’s sections were different but excellent. I had never done a collaborative book and enjoyed the process very much.
CB: Susan, thank you so much for all this—and may you still keep getting insights from Merton!
SM: I’ll leave you with a poem:
A Dream of Thomas Merton
Susan McCaslin
How is it the monk (unhabited) is not surprised,
sitting cross-legged on a patch of earth
trading jokes and cold beer?
Talk of Martin Luther King, Osama, fallen towers,
nothing new under the sun
(except his arch eyes, a high-energy discharge).
“Jesus was the kind of doctor
who would heal anyone who asked –
criminal, insane. No flinching or thinking of bounds.”
He pronounces his own new name –
“Threshold dweller” –
hopping like Raven across portals.
Waking, I think how straightaway
I felt his mettle, knowing he had been fed fire –
I, grain.