Because I Didn’t Drown

poems & essays by

Pat Riviere-Seel

~200 pages, $19.95 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: June/July 2025

An Advance Sale Discount price of $12 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $17/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.

About this book…

I dwell in possibility—Emily Dickinson

My life has always been a balancing act, a lot like crossing a river by stepping on rocks, moving from one to the next without falling. The trick is to keep moving. Too often I’ve tried to steady myself on one rock before moving on to the next. I’ve found some balance, but more importantly, I learned to swim by slipping and tumbling into the water.

If I were to choose only one word to describe my life, it would be resilience. I didn’t drown. I found possibilities.

As I began to reflect on how the Covid Pandemic had changed me, how I had changed, and what was important to me, I found myself writing both prose and poetry. Writing in both genres, and pairing poems with prose, I discovered a balance of possibilities.

 These stepping stones into my life are a few of my stories.

 Now they are your stories.

  —Pat Riviere-Seel

Pat Riviere-Seel is the author of four poetry collections, including The Serial Killer’s Daughter, winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Award. She taught for 15 years in the University of Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program and served two years as the NCPS Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the state’s western region. She once served as Poet in Residence at the North Carolina Zoo. Her poems have been widely published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Before earning her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, she worked as a newspaper journalist, publicist, editor, and lobbyist. Find more about her at www.patriviereseel.com

Pat Riviere-Seel’s Because I Did Not Drown is a powerful mix of personal essay and poetry. Already renown for her poetry, Riviere-Seel’s essays were an exciting surprise. This book is about substance. If there are secrets in us all, Riviere-Seel unfurls the beauty and grace of revelation. This book offers the soft underbelly of the public self in a way that made me honored to be allowed to read it. ~Beverly A. Jackson, author of Loose Fish (memoir) and Every Burning Thing (poetry) and visual artist

Pat Riviere-Seel’s latest volume, Because I Did Not Drown, is a provocative, courageous, beautiful contemplation – powerful, elegant poems interspersed with powerful, elegant personal essays – on the fragility of life and the inextinguishable indomitability of the human heart and spirit to cling to it in face of often withering challenges. The yield is extraordinary: an inspired montage that takes on, with breathtaking candor and insight, the sublime daily triumph of “a woman made of water and fire” drawing breath. ~Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) & author of Light at the Seam
 

FROM THE ALMANAC OF BROKEN THINGS

I choose this earth that breaks
my heart again and again,

the woods for the way trees
bend, fall, and return to dirt.

I choose the sand dollar, the nautilus
that in brokenness finds new creation.

I choose the favorite doll that no longer cries,
loved into silence, into rags.

I choose the memory of a stranger’s touch
that lifted my face above water. Because

I did not drown, I choose morning,
the gauzy-gray dawn that returns.

I choose the once-wild Palomino
whose beauty can never be tamed.

I choose light from long dead stars
that illuminates without heat.

I choose March with its promise of spring,
the warm days that tease, the blizzard

that insulates and warms the bulbs, the seeds,
all that lies beneath the surface, waiting.

HOLDING ON, LETTING GO

“Hold on! Don’t let go,” the ski instructor shouts as we beginners crouch over our skis and grasp the rope that will pull us to the top of the bunny slope for our first try at the skills he demonstrated on the flat, packed snow. I’m determined to get this right.

I hold on as if my very life depended on my clinging to that rope. I hold on when we reach the top. The person in front of me lets go and stands up, triumphant and ready for the downhill. I try to hold on even when I find myself tumbling down the other side of the little hill. I land in hunks of dirty, slushy snow.

“Why didn’t you let go?” The astonished instructor asks. He’s peering down at me, my akimbo skies, my body intact. I have no good answer. I have no answer at all. Suddenly aphasiac, I struggle to my knees. The instructor scans the disheveled lump of me, bundled in puffy down, and quickly determines that the only damage is to my pride.

Why didn’t I let go of the rope once I reached the top of the hill? It’s not that I always do as I am told. Far from it. But holding on is something I tend to do even when all the evidence and good sense indicates that I need to let go.

I was forty-four-years-old in 1994 when I took that first ski lesson, old enough to recognize a metaphor for my life when I fell into one. By that time I had read all the self-help books I could find, looking for the magic bullet that would turn me too into a best-selling author. At one point, I became somewhat of a cult follower of Melody Beattie. I knew about codependency, self-care, and the need to let go. I had moved to rural Yancey County, NC, in 1992 after holding on to a life in Annapolis, Maryland, that I could not afford, either financially or emotionally. I let go of a lot in that move: antiques I loved and my little home for the last seven years, a beach cottage on the South River. I left a community of friends and fellow runners. I left work I enjoyedwork that no longer paid my bills. I left daily walks and talks with my best friend who lived just down the road.

Looking back at that move, I realize that I should have left Maryland several years before I finally did leave. But I held on. I held on until I realized that the only way to support myself financially was to either find a well-paying job in the area or sell my house and move back to North Carolina, where the cost of living was much less and where I still had friends and family. The year before, I had turned down what had once been a dream job for me. The job as editor/lobbyist in DC would have meant an hour or more commute from my home south of Annapolis. The commute into DC would have also have meant less time for running, a relatively new addiction.

So, I put my house on the market and began an aggressive search for work in North Carolina. My plan was to join a public relations firm in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area and make enough money to buy a little house in the mountains where I could retreat to write and run trails.

My house sold before I had found gainful employment, so I packed my few belongings into a self-storage unit in Durham, NC, still convinced that I would land that high-powered position in the Triangle area. That was a dream I intended to hold on to– until I had an unexpected offer: editor of a bi-monthly peace and justice journal. The work and the location seemed ideal. The office was in the mountains, just south of Burnsville and less than two-hours’ drive to my hometown, so a visit to my dad in Shelby would be a day trip. The work would be part time but the salary not nearly enough to allow me to buy that little house and spend my time writing and running.

“Don’t ever tell anyone how little you’re making,” Daddy chided after trying to talk me out of taking the job.

So what if I didn’t make a lot of money and retire to the mountains? I would be able to live in the mountains, work for an organization that I believed in, my small way of helping make a difference in the world. A flexible schedule would also allow me the time I to run.

The forced letting go also meant that I had to let go of a way of life. For the past fifteen years, I had lived in cities. Fayetteville, NC, where I lived for almost seven years was a metropolitan area with easy access to grocery stores, movies, a mall, and restaurants. Streetlights and central heat at the flick of a switch were conveniences I took for granted. Annapolis, although a smaller city, much the same. A drive into Baltimore or DC took less than an hour on four-lane highways.

Suddenly I found myself living in a rural area in an old farmhouse heated with a wood-burning furnace that took up most of the space along on wall in the living room. A small wood-burning Franklin stove heated one of the two front bedrooms where I set up my desk and computer. The back of the housekitchen, dining room, and back bedroom where I slept remained chilly in winter. The house had no insulation in the walls or floor, and the metal roof leaked. A ceiling light fixture with heater in the bathroom made long soaks in the clawfoot tub comfortable, one of the few luxuries of my new home. A washing machine with cold water only sat in an unheated outbuilding. I dried clothes outside on a line strung beside the back porch, something I had not used since living in my parents’ home. I bought a folding clothes drying rack that I could use in front of the furnace during rainy days and subfreezing temperatures. I exchanged my dresses, heels, and suits for jeans and boots. I traded in my Hyundi sedan for a four-wheel-drive truck.

“These mountains heal,” my new landlady said to me. “They make no promises, but they heal.” I didn’t pretend to understand what she meant. But I was in need of healing, so I chose to believe her words.

WHEN THERE WERE HORSES

I miss the hammocks,
the teenagers swinging between trees,
high pitched laughter, urgent talk.
Sometimes at night their joy would float
through the house’s open windows.
They were so alive, innocence sweet
as freshly cut hay, the future an unnamed galaxy.

Riders still gallop horses across the field,
into the woods. But now empty picnic tables
replace hammocks along the perimeter.
Last week a man spent two days mowing,
mechanical hum measuring the hours.

Today, when I walked out near dusk,
a black Mercedes parked beside the gate.
In the middle of the field, a man
and a woman lay on a blanket,
feeding each other sunbaked brie
spread on a French baguette.

Maybe they are lovers who
will wait until the sun sets,
then shed their clothes, offer
their bodies to God, desire unbridled.

When there were horses stabled here
there was a cat that asked
for love the way cats do
running figure eights around
your legs, arching her back.

I loved like that once. The man
said he had always loved me. Maybe
he had. Maybe he never loved me.
It no longer matters what is true.
I head back to the house, searching
for the car now lost in darkness.