Storing memory within and without us: Haley Hutchinson and Molly Johnsen’s poetry reading

Molly Johnsen MA ’14 and Haley Hutchinson ’24 first met through their shared publisher, Green Mountain Press, and it is a good thing they did. Both are Middlebury alumni; Johnsen graduated from Bread Loaf in 2014 and Hutchinson from Middlebury in 2024. They entered the Abernethy Room for a reading facilitated by the Middlebury English Department this past Friday, separated by a generation and years spent living on opposite coasts. Despite their disparate backgrounds, both poets came off recent projects that thematically fit together seamlessly. The synergy between the two was palpable.

Hutchinson graduated from Middlebury just two years ago with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and Psychology, presenting a poetry collection as her senior thesis. It was all the more poignant that her first time returning to Vermont followed the release of her first published poetry collection “Her Womanhood of Mine.” The collection — which came out last February — orients itself around location, particularly how three streets where the poet has lived mirror different eras of her life. 

In between poems, Hutchinson reaffirmed the importance of place. To the poet, new locations stimulate different parts of her identity, and different periods of her life alter how she relates to her surroundings. Indeed, each poem felt like a snapshot of a specific era: “Eleven” was distinctly youthful, discussing “toenail moons” and “earthly blankets,” while “All Said and Undone” carried the frustration and regret of aging (“I forgot to clock into living,” she writes). In between, the mundane adventures of young adulthood, such as baking carrot cake, were saturated with sentimentality. Regardless of the period of life, each scene is written about with reverence, each street and moment of her life equally crucial to becoming who she is today

While Hutchinson focused on the places she had lived and the memories they stored, Johnsen turned the attention to her own body’s recollection. In 2015, Johnsen and her cousin were involved in a car crash that left her with broken bones, severe organ damage and deep physical and psychological trauma. What followed was an odyssey of recovery in and out of hospitals, much of this experience retriggering old pain or creating new trauma. 

In an interview with the Compulsive Reader, Johnsen stated that the crash itself existed as a “thick, black line at the center of my memory.” She elaborated that many who experience trauma find it hard to access, yet central to daily experience. So, Johnsen turned to poetry. Her poems exist as vignettes of her life and ruminations on recovery, the language often visceral and uncomfortable.“Follow Up with Orthopedist” was a poem that stuck with me particularly, describing an experience of an invasive medical professional, against whom she desired to build a metaphorical moat and raise up a drawbridge.

Aside from the thematic overlaps of growth and pain that the two poets shared, there was also a certain personal affinity between the pair. Johnsen asked Hutchinson where the different eras of her life begin and end. Hutchinson responded that sensory details, state of being and presence helped to separate these chapters. Hutchinson then asked Johnsen where her poems lived in the body. Johnsen’s answer was striking; she felt that poetry was an opportunity to leave her body and be in conversation with it, providing the distance necessary to understand her trauma that normal cognition did not allow.

Even within their readings, the connection between the poets was apparent. Several times, Johnsen added a poem to her reading on the fly, inspired by themes Hutchinson had brought up. She had never read her poem “What We Share” aloud, but felt moved by Hutchinson’s discussion of origin and upbringing. The work was a meditation on what sourdough starter and trauma have in common, coming to the conclusion that “we eat each other’s beginnings” in both.

Several other moments highlighted the poets’ kinship. Hutchinson’s “Girlhoods” was aspirational and uncomfortable, walking between deeply held sentimentality and bodily sensation. This poem yet again shot to mind as Johnsen read “Mother-Daughter,” an ode to familial intimacy and the specific anxiety that comes between parents and children.

As the Abernethy Room began to empty, the poets shared a hug. Although they had known each other prior to the event, they clearly shared a deeper understanding of each other; coasts and generations bridged by unparalleled writings about memory within and without.