When Cyra Dumitru was 16 years old and her brother David was 19, she was brushing her teeth at their home in Cincinnati when she felt something speak to her. She was guided to the window, where she witnessed a violent tragedy: the death of her brother by suicide. That night, Dumitru found a deeply spiritual presence she would later name “Voice” in order to distinguish it from her lowercase v voice as a writer. But as shown in her most recent work, Words Make a Way Through Fire, a blend of memoir and poetry, Voice, which guided Dumitru’s long recovery from this trauma, is intrinsically linked with the power of her voice as a writer.
“Voice found me in the moment before my greatest wounding and let me know that it existed,” Dumitru says, explaining, just as she does in the book, the words that came to her, offering some sort of comfort and context for what she would witness. (“Cyra, this is going to be very hard!” she writes as she remembers it in the book. “A part of you must hide…I will help you.”)
Following the death of her older brother, Dumitru pursued her love of writing and poetry, obtaining a degree in English at Indiana University Bloomington. She then returned to Cincinnati and met her spouse, Daniel. The two later lived in Norfolk, Virginia, and then San Antonio, Texas, where Dumitru began working as a medical writer—a small hint of future connections she would make between writing and healing processes—before completing a master’s degree in poetry at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Since then, Dumitru has served on the poetry faculty at St. Mary’s University for nearly 20 years, publishing multiple books; a little more than 10 years ago, she began the process of becoming a certified PPM, or Practitioner of Poetic Medicine.
“I think more people are aware of music therapy and art therapy” Dumitru says. “For whatever reason, poetry therapy is just not as well known.” Through the work of John Fox, founder of the Institute of Poetic Medicine, where Dumitru obtained her certification, she recognized something she already knew intuitively. “I had been using poetry for my own healing purposes, really, most of my life.”
As a teacher and a poet in schools, and while serving as a writer-in-residence at the Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas (an experience Dumitru writes about in Words Make a Way Through Fire), Dumitru had always pushed blossoming writers to look beyond craft and to use their writing to wrestle with difficult material.
“It was so moving to me to see how other people, especially young adults, were finding more breathing room and…a way through really tough stuff in their lives,” Dumitru says. “I think part of that passion probably was because I could identify with that. I didn’t really have that support much when I was their age. When I desperately needed it.”
She continues to see that work through the poetry medicine circles at the Ecumenical Center in San Antonio. “We’ve got folks ranging from 24 to 92 coming in. People are grieving the loss of spouses, the loss of a marriage. People who are struggling with their fear of being queer in our increasingly hostile political environment.”
Dumitru says the work has allowed her to see people translate their feelings into metaphors, creating space to process them. “You feel like you have more choices about your life,” she says. “You can tap into your resilience and into your own perspective.”
Much of the material making up Dumitru’s own perspective that would become Words Make a Way Through Fire came organically out of her own effort to process having witnessed her brother’s death. She remembers reading about a eucalyptus seed when her children were little: “Suddenly I saw how I could write a poem about witnessing David, like the actual night of witnessing that. And I immediately went and wrote that poem.”
Years later, that poem would become “Gift of Fire,” which she integrated not only as the poem itself, but also as a narrative description of the moment that perfectly showcases the blend of poetics and storytelling that Dumitru weaves throughout the book, “related in often gorgeous prose,” as Kirkus Reviews notes:
While my children play tea party with their stuffed animals, “Gift of Fire” emerges virtually intact, as one pent-up flow of images and words.
“Some eucalyptus seeds develop inside a hard case that needs
to be burned by flames before it will break open.”
—Trees, Eyewitness Explorers
All along you must have secretly been the seed of
a eucalyptus.
When I heard you screaming in February air,
and found you, a ball of fire with legs,
I understood you could no longer be my brother.
While preparing a presentation for the National Association for Poetry Therapy, Dumitru returned to writing she’d done on her brother and realized the depth of the material she’d accumulated over the years. “I had two-thirds of what became the book, written naturally out of my own desire to continue healing at deeper levels.”
By working through the trauma of that night, Dumitru says, she began to move beyond seeing David only through the lens of that one event. “I was no longer stuck at David’s death. I began to remember much more about him and our life together. It felt urgent to write that down because I didn’t want to lose his life.”
That drive to remember David’s presence led to the book’s most emotional centerpiece: a monologue from David’s perspective, written from the point of view of the last night of his life. “He just came pouring through to help me with that,” Dumitru says. “It started writing itself. And I think it was David saying, ‘No, do this. Do this. I will help you.’”
The inclusion of the monologue mattered to Dumitru, both as a writer and as a sister. “I had felt so disconnected by witnessing his suicide, being horrified by it and angry,” she says, but writing the monologue offered a new way of looking at David and his continued presence in her life. “In a way, I felt like I was collaborating with him,” she says.
By 2018, while fully immersed in poetic medicine, Dumitru found that she had enough material for a complete book, a realization that came full circle to what she’d felt and heard the night he died. “That’s been fulfilled,” Dumitru says. “I’m no longer dissociated. I feel whole again. It’s been the creative process, and it’s been this presence, Voice.”
Dumitru is careful when describing Voice, not wanting to ascribe it to a particular religious tradition; instead, she hopes to communicate that she sees it as the loving, creative spirit of the universe. Others, she says, have responded when she speaks openly about Voice. “People come up to me and say, ‘I’ve had a voice.’ The fact that I’m willing to talk about it seems to give others permission,” she explains. “It feels personal and universal at the same time.”
With the publication of the book, Dumitru feels more than ever that both Voice and David are with her. “He is spiritually very, very alive for me,” Dumitru says of the process of healing from his death and writing from his perspective. “We are very much an ongoing relationship, and it has continued to change.”
Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.
