Author Archives: Kristin Rose Jutras, M.F.A

Kristin Rose Jutras attended Stanford University and received a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing with a minor in Biological Sciences; she has a love of contemporary fiction and nineteenth century poetry. At Stanford, Kristin was a reporter and photographer at The Stanford Daily. She has worked in science publishing at Pearson Education and The New York Times Digital. Kristin graduated with her MFA in Creative Writing and Communications at Fairfield University and was the Poetry Editor of Mason’s Road Literary Magazine for two semesters. Kristin taught Composition, Communications, and Poetry at Fairfield University and was previously the Communications and Creative Services Director at the Fralin Life Sciences Institute at Virginia Tech. She is now an Account Supervisor at TellMed Strategies, a woman-owned healthcare, life sciences, and biotech public relations agency.

WE SOMETIMES HEAR THE WORLD IN TECHNICOLOR

My dog and I are on the same 

SSRIs. We sometimes hear the world 

in technicolor. We hear the hum of the 

train tracks and feel responsible for 

rebuilding the rubble and hurt we pass 

by. I’ve been medicated since age 15; the 

movie Primary Colors made me cry at 

age 10. “Why can’t we just give the 

campaign money directly to the people 

who need it for education and food?” I ask 

my mom as we drive back from the movie 

theater in the Subaru, winding our way

under the Stony Creek train bridge, 

through the muted marshes. The world’s 

sadness seems to bellow from chipping

paint and wood siding, the world goes 

gunmetal gray, a muted splintering.

My boyfriend in graduate school told me

my emotional range was just too much 

for him as we sat on the beach made of 

shells. Razored mussels digging into my heels.

But there are certain bursts of color and hope in 

the scent of the purpled and orange sun or the 

sound of the dark blueberries growing in the 

humid air. The small spider, knitting the 

weighted silver strands on the underside 

of the kaleidoscoping light-dappled leaf,

things usually unseen.

I. Induction

It’s been forty-eight hours without food &

only ice chips, but I know I can do this for

you; I’ve been doing this for nine months,

the swollen hands and feet, & nose

that are not my own. My mother tells 

me to ask to doctor about my swollen nose;

“Is there anything they can do about it?”

The balloon priming didn’t work & fell out.

The white coats come in and ask again about 

my enigmatic cervix. “Is it always this hard to find?”

“We are ratcheting you up to the highest level of Pitocin.

We’ll know in six more hours whether it worked.”

The pain is searing, & they are asking me to move from 

side to side, but I can’t feel my limbs with the epidural. 

I can only smell antiseptic, dried blood. 

Can I do puppy pose for just twenty more minutes?

the Dilaudid fills my veins & my memory feels

like I am swimming deep under water. 

Aqua, blues, & greens, but I still feel this adjacent pain.

I don’t think I can hold for six more hours. I look at my husband

& say, “I’m done; I’m tapped out. We need

to move to the next option.”

That Blue in the Mountains

It’s the blue of pebbles at the 

bottom of the stream, in the

warm afternoon fish scales, a

reflection of the emerald ash

beetle at the creek of the deer,

another cracked robin’s egg,

It had started again. I felt

that old, familiar nausea rise

up from my belly,  and I began to

hope again. I was a flurry of pinning

baby nursery ideas to design

boards, shades of blue, that

blue in the mountains at

sunrise and dusk, imagining

filling up the empty bedrooms

upstairs with our future kids

and their laughter & sweet baby

smells. In May 2021, I had my

third early pregnancy loss. At age

39, I couldn’t help but think I

only have so many more chances. I

just wondered if perhaps I

was broken? Had I broken

myself? My husband and I have  

tried Clomid treatments, baskets of

needles and IVF; red biohazard sharps

containers stacked in the garage

 I wish for the shape of my future

children. I send this wish out into

the Universe, I reach towards that

blue, that blue in the mountains.

I Feel Bad About My Zoom Neck and Other Deep Thoughts from the Pandemic

There are so many things to feel bad about during a global pandemic, so in this youth-obsessed capitalist culture that cares nothing about over 323,000 US deaths and more about the billionaires’ bottom line, let’s talk about my zoom neck. 

There is a reason I own SO many scarves. Lighting got your neck at a weird angle where your neck starts to look all saggy, lined, and crepey? SCARF. 

Deep sense of impending doom and dread? I prescribe a hot, steamy shower and SCARF.

The SCARF is the second cousin of the MUMU and the first cousin of the PONCHO. We can delicately drape our bodies to mirage those unwanted pandemic pounds. A MUMU allows you to eat breakfast and second breakfast. Don’t get me started on third lunches—they are delicious. 

While I’m not wallowing in self-pity about the state of our necks and all those times in the 90s when I ran around without sunblock, sometimes I feel bad about my NETFLIX, HBO MAX, PRIME VIDEO, and HULU consumption. Can I just chalk it up to research for the screenplay I’ll never write?

I’ve just finished my second breakfast of the day, and I’m off to the interwebs to the buy more SCARVES! I’ll report back from the front lines shortly. 

~By Kristin Rose Jutras 

How to Hypnotize a Lobster will publish Fall 2020

My first collection of poetry, How to Hypnotized a Lobster, will be published with Atmosphere Press on November 15, 2020.  The book is now available for pre-order on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Hypnotize-Lobster-Kristin-Rose-Jutras/dp/1636495265/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3T3YT5A2Y5CSU&dchild=1&keywords=how+to+hypnotize+a+lobster&qid=1602855599&sprefix=how+to+hypnotize+a+lo%2Caps%2C148&sr=8-1!

HOLLYWOOD IS A PECULIAR PLACE

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Growing up, I always dreamed of moving to Hollywood and writing screenplays. I also dreamed of being a mermaid just like Daryl Hannah in Splash. I thought that Mermaiding was a possible career trajectory. O, and I wanted to be a doctor and a novelist. I still want to be all of those things, but my doctor tells me I must sleep, eat, rest, and exercise. These requirements apply to me as a “human woman.”

The more I think about Hollywood, the more perplexed I become. As a child I thought Hollywood seemed like the Land of Oz or Narnia. It was the place that transformed my beloved books into movies, a magical place. Oz and Narnia came from Hollywood as far as I was concerned as a 5-year-old director, actress, dictator. I assumed everyone must be super nice in Hollywood. You know, as nice as the munchkins in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy arrives in Munchkinland. As I grew older, I started to get some intel that this was not the case. I became aware of child actors having problems with drugs and alcohol. My mother somehow appropriately conveyed that Dorothy in real life did not come to a good end. As a 7-year-old, I could not understand this. This place was magical. It was in the same state as Disneyland. This place made the Parent Trap with Hayley Mills and ALL the Shirley Temple movies.

In 4th grade, when I had finished all my homework. I went up to my teacher Mrs. Light and said, “I’m bored! I need an activity!” She rolled her eyes and politely directed me to the library. “Kristin, you can pick out any play you would like and cast and direct it yourself.” This was the best assignment ever for 10-year-old Kristin. I chose Heidi and cast myself in the leading role. I then proceeded to hold tryouts on the playground and cast my closest friends in the leading roles. What I didn’t realize at the time is this is how Hollywood works. This was nepotism, although, sadly 10-year-old Kristin didn’t know that word. I was a slavedriver as a director, and we had rehearsal after school every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for 3 months. The Martha Stewart parents of the cast were enlisted to make costumes. I took over my mom’s home office and made programs. We did 3 performances. In my mind’s eye, these went pretty well. I wish I had proof, but sadly my brother or father taped over the footage of the play on VHS with some teenage mutant ninja turtle movie.

But, I digress. I thought living in Hollywood would perhaps be as easy as directing my 4th grade play. What I didn’t realize and nobody told me about is life gets sad. Other children can be cruel, and though I hope I wasn’t cruel in 4th grade, I think I was just bossy and pushy, I didn’t experience real cruelty until middle school and high school. 13-year-old Kristin was probably the worst version of herself.When I got into middle and high school it seemed as though everyone else had been handed a rule book or magical map of how to be cool or how to live, and I must have just been absent that day or playing my viola in a corner. As I went through high school and started college, I started to hear more about my beloved Hollywood and Disneyland. I watched “Pretty Woman” at age thirteen and thought, hmm, hold the phone, where Julia Roberts is living initially doesn’t look like the Hollywood I imagined, but the movie is saying this is part of Los Angeles. The movie also glamorizes the life of prostitution and turns it into a Cinderella story so it probably didn’t really help with my understanding of how the world works. I began to find out that the people who work at theme parks aren’t all that happy. I heard stories of the actors playing Pluto and Donald Duck hiding handles of Jack Daniels in the ceiling for relief between shifts. Yeah, happy people don’t do that.

I went to visit a friend at Yale my sophomore year of college. She told me about a fellow student who published  Yale’s Hottest Women Catalogue every fall. He spent every summer in Hollywood and was going to be a director. When I ran into him at a party, he told me all about the “Mattresses” he had encountered over the summer. At this point, I thought a mattress was a comfy, down feather bed covered entity. But, no, this guy told me “Mattresses” were models, actresses, and waitresses, and, as a director, he could just sleep with any of them whenever he wanted. It was then I realized there was something very wrong with Hollywood. As college and life progressed, the intel just kept coming.

My childhood friend wrote and sold a screenplay and moved to Hollywood. I would see him when I visited Santa Monica and when he came back to Connecticut for the summers. I would tell my friend about my plans to turn my book of short stories into a screenplay and maybe wanting to move to LA. He was encouraging of my writing, but told me “LA would eat your soul for breakfast, Kristin.” Firstly, I don’t think my soul would be very tasty, but that is besides the point. That sounded pretty ominous. So, I continue to sit here, in my room of my own in Virginia and write and make judgements. But, still a part of me dreams of Hollywood, that peculiar, terrifying place.

 

~by Kristin Rose Jutras

April is the cruelest month

By Spring semester my sophomore year of college, I could no longer get out of bed anymore. The world had lost its color again, and my biochemistry had betrayed me like clockwork.

At age 20, I had no vocabulary or self-awareness to express what was going on.

Ophelia

I had gone to the school counselor, I was on Zoloft, and I was seeing a therapist weekly. But, all I wanted to do was sleep; any type of activity was pain. The useless thoughts flooded my brain and nervous system again: I was no good, I was useless, I was a disappointment, I was a bad friend. I was unloveable. All I wanted was escape.

This had happened on a lesser scale the Spring before, but I had managed to go through daily activities and make it home to Connecticut for the summer to rest and recoup.

I didn’t want to go through that again publicly – which is what it felt like living in a sorority house with 60 other women. In 2001, mental health awareness, compassion, or support was not a thing. I was also a perfectionist, so that made it difficult to share any of my emotions in an authentic way. I felt ashamed and alone, and I wanted to go home and curl up in my bed for 30 years.

It is only with perspective, 18 years later, that I can look back on my 20-year-old self with kindness and compassion. I was sick and in the middle of a crisis; I took a leave of absence from college and went back to live with my family for a year.

One of the most challenging things about depression is it takes away my love of writing and creating. Then, it is hard to find words to articulate what I’m feeling. In writing this, I finally feel like I can lessen some of the power depression has over me.

By Kristin Rose Jutras

 

 

Flight of Icarus

Flight of Icarus

I knew what I was doing,

lifting over crosshatched stones,

grey and red, seams like tributaries

wondering what lived in the spaces

between those graveled stones,

twists  of light on the wind, saturated

and soft against my back, I

was a black cut-out figure

against the sky and wondered what

gnarled hand had woven this dream?

I saw the beveled labyrinth and minotaur.

The yellow scales of eagles’ feet, talons

blunted by wayward rocks.

The wax was fresh and the feathers

second hand. I’m sorry, Father.

I remember the month

I was sick as a boy, hot with fever

and you took me down to the

ocean’s rim so I could breathe again,

and we sat, trying to stop the waves.

But this day, I flew, feathered with fear,

clutching the broken compass

you had given me on my sixteenth birthday,

the antique glass cracked open,

the needle bent. North, South,

East, West, blending to one.

 

I flew towards what was warm

and what I felt was good.

The wax melted across my shoulders, my back,

Finally I had made a choice that was mine.

I fell past the cool waters into

seaweedy depths of kelp and coral.

The sun made sense.

The sea made sense.