Still With Us in Words

Misty Mallory grew up in a world of poetry. Her father’s life has literally been defined by it. She embraced it as a way to express herself. And now, posthumously, a collection of her work is being published.

It’s with mixed emotions that her father, poet Lee Mallory, will read from “Two Sides Now,” which contains 23 of Misty’s brief, free-verse poems, Thursday evening in Laguna Beach.

Misty had learned in June that a Laguna Beach press would publish her first collection of poems. That was only a week before the 23-year-old former Newport Beach resident was released from an acute-care hospital in New Jersey where she had spent a month and a half being treated for a serious mental illness.

On Sept. 22, while in an outpatient program, Misty took her own life.

The debut reading from his daughter’s book, Mallory said, will be a joyous occasion for those who worked on it and for those who knew Misty.

“But,” he acknowledged, “it will be the hardest reading of my life because Misty will be there with us in the sense of her presence coming forth in the words.”

Joining Mallory in reading Misty’s work will be poets Bil and Carole Luther, John Harrell, Neil Miranda, Curt Last and Misty’s 20-year-old sister, Natalee Mallory.

“Two Sides Now,” which takes its name from one of Misty’s poems, was published by the Luthers’ FarStarFire Press, which publishes the work of Southern California poets. (Misty’s book includes six short poems by her father, two of which the Santa Ana College English teacher and poetry-reading producer wrote for her.)

“I’d read a number of pieces Misty had written and was very impressed,” Carole Luther said. “We decided to go ahead and publish the book posthumously because she’s a damn good poet. I found her work very intriguing.”

Mallory assembled the manuscript in November, sorting through not only Misty’s poems but also her personal correspondence, which, he said, “was voluminous.”

“Going through the correspondence was harder,” he said. “With the poetry I can be more objective.”

Mallory finds some comfort in the publication of his daughter’s poems.

“In the same way I tell my [writing] students, ‘If you bother to write down your emotions or feelings, if you take the time to write a poem, if you create a short story--whatever you do--that work is then able to transcend you, the writer, to make you immortal’: the work becomes permanent and goes beyond our very finite lives.”

As he read Misty’s poems, Mallory said, “I knew that had to be true because now she exists only in her writing and, of course, in our memories.”

Mallory describes Misty as having been extremely “bright and compassionate, but with a bit of an attitude, in the sense that she insisted on setting her own life agenda.”

At the end of her sophomore year at Newport Harbor High School, declaring to her father that she had learned everything she possibly could in high school and that she wanted to go to college, the 16-year-old took a proficiency test that allowed her to get out early. She immediately enrolled at Orange Coast College, where she did well in classes ranging from calculus to English composition.

She spent the past three years traveling and writing. In January, she moved in with her mother in Cranford, N.J.

Mallory said Misty was diagnosed with “an acute mental illness” in mid-May. The supervising psychiatrists at the hospital and the outpatient program had different diagnoses: one thought Misty was schizophrenic; the other believed she was manic-depressive.

About a month after Misty was hospitalized, Mallory began showing some of her poems to several published poets who, he said, were impressed by her talent. In June, the Luthers said they were interested in publishing Misty’s poems.

After leaving the hospital in late June and beginning the outpatient program, Misty moved back to her mother’s and started gathering poems for the book.

“She was very excited about the book; she was very flattered,” said Misty’s mother, Adell Hawkinson, who has since moved back to Orange County. “That was a high point for her.”

The family, Hawkinson said, was “hoping it would keep her hopeful” and help her realize she could get well.

Hawkinson said Misty had been depressed before entering the hospital and showed some manic signs, such as staying up all night working on her computer. But except for panic attacks, which she began experiencing when she was 18, Misty had always been “just a wonderful, bright, motivated girl.”

Mallory said his daughter’s admission to the hospital for mental illness “fell on my head like a bomb.”

In a letter he wrote to the supervising psychiatrist, Mallory said there were two things the hospital should know about his daughter: she is extremely smart--”maybe too smart for her own good”--and that because of her religious studies she is not afraid of death.

Mallory recalled that Misty once told her sister that “we’re all part of the universe” and that with death “we just move on to a different life plane.”

Although Misty took the medications prescribed by her psychiatrists, she abhorred drugs and chemicals, Mallory said. Her death, he believes, “became a quality-of-life decision.”

“She told me, ‘I think I’m losing my creativity, Dad; my intellect is becoming dulled because of all this medication.”’

The last time Mallory spoke to Misty, on the phone, was the week before she died.

“Every time I talked to her, she was upbeat and positive,” he said. “She never wanted to worry us.”

On the afternoon of Sept. 22, she called her mother at work to say she was going for a bike ride.

Her body was found the next day about 15 minutes from Cranford in the midst of a circular grove of trees in a nature conservancy. Her death was ruled a suicide.

She was carrying just two things in her purse: her identity card and a poem.

The poem is the last one in the book and is marked, “Final Poem.” It’s titled “Withstands All Tests of Time.” The last five lines are:

“I am in the clear blue sky,

in storm, I make it black

But soon I’ll stay on high,

bright, for I am conquest

And withstand all tests of time.”

Mallory said his daughter also left “a beautiful, positive note” for her family. A portion of the note, which was found in her computer, is included in the book.

“She said simply, ‘Everything I have goes with me; I go happily for myself. After all, whatever happens, we’ll always be connected, whenever you call me, I’ll be there.’ ”

The note ends with Misty’s request, “Please share this letter and my work.”

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The reading from “Two Sides Now,” hosted by John Gardiner, will be at the Laguna Beach Brewing Co., 422 S. Pacific Coast Highway, Laguna Beach, at 8 p.m. Thursday. (949) 494-2739.