Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Amanda Quaid

Poetry Unbound

Amanda Quaid, actor and dialect coach, shares her journey of writing poetry after being diagnosed with rare bone cancer in 2021. Her memoir-

Key takeaways

• Poetry allowed Amanda Quaid to confront illness not as a story of suffering but as an opportunity for curiosity and connection.
• Naming the disease—mesenchymal chondrosarcoma—became a sacred act of solidarity and shared understanding with others.

Main topics

• Poetry as healing during illness
• Medical language transformed into art

Notable quotes

"I decided that I wasn't going to tell a story to myself about it being good or bad. I wasn't going to inherit that story that everybody has about it being a curse."

Conclusion

Through poetry, Amanda Quaid transforms the clinical language of illness

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Hi friends, Padraig O'Tooma here. Thanks very much for listening to Poetry Unbound. In between Poetry Unbound seasons, and we have season 11 that'll start later in 2026, we have a whole host of interviews that I've done with poets over the last two years. Poetry Unbound in conversation, we call them. I've loved the opportunity to talk to poets about their craft, how they see the world through the lens of poetry, and what this art form does for them. These... Poetry Unbound in Conversation episodes deepened my curiosity about language and art. I trust they will for you too. Speaker 1 (0:41) In this episode of Poetry Unbound in Conversation, you'll be hearing from the poet, teacher and actor Amanda Quaid. She was raised in New York City, where she works as a dialect coach. She also teaches at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. And after working in theatre for most of her life, Amanda Quaid began writing poetry in 2023 as a way to work creatively with illness. Her debut collection, No Obvious Distress is out now with John Murray Press and was named Memoir of the Month and one of the best books of 2025 by the British newspaper The Independent. This conversation took place in May of 2026 at the Morgan Library in New York. Special thanks to Jennifer Coulter, the magnificent director of education and programmes at the Morgan. Brand new episodes of Poetry Unbound will be back later on this year. In the meantime, here I am with Amanda Quaid. Speaker 1 (1:42) Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Good evening, everybody. And you're all very, very welcome to Amanda and my personal library. Speaker 2 (1:51) Great Speaker 1 (1:52) joy to have you here. Thank you very much to Jennifer and to everybody at the Morgan for this beautiful opportunity to be here in this room of letters, this room of learning. Probably most of these books were written by people who spend time alone, which is one of the activities of writing, of course. In this room also we acknowledge a much older history. We're on Lenape land. We honour the land, the waterways, the peoples, the elders, past, present and emerging of Lenape people. So, Amanda Quaid, I am thrilled to talk with you about this magnificent book, No Obvious Distress. There are a whole variety of ways in which you've created poems out of medical charts. And to kind of chapter this book, if that's the right word, because it has gotten acclaim both for poetry and as memoir, because it's a memoir in poetry. And one of the earliest... found poems that you create in this, says the following, created from a medical chart. She is a story, a great occasion. So Amanda, could you tell us something of the story and great occasion of you? Speaker 2 (3:08) Well, thank you. It's a delight to be with you, Padraig, and all of you. I started reading those medical charts and... creating self-portraits out of them sort of on my own terms and that phrase jumped out to me a great occasion which came of course from the word occasionally probably about some horrible symptom Speaker 2 (3:37) The great occasions of my life have been around learning to love, learning to love well and better. I remember when I was a kid, I looked up the meaning of my name. It was like, it was a Latin. I had some chart of Latin and the meaning was she who will be loved. And I remember being a bit disappointed that it wasn't, you know. the brave dragon slayer or something really, you know, macho. But over the course of my life, I've tried to live up to that name to receive love and give love better. The great occasions of my life have been certainly the birth of my daughter eight and a half years ago and also marrying my husband who... has been a wonderful friend and a great support through all of this. I Speaker 1 (4:37) was wondering whether in looking at that, of the she, she is a great occasion. Speaker 1 (4:45) I wondered whether the she of that was you, but also not you. I'm thinking of the line from Mahmoud Darwish, you are you and not you at the same time. Speaker 2 (4:54) I Speaker 1 (4:54) wonder whether sometimes looking at these medical charts that were telling you something of you, you needed to fictionalize some versions of you. Speaker 2 (5:02) That's right. I think the palpable fear that was coming up every time I would look at them told me that there was something really fertile there to play with and to... take ownership of in a certain way. Several poems in the book, or at least one I'm thinking of, are written in the third person that way, because certainly early on with an extreme diagnosis, I felt a real alienation from the person I used to be or thought I used to be. And that person almost became she. Speaker 1 (5:36) Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 (5:40) When did the diagnosis come? And do you want to tell us a thing or two about it? We're not going to spend too much time talking about it. Speaker 2 (5:46) It came in 2021. My daughter was three. I'd had back pain for a number of years that, you know, everybody attributed to normal things. And we found, you know, a sizable mass that turned out to be rare aggressive bone cancer called mesenchymal chondrosarcoma. My doctors all pronounce that differently. I know, there's a poem about it. So really, I went from being somebody who didn't take aspirin, who my medicine chest looked like I ran a side hustle selling essential oils or something, and all of a sudden I was in this new world. Speaker 1 (6:29) Hmm. You wrote a poem about how to be a friend to the newly diagnosed. I wonder if you could read that. I'm curious about how you became a friend to the newly diagnosed as well. It's page 31. Speaker 2 (6:44) How to be a friend to the newly diagnosed. Before you try to pick me up, lie down with me a while. It's fine to cry. No need to insist it's not about you. Tell me the ways you will harbor my child. Show me women, arms woven like ropes, catching my girl as she slips from my grasp. Don't go on about the time they thought you had it too, but misread the scan. Don't remark on my protruding bones, my sallow skin. Don't call me your wake-up call. Do send peonies and easy reading fiction, know the names of my doctors, and do learn to say mesenchymal chondrosarcoma. Ask how to spell it. Please write it down. When I hear it in your mouth, mangled by most every doctor and nurse, you hitch your sturdy belt to mine and stride beside me up the lowering hill. Speaker 1 (7:55) There are so many of your great themes come across in this poem. And this poem is somewhat of an outlier because you don't have too many poems of advice in the book. So often they're narrative, but this is addressed to the you, you know, the you of the friend of the title or the implied friend of the title. Lie down with me. You know, there's an invitation to be in the body. I'm struck too by the old, almost magical and deeper than magical. primal necessity of naming in it. What is it about knowing that other people will name what it is that you have to name every day that was so important at the heart of that poem? Speaker 2 (8:34) I didn't know it was important until I was walking with a dear friend and I learned to say the name of the diagnosis and kind of make a joke about how unpronounceable it was and I had a little comedy routine as you do about all these things and I... I said it and I turned to her to make a joke and she had her phone out. And she said to me, mesenchymal, is that M-E-S or M-E-Z? And I was like, oh, that means so much. Speaker 1 (9:04) And Speaker 2 (9:04) I didn't know how much that would mean. Speaker 1 (9:07) So Speaker 2 (9:07) she taught me that. Speaker 1 (9:08) Yeah, she became familiar with what you had to become familiar with. Speaker 2 (9:12) Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:12) There's such power in naming. It's no wonder that so many sacred texts, some of which we're surrounded by, have... a great fascination and necessity with naming. There's something much more, there's nothing passing in that. I was really moved by that poem. What did it take for you to become that friend who could be good to yourself in the middle of all this? Speaker 2 (9:37) I decided three things really quickly. I decided that I wasn't going to tell a story to myself about it being good or bad. I wasn't going to inherit that story that everybody has about it being a curse. To me, it was a neutral ecological phenomenon that was happening to me. I decided that I would let it connect me to people instead of isolate me. And I decided that every time I was afraid, I would try to become more curious. And those three principles have guided me through this, through the woods of this. Speaker 1 (10:18) Yeah. Speaker 2 (10:20) We're Speaker 1 (10:20) going to talk about a bunch of those. Do you avoid language like battle? Speaker 2 (10:24) Yeah. Speaker 1 (10:24) Yeah. I do. What's the preferred choice? You don't even have to say why not battle, but I'm more curious about what it is you prefer. Speaker 2 (10:34) I say I'm living with this. I'm walking with this. I don't go so far as to say I'm dancing with this. I know some people do. But I say I'm working with this. I'm working with illness. Speaker 1 (10:52) The book is structured in a variety of chapters and all the chapters take their title from something that you extracted like a gold miner from some of the charts that you were given. And there's facsimiles of the charts or maybe they're fabricated, but they look like facsimiles of the charts the whole way throughout the book. Why did you do this as a poetry book rather than a memoir, you know, a straightforward prose memoir or play? Speaker 2 (11:21) Poetry allowed me to come at it slant, as Emily Dickinson would say, right? I didn't have to tell everything. I didn't have to, it wasn't just so head on. But the main thing I think was that there wasn't going to be a beginning, middle and end. To do a memoir, you need an arc. And to put an arc on it felt really artificial. What I was looking for, and I'd never written poetry before. I was looking for an art form that allowed me to be with uncertainty in a beautiful way and to be in the moment in a beautiful way. And I thought, well, poetry does that and I can start writing them for myself and that's it. Speaker 1 (12:04) Yeah. When you went looking through your medical charts for these chapter titles, did you know what you were looking for or did you allow the medical charts to guide you? Speaker 2 (12:14) I forget exactly how that... I think it was, I saw the word demonstrated and then I just