Deborah Derrickson Kossmann
Nonfiction
Havertown, PA
Deborah Derrickson Kossmann’s essay “Tale of Two Primates” appeared as a Menagerie column in the New York Times Opinionator section in October 2014. She won the Short Memoir Competition at the 2007 First Person Arts Festival in Philadelphia and her essay, “Why We Needed a Prenup With Our Contractor” was published as a Modern Love column in The New York Times. “Taking a Step Forward” was also published as a Modern Love column in December 2011. Her other essays have appeared in journals and magazines including Tiferet, A Journal of Spiritual Literature, Psychotherapy Networker, and Families, Systems, & Health. In 2004, Deb received a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Poetry Fellowship and her poetry has appeared various literary journals. When she’s not writing, Deb is a clinical psychologist in full time private practice with offices in Langhorne and Haverford, Pennsylvania. As a leadership consultant with The Wolper Institute for Group Learning (www.wolperinstitute.com) she teaches at The Lauder School at Wharton and the State Department. She is married and a devoted servant to a geriatric cat.
While in residency at Ragdale, Deb will be working on revisions to the final draft of her memoir. What We Hold On To is the lyrical and compelling story of a mentally ill mother and her psychologist daughter, as they confront the mother’s compulsive hoarding of more than thirty years. The book opens with the recognition that the mother’s world is spinning out of control, creating a crisis. Through the horrifying process of going in and excavating her childhood home, the daughter opens up memories about her own past. In the midst of the chaos, she tries to make sense of this history and how her mother ended up in the nightmare she’s cleaning up for her. The archeological dig and all of the complications that arise from it, form the structure of What We Hold On To as it moves back and forth in time from the present situation to the daughter’s understanding about what’s lost, what’s found, and what’s been kept in both her own and her family members’ lives.
Featured Work
Excerpt from What We Hold On To:
Memoir by Deborah Derrickson Kossmann
At Marc’s insistence so we don’t expose ourselves to anything in the house, I put on my long- sleeved shirt so my arms are covered, and Marc does the same as we walk around to the back door. He unlocks it while I hold open the broken storm door. He pushes against it a little with his shoulder since it doesn’t seem to move easily. It opens a tiny bit, less than a foot. It’s so dark inside, it takes a minute for our eyes to adjust. The smell is terrible, a wave of funk hitting us like a storm cloud. I know that this door opens to the laundry room and there’s a washer and laundry sink to the right, and to the left is the water heater and door to the garage. Except you can’t see any of those things because everything is covered with stuff. There is no floor, there’s kind of a sloping step made of things: bags, unidentifiable solidified objects that are about a foot tall. As my eyes get used to the dim light, I see that the piles continue to rise up into a kind of wall between the laundry room and the rec room. The rec room is also dark because the heavy orange curtains are closed so only a tiny sliver of outside light seeps in.