The Lightning Room With Brennan Bestwick

Brennan Bestwick speaks about his poem “Surname NASA” in the December issue – infinite love, tethering space, and the anatomy of the universe.

1. I think there is a lot to say in this poem about ancestry, about what our forebears have built and left for us. Can you explain this at all? What’s one important or valuable piece of inheritance in your life, galactic or otherwise?

I’m very blessed to have entered a world surrounded by the family I have. Both my grandparents, the subjects of the poem, and parents, built a world for me full of endless encouragement and support.  I’m from a Midwest do-all-that-you-can-to-help-anyone-who-needs-it kind of family. I’ve inherited their humor, I hope to master its way of tackling the most trying times as gracefully as they do. A nature as good as theirs has a special gravity to it. I try to spin as brightly.

2. I see this theme, of older figures (here, grandparents, but I imagine it would serve any character with accumulated age and wisdom), painted as interstellar, as mingling and one with the hugest mechanisms of the universe. Tell me about this myth.

All the things my grandparents have seen and done are too big for this world, too big for them to understand just how powerful they’ve become from it.  I’m sure they’ve built some stars up there, filled some black holes I wasn’t ready for, but they’d never tell me if they did, they wouldn’t want to worry anyone.

3. There is some really breathtaking imagery in this poem, small moments that become huge. Can you describe one moment in your life that has suddenly made you consider the grander (the grandest) scheme of things, in a universal sense?

When my mother’s mother passed, it was a sadness I wasn’t prepared for, as these things often go. The poem is really about both sets of grandparents, the two that have passed, and the two still living. My maternal grandmother had an amazing amount of love to give and though it was never in question, it seemed to reveal itself even more when she died. It was so clear in the faces of those she held dear, just how great this hold she had on us all was. Eventually you learn that time really does come to a close. It makes all the big things feel a little smaller. It’s looking at all the universe through only the telescope lens. I’d never understood how the size of things can be altered so quickly like that previously. Despite the end that comes, some things have this miraculous way of pulling through even time, like she still does. The impact she had may have left us a bit cratered, but it gave us more space to hold all the love. It’s the anatomy of the night sky in that way, what’s beyond the surface is remarkable and overwhelming as plain (though beautiful) as it may look some evenings.

4. Which space exploration programs have you been excited about lately? Where do you see us going in the future?

NASA recently revealed plans to capture an asteroid and tow it into the moon’s orbit. With the asteroid close and somewhat controlled, they have easier means for studying it. It also provides them the opportunity to modify the heavens, making things movable for developing permanently manned outposts in space in the future. What I’ve read of it is fascinating. I think there’s plenty more to learn about Mars and we’re well on our way with Curiosity. I think children are going to want to be astronauts again.

5. Describe a trip to a space-related monument, museum, or other site.

I’ve only ever been to the Cosmosphere here in Kansas and that was as a boy, too much of it I’ve forgotten. I hope to return soon. My bucket list for space monument and museum visits is growing.

6. When you look into the night sky on a cloudless night, where are your eyes drawn first? What do you see?

It’s still hard to know where to start, though it’s probably always been the moon. I still see a face in it, the same one I’ve always seen. I’m not sure what that face looks like exactly, but I’m sure it’s wise.