July 7, 2021
Lara Ehrlich
Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest today is Kate Baer. Before I introduce Kate, thank you all for tuning in, and please chat with us during the interview, so we can weave your comments into our conversation. If you enjoy the episode, please also consider becoming a patron or patroness on Patreon to help keep the podcast going. You can look up details on the writermothermonster.com website. Now, I’m excited to introduce Kate. Kate Baer is an author and poet based on the East Coast. Her first book, What Kind of Woman, was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and featured in publications like Harper’s, Vogue, the Chicago Review, and the New York Times. Her second book, I Hope This Finds You Well, is a collection of eraserpoems created from notes she received from followers, supporters, and detractors, an art form that reclaims the vitriol from online trolls and inspires readers to transform what is ugly or painful in their own lives into something beautiful. As Publishers Weekly said, “In these confident and fearless poems, Baer suggests that the deepest and most vulnerable love is found in life’s imperfections.” Kate lives in Pennsylvania, where she has four kids, ages 10, 7, 5, and 3, and she describes writer motherhood in three words as “determined, focused, strong.” Now please join me in welcoming Kate. Hi, Kate.
Kate Baer
Hi, thank you for having me.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you for joining me. I’m really excited to talk to you, as a longtime fan of your work through Instagram and now through your wonderful books. Let’s start with your three words that describe writer motherhood. Tell us about them: determined, focused, strong.
Kate Baer
If you’re a mother and a writer, I think that you have to have some determination, you have to have some strength there to both make time and to use that time to write. And women are notoriously wonderful multitaskers, and I think sometimes it can be a detriment because you’re writing but you’re also thinking about lots of other things that have to do with household and relationships and children, which can sometimes be a detriment, but I also think it can be to our benefit. I think what I found with so many women and mothers who are writers is that when we do set aside time to get something done, we have a great ability to. When you’re a mother, it forces you to have to use your time as wisely as possible. I think having the determination comes from there.
Lara Ehrlich
In a second, we’ll talk about how you managed to write two books with four small children, but first, tell us about your kids a little bit. They range in age from 10 to 3. My daughter’s 5, sort of in the middle there. What have you learned from experience from 10 years of motherhood, with a 3-year-old still in the house? That’s a lot of experience.
Kate Baer
I think to hold things very loosely is something that I’ve learned. Behaviors and hard times and things that are going well are always going to change. Nothing is forever, and that’s good and bad. You’re in such a wonderful year—the second you announce that on your Facebook feed, that will change. And same with the bad stuff. There’s been so many horrible stages and things that have happened over the last 10 years, but they’re not forever. And it’s hard to see that in the moment. It’s still difficult. I will say that it is easier now to have a 3-year-old than it was eight years ago, because I know that he will not always dump out all the goldfish and then purposely step on them, like he did today, all over the kitchen for me to clean up. I know he’s not going to do that when he’s 10. I think that is something that I’ve learned.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, I remember the early days when my daughter was just learning how to sleep by herself, and then she’d have a hard night and come into bed with us. My husband was so concerned that we were ruining her forever, like if she sleeps in bed with us, she’ll never sleep alone again. I was like, she’s not gonna be, like, 30 and sleeping with her parents. But it does. It kind of feels like everything is so important the first time.
Kate Baer
Yeah, everything feels very precious and important, the first time you do anything. There’s so many life lessons to be learned when you have kids. There’s just so many things to learn. I feel like you learn more as a parent. You’re trying to teach your kids all these things, but really, you’re just teaching yourself. You want them to be patient, but really, you’re teaching yourself to be patient, and you want them to hit all these marks, but really, you’re just teaching yourself that that stuff doesn’t matter. I think that’s something you have to learn over and over again.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, that sounds familiar to me. Did you always want to have kids?
Kate Baer
Yeah, I always wanted to have kids. I didn’t necessarily want to have four kids. That was not planned. But yeah, I always planned to have kids.
Lara Ehrlich
What was your own childhood like? What was your mom like?
Kate Baer
My mom was a teacher. Both my parents worked. I had one sister. We lived in the Philly suburbs. I had a pretty quiet childhood. Definitely some ups and downs, like like anyone else. That’s such a hard thing to describe, a whole childhood in a piece. I don’t know what else to say about it. There are definitely things that I don’t write about or talk about in interviews, as far as my family goes. I try to keep that private. But as far as my childhood, it was really nice to have a sister. We were really close. Obviously, we’re still close. And my house was so much quieter than mine is. It was just two quiet girls. I have three boys and a girl. It’s really loud all the time. Much different in that way.
Lara Ehrlich
I’m also intrigued by people who always knew that they wanted to be parents. I’ve said this before to other guests: that was not my experience. It took me a very long time to come around to the idea of having kids, even though my childhood was wonderful. My mother was a great example. It felt like such a commitment and something that would take me away from writing. I just wanted to be a writer.
Kate Baer
Yeah, I always wanted to be a writer. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a writer or a mother. I’ve never really thought about those two things together, but they have gone together in a way I wouldn’t have known or predicted as a child or a teenager or young adult. Both of those things are nothing like I thought they would be, but I’m lucky enough that they both came true.
Lara Ehrlich
Okay, so we’ll have to get to how they are different than your expectations in a second. But you never really thought about them together, and how they might complement each other or conflict with one another? I find that so interesting, because it was what consumed me about my decision to become a mother was how that would impact my writing. Were they just separate things for you? How did you consider those two parts of yourself growing up?
Kate Baer
I think as a child and a teenager, I wasn’t necessarily thinking about the strain of motherhood impacting writing, because I wasn’t aware of that or understanding that. How can you know what it’s going to be like to be a mother? I had kids pretty young. I was in my late 20s, so I guess I just went in feet first, in that endeavor. Writing has been something that I’ve done since I was a child, so that, to me, feels like I’ve always done that. I always knew I would do that in some capacity—maybe not published books, but I always was doing it. I never stopped. And motherhood also felt like something that I would always do. I honestly didn’t question either. It just felt like something that was always going to happen, which is weird, I guess.
Lara Ehrlich
No, I think everyone’s so different. I always thought it was weird that I couldn’t figure it out, until I was 35, 34. I was finally like, “Okay, I guess I can have a child now.” Who knows.
Kate Baer
Yeah, everybody’s different. Mine just went feet first and try to figure it out later, which has been a real journey. It wasn’t like I always wanted to have kids, and then I had them, and was like, “Okay, this is great.” It was more like, I’m having kids, and they’re great, but wow, what a shit show. I have to figure all this out and figure out how to have time for myself, figure out how to also have a career. So, yeah, I don’t know. Think about it first, probably.
Lara Ehrlich
I don’t think it’s any easier to think about it first, because it’s so individual. I think everyone I’ve talked to has essentially said it’s a shit show. Talk me through the shit show part of trying to figure out how to balance everything and whether you actually achieved balance, which, I think, is maybe elusive.
Kate Baer
I think the magical unicorn balance of motherhood and career is completely impossible. I think you can have it all but just not at the same time necessarily. There’s always something. There’s always someone’s losing in those scenarios, so I think it’s just coming to terms with that. I’ve had my share of angst over being away from my kids and also being with my kids too much, and finding that balance is a constant thing. I don’t think that anyone achieves it and then just lives their life. I think that changes all the time with kids and their needs and their ages and what’s going on. Things can change at any second. Some kids have anxiety, someone’s having a hard time, I’ve got a deadline coming up—there’s just so much that changes on a day-to-day basis. Sure, I’ve had times of balance and feeling great about things, but families are so fragile, people are so fragile, careers are so fragile. It’s just something that I constantly have to work on, and I think everyone works on it—especially if you’re balancing kids and writing. It’s just something that is always on the docket to figure out on a day-to-day basis.
Lara Ehrlich
Totally. Tell me a little bit more about writing What Kind of Woman. What was the timespan of writing the poems? And can you take us through some logistics of how you would actually write while mothering?
Kate Baer
Sure. I wrote that book in a year. I had maybe a quarter of it at the start of the publishing process. I pitched that book with maybe a quarter of it done. Then I read it over the course of the following year, like January to January. And it was great. I’ve been writing personal narrative for 10 years on the internet, but I’ve also been working on a thriller fiction novel. It’s so cliche to say, but when I wrote What Kind of Woman, it felt like everything I’d ever done was leading up to this, and I had been circling it and just not ever doing it. I’ve been circling these topics and doing all these other things, and then when I sat down to write What Kind of Woman, it was, like, here it is—this is what I’ve been waiting for this whole time. All these things I always wanted to say. I was just dancing around it. To sit down and write it felt like scratching an itch. It was difficult, but it was also right there under the surface. I didn’t have an office—we just moved in a few months ago. When I wrote What Kind of Woman, we lived in a 1,200-square-foot house with six people in it, so I wrote it in Panera, or I wrote it in the Panera parking lot, using their wifi during the pandemic. That was my second book. It was wild. It was the most uninspiring environment, and yet, it was I was very focused. It’s kind of hard to look back and tell you how I how I wrote it or the process. I spent a lot of hours there, spent a lot of hours staring at a screen and panicking there, but it happened, and it was a wild experience, and then to be done and have this huge thing happen to everyone else—the pandemic. It feels like a lifetime ago. Pre-pandemic times feel like so long ago.
Lara Ehrlich
What was it like to have the book come out in the midst of a pandemic?
Kate Baer
I had to spend a few weeks really crying about not having a book tour and some shallow things, but it was not a big deal. My family was safe. My husband was still able to work. I was still able to work, all the things. We were fine. I spent some time mourning that, and I felt very sorry for myself. But when the book actually came out, it was great. I just did this kind of thing from home, and it was successful and wonderful. But it was also strange because I couldn’t go anywhere. I didn’t see my book in the bookstore for six months after it came out. It was a very strange experience that ended up being great. People really turn to poetry during difficult time.
Lara Ehrlich
The reception has been amazing for the book. We all hear “poetry doesn’t sell” and “people don’t read poetry.” Clearly, that is not true. More people should read poetry, but that doesn’t mean that no one is. Tell me a little bit about the reception of this book. When your New York Times interview came out, I had about five or six different friends email me the link for the show, like, “Okay, so here’s your next guest.” What that been like? What expectations did you have for the book, and what has the reception been like for you?
Kate Baer
I don’t know if I had expectations for the book. My hope was that I would earn back my advance—which just means sell some books to people besides my family and my friends. I did. I wasn’t thinking about the New York Times bestseller list only because I’m such a baby writer in that way. I’ve been writing since I’ve been in second grade, but I didn’t know the logistics of it or even the possibility of it. It was not on my radar. It sounds like I’m making that up. It was so exciting. A few days leading up to it, my publisher was mentioning it, and then I was like, “Oh my gosh, is this something that I should be thinking about? Should I be worried about it?” But in general, I didn’t have that expectation for the book, because I didn’t think that was a possibility for poetry. The reception was far more than I ever imagined. And it was wonderful. I will say, though, that it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t. I still have to load the dishwasher five times a day and sit down and write and experience writer’s block and imposter syndrome and sadness and take care of my kids and try to figure out childcare. The moment I found out I was No. 1 on the bestseller list was a life-changing moment. I cried. But then, I had to go give the kids a bath. Do you know what I’m saying? It’s like, yes, it was so great, and it’s so wonderful to receive messages from people that this book has impacted, but at the same time, nothing’s different.
Lara Ehrlich
I wonder if that’s something about having kids, too. They sort of keep you grounded. They don’t know what that means. They don’t care. You can show them your book, and they’re like, “Oh, cool. Can I read your next one?” No, not for five years.
Kate Baer
Have you seen the movie Soul? I think about that movie a lot. There’s that moment where he comes out of the jazz club, like, “What’s next?” And the other jazz musician who’s had success is kind of like, “This is it.” You know? She kind of gives this parable of the fish that is looking for the ocean and the other fish are like, “You live in the ocean.” “This is just water—I want to go to the ocean.” “You’re in it.” I feel that all the time, kids or no kids. I think people who have found success in any field go through that cycle of waiting to feel happiness over success and really, that’s not going to give you happiness—moments of happiness, but in general, it’s not. That’s not what’s fulfilling. I thought I knew that until I went through it. For me, I have to learn everything the hard way, every single thing. Everything in the publishing world, everything about writing a book, everything about having kids, I have to learn everything the hard way. I had to do the worst job and then experience the pain of that. There’s a certain amount of emptiness that follows success. I think it’s easy to wait to feel this “moment of arrival,” which does not come. That has also been part of it.
Lara Ehrlich
I’ve heard so many people say that. They ask if you’ll be satisfied after you publish a book, and so many writers say no. It’s kind of like, well, now I have to write the next book—especially in a society or culture that judges you on the last thing that you did, and where there’s this pressure to do the next thing and the next thing and to be productive. It’s antithetical to creativity, I think, sometimes.
Kate Baer
Yeah. Social media, also, is such a creativity killer, when you constantly feeling that you have to perform, because if you perform well, then your books will sell. I really had to try to remove myself from that and give myself boundaries, because it can be such a buzzkill, constantly trying to perform.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, I want to get to social media in a second, but do you want to read a poem first, from What Kind of Woman?
Kate Baer
Oh, sure. This is a mother podcast, and so I can pull from a section that talks about motherhood. I’ll read a poem called “Stronger Than You Know.” I wrote this for my friend, Heather.
My friend’s young daughter tells her mother, “You’re stronger than you know.” We repeat this, even though it doesn’t make sense. We say it to cheer each other up, we say it knowing how much harder it is that versus then one suggests it was always inside you. The other suggests it’s better you’ve learned the point and slip either way. We tell our daughters they can be anything. We call them worrier, fierce, and brave, as if they arrive in working fields to fight off our old demons. And when they suffer, which they do, we offer our constellations. This is part of it. Take a deep breath. Look it up in your life.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you. I love that one. I mean, the whole book. Anyone listening who has not read this book, please, go get it. Let’s talk a little bit about the sections of the books. You said there’s the motherhood section. Can you talk a little bit about putting a collection together, for anyone who’s listening and wondering what that process is like. Is it organic? Did you strategically think, “I need another one about motherhood here”? How did that all come together?
Kate Baer
Yeah, at the end, there was a little bit of that, although most of it was reading a bunch and then my editor looking for themes and then breaking them up into sections. I think it was the middle section, part two, that needed some more, so I did try to focus on writing about relationships a little more at that point. But in general, it was more just writing poetry and then her and I putting it together
Lara Ehrlich
I’m interested in the editor relationship, too, and how the book came to your editor. What was the route by which you published this book? You mentioned you had a few poems to start.
Kate Baer
I got an agent many years ago. Her name is Joanna. She’s incredible. I was writing pieces for Huffington Post that went viral, and she reached out to me and asked if we could work together. For years, we worked together. I was trying to write this novel, and she was just very encouraging, almost like a mentor to me, just someone to have in my corner. When I approached her with poetry, I really held my breath because I thought, my gosh, first I was doing personal narrative, and then I was doing this novel, and now I’m going to ask about poetry, and I think sometimes with poetry or to sell poetry, the agent doesn’t have to represent you, you represent yourself. She said yes, obviously, and she took that tiny manuscript that I had started and started pitching it to publishers during the summer—which you’re not supposed to do, because in summer, all the publishers go to lunch, basically, all day long and don’t care about you. It was very nerve racking. I lost so much sleep. I had choice, though, which is not always the case, between two publishers. I went with HarperCollins. and a woman named Mary is my editor. I felt like she understood my vision for this book, and it’s been great.
Lara Ehrlich
It’s so exciting and I think inspiring to other writers. The gatekeepers can be so intimidating in publishing—the publishers and then the agents and just all the different levels that you go through. I think it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by that and be afraid to try things, like to try going from fiction to poetry. It’s like, well, this is what I want to write, and do you want to work with me on it? And clearly, there are some who do, who are risk takers and who care about the work above all, so that’s really inspiring to hear.
Kate Baer
Yeah, I think you have to be your own best advocate in those situations. Again, something I learned the hard way. If you’re not selling yourself, nope. Nobody cares about me. Nobody cares. If you’re a writer in general, you’re the one who has to care. I think half the battle is talking yourself into being the advocate, being the one who believes in the work. It can be difficult because I don’t know many writers who don’t struggle with the feeling inadequacy. I think half of it is just believing, at least faking that you believe in what you’re doing.
Lara Ehrlich
Now there’s some performance involved, which leads back to social media and the performative aspects of social media. Tell me about the personal narrative that went viral. Let’s start there. The one the agent found you through.
Kate Baer
Okay, sure. It was a piece called “When You’re Tightly Wound.” I wrote it when my first one was a baby. It was talking about the feeling of being very tightly wound as a mother, trying to write, trying to be a woman outside of being a mother, but also feeling like there’s no space. It was very first-time mom vibes, for lack of a better description. I think it really resonated with people. I don’t know where that is at this point. It was short. But people could see themselves in it.
Lara Ehrlich
Okay, well, after this interview, I’m going to see if I can find it and put it on our channel.
Kate Baer
I know I did ask them to take all those pieces down on Huffington Post. I don’t know about you, but when I read things that I wrote 10 years ago, it’s not that I want to censor as much as I don’t really need to be quoted over and over things that I said 10 years ago, so I actually had all that stuff taken down. It was a really hard decision, because I loved a lot of the pieces that I wrote, and I have them somewhere, probably, but the internet keeps record of everything, for better or for worse. It’s a constant battle of letting go of ego and also being protective.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, and a lot has changed in 10 years online, too, as far as where those boundaries are. Take me through your internet persona, from that point, when your piece went viral, to recently when you’ve actually started to turning responses via social media to make art out of them.
Kate Baer
I started a blog, as you do, when I was only, I want to say, 23. I was very bored at my office job, my first job out of colleges so I started a little website where I wrote short stories and little feminist essays, as you do. And that’s when I first started encountering what I call strangers on the internet, not because it had a big following—I had a readership of, like, 25—but sometimes my website would randomly come up in a search result. Then I’d have Steve from Missouri, write, like, “Show your tits”—stuff like that. I was like, oh my gosh, wow. Delete. And from then on, as readership grew, of course that comes up—that’s just part of being on the internet—and my MO is always, like, “What? No. This is my space.” Delete. I carried that through any platform. About a year ago, my book was about to come out, so I was getting a lot of messages. I was trying to figure out what my boundaries were. Then we had such a horrible thing happen in our nation’s history, which, unfortunately, is very common, but George Floyd was murdered. That was a very contentious time, of course, on the internet in general. I had posted something about police reform. A woman was upset with that, so she wrote me an angry message. And again, like I said, normally, I just hit delete or whatever. That day, just on a whim, I was looking at it, and the words kind of rearranged in front of me. I took a screenshot and kind of plotted it out and made a poem out of it and posted it at the end. The response to that was very unexpected. People really connected with this. There’s a lot of people out there who are at odds with people on the internet. I started seeing poetry everywhere—my kids’ worksheets and billboards and my spam mail—and I started to make these eraser poems, which was like a party trick. Like, I can do this and people seem to like it and it is fun. I never expected to publish a whole book of them. I was asked a few times, and I said no, and then I finally said yes, and I’m proud of the book. However, it was difficult to write. It was during COVID. It was horrible to look at these messages for long amounts of time. I don’t anticipate writing another one. I think people really connect with them because everyone can find a moment in history for themselves of feeling attacked for what they believe, or even getting constant advertisement for losing weight or looking younger. I think that is what speaks to people who are so tired. Women are so tired. I have noticed that more during the pandemic. We’re just really tired. I think a lot of the response to this book and to those poems is born out of that. It was a much different experience than writing What Kind of Woman, only because I was tired, too. I don’t want to read, over and over, messages from Steve talking to me about anti-feminist rhetoric and women in the White House. I just wanted it to be over. And I’m glad it’s over. Like I said, I don’t really anticipate doing this for the rest of my life, but who knows. I could have never predicted I would write poetry. It’s been a very unexpected journey, but I hope people like it.
Lara Ehrlich
I’m sure they will. I have to say, other than the New York Times article, that was my entry into your work. There was a poem where you got a message from a man who was talking about his daughters and how he was going to raise that one. Please read that one. That is, I have to say, one of the most powerful things I read in a very long time. I shared it with everybody I knew. I’d love for you to read that. And let’s talk about it.
Kate Baer
Sure. This is from I Hope This Finds You Well. It’s kind of hard to read out loud, because the poem is visual. This is a message I received, and then this is the poem I made from it. I’ll read it in order. “When Chad Is Dead” is what the poem is called.
He writes, “I think it’s funny how much you hate men and then go ahead and have this husband like he doesn’t apply. Not buying your book, but if I was, I would get it from my daughters to show them how not to be. Even though you’ll never see this, it’s worth sharing. Not all women think like you or believe men are inherently against women. They might even say they appreciate men. Can’t fathom this? Maybe read a book outside your What Kind of Woman bubble. Sincerely a man who believes his daughters can be both independent and polite.”
This is the poem: “It’s funny how men go ahead and have daughters, even though they can’t fathom what daughters can be.”
Lara Ehrlich
That is just incredible, how he turned this guy’s musings on the politeness of women and what daughters should be, and he has no idea what daughters could actually be. It makes me tear up. Very successful poem.
Kate Baer
Thank you.
Lara Ehrlich
Do you ever get people writing you back after you create an eraser problem from their message?
Kate Baer
Oh, I blocked them.
Lara Ehrlich
Do you block them before you post the poem?
Kate Baer
Yeah, I do.
Lara Ehrlich
I don’t have an answer to this, and I don’t expect you do, but I wonder what inspires people to write this kind of message to a stranger on the internet. And what it is about you that draws them in. What is it that they see in you that it’s like, “I need to engage with her and tell her all the ways in which she is damaging children or men.”
Kate Baer
I have a lot of theories. I think it’s best read this book and maybe come up with your own theory. I think we’re all fragile people. It’s not just men; it’s also women. I think that when we find others who maybe think differently or look differently or talk differently, there’s this threatening aspect. I think that, especially women go against the grain a little bit are very threatening to other people, especially women of color. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many people who receive volumes more messages and ugliness than me. I think it’s feeling threatened, feeling your lifestyle threatened or your value set threatened, that really sets people off. I think for a lot of us, it’s hard to imagine sending a message like that. I would be so embarrassed to send that message to someone. But if you’re pushed to a certain point, it’s maybe a way to blow off some steam. I don’t know.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, I don’t know. Something about the anonymity of the internet. I guess that’s been written about or posited, that people feel comfortable behind the screen.
Kate Baer
Right. Yeah. Absolutely. That really adds to it. I’ve had some people say some really rude things to my face but nothing like what was emailed or sent messages about.
Lara Ehrlich
I think people don’t think about the human on the other end who’s receiving messages, because I think if you did, if you were face-to-face with somebody, and you lay into a person like that, that forces you to confront them as a human. But you said you’ve had people respond to you about writing face-to-face, too?
Kate Baer
I was at a classroom, and a former classmate came up to me who doesn’t normally read women writers and said he was gonna give me a chance. That’s not super aggressive or threatening, but it’s rude and annoying. There have been versions of that throughout my friend and family circles, because that’s just what it’s like to be a woman writer. I think that’s what people are responding to—feeling that and recognizing all the micro-aggressions that can lead up to a message like that.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah. How would you want What Kind of Woman to feel like? Did you have a feeling that you were tapping into for this book? And then we’ll talk about the second person.
Kate Baer
No, with What Kind of Woman, it was a mix of love and rage, which, of course, are so close to each other. Yeah, just a lot of love towards people in my life, friends and my children. Even my husband, who I do love, and also the rage that comes along with being married and being a mother and the expectations of those things. I felt both of those emotions.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, I think it really comes through and in all the pieces of the book, love and rage and how they work together. That’s kind of motherhood, right there: love and rage. I had some love and rage this morning. So: same question about I Hope It Finds You Well.
Kate Baer
Oh, I felt sad. If I’m being honest, I felt really sad. Do you hear him on the mic?
Lara Ehrlich
Just a bit.
Kate Baer
What if I paused for just a second?
Lara Ehrlich
I will share Kristin Barrow Keith, who was on the show a few weeks back now, says, “So excited Kate Baer is with you tonight. Love her work.” Me, too. Absolutely. And when she comes back, maybe we’ll have her read another poem for us.
Kate Baer
I’m sorry, my 4-year-old is turning 5 on Friday, and he has yet to conquer the bathroom. He was calling me, and I thought it better for me just attend to him.
Lara Ehrlich
You know what? We can talk about that for a second. My almost-5-year-old—same thing. She’s going to camp in two weeks, and I’m kind of like, maybe you should know how to do certain things in the bathroom. So, we’re going through the same thing.
Kate Baer
I’ve probably done 100 interviews and had not been interrupted yet, but I knew it was bound to happen. Because when you’re doing book tours from home, that’s just gonna happen. Anyway. I Hope It Finds You Well, I felt pretty sad the whole time. I probably shouldn’t say that. My publisher would probably be like, “You should say something nicer.” It was sad the whole time. But it doesn’t feel sad now. It just felt sad when I was writing it. And there’s some positive pieces in there, too. It’s about half and half, because we felt like it couldn’t just be a big downer book, so they asked me to put some positive ones in there, too. So, it’s not all sad. There’s some light in there.
Lara Ehrlich
I can see how it would be a sad book to write. Like you said, if you have to engage with these messages in such depth and with such concentration, that is hard. That’s grueling. But even like the one that you read us, I think you turned it into something so beautiful and hopeful and inspiring, so I don’t know if that counts as one of the sad ones or one of the happy ones.
Kate Baer
Yeah, it does. That does really help.
Lara Ehrlich
I’m excited to see how people will respond to it. What are you working now? Are you working on something completely different?
Kate Baer
I have another full-length book of poetry out next fall, so fall 2022. I am working on that. Then I’ll probably take a break for a little bit.
Lara Ehrlich
Can you share anything about the poems in the new collection and how they might be different from the first two?
Kate Baer
I think they might be a little darker. But I’m not quite sure. I haven’t written it yet. I have maybe a quarter, so I don’t really know where it’s going. I think it’s going in a slightly different direction, but I’m not sure yet. It’s not titled. It hasn’t been really touched very much by anybody else. I’m also curious how it will be different.
Lara Ehrlich
But not eraser poems this time?
Kate Baer
Yeah, it’ll be more like What Kind of Woman
Lara Ehrlich
I’m so intrigued. And tell us when I Hope This Finds You Well comes out.
Kate Baer
Oct. 9.
Lara Ehrlich
And do you know when preorder starts?
Kate Baer
Yeah, you can preorder it anytime from anywhere. My website has the links to all of that. I’m hoping to be in New York the week of pub, so I’ll probably be doing a few events there, which is really fun, because I didn’t get that last time.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, it would be nice to actually meet people in person, right?
Kate Baer
Yeah, exactly.
Lara Ehrlich
Since we have a few minutes left, could you send us out with another poem? Just any one of your choice that you’d want to share with us.
Kate Baer
Oh, sure, absolutely. Okay, this one’s called “My Friend Bethany Rages at the News.”
A beautiful celebrity woman is asked what’s your beauty secret? she answers hot lemon water every morning. She does not answer time. She does not say the names of every woman who scrubs her bathroom tile and carries children to and from the car. trailer shot at a convenience store. An expert asked was the derivation. He answers parents in video games. He does not answer guns. He does not mention gross convenience. He does not say how an angry man can buy several killing machines. A young girl tries to save her. An online post asked what is her important? Amanda answers. She is nothing but an ugly whore. He does not answer in lonely. He does not say how every time they show her face. All he sees is every girl was taken her love away.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you. And thank you so much for joining us. This has been really fun.
Kate Baer
It’s really fun. Thank you for having me—and for bearing with me during my childcare issues here.
Lara Ehrlich
No, not at all. I think it adds some texture to the conversation.