June 3, 2021
Kendra DeColo is the author of three poetry collections: I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World (BOA Editions, 2021), My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016), and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She is also co-author of Low Budget Movie (Diode, 2021), a collaborative chapbook written with Tyler Mills. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, Split this Rock, and the Tennessee Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House Magazine, Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Bitch Magazine, VIDA, and elsewhere. She has performed her work in comedy clubs and music venues including the Newport Folk Festival, and she has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Vanderbilt University, and the Tennessee Prison for Women. She currently teaches at The Hugo House and lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she has a 5-year-old daughter and a baby on the way in August. She describes writer-motherhood in three words as: “adjusting previous expectations.”
Lara Ehrlich
Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest today is Kendra DeColo. Before I introduce Kendra, thank you all for tuning in, and please chat with us during the interview. We’ll weave your comments into our conversation. Now, I am excited to introduce Kendra. Kendra DeColo is the author of three poetry collections: I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World (BOA Editions, 2021), My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016), and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She is also co-author of Low Budget Movie (Diode, 2021), a collaborative chapbook written with Tyler Mills. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, Split this Rock, and the Tennessee Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House Magazine, Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Bitch Magazine, VIDA, and elsewhere. She has performed her work in comedy clubs and music venues including the Newport Folk Festival, and she has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Vanderbilt University, and the Tennessee Prison for Women. She currently teaches at The Hugo House and lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she has a 5-year-old daughter and a baby on the way in August. She describes writer-motherhood in three words as: “adjusting previous expectations.” And now, welcome, Kendra.
Kendra DeColo
Hello.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you so much for joining us. This is wonderful.
Kendra DeColo
Thank you so much for having me be part of the show and be part of this community. I feel like this has become its own network and family, and it’s an honor to be part of the conversation. Thank you.
Lara Ehrlich
That’s definitely the goal, to have a community around writer motherhood, so I’m really thrilled to welcome you into it. And I’m going to hold up your book here, which we’ll talk about a little bit, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World. Kendra, remind me, is it out yet or forthcoming?
Kendra DeColo
Yes, it came out in April, so it’s been out for a couple months. I’m kind of midway through the scheduled book tour, and that’s been fun.
Lara Ehrlich
Everyone, please pick it up. It’s amazing. And we’ll get to that. But first, can you tell us a little bit about your three words for describing writer motherhood: adjusting previous expectations?
Kendra DeColo
Yeah. I almost put, “constantly adjusting expectations,” and I feel like that could sound kind of negative, but I mean it in a really beautiful way, that to be fluid and flexible is such a wonderful gift of motherhood. To really see that state of having to change who I thought I was, and what writing looked like, has been a gift. That was really made clear for me in the book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, by the playwright [Sarah Ruhl]. She writes that she felt herself being annihilated by motherhood, and then she came to this realization of “fuck it”—like, let this previous self be annihilated. It must not have been that great anyway, if it could so easily be dismantled. That gave her permission to just walk into the next chapter. I feel like there’s so much resistance, or I felt resistance, and how beautiful to say, “No, I actually have this freedom and this power to shift perspective and change what I thought I was going to be and do.”
Lara Ehrlich
Oh, yeah, definitely. I love that book. I love books that take the feel of motherhood and represent it in different forms than we come to expect, like 100 essays left unfinished—that’s exactly what motherhood is like, right?
Kendra DeColo
And how that’s not a deficit. What an incredible invention. I love fragments, and I love things that are unfinished and find their other half a year later. I feel like so much of the book was written in that way. Like, “Alright, I’m just gonna write these fragmented thoughts at 4 in the morning, and then, six months later, I’m like, OK, these fragments are starting to find each other.” It’s a much different pace than what I was used to. I like to write kind of feverishly in one go. It was really nice to have my life inform my writing in a real way.
Lara Ehrlich
Absolutely. How far back in your 5-year-old daughter’s life did you start writing these poems?
Kendra DeColo
My Dinner with Ron Jeremy, which is the book before this, I wrote when I was pregnant. I got the book contract when I was two months pregnant, and I was like, “I’m gonna finish this before she’s born.” I had the idea to go to a writing residency and really work on it, so it was written in this kind of amazing, pregnant, horny state, which was part of the porn conversation that occurred. Then after that, my daughter was born, and I really didn’t write for probably the first seven months or so, except sometimes taking notes. A lot of reasons for that was I had postpartum anxiety, and writing itself felt very fraught for me—until it wasn’t, until writing actually became a life raft and a way for me to put myself back together. Really, when she was a year old, that’s when I went to AWP for the first time—the writing conference, for anyone listening who has not had the joy of going. That was a real kind of coming back to myself. I wrote the poem “I Pump Milk Like a Boss” after that conference, and that felt like a breakthrough and kind of a way to find my new voice. It took a while. We didn’t have childcare until she was 18 months, and then once that happened, I could have a more sustainable and creative schedule.
Lara Ehrlich
Oh, yeah. Definitely. A long time to be without childcare.
Kendra DeColo
My partner is kind of a stay-at-home dad. He’s a writer who works from home, so we had the flexibility, where if I really felt myself needing to work, we could trade off, so that helped a lot. And that made it possible. I’m getting that third trimester windedness. My diaphragm is pushed up.
Lara Ehrlich
Take breathing breaks whenever you need them. And thank you for coming on in the middle of their third trimester. That’s incredible. You mentioned how you had changed as a writer, when you had your daughter, both in finding new form—in piecing together fragments—and in the logistics of actually getting writing done. Tell me a little bit more about the difference in writing your previous book and this one, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World. How have you changed as a writer?
Kendra DeColo
Well, it’s funny, because My Dinner with Ron Jeremy was my second book, and I wrote it pretty soon after my first book. Once I found out I was pregnant, I think I had those worries, like, OK, I’m not going to write again, or that window is closing. I was like, “OK. Nine months. Let’s do it.” I really feed off that external pressure or having that momentum, because otherwise, I think we can sit on things forever. Or I’ll speak for myself: I can sit on something forever and not really finish it. I really liked having this other project that I knew I wanted to really give a chance to be out in the world. At the same time, it was rushed. What’s that phrase—“the days are long, but the years are short”? It was very much like that. I had these long, luxurious days because I didn’t have a small child to look after, and I was doing a writing residency. I wrote for eight hours a day. I was at McDowell, where they bring you lunch, so I was kind of this pampered pregnant panda, getting the best bamboo. It was glorious. I was reading a lot of Diane Seuss at that time. She’s my forever poetry godmother and punk High Priestess, and she was very much with me there and guiding me and teaching me how to write autobiographically, while also having that lyricism and fantastical leaps. That was My Dinner with Ron Jeremy. It was also about porn and having this conversation with Ron Jeremy, which I think was a way of closing this chapter. I’m always gonna write about sex and sexuality, but at the time, I thought I was saying goodbye to the way that I write about sex. I don’t think that’s really true now. Then, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World—it’s so different, because I didn’t see it as a book for so long. It really was like each poem I wrote felt like a life raft, like I am so lucky to have this moment to write this. When my daughter was a little bit older than 18 months, I went to the coffee shop two days a week when she was in childcare, and those days were just amazing. I think I felt a lot of pressure at first to produce, and then once I let go of that pressure, I could really play. I think so much of this book, for me was really about joy and finding out how to play in language again.
Lara Ehrlich
So much of that resonates with me: finding the need to play again and stop taking yourself so seriously at a certain point, after you’ve produced some work, and you feel compelled to produce more work.
Kendra DeColo
And seeing peers. This is kind of an unattractive quality, but I think we all have it, to some extent. Jealousy. If you’re in a position where you can’t be writing, and then you see your peers who are just barreling ahead, you’re like, “Yeah! Go! Go!” But you’re also like, “But what about me? Don’t forget about me, guys!” I think I had this thought that I was gonna write my way in. I won’t be forgotten. What an awful way to create. That was not productive for me. My whole body firmly responded, “No. We will not respond to that pressure.”
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, antithetical to creativity.
Kendra DeColo
Competition, I think, can be really useful, but not in a self-punishing way.
Lara Ehrlich
No. I’m gonna go back to Ron Jeremy and sex a little bit. Tell me more about sex. Just we’ll leave it there.
Kendra DeColo
Well, yes, what can I say? I was just talking about this with someone, how I write so graphically about sex and sexuality, but in my persona, I feel very respectful, and I don’t ever pry, I don’t talk about my sex life, even with good friends, which is different than my life on the page. I think sex is so interesting to write about. Not just sex, but sex that is flipping the gaze on how women are viewed as sexual beings. I was growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, so writing about porn was a way of reclaiming my agency with that as a person who enjoys sex and pornography and the pleasures of it. I think in the ‘80s and ‘90s, women were so much sex objects. It was the era of Pamela Lee Anderson—and God bless her, I have so much respect—but those were, like, my role models. There was one way to be sexy, there was one way to enjoy sex as a woman, which was really not actually enjoying it but appearing like you’re enjoying it so the man could get off. I think I was really interested in exploring that and what I learned as a teenager about sex, so I could go back and really heal a lot of things. I don’t really have a great answer. Why is sex so empowering to write about for me? I don’t I don’t know. Growing up, I loved Madonna. She was someone who I was like, “Yes, that is a powerful woman.” I remember seeing her coffee table book that was such a scandal. There were these amazing leather photos, and I found those images so empowering. Even though I was young, I knew it was a performance, and for a woman to own a performance felt so liberating to me. All those things feel really rich. I also grew up in Provincetown, spending half my year there as a kid, and Provincetown is this gay mecca, and to be there in the ‘90s, this really vital time, where sex and sexuality was a performance, I really found so much joy in it. I think when I’m writing about the performance of sex and sexuality now, it’s a way of returning to joy, rather than feeling repressed, which I think is so easy to do, even now. Women still feel like, “If I look a certain way, then I can’t really be a sexual person,” or, “If I enjoy sex too much, that’s uncouth.” I don’t think that’s everyone’s baggage, but that’s stuff I’m always trying to unlearn/
Lara Ehrlich
Let’s talk about sex and motherhood and this book, where, as you said, you are so open about the female body. The first poem in the book, which you mentioned, “I Pump Milk Like a Boss,” is just so visceral, and you really get the experience of what it’s like to try to squeeze milk out of your body. Let’s talk about the bodies of mothers and writing the body of a mother as a sexual entity.
Kendra DeColo
I feel like I was less interested in writing about my own sexual desire in this book but really using the energy of that language to write about birth and the postpartum body and to get visceral—to talk about blood on the sheets. I really love bodily fluids. I think it’s an amazing part of being alive, that we leak things like that. We’re like slugs; we leave traces. I don’t know why I love it so much. It’s just juicy. We’re juicy beings. And those are the kinds of poems I like to write. I like to read things that are abundant. I love to write things that are full—really claiming the abundance of our bodies and in every way, not just for women who choose to breastfeed, but women who use their bodies to hold their babies to literally keep their families alive. I think it’s so amazing. I think those themes naturally draw out a language that’s visceral, because it is such a visceral subject. I think giving birth was transformative, and everyone has their own birth story. Writing this book was a way of putting that into language and to harness that power that I felt after.
Lara Ehrlich
Can you tell me about your birth story? There’s a poem in here … the one about the asshole.
Kendra DeColo
“I Write Poems About Motherhood”—is that the one?
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah. You have prepared to read a poem for us. Would you feel comfortable reading that one?
Kendra DeColo
I’d love to.
Lara Ehrlich
And then we’ll talk about it.
Kendra DeColo
Just a little backstory. A few years ago, an editor of a well-known magazine tweeted out an article about how women were ashamed to submit poems about motherhood. And then he wrote, “Why is that, guys?” And it just really hit me in the wrong way—an editor, who does not publish poems about motherhood, asking why we’re not submitting those poems. It’s like, “Because of you, motherfucker, that’s why. Because you’re not publishing them.” I also found it really offensive, that there’s this idea of a “motherhood poem.” I could just imagine what his conception of that would be, and so, I wanted to write something that would really explode his idea of what a motherhood poem is.
I WRITE POEMS ABOUT MOTHERHOOD
Tonight I can write the most motherly lines,
for example: it’s true, my asshole will never be the same
after giving birth, not its shape, but its soul, small wick
of shadow I once called home and dream. Tonight
I can write how it burned like a votive, the whole
inverted star a series of grievances from which another
self grew, séance and seam, split off
to live parallel lives like vaporish twins. I can write
that I gave birth and died and came back to life
and my asshole will never be the same. It wore
a haunted look those first few weeks. Claimed
it needed to “take fresh airs” in the country, wore
aggressively Victorian clothes and strutted
around naming geodes like a gentlemen
farmer. Shut up, asshole, I admonished. Tonight I write
my daughter emerged and split me into two selves. It did not hurt
the way they said it would. I rocked on my knees
singing a song like hurtling my voice off a cliff.
My husband’s hand disappeared into mine
and for a moment I left this world, a hem of blood
between us. I broke onto the shore of a fixed
note. I helixed and drank the urine of starved
apparitions to keep me afloat, slapped the shit
out of my reflection, squatted and squeezed
a rocky planet out from the blue horizon
like a ship bifurcating a labial sky. But my asshole,
to whom I must now give credit where credit is due,
taught me how to anchor to the earth, locate the hot center
which I always knew was there but never saw
shining in my sacrum like Orion’s belt
when they stitched me shut in a ragged,
casual way, even though I wished
to stay open a little longer,
unhinged and full of silences. Tonight I can write
that I would give birth a million times
over and not tell anyone about it
if I could feel that kind of way again:
one hollowed self opened wide
enough to swallow my own body
then spit it back out onto the earth.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you. I love that poem. It’s not only absolutely stunning and beautiful, but it is funny at the same time. It’s tender and powerful. It also made me laugh out loud. This is a great example of how you write so viscerally yet lyrically, and how you can make bodies and juices and assholes poetic. What led me to ask about that poem was your reference that you found childbirth to be so empowering and so transformative. I think the end of that poem, about how you wish you could stay open longer, to consume yourself, in some ways. Can you talk a little bit about that and what your own experience was like?
Kendra DeColo
I just feel like there was that moment when you’re kind of in between worlds. At that point, my daughter had been born, she’s on my chest, I’ve crossed that threshold—I’m holding her, she’s there—and at the same time, I’m delivering the placenta. It’s ongoing. Birth doesn’t end when the child comes out. It doesn’t even end after the placenta comes out. There’s this idea of the fourth trimester. But those first beginning hours are so ethereal. Time doesn’t exist anymore. You’re in that other state, and there’s still that pure adrenaline, but you’re also exhausted. I remember I just wanted to hold on to that feeling of holding her for the first time, while the placenta is still in me, when she’s still connected to me. The umbilical cord is still there, and we’ll never have that again. We’ll never have her connected to me in that way. I think that’s part of it, and that felt like the right place to end the poem, because that’s what it felt like, energetically, after giving birth: I’m unhinged, I’m open, and what a beautiful thing to be. I don’t want someone to come and sew me up yet. You want to stay in that state, because you know you’ll never feel that way again.
Lara Ehrlich
Now you’re bringing tears to my eyes. Our daughters are the same age, so I remember that so well—and the time when they’re starting to really move away from us, becoming more independent. Thinking about that moment with them being connected to you in that way that they never will be again but will only move further and further away …
Kendra DeColo
It’s brutal.
Lara Ehrlich
Tell me a little bit about your daughter, while we’re talking about 5-year-olds.
Kendra DeColo
She’s magical, she’s amazing, she’s not too far away from where I am right now. She’s outside playing. I don’t want to label her as anything, but I find everything she says poetic, as parents do with their kids. Her words find their way into my poems. The way she looks at the world is always blowing my mind. Just a tender hearted, incredible person. It’s amazing to see how it just keeps growing. She’s about to start school, so we’re all preparing for that. It feels like a gift, as hard as those hard times are.
Lara Ehrlich
How have you changed through motherhood? That’s such a big question. But beyond writing, in those five years, how have you as a person changed?
Kendra DeColo
Just so much. Especially now that I’m in this other transformation, where I’m seven months pregnant, I feel so different from how I felt a month ago and the month before that. I think I’ve let go of a lot of perfectionism. I think I’ve seen more clearly how it’s a foe, and maybe how I can use it in a productive way. At the same time, I really value my profession as a writer. I take it a lot more seriously than I ever did, while, at the same time, not taking it seriously. I think it’s this struggle. You emailed out this amazing tweet from another guest who said, “Fuck balance. My life is a mess. And that’s a good thing.”
I think it’s only recently that I’ve really seen that myth of balance to be so toxic, and I don’t know why it felt like this thing to aspire to, not just in motherhood. Like, “One day, I’m gonna have balance. One day, I’m going to work out and eat well and sleep well and write and blah, blah, blah, blah.” I wish someone had just told me, “No, you’re never gonna do that. You’re never going to find balance, and you shouldn’t.” At the beginning of the pandemic, I heard this amazing panel with Camille Dungy, Erika Meitner, Tina Chang, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. They were talking about balance, and Aimee said something her mother told her, which is that balance is not what we should strive for, but rather, we should feel really lucky to have a full life, where we’re being pulled in different directions, and it’s a gift to feel unbalanced, because that means you have things that need you. And that blew my mind. Because at that point, I’d been like, “If I can just balance writing and motherhood, I’ll be happy.” And I was miserable, because that can never happen. There are days or weeks where I’m writing, and my family’s not getting as much of me, and then there are weeks and months where my writing isn’t getting the best of me. Of course, it sounds so simple and obvious to say that, but I really felt like that was so liberating to hear. The me five years ago was like, “I’m going to do it all.” Like, who am I doing that for? Am I doing that to impress someone on Twitter? That’s such a waste of time. I think my husband has really taught me that I want to save the best of me for the people I love and not trying to do things to impress people who I don’t know. I think that’s something that’s really hard, especially being writers and needing a public platform, and we are in the attention economy where to sell books, you want to be center stage, but I really do want to try to remember that that’s not the center. That’s not where I want to live.
Lara Ehrlich
That’s so eloquently said, and it is empowering to think how lucky we are to be needed and to be pulled in so many directions. That’s not something I’d ever thought about. I hadn’t thought about it in that perspective, so that’s really helpful to me.
Kendra DeColo
Because when we think about it, are there people we know who are balanced? I don’t think I know anybody. Yeah. That’s very mechanistic. It’s not human. I still meditate and like to feel balanced emotionally, but not in terms of how I designate my day to day. There is some Instagram mom who I follow, like a lifestyle person, and I remember her revealing to her followers, you know, “Today, I let my daughter watch eight hours of cartoons so that I could get work done.” I was like, you were so brave for saying that. We’re so afraid to share that, because we know we’re gonna get judged the fuck out of, and everyone has something to say, and it’s really not easy. There was a reason why a few years ago why why I felt so protective over my image as a mother. I wanted to seem like a perfect mother all the time and at the same time, be trying to keep up in my writing. I think it’s because of that feeling of being on the playground, where mothers are checking each other out. It wasn’t always the supportive community. It’s kind of like, “Oh, you’re letting your child eat those snacks,” or, “That’s the kind of stroller you use?” or, “You use a stroller?” There’s so much of that. I don’t want to sound like I’m misogynistic here. That sounds like it’s blaming women, and it’s not the mother’s fault. We’re in a culture that values appearances over substance. Everyone is feeling that pressure to perform, and it’s so unhealthy. I don’t know if other people have gone through that.
Lara Ehrlich
I’m sure they have. I have. Whether or not it’s real, there’s shame involved, or fear of being judged by others. We moved to Connecticut a couple years ago to be closer to my parents, and thank goodness we did, because now they can help watch my daughter, and I can get work done. But before they come to pick her up in the morning, she sits and watches TV while I do work on my laptop.
Kendra DeColo
She’s happy, you’re happy.
Lara Ehrlich
Exactly. Yes. And I still feel that guilt of, like, “My daughter is sitting here watching like 10 episodes of Octonauts, while I’m doing work.” But who am I feeling guilty for?
Kendra DeColo
We have this invented person who’s this other mom out there making her organic snacks and has these activities laid out that are structured, and if there are people like that, God bless them, but why does that have to be better? Even saying that, I start to feel like, “Oh my god, is that better?” And I sound like an asshole. That shines a light on how much pressure is on us. I let my daughter watch a lot of cartoons when I have to work, too. I want to say that so that other people are like, OK, yeah, I’m gonna do that, and that’s okay. I’m not gonna feel bad anymore.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, exactly. I try to be very transparent that the only way I get anything done is that my parents are watching my daughter right now when her school is closed. Because otherwise, you look like a super woman. It feels good to be perceived as a super woman, but it’s not reality. There is help, there is support there.
Kendra DeColo
I think there’s so many conversations about the things that we lean on and how it’s OK to lean on these structures when we don’t have that support. I like to open up people’s eyes to how mothers are struggling in general, even before the pandemic. There’s not enough support. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what the answer is to any of it, except to get people into Congress and Senate who are not insane, and try and be transparent.
Lara Ehrlich
That’s the first step. There was this great series in the New York Times called “Primal Scream,” I think. It was all about mothers who are really struggling during the pandemic. They’re all these think pieces, and it was everywhere in the news, and of course, nothing changes. But the first step is awareness.
Kendra DeColo
I was just talking about this with my friend’s father. Courtney Love … how am I going to connect Courtney Love to this? I think we need more role models of women who are fuck ups. We just need more. We need more images and representations of women and mothers, period. I feel like we feel so pinned in, that there’s one way to parent, there’s one way to mother, and Courtney Love is not my role model for mothering, but she holds this amazing territory, where she’s like, “I’m gonna be over here, and I’m gonna do what all the men are doing. And you’re gonna judge me for it, and I don’t give a fuck.” We need more people like that to just widen the scape, just so we can feel a little bit more free. I feel like the freer that we feel, the more power that we feel. And I think that’s a start for me.
Lara Ehrlich
Let’s talk about pop culture a little bit more. I love the intersection between pop culture and poetry and going back to the visceral nature of the subjects of the poetry. All these things are mixed together in your work, and it’s so fascinating. Tell me more about your love of, and interest in, pop culture.
Kendra DeColo
I love writing about it so much. In my first book, I wrote a lot about Rodney Dangerfield. I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work, but he’s so poetic, both as a performer and as a writer. I feel like the one-liner is such an incredible form. I learned how to write by watching pop culture figures. I feel like Rodney Dangerfield helped me write epigrams, and he taught me how to make a turn in my work or keep things concise but also funny. You can learn so much from the standup comics, so I think that’s, that’s a big part of it. Then also, there is Courtney Love and pop culture [icons] who aren’t necessarily informing my writing, but they’re informing how to be really brave in the work or stop caring what other people think. I’ll listen to an old Hole song sometimes before I write to get in touch with my 14-year-old self. She’s huge for me as a writer. I really trust 14-year-old Kendra to be truthful, and Courtney is a way of connecting me to her, to be raw. My husband has this really great phrase, to “take it by force.” I feel like that just means you don’t wait for someone to give you permission. You just take it. Music really energizes me. I know that a lot of writers have that. My friend Keith Leonard, an amazing poet, and I were making playlists called Poet Walks to Her Desk. Like a boxer walking out into the ring, we we had this playlist of what we were gonna listen to when we go to our desk. And it’s so anticlimactic, because then you listen to this Drake song and then you’re sitting in silence at your desk. Now he and I are trading early-aughts music videos and challenging each other to write about the most unpleasant ones. It’s low stakes. He’s a father, he has two kids, so it’s a way to not have pressure and keep it fun.
Lara Ehrlich
I love this. That’s amazing. What a great prompt and way to, like you said early on, play and get back to the fun of writing.
Kendra DeColo
And back to an earlier version of you. Getting back to who I was in 2002 was really fun. Like, “Alright, when I was listening to this 50 Cent song, who was I? How did I perceive this song? What was I doing?” That’s always a great place to start. I recommend looking at a Cameron or Ja Rule. They can really bring a lot of interesting things to the table.
Lara Ehrlich
I’m fascinated by this idea of a younger self. I don’t know what it is I’m working on exactly, but I’m going back through all of my old journals, starting from when I was 10. There’s this whole bookcase full of journals, and they’re so earnest and so uncomfortable, but, like you said, so honest, because we were, or at least I was, sort of raw emotionally. Reacting to that, I think, is really powerful but scary for me, because it makes me feel really icky, for lack of a better word.
Kendra DeColo
I want to mother that part of myself at the same time, like, “Honey, what are you doing?” And like, oh, you clearly needed someone to steer you in the right direction. But at the same time, I’m like, OK, you needed to go in that direction to get where you eventually landed. I love 14-year-old Kendra so much, and I think it’s because she was so lost. It’s a maternal love. There are other ages where I feel that icky-ness, and it has to do with choices I was making at the time. Like 24-year-old Kendra, I’m like, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I don’t want to read what you were writing about that terrible ex. I just don’t. But I do think music is such a great way to reunite with ourselves. I do have some journals. I think that’s so cool that you have that record.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, I don’t know what I’ll do with it yet, but accessing that is very powerful. What do you do with that energy, once you access it through songs?
Kendra DeColo
It’s counterintuitive. I’m starting with a very personal experience through song, but then, I don’t write about the personal experience. I use the emotion, whatever emotion I was feeling about the song at the time or in the present. I first try to find language that matches it and start in a more hypothetical zone. I don’t want to box the poem in too soon. I like to start broad. That’s why a lot of the poems in I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World have almost like punchline titles. I want start with a conceit or a really hilarious situation and go from there. I think Diane Seuss does this so well. She is writing very personally. She has that poem, “Sometimes I wonder how I’ll leave this world. Will I leave this world the way my ex dragged his garbage bag full of clothes through the snow?” She has this list of ways that one can leave the world, I think repetition is such a good vehicle for that and writing nonlinearly. Yeah, I could end up writing very personally, but I don’t want to stay stuck there. I like to move in between different modes. I’m trying to think of an early song poem, where I felt like it was successful, and I don’t know if I have any successful ones yet, but they’ve been so fun.
Lara Ehrlich
It sounds amazing, even as a writing exercise, to reconnect with an emotion and then go from there. I might have to try that.
Kendra DeColo
I think Terrance Hayes is the first poet I read who I thought was really doing that with music and also with pop culture figures.
He has this amazing poem about Mr. T. It’s a sonnet, and the language is so heightened—it’s not necessarily language that you would associate with Mr. T, but, of course, it is. Mr. T is an operatic figure, and so he’s both writing operatically, but he has some other lines that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with Mr. T. And Hanif Abdurraqib is such a go-to for that. He writes about Carly Rae Jepsen in this really gloomy, melancholic way. I’m like, you’re writing about the singer who did “Call Me Maybe,” but it’s this very dark and sad poem, which is perfect … that dissonance.
Lara Ehrlich
Tell me about teaching writing in prisons.
Kendra DeColo
It’s been a long time since I’ve done that. The last time was probably 2011, that I taught my last class at the Tennessee Prison For Women. But before I applied to grad schools, I was working full-time at the Suffolk County House of Correction in Boston. I taught there for two years as a full-time writing instructor. It was part of an offender re-entry program. I tend to get annoyed when I hear people talk about teaching in prisons, because there’s this feeling of patting yourself on the back. That could be a projection of mine, but also, I’m never gonna be OK teaching in a prison. I don’t think it’s anything to feel proud about. I think that there should not be prisons, period, and so to work inside of one never felt right for me, even if I felt that I was part of a service that’s eventually going to be useful to my students, it still felt like I was part of the system. That was something I tried to write a little bit about. Early on, I was really informed by Poetry of Witness. Now that feels really dated. The idea of elevating your perspective, when really, it’s like, write about your own shit. Like, don’t focus on what they’re doing, focus on what you’re doing. I was writing about teaching in prisons before I could really write about my own things that I needed to unpack and heal from. I’m always really suspicious of people writing from that [experience]. I’m not gonna judge anything. I love Carolyn Forche and her Poetry of Witness. I think she does it in a really incredible way.
Lara Ehrlich
For anyone who doesn’t know what Poetry of Witness, tell us a little bit about what it is.
Kendra DeColo
I can’t speak too much. I don’t think I know enough about it to really describe it. But the idea of a poet going into a war zone or a place where something is happening and feeling like it’s my job to record what’s happening. I need to have the record. I think docu-poetics is incredible. I think that’s what it’s turned into. Like Erika Meitner and Claudia Rankine and so many poets are doing it, where the focus is really on yourself, but you’re engaging with what’s happening around you. I think there was a mode of poetry where the more absent the poet was from the poem, the better the poem is, and I’m so glad that we’re away from that now. It felt like a very male thing to me at the time, like the idea of taking the personal out of the political, which is so silly. They’re clearly the same. It feels like we’re in this really exciting time right now for the way that poets are writing. José Olivarez is someone who I think about. I wouldn’t say he’s a docu-poet, but he’s someone who’s engaging with politics in an incredible way. And Danez Smith … I mean, literally every poet out there is doing incredible work. I feel like it’s a really rich time.
Lara Ehrlich
You talked a little bit about pushing yourself to be more autobiographical or to write more from your own life. Was that a challenge for you to write from a personal place? Was it a shift or something you had always intended to do?
Kendra DeColo
I think being in a residency will do that to you, because you’re just with yourself. You can socialize, but that’s not my favorite thing to do at a residency. I don’t want to be playing ping pong. I want to be getting sleep or writing. Shout out to people who play ping pong at residencies, though, because I do think that whatever you need to do to write in the end is the best thing. But yeah, I think being at a residency really made me reflect, and probably because at that time when I was pregnant, the future seemed so unknown and so uncertain and so scary, so it was actually really comforting to look back. I think there’s something about being pregnant where I wanted to take an inventory of these different phases of my life and really try to close some doors and get some sense of closure with certain things, to really feel like entering this new phase cleanly. I think that was part of it. I hadn’t really found a model yet for how I wanted to do it, so having these external, received forms really helped. I know I’m not writing formally in that book, but even just reading a Diane Seuss poem. I really love how she starts a poem out about her leg, and it ends up taking place in Paris—so learning how to move from one end to the other. I felt like it was really fun. Knowing that I was going to write about this experience when I’m 14 but end up writing about Courtney Love at the end. I’m trying to think about how I felt about autobiographical writing before that. I think there was this idea of the confessional that I was always being pushed into, so I kind of resented it—like, I’m not going to be confessional, I’m going to do what Terrence Hayes does. I’m going to be lyrical and narrative at the same time and not feel like I need to reveal anything about myself. And now I really enjoy writing about myself and my experiences.
Lara Ehrlich
I enjoy reading about your personal experiences. Tell us a little bit more about this sense of closing doors through writing and what types of doors you felt like you needed to close, why poetry was the vehicle through which to do that, and how maybe that changed once you gave birth. Do you feel like you’ve succeeded in doing what you set out to do there, or do you feel like there’s still doorways that you’re standing in?
Kendra DeColo
I don’t think any of the doors really stayed shut, but I saw the people I wanted to keep out from coming into those doors anymore, like old monsters. I think maybe on a purely creative level, I wanted to get rid of old enemies of self-esteem. Really going back to high school years and saying, “OK, those mean girls do not have room at the table anymore.” Why was I carrying their voices for so long? I don’t know. But it’s time to let them go. I feel like there are different stages of looking back and saying, “I’m still carrying on to something that teacher told me. Alright, time to let that go.” The work keeps going. Like, “I’m repeating that mean thought to myself. Let’s let that go again.” But it gets easier. That’s more how I come to the page, and then there’s closing doors in terms of subjects. I do feel like that happens. There are certain things I’m not interested in writing about anymore. But that didn’t feel as much a part of getting ready for motherhood as letting go of the way that I saw myself as a younger person that wasn’t helping me anymore.
Lara Ehrlich
Why did it feel like that was so necessary in preparation for motherhood?
Kendra DeColo
I think it was just this desire to come into motherhood feeling like I’m a person that can be relied on, and I’m not going to pass on this shit to my child—wanting to take an inventory of the stories I’m telling myself and my history that I don’t want her to have. I think that it starts in pregnancy and then continues, because having a child such a harsh reflection of what I haven’t dealt with, because I’m hearing my child parent this back to me, and like, “Fuck, no, I don’t want you to feel that way.” I don’t think it’s being a perfectionist. Being authentic with my daughter is the most important thing. I don’t want her to see me as perfect. That’s not my motivation anymore. It felt like unnatural exfoliating. There was less room for my internal organs in the body, because they were getting squished, and there was less room for mean, shitty thoughts in my head. It really felt like, “OK, time to clear out.”
Lara Ehrlich
Did it have anything to do with the fact that you have a daughter? I know that having a daughter for me brought up a lot of questions that I asked myself about my own perception of women’s bodies and sexuality and relationships and all those things.
Kendra DeColo
Yeah, completely, and also my relationships with other women—friendships and women relatives. Part of that was wanting to make sure I’m building a strong foundation. I want everyone in my life to be someone who is really going to show up for me and my child, so there’s that winnowing away of certain people who you love who are not really on board for this next chapter of the ride. There’s a lot of grieving to do, I think, in that transition—grieving your old self but also grieving the way that you relate to other people, because it changes so much. But that makes room for something else. Grief is something I tried to write about, wanting to celebrate this new chapter but then grieving the way that I was in the world before. Now that I’ve done that grief work, I can really love 30-year-old Kendra and feel like you were doing all the things you needed to do so that you can get to this next place.
Lara Ehrlich
I love that. I think, since we have a few minutes left, why don’t we close with another poem?
Kendra DeColo
Alright, I’ll read “I Pump Milk like a Boss.”
I PUMP MILK LIKE A BOSS
I pump milk on the side of the road where the grass is biblical green
as if first cousin to the cow, her pink and swollen tits immaculate
as the plumbing of a church organ sending up calls to god, brassy mesh
of notes, fermented and dank as kush. I pump milk with my bare hands
into a bar’s bathroom sink, above which is a mirror where someone’s scrawled
I Love Cricket Pussy and below that, Everyone Deserves to be Loved.
I look at myself under the fingered smudge, the bodily fluids spattered
like haikus and I pump as if my milk is propaganda,
fingers bowing across my chest like a pawn shop violin,
milky graffiti tagging the spit-clogged drain.
I pump like I’m writing my name in blood
which turns to the milk my child sucks dry, which she turns into blood.
I pump like I have a tattoo on my pudenda
that says Aerosmith backwards, I pump
as if my hands have teeth, one combat boot hitched up on the toilet seat,
each hiss of milk chanting like a choir yes bitch yes,
my tits bitten and salt-veined, as when my baby
took her first gulp of air, humming
from the engorged crevasse of me
like a herd of wildebeest, as if the hive of me could have burst,
the infrared honey, the glop glop
of afterbirth dripping down my left leg,
spittle and amen, amniotic residue
fluorescent with prayer—
Do men lactate is a popular google search and I wonder
what would happen if they could, our presidents
lifting their offspring to their breasts in the deep pockets
of night, listening to the dribble of milk
sipped from the pulpit of their bodies. Tonight my breasts
became so engorged I said I’d pay someone to suck my tits
half-joking. But a woman who heard followed me to the bathroom, read me
a sex poem while I pumped my milk, leaning away from the need in her voice
and the milk came slow and I pumped and waited for her to finish
and a street light scribbled in the parking lot
and I know there is a price we pay for loneliness
and a price we pay to forget it and I dedicate my libido
to my younger self and this is how I want to live, milk-stained, a little bit emptied,
a little bit in love with the abundance of my body,
my milk pale yellow with a layer of cream
which I will save long after it’s turned, praising its curdled glow
every time I open the fridge, as if its presence is enough to keep me safe,
as if it’s enough to make me invincible.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me. This was such a wonderful conversation. I could talk to you all night. Please come back. And everyone: Buy this book.
Kendra DeColo
I’m excited to get my Writer Mother Monster tumbler. I saw that you have those. Thank you for the work that you do. It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you, Kendra. You, too. And thank you all for joining us, as always. As Kendra mentioned, we now have Writer Mother Monster tumblers, so if you are writing at 3 a.m. and you need some coffee or at 3 p.m. and you’d like tumbler of wine, whatever floats your boat, you have a nifty Writer Mother Monster tumbler to drink out of. Just go to the website and you’ll find it under merchandise. We are taking a little break, but we’ll see you in July for the next episode of Writer Mother Monster. Thank you, and good night.