Category: Poetry

Rosanna Warren

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I’d take a big basket of laundry down to the cellar so I could have 10 minutes in the basement, sitting on the floor with my back to the washing machine, scribbling in my notepad.

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(March 11, 2021) Rosanna Warren, who teaches at the University of Chicago, has been publishing “poems of riveting, compassionate darkness and social conscience for nearly 40 years” (LA Review of Books); her most recent book of poems is So Forth (2020). She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the New England Poetry Club, among others, and she was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Rosanna has two daughters, ages 37 and 35 and two grandchildren, a boy and a girl, ages 6 and 3. She describes writer-motherhood in 3 words as: “frazzled, passionate, surprised.”

FROM THE EPISODE: READING LIST & REFERENCES

Rosanna Warren’s Website
Rosanna’s Books
Rosanna’s Poem, “For Chiara”
Rosanna’s Poem, “A Way”
Rosanna’s biography of the French poet Max Jacob
Rosanna’s Parents, Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark
Academy of American Poets
The American Academy of Arts & Letters 
Lila Wallace Foundation 
Guggenheim Foundation 
American Council of Learned Societies 
New England Poetry Club
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Philosophical Society
University of Chicago 
Boston University
Skowhegan 
New York Studio School
Bibliothèque nationale de France
Hart Crane
Dostoevsky
Poetry Magazine
Marianne Faithfull
Athenians 
Poem-a-Day
Paul Valéry  
Winnie the Pooh 
The Wind in the Willows

sound bites

I try not to write poems that explain themselves too much. I try to have the poem be suggestive, to have the objects and actions and colors in the poem do the work for the imagination.

I would like poems to be unsettling in different ways, and for occasionally a line to feel like a knife stab.

“Poems have to have an urgency. They have a demand, a problem to solve, and some kind of trouble is the germ of a poem for me.” Rosanna Warren

I was uncomfortable with the role of being a, quote, “girl” in high school. It was unbearable. Those awful dances. I just thought the whole thing was so awful. This romance stuff, when I was a teenager, struck me like a Halloween party—you had to play “girl” and put on some makeup.

Having children was this tremendous gift—and maybe all the more tremendous because I hadn’t imagined it for myself.

I had to deal with the social expectations of outsiders looking at me and thinking, “She’s just riding on her parents’ reputation.” In order to be a writer, in order to have the courage to go on and keep writing and publishing, I just had to ignore all that and follow the drive that I had to make things in words. It was such a strong inner drive.

I don’t remember feeling any resentment myself as a child with my parents closing the door. It was just understood that was the way things were. They were very loving when they when they were with us. They were really with us, playing games, including us.

My children missed me at times, and it was hard for them and hard for me, especially when they were little. My daughters have told me, “Mom, when you shut the door, I was crying on the other side.” I didn’t stay in the study with a little child weeping on the other side of the door, but there were tensions. This is not easy, being a mother and any kind of artist or professional person. There are costs.

One of the places I could try to write a poem was when I was doing the laundry. I’d take a big basket of laundry down to the cellar, and I could have 10 minutes in the basement, sitting on the floor with my back to the washing machine, scribbling in the pad. Or driving to BU and parking in the parking lot, and before rushing in to teach, giving myself 10 minutes in the car, resting the pad on the steering wheel.

“The book that I started in 1985 just came out in 2020, if that gives anybody courage to keep on going.” Rosanna Warren

“There are so many marvelous things to say about having children. You’re no longer the center of the world. Your whole cosmology has changed. Your fundamental imperative is to care for somebody else.” Rosanna Warren

“The mystery of personhood is an extraordinary miracle. It’s like watching a seed turn into a little sprout and then grow leaves and grow up into the sun. The rest of our lives, I think of us as struggling to become people.” Rosanna Warren

“Poetry is a theater of possibilities. It is where we experiment with consciousness and where we can take imaginative and emotional risks.” Rosanna Warren

I could not have imagined that we would have this kind of threat of a militant oligarchical revolution and takeover destruction of our democracy and suppression of the vote. I was trying to find ways to figure out how to put that horror, that fear, that anger into the shapes that would be honorable poems. Each poem is a new struggle.

“I stick my draft into what I call a compost heap, and I let it sit there decomposing or stinking, and then look at it a few weeks later and if it still seems to hold together, I send it out to a magazine.” Rosanna Warren

Reading aloud was always a very big part of our family life, from my husband and myself reading with our children every night and having supper together and talking, trying, no matter what was going on, to have some core to family life, even with all the other emergencies that were around us.

Beth Ann Fennelly

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Our view of motherhood is still this post-romantic vision of the mom feeling nothing but bliss for her child, completely content in the relationship, desiring nothing more. I think portraying motherhood that way allows new mothers, in particular, to feel like they’re insane.

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(February 25, 2021) Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, is a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She has received grants and awards from the N.E.A., the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil, and has published three books of poetry: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, all with W. W. Norton. Beth Ann’s poetry has been in over fifty anthologies, including Best American Poetry and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and in textbooks. She is also the author of a book of essays, Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother. Beth Ann lives with her husband and their three children in Oxford, Mississippi, and describes writer-motherhood in 3 words as, “monstrous, magical, mind-bending.”

FROM THE EPISODE: READING LIST & REFERENCES

Beth Ann Fennelly’s website
Beth Ann’s Books
Beth Ann’s Washington Post article about her mother, “As the pandemic raged, my independent mother’s memory worsened, her isolation increased — and I was far away”
Emily Dickinson, “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?”
Denise Duhamel, “Bulimia”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

sound bites

“I just want to go back to a barter society where if I want a hamburger, I’ll write you a haiku.”

When you’re a writer, you get used to being vulnerable and honest, and I really value honesty. I’m interested in explicating my emotions to try to figure out what the truth is and valuing the truth almost above anything else.

When I was in high school, a Catholic, all-girls boarding school, writing was something you did to be a lady. It was like a finishing school thing. We weren’t exposed to contemporary writing or poetry at all. The only Emily Dickinson poem we read was, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – too?”

I remember reading a poem by Denise Duhamel about a bulimic woman eating a wedding cake, and it was so shocking to me that there was vomit in a poem. I just couldn’t believe that someone had written something that was so intimate and personal and revealing. It was a door into the path that I was going to follow, where I wasn’t interested in any type of mask. I was interested in figuring out how I feel and how other people feel and what we’re doing here on planet Earth.

I memorize poems and recite them to myself and train my ear through the art of hearing the words coming up my windpipe and out of my mouth. Writing is physical—as physical and rhythmic as dancing. Human beings are rhythmic creatures; our patterns of eating and breathing and sleeping and making love. When we’re writing, we’re putting our bodies back in touch with the old ways, the rhythmic, natural world, and finding pleasure there.

Before I was a mom, when I wanted to write, I had to have my desk clean and my favorite pen and the right mental space. Now, looking back, it was so precious to me. When I became a mom and my time got so attenuated and condensed into these weird little pockets, I would lunge into any opening that presented itself. I didn’t care if my desk was clean. I didn’t even notice.

Motherhood allowed me to focus more quickly because I only had these pockets of time. I didn’t waste time. I was able to get more quickly into the heart of something.

Motherhood made me a deeper human being. I don’t think you have to become a mom to be a deeper human being; there are plenty of people who choose not to, or can’t, become moms. For me, personally, I think it deepens my connection to history, to genealogy, to the future, and to the past, and it made me feel more a part of the world around me. That was ultimately beneficial for my writing.

I’m a research-type person, a Type-A, an A student, so when I got pregnant, I thought, “I want to be really good mom—I want to get an A—so I’ll just study. I’ll read. I’ll approach it like a Ph.D. exam.” I read the books so when my daughter would come, I would have no questions; I would have this nailed. And of course, I was completely unprepared, emotionally and psychologically, for all the shifts that I was going through. I was filled with questions. Writing is the best method of articulating my questions to myself and trying to understand my own emotions. I think it’s hard work to know how you feel in a certain situation. I use words to help me do that work.

I’m trying to explore some of the funnier parts of motherhood, which is not written about all that much, maybe because it’s a private space, but it’s also a sacred space and a romanticized and frequently sentimentalized space, which is dangerous. To sentimentalize something is to simplify it and weaken it. I write about some of the complexity of motherhood, and there’s a lot about it that’s funny, because we’re only allowed to talk about certain parts of it in a way that’s socially acceptable.

It turns out, despite my best intentions, I’m always going to be circling around motherhood but through different genres, approaches, and names.

I wrote this tiny piece about the first day at daycare, when my daughter comes home smelling like another woman’s perfume. I had this sense of betrayal, of jealousy that another woman had held her that close. That’s a crazy, crazy emotion, but it’s also an honest emotion. That’s interesting to me, because it’s not so often represented as a part of motherhood.

Our view of motherhood is still this post-romantic vision of the mom feeling nothing but bliss for her child, completely content in the relationship, desiring nothing more. I think portraying motherhood that way allows new mothers, in particular, to feel like they’re insane.

It has not been portrayed how messy and sometimes painful and crazy breastfeeding is. When you’re in it, there’s so much about it that’s hard and gross and amazingly blissful and mind-blowingly profound. It’s like all the complexity has just been sanded off so that what remains is the woman in the beautiful nightgown holding her sweetly suckling baby, and that’s like 1% of it.

Sometimes women talk about reading my books in the hospital after giving birth, and it’s a cool thought that someone would want my voice with them in that very vulnerable moment.

“We have no ethos that has presented the complexity of motherhood and validated the true emotional and physical difficulty of a lot of it.”

It’s a fascinating, complex mechanism that’s always changing—this growth organism of the family. I think if I got it figured it out, I would stop writing about it. But unfortunately, or fortunately, that will never happen.

When I was in graduate school, everybody was writing about the Greek myths—like, here’s my Perseus poem, as if I care. All the books that were lauded, that giant novel, the Hemingway, Roth/Franzen model, or the novel that’s about war … all the drama that is in those books that people are seeking elsewhere through fighting Odysseus, or whatever, is in motherhood. There’s so much drama in the act of being a mom. It’s all there.

In motherhood, your boundaries are exploded and your capacity for joy is exploding, your capacity for fear is exploding—you’ve never felt such extremes before. I never was someone who yelled until I had my second child. There are new emotions, new actions, not all of which are pretty, new fears—all of the hugeness of this crazy thing that is so everyday, and all around us people are doing it, and yet we somehow aren’t quite aware of how miraculous it is.

My problem is I want to do everything well. I want to be not just a mom but a really good mom, and not just a writer but a really good writer. I want to be really good friend, and I want to be really good teacher. I want to do service work and be a good human being. You can’t be good at everything, but some days, I’m good at one thing and not another. Some days I’m not such a good mom, but I’m a good writer. Other days, I’m really giving it all to my teaching and then I’m exhausted when I come home. I try to keep it in balance in the bigger sense, instead of that micro-sense. I think it’s the No. 1 challenge of writing moms. I think it is the single most essential and unending discussion that we have.

The contract I have with myself is to be at my desk and in the right mental space, which means I cannot have checked email, I cannot have looked at internet banking—all the things that bring people into my life that need things, because if someone needs me, there’s something in me that has to start worrying about that. I just have to go to my desk as close to my dream life as possible. I do think that kind of dreamy headspace helps at the desk. If I’m there, and nothing happens—if I can’t write, that’s fine. I was there. That’s all I asked of myself. I’ll try again the next day.

Spending my time with my family or my writing or my friends or the arts—that’s what’s valuable to me, not a designer handbag. But if you live in a culture that’s always showing you designer handbags, and the only question you’re going to be asked today is “confirm purchase?” or “go to checkout,” you have to struggle to keep your eye on the prize, when the prize is time, beauty, and truth.

I try to keep in mind a statement by Emerson, who said, “Guard well your spare moments, for they’re like uncut diamonds. Spend them and they’re worth will never be known.” So, those moments that we give away, what could we have done with them? What could we have written? What amazing time could we have spent with our family? If we give it all away and use it up, we’ll never know what those moments could have been.

Rachel Zucker

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This is a call to women my age and older, particularly white women or women with privilege and power of any kind. Now is the moment. Do not let us go back to the worst part of what was before.

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(January 28, 2021) Rachel Zucker is the author of 10 books, including, most recently, SoundMachine. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Zucker is an adjunct professor at New York University and at the Antioch Low Residency MFA program. Founder and host of the podcast Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People), Zucker is working on an immersive audio project (also called SoundMachine) and a book of lectures called The Poetics of Wrongness. She’s the mother of 3 boys ages 21, 20 and 13, and she describes writer-motherhood in 3 words as: “attachment, attachment, attachment.”

FROM THE EPISODE: READING LIST & REFERENCES

Rachel Zucker’s website
Rachel’s books
Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People, Rachel’s podcast
MacDowell Colony
Sustainable Arts Foundation
Podcast: Appearances with Sharon Mashihi
Kaitlin Prest‘s podcasts The Shadows and The Heart
Sharon Olds
Claudia Rankine
Sarah Vap
Makenna Goodman, The Shame
Darcey Steinke, Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life
Sarah Manguso
Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement
In motherhood, Tillie Olsen famously said, “You’re so terribly interruptible.”
The Long Winter, Laura Ingalls Wilder
Katie Peterson (Check out the Writer Mother Monster conversation with Katie here!)

SOUND BITES

I’m trying to figure out how to date as a 49-year-old woman, during a pandemic, when I take COVID really seriously. I am basically Rip Van Winkle— like I woke up 25 years later, and I don’t know what Tinder is. How do female humans do this?

“I’ve been trying to do a better job of telling my kids how much I love to work and not feel horribly guilty about it.”

It’s so hard to have solidarity amongst women, amongst mothers. Motherhood is so intense at almost every stage. It’s hard to be interested in menopause when you’re obsessed, understandably, with sleep training. It’s hard to think about having sex after a hysterectomy in your late-40s after a divorce when your nipples hurt from breastfeeding. I’m desperate for wisdom, experience, advice from mothers who are half a generation older than I am, but it’s hard to have that conversation when we’re at such different stages.

Part of why I wanted to be a mother was that I wanted to do it differently than my mother had done it. One of the central damaging things was my mother was a writer and an artist, and I thought she chose her work over me. She was ambitious and did the best she could, but it wasn’t really good enough—and then she got divorced and ruined my life. I have a very different understanding of that now.

I’ve never been able to do what my mother did, which was to say, “I’m working now. Go away,” or to just go away herself. I have struggled with that so pointlessly.

It was one thing to teach, it was one thing to make money, it was one thing to fulfill a family obligation to go to a best friend’s wedding or something, but to go away to write was something that I couldn’t imagine.

You have to commit to many residencies for four weeks, so it’s really prohibitive to almost every mother that I know. I don’t think people think very hard about how exclusionary it is. Those residencies were basically created for men with tenure-track jobs who were on an academic calendar.

The McDowell Fellowship was a profound experience. It was the first time in my adult life that I didn’t have to make dinner every night, that somebody fed me. That was very emotional, actually, to be cared for in that way. I’d never had that experience—not from my mother, not from my father, certainly not from my husband.

I was less hirable than some other people for junior faculty positions, because by the time I was full on the job market, I had six books, I’d won awards, I was too old. Nobody knew what to do with me.

I’ve been trying to do a better job of telling my kids how much I love to work and not feel horribly guilty about it. That’s also a weird thing that I used to do when they were little, sort of act like it was not what I wanted.

With this whole helicopter mom thing, now we’re screwed because we’re too attentive. It’s never ending with the fault and the shame and the guilt. Kids also need limitations, and they need to be safe, and the world is so “horribly dangerous,” but if we keep them too safe, then they’re not going to be resilient. I mean, it’s impossible.

Prose, poetry, memoir, short story, creative nonfiction, essay, lyric essay, audio transcription–there was no one of those that was adequate to describing the experiences that I was trying to describe, which are primarily stories of motherhood. How do you record, or describe and communicate experiences that are internal or external, in the body, in the subconscious, the way you have the running tape in your mind all the time? The novel wasn’t really invented for that material.

“The person who made Candy Land should be killed.”

What kind of narrative structure or lyric structure can contain or embody what it means to be interruptible but also have a relationship with the reader in which you don’t seem psychotic?

People are so fucked up in their ideas about “you have to sleep with your child, you can’t sleep with your child, it’s incest, they’re never going to individuated.” And it’s like, everybody’s just trying to get some sleep and not feel abandoned.

“The problem is that the pandemic, so far, has made every vulnerable group more vulnerable, and the few people who were basically immune to everything that could possibly go wrong in a person’s life have made billions of dollars.”

I hope we can come out of the pandemic with real personal and, more importantly, institutional change. There are things that we should never go back to. There’s no reason for in-person parent-teacher conferences. Just be done with that. A lot of things are opening up in ways that, hopefully, will give people more accessibility, opportunity, and potential for an equal playing field. The problem is that the pandemic, so far, has made every vulnerable group more vulnerable, and the few people who were basically immune to everything that could possibly go wrong in a person’s life have made billions of dollars. And it’s really hard to protest right now safely, so that constellation of things is very concerning to me. How do we continue to dismantle capitalism, for example, and racism and white supremacy and things that exclude women and exclude mothers? Well, I think that a major societal disruption, which is what’s happened, is one of the things that we needed to make this happen. But how do we not slide back is really the question. It’s not primarily the job of mothers and parents with young children; it is primarily the job of people like me. I don’t know yet how to participate in that fight, to not slide back, to move forward. But it really has to be the work of women who don’t have young children at home, who are not struggling just make enough money or keep their jobs, so I don’t know yet how to do that work most successfully and powerfully. But I think this is a call to women my age and older, particularly white women or women with privilege and power of any kind. Now is the moment. Do not let us go back to the worst part of what was before.

“I hope we can come out of the pandemic with real personal and, more importantly, institutional change.”

Creating Community for Writer-Moms, with Scribente Maternum

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“I’m for women being just a little bit selfish.”

Carla du pree
read the transcript

scribente maternum

In this special episode, “Creating Community for Writer-Moms,” the founders of Scribente Maternum offer actionable advice for seeking out, creating, and participating in writer-mom communities. The panel features Rachel Berg Scherer, Carla du Pree, Caytie Pohlen-LaClare, and Elizabeth Doerr, whose bios can be found at the bottom of this page. Scribente Maternum is a community of writers that explores our emotions as mothers, provides space to recharge, facilitates connections with other writers, and inspires personal and collective action. The organization hosts an annual retreat in February.

Read the bios of this episode’s panelists at the bottom of this page.
Learn more about Scribente Maternum here.

EPISODE RESOURCES

Scribente Maternum website
Scribente Maternum February retreat
CityLit Project
Better Smarter Stronger
AWP Conference

SOUND BITES

An awesome tension exists between being the on-call parent and a creative professional.

Rachel Berg Sherer

There’s a unique dichotomy of being both inspired by and distracted by our children. We created Scribente Maternum to live with that balance and find the time to still be creative and be moms.

Rachel Berg Sherer

You’re always a mother, and you’re always a writer–even when you’re not actually doing the act of writing. You’re always thinking about these different personalities and how they show up in the world, how they announce themselves. My mom used to say: “When children are young, they’re around your feet, and as they grow older, they’re around your heart.”

Carla Du Pree

“You’re always a mother, and you’re always a writer–even when you’re not actually doing the act of writing.” — Carla Du Pree

When we talk about balance, it’s not ever exactly 50/50; you’re going to give more time to your children, and your writing is going to drop down for a while, but then you might have times when you can do a little bit more writing. It’s a give and take.

Caytie Pohlen LaClare

“I learned that if I was happy, my kids would be happy. If I fed my spirit, it meant that I could feed theirs.” — Carla Du Pree

I like to change the concept of what is writing. Writing can be the physical act of writing. Writing also means paying attention, observing the world in a different way, listening to people with a different ear, taking time to really absorb and observe what’s around you. That’s writing to me, and it’s not necessarily something you have to pinpoint or structure.

Carla Du Pree

“Listen to children, the way everything is new to them. They’re like walking scribes. We have to listen and pay attention and be in that moment with them.” — Carla Du Pree

I’ve become a better writer in some ways since having a kid because I’m paying attention to what he’s observing in the world. As adults, we take some of the things going on in the world for granted. When we travel with my kid, he notices things that I would have walked right past. That’s a huge example of how they are sources of inspiration. If we see the world through their eyes, they’re our viewpoint and inspiration.

Elizabeth Doerr

I’ve become so much more efficient since I had children. My whole process has changed. I find myself outlining entire essays in my head when I’m with small children and don’t have time to sit and write. I have an ongoing notes app on my phone, where I quickly type when something comes to mind.

Rachel Berg Sherer

I’m very externally motivated, so having a group that holds me accountable, with deadlines, is how I will force myself to make time to write. The time is there; it’s just a matter of looking for it.

Elizabeth Doerr

Writing with a baby or toddler is different than writing with elementary or high school kids. That’s the biggest thing to keep in mind: It continues to evolve. And just when you think you’ve got it down, it changes again, because your kids are in a new stage as well.

Caytie Pohlen LaClare

“Motherhood is messy. You will not be perfect, but life isn’t either. And neither is writing. Quite frankly, that first draft is usually horrible.” — Carla Du Pree

When we started Scribente Maternum, we wanted a real space where mothers could embrace their motherhood and the idea of rage in motherhood—because there is that, too. Like, “How dare you take up all this time, when all I want to do is this one little thing.”

Carla Du Pree

It’s a wonderful thing to find a writer who really identifies with the way you write or a poet whose work you really want to support and become writer friends or literary friends from that. There are all kinds of ways to build community.

Carla Du Pree

Being a parent can be isolating, and being a writer can be isolating. It’s so important to have a place you can go where other people have similar experiences and can offer encouragement. Knowing that somebody else is going through the same thing helps you feel like a part of that group, and not so alone in your individual world.

Caytie Pohlen LaClare

I think of mothers always as creative beings. You created a miracle. You have so much to offer, and it’s so important to hear your stories. When I think about black mothers writing, I remember I was on a goose hunt, trying to find stories that had characters that look like my children. I’m supporting every writer of color, every black mother, every mother, period. We need to hear your stories. Your children need to read them. I’m for women being just a little bit selfish.

Carla Du Pree

“I’m for women being just a little bit selfish.” — Carla Du Pree

My son was older when he read my work. He was stunned. He had this idea of who I was, but he didn’t know writer me. And I’ll never forget, he walked into the room, and he said, “Mom, this is you?”

Carla Du Pree

We’re better parents when we set aside time for ourselves, like the metaphor of securing your own oxygen mask before you try to help somebody else. You can’t help anybody if you are exhausted, if you’re depleted, if you’re not fulfilled, if you’re resentful because these tiny humans are taking everything you have. We’re better mothers when we step away and do what we need to do to make ourselves feel whole.

Rachel Berg Sherer

“We’re better parents when we set aside time for ourselves, like the metaphor of securing your own oxygen mask before you try to help somebody else.” — Rachel Berg Sherer

You’re not alone. Wherever you are out there, wherever you are on your journey, you’re not alone. There are other people going through the same thing, so reach out.

Caytie Pohlen LaClare

episode panelists

Rachel Berg Sherer

Rachel has worked in public relations and communications, everywhere from from Capitol Hill to an order of nuns, taught tenth-grade English, and coaching Speech. She is the founder of Midwest Writing and Editing and writes a regular Feminist Parenting column for Rebellious Magazine for Women. Her work been featured in Solstice Literary Magazine and Minnesota Parent magazine. Rachel and her family live in Minnesota.

Carla Du Pree

Carla Du Pree is a fiction writer, a Maryland state arts ambassador, and the executive director of CityLit Project, a nonprofit that creates enthusiasm for literature. She’s a recipient of fellowships from Hedgebrook, Rhode Island Writers Colony for Writers of Color, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She’s won a Rubys Artist Grant and an MSAC Individual Artist Award for her fiction. Carla was awarded NASAA’s 2020 inaugural Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Individual award, and she is the Maryland State Department of Education’s Arts Leader for April 2020. Carla lives in Baltimore and is the mother of three twenty-something-year-olds and the grandma of a six-year-old grandson. 

Caytie Pohlen LaClare

With Better Smarter Stronger, Caytie merges her purpose and passion into an organization that provides inspiration and education. Caytie lives in the Minneapolis area with her two sons and husband. Caytie also has two grown children and one new grandbaby. Her writing journey has been mostly for personal enjoyment, but she has also recently started writing more blog posts and marketing materials for her businesses.

 

Elizabeth Doerr

Elizabeth Doerr is a freelance writer who helps justice and equity-focused professionals and brands tell their stories. She won a Maryland/Delaware/DC Press Association award for her 2015 Baltimore City Paper story about street harassment, “Stop Calling Me ‘Baby.” You can find her work in CityLab, Portland Monthly, and Baltimore City Paper among other publications. Elizabeth worked in higher education in the realm of experiential and social justice education for over a decade and she has frequently put her organizational and spreadsheet skills to work through event management. Elizabeth in Portland, OR, with her husband and son. www.elizabethdoerr.com

 

Katie Peterson

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There was no way I was going to carry a baby and then give birth to it without being ruminative, conceptual, philosophical, desiring of making generalizations about the experience, kind of idiosyncratically obsessed with what was most conceptual at the root of the experience.

read the interview

(November 19, 2020) Katie Peterson is the author of four collections of poetry, including A Piece of Good News, and her fable in lyric prose, Life in a Field, winner of the Omnidawn Open Books Prize, will be published in April 2021. Katie has received numerous fellowships, including from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and she collaborates with her husband, the photographer Young Suh. Katie, Young, and their daughter Emily live in Berkeley, where Katie directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at UC Davis. She has one daughter who is 3 and she describes writer-motherhood in 3 words as: Always Play First.

FROM THE EPISODE: READING LIST & REFERENCES

Katie Peterson’s website

Katie’s books
Life in a Field (Omnidawn, 2021)
A Piece of Good News (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019)
Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)
The Accounts (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
Permission (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2013)
This One Tree (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2006)

Young Suh, photographer and Katie’s husband

Yaddo artist retreat

Katie Ford, poet

Elizabeth Bishop, poet

Sandra Lim, poet

The Last Clear Narrative, Rachel Zucker

“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant—success in circuit lies.” Emily Dickinson

The Odyssey, Homer

sound bites

Sometimes when I look at my own work, it feels like a combination between a classic American nature poet and a sexy, metaphysical John Donne.

When my mother died, I was filled with two twin senses: the first, this feeling that I would never be a mother, and the second, this incredible hunger to be a mother.

“I think of it as a hallmark of my generation that people felt complicated feelings about “settling down.” We were raised in a generation with a lot of ambivalence about family.” — @hugyourfamily

During the nine months of pregnancy and the month right after it, all these things happen in your body that you can’t refuse. You can’t refuse the heartburn, you can’t refuse contractions, you can’t refuse back pain. And then you have a baby, and you’re supposed to breastfeed that thing, which is so crazy. Talk about an experience that’s both biological and intellectual! There are all these biological things happening, but your brain can’t help but reflect on the strangeness of the experience.

You’re really hungry while you’re pregnant, and then you have the baby, and when you’re breastfeeding, you’re really hungry. I remember some Berkeley person said to me, “Well, it must be really nice to feel so close to your body.” And I said to the person, “I live here [points to forehead]. When this is over, I’m coming back here.” And the person looked at me like I was a horse.

There was no way I was going to carry a baby and then give birth to it without being ruminative, conceptual, philosophical, desiring of making generalizations about the experience, kind of idiosyncratically obsessed with what was most conceptual at the root of the experience.

Right after Emily was born, I’d constantly have a thought and lose it completely, and the thoughts were a wandering around somewhere in me, but I couldn’t find them. It really drove me crazy.

“We have all these reserved feelings about thinking about ourselves as animals, but never in my life have I thought more about another person as an animal than having a little girl.” — @hugyourfamily

In the last two or three months, Emily wakes up at three or four in the morning and comes into our bed and literally wants to sleep on top of me. It’s so mammalian. It’s so intense. I can feel that she wants that closeness because it’s going away. She’s a little girl, she’s becoming a grownup. The animal in her is moving forward in time.

I don’t think we have a great sense in our culture right now about what it means to grow up. Many of us don’t want to grow up. I felt and still feel, like being a grown up is fundamentally a bad thing. Who are the models for really good grownups—Obama? That’s it. It’s hard to think of that many more. Dolly Parton and Obama are really good grownups.

“Who are the models for really good grownups—Obama? That’s it. It’s hard to think of that many more. Dolly Parton and Obama are really good grownups.” — @hugyourfamiliy

Emily and I can’t stand in the rational truth of things when she doesn’t want me to park in a certain place and throws a temper tantrum.

Dickinson said, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant—success in circuit lies.” The truth is something that cannot be dropped on the page unceremoniously, but is its own difficult animal that needs to be cajoled and sometimes restrained.

“The truth is something that cannot be dropped on the page unceremoniously, but is its own difficult animal that needs to be cajoled and sometimes restrained.” — @hugyourfamily

Motherhood has made me think about how many of my own feelings, and how many of the things I’d like to say, I now must repress. More than once, Odysseus from the Odyssey sat and, through tears, listened to a story that he couldn’t react to. Nothing has made me think about that more than this pandemic.

When I think about being a mother, I think about being a grownup, and when I think about being a grownup, I think about being so attached to others that what you do and say and eat and feel matters in such an embodied way to somebody else.

I had given up hope this spring of writing any poems this year, and then I started going for walks. On these walks, a poem came to me. And then I had to go on the same walk every day. I still go on it, because there might be a poem on the walk.

The life of a poet is a lifelong dare and I’m just in the middle of that big dare, like I jumped out of a plane and I’m still in the jump. I just have really cute company.

“The life of a poet is a lifelong dare.” — @hugyourfamily

Tzynya Pinchback

on By

Regardless of what I’m writing about, I want to start with beauty or end with beauty.

READ THE TRANSCRIPT

(November 12, 2020) Tzynya Pinchback writes poetry shaped like prose and essays that would rather be poems. She’s the author of How to Make Pink Confetti (Dancing Girl Press 2012) and her work appears in American Poetry Journal, Mom Egg Review, WOMR’s Poets Corner, and others. Tzynya is a finalist for 2020 Poet Laureate of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and mother to a 23-year-old daughter. She describes writer-motherhood in 3 words as: PRIMAL. THEATER. SANCTUARY.

SOUND BITES

“In some weird way, getting cancer made me a better writer. It made me trust my voice more. It freed me up to write about whatever I wanted. So much of what I write is about what scares me.” — @Tzynya

Before motherhood, I was very eager. I wrote all the time, every day. It was urgent. It didn’t matter if I didn’t sleep, if I didn’t eat. It was something that I had to do all the time. When my daughter was born, I looked up one day, and I hadn’t written in a year. I couldn’t find the words to capture how big mothering was. It replaced the desire to write.

“I couldn’t find the words to capture how big mothering was. It replaced the desire to write.” — @Tzynya

In my mind, I would have one child walking beside me, one in a sling on my chest, and a double stroller. This was my fantasy. I would write at night when they were asleep and teach writing workshops. I’d be cooking from scratch and baking and sewing and just doing everything perfect. I had a very unrealistic idea of motherhood. When I first became a single mom, I let go of some of that.

So many things are out of control when you become a mother. When I was pregnant, I had my birthing plan spelled out to the T. I knew how I was going to give birth, how I was going to deliver, I wasn’t going to use any drugs, what I was going to wear—all the way down to my socks. None of that came to pass.

“Pain is a very interesting thing. It’s so violent. It’s loud. It’s obnoxious. So, I felt like my writing had to shrink.” — @Tzynya

The sicker I got, the more I wanted to find and write about beautiful things. When you’re really sick, you start to notice little things. Like, when you’re driving back from the cancer center, you notice a little 7-year-old skipping down the street, and you instantly remember that unbridled joy of skipping through a hopscotch pattern. Then I’d go home, and I write about that memory, drawing hopscotch in front of my house when I was a little girl.

Regardless of what I’m writing about, I want to start with beauty or end with beauty. That’s my dream, my motivation. It doesn’t matter if it’s an essay, poetry, fiction—I just really want there to be a starting point of something beautiful, even if the only beauty in the work is the language.

“Regardless of what I’m writing about, I want to start with beauty or end with beauty.” — @Tzynya

My story as Elizabeth’s mother diverges from her story, and there’s a line there. So, if I’m ever writing anything that I think may start to intrude on her narrative, then I will take it to her. I never want to, in telling my story, intrude on hers.

It’s a little overwhelming to think that my daughter is going to see me splayed out, writing about my flawed decisions. But at the same time, maybe it will help her when she has to make decisions. I would rather her understand how many mistakes I made, and how I went to bed every night doubting if I’d made the right decision. I think it’s great for her to understand that there’s no perfect way to be a mom or a woman or a human.

“It’s a little overwhelming to think that my daughter is going to see me splayed out, writing about my flawed decisions. But I think it’s great for her to understand that there’s no perfect way to be a mom or a woman or a human.” — @Tzynya

I always tell my daughter: Follow your heart, and follow it all the way through. Don’t give up on it. Don’t settle. You will have to compromise, because that’s life, but don’t settle. Just do what’s going to bring you joy and make you happy and make you solid and fulfilled at the end of the day.