Category: Uncategorized

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July 29, 2021

Lara Ehrlich

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest today is Rachel Yoder. Before I introduce Rachel, thank you all for tuning in, and please chat with us during the interview. Your comments will appear in our studio, and we’ll weave them into our discussion. If you enjoy the episode, please also consider becoming a patron or patroness on Patreon to help keep the podcast going. Now, I’m excited to introduce Rachel. Rachel Yoder is the author of Nightbitch, her debut novel, set for release on July 20, which has also been optioned for film with Amy Adams set to star. She is a graduate of the Iowa nonfiction writing program and also holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona. She is a founding editor of  draft: the journal of process. Rachel grew up in a Mennonite community in the Appalachian foothills of Eastern Ohio. She now lives in Iowa City with her husband and 7-year-old son. She describes writer motherhood in three words as “never enough time.” Now, please join me in welcoming Rachel.

Rachel Yoder

Hi, Lara.

Lara Ehrlich

Hi, Rachel, and congratulations on the soon-to-be released novel. Look at this. It’s gorgeous. And it’s a wonderful book.

Rachel Yoder

Thank you. And it just so happens, the image is pulled from a vintage meat ad, which has astonishing, extraordinary messaging about meat about how meat is so good for you.

Lara Ehrlich

Very appropriate for the book, right?

Rachel Yoder

Yeah, right.

Lara Ehrlich

We’re going to get into that pretty deeply in a few minutes. But first, let’s talk about the three words that you chose to describe writer motherhood. “Never enough time,” I think resonates with most of the people listening. Why those words?

Rachel Yoder

Yeah, I mean, I tried to come up with something a little bit more positive, but motherhood and being an artist has been about the negotiation of time. What time can I take? What time do I need to give? I find my life being scheduled into smaller and smaller bits. That’s the central tension for me, especially with a partner who does, as the partner in the book, work out of town every week. It’s this constant “When are you leaving?” “When are you coming?” “When can I leave?” “When can I come?” Never enough time, as compared to my two MFAs, during which, I spent all my time, all of my single time, in my creative space. It was a big changer from that sort of lifestyle.

Lara Ehrlich

Oh, I’m sure, yeah. Your son is 7 now, so I’m sure that negotiation with time has changed and morphed throughout the years.

Rachel Yoder

It has, and you know what’s really funny? I just realized this. My son is very creative in a very different way than I am. He is a builder and loves to build Legos and Minecraft, and my main negotiation with him now is about time. How much screen time can you have? How much listening to podcast time can you have? That tension has now transferred over to his grade of life. Maybe I need to think about that a little bit more. I sent him to half-day nature camp, and this morning, he’s like, “I don’t want to go to camp. I don’t have enough time. I want more time for my projects and my creative space.” And I was like, interesting. I’ve heard that before. Maybe it’s tension that we now share, oddly enough?

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. I wonder if there’s ever enough time for creative people.

Rachel Yoder

Yeah, that’s a great question. Is there ever enough time. It feels like that’s probably a central tension for many creative people.

Lara Ehrlich

You feel like you had enough time during your MFA programs, even though it was a very different type of place in space?

Rachel Yoder

I did. It felt really wide open, especially during my first MFA, when I was really uncomfortable with teaching. Teaching took up a lot of time. I actually gave up my teachership in my second year, because I didn’t go to get my MFA to spend all my time teaching or worrying about teaching. I think there was a really big commitment on the part of the program to give students a lot of time, and the teaching loads weren’t that heavy, especially when I came to Iowa. I was very lucky, grateful for a fellowship that I got. That was really my condition for myself. I’m getting a second MFA, which is sort of a ridiculous, embarrassing thing to do, but I was like, if I’m going to do this, I’m only going if I get a fellowship, so all my time can be spent on writing.

Lara Ehrlich

Tell me about the two MFAs, and I don’t think it’s ridiculous and embarrassing, considering one of them is from Iowa, which is, of course, incredible. But tell me about the first one, about nonfiction and where you started and why you started there, and then about the movement to fiction at Iowa.

Rachel Yoder

It’s actually flipped. The fiction was first, and it was at Arizona, and then I moved into nonfiction at Iowa. I was 25 when I got my MFA, which felt really young. I hadn’t studied creative writing as an undergrad. It all felt very new to me. I wasn’t familiar with the literary community. When I went into that program at all, everyone else felt a lot smarter than me. They had gotten their undergrad degrees in creative writing and kind of knew how to talk like writers. And I was like, who are you people. That just felt like I was getting my feet wet. I didn’t quite know where I was or what I was doing. It was only after those two years that I realized, oh, okay, this is what I just did, and this is the literary world. I didn’t know about literary journals, really, before I went there. I had published a Modern Love essay when I was at University of Arizona, and that was my first dabble into nonfiction. I took a few nonfiction classes when I was there, too. And all of my fiction was very autobiographical. It was very autofiction. I was really interested in what is nonfiction all about? Should I be an essay writer? Should I be writing a memoir? I seem too young to be writing a memoir, but all of my stories are drawn from my life. I’m really glad I wound up at Iowa, because the focus is so much on the essay and what an essay is. I feel like my literary repertoire was really expanded at Iowa, looking at a lot of experimental forums, talking about all the different ways in which you can think about narrative, thinking about the narrative of an idea—which was something really new to me and that really sparked my imagination. I think in Nightbitch, I really brought all of that to bear. Before I went to Iowa, before I got a nonfiction degree, I was really scared of exposition or any sort of telling stories. My stories were very mannered, very stylized, very “only showing,” sort of mysterious, like, what is going on. But when I sat down to write Nightbitch, I knew that there was going to be a lot of just ranting, for lack of a better word, and I was a lot more comfortable with that, because I knew that there were a lot of ideas that were also going to be part of the story, and I felt more comfortable using that mode, as well as all the tools and tricks I knew from writing short stories.

Lara Ehrlich

Talk us through Nightbitch a little bit, for anyone who doesn’t know what it’s about. Give us the elevator pitch.

Rachel Yoder

Nightbitch is about an ambitious artist turned reluctant, stay-at-home mom who becomes convinced she’s turning into a dog. It’s looking at issues of rage and power and ambition and motherhood, and it’s really challenging a lot of messages that we’ve been given about what motherhood is and what it should be and what womanhood is, through this story of … a mom-dog? A were-mom? Or is she? Which is also in question in the book.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, all of those themes resonated with me so much and I’m sure will with readers, as well. It’s an amazing book and premise and ranting. I think you’re right. It has a negative connotation to rant. But in the best possible way, I see what you mean in this book, and the rage really comes through. Talk to me about rage.

Rachel Yoder

Yeah, I was really angry in early motherhood, and I never was given any tools for dealing with anger. It felt really uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to express it. I felt guilty for being angry. I come from a Mennonite background, and anger is right next to violence. Mennonites are pacifists, so my instinct is to never express anger and to just deal with it on the inside. But that wasn’t working. For me in early motherhood, it was, like, rage. Rage can really destroy you, if you let it. The book was me trying to negotiate that rage and figure out how to deal with it. I think that’s, again, probably something a lot of women struggle with, how to be angry. You don’t want to be the angry woman. People just stop listening to you, which has been my experience. When you get angry, you lose all your credibility. In this book, I wanted her to be so angry that you couldn’t look away. Like, you had to listen. And to show that she was being completely logical and completely credible, despite her anger. That felt really important for me.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, completely credible and logical in the most illogical of premises, kind of.

Rachel Yoder

Yeah.

Lara Ehrlich

Which is an amazing balance to strike.

Rachel Yoder

I also feel like there’s something that felt very logical, even about the absurd premise, to me. I didn’t interrogate it too much. I just ran with it, no pun intended. There was something that felt deeply right about her turning into an animal, so that became something very interesting to explore. It was kind of like, what is this all about? Let’s see how it plays out over the course of this book.

Lara Ehrlich

I totally I understand that. And I love that. It’s interesting. A draft of a book that I just finished, I started writing with the word “rage” in mind, and it was an emotion that I wanted to tap into, and then the story was kind of secondary. It was like the rage was driving the characters and the plot, and it sounds like you’re saying something similar here. Did the rage come first and then the story was crafted around the rage, or how did that come to be?

Rachel Yoder

Oh, yeah, the rage came first. You have to remember, I was writing this deep during the Trump presidency. I started it soon after he was elected, and that the helplessness and rage I felt on election night, sitting there after it was called, and being like, “I have known this man. I have met this man so many times, and I have felt small and foolish in his presence.” And that was the night it really began. It kind of cracked everything open for me, because it seemed like something must be done in the face of what had just happened. But I think, too, having my son and then deciding to quit working and stay home with him was a big transition out of my girlhood into my womanhood, and a very rocky one at that. It was me having to learn how to own my rage, own my power, own my womanhood, and I didn’t know how to do that. Yeah, the rage came first, and the book was, in very many ways, like a catharsis. I had to figure out how to work through it, and the rage was very inarticulate for a long time.

Lara Ehrlich

Wow, there’s so many directions I want to take, but what made you angry? Obviously, the election, which, I am right there with you. My daughter was not even 1, I think. I’m hearing this result that would shape her childhood for at least four years of her life, which is devastating. That is a very tangible rage. What else made you angry in early motherhood?

Rachel Yoder

Well, I was never the kind of girl who fantasized about getting married or becoming a mom. My fantasy was about moving to New York City, working in a high rise, wearing high-heeled shoes, ordering takeout. From a very early age, I wanted to have a big, juicy, great life, and I really saw that centering on my career. My vision for what my motherhood would look like with my husband was that we would both work in town, we’d have both come home at 5 o’clock, it would be a very equal undertaking, I would be able to be fulfilled in my career, I would be able to keep all these parts of me that were really important, I’d be able to write here and there. And just because of the specific logistics of our lives, that is not at all what wound up happening. I also should add that after my son was born, I lost my desire to work. While I did still want to, it became a lot easier to see how stepping out would happen. I was so deeply in love with my baby the first year. The oxytocin was doing its magic. I was high all the time on my baby, my baby hormones. Actually, for the first nine or 10 months of his life, I did work. He was at daycare for 40 hours a week, and I was in agony. I was like, is this what modern motherhood is? You see your baby from 5 to 8 or whenever he falls asleep? Or maybe he has been awake at daycare all day, and as soon as you get him, he falls asleep, and you never see him awake. That felt like a tragedy to me. Like, I don’t want this to be my motherhood. So, then, okay, I’ll quit my job. Well, we won’t have any money. We’ll make do with one career. And that’s what happened. I find myself at home with him, and it’s great for a while. It’s all I want. I want to go to the park with my baby. I want to hold him every time he falls asleep. I want to nurse him to sleep. It was great, and I was so grateful that I could do that. But after a time, by the time he got to be 2 or 3, I sort of came to, from this view this baby view, and was like, what have I done? I’m 38, I have stepped out of the workforce, I have not written for two years, my husband is never here, I don’t have any friends, and I have a toddler. Suddenly, it felt like the trap that I had been working my whole life to avoid. Marriage always felt like a trap to me, motherhood felt like a trap, and I was like, how did I get here? Despite my two MFAs, despite my this, that, and the other thing and all this ambition I had, how am I still here? Despite my great partner, despite this great community I live in. That’s when the ball really started rolling, because I just started thinking, like, of course, this is how it’s all set up. I think that’s where the rants began. I knew that if this had happened to me, then certainly it happened to so many other women. How do we escape that story? How do we write another story? It seems almost impossible. That’s where the rage came from. And the rage also came out of desperation and isolation, too—this huge feeling of being so alone. Like, who can I turn to? We didn’t have family in town, all my grad school friends had moved away. I was like, where’s my pack? Where’s my community? How do you find a community nowadays, if you’re not part of a church or some other established thing? These all felt like really insurmountable questions to me, and I couldn’t figure them out.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. Did writing the book help?

Rachel Yoder

Yeah, it did on many levels, because I went back to writing. If I could do one thing differently, even though I didn’t want to write, and I thought I didn’t have anything to write in the first two years that my son was alive, I would have made myself write. I find time to write every day—not, like, while he napped, but being like, no, I need to pay someone for two hours a day to come. I think that would have been incredibly helpful for me to move through it, but I didn’t know that. The book was me writing the story I needed to read. It was putting these characters that were very similar to me and my husband and my son in a very similar situation—except I didn’t think I was turning into a dog, so throwing that into the mix. How can we use these characters, or embodiments of ideas, and move them through time and space to some sort of resolution? The structure of story is what I turned to, to find some resolution. It’s such a good engine. That’s what I’ve done for it for the last 20 years. The reason I started writing was because I was in deep crisis. I had left my family, I’d left my Mennonite community, I’d had a huge, cataclysmic break in my life. I was just this girl alone in Arizona without her pack. That was when I first started writing, because writing has this promise of resolution if do it enough, and resolution not in the sense that you’ve figured something but that you’ve moved through something. You’ve moved to a different place. And that is very much what I wanted me to do. When I started writing this, I was in a place of rage. I was in a place where I thought I was helpless and powerless. I knew I needed to move somewhere different. How do I do that? Through the use of story.

Lara Ehrlich

Let’s go back for a second, if I can remember my thought because I was so enthralled by what you were saying. Your point that had you known, you would have hired someone to come and give you those two hours a day or whatever it would be. For anyone listening, who hasn’t thought to do that, why is that an important thing to do?

Rachel Yoder

I was actually talking to my best friend about this last night, and she told me this anecdote, which I thought was so great. She was a long-distance runner before she had her three kids. Before she had her baby, she was wise enough, she turned her husband and said, “I am never going to stop running. I want you to know that.” And she said that because she knew it was the part of her that made her her. It’s what made her feel alive. It’s what fulfilled her in a very deep, soulful way. As soon as her son was born a few weeks after, she gave the baby to her husband and said, “I’m going for a run now”—probably not fully wanting to go for a run, but she went for a run. On the run, he called her and said, “The baby’s crying.” She’s like, “Welcome to fatherhood. I’m going to finish my run.” Like, figure it out, you know? That blew my mind. Like, yes, of course, it’s not only that you’re doing something for yourself that’s not just superficial self-care but something that is important to who you are, but you’re also setting up a dynamic with your partner about how this is going to go. You are setting up a way in which your core self should be treated. You’re saying, I’m going to cherish my core self, I’m going to cherish the part of me that makes me me, and it’s really important for me not to lose that. It’s like a ritual that you’re setting up and a way of relating with that core self. That is really important. I think, again, even if I had hired someone, with money we didn’t have, to come for two hours, and then I went to the coffee shop and ate a cookie and just sat there, I still should have done that, because that would have been me taking care of myself in the way I needed to and respecting who I was and valuing myself properly.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. I know self-care is something you wanted to talk about specifically during this conversation. Tell me what the word means in our culture and then what it means to you.

Rachel Yoder

I get this look on my face when you say, “Tell me what it means in our culture,” because it feels so superficial and corrupt at this point—you know, the commodification of self-care. It feels like a business, and whenever anything turns into a business, it feels like it’s far away from its original intent to me. Again, I was talking to my best friend about this, how real self-care requires you getting to know yourself and getting quiet and still with yourself and figuring out what you need and want and what needs aren’t being met. I think there’s a trap that you can fall into of superficial self-care. “I went and got a facial, and I should be feeling great now.” Maybe those are your forms of deep self-care. It’s different for everyone. But I think the real self -care comes in taking care of your internal self and coming into a better relationship with yourself. That’s what we’re really going for here.

Lara Ehrlich

What’s your form of self-care? What do you do?

Rachel Yoder

Writing is a huge form of self-care for me. Whenever I’m not writing—and my husband actually sees this sooner than I do—he’s like, “You’re a mess. Do you need to write?” And it’s like, yeah, I actually do. It’s my way of being still and quiet and going somewhere that feels really sacred and working from there, which is what I need. I’ve also found that gardening is a form of self-care, touching the earth and being in relationship with these amazing things that are alive and are so weird and have so much vitality and personality. I’m looking at my flowers right now. There are so many personalities out there. They all have something to say. I’ve also recently gotten into somatic therapy. I’ve started working with a somatic therapist who, when I asked her what I can do when I’m feeling really anxious, she’ll say stuff like “you could drink a glass of water” or “you could look out a window at something very far away.” And I’m like, “You’re insane. What are you talking about?” But really, what she’s getting at is how can I become more a part of my surroundings? How can I become more aware of my body as a thing in this incredible system that’s all around me? A huge part of self-care for me, for this past year, has been understanding how to communicate and listen to my body. So many women are estranged from their bodies and from the sensations of their bodies. That has been a mind-blowing thing for me, too. Nightbitch has a lot to do with being in communication with the sensations of your body. That has been some real self-care for me, negotiating my relationship with my body.

Lara Ehrlich

I feel the same way, actually. I’ve heard that from a lot of women on the show, that sense of disconnect from our bodies and how somehow motherhood brings you back into your body, through pregnancy and then through nourishing your child with your body. Even women who don’t give birth and who don’t breastfeed still come back to their bodies in a very vital way. Did motherhood bring you back to your body?

Rachel Yoder

That’s a great question. I loved being pregnant. I loved all the sensations of pregnancy. This sounds totally crazy, but I love giving birth. That’s, obviously, a mama who gave birth seven years ago saying that. Did it bring me back to my body? Yes. It made me understand my body had a lot more potential than I thought it did, and therefore I had a lot more potential than I thought I did, in terms of strength and resiliency and doing something really hard. That has been a big piece of my relationship with my body. I also have some autoimmune stuff and incredible pain in my body, which has been something that I’m also negotiating, and I think part of the horror of the body in Nightbitch is a body that seems to be out of sync with you or at odds with you. I’m really interested in that tension and what stories that has to tell.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, let’s stick with that for a second and talk about transformation and women’s bodies and that out of sync feeling. Just go deeper there. That’s so fascinating.

Rachel Yoder

I think what was interesting to me about Nightbitch is that it is a narrative of her being literally at odds with her own body. Like, there’s another animal in there that she’s warring with, but also the fact that her body, on a literal, physical level, is expressing things that she cannot express. In her silence, in her inability to take action, in her internalized, repressed rage, her body begins to change, because it’s like, “I am not going to wait for you. Catch up. This is where we’re going, and you’re coming along, whether you like it or not.” At first, she resists her body, but then, as she figures out how to negotiate it, how to wrangle it, she sees that it’s saying something very important, and it’s crucial to her coming into her own power, to her transforming into this artist and woman and mother that she always wanted to be. It just seems like we can’t go there without our bodies. We have to bring our bodies along. I’ve recently gotten Botox in my face, and I’m like, can I do that? Can I do this and be the person I want to be? Is there any way to get Botox in my face that doesn’t reinforce the message that I am flawed? Is there any way to do it? I don’t know if there is. I’m feeling it out. It doesn’t mean I’m not ever gonna get Botox again. It means that’s an open question right now that I’m negotiating, and more will be revealed. But for lots of people, there’s a thought that the mind and the body are separate, and we can do one thing in one place, and it won’t affect the other place. It’s become incredibly clear to me that we’re this one unified animal. I’m really interested in the ways that all those parts of us are working together, because I think they constantly are, and they’re constantly telling us things, whether we hear it or not.

Lara Ehrlich

Well said. I think this is a good transition to maybe sharing a little bit of Nightbitch, if you’d like to read to us.

Rachel Yoder

Sure. I can read just a little bit of the beginning and give you a little taste. This is the first time I’m reading from a finished copy here, so thank you for the opportunity to do this. It’s really exciting. Okay, so this is from the very beginning of the book:

When she had referred to herself as Nightbitch, she meant it as a good-natured self-deprecating joke—because that’s the sort of lady she was, a good sport, able to poke fun at herself, definitely not uptight, not wound really tight, not so freakishly tight that she couldn’t see the humor in a lighthearted not-meant-as-an-insult situation—but in the days following this new naming, she found the patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck, and was, like, What the fuck.

I think I’m turning into a dog, she said to her husband when he arrived home after a week away for work. He laughed and she didn’t.

She had hoped he wouldn’t laugh. She had hoped, that week as she lay in bed, wondering if she was turning into a dog, that when she said those words to her husband, he would tip his head to one side and ask for clarification. She had hoped he would take her concerns seriously. But as soon as she said the words, she saw this was impossible.

Seriously, she insisted. I have this weird hair on my neck.

She lifted her normal hair to show him the black patch. He rubbed it with his fingers and said, Yeah, you’re definitely a dog.

That’s their relationship in a nutshell.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you for reading, and I’m honored to be the first place in the real book. Let’s talk on a craft level for a second about that opening and about how effectively and beautifully you set up the entire rest of the book with those first few paragraphs in such a matter-of-fact way—here’s what’s happening to this woman, she accepts it as a matter of course, even if she’s going to rebel against it—and just how efficiently you do that in the first page. Talk about that.

Rachel Yoder

Well, thanks. There is a lot going on there, I think. When I just read it now, I was like, oh, what’s so evident from page one is her own internal gaslighting, her own internal doubting of what’s happening. Then that’s reinforced by her husband, who’s like, “Oh, you’re being silly again” and “yeah, you’re totally turning into a dog.” That’s a dynamic that I think a lot of us can relate to, where you don’t take yourself seriously, for many reasons. That’s also a really big tension in the book, her not knowing whether what she’s thinking is worth being taken seriously, and her getting to a point where she’s like, “No, what I’m saying must be heard.” It starts off as a joke. She wants to be a cool girl who can take a joke, she’s not uptight—which is a vibe I definitely relate to and have related to throughout my life—not wanting to be confrontational, not wanting to be uptight about feminist stuff. I think now in midlife, I’m like, “No, it’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit.” And it’s all designed to make us feel bad about standing up for ourselves, make us feel bad about being angry, make us feel bad about hurting the man’s feelings or confronting a man. It’s just so insidious. I feel like all of that is sort of swirling on this first page, and I think it sort of swirls between the wife and husband in the book. That was a really interesting dynamic to write, because I don’t think he’s a bad guy, and I didn’t want to make him a bad-guy character, but I did want to show that they were both part of this pretty insidious dynamic that was really unconscious to both of them until it gets to a point where she realizes the power is within her grasp to transform their dynamic.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, and actually, you just touched on this, too, but the power of naming, too, that she claims this name for herself, and it has the word “bitch” in it. You know, claiming away from those who use it in a disparaging term against women who are angry or women who speak out. There’s just so much power in the book generally, but in that first page plus, you really start off with a bang.

Rachel Yoder

Well, isn’t it interesting, too, that “bitch” is a word given to women by men? Because I feel like if someone’s a bitch, I want to be their friend. Like, that’s a plus in my book. I want to know what’s going on with you. It’s just this very obviously gendered slur. I did think about that, like, should I take it back? Do I even want to take it back?

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. This is such a technical question, but was the book always called Nightbitch?

Rachel Yoder

It was. The title was the very first thing. I did talk to some editors who were like, “If we publish this, we can’t keep at Nightbitch.” And I’m like, “That might be a deal breaker for me.” I just felt like that’s what it had to be.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, I mean … if you see this on a shelf, you’re gonna pick this up, right? It has meat and the word “Nightbitch.”

Rachel Yoder

It’s also, like, totally absurd.

It is very angry, but that had to be leavened with the humor. It was also just really fun to write, because I could be utterly absurd and just play around.

Lara Ehrlich

Let’s talk a little bit about the book on a publishing level. Tell us a little bit of story about publishing Nightbitch and about what’s next for it, because you have some exciting next steps for the book.

Rachel Yoder

The deal happened right before we all shut down for COVID last year. Really quickly. I found my dream editor. She saw it, and she knew. She was like, “Yes, yes, we’re doing it.” And I was like, “Okay, yes, let’s do it.” It’s been a joy to work with her. Her name is Margot Segmanta, and she works at Doubleday. We did some editing during the pandemic. It wasn’t really in-depth editing; it was adding a little bit more to the MLM mommy narrative and building that out, fiddling with the middle backstory part, which was always a little problematic and hopefully works now, and then just fine-tuning language in some areas. That went really smoothly. And it should be noted that every single person who I have worked with on this book and with the film, which we’ll talk about, has been a woman. Every single person, which I find astonishing. I feel so lucky. It just hit me the other day. Especially for film stuff, you don’t get to work with women, but the executive who I’m working with, the producers are women. Soon after the book was sold, some sort of magic happened, and everyone in Hollywood had the manuscript. I still have to get clear with my agent on how exactly this happened. But I got hooked up with a film agent, and she’s like, “Okay, we’re gonna sell it.” And she did her thing. During the pandemic, I was taking calls with producers and with Amy Adams. It was a pretty long process, but it was also really interesting, because you would have calls with these producers, and they just wanted to talk about your work and talk about the story, which was really fun and gratifying. It was great. I think about it took about six months to get a contract, and everything kind of paused at that point. Hollywood was shut down. But now we’re in July again—how is it July again?—and it seems there’s been some movement and hopefully there will be an announcement soon. Things are moving forward in a really positive way with people who are just really vibing with Nightbitch. So many moms and women are vibing with my pitch, and so I’m just really excited to see what someone else does with the story. It feels like something that is no longer mine. I think on July 20, it’s really not gonna feel like mine. It’s gonna feel like this thing that is doing something out in the world.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, July 20, and then the book will be on shelves. I want to be respectful, because there are some things that you are not able to talk about yet, when It comes to the film, but can you tell me about any of the calls that you had? Can you tell me about talking to Amy Adams and what that conversation was like?

Rachel Yoder

I think so. It was funny because my son was home, and I got the time zones wrong, so I had just gotten out of the shower, and my phone rang. I was literally in the towel, and she’s like, “Hi, it’s Amy.” And I’m like, “Um, I’m sorry, I got the time wrong.” She was very sweet. She’s really smart, and it was a very personable conversation. It’s pretty amazing to be able to ask, you know, what scenes resonated with you the most? And what was it about the book that captured your imagination or your interest? She said she was really interested in the feral rage of the book. She’s been taking edgier roles of late, but still, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen completely unhinged Amy Adams. I think that’s probably an exciting prospect for her to go into this new territory. I think it is in the right hands. It can be something that’s really singular and funny but also deeply earnest and serious. It was completely surreal. She said she really liked the script from arrival, because at the beginning of it, she had no idea how it was going to end, and she likes things that are really surprising. She had a very sophisticated aesthetic sensibility, so I was like, “Yes! Yes. Thank you! This is what I want, too!” It was wonderful. It’s just been wonderful working with everyone who I’ve worked with so far and feeling like what I wrote is being respected and understood and handled in a way that’s gonna do it justice. By women, it should be noted.

Lara Ehrlich

Like I said, I think that the scenes and the ferocious energy of the book really resonate especially now. It feels like there is a swelling of rage among women that you’ve really tapped into, so it’s the right time and place for this book, I think.

Rachel Yoder

I hope so. I hope that women will be able to read it and say, “Oh, this is what I can do with my rage,” or it’ll give them a way to think about how rage can be generative and propulsive and creative and can actually serve you very, very well, if you know how to come into relationship with it, instead of trying to repress it or push it away. Like, inviting it in, inviting the beast in and asking what is up? What do you want? That is what I hope women do, come into closer relationship with their rage from this book.

Lara Ehrlich

Let’s talk about that a little bit more. This goes back to something you said early on, that with your upbringing, rage is something that you hold at bay. I think that’s something, whether you grew up as a Mennonite or not, women are taught, whether it’s conscious or subconscious, to hold their rage at bay. You’re not supposed to be angry. You’re not supposed to be a bitch. You’re not supposed to argue. Can we talk a little bit more about your grappling with that complexity and where you’ve come out the other end? You say you want women to invite the beast in. What can it do for you?

Rachel Yoder

I think rage is a piece of self-care for me. I feel so guilty sometimes, going and getting a hotel room for the weekend after my husband’s been gone, being like, “Peace, bye, you’re with the kid on your own.” The way I get through that is you summon the beast. Here is your ambition. Here is Nightbitch. Like, Nightbitch needs to fucking go and get room service and have no one talk to her for two days. Like, let’s get serious. There are lots of different ways of talking about it. It could be rage, it could be bringing your fierce mother energy to yourself, to your own caretaking. Rage has been so propulsive for me. I mean, it created a book where I was like, “I haven’t written in two years, I am a writer, I am going to write a fucking book now.” It gave me focus, like, this is what I’m doing. There’s no negotiating my way out of it. Here we go. If you feel guilty, cool—we’re gonna do it anyway. If you feel like you’re abandoning your family, cool—we’re gonna do it anyway. The rage is really at all of the other voices who would have me act otherwise, and that is power, to have a fierceness that you can bring to all of this other stuff around you. That has been really helpful for me, to focus my rage in those ways and to use it to protect myself, to protect my time, to protect the thing that makes me me. I have to do it every day. It’s a constant negotiation. You can see it in how I’m sitting. You take the rage, and you put it in your chest, and that’s how you activate it. You can take the rage, and you can put it in your guts, and it’ll eat you alive. You can hold it in different parts of your body. Yeah, this is what’s always going on in my head these days. I don’t know. Pandemic. Too much time to myself. But that’s how I think about it. Like, where is it in my body? How does it feel? Where does it feel like it’s harming myself, when I feel sick with rage? Where is it then? How can I become more comfortable? Can I drink a glass of water? Can I look at a tree far away? Yeah, all of this work on myself—all of my work with my physical ailments, all of my art—it all just really feels like it’s converging now. That’s what this book was, a convergence of all of these different relationships and negotiations and problems and trying to find how that all comes together in this story. And it can be a story that’s hopeful in the end. Not everything was resolved, but she’s headed there. She’s found a first stage on which to perform this self, and we can be hopeful that she’s now on the right path.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you, Rachel. That’s the best ending, right there. Thank you so much for joining me. This has just been such a pleasure. I’d like to talk to you every day. It’s been such a pleasure, everyone. Thank you all for joining us. Stay tuned for the next episode. Go out and get your own copy of Nightbitch, and I will see you all next time. Thank you, and good night.

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July 7, 2021

Lara Ehrlich

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and this is a special episode about writing motherhood and mental health with writer mothers Alicia Elliott, Liz Harmer, and Megan Leonard. Please share your thoughts and questions with us in the comment section, and we’ll weave them into our conversation. And I’m honored now to introduce Alicia, Liz, and Meg.

Alicia Elliott is a Mohawk writer whose essays have been nominated for national magazine awards and whose fiction was selected for Best American Short Stories 2018. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, was a best-seller in Canada and the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2020 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award. She’s working on a novel and lives in Ontario, where she has a 14-year-old son. Alicia describes writer motherhood in three words as “difficult, meaningful, confusing.”

Liz Harmer’s first novel, The Amateurs, received starred reviews with Publishers Weekly and the Quill & Quire and was a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novels Award. Her second novel, Strange Loops, is forthcoming in 2022. She writes about love, madness, motherhood, and religion, and she’s working on a memoir on her experiences of psychiatric crises and treatment. A Canadian living in California, Liz has three children, ages 9, 11, and 13, and describes writer motherhood in three words as “challenging, interesting, deep.”

Megan Leonard is the author of A Book of Lullabies, a collection of poems that explore mental illness and new motherhood through the lens of fairy tales, Disney princesses and labyrinthian language. She teaches writing through the Connors Writing Center at the University of New Hampshire and has been a mental health advocate for more than 20 years. She has four children, ages 8, 5, 3, and eight months, and she describes writer motherhood in three words as “playful, adaptive, messy.”

Now, please join me in welcoming Alicia, Liz, and Meg. Thank you all for joining me. We have a full house here tonight, so let’s get started. Thank you for being brave enough to join me to talk about an issue that is often ignored in our society, mental health, especially for mothers. And we’ll talk about that a little bit. But before we do, I’m going to ask each of you just to tell me why this topic is important to you. What’s your personal story? What brought you here? And we’ll start with Liz.

Liz Harmer

Hey, thanks, Lara. I just want to say, first of all, it’s important because it’s so stigmatized. I still feel the effects of that stigma, and no matter how sane I appear to be, there’s still a feeling of if I transgress and I don’t seem mentally healthy, it feels like I’m doing something wrong and other people are judging me. So anyway, I just wanted to put that out there—that it does feel kind of scary to talk about it, because there’s such a strong stigma. I’m writing a memoir, which is about when I was 17 and had a pretty severe crisis of depression and anorexia. It led to a long, manic psychosis. That led me to be in the hospital for about six weeks of my final year of high school, and then figuring out what all that meant and what the diagnosis I received meant, and whether I should stay on the meds and how to care for myself. All of that has been my life’s work. I’ve been writing about that ever since. That was over 20 years ago. I’ve also experienced pretty severe postpartum depression. I have three kids, and only with one of them did I have postpartum depression, and it was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever gone through. I’m talking about that in de-stigmatizing. That’s really important to me as well.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you, Liz. Yeah, we’ll definitely talk about postpartum depression, and thank you again, because it takes a lot of courage to come on and talk about something that there’s a lot of stigma around, and rightfully so. And so now, let us hear from Alicia. Alicia, can you tell us a little bit about your story?

Alicia Elliott

Yeah, it’s a little bit complicated. My mother had bipolar disorder. She was diagnosed with different things throughout my life, and I’m fairly sure her most recent diagnosis is schizoaffective disorder, which is bipolar disorder with schizophrenic elements. I was mostly being cared for by her. Our family was very traditional: my dad went out to work, my mom stayed home and raised the kids. We dealt with her having this mental illness and saw it in front of us in ways that really shaped how I felt about about the world. And I saw the ways that she was criminalized, in certain senses, as well, for having mental illness. There was one time in particular, where she was tasered in front of my young siblings while we were on the res, and this was because she has a mental illness. This kind of binding up of mental illness with criminalization, using the police, in some senses, to deal with us … I saw that growing up, and I wrote about that in my book of essays, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground. My mother talked about mental health, and at the time I wrote it, I had only really experienced depression and anxiety—like bad depression for years. But then I had a mental health crisis last year, of mania and psychosis where I ended up in the hospital, mandated there by the court, by my siblings. It was a very complicated thing. I’m still dealing with the fallout of that, in terms of how my family sees me, despite the fact that we all grew up with a mother who had mental illness. The novel I’m working on now actually talks about psychosis and what it’s like as a mother, particularly having postpartum psychosis and things along those lines.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, thank you, Alicia. That’s a lot. Having a mother who was dealing with mental illness must have been traumatic to have witnessed as a young child. We’ll definitely come back to the criminalization of mental illness. I think the phrase of having the police “deal with us,” quote unquote, is so telling, especially with the criminalization of mothers with mental illness. That’s something that we’ve all seen in the news, as well. Meg, same question to you.

Meg Leonard

I love your podcast, Lara, because of this use of the word “monster.” I feel like motherhood is this space where how our society defines what’s healthy and acceptable is so narrow, and I feel like the mentally ill mother and the selfish mother are the two tropes that show up in media and movies and songs and writing as the two things that are like the most monstrous that a mother could be. And of course, writers, to some degree, have to be selfish, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say they’re seen as selfish. I feel like being a mentally ill writer mother has the potential for this monstrosity. That really interests me. I have a long mental health history. I had multiple hospitalizations in my 20s, I was very ill as a teenager, sort of did better in my 30s, but mostly because I had lots of therapy and lots of support and knew my own illnesses better and knew how to manage them better. I have four children, the oldest one is 8, the youngest one is eight months, and I had postpartum psychosis after my first and fourth children, and then just sort of a run-of-the-mill postpartum depression after the second and third. All of my friends know this about me. Most of my friends are also people with complicated mental health histories. And when I became a mother, suddenly, I felt all of this pressure to be quiet about that part of my identity. I felt like if I talked about it too much with other mothers that that would be scary to people or might make them think twice about being my friend or think twice about me. I was interested in how this one identity as a mother made this other identity that I was pretty comfortable with sort of unravel, in terms of my public comfort with it. I feel like we don’t have a lot of models for healthy mentally ill writer mothers. If we think of mentally ill mothers who write, we think of Sylvia Plath and and Sexton. We don’t think of the women who survived and wrote dozens of books. I’m interested in having these conversations so that we can talk about what healthy writer mothers with mental illness might be, and how that’s possible. And I’m also just interested in talking about how these monstrous identities like mental illness and selfishness are not monstrous and are actually just part of being human. The two do not have to be in opposition to each other. When I was writing my book of poetry, I was interested in those identities and how they hide each other and subvert each other. And so I was excited to learn about your podcast, and I’m so happy to be here today, because I feel like this topic is one that touches a lot of writers and a lot of mothers. I think our collective feelings around it are not going to shift until we talk about it more.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, thank you. Man, that was really eloquently said. And I should have said at the top of the show that you actually came to me with this idea and helped me craft the episode around motherhood and mental health. You’ve brought so many amazing ideas and questions to this moment, where now we’re all gathered to discuss. This is a great group of strong, monstrous—in the best way—women. I want to keep the focus on you all as the panelists, but just for the sake of transparency, I also struggle with anxiety and depression, and having had a child, raised the stakes for that. You kind of realize how much there is to lose and how easy it is to to lose the things that you love and how fragile your children are. That, for me, raised the anxiety level. Motherhood and anxiety and mental health, for me, are very intertwined. Just putting that out there. You gave us a good launching off point with monstrousness. Can we talk a little bit about monstrousness and about the stigma, as Liz named it, around mental health specifically for mothers? Who wants to take that runway?

Liz Harmer

I don’t know if I have anything to say about that, but I just love what you said, Meg, about healthy mothers who also have mental illness—like, those things coexist. The monster thing … I feel like there are people in my life who think I’m a monster. It doesn’t matter how well I do and how stable I am and how good I am. It seems like some people have decided that I’m a monster. It’s pretty terrifying to come out from under that. One thing that is really useful is that because I’ve gone through these things, I’m less afraid of what might happen to me, and I’m less afraid of the judgments I might receive, since I’ve received them all. In a way, it’s very freeing, because I can be bold in ways that maybe would be frightening if I hadn’t gone through those things already.

Lara Ehrlich

How does that come out in your work, that boldness?

Liz Harmer

I’m not hung up on apologizing for being selfish or choosing art. Because for me, art, or being a writer, is a very important part of how I cope and make sense of my experience, so it doesn’t seem to me like a selfish act. It seems like it’s an important thing that I do. I choose that as a healthy choice for myself. I guess that’s one way that it comes out.

Alicia Elliott

For me, also, just thinking about the ways when I was younger, I conceived of my mother as a monster when she was manic, for example, or when she was super depressed and couldn’t get out of bed. Those kinds of things, you don’t understand as a child, particularly when, in my case, a parent is basically telling you all of these things, like you need to look for this, you need to look for that. Basically, I was kind of policing my mother’s mental health, by, like, “Oh, you got to make sure that if she isn’t sleeping much, she’s doing this”—all these different things that made it so that it was kind of like this carcerality imposed into my head, in terms of how I conceived of my mother. I never really had a chance to really reckon with that until I was writing, particularly an essay about her specifically in my book. It was then that I was trying to reckon with this way that I had conceived of her as someone else entirely when she was sick. Having been on the other side of that now gives me this difficult but necessary insight into what was happening with my mother at the time and all the ways my father had failed her, in terms of giving options, like giving the idea that you could be healthy, in any sense, while you have mental illness. It felt like there was no model for that for our family. We fell into these patterns that are still very much there. At least, I saw them when I had mental illness and saw how my siblings reacted. As a society, despite how many years we’ve been aware of mental illness, there has not really been any significant changes. It’s been illuminating to think about that and put that into my work, that double-sided awareness of being on both sides of that, as a mother myself and as the daughter of a mother who had mental illness, I was encouraged to think of her societally and within my own family. Seeing how people were to frame me, once it was clear that I had mental illness in very similar terms, despite there being 30 years difference between when those things happened.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, Alicia. Forgive my ignorance in asking the question, but I wonder what it was like for you growing up on a reservation. In that rarefied society, did you notice differences in the way mental illness was addressed or not addressed, as compared to where you live now?

Alicia Elliott

I think it’s important to note that I didn’t grow up on the res, I moved there when I was in grade nine. I had a significantly different experience than my siblings who were much younger and spent most of their lives growing up on the res. We were in a very particular situation, because my mother was not indigenous. She was white. My dad just moved us there. He had been very abusive to her in the past—including moving us there to begin with. He didn’t do anything to make it so that she had legal standing there. She basically had to hide that she was there the entire time, and if you know anything about the way that reservations in Canada work as a result of the Indian Act, there was a period where if you were an indigenous man and you married a white woman, she would gain status and therefore be able to live on the reservation, whereas, if you were an indigenous woman and you married a white man, you would lose status, and all of your kids would lose status, and you would basically be forced off the res. That kind of sexism was really embedded into the Indian Act, and that affected my family because right before my parents got married, they had changed it, so she didn’t have any status there. That meant that because she had no status, she was not supposed to be living on the res. All it would take was someone to find out she was there and be mad at my dad and report it to BAM Council, and they could send a letter evicting us. We were in a really precarious situation, considering the historical context. When she did have mental illness, we couldn’t take her into Branford, for example, to get help, without it having to be something we would pay for. Instead, we would have to literally drive her to Buffalo, and my dad would have to call the cops on her and get her put into the hospital as a threat to herself. That’s kind of how it went. It was this constant trauma. Sometimes, all the kids would have to be in the car so she wouldn’t get out of the car while we were driving on the highway and things like that. I think that my dad really was very aware of the power he had in that situation. It was a complex situation. I think as a result of intergenerational trauma, we don’t like to talk about mental illness on the res. You kind of put it to the side. We’re all dealing with our things, or not dealing with our things, and that’s not what we talk about. This idea of silence got really reinforced through the places where I was and the historical context I found myself in.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, different layers of silencing, not just womanhood but being on a reservation, indigenous culture, the context that you were living in. That touches on something that Meg noted. Alicia, your word power—the power that your father had in that situation, the power that the authorities had to step in and try to manage, that leads into monstrousness and some of the power dynamics that you mentioned as well. Can we talk a little bit about power and powerlessness of women, particularly mothers, when it comes to mental health?

Meg Leonard

Alicia, one thing I loved that you said that I think is so important is you talked about how the systems failed your mother. And in her case, it was many layers of systems. I think for those of us in this conversation, that seems very obvious, but it’s such an important thing to name. I think there is this thing in our culture, especially around postpartum depression, but also around a lot of other mental illnesses, to where we view them as individual crises, and we view the treatment as individual: it’s a pill and it’s therapy. There’s something wrong with the individual’s mind. This is very similar to how our society currently treats new mothers. It’s very individual. People are parenting in silence, they’re not with their families, they’re not getting time off from work, we don’t have these big communities who bring us hot meals, there’s nobody to hold the baby at night. Mothers, even if they’re married with great, supportive partners, are very, very isolated, in a way, and their challenges are individualized in a way that’s very similar to how we individualize mental illness. I think this allows us as a culture to not look at the way the systems are failing us, and they are failing us as mothers, and the systems are failing people with mental illness. And it’s so much more so for people who are people of color or queer or living in poverty. We know that the systems actively make marginalized people ill, yet we persist in believing that the problem is in the individual mind, where the problem can only be solved with individual treatment, instead of thinking about: how do we radically change these systems, so that women have more support when they have young children, so that people with mental illness have more support? I’m glad that you brought that up because I think that’s crucial to the conversation.

Lara Ehrlich

Absolutely, thank you, Meg. And that leads us to the importance, as you said, of naming issues and of defining terms. Let’s take one step back and just define what we mean by postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis, for people who don’t know what that means, and talk about new mothers’ experiences with mental health specifically. Who wants to take that one?

Liz Harmer

I had postpartum depression, but to be able to define it would be very difficult for me to do. I could talk about my experience. I have a very complicated relationship to my diagnosis, because I rejected the diagnosis I received when I was a kid. Part of what I’ve been exploring is trying to figure out what happened to me if it wasn’t this biochemical thing. I’ve been reading a lot about systems and ways that families can create these problems, or the way that lack of resources or certain kinds of stresses can exacerbate mental illness. I have three kids, I wasn’t on medication for any of them, but only with one did I experience the depression. This is part of my mystery for me of what it means to be on a spectrum, to not have a clear idea of what it means for me to be mentally ill. That’s my caveat. As a result of that, I was used to taking a lot of responsibility for my own illness as an individual. When I became bereft, I kept describing myself as shattered. I couldn’t get through a day. I could hardly walk. Every day just felt like a mountain I was climbing. I remember one way I was thinking about it at the time was like, oh, here comes 9 o’clock again. Like there was nothing. Like I just had to get through it. But I couldn’t get the rest I needed.  People who might be vulnerable to hormonal fluctuations or lack of sleep, in addition to all of the other anxiety that comes with being a mother, I believe that sets you up for the possibility of having postpartum depression. For me, I was in this confusing relationship with psychiatry. They wouldn’t put me on antidepressants, because antidepressants can cause mania, so I couldn’t get the kind of help that maybe I needed, so I kind of suffered alone. I feel like I am lucky to have survived it. Because when I look back at how desperate I felt, it might not have been survivable. That went on for a year for me—an experience of not feeling like I could be a good mother, and the feeling of not feeling like I could be a good mother somehow made my mothering worse. You get into these guilt/shame cycles. I don’t know, Meg, if this connects for you at all, with your experience.

Meg Leonard

Yeah, I had a very similar thing, and I really appreciate you saying that you’re glad you survived because it was potentially not survivable. I feel like that is one of the things that mothers are not allowed to name. It’s like, once you become a mother, it’s one thing to say, “I have the baby blues, and they put me on Zoloft.” And that is really hard, but in terms of acceptability. Then, if you talk about being so unwell that it’s a miracle you survived, that’s the sort of thing that we don’t say at dinner parties. People are really uncomfortable with it sometimes, or perhaps it’s that we perceive people will be uncomfortable with it. I feel like I’m afraid to say those things a lot of the time. I had a very similar experience after my first was born. I actually had postpartum OCD, which was interesting, because it helped me understand my lifelong OCD in a completely different way, because it was so magnified, so in a weird way, it ended up being almost like a gift. I sort of hate to use that word, because wasn’t a gift at the time, but now, at age 40, having survived it, I feel like that experience allowed me to understand my own mental health in a new way. But it was so extreme, and it lasted well over a year, which goes outside of the typical diagnosis. I was back at work two weeks after I had my baby. Now I worked from home, and I was working part time, but I was working two part-time jobs, so it was a lot of hours. I feel like a lot of what made it so dangerous for me was things like I wasn’t eating well, I wasn’t sleeping, I didn’t have people to talk to, I hadn’t met a lot of friends with young children yet. It was this isolation and this longstanding ambivalence with the psychiatric community, because I had a very long mental health history. A lot of what you say really moves me. And I think what you were saying earlier, Lara, about power, when someone feels like they can’t trust the potential care providers, or when they feel like they have to be alone with their symptoms, because if they say the wrong thing, it’s going to trigger a chain reaction of responses. Or if they say out loud to their friend how desperate they are, that would be entering in the taboo, and, somehow, that renders a person powerless. You can’t speak any of those truths, because of all of those very legitimate fears.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. Alicia, would you like to add?

Alicia Elliott

I think it’s hard for me to talk about anything to do with postpartum stuff, just because I was a teen mom. When I gave birth to my son, it was a month and a half before I was supposed to be going to university, and I was very fortunate in that my partner’s mother was willing to basically take care of our child while we were going to university. We were coming home every weekend, and for the first six months, I was still trying to basically pump breast milk, and trying to figure out how to not tell people that I couldn’t go out because I had to be home to pump breast milk every four hours, put it in this little freezer, and then be able to take that back on the weekends. It was like very isolating in a different way. A lot of guilt for not being there with my baby, even though I knew that we were trying to make it so that we could have a better life, ultimately for our son. It was one of those things where I felt so much shame, I didn’t tell anyone anything. In my residence that I was in, I didn’t really talk to anyone. I was just nervous to talk about any of this stuff. It’s hard for me to know, I guess because I was so young, what was going on with me mentally and how much of that was situational and how much of that was other stuff. It’s kind of depressing to say, but for so much of my life, I’ve dealt with depression, so it’s hard for me to be able to point my finger at something and say, this was a time where I wasn’t depressed.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, that resonates with me, too. Like, what would it feel like if it were to go away? It’s interesting to think about. Let’s talk a little bit more about support. You have mentioned a broken system that was actively moving support away from you, and in other cases, a lack of support from family or friends or people who understood what you were experiencing. How important is support? Have you found support? Since you’ve become mothers, have you found communities that you’ve entered into or created for yourselves that have helped with surviving, to Liz’s point?

Alicia Elliott

Because I had my son so young, it kind of set me apart from a lot of the mommy groups that were around at the time. A lot of the women were older than me, and there’s always this judgment of young mothers. Even with my son growing up: we have an apartment, and the other people that were in his classes were in their 30s, established, and had houses, and we’ve never had that. Having to deal with that sort of stuff has been difficult, in terms of not feeling support. Having a child before you’re a certain age, I guess, society deems is appropriate. It’s always changing, it seems. We did have, like I mentioned, my partner’s mother. She was very supportive. But there was always this underlying fear that she might not let us have our son again. When we would be in fights, that would be something that would come up. It was constantly me having to worry about being considered an appropriate mother enough for a court to me give access to my child or custody of my child, and that kind of thing constantly played in the background. I remember when I was first pregnant. I decided to have my baby in a birthing center on six nations because I was terrified of the general hospital, where it was common knowledge that young teens from six nations who had babies, they had basically social services outside of their door as soon as they were born, asking questions or taking kids, specially if they had any kind of involvement themselves, when they were children with social services, and we did have that in my house, so I was terrified of that. You have this fear of policing of particular racialized communities and their ability to be mothers at the drop of a hat. That was something that was also difficult to navigate. I’m just glad that my family has always been supportive of me. My dad was there every single weekend to pick us up all the way from Toronto and drive us home, and then drive us back on the Sunday night. My dad is flawed in a lot of ways, but he also is someone who’s really supported me in a lot of other ways. That was helpful when I was feeling otherwise isolated and not sure how I was going to be able to fulfill my role as a mother while trying to do these other things to make it so that society would see me as someone who should be a mother and would be able to have my child.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you, Alicia. This is a point that Meg brought up before the show. And you’ve led us into it. This is the way in which this mirrors how women writers are often working in isolation and without structural supports in my language, which affects their ability to create and reach an audience. Let’s pivot a little bit to the writing and how you see the things that Alicia really beautifully pointed out playing out in our careers as women writers. Who wants to start? Liz has something to say.

Liz Harmer

I have kind of a funny—to me, funny—anecdote, which was that I was reading over my psych records as part of writing my memoir, and they’re always looking for “delusions of grandeur,” so they would constantly find me writing a novel and calling me “grandiose,” like I was having a delusion of grandeur. I really was just always writing novels. It wasn’t a delusion; it’s just what I did. The writing: In my case, I feel like my family was really supportive of writing—like, writing was a really important thing. We were kind of … I call it “shabby intellectuals,” because we really didn’t have much money, but we had a lot of education. That’s possible in Canada. I don’t know if it’s the same in the States. There were always books around my mom’s library, and my dad was an elementary school teacher, so writing was really important and valued. When I had this episode that everybody kind of had to recover from, I’m interpreting it, at this point, as like a trauma. It’s not just that the trauma can exacerbate the symptoms, but the thing itself causes a secondary trauma—the breakdown itself and all the treatment and coping with the treatment. While that was all going on, everyone was just not sure what would happen to me, and I kind of felt like nobody expected anything. They felt like we would be lucky if Liz got her degree. I felt left alone to figure out my ambition. To me, that was kind of a blessing with having had this crisis. I could just go ahead and do my thing, because no one expected anything. That’s maybe not fair to my parents, but that’s kind of how I feel about it.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, Meg, this was your point to make, so I want to come back to you and ask you if you want to talk a little bit about how women writers are working in isolation and how that plays out.

Meg Leonard

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I had a baby in the pandemic, and my book also launched in the pandemic. In the poetry community, we talk a lot about being good literary citizens. Practically speaking, what that often means is buying each other’s books and going to each other’s readings and promoting each other on social media and inviting each other to speaking events and networking to be on panels and things like that. I feel like this group of people will understand that when you have a young child, that becomes impossible pretty quickly. And when you have a mental illness, that becomes impossible for different reasons. I have started noticing, in my own life, how much I have to say no—because I have to go to bed at 9, because my baby’s gonna wake up at 5, and if I don’t get enough sleep, I am going to be in a bad place with my mental health. Or, you know, I find networking so exhausting, and it takes such a toll on my mental health, so even if it’s something I enjoy, it might be something that I have to limit to some degree. The poetry community tends to be kind of small, so I don’t know if this is true in your writing circles as well, but we put so much emphasis on this work that people do behind the scenes, and women especially. A lot of it is about the way we use our relationships to promote our work. I’ve just been thinking about how I just can’t do a lot of those things—things like residencies. I can’t go to a residency. I’ve been breastfeeding somebody or pregnant with somebody since 2012—so, basically my entire 30s. So, right at the time, when I’m supposed to be trying to promote myself and get out there, I’m sustaining other people with my body, and it’s time consuming. I don’t know how to solve that. I think one way to solve that is to make things like writing conferences and residencies child friendly. That would be huge. There is no residency that I know where you can bring a breastfeeding infant. I went to AWP when I was really pregnant with my first, and I haven’t been back to one because it’s too hard to travel far away from very young children. So: Making things child friendly would be one thing. And then I think recognizing that literary citizenship is going to have to include people with mental illness and chronic illness and other disabilities, and in order to include everyone, there has to be space for just recognizing that not everybody has the same energy levels, or that staying up late to get stuff done can mean very different things for different people, and that can shift for individuals over time. I feel like right now, we’re at a point where we’re just, as a writing community, starting to recognize that things that we label as working hard or hustling are actually just keeping out anyone who doesn’t have uncomplicated health. I’d like to see those things change. I think that will help women. And I think that will help women with mental illness. Hopefully this can be part of that conversation, and we can all start shifting our thinking around those things.

Lara Ehrlich  47:35 

I love that Meg. Thank you. Yeah, and I agree. I’ve heard a lot of women on this podcast talk about residency, specifically, and fellowships, and how these are often one- or two-month long experiences. I’ve just gotten to the point where my daughter’s 5, and I’m like, maybe I could go away for two weeks—maybe. But a month? No. It’s definitely different.

Alicia Elliott

I also feel like one of the things that is complicated, particularly when you’re dealing with mental illness, is up in Canada, we have festival circuits, when you’re promoting your book, and things that you’re expected to do. People don’t really talk about the fact that you write a book, and you’re just supposed to write a book, but that’s not how it works. You have to promote it. In some instances, audience members or other people on the panel ask really inappropriate questions, or you have to deal with other people saying things that are super offensive. And you have to keep smiling the whole time and make sure that you’re viewed as professional because to show any signs of weakness or anger, these are things where you would be considered monstrous. If you’re a mother, too, people have all these expectations: What does your family think about this? Where’s your son right now? They’re projecting these societal shames onto you, and you’re just supposed to smile because you have to sell books. That’s something that is really difficult. When I was touring my book, there was a lot that was going on in terms of me having dealing with depression but also trying to push myself to do all of these things. There was also a lawsuit launched against, and I was terrified of people asking me about it. There are all these things that I don’t think people really think about, in terms of how they’re making spaces for writers, especially if we’re writing about things that are very difficult. There’s this expectation that we should always be slashing our wrists open and letting everybody see all of the mess. We chose what we wrote about because we felt comfortable writing about it, so when you’re asking all of these deeper questions, it’s like, I didn’t write about that for a reason. It’s kind of gross and appropriative or exploitive. People don’t really consider those things, or what it means to hold someone who’s trying to talk about their work that’s very difficult and has a lot of personal things blended within it.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. We talked before the show about the way that this industry reinforces ableism by not treating our work on these subjects with care and respect. I think, Alicia, you’re getting at that, but that there’s a sense that if you put yourself out there through your work that people have permission then to dig at wounds and ask you to display yourself in public. I don’t know, I’m just putting this out there, but what if the same request is made of men who write about mental illness? I feel like that’s literary, if men write about mental illness. What do you guys think about how it’s perceived when women write about mental illness? And we talked about monstrousness and shame. There’s definitely a disparity there, I think.

Liz Harmer

The problem being taken seriously as a woman is compounded by being a person who’s perceived as mentally ill. It’s just being credible, people taking seriously what you have to say about your own experience about anything. It’s a big problem.

Alicia Elliott

Oh, yeah. There is always this sense that men have more authority on whatever they’re speaking about, that they have more control over themselves. Just the idea of women, as you know, having hysteria, this whole idea of madness that is specifically female. It has its roots in being in women. This whole notion of this is so prevalent in our culture, it’s hard to not see it, wherever you look, this idea of how when men break up with women, they’re “my crazy wife,” “my crazy ex-wife,” “my crazy ex-girlfriend,” whereas, you don’t as often hear people saying, “Oh, my crazy boyfriend” or “my crazy ex-boyfriend,” even if they were abusive in different ways. There’s this idea of a certain level of harm that’s acceptable to lobby towards women, and if women respond to that in any way, then they’re crazy. If they have any sort of emotions that aren’t just smiling, docile, this version of submissive femininity, then we’re crazy. Automatically, there’s always this kind of idea lodged against us. But then when you are on top of that, when you actually have a severe mental illness—or any mental illness, really—then that also lowers your credibility to a certain extent, where people don’t believe anything you’re saying, even people who are close to you. They’re always seeing you as someone who they can’t trust. They can’t trust your perceptions of what’s going on around you. They can’t trust your memories. Then, that kind of makes you wonder about how much you can trust your own memories or how much you can trust your own perception of the world. It kind of creates this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, where you’re mired in this doubt about yourself and about your worth. I really do believe, too, that the literary industry just doesn’t make space or provide the respect and care necessary for the works of mentally ill women. There’s this notion that our book is our product, and we have to be able to sell them to people, and there has to be some sort of pitch for it, in terms of, well, who wants to read about a crazy woman? No one wants to read about that. It’s really gross.

Meg Leonard

I really relate to that, Alicia, because I think we do see motherhood and mental illness and women as a niche subject, when the reality is, we all, every human, has mental health. We have mental health days that are great, and we have periods of time when our mental health is less strong, even if it doesn’t cross over into the line of a diagnosable mental illness. We all have mental health; that is a universal experience. And almost all of us have mothers. Yes, there are people who don’t, but everybody came out of a uterus.

This is how we all got here. We all have some relationship to motherhood, whether it’s an absent mother or a painful mother or a loving, wonderful mother; whether it’s mothering our own children or imagining how we might mother other people. We all have a relationship to motherhood, and we all have a relationship to mental illness, yet the book marketing industry pretends like this is a niche thing. And if you say, “I wrote a book of poetry about motherhood,” people will go, “Oh, like Sharon Olds?” Well, there are a lot of people who have written about this, not just one. It’s fascinating how both motherhood and mental illness is used to discredit women, and how writing the truth about this — or a truth, writing our truth — is a way to push back against those cultural beliefs that would discredit us. There’s a real fierceness to that. I think this is why I love reading motherhood stories, and I love reading about women who have experienced mental illness, even though it can be very painful to read sometimes, because the very act of putting it out there pushes back against this idea that it’s unimportant or uninteresting or not reliable … that we somehow can’t be experts of our own experience. That’s BS. I love these spaces, like this conversation, where people take the time to say, “No, that’s a lot of crap.”

Liz Harmer

I wanted to just add one thing. I love what you both are saying. I was just thinking about how rebellious I felt to that notion, like becoming a mother was so transformative and weird. What’s more interesting than that, I can’t think of a so-called masculine topic more interesting than that. I guess war and mafiosos? I’m trying to think of masculine topics. Race-car driving? Those things don’t interest me as much. First of all, like a psychotic experience of feeling like something has happened to your mind and other people are no longer in the same world that you’re in. I mean, that is an incredible thing to go through. And motherhood is also a transformative experience. It doesn’t even make sense to me why would that be diminished. It’s just interesting inherently.

Lara Ehrlich

I want to keep going here. I think it was Meg, in an email, who mentioned Britney Spears. I feel like this is a really timely conversation, given the publicity of Britney Spears’ testimony in court recently, about her conservatorship. I think it speaks to all of the things that we’re discussing here about trust and about trusting a woman’s perspective on her own mental health and her own lived experience. Let’s talk just for a second about that example. And Meg, since you brought it up in an email, do you want to start with just why you felt like that was something that we could talk about today?

Meg Leonard

I’m getting credit where it isn’t due. I wasn’t the person who brought up Britney, but I’m so glad somebody did.

Alicia Elliott

I think what resonated with me and a lot of other women who have mental illness was the fact that her conservatorship made it so that she had to get an IUD implanted, and they would not allow her to marry or have any more children. And the way that that ties into this idea of eugenics, whether women with mental illness should be parents or our ability to parent and be mothers, and not only mothers but also productive. On the one hand, this conservatorship was making Britney so that she was working over 10 hour days, all the time, to make all of this money for the conservatorship and for these people who are profiting off of her. And yet, at the same time, she can do all of this and be on these sets for hours and hours a day and months-long residencies in Las Vegas, she cannot have another child. She should not have had children to begin with is the the idea that I think is being implied there. I think that because she’s so famous, and this has happened to her, it’s shocking to some people in a sense, but they maybe have never had to deal with court systems and the ways that police come into play with mental illness and controlling mentally ill people, specifically women, and also racialized people. People are looking at this, and they’re saying, “Yes, this is so terrible,” and they’re thinking about the fact that all states, that I’m aware of, have laws where you can force someone into the mental hospital, outside of their will—that’s definitely the case in Canada and all of the provinces. When my siblings put a Form 2 for me, they hadn’t even spoken to me in weeks. I was not asked to go to the judge, I could not defend myself in any way, I didn’t even know any of this was happening until I was arrested. This is the kind of stuff where we talk about things like this happening to Britney, but I don’t think we’re doing enough work as a culture to really interrogate the assumptions underlying the situation, so that other people, who are not famous and rich and resourced like Britney Spears and privileged in those certain ways—what are we having to deal with? What are the assumptions that are put into law that make it so that we are not able to make decisions on our own, even if they’re bad decisions? I think we all probably have friends who have made terrible decisions, and they’re still allowed to do that, and yet, if you’re mentally ill, and you decide that you want to do something that other people determine is not okay, then they can force you to do that. We are talking about defunding the police and things like that, but I don’t think there’s enough attention being paid to the fact that a lot of the people who are being killed, even in terms of indigenous and Black people in the States and Canada, are people who have the cops called on them for mental health issues or mental health checks. The fact that they’re considered monsters immediately, and therefore, it’s okay to kill them, not only because they’re racialized but because they have a mental illness and they’re somehow dangerous or more dangerous than other people, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, all these statistics make it very apparent that people who have mental illness are much more likely to be the victims of violence than to be perpetrators. I feel like there’s so much there, and these things are all intertwined. I just think that if we aren’t looking at what these bigger standout cases say about the society that we’re in and the assumptions that we make, the laws that we have, etc., then we are failing, in some sense, to really do justice to this topic and all the other people who are not getting the same attention as someone like Britney Spears.

Lara Ehrlich  1:05:23 

Yeah, thank you for suggesting that we talk about her, because, like you said, all of these issues are coming together in this one really hyper-visible example. But you’re right, there’s a sense of spectacle involved, too, because she is so well-known, and people are interested, but are they interested because it’s important to change the laws and the systems that are in place that have led to this point, or are people interested because it’s Britney Spears, and they want to read about her testimony in court? I agree, there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done and contextualization that needs to happen.

Meg Leonard

Alicia, I think this speaks to something that I have noticed about women and mothers in particular, that we’re allowed to occupy this very narrow space around difficult subjects. Like, it’s okay to talk about or write an essay about a miscarriage, but nobody wants you to write an essay about 12 miscarriages, and there are women who have 12 miscarriages. I feel like mental illness is like that. A lot of the narrative I’ve seen around Brittany is that she shouldn’t be in this position, because look at her—she can do all of this work, and if she can do this work, she should be able to make these decisions about her own body. But the real thing is that anybody should be making decisions about their own body. There shouldn’t be a point where we say, “Well, that person doesn’t get to.” With the police brutality, even if someone is having an enormous mental health crisis, they still do not deserve to be shot. I think about this in terms of writing, and I love that both of you are bold enough to write some autobiographical things. I don’t write a lot of autobiographical stuff, even though I approach mental illness in my poetry, and part of that is because I struggle with this window. I’ll share a brief story. After my first child was born, I had this horrible postpartum experience. When I was pregnant with my second child, I went into my midwives office, and I said, “Okay, you know what? I had a really, really difficult time with mental illness after my daughter was born, and I want to get ahead of this. I want to have support in place ahead of time.” My biggest fear had been that if I was honest with my practitioners about how I was feeling that I would be forced to take medication I didn’t want to take or that I would be separated from my child because I would be hospitalized. I was talking to my midwife, and I was asking, “Do I have to worry about them? I don’t want to lose that autonomy.” And she was like, “No, of course not. We would never make you take medication if you didn’t want to, we would never, make you be hospitalized if you didn’t want to.” And I was like, oh, thank God—now I can be honest with her. And then she said, “Well, unless, of course, you were suicidal, thinking of hurting yourself. Then we would make you take medication, and we would hospital.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” So, now I’m aware of my window, and it’s small. I can be honest right here. But everything out here is very risky to tell someone who could help me, because in asking for help, I could lose autonomy, not only over my own body but also with my relationship with my infant child. I think for some people, having time away from their baby to rest and recover can be really healing. For me, just because of what I was experiencing, being separated from my child, even for a 72-hour hospital stay, would have made things so much worse. Just knowing that I couldn’t be honest with my care providers and get help because I could lose my own ability to advocate for myself—it was ridiculous. Like, this should not be the case. This should not be how we’re treating women with mental illness. I like what you’re saying about Britney as this big example. In some ways, she’s a sympathetic example. A lot of us grew up with her, grew up listening to her music, and we can see that she should have autonomy over her own treatment and her own body. But that truth really needs to be applied to every person with mental illness, no matter how extreme their illnesses.

Liz Harmer

I was thinking about how I was told I shouldn’t have children, at some point, when I was very young. I had just had the diagnosis, and I was being told what the course of my life was going to look like, and it was not going to include children, if I wanted to be safe or careful or good or whatever. Obviously, I rejected that, but I do feel very distressed by the news around Britney. It’s partly the way people talk about it. I was trying to watch something on the news about it, and I had to turn it off, because this lawyer was like, “Oh, we’ll have to see how she performs mentally.” And I’m like, what would she be able to do that would prove to you that she’s been proven ill? I’ve had that experience, before I my diagnosis, where you could have a day where you were feeling jubilant or excited—a symptom of mania—and now I can’t behave in any way because I’m being watched, and my symptoms are being reported on. It’s just very painful to watch and to think about—the IUD thing, the social situation, the whole thing is unbelievable. I remember being very careful about what I told my doctors around birth, because I wanted certain kinds of psychiatric care, but I didn’t want to raise red flags. If you talk about anxiety and depression, or your former eating disorder, those are kind of like, “Oh, we can deal with those. Just get more rest. Here’s some vitamins, here’s your anxiety support group.” If you start talking about psychosis and more serious illness, you lose that credibility, and you no longer have that kind of control over how you’re treated in those situations. It’s all kind of flooding back to me, but I’m glad we’re talking about it.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you for sharing that, Liz. And you use the word “perform,” which I think really ties into what Meg was saying here, and what Alicia has been touching on. You said the lawyer in the courtroom would have to see how Britney performs mentally. Can we talk about that word “perform”? I hear you saying that there’s a level of performance when it comes to healthcare and motherhood, that there’s a line that you shouldn’t cross, and in order not to cross it, there’s maybe some performance that you’re navigating. Can you talk a little bit about that word “performance”?

Liz Harmer

I think a lot of people in my life don’t know that I have this history, and when I talk about it, I start to feel like I’m testing to see whether people are going to be too alarmed. Or you’ll overhear people saying things that are horribly ablest, and it’s very shocking and upsetting, and you think, this is what people think of me. I was thinking about the ways that I have been unconsciously strategic, and one of those things is that my partner is a white cis man who’s very successful, doesn’t suffer from an any mental illness at all, and is able to very much be my advocate and ally and is able to speak for me when people don’t listen to me. I was thinking a lot about how I’m finding a support person or a person who’s able to resist all of those other things happening, all of those other people who mean well but who are maybe doing you a disservice. That’s part of the performance of my life. Partnership is a resource for me, and it protects me.

Meg Leonard

I love that. And Lara, I’m so glad you brought up, or pulled out, this word “performance,” because it’s making me realize that there’s so much performance of wellness when you live with mental illness. And there’s also so much performance in motherhood. Unfortunately, I think it’s really hard to step out of the performance that our culture requires of us when we’re mothers, and I really see writing as something that dramatically resists both of those types of performance, and that when we’re authentic in our writing, even if it’s not telling our own story, just when we’re authentic about motherhood in our writing, or when we take up space as mothers who write, or when we take up space as people with mental illness who also choose to mother, that it takes away some of this power that the requirement of performance has, so I love that we’re talking about that.

Alicia Elliott

I think that another aspect of performance is the ways that everything is okay, in terms of how society sees you, if you’re performing your job, hitting your deadlines. It doesn’t really matter what’s happening to you outside of that, because you’re doing those things. If you are, for example, having a mental health crisis and need time off work, what does that mean then? Are you going to actually take that time off work, or do you not have the money? I believe that this idea that we all have to be constantly performing under capitalism and making sure that we’re making money and spending money contributes to that stigma, because if we’re not doing that, then we’re hangers-on, we’re burdens. There’s this notion that if we are too mentally ill and can’t make money, then we have less value to society in general. I’m not just talking about values in terms of social value but also literally economic value, and the ways those all fit together. What would it look like if we not only had maternity leave but paid mental health time off? When you start thinking about the ways that we can’t care for ourselves because we’re stuck in this wheel, it really does make matters worse.

Lara Ehrlich

Absolutely. I know we’re coming to a close, but I want to come back to something we talked about at the beginning and what a healthy writer mother monster who lives with mental illness looks like. What can that look like? Tell me your vision for a healthy writer mother monster.

Liz Harmer

Oh, you can read my face. It’s a curse. It’s been my curse. This has been something I’ve been working on a long time, because I was very afraid of my emotions. For me, what’s really important is healthy expression of emotion and accepting that emotions are healthy to express, even negative emotions. Being distraught, being angry, and things that are frightening to others, we don’t find those frightening in our family. To us, it’s sort of like being able to have a narrative around emotions that gathers them all up and says, “Hey, this is what it is to be human. There’s nothing to be alarmed about.” Because I think sometimes that stuff can just build. For me, the gift of being a person who’s a healthy mentally ill person is that I can not be afraid for my kids in the same way, because I can love and see them and not be afraid of symptoms that I might perceive, and that kind of thing.

Alicia Elliott

I feel like I’m still trying to figure out what that looks like in a lot of ways. I know that through my experience, one of the things that I was always worried about is what would happen if my son had a mental illness as well. I think, if nothing else, the experiences that I’ve gone through have made it very clear to me what someone needs in that situation and what someone doesn’t need in that situation. Going through that, and being able to turn those negative experiences into wisdom, helped me figure out how to then approach others who are in similar situations. I’m not just thinking about it in terms of me as an individual, but what it would mean to be a good community member, who is aware of these things happening with other people all the time and being able to know how to advocate. I guess I’m still figuring it out.

Lara Ehrlich

Still figuring it out is, I think, a good place to be. That’s where we all are, right? Endless work. And Meg?

Meg Leonard

I think for me, one thing that I love to think about and that really helps me feel grounded in health is when I let myself believe that my mental health and my writing life are not in competition with each other, and that my writing life and my children are not in competition with each other, and that my mental health is not in competition with my children—that I can attend to all of these things and take care of myself. Like I said, that might mean going to bed early and not going to a reading that I feel like I should go to. Maybe I missed out on some writing time that I wanted. I can also take some writing time and let my children watch TV for the afternoon, if that’s what I’m needing. There’s space in my life for all of that. I don’t have to choose or put these things in competition with each other. And Alicia, what you were saying about capitalism really resonated for me. When I start thinking that there is not enough time or enough of me to live as a healthy mentally-ill person and a poet and a mother, it’s usually because of these embedded capitalist beliefs that have me thinking I need to produce more poems, I need to somehow be doing something with my children that I’m not doing, that I need to be more outwardly productive in some way that goes against my mental health. When I can release those ideas and uncouple them from my own belief system, then I do find that living in that space of health is really fulfilling, and really very possible.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you all so much. I think those are some great words to end with. And I really appreciate all of you, your honesty, and your bravery to be willing to speak to these experiences in this truth. It’s so important, this conversation. You guys have brought tears to my eyes—like, I’m tearing up here. Thank you all for joining us tonight.

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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.

---

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.

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May 27, 2021

Tananarive Due is an award-winning author who teaches Black horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA and is an executive producer on Shudder’s groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote “A Small Town” for Season 2 of The Twilight Zone on CBS All Access. A leading voice in Black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. She has a 17-year-old son and 35-year-old stepdaughter and describes writer-motherhood in three words as “every single day.”

Lara Ehrlich

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is Tananarive Due. Thank you all for tuning in. Please remember to chat with us during the interview, and if you enjoy the episode, please also become a patron or patroness to help keep this podcast going. Now I’m excited to introduce to Tananarive Due. Tananarive Due is an award-winning author who teaches Black horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA and is an executive producer on Shudder’s groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote “A Small Town” for Season 2 of “The Twilight Zone” on CBS All Access. A leading voice in Black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. She has a 17-year-old son and 35-year-old stepdaughter and describes writer-motherhood in three words as “every single day.” Welcome, Tananarive.

Tananarive Due

Hello.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you so much for joining me. This is exciting.

Tananarive Due

My pleasure. My pleasure.

Lara Ehrlich

From your bio, we have a lot to talk about, but I’m going to start with the three words you selected to describe writer motherhood. Tell me about “every single day.”

Tananarive Due

I don’t even know where to begin. People say parenthood changes everything, but people who are not parents often don’t really have the vocabulary to understand what that means. It’s just little things. The school system school year, for example, means that once your child hits the public school system, from that point, until the foreseeable future, you’re going to have to get up super, super early every day, no matter what your job is, to get your kids to school. We’re just basically hanging on until summer. My husband and I are both feeling a little rest broken. We work at home and always have, so given our own schedule, we probably would be getting up closer to, say, 8:30 in the morning. Anyway, it goes on and on. That’s just one small thing. There’s the actual hands-on caretaking aspect of parenthood, and there’s the emotional aspect of parenthood. The caretaking part, you can kind of extrapolate what that looks like: preparing and fixing meals, buying clothes, tending to injuries, tending to illnesses, and all these kinds of things. But the emotional part … I’ll give you an example. My son is 17. He’s 6 foot 5 and weighs 220 or so pounds, so he’s a big, big kid, but inside, he’s still kind of a little kid. He likes to to play childish games and that kind of stuff, so the way I see him is very different from the way he’s perceived by the outside world. One of the things that our family was able to take advantage of during 2020 and a pandemic was we were spending so much time together—it was just the three of us—and I think we got a lot closer. We did more activities together, and I had forgotten what it feels like when my son leaves the house. At one point, I’ll call it three or four months ago, he and his friends got masked up and wanted to go play basketball. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but we live in a mostly white community. It’s somewhat mixed, but three teenage black boys are still a standout in this community, especially at that size. And I had forgotten all through 2020—for all my hypochondria, for all my fear that there would be food shortages, for all my worries with the virtual schooling—I had forgotten what it feels like the minute my son leaves the house. That old anxiety comes in, that fear that they’re a police magnet, that my son would say or do the wrong thing. Onsite, to a lot of police officers—from the training, from TV and media—my son looks like a suspect for something, in a lot of places. The whole idea of profiling is that if you pull over someone Black, they’re bound to have done something, right? That’s really the whole premise of it, the assumption that there’s some kind of guilt, so let me just go ahead and find out what it is. That’s something that a 16- or 17-year-old kid, well, nobody really should be dealing with, but especially a teenager. You give him the talk, and you try to explain that you want to be respectful and don’t want to be rude, but also, you don’t want them to be too scared. It’s a very difficult balancing act for both his anxieties and my anxieties. My late mother told me that anxiety only begins when they leave the house, like not just going out for the night, but when they leave when they’re ready, when they’re 18 or 20.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, I’m not looking forward to that. Of course, it’s a different situation.

Tananarive Due 

How old are your kids?

Lara Ehrlich

I have one daughter, and she’s 5.

Tananarive Due 

Oh, OK. You’re just getting started at 5. Five is fun.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, definitely. She’s a great age. I don’t have the same concerns, though, about race. And we should mention that this week was the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, so that’s, of course, always on people’s minds, but this week especially. Tell me a little bit more about that fear and about the talk that you have with your son and when you had the talk for the first time.

Tananarive Due 

That’s kind of a heartbreaking question. If I look at my childhood, my mom probably had to have a talk with me when I was a little bit younger than your daughter, because she was trying to enroll me in a Montessori school in Miami, Florida. This was post-Civil Rights Act. I’m not that old, but Jim Crow didn’t die very quickly. And these were private schools, and they have their own rules. She wanted to enroll me early, so I could get a head start on kindergarten, so as a 4-year-old, I was subjected to hearing again and again that I was being rejected because of my skin color. I remember rubbing talcum powder all over my body—my face, my neck, covering myself with talcum powder—and saying to my mom, “Mom, can I go to school now?” So that’s when my mom had to have a talk with me. And my heart kind of breaks for her when I imagine being in her place, because how do you explain that to a 4-year-old? Skin color is an accident of birth. Even people in the same family have different complexions. It’s just meaningless, except that it means so much. With my son, I don’t have the vivid memory of the first talk, but when he was about 9, my husband, Steven Barnes, and I took him with us to Marianna, Florida. We’d been called because there had been a reformatory in Marianna Florida called the Dozier School for Boys that operated between about 1900 and about 2000 or so, and my great uncle was buried there at the age of 15. So many children died at this reformatory, it had its own cemetery. The Florida State Attorney General’s office called to get permission to start exhuming from the families. So, my husband, my son, my father, and I all went and took part in this beginning of excavation, so he began to actually dig into the soil, and even though it wasn’t only Black children who died there, it was disproportionately Black children who died there, and I think that really sank in. He had a very sober look on his face, the whole time he was there, as he absorbed this idea that children would have been killed, and frankly by adults. There was a lot of mystery around how a lot of these kids died, and I’ve heard all kinds of stories—one who was put inside of an industrial dryer and never seen again. This place was like a horror novel. In fact, I did write a horror novel out of it. I call it The Reformatory, which will come out next year, and we can talk about that later, but being on those grounds and actually seeing that and being up close to that racial history, I think made a great impact on him. And then, when he got older, he wants to go to a park, right? He’s 10, 11, 12, by himself. We used to sit and watch him at the park. He even noticed one time, when he was about 12, we had let him be there a while by himself, and we came to pick him up, and he and a friend came to the window—and his friend was white—and they both look so upset. He said, “Mom, there was a Black teenager just playing basketball by himself, he wasn’t doing anything, he wasn’t talking to anybody, and then the police came up to him and they put him in handcuffs.” He was so shaken by having witnessed that is profiling. I actually wrote a letter to the local police chief. I happened to have heard about her. She was Latina. I said, “Let me introduce myself and say hello and also bring up this incident.” And to her credit, she called me at, like, 7:30 in the morning—like the minute she got my letter, she called me and looked at the case, and it boiled down to “a neighbor thought he looks suspicious, so they called police.” And she kind of said, “See something, say something.” And I actually wrote a short story called “See Something, Say Something,” which is about this incident from the point of view of a white ally, who’s witnessing this, to show people how you can intervene in situations like this before they escalate—although, it’s dangerous. I’m not even saying I advise it. But it’s a thing that you can do as an observer, when you see Black teenagers being harassed. I like to slow my car. I like to let people know they’re being watched. They don’t like it. You can actually be violently confronted for starting to tape a police encounter, so again: exercise it with caution. But situations like that, that’s what leads to the talk, and I probably had been giving him some version of that most of his life but definitely when he wanted more independence to walk around, just walking down main street. We live in a kind of a smallish town that has a main street. I can’t tell you how many times he’s come home and is telling a story about a police encounter. At least three times. And he notices how quickly they reach for the gun, because they are scared of our kids. One of the things I said to this police chief in my letter was studies have shown that children of color, especially Black children, often look older than they are to people who are not Black. Although, it doesn’t really matter. They will still shoot a child. Sometimes, they don’t care, to be honest, but at least you might get a little more grace if a police officer thought you were a minor. But that’s long ago now, because my son is 17, almost an adult. He would be tried as an adult if he were arrested, in a lot of jurisdictions. The fact that he’s never been arrested, never gotten into legal trouble—it doesn’t always matter. The judge does not see a human child. They see Other in our system. And I don’t mean every judge, but systemically. Look at the statistics. The judges see Other.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, the police, the judges …

Tananarive Due

The police, judges, the prosecutors. The list goes on and on and on. It’s, frankly, horrifying, especially for someone like me, who has a very vivid imagination.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, and I want to get to your imagination, and you’ve already referenced a few wonderful stories. I want to talk to you about, but since we’re on this subject, tell us a little bit about the book you wrote with your mother. And tell us about your mother.

Tananarive Due

I like to joke that having collaborated with my late mother and my husband, I can collaborate with anybody, because those are such tight relationships, they can be fraught with conflict. Writing is difficult enough by yourself, and collaborating adds a level of difficulty. I’ll tell the audience a little bit about my mother. Her name was Patricia Stevens, and she died in 2012. She was one of the first superheroes in my life. She was a civil rights activist who started out as a normal college student, not really giving much thought to any kind of activism for her first two years, but then in 1959, she came in contact with an organization called CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. CORE had tactics— like, here’s a handbook, here’s a workshop, here’s how you sit at a lunch counter—you don’t look left or right, you don’t respond if someone grabs you, you go limp—all these very concrete tactics to try to bring attention to segregation and try to end segregation. She and her sister, my aunt, who’s still living, started a little chapter at their college at Florida A&M University. After the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960, they said, “It’s on.” They did sit-ins, and as a result of that, my mother was arrested. She and my aunt spent 49 days in jail—they were sentenced to 60 but got a few days off for good behavior—for sitting at a lunch counter in Tallahassee, Florida. They got arrested for that. As a result of that, she got diaries from Jackie Robinson, the famous baseball player. She smuggled a letter out, and Jackie Robinson published it in his column in the New York Post, which used to be a thing. Eleanor Roosevelt hosted a party for the students in her home. I mean, the whole civil rights set from the 1960s, my mother was interacting with. And it was considered the first jail-in because they refused to pay their fine to get out of jail—my mother and other students from Florida A&M University. They kind of made history. She would show up in my history books. That wasn’t all she did, but that’s probably the most famous thing she did. My whole life, as you can imagine, if you have a mother who’s been through something, I’m hearing the story many, many times, and I knew she wanted to write a book. In the ‘90s, I was just starting to get enough fame—famous for a writer, I guess—that we could get a book contract. It wasn’t easy. We tried to sell them as a book of oral histories, just interviewing the people she knew, Black and white, who were the ones who stood up, when the vast majority of people—trust me—were afraid to. Every movement starts with three or four people, or two people, sometimes one person, who are like a snowball rolling down a mountain, inspiring other people to join them. But look at all the injustice in the world today. The movement started small: White Banker in Tallahassee, why did you sneak to the back door to hand them a sack of cash to get students out of jail? Why did you, Black Housekeeper, stop on your way to work to sit in with this group of students and then lose your job as a result of that? She never knew some of these people. She just knew that most people were too afraid to do anything, but a handful, like she always said, of ordinary people can do extraordinary things, and these were the foot soldiers. These were her words. So, she always wanted to write a book, and I finally got famous enough to get a contract. It was challenging to collaborate, but the thing about collaboration is one person has to have the kill switch, and in this case, my mom had the kill switch. It’s her story. One editor said, “Why don’t you write it as a novel,” and I got so excited for, like, five seconds, because I know how to do that. I know how to write a novel. I was not a nonfiction writer. Even though I’d been a journalist, I’d never written a nonfiction book, so the idea of writing a novel was way more fun than writing a history book. But it’s told in first person, and it’s alternating chapters, not because I really did much of anything but because that’s how my agent packaged did. He took our little book of oral histories that we could not literally give away, and he repackaged it as a mother-daughter memoir of the fight for civil rights, so we could fold in all those stories and my mother’s chapters. My chapters were more contemporary, like the anti-apartheid protest I walked out on in college because I had a dinner date. My mom said, “I went to jail so you wouldn’t have to.” And, believe me, I have been living by that my whole life. I do not ever intend to go to jail, if I can help it.

Lara Ehrlich

She sounds incredible.

Tananarive Due

She really was. She was so strong. She wore dark glasses her whole adult life, because in 1960, a police officer threw a tear gas canister in her face, because he recognized her as a leader of the student movement, and she had sensitivity to light for the rest of her life. Her sunglasses are now on display at the Florida archives in Tallahassee. And she’s in the Civil Rights Hall of Fame in Florida, and my dad is, too, and I’ll stop talking.

Lara Ehrlich

No, please don’t stop talking. You called her a superhero for a mother. What expectations did that set up? What kind of mother did you want to be, based on her?

Tananarive Due

The expectations were super high. She was someone who, for all intents and purposes, gave up a lot of her activism when she had kids. Not all of it, but she gave up the more flamboyant activism, like laying down in front of garbage trucks and stuff like that, because she really felt that it was important for her to be there. Having interviewed all these other activists who were not there for their kids, their kids definitely suffered. Any time a movement completely takes over the home, where the affairs of people outside of the home are more important to both parents than what’s happening inside the home, disaster will follow. She knew that instinctively. I got from her a sense that no matter how passionate I am about my work, I cannot make my son secondary to my career. You have to find a way. Balance is the wrong word, because there’s no such thing, but you have to find a way to do everything. If you’re going to be writing books or, in my case, learning how to write screenplays, I was going to have to do that while parenting, not instead of parenting. There’s that expectation. She was the disciplinarian. She had a deep voice. My dad was more of the writing-on-his-legal-pad-in-the-corner kind of guy, not wanting to get involved in disputes in the house. I thought I was going to be that strong disciplinarian, but it turns out, I’m more like my dad’s personality. I would rather be the one in the corner, writing in the notebook. My husband was more of a buddy with his daughter, my stepdaughter, who’s now 35. I saw her from age 11 on, and then we had Jason when she was 18, so I got to see the teenage years first, and then start from the beginning. He had been more of a buddy parent, like she was allowed to use colorful language around him. Having grown up in such a socially conservative house, that was hard for me to get used to, but she turned out great. My first lesson was something can be different than what you did or what you experienced and still turn out great. That was a valuable lesson, and I brought that lesson with me into Jason’s infancy. His childhood was going to look very different than my sisters and me. He has ADHD, and there are different issues that we’re dealing with than the ones my parents were dealing with. I’ve had to reinvent what that looks like. I’m not going to be the disciplinarian. He just responded differently to my husband’s deeper voice. I think there’s some biology in there, I dunno. My husband had to take on the role of disciplinarian, and my son has to call him “sir” if he gets in trouble. I think the most important lesson I took from my mom that I’ve tried to apply to Jason is to be there. In my case, I work from home, so it’s literally be there. Quick example: Steve and I are having a lot more interest in our screenwriting than ever before. We’re working on TV pilots, we’re working on a movie script—this is like the dream come true for people who have been slogging their way on the periphery for all these years. It would be really easy for me to just lean into that, but with Jason doing virtual schooling still, I don’t do any meetings, unless I absolutely can’t help it, before 12:30 in the afternoon on school days, because that’s when he’s in class and I need to be on him. It’s more hands-on than my mom needed to be with me and my sisters. He’s first. Jason is first in the day. Everything else squeezes after that. For us, that’s what worked for us.

Lara Ehrlich

How do you actually get the writing done? Let’s talk logistics. Do you stay up until 2 a.m.?

Tananarive Due

Heck no, I don’t stay up till 2. I lost my ability to pull all-nighters when I was in graduate school, back when I was 21. When I first got married, I used to push writing till the end of the day. My husband would be in bed by 11, and I’d stay up till 1. I can’t do that anymore. I don’t have the energy. I need seven, eight hours of sleep a night, and I really feel like robbing myself of sleep is stealing weeks of time at the end of my life, so I don’t do it. We go to bed early-ish. We get up early. There are a couple of ways to to thrive. My husband and I teach a program called Life Writing, which I can shamelessly plug, and part of the premise of life writing, which is something he’s taught but also something we practice, is that you can write a book a year in a sentence a day. People say, well, that’s not possible, because then you only have a 365-sentence book. But the point is, if you’re a writer, and a lot of writers listening understand this, if you can make yourself actually engaged with your project for 2 minutes every day, you may just write one sentence Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, but by Thursday, you’re gonna write two sentences or a paragraph or a page. And that’s the whole point. We lie to ourselves about not having time, because it’s so easy to be afraid, as a writer—afraid of success, afraid of failure, afraid of rejection—so we tell ourselves we don’t have time to write, when we know we just binged Bridgerton. We know we’re watching Mare of Easttown. How is that not having time? When I was single, and I wanted to write a book in a hurry, I narrowed my life down to get up, go to work, and then it was all writing—early before work, after work. I didn’t have to talk to anybody. I got it done in nine months. I can’t do that. I can’t lock myself in a room. My dad used to lock himself in a room to write, and that had a negative impact on me, so I don’t want to do that to my son. It’s bad enough the poor kid is being raised by two writers. You’re staring into space, he asked you to bring something, and you forgot to do it, because you’re writing. He’s already dealing with that fire. But it’s learning how to write in the margins and being honest about the fact that we do have time to write. I used to work with a reporter who worked for the Miami Herald, when I was a reporter for 10 years, and her husband passed away unexpectedly at the age of 35. He was also a reporter, and it was devastating. She’d just had their fifth child, so she has a baby and four other children. That’s why she started writing her book, so it’s not about the time. She would get up at 5 in the morning, she would let her sister do the babysitting. She finally had the clarity of mindset where she told herself, “I’m going to do this.” In my case, and in many cases, when we tell ourselves, “I am going to do this,” we let go of excuses, and we find a way. And, trust me, I still watch plenty of TV—plenty. Maybe because I can justify it. Now it’s part of my business. I’m a screenwriter, so I have to watch everything and have every streaming service. I was writing early this morning, after I made sure Jason was at his class, and I can steal 30 minutes here and there. Sometimes in the evening, like between 5 and 7, you might get that block. Some writers do need 90 minutes, or they feel like they can’t do anything. I’ve learned how to dip in and out, and it’s because the embers never go cold. There’s nothing harder than coming back to a cold manuscript you haven’t looked at in two months. The first hour or two is just getting reacquainted with the manuscript. But if you’re reading a sentence a day or even alternating projects. I’ll be working on one project the first half of the week and another project the second half of the week. It’s really a matter of discipline. I hate to use the word discipline—it sounds punitive. But it really is the difference between the inner child that fuels our imaginations, that 10-year-old inside of us who always wanted to make up stories, and the adult who has to actually make it happen—which is, by the way, one of the reasons I quit writing full-time. I was a full-time writer for 15 years, and then I slowly started doing more teaching, and now I’ve taught at UCLA for five years—just one class, but it’s a nice income. OK, it’s a nice baseline because as two writers, you can imagine our income was up and down and up and down. We can never predict from one year to the next how much money we would or wouldn’t have, and I don’t thrive with uncertainty. I never spent two years after college just finding myself and writing. I needed a job because I needed to know I had security, and I had a two-bedroom apartment so I could get myself an office. I made that proclamation to the world: This is my office. I hadn’t published anything, hadn’t even sold anything, but: “This is my office, and I’m a writer.” I’d been telling myself that since I was 4 years old. Having a job meant that I wasn’t relying on my inner child to earn our money. I realized that’s not fair. I was trying to get on that elusive, book-a-year schedule. I was trying to get on the New York Times bestseller list. I won’t name who it is, but I know a writer, who literally worked himself to death, who had been one of my mentors. He was so sweet, and I admired him so much. He told me, at one point, that he spent 50 percent of his time on the road. And I was like, “Oh, well, that’s not gonna happen.” There was a time I wanted to be a stand-up comic but, again, don’t want to spend my life on the road, so that’s not gonna happen. I wrote that down, and the man had a heart attack while pitching to Hollywood. It’s almost like really a cautionary tale: Don’t work yourself to death. Get your sleep, write a sentence a day, and stay focused but don’t exclude everything. You cannot exclude your family. You absolutely cannot exclude your children from your life to pursue your dream.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, it all sounds very reasonable. You hear some people say, “My house falls to ruin around me” or “my children are crying on the other side of the door,” and it’s like, oh, that doesn’t sound great either.

Tananarive Due

Yeah, when our son was a baby, you know those BABYBJÖRN things or whatever carriers? I have a picture of my son, baby strapped to him, sitting at his desk. That’s kind of how we rolled with it. And he came up with a brilliant technique. I don’t know how many of your listeners are new parents, but sleeplessness is like my husband’s kryptonite. We knew about those first four months, when a baby doesn’t sleep at night, so we came up with a system. One person would sleep in the bedroom alone, and the other person would sleep in a family room with the crib with the baby. Only one person is on call. Very often, traditionally, that person is the mom, when people are breastfeeding, and it takes that extra amount of faith to say, “Okay, I’m gonna pump and leave it in the fridge, and you can do it,” because sometimes moms feel like we’re the only ones who can do it right, and sometimes we do it in an extra special way. But that doesn’t mean that another way wouldn’t also work. I think we have to give ourselves permission to share the responsibilities. Even with my son’s homework. He had trouble working with my husband. They would clash, so I was doing all the subjects, and I’m not good at math. This past year, we hit a wall. I couldn’t help him with the math. It was going to have to be Steve, and he was happy to do it. I didn’t even realize how much of an extra load I was carrying. I had this idea in my head that I have to be the one. No, you don’t have to be the one. You can share, unless you’re single mom, which is so hard. But that was [this reporter]. Her husband had passed away, so she was not only a single mom, but she was a new widow dealing with grief, and I have no doubt that her grief helped fuel her clarity. I think that’s something that a lot of us need to embrace as we’re like coming out of 2020. A lot of people feeling shell shocked. Steve and I were getting all these opportunities, so we were very productive in 2020. There were some writers who just felt like they couldn’t create in 2020, and it’s OK to be whatever kind of writer you are, but now that things are getting a little better—supposedly half of adults are vaccinated in the U.S., we’re starting to go out more, we’re seeing people’s faces—try to take some of that anxiety and bring it to life in your in creative projects. I always say, “Put it in your writing. Put it in a story.”

Lara Ehrlich

Yes. This is a great transition to your work, because you’ve already mentioned a number of stories where you’ve done just that. I’m particularly interested in horror, because I am a fan of horror and your work in that genre. What is it about that that genre that appeals to you?

Tananarive Due

I’ve told everyone about my mother and the trauma she suffered. It might not be surprising to learn that my mother was the first horror fan I knew. My mother was the one who made me a horror fan. She loved it. From the time I was a kid, she had us watching these creature features or the old Universal black-and-white horror movies—The Mummy, The Fly—all that. She gave me my first Stephen King novel when I was 16. I used to think she just thought horror was fun, like I did as a kid. You’re on a roller coaster going, “Whee!” But, as the New York Times pointed out last year in a story, people who love horror did better emotionally under the pandemic than people who didn’t. I may be paraphrasing the study, but the fact is, I think that speaks to a lot of things. It speaks to how horror lets us process trauma, both past and current. In my mom’s case, although she was a bit of a pessimist—I mean, Trump would not have surprised her in the slightest—she always felt like the gains from the ’60s were being rolled back before her eyes in ways that I thought were not like, “Oh, Mom, you’re being paranoid.” And now I’m like, I was being naive. She had horror from past trauma and from current trauma. She was afraid for us to have boys, she was afraid to have grandsons for all the reasons I’ve described, and horror really helped her. I never got to talk about this with her. It was really only after her death, which was my big trauma, that I started to see that relationship more clearly. It can even be an escape, because the worst horror movie doesn’t feel as bad as losing somebody’s love. Let’s face it. The worst horror movie, you can turn it off and it’s done, and you’ll maybe forget about it. Horror, I think, is a really, really good tool. Not for everybody. Some people need to avoid horror. Some people need to go to comedy. I do both. I listen to standup every day. I watch horror every day, when I can. I just like the one-two punch. They’re really two sides of the same coin. Jordan Peele believes that, and it’s evidenced by his career. I’ve loved horror for as long as I can remember. It took me a while to get to it though, because of genre bias. By the time I got out of grad school, I had been trained out of writing horror, and I’ve been trained at writing Black people. I was just losing myself entirely in the so-called canon. But nowadays, a lot of MFA programs are much more open—thank goodness—to genre writing. People are not made to feel diminished because they want to write horror or science fiction or fantasy, because you can point to award-winning writers. In fact, a lot of literary writers are embracing it, even though they’re still distancing themselves from genre, which really irritates me—to take on the trappings of genre while at the same time distancing yourself from it. Harlan Ellison advised me not to call myself a horror writer, because he felt that being labeled a science fiction writer had hurt his career and level of respect. That bias is real. I’m not gonna blame the artists for the bias they’re walking into, but at the same time, if you’re doing the thing, it’s a little insulting to people who specialize in that thing for you to distance yourself from it as if you’re not doing the exact same thing but with slightly different language.

Lara Ehrlich

In college, I wanted to write in a thesis about Ray Bradbury. I went to my advisor, who is a Jane Austen scholar, and he said I can’t write about Ray Bradbury because science fiction is not literature. That was the first time I’d heard that, and I was like, “What are you talking about?” Ever since then, I’ve become attuned to it, and it’s insulting.

Tananarive Due

I had to find my way back to it, and it took, again, a trauma. I was just doing these sort of epiphany, short stories, white characters, typing away, when Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992 and literally turned my life upside down. Luckily, no one I knew was killed. It’s hard to even explain, but it was a windstorm more than flooding, and trees and buildings flattened. You could look for almost miles down the road, and everything was flattened, and that was my old neighborhood, where my mom lived, my grandmother’s house was damaged, my aunt screaming in her upstairs closet for two hours. It was horrible. I was single then. I’d had a someone I had a crush on from college and we had been sort of checking it out, and he gave me the “I love you, but I’m not in love with you” speech, which nobody wants to hear. That’s a death, when a relationship or a dream of a relationship dies. That’s why I hurt so much. Grief is grief. Grief is an emotion, and it can be applied to anything. It’s just the duration and depth that’s different. That feeling of grief happens when we lose things, and I was just swimming in grief. I felt like my world had been completely destroyed. I came up with an idea for a novel called The In Between about a man who has a near-death experience and wakes up between alternate realities, and he was blessed. I was like, OK, I know I’m going to write a Black, middle-class character, because, again, it’s not just the fault of canon that I had lost myself. The Black literature I’d read tended to be Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, and it was this rural, Southern tradition I didn’t know. I grew up in the suburbs with air conditioning, and I had never seen myself in fiction. I had never seen a character who grew up like me in fiction. I had to realize that it was a legitimate way to be a Black author to write about something other than a rural setting, or, frankly, an urban setting, which I also didn’t know anything about. I was like, where’s that suburban Black literature section? Just write what you know, and The In Between came out of it. Honestly, it was the best thing I’ve ever written. I didn’t know it yet. I made the mistake of only submitting it to a couple places, like an agent who didn’t like it and a screenwriting contest that accepted novels. I didn’t really want to be a screenwriter then, but I said, OK, I’ll accept this deadline. And when you asked me how do you get it all done? Deadlines help a lot. When I’m really serious, I have a quota—like, the script is due next Friday, how many pages do I have to write a day before it’s done next Friday? Anyone who wants to work in television and film really has to know how to write on a schedule. That’s often true with prose, too, but more so with TV and film. The deadlines are quicker. The stakes are very high. It’s not just one person mad at you or a few people mad at you, it’s like a whole village mad at you, because it takes a village to produce a television episode or make a movie. But that’s how I came to horror. I was very lucky that I started publishing in the ‘90s, because if I’d come in the ‘70s or ‘80s, I probably would have had a struggle on my hands. Because I came in the ‘90s, in the wake of Terry McMillan, who wrote Waiting to Exhale—which is not horror, but it’s Black—and publishers were like, “Oh, Black people buy books.” It might have been a tougher time for me if I had tried to come in through horror circles, but I never had the opportunity because my first agent sent it to an editor who had published a Black relationships novel, and she bought it. They’re like, “This could be commercial.” That’s all they cared about—could it be commercial—and horror looked like something that could be commercial. I was very lucky to start publishing when I did, and I’m lucky I’m still around to see the Renaissance. Now the film industry is finally starting to catch up.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, I was about to ask you how things have changed since then—for you but also for horror and writing literature about with Black protagonists. What changes have you seen in all of these various areas that you work?

Tananarive Due

There’s been a lot of change, and when it happens, it seems to happen very rapidly. But in reality, it’s been almost 30 years since I published my first novel. I was lucky to be published in the ‘90s, but what none of us knew, and this was true also in the film side, there was Eve’s Bayou, by Kasi Lemmons, which is, I’ll call it magical realism, and Tales from the Hood, by Rusty Cundieff, which is a Black horror movie. There were a lot of people getting opportunities in the ‘90s, but I only started publishing in ’95. What I didn’t realize was the tide was already receding. By 10 years after that, you weren’t going to have as many writers getting contracts. All of a sudden, writers were having trouble in getting contracts, owing money on advances that were oversized that they’d been given, and all these kinds of things. It looked like we had arrived, and then it dried up. There are a lot of directors who didn’t get follow-ups from their movies and a lot of writers who were not able to sustain a realistic level of writing success, given that there’s still a lot of prejudice and bigotry and unwillingness to try new things. Something amazing happened, first in literature. Octavia Butler started to rise in prominence in the ‘90s and continued, so even though a lot of the rest of us didn’t have the same recognition, she kept the fires brewing long enough that by the time she passed away in 2006, we were all kind of trolling around together. There were enough of us. And even though her death in 2006 also set that back, it came back super strong with this idea of Afrofuturism. It’s been around for a while, but people have really been talking about it in the last 10 years, I’d say. On the cinema side, between Get Out and Black Panther, that’s the one two-punch that just completely knocked the doors open, so that you can have a common vocabulary in a meeting with a TV executive, where, if you pitch something, they can think of something recent and successful, which was not the case when we were making those rounds back in 2008. Trust me, there was nothing recent and successful that had been Black horror that I could point to and say, “It’ll be like that.” Get Out was sort of the key to every door, and Black Panther, on the science fiction/fantasy side, was hugely impactful.

Lara Ehrlich

What are the screenplays that you’re working on now, if you can tell us about them? Where do they fall in that spectrum of genre? And then tell us about the new book that you have coming out that you mentioned.

Tananarive Due

Generally speaking, I learned how to write screenplays because my books were getting optioned, but then they would stall in the script stage, which I now know is typical and happens to almost every project. It’s a miracle that anything gets made, period. But I thought if I learned how to write screenplays, I could help move that along—which is such a naive thought on so many levels, because, especially when I started learning screenwriting, and I learned from producers like Blair Underwood, who option my novel My Soul to Keep and a producer named Nia Hill, I can almost still hear her voice in my head talking about how the dialogue has to be choppier. It has to be more conversational. Literally, my teachers were producers, and I got opportunities to write scripts. We sold a script to Fox Searchlight back in 2008. Adaptation was my way in. I didn’t have any particular aspirations to write original screenplays, because I already had the books I could adapt, but about three years ago, my husband and I realized that we were really holding ourselves back by only focusing on adaptation, because that meant we had to wait for some producer to fall in love with the book and come to us and then fight to get the spot—and you don’t always get it, by the way. It was not getting that spot for one of my projects that made me realize we needed to write original scripts, like stories that are spec scripts that we just send out, and I’m telling you, it was a huge breakthrough. We wrote two scripts, The Keeper and Mississippi Shuffle, and neither of them has been produced yet, but I feel like both of them will. The Keeper is an amazing script sample. We’re getting meetings, and then on top of that, almost as if by creating my own agency, all the other doors open. I have several works being adapted right now. I don’t think any of them are public yet, darn it. Well, The Good House is at Macro, and they didn’t say it isn’t public, so I’ll just say that. Macro is a great company. We’re pitching The Good House as a television series and adapting a short story of mine for an upcoming as-yet-untitled Black horror anthology series that Shutter is going to do. Steve and I are writing at least one of those scripts, an adaptation of my short story called “The Lake,” which is in my short story collection Ghost Summer. It is kind of ironic to me that after all these years and all these people trying to make movies out of my books that it’s a short story that is my first adaptation. I really want to leave that to the writers out there who may be lost in novels, and I may be talking to you. If you’ve been working on your novel for years and years, as I did for seven years, you might have some emotional aversion to either the story or the process, and I would never say to give up on a novel, but also: write short stories. Give yourself the satisfaction of a beginning, middle, and end. Give yourself the satisfaction of being published for the first time. One of the best writers I’ve ever worked with, I read her novel and was like, “Wait. Why aren’t you published?” She’d been working on this novel. So, she wrote a short story based on the world of that novel, so she’s not even cheating on it—it’s still the same world—but it would be like an epilogue to the world of her novel, and she sold it to a highly regarded anthology. So many writers lose years of their lives trying to learn how to write by writing novels, when novels are incredibly difficult to write. Short stories are also incredibly difficult to write, but they generally don’t take seven years. Even often-published authors like myself, and as an author who is trying to get on that book-a-year system so much, spent seven years working on a novel. If that was all I was working on, I would never know how talented I am writing other scripts. Sometimes, I had to use the sentence-a-day method, because The Reformatory—because it’s about a child’s prison, because it involves the death of someone I was actually related to, even though I never knew about him, I decided to make my protagonist 12, and my son was about 12 when I started writing it—it was hard to write. The research made me cry. It took a long time. I procrastinated. I put it off. But I finally got it finished. I can’t say who’s publishing it, because it hasn’t been announced, but I’m super excited about the publisher. It’ll come out next year. I also want to say, without maybe too much of a spoiler, but the whole point of my writing this novel was to change history. I am not writing a novel about a 12-year-old kid getting beaten up and sexually abused, and that’s the story. It’s really about the frenemy ship, I call it, between my 12-year-old protagonist and the the ghost of a long-dead child, as they have to come together to liberate themselves and expose this warden and his homicides and his horrors at this place. That’s what The Reformatory is about.

Lara Ehrlich

It sounds incredible. This is a good transition back to writer motherhood. As you mentioned, the research was incredibly difficult to do, given the subject matter and with your son being around the same age as the children in the book. Can you talk a little bit about that intersection of motherhood, how difficult certain subjects can be to explore, and the impulse to write and the need to tell that story?

Tananarive Due

Well, I’ve been fascinated by motherhood and inspired by it, even before I had kids, because I had so much reverence for my own mother. The Living Blood, a book I wrote back in the ‘90s, was asking the question: What would it be like to raise a child who is more powerful than you? A child who literally has magical powers and can cause a hurricane? How do you raise that child? I was in Big Brothers Big Sisters before I was a mother, so maybe I’ve always had that in me, that wanting to help nurture children. I noticed when Ghost Summer came out, and I was collecting all my short stories, how many of them had child protagonists. I put a child protagonist on the cover, and I realized, holy cow, all these stories were about children. I’m very fascinated by that coming-of-age moment, when the child has to grow beyond the childishness of who they were because of some trauma they’ve been pushed into, like the protagonist in The Reformatory. People say children are so resilient. Yeah, but don’t beat them. They are resilient in a way, and that superpower that my child has in The Reformatory, and this is why children create movement all over the world, is because their idea of what should be is not fixed to what is. If there’s a sudden change, they can sometimes roll with it with much more grace. You can give an iPhone to a 5-year-old, and they’ll figure it out in two seconds. If you give it to an 85-year-old, not so much, because it doesn’t look like anything else that they’ve seen before. A child expects everything to look like something they’ve never seen before. They figure it out. And that’s what I love about my character in The Reformatory. No matter what I throw at him, it’s like, “OK, so now we’re doing this.” That and I think, maybe partially, I’m mothering through my writing, mothering the child and the story, mothering the readers past their traumas, which is so much of the journey that has made me write this in the first place. I’m mothering myself. The reformatory has a missing mother and a 17-year-old character who has to step into that role, and I think to a degree, that’s kind of how we always feel as mothers, even if we planned it, because it feels so much more immersive than we had the capacity to understand. It’s like, OK, I’m taking on this unexpected challenge, and you want so much to get it right. It just feels like the stakes for getting it wrong are the stuff of deathbed regrets. At my age, I’m just trying not to rack up any deathbed regrets. I want to do it as well as I know how to do it, not phone it in. I really do think, if we can’t have it all, if there are things I don’t do because I don’t have time, I don’t miss those things. I don’t want to be hustling and grinding. I want to be having fun. I don’t I don’t work on anything I wouldn’t do for free at this point, and I want to keep it that way, if I can help it. That includes my teaching job. Don’t tell them.

Lara Ehrlich

That’s the perfect place, I think, to draw to a close. But since we have a few more minutes, you’ve given some wonderful advice for listeners, but just in a couple final words, if you could offer a message to the writer mothers who are listening, what would you say?

Tananarive Due

Well, first of all, be patient with yourselves. Writers are either aggressively not writing or aggressively beating themselves up for not writing or maybe both. Sometimes after a new job or a move or a pandemic, like I said, it’s just not going to be there. That inner child is sort of in a ball and doesn’t want to talk to you right now. And that’s okay during a period of stress, during a period of transition. When it’s not OK is when it becomes the idea that you have of who you are as a writer: I am a writer who doesn’t write because I don’t have time or because I’m too traumatized or whatever. At a certain point, you want to address the trauma, maybe through therapy, maybe through friends, maybe through writing. That’s one of the things I love about writing that teach in a horror workshop—like, here’s a quick prompt, so you could pick a real life trauma that either happened to you or someone you know, something that really stuck with you just, create a premise from that trauma, which can be the thing itself or that same feeling that that trauma created, find the character who’s the best protagonist to interact with that experience, and then figure out what they’re going to do about it. Figure out that story part. How is your character going to interact with your premise to create a change for themselves or for someone else? What can they experience that will give them a greater understanding of the world?

Sometimes horror has a downer ending. It doesn’t have to have a happy ending. But if you can bite off that little trauma and tame it through storytelling, it might help you not feel so paralyzed by any particular trauma. It opens you up to work on other stuff or invites you to engage further with similar traumas, and you realize, “Oh, I like writing horror. I like taking this horrible thing that happened and turning it into Cujo, the dog who’s a monster.”

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, that’s wonderful. I’m going to try that tomorrow. And I challenge everyone who’s listening now to try the prompt also. And let me know how it goes. Email me at writermothermonster@gmail.com, and tell me how it went. Thank you so much. That’s just been the most wonderful conversation, and we have a comment here from Danielle who says, “What a rich and enlightening chat. I’m a new fan.”

Tananarive Due

Well, great. If you’re a new fan, check out my short story collection, Ghost Summer, for a little taste. And I do have an online writing course called Life Writing Premium at lifewritingpremium.com. It’s about both your work and basically you as a protagonist in your own story. As you work on yourselves, you work on your writing, and it has a synergy, so check that out. There’s a video on the page that explains what it’s about.

Lara Ehrlich

Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure.

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