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Writer Mother Monster: Interviews with Authoresses, hosted by Lara Ehrlich

Guest: Amy Shearn

Interview: October 15, 2020

Amy Shearn is the author of the novels Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here. She is a senior editor at Forge and a fiction editor at Joyland, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Literary Hub, and many other publications. Amy has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

Lara Ehrlich 

Hi, I’m Lara Ehrlich, coming to you live from Writer, Mother Monster, a new series about writer moms. With me today is Amy Shearn, author of the novels Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here. She’s a senior editor at Forge, a fiction editor at Joyland, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Literary Hub, and many other publications. She has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and she lives in Brooklyn with her two children. So, with no further ado, welcome, Amy, and thank you so much for joining us.

Amy Shearn 

Thank you so much for having me.

Lara Ehrlich 

So, you are our first guest on this new series! Thank you also for being my guinea pig tonight.

Amy Shearn 

I’m so happy to be. It also means I can’t be your worst guest. This is great news for me.

Lara Ehrlich

You would never be the worst guest. You and I already had an event together a couple of weeks ago now. We’re both authors for Red Hen Press, and your book just came out and is getting wonderful reviews. So, Amy, just to start, why don’t you tell us where you’re from and a bit about your family.

Amy Shearn 

Oh, like my current family?

Lara Ehrlich 

Tell us about your kids, since we’re both writer moms.

Amy Shearn 

I’m like, “How far back do I need to go?” Well, I live here in Brooklyn, New York. And much to my surprise, I’ve lived here for 15 years now, although I’m originally from the Midwest, from a suburb of Chicago called Highland Park. I feel like it’s really important to name the suburb because real Chicago people are like, “You’re from Chicago? Really? Where? City? Or suburbs?” Just to be clear, I just say that up front. I have two awesome kids, a 9-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter, which I think are really fascinating ages. And they both seem to be writers.

Lara Ehrlich   

I have a 4-year-old myself, so I know you remember that stage. And we can talk about that, as well: having a very young child while writing your first two novels.

Amy Shearn 

Yeah, it’s such a different ballgame. I remember with one of my 4-year-olds talking to their pre-K teacher and the teacher saying, “The thing about 4-year-olds is they’re sociopaths. And that’s okay. That’s the developmental stage. And then they’re about to learn all the social cues and, you know, some system of sort of rough ethics and things like that, but they’re not there yet.” It’s a wild age.

I kind of at every age, this is the most fascinating. Wow, this is the best one. Well, I don’t always think it’s the best one. But then they get a little older, and I’m like, no, this is the most fascinating age. Your own kids are very interesting to you.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, I have the same thought, as well. I’m like, “When will she not be cute?” There might be a time when she won’t be cute, but so far, I haven’t found it.

Amy Shearn   

Yeah, you’re still in the era where just everything they say is cute—because they’re saying it.

Lara Ehrlich  

We have a lot to talk about, with our kids. But first, you’re also an editor.

Amy Shearn  

Yeah, I’m an editor at an online publication called Forge, which is part of Medium. Forge is a personal development publication, so I write and edit content to help people live their best life and improve as people, which is really interesting. It’s a really good space to be in, especially right now with everything that’s going on. It feels really nice to have my work be trying to help people feel better.

It’s funny, because I got an MFA in creative writing, and I thought that I would probably end up teaching, because that was just what all the writers I knew did. It just seemed like the job that writers had. And then I moved to New York and found that I couldn’t really afford to teach, actually. And also, I found it really, really super draining. I’m fine for a couple hours in the classroom, and then I’m like, I need a nap in a quiet room for three days. I guess maybe you get used to it. But I kind of stumbled into editing, which, as it turns out, is a great path for me. I feel like editing makes you a better writer. And writing makes you a better editor. So, it’s a good combo.

Lara Ehrlich 

Can you share one of your favorite pieces of advice from your work at Forge? What have you discovered about how we can be taking care of ourselves during a pandemic?

Amy Shearn 

Well, you know what is funny? Something that’s really super popular among the readers of our publication is stoicism—anything that has to do with the ancient philosophy, but also the modern iteration of stoicism. I’ve worked at Forge for one year, and for months I was just like, “Ew, stoicism—why? It’s so boring. And it just seems so male, like it’s telling you not to have emotions or something.”

I thought, “I don’t know why people are so into this.” Then, my fellow staff members asked me to write about stoicism, so this summer, I did a deep dive and ended up writing a feature about stoicism and actually finding it super useful. Stoicism is knowing what you can control and what you can’t control and looking at the world and looking at your life and saying, “Okay, what’s happening right now? What am I feeling about it? This thing that’s causing me stress—is it something I can control? And if not, can I deal with my own emotions about it and just sort of surrender a little bit? And if it is something I can control, then I adjust and deal with it.”

There’s a lot more to stoicism than that—but that whole question of the practice of just giving up what you can’t control is so useful in this time when there’s so much that’s crazy and stressful and that I really am not in control of, as powerful as I am. So that’s, I have to admit, super helpful.

Lara Ehrlich   

Yeah, helpful for everyone, I think, but especially mothers! That’s a great segue into the writer-mother conversation. As a woman, at least, I feel like I always need to be in control of everything, like our day jobs and our families. We have to make sure that our kids have their doctors’ appointments and their lunches and all the things we need to take care of as moms. And then the writing time—because it’s for yourself, it’s a personal act—tends to be the thing that falls off the priority list as writer moms. Is that something you’ve found? That’s my personal experience, but tell me a little bit about yours and how you prioritize all of these different balls in the air.

Amy Shearn 

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s hard, right? As a mother and as sort of like a contemporary, creative class, urban mother, I feel like there’s a certain kind of mothering you’re supposed to do. You need to be in control and on top of everything. And of course, that doesn’t have to be the mother, but every heterosexual couple I know has that dynamic. And you’re also expected to do all these things at such a high level—you’re supposed to work like you don’t have kids and parent like you don’t work. And then if you have creative work, too, that’s like another layer. Honestly, something that helped me with that was having my whole life just be forced off the rails—which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend, but in the last year, I’ve lived through this pandemic with all of y’all, but I also separated from my husband, moved out, and I am in a different place now. I co-parent my kids with my ex. So many bananas things happened all at once.

Lara Ehrlich 

You had to give up some control.

Amy Shearn 

Right. I’m just doing what I can to do my best. So there’s that—that’s a technique if anyone wants to try it. And then also, I think just being forgiving of yourself. Something that’s helped me is being aware of how much my daughter—and my son—is watching me, thinking about the kind of woman and mother I want her to be or feel like she has to be. I would never want her to grow up and think, “Oh my God, I have to do everything perfectly.” That is so stifling.

If you’re a creative person, so much of being creative is giving up control and letting a little bit of wildness in sometimes. My kids really have loved the past few weeks, because I’ve been super busy with the book launch and a big thing at work, and they were like, “Wow, our lunches lately have been awesome!” My daughter actually said, “I’m really into your benign neglect.”

They know that I love them more than anything, and that they’re my most important priority, but they also know that I have other stuff going on in my life and that adults have things and that even moms have other things that they’re doing. Like my son said to me recently, “I feel like your job is your job. But your writing is your profession” They can see that because they see me making it a priority. And they know it’s a part of my life.

Lara Ehrlich 

It’s helpful to have that solidarity, to hear that the balance is hard, and that sometimes things go off the rails and we lose control. The only thing we can do is the best we can. Our kids don’t know the level of perfection we’re shooting for—they can only live their experience—so as long as they’re safe and happy and we’re giving them a good example, maybe that’s sufficient.

Amy Shearn 

Our kids are watching all of us live through a crazy time, and they’re learning from us. So, if we’re like, “Oh, okay, this is what I can control, this is what I can’t control, this is how I deal with the stress,” that’s what they’re learning. It’s totally fair to have emotions in front of our kids and to be like, “Hey, I’m juggling a lot right now, and these things are important to me and here’s why.” It gives them permission to have things that are important to them, too, and to value and prioritize their own passions, their own professions.

Lara Ehrlich 

I still have those conversations with my daughter who’s four. I don’t think she’s too young for that. I think it’s important to respect these little people enough to say, “This is my work,” or “This is my writing, and it’s important to me. It makes me who I am, and it validates me as a person, as a woman, as a writer. I want you to know that it’s important, but not more important than you”

Amy Shearn 

When kids are readers themselves, or if they take in any media, I think it’s fair to say, “Somebody had to make this and put a lot of work into it, and it doesn’t just appear. And if you want there to be cool things in the world, somebody’s got to take time making them—and maybe that means that week they didn’t bake you some muffins or something.”

Lara Ehrlich

And to show them the end product I gave a copy of my book to my daughter and said, “Look, it’s dedicated to you. I wrote this for you and your name’s in here.” And she was just thrilled with that. She’ll probably understand that a lot more as she gets older.

Amy Shearn 

Unseen City is not dedicated to my kids—it’s dedicated to my parents—and my kids were like, “What the hell?” I’m like, ”The last one was dedicated to you guys!” And they were like, “Okay, we want the next one, too.” I was like, “Alright. We’ll talk.”

Lara Ehrlich 

Have they read your books?

Amy Shearn 

They’re still a little young, but they both made a big show of Unseen City, being like, “I’m gonna read this.” I feel like the best moment of my life was when they were going through together and just picking out all the swear words. I was like, “I raised you right, and this is amazing.” They’re just like, “Ah, I found another one!” And my son, the littler one, was, like, “I’m gonna read this whole thing.” And he was sitting down, he was really reading through it. And then he was like, “I don’t really find this that interesting.”

I was like, “You know what? You’re not totally the audience. Maybe, maybe give it a couple years.” I don’t know why they would find it interesting. But they’re very supportive. And they’re very aware. If we go to a bookstore and they see my book, they’re really excited about it. It’s cool to see them be excited about it.

Lara Ehrlich 

Before you became a mother, what preconceptions did you have about writing and motherhood?

Amy Shearn

It’s such a good question. And it’s something that I know from our previous conversations that you thought about a lot. And I feel like maybe I actually didn’t think enough about it. I didn’t think very clearly about it. I was a writer before I was a mother. I had gone to graduate school, my first book had been published—actually, I found out I was pregnant with my daughter the day after my first book came out, which was amazing. So, I think that helped a little bit.

I think before people have been published, particularly women, we have a hard time calling ourselves writers or justifying writing time if no one has ever seen the result of the work. And so, it really helped me in those first few years. In the back of my head, I knew I had a book, but that book isn’t the world, and someday I’ll have another one. I think that gave me a little bit of permission to write the second book. I feel like it’s always a leap of faith.

It’s always hard, especially when you have little kids and a partner who has needs too. I was home with my kids when they were really little. And then on the weekend, I’d say to my partner, “Okay, cool, you’re home, I need to go take some time to write.” And no one’s ever really happy to hear that. Everybody wants you to be the mom and wife who’s home and doing stuff for them. And it’s hard. It’s really easy to fall into that trap of like, “Oh, yeah, I shouldn’t be so selfish and take time away from the family and work on the book.” But I feel like I was often able to justify it because I get really crabby when I’m not writing. It’s actually better for everyone.

But to more clearly answer your question: I did have a very clear plan about how I was going to keep writing after I was a mother. I would recommend this: If you’re going to have kids, sit down with your partner and have a real conversation. This is so hard to do, but tell them, “I am going to need this much time to work on my writing. When are we going to make this happen?” That’s such a privileged thing to say, but I think it probably would have been smart to do that.

I had a couple years of having a baby and working on a book and just fitting in the writing time whenever when she was napping or when I could get someone to watch her for a couple hours and feeling guilty about it the whole time. That was not a good plan.

Lara Ehrlich 

I’m very, very lucky to have a very supportive husband who wants to give me that time and encourages me to take it. He was the one who said, “We need to make sure you take time for writing. This is important.” And I was the one who, when my daughter was born, held myself back from doing that. I think your word selfish is a very apt one. Maybe this is a female thing, ut we feel selfish for taking that time. I think it goes back to the point that unless you already have a book contract that you’re writing toward and you have accountability in that way, it does feel like a personal venture. It’s something you do by yourself in a room, something that’s just for you. And if you don’t have that book contract where you’re getting paid at the end, it feels selfish, even when it’s not, and that’s very hard to combat. How do you deal with that feeling of selfishness?

Amy Shearn 

I think it’s so important to have someone in your corner who you can delegate to check you on that. For you, it sounds like that’s your partner, and that’s lucky and very convenient. I have some very supportive writer friends who I do not know how I would survive without. They’ll talk me down and be like, “No, this isn’t selfish. You know that you are a writer and you need to write. Don’t be stupid, just do it.”

For the past few years, I’ve been connected with this amazing group of women writers and artists. A couple times a year, we’ll all coordinate a DIY writing residency inspired by Lenka Clayton, an artist who started the Artist Residency in Motherhood. She has a website where she has all the materials to do your own DIY writing residency, and it’s so helpful. She literally has signs you can print out. I have my card. [Reading from residency card]: “I aim to embrace the fragmented mental focus, exhaustion, nap-length studio time and countless distractions of parenthood as well as the absurd poetry of time spent with young children as my working materials and situation, rather than obstacles to be overcome.”

Lara Ehrlich 

I love that.

Amy Shearn 

I have it right here, so I don’t forget. It’s important to have that support, whether it’s signing yourself up for a residency and making yourself accountable or connecting with a group of other creative friends or just having someone who will check you if you’re getting wrapped up in your bullshit, because it’s so easy to see in someone else. Like: “You need to do your work. Why wouldn’t you?” That’s not selfish. Sometimes you need like that outside voice, I think to remind you.

Lara Ehrlich 

This is kind of like a therapy session thing to say, but I ask myself what I’d tell a writer friend. Would I tell her, “You’re being selfish. You should never take the time to work on your book”? Or would I say, “Of course you should take that time to do on your creative work. That’s just as important as your day job or your children or your spouse”?

I love the recommendation to do a retreat in that way, whether it’s going to a formal retreat—or, something that I’ve started doing, just get an Airbnb for a night, just in the town over. I spend the whole time in the room, and it’s just mine. Something about having that place that’s a dedicated time and place makes you buckle down and just plow through as much work as you possibly can.

Amy Shearn 

What I’ve done a couple times as part of the Artist Residency in Motherhood is to connect with a couple other friends and just plan the weekend. I don’t think we’ve ever rented an Airbnb. It’s always been at someone’s house. A friend who’s a great novelist very good at locating these places will call me and be like, “Okay, my friend is not in their house on Long Island for this week, and we can have it for free.” And then she’s also very good about snacks, which, if you’ve ever been to an established residency, being fed is kind of the best part. Not having to think about food is so important.

There’s something about that, especially if you’ve been doing that mother writing thing of scribbling when the baby’s down for a second or waiting in line at the Y to register for toddler ballet. When you’re used to buying time and finding time wherever you can get it, to have even two days—or even an entire day—of uninterrupted focus … it’s like a drug. It’s the best.

Lara Ehrlich

Yes, I had other writer friends tell me before I had a child that their focus turned laser after they had kids, because when they had that time and space, it was like, “Okay, time to work,” and they were not distracted by anything. I find the same thing. If I have that time that I’ve devoted to writing, it’s like, “Nope, don’t want to stop for lunch. Don’t want to take a shower. I’m just gonna sit here and work.”

Amy Shearn 

Oh, totally. Someone asked me, “How do you keep from getting distracted or blocked in your writing time?” I was like, “I can’t. I don’t have enough time to get distracted or to procrastinate.”

Lara Ehrlich 

How has your writing changed since you became a mother?

Amy Shearn 

Ifeel like in the same way being a mother changes you as a person, or changed me as a person, it sharpened my empathy in a way that for a couple years after having my first baby, I couldn’t read or see anything scary or violent. It was just like, “That’s somebody’s baby”—even if it’s a schlocky horror movie or something. All of a sudden, you’re going around the world like, everyone is somebody’s baby. It gives me this intense empathy for everyone.

I don’t think I was a mean person before I had kids, but I remember getting that note in workshops—”I don’t think you love all your characters”—and being like “What?” And now I get it. I really do love my character in a really intense way. It’s like my empathy muscles got stronger.

Also, something I think is hard about writing as a mother is that your goal as a mother is to make things nice and take care of people and make things pleasant—but in writing, it’s much better if you’re not doing that, if you’re not trying to be pleasant. You’re trying to be as honest and real as possible. I find it slightly harder to get there. Now I actually think it’s coming back a little bit, getting to that more untamed place.

Lara Ehrlich 

Is there a scene from one of your books that you could point to that was really difficult to get into that mental space for?

Amy Shearn 

The very beginning of Unseen City. It was really important to me that this character was trying to find her own way in life and not trying to live life the way people expect a woman to. She’s never been married, she never wants to be married, she doesn’t want to become a mother, and she’s really adamant about that. That stuff was hard to write. At the time, I was a wife and a mother. A little part of me was like, people are gonna read this and be mad at me, because my character is like this. But I knew that was important for her, and I had to get her there, even if it didn’t feel polite.

And actually, a lot of The Mermaid of Brooklyn—which I wrote when my kids were littler and I was married—when you have to answer to a spouse, it’s hard to write certain stuff. That character is a very stressed-out mother of two children. I was like, “Oh, no, people are gonna think this is me, and my kids are gonna read this and think that he didn’t like them or something.” As it turns out, people think your main character is you, no matter what. It’s a thing that they do, and you just can’t fight it. It’s a little insulting because there’s this subtext of, “How could a woman really create something from scratch? Obviously, she’s just writing about herself.” And then there’s a little bit of like, of course, every character is you. It’s ridiculous. Every single character from every book I’ve written came out of my head. I invented them all. It’s all made up. So of course, that’s part of it.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, it’s a weird dichotomy, isn’t it? At one of the first events I did for Animal Wife, I felt like I had to say, because my parents and my daughter were watching, “I want everyone to know that I love my daughter and I love my parents. I do not want to leave my family, even though many of my characters do.” You feel like you need to make that apology for yourself, which is problematic. And I would say it’s not just kind of insulting, it’s very insulting that women get asked that question and men often don’t—how much of that character is you, what part is autobiographical—particularly when it comes to sex scenes and things. Like, do really want to know? Why are you asking me that question?

Amy Shearn 

Boring question, right? You’re not interesting. That’s for you to think about, I guess.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah. If you must, I guess.

Amy Shearn 

Something that helps me when I get stuck in that place is I think about my ideal reader. For Mermaid, I was like, “Alright, it’s a little scary to write about an unhinged mother,” but what gave me the idea for the book was being at the playground, next to another mother with our little, teeny babies—they must have been like, eight months old, like just old enough to sit in the swing and also let us have a conversation.

The other mother said, “I want to read a novel about a mom like me, a mom I can relate to. And I feel like I can’t find this book that I want. I want a book that’s really honest, and honest about the great things about motherhood and the crazy things about motherhood. Especially in that early stage of motherhood, when it is still about you, and your identity has changed. And you’re not actually dealing with the kid as a kid yet.”

I was like, “I’m gonna write that book for her.” And she never knew that she inspired this whole book. I think about the reader out there who needs this book, or who will be moved by this book, and I think about the times I’ve connected with a book and didn’t know the author—which is the majority of books—there’s that amazing intimacy of that relationship between the writer and the reader who never meet each other. It’s almost otherworldly. And it’s why I wanted to write in the first place, so I feel like I have to remember that. I have to remember the lovely people that I work with and the other moms at school who are like, “Oh, I read your book!” I’m like, “Oh, thank you—let’s not talk about it anymore.” That’s the vast majority of the people who will encounter your writing, and it’s not for them. I mean, it is, and it’s great when they read it and are nice about it, but for me as a person. it’s like a different part of me that’s being tapped into. Do you know, I mean?

Lara Ehrlich 

Yes. And I love that story about the mother at the swing set. What was the feeling you wanted to tap into when writing that book, specifically?

Amy Shearn 

Well, full disclosure, partial disclosure, she was talking about another book she had just read that was very popular at the time. This was 2009, 2010, and the book was about Brooklyn moms and was supposedly the “Brooklyn mom book.” I remember that book. I read it and was like, “These are very glamorous moms. They’re just having sex all the time and they’re super chic and what the hell? Like, I’m a real Brooklyn mom, and I’m losing my goddamn mind.”

The woman at the playground had had a career that she really cared about. She chose to be home with her baby, and she was already like, “I love this baby so much, but this is not what I was trained for my entire adult life.” She was particularly neurotic. She was like, “I love my kids so much, I love being a mom so much, and I also feel like I’m losing my mind. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t know what the rest of my life and identity is going to be like. Raising kids in the city is bananas. I don’t know if it’s great. I don’t know if it’s good. This is so hard on my marriage, and what the hell?”

I had had this idea in my head for a while. I’d actually written it as an essay in graduate school, and very smart friend of mine, Amanda Fields, read the essay and said, “This is a novel, not an essay.” It turns out, she was right.

There’s a family story that my great-grandmother had been depressed, had been standing on a bridge, took her shoes off, and was going to jump into the water and then looked at her shoes and was like, “No, I love those shoes. I don’t want to lose those. I don’t want anyone else in those shoes. I’m not gonna jump.”

She had a very troubled life and actually married and divorced the same man twice, which I just think is fascinating. She was from Eastern Europe, Lithuania area. I had tried to write an essay about that family story and the mermaids in Eastern European folklore. They’re not nice mermaids. They’re mean, scary mermaids who seduce sailors and then kill them. I was trying to weave together these storylines. And then when I talked to this mom, it made perfect sense, like I’m living in this weird world of Park Slope, Brooklyn, parenting, which feels like a novel itself, it’s so off-the-wall. This woman with her shoes, this weird relationship, mermaids—it all makes sense.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s fascinating. The book I’m working on now is about a mother and sirens and the dark side of mermaids—the ones who destroy sailors. What do you think it is about sirens that lend themselves to stories about mothers?

Amy Shearn 

Well, I think you already know this because in your book Animal Wife, there are so many transforming characters and half-person, half-animal mythical creatures, fairytale creature types. That makes total sense to me, because there’s something so weird and transformative about motherhood, and also physically transformative in a way that’s so weird. I mean, I don’t know if everyone is like this, but for me, I was like, “This is crazy. This is really how we propagate this species? This is nuts!” I think part of that dissonance is that we live the way many of us live, so disconnected from our mammal selves. I was at work at an office today, not seeing any sunlight or breathing air and staring at a computer and also growing a person in my guts. That’s bananas. Like, I just couldn’t get over it the whole time. Well, the second pregnancy, I was over it—like, “Right, right, right, it’s a miracle, yeah.”

But it’s so weird, the way it transforms your body and the way you become so aware of yourself as an animal. Nursing babies is so nuts. That puts you in touch with that animal part of you, and you’re so connected and you’re transforming and then watching a baby grow and transform into a child is the most fascinating thing.

Stories like that—half person, half animals—they make total sense to me. It’s like metaphors. You have that great story in Animal Wife about the woman who wants to become a deer and builds an exoskeleton for herself. And I’ve written a short story about a woman who’s half person, half goat and lives in New York City and is just trying to figure it out like any of us. She just happens to be a fawn. It’s like a woman who’s trying to deal with the wildness inside her and domesticate it and be like, “No, no, no, I’m not a wild animal—I’m a totally normal lady just living.” Your woman’s the opposite, trying to un-domesticate herself.

Lara Ehrlich 

Do you feel like that, as a mother? I often do. I feel a sense of wild restlessness, but then I have to, like, make dinner and clean the toilet.

Amy Shearn 

Yeah, totally, yeah. I don’t know if it’s universal feeling, but I feel like it’s definitely something that a lot of people have. And there’s this great book called Norma Jean the Termite Queen from 1975 about a mother who kind of does just that. She’s like, “I can’t take it anymore!” And kind of takes off.

There’s a Facebook group I was in, in those years when my kids were toddlers, and someone posted, “Am I crazy? Does anyone just kind of want to get in the car and drive away sometimes, or just like take a walk and just keep walking away?” And everyone was like, “Oh my god, yes. I thought it was just me.”

I felt so much shame about this. I don’t even know if that’s motherhood so much as domestic life, especially when the kids were little. The parenting part is great. But it’s the other stuff that’s a real drag. In my relationship, a problem with division of labor that maybe other people have figured out better, but I’m just like, “I used to have a career and I have a master’s degree, and here I am just cleaning up after everyone all the time.” In my friend Siobhan Adcock’s great novel The Barter, there’s a scene where a mother who’s in that very situation is just like, “Here I am, putting the same slightly damp sippy cup on the same shelf, just like I did yesterday, just like I’m going to tomorrow.” I think about that image all the time. The domestic stuff is so stultifying and boring. Who wouldn’t want to run away from that?

Lara Ehrlich 

No, it’s true. Have you read Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment about a mother trapped in her apartment with her two kids?

Amy Shearn 

I have. It’s such a nightmare.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yes, and it’s all so mysterious, in that you don’t know if her breakdown is physical and if her lock really breaks and she can’t get out, or if it’s mental and she just can’t remember how to unlock her door. It’s so relatable in that she’s walking through her apartment like, “Okay, I need to make a phone call to get the lock fixed.” And on the way there she has to pick up clothes to put in the laundry, and then at the laundry, she’s like, “Oh, but here’s some broken glass on the floor. Oh, but before I do that, I need to do this”—and she never gets to where she’s trying to go. There is this sense of all the domestic clutter getting in the way of a pretty simple goal: just getting out of her apartment.

Amy Shearn 

You’re making me think of this great book called Forty Rooms, by Olga Grushin. It’s about this woman who is a poet and has all this promise—her teachers have all this excitement about her future as a poet and she has all this excitement about her potential as a poet—and she has this almost mystical ability to summon spirits and talk to this muse that appears almost like a ghost. But she also wants to get married and have kids. So, she does, and they obtain this beautiful house—and she’s really into her house—but then, over the course of the book, she starts to realize, and you start to realize, that the house is becoming her creative work and is taking all of the juice out of her.

She has a moment where she’s like, “Wait a minute, am I just a totally ordinary person just in a house now? What happened to this art I used to have? What happened to this connection to this other realm, this great gift I used to have of these things speak through me?” It’s really sad, but I think it really captures that thing that can happen and that we’re all kind of worried about, because every mother writer I know is working through this. My hope is that we’re figuring out how to evolve slightly, and our daughters will have an easier time being able to balance these things and be able to be a mother and not feel trapped in a room or house or something.

Lara Ehrlich 

We really are conditioned to feel like we can manage all of these things at the same time. The subhead of this series is “Dismantling the myth of having it all.” Because it is a myth. We grow up thinking: “Now we’re liberated women, we can have careers and families and passions—all the things we want, if we just work hard enough.” Then we find that, yes, we might have all those things, but we feel like everything is crashing down on us, and we can’t be 100 percent everywhere. We feel like we’re failing in various places. I think the word evolve is so important. We are evolving women’s rights, but the systems in place to support us in that evolution are not evolving with us.

Amy Shearn 

It’s not really fair to say our daughters will have it figured out because sure, they will. The structures that are in place just make it impossible—like the fact that, for so many people, childcare costs in this country cost more than their income. And we’re in a moment right now where there are historic numbers of women dropping out of the workplace because they can’t manage kids being at home and manage home schooling. Whether it’s finances or the patriarchy or whatever, the husband’s career is being prioritized. And that’s not a failing on the part of those women; the system has failed.

Lara Ehrlich 

And just to remind all of our listeners who might be feeling this way that we are in a global pandemic, and it’s unprecedented. So why are we beating ourselves up for not accomplishing enough in a time that no one has ever lived through? No one living right now has been through a period like this, so there’s no precedent for it. But that said, in the next couple of minutes that we have, let’s talk about a couple really easy things that we’ve found—because we both have careers, we both have families, and we both have published books—for women to prioritize their writing. What can we do?

Amy Shearn 

I’m cheating slightly, because for me, the pandemic has coincided with me moving into my own place—it happened right before the pandemic—and co-parenting. I know this isn’t totally practical, but I truly believe that every couple should co-parent as if they are divorced and have 50/50 custody. It’s the first time since I’ve had kids that I’ve felt like I have the time and the bandwidth for everything. And it’s because they have to be somewhere else every other weekend. And, yes, I miss them when they’re not here, but I have every other weekend to myself, so I almost feel bad talking to my parent friends who are freaking out, saying “This is terrible—I never have a minute to myself!” And I’m like, “Oh, I do. It’s great. I really recommend it. I feel so much better. I always know that some time is coming to catch up on work.” Because the rest of the world is pretty shut down, it’s really easy to like prioritize writing in that time.

But in a more practical way: quarantine life reminds me of when I was home with toddlers. I didn’t have any childcare or anything, so it was just that compressed time all together, being stuck in the apartment or the house or whatever. Something that helped me in those times was if I didn’t have a space of my own, and I couldn’t carve out time during the day, it was a matter of chipping away where there’s some give, where I can create some time and space for myself. In those years, it was early morning time. For a couple years, I’d go to bed when the kids went to bed, and then woke up at 4:30 or 5, just knowing that the next few hours are mine and making that like sacred time.

There’s a line from Norma Jean the Termite Queen where she’s talking about TV—which now seems super wholesome. The character turns on the TV so the kids will watch it and she can do her work, and she says, “Sometimes you absolutely have to forget that their brains are being destroyed so that your brain can survive”—or something like that. Just finding that time, whatever it is. For some people, it’s after their kids go to bed.

Something else that helps is being really not precious about the amount of time you have. If you just tell yourself, “Alright, I’m gonna write for 15 minutes”— maybe it’s gonna be 15 minutes, but maybe it ends up being more. It’s easier to commit to that when you’re tired or there’s a pile of laundry. I’m gonna face the other way from the laundry that needs to be done and just give myself at least 15 minutes.

And also, I signed on very early in my parenting career to outsourcing everything. What can be delivered? What can be ordered? What can someone else do? I’m not gonna be precious about that. Let’s just minimize my work.

Lara Ehrlich 

I think that’s great. That’s a lot of wonderful advice. One of the parts that you said might not be relatable, the part where you co-parent and alternate weekends, I think is relatable. You’re saying you don’t have to write every day; you can find a chunk of time that can be just yours—whether your partner takes your child for two hours, or you go away to an Airbnb for two days, or you get up really early while they’re sleeping or stay up really late—it’s not about, as you said, being precious, like, “Every day starting at 4 PM, I will write 50 pages.” It’s about cherishing that time and saying, “I will prioritize my writing. I will take this time and claim it.”

Amy Shearn 

Also, not getting too attached to the ritual. People love the idea that there’s like some writing routine that you can set yourself up with and that then it’ll be like a magic formula—like it’s gonna be 5 AM every day and I’m gonna light a candle and I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna write 1,000 words or whatever it is. If that helps you, that’s great, but the problem with that is if you don’t do it one day, or it gets ruined or interrupted, then it’s easy to say it’s not working and now I can’t do this. I think you have to give yourself the permission to have your writing time be different every day. I don’t write my own stuff every day. I just don’t. I do write in big chunks on weekends. There’s no right way to do it.

Lara Ehrlich 

We’ve come full circle now to giving up control. It’s giving up control over those rituals and the preciousness and instead leaning into the fact that your writing life is messy. Sometimes you’re writing next to laundry, and sometimes you’re writing in an Airbnb, and sometimes you’re dictating to yourself while you’re driving to your kid’s dance lesson.

Amy Shearn 

Sarah Ruhl has this great book called 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write. They’re really great. They’re all these really short little ideas. In one of the first ones, she writes about how she can’t write these essays because her children are constantly interrupting her. And then she writes about having this moment of revelation where she realized, wait—life is not interrupting the work; life is the work. This is the work. This is part of it. This is my life that I’m writing about, which I feel like can be really liberating.

Lara Ehrlich 

Absolutely. I think I need to go read that book right now. And it’s a wonderful place for us to close on. Thank you so much, Amy, for joining us. Where will you be next?

Amy Shearn 

Oh, good question. Things are calming down a little bit for me now. After this, I’m doing a craft talk about setting in writing on Oct. 26, through The Resort, a great, co-working and writing space in Long Island City in Queens, and they’re doing all this online programming. And then in November, you and I are doing a panel for Politics and Prose with some other great Red Hen Press writers about crushes and writing, which is my favorite. We’ll come up with a December thing. It’s gonna be great.

Lara Ehrlich 

Sounds good!

Amy Shearn 

And your book is a book that all mothers and humans should read. It’s a very good, wild mother book.

Lara Ehrlich 

Thank you so much. And thank you to everyone who has been with us tonight on various platforms. We really appreciate you tuning in. We will post the recording and have this talk on social media so you can catch it again. You can watch it every night if you want to or share it with other writer minds.

Amy Shearn 

Just like on a loop!

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Writer Mother Monster: Interviews with Authoresses, hosted by Lara Ehrlich

Guest: Blair Hurley

Interview: October 22, 2020

Blair Hurley is the author of The Devoted, published in 2018 from W.W. Norton & Company, and her stories are published in Ninth Letter, The Georgia Review, West Branch, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She’s also the winner of a Pushcart Prize and scholarships from Breadloaf and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Arts Center. She received her AB from Princeton University and her MFA from NYU, and she lives in Canada, near Toronto, with her husband and daughter.

Lara Ehrlich 

Hi everybody. Welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m Lara Ehrlich, and today’s guest is Blair Hurley. Blair is the author of The Devoted, published in 2018 from W.W. Norton & Company, and her stories are published in Ninth Letter, The Georgia Review, West Branch, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She’s also the winner of a Pushcart Prize and scholarships from Breadloaf and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Arts Center. She received her AB from Princeton University and her MFA from NYU, and she lives in Canada, near Toronto, with her husband and daughter. Welcome, Blair.

Blair Hurley 

Thanks so much for having me. Great to see you, Lara.

Lara Ehrlich 

You, too, Blair. Now, we met probably five years ago now at Breadloaf, before either of us were parents, or had published books. It’s great to meet here in this virtual space as both writers and mothers. To start, can you tell us who lives in your house?

Blair Hurley 

It’s funny. I’m such a new mother that the title is still something that I’m getting used to. But I live in a suburb of Toronto with my husband and our seven-month-old baby girl. And a couple of cats, as well.

Lara Ehrlich 

Can’t forget the cats. You were telling me, just before we started, that your daughter’s crawling now, right?

Blair Hurley  

Yes. Everyone told me that that would be one of those milestones where you had your life before that, and then, forget about having a life after that. It’s true that before that point, you can just kind of put a baby down on a mat somewhere and walk away and they’ll be there when you get back. But that’s not true anymore. She’s very much underfoot, all over, which is exciting and great. I’m so happy and delighted about it, but it does sort of ratchet up your alertness to another level, where you feel like you have to be constantly monitoring.

Lara Ehrlich 

Definitely. I used to put my daughter in a little basket by the couch. It was a basket with handles, and I could move her around the apartment and just sit and write next to her.

Blair Hurley  

There was this pillow that I would put her on, right next to my computer, and she would just sort of smile up at me and I’d smile back, and it was very, very cozy. But now she’s just too busy. She would roll right off that pillow. She’s on the move.

Lara Ehrlich 

What were your expectations of motherhood before you became a mother?

Blair Hurley  

Wow, there are so many things. Motherhood is such a huge, powerful identity in our culture and in our literature and in our lives that it’s nerve-racking to approach it yourself and to consciously make the decision to become this identity. I love the name of your series, Writer Mother Monster, because I think there are all these epic elements of motherhood. I definitely thought a lot about my relationship with my mother, of course. I was very close with my mother. She passed away more than five years ago now. And we just had a wonderful relationship. There was never any one clear moment where I could put my finger on why she was a good mother—or, you know, what were the things she was doing that made her a good mother? It was so hard to quantify.

And yet, thinking back, it was in 1,000 small decisions, every day, to be present with me, to be interested in what I was interested in, to show me caring when I needed it—all these thousands of little decisions. And in retrospect, it feels like she made the right decision every time. So I felt very nervous going into it, thinking, “How could I do that? How could I make the right decision every day, 1,000 times a day, without ever making the wrong decision?”

It feels that way, right? Like that, as a mother, you have to make the right decision every time. You have to get it right every time and choose to be the good mother with every decision. And so, I felt a lot of trepidation, for sure, heading into that decision to become a mother.

My expectations of motherhood were that, yes, it would be tough, and there would be all these decisions to make. I had a vague sense of how tired you might get. You can have people tell you you’ll be tired, but it doesn’t really mean anything until you experience it. Another thing that a couple of parents told me is that you’ll be so sleep-deprived in those first couple of months that they’ll go by in a blur and you won’t remember them after this. That has been true a little bit. But there’s a lot of time there. I’m not sure what I was doing—so your memories are not that strong those first couple of months. Things got much better as time went on, when we started to find our routine and just kind of understand our baby better and better. I think that happens, where it’s not just a generic baby; it’s your child, and you start to learn what your child needs better and better. So yeah, my explanation is a long, rambling way of saying that my expectations were that it will be difficult and tiring. But it doesn’t really mean anything until you experience it.

Lara

There’s no way to prepare for it, right? People tell you, you can get a dog, but it’s not the same thing.

Blair Hurley

It’s not. And that’s okay, because you’re also learning every day, and you get a little bit better every day. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have bad days, but you learn more and more about what to do right each day. So, there is a learning curve, and you start to understand better with each day, so you feel more in control, as well. In the first month, in particular, I felt sort of out of control. You’re learning so many things you have to keep in mind, at the same time you’re recovering from a major biological event and you’re exhausted. It seems particularly cruel to me that you have to learn to care for an infant at exactly the time you’ve been injured in a way physically, and you have to recover. The fact that it all happens at once—it’s tough. It’s a tough time, for sure.

Lara Ehrlich 

Oh, absolutely. Did you always know you wanted to be a mother and/or a writer? Do you have strong sense of one or the other or both?

Blair Hurley 

I had a strong sense from a young age that I wanted to be a writer. From age eight, I was writing stories, and it was always part of my dreaming about myself, my sense of self. I only felt whole and complete and content when I had written, and I couldn’t go long without feeling irritable if I hadn’t written. So, writing has been a part of my identity since I was very young. The idea of being a mother, though, I think, was something that I mostly avoided thinking about. I didn’t always know that I wanted to be a mother. It was something that was very much a question mark, and I was open to what the adult version of me might want for herself.

I had a very liberal, feminist upbringing, and the focus there is to value your career and your ambitions and put motherhood aside. It’s sometimes looked down upon if that’s your only ambition, to be a mother, and that’s an unfortunate conflict, the idea that a feminist can’t want to be a mother and see it as a value—meaning you can really be a feminist parent. That’s something that I absolutely wanted for my vision of parenthood. But I didn’t know how to do it. When I thought about motherhood as a young woman, in my teens and 20s, I thought I should focus entirely on my career and not really think too hard about parenthood, because I somehow got the impression that it wasn’t feminist to long to be a mother.

Have you had that impression? If you think back to the messages that we received, well-meaning messages about encouraging girls to have a focus on careers and valuing career, I don’t think there was a lot of talk about, “Oh, and when you’re there, you’ll feel this way.”

Lara Ehrlich 

I think you’re right. And I wonder how much of that is a response to the generation before us, to our mother’s generation, when women were encouraged to get married and become mothers, and that was the identity that they grew up believing was theirs to inherit. And so, in pushing back against that, a whole generation of women who said, “We can focus on our careers, we can be empowered to be feminists, and you want something more than domesticity?” Maybe it went a little too far?

Blair Hurley 

It’s unfortunate to put these two things in conflict with each other. One problem I have with the “having it all” myth is the idea that motherhood and career are two things, and that you have to somehow add motherhood and career onto your life, when really, there should be some way for these roles to complement each other and to be part of your life—to be a writer, to be a mother, to be both instead of piling more burdens onto yourself.

I’m glad that my school and my family encouraged my career and my growth as a feminist, as a self-reliant person, but I also wish, in a wistful way, that there was some sort of class I could have taken or model I could have seen about becoming a parent. Almost like the way a lot of adults say they wish there had been a class they could have taken in high school about how to do their taxes or these other practical life things. That would be great to have a model for a parenting class. I know some schools do have them. I don’t know if I would support it or not. But I do, at least on a very personal level, feel this kind of gap, this emptiness around what sort of parent I was supposed to be or what sort of skills I was supposed to know. I feel like everything I’ll be saying to you tonight, Lara, will have the caveat that I have the benefit of literally seven months of experience. I don’t have a lot of worldly wisdom around parenting yet. I don’t know that you ever feel that way. I’m not sure.

Lara Ehrlich 

I don’t think you do. And honestly, I think it’s great that you have the experience that you have. This series is for women of all stages of motherhood and of writing. Seven months is just as valid a mother as seven years and 17 years. Your experience as a mother is very valid.

Blair Hurley   

Thank you. We haven’t even mentioned how the pandemic adds to the burdens of all parents these days. It felt particularly odd with the timing for me, because I gave birth literally two days before the borders closed between the U.S. and Canada. And so, when I had a baby, the world was different. We’ve been pretty much in social isolation since then, just trying to do the right thing about being safe and not really socializing or meeting other moms or getting the benefit of our local community. We’re just trying to pretty much hold up. Both my husband and I have felt like we’re on our own. It’s just the two of us raising a baby and figuring out how to do it and learn. So, it feels particularly isolating that I haven’t been able to have that benefit of my community.

And, I’m certainly missing my mother more than ever, feeling like she would have so much advice to give me and this would be a time when she would have so much to give. She’d be able to tell me so much about caring for a baby. I felt that as a refreshed grief. It’s another time in life when I miss her particularly. It’s an isolating time for everyone right now. I would really appreciate having the opportunity to just kind of connect with other moms, but in the digital sphere, it has meant a lot to me to make the connections that I have had. I’ve been emailing with other writer moms and just kind of connecting with them and seeing what they’re up to and commiserating, feeling their woes and just sort of sharing what we’re struggling with. That has been so meaningful to me. I know you and I have exchanged a few texts about some of the more difficult questions and dilemmas that we have had, and it’s been so great to connect with other writer moms and see what they went through at this stage or that stage and hear about what they’re struggling with. It definitely helps with the sense of being alone, to connect with other mothers and see what they’re living through.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, there is a universality to the experience of motherhood and of being a writer mother specifically, even though everyone’s experience is so different. I think the unpredictability and the loss of control, as you said earlier, are uniting factors among mothers. I mean, what a loss of control not just of your own body but of your space, your time, your sleep—of just about every aspect of your life. And then to rebuild your identity as the mother to this small being whose identity you’re still learning because they’re not born fully formed either. So, yeah, building a community is so important.

Blair Hurley 

It is, absolutely, just to get someone else’s experience about that. And that was something about my expectations beforehand that I’m starting to learn, which is that on some level, before I had my baby, I thought, “Oh, it’ll be hard until she reaches X milestone, and then I’ll get my life back and I’ll be myself again.” It’s not really that way at all. It’s taken some adjusting to realize that my identity has changed forever. I’m living a different life now than I was in the past. And that’s perfectly okay. Life is change, and change is not always bad. In this case, it’s been an incredibly positive change. There are so many ways that I feel more access to joyful experiences.”

That’s something that with my writing, I think it’s going to be really interesting to see what happens there. Because with writing, as well, I thought I could write the same way I was writing, or just carve out the time, thinking, “Of course it’s going to be hard, but I’ll find some time, and I’ll write the same things that I was writing before I had a baby.” But now I realize that no, again, my identity has changed. I’m going to be writing different things, I’m going to be concerned about different things, I’m going to be feeling different ways. And again, that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it will probably enrich my writing in ways that I have yet to see.

In my writing, I’m a little bit wary about being prone to sentimentality. It’s something that I’m really concerned about right now. Because, sure, there’s a lot of hormonal shifts that occur, particularly in those first few months, and yes, I was crying at commercials. I was feeling waves of emotion about things that before I could keep a very dry, ironic distance from. Or now, if there’s a movie where a child is in danger or a child is hurt, I can barely take it. It is amazing to me to see how my emotions have changed in that way. Things leveled out, and it got better, but I also feel that there’s some aspect of it, that there’s a permanent change, where I can feel a deeper sense of concern. Or it might be that I’m more prone to sentimentality. I’m not sure. I’ll have to watch out for that in my writing.

Lara Ehrlich 

Sentimentality is something I’ve heard other mother writers talk about. I think particularly as women, we’re conscious of sentimentality as being a negative in writing, right? Like, you don’t want to write prose that is purple or that is too emotional, because then it’s not literary. It becomes something different. And yes, as a mother, I feel the same way you do, where a story with a child in danger is hard to take. And that tendency when you’re writing on certain topics and subjects to veer into sentimentality—what’s wrong with sentimentality, do you think, as a writer?

Blair Hurley 

I’ve tried to make more of a distinction in my mind between what we generally call sentimentality and what might just be sentiment. It’s a useful distinction to make, because yes, there is a problem with excessive sentimentality in writing. If I had to define it, I suppose it would be a kind of heaping on of emotion that is instructing the reader to feel terrible or tragic in a manipulative way, whereas sentiment is just strong feeling. I want my readers to experience strong feelings, so I don’t want to be afraid of sentiment.

In fact, I was reading a bunch of short stories in very prestigious literary magazines, and every now and then, I’ll feel a little bit impatient with the kinds of stories that I see that are so ironically detached, or bleakly showing sad people doing depraved things for no discernible reason. And I realized that no, these may be the stories that often get praise, but I’m not always sold by them. I actually do want to feel strongly about things, and I want to have an emotional experience. When I’m reading, I don’t want to just feel detachment or disdain or contempt for feeling. I do think restraint is powerful. You want the reader to feel emotion; you don’t want to have to grab them and shake them and say, “You have to feel this!” So, in a craft sense, restraint is important, but overall, I want my reader to feel something strongly, and I don’t want to be ashamed of that.

I think women writers, and maybe mother writers in particular, can be denigrated or looked down upon if they’re willing to show emotion. I disagree, because realistic writing is about showing emotion, being willing to make a reader feel something. But there is a perception that if you do it from the perspective of motherhood, there’s something inherently sentimental about it.

Lara Ehrlich 

Sentimental and domestic.

Blair Hurley 

Yes, absolutely.

Lara Ehrlich

“Domestic” being, as it should not be, sort of a curse word in the literary world.

Blair Hurley

Kind of small-minded, afraid of risk taking, and that sort of thing. I hate that, because there are so many male writers who write about domestic spaces, and it’s seen as the height of intellectualism and experimentalism. I think about all the many Updike stories and novels about domestic situations, for example, and somehow because it’s from a male perspective or focusing on the male vantage point, it’s seen as more serious, more legitimate.

Lara Ehrlich 

And talk about purple prose and sentimentality—John Updike! I love the Rabbit books, I have to say, but yeah, why is it different for a male writer to write about a man leaving his family and escaping from domesticity? Why is that literary, and when a woman does the same, it’s either denigrated because she’s unlikable or it’s chick lit because she goes off and has an affair in Paris or something.

Blair Hurley 

So irritating that there’s a double standard of perception there. There was a question you were mentioning before we went live about the idea of transgression and how male characters and male authors are sort of encouraged and lauded for showing characters transgressing, and this is something that I felt very strongly as a writer before becoming a mother. In fact, my novel The Devoted is a lot about that: if a woman decides to take a transgressive route, she’s viewed differently than a man. So, in that case, it’s a character running away from home and going on her own kind of spiritual experience and adventure. I think the moral judgment that would be passed on her if she were a mother would be exponentially harsher, if she decided to do something transgressive like that—to leave a child, even temporarily, just to get away. To somehow not be thinking about her child at all times and all moments in her entire sphere—moral judgment would be passed on a character like that.

Lara Ehrlich 

To be a bad mom and an unlikable woman, right?

Blair Hurley 

Yeah, absolutely. That idea is something that I think I’ll probably always be fascinated with as a writer, and I’ll probably write about it. I’m only just beginning to learn how much higher the stakes are for a character as a mother who’s interested in transgressing in some way and breaking out of norms. The stakes are so high for a female character who has a child.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, in the same way that I feel like, for example, in a thriller, the stakes become much higher if it’s a child who is held captive or kidnapped. There’s something about the vulnerability, or the perceived vulnerability, of that character and the transgression of that vulnerability.

Blair Hurley 

Yeah, absolutely. There’s this feeling that is wrapped up in a lot of sexist ideas about the purity of girls and how it’s important to preserve the purity of girls and how their innocence is something that needs to be preserved. I find all of that deeply problematic and often angering. We both have daughters, and maybe this is something you’ve started thinking about. Once I found out I was having a girl, all these thoughts swirled through my mind about how I could be a good parent to a girl in particular, because there are so many ways she’s going to learn to devalue herself or see herself as vulnerable to corruption or to the repugnant ideas out there around girls and women.

One funny thing that I remember about my parents’ views about parenting—this is maybe one of the more unusual things that they felt strongly about—was that they didn’t want their kids—I have a sister—to grow up thinking that the world was a malevolent and scary place. There were all these classes, like “stranger danger” lessons that kids would be taught in the ‘80s. My parents refused to sign the permission slip and took us out of school for the day for the “stranger danger” one. They felt that strongly about it. That was their hill to die on. They didn’t want their kids to get the impression that the world is a scary place, that you should be afraid of everything and everyone that you should feel anxiety. Of course, we all have read various statistics about how we’re probably living in one of the safest times that humans have ever lived, and crime has been on the decline for a long time. That’s a wonderful thing, and yet, there’s this perception of the world as an increasingly dangerous and malevolent place.

Lara Ehrlich

In ways that are not as visible, right? Online.

Blair Hurley    

Absolutely. It’s a really funny balance to have to strike as a parent today. These dangers are real, and there are ways in which we have to teach our children to be safe, to protect themselves, to know about the dangers that exist. And yet my parents decided that was one thing that they didn’t want us to feel overall. I mean, they taught us things about being safe, but they didn’t want us to have the impression that the world was a malevolent place. I think that was interesting. That’s something that I can point out as a definitive parenting decision my parents made. I question what balance I want to strike with my child; what kind of perception do I want her to have about the world? There are ways in which, as a girl, she’s uniquely vulnerable to some dangers that she wouldn’t have to think about if she were a boy. And yet at the same time, I don’t want her to feel fearful of the world. So, it’s a difficult balance to strike.

Lara Ehrlich 

We have that same conversation all the time, specifically around sex and education and bodies. You want to make sure that your daughter’s not ashamed of her body but at the same time, trying to avoid the messaging around purity and virginity and the sacredness of her “flower.” How do you instill respect and empowerment without those ickier sides of sex education? It’s gonna be tricky. I think you hit it pretty straight on with the ‘80s, the messaging. There’s just something so creepy about the messaging from the ‘‘80s around sex and drugs and “stranger danger” and all of these after-school specials.

Blair Hurley 

Maybe it was one of the first generations where people were talking frankly about dangers, when before they were unspoken. In some ways, that may have been a positive improvement, to talk about some of these things explicitly. But there are also ways in which they, I think, got it wrong. One thing that made a big impression on me was when I learned about the way that they’ve changed the character of Mr. Snuffleupagus on Sesame Street. In the old days, in a previous generation, Snuffleupagus was invisible to adults. Only children could see him on the show. And then they decided to change this after consulting with a lot of child psychologists and experts, because the danger of that narrative, the experts believed, was that it was a case of where the children are always trying to tell the adults that they can see something happening, and the adults don’t believe them. So it’s a kind of ominous sign. So if a child is, for example, being abused or something, they’re learning the lesson with this particular story, unintentionally, that if they tell adults, they won’t be believed. So it seems like such a harmless thing, but I can see how that might have the unintended consequence of teaching children that their stories don’t matter and that they won’t be believed if they tell an adult something. What I’ve taken from that is the importance of really respecting the inner life of a child and believing a child, being willing to value their story, and listening if they tell you something.

Lara Ehrlich 

There’s a lot to unpack here with storytelling, the power of characters in childhood, and the way that adults can write for and to children. Just to go back to your own daughter and your writing. Obviously, she’s too young to read your book right now, but thinking about your daughter, when she’s maybe 15, 16, and older, maybe when she’s a mother herself, what would you want her to read into your work, whether it’s The Devoted or work that you’ll write from here on out?

Blair Hurley 

My first thought is that it’s something I really hope for my daughter: to be a reader, to love reading, and to have books as a great source of joy or comfort or stimulation or challenge in her life, no matter what path she chooses. I think that being a reader is such a valuable part of having a meaningful life. My side note is we read lots of books with her every day, little board books, and she started turning the pages herself today, so she figured out the system. When I’m done reading a page, she’ll turn the page. I’m just very proud of that right now.

But when she’s 15 or 16, what I think is that, first of all, it’s perfectly healthy and normal for a child to be totally uninterested in the private lives of their parents and to be a little bit mortified by it and to just be totally detached from it. I’m perfectly okay with that. I won’t be insulted or hurt. I think it’s perfectly fine for kids to lead their own lives. If she does have an interest, I will be perfectly happy. If she finds something meaningful there, if she does have a curiosity about my life before I had her and the kind of person I was then, the writing that I was doing, I hope on some level that she’s proud of the work I do, and I want her—hypothetically, in the future—to see me working and to be proud of that and see it as a major part of my life, something that’s part of my identity. I would be perfectly fine if she is embarrassed by the deep feelings that are in there. Above all, I think that one of my jobs as a parent is to encourage and foster a child to learn how to lead her own life and define her life the way she sees fit.

Lara Ehrlich 

Did you wonder about your own mother’s private life? What did what did you see her doing? Did she read a lot? Was she a writer?

Blair Hurley  42:22 

She was a writer, which is something that I feel very proud of. That is something that was a great, strong connection that we shared. She wrote a number of short stories that were published in small magazines. She never published a full-length book. She was a lifelong, avid reader, as well. My love of reading definitely came from her. We would share books and read to each other and talk about books. And I would rush to her with my little written-up stories, you know, and have her edit them. She was strict, as well. She had high standards. Even if I was 9 or 10, she would mark it all up and say, like, ‘Too many commas here,’ or, ‘This metaphor is not working.’ She would give me real feedback. And I would run to the computer and try to implement the changes and then rush back with another version. So yeah, we shared this love of reading and writing that is one of my fondest memories of our bond.

She had really interesting interests, I would say. In her own career, she was a wine importer. She created her own business from scratch. I was always proud of her. I had this sense of her starting this business and figuring out how to make it work. It also enabled her to work from home, so that meant that she was always there. We had a variety of babysitters and stuff, but I never had to be away from her for long periods. Even as a kid, I realized that that was kind of a rare opportunity. So that’s something that I hope to have.

Lara Ehrlich 

I want to get into that deeper because I wanted to ask you about the work you do outside of your creative writing. But first, I just want to remind viewers, you can post questions and comments. We’ll see them come in. And we do have a question here from Brittany for you, Blair. This goes back to our conversation about sentiment and sentimentality. Could you tell us which female authors you feel do an elegant job of navigating that balance of sentiment and story? Great question.

Blair Hurley 

I love a woman writer who’s willing to engage with a little bit of cruelty, like a thin edge between warm tenderness and cruelty or viciousness. I think Alice Munro does a great job of this. On the surface, she’s portrayed as a quiet, domestic writer—again, that perception of women writers as being quiet, little writers or something—but she’s a writer with a lot of ferocity, I think. There are these incredibly devastating moments in a great climax of her story, where we’ll suddenly realize that a scene that we thought meant one thing is turning on its head and, in fact, something else is happening here. It’s sort of a knife’s edge element of perception between who’s being cruel and who’s being kind, or who’s acting in order to protect someone else. I love Alice Munro so much.

And this is not a female author, but I’ll put him in there anyway. I grew up loving John Steinbeck. I think he often gets a bad rap or he’s seen as a somewhat sentimental writer—he’s willing to engage with big sweeps of emotion in his writing and show suffering on the page and show how painful situations are, and he’s sometimes looked down upon for that very reason. But I think he does it very powerfully and well. I am willing to engage with that powerful sweep of emotion, the feeling that sometimes life does exist on an epic scope. So yeah, I’m a Steinbeck fan.

I’m just looking over my bookshelf because there’s a writer that I really enjoyed who I only discovered a couple years ago, Ruth Ozeki. Her book A Tale for the Time Being was one of my favorites of the past five years. It got a lot of attention when it came out. It’s about a diary that washes up on the shores of California all the way from Japan after the tsunami. And so this woman who lives alone is reading the diary of a young Japanese girl, and bit by bit, we learn about the girl’s life, and we’re also learning about the California woman’s life, alternating chapters, and we see how they’re kind of reaching this amazing connection across time and across an ocean. I think it’s truly a beautiful book. The teenage girl is in a really terrible situation. She’s being bullied at school and is quite miserable. And the author’s willingness to engage with teenage-girl misery maybe is seen as sentimental, but I was moved by it. I was totally moved by this girl who felt totally trapped in her situation and didn’t—couldn’t—see a way out.

Lara Ehrlich 

That leads into another great question from Brittany. Brittany, I think I’m gonna invite you on here to ask some questions. she asks how having a daughter has changed how you plan to write female characters.

Blair Hurley 

Oh, good question. As I said, I feel still so, so young in the stages that I’m sure I’m going to learn more as time progresses. I almost feel like I’m only just starting to learn her personality and starting to see it come out in the most recent months, which is a true delight, to see her starting to become an individual. The way motherhood is already changing my writing about girlhood particularly is seeing how fiercely girls want to become—to grow and to become yourself. Even at my daughter’s young age, I can see it in her desires and in the way she’s trying to figure things out and how she gets excited when she’s able to do some new skill. I see it as this powerful desire to become, which I find deeply moving to witness, and I feel honored to witness.

When I’m writing characters, I want to try to capture that desire and that process of becoming. No character is truly static, if I’m doing a good job. They’re always wanting things and wanting to become something else and wanting to grow and to be a better version of themselves, or to escape, or to transform. Everyone wants to become—and when girls are wanting to become, it’s seen as a dangerous thing. There’s something dangerous about a girl who wants something for herself, who wants to transform. I hope to write characters that have that ferocity of desire, and also, to engage with the danger and the risk of that.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s fabulous. What a great answer. And I want to read those stories immediately. Something I love Blair about this conversation is that you’ve touched so often on the joy of motherhood and of thinking about writing from a mother’s perspective. I think we often lean into how hard it is to write as a writer-mom, but it’s also such a joyful and powerful honor to learn from this little person, and then imbue our writing with the lessons that we’re taking from this shift in identity. Thank you for talking about the joyful parts. That’s so valuable and so empowering.

Blair Hurley 

I do want to give that impression, because it is it is an amazingly joyful experience. And as you said, it’s an honor, for anyone who decides to make this choice. It’s an incredible experience. I will say as well, though, another thing I didn’t expect when people talk about how hard it is to make time for your writing, which I do feel powerfully, is that I thought I would feel resentment, like I was a prisoner unable to work and I would feel horrible about it. But actually, it’s more insidious than that, because I’m too busy feeling happy and joyful to be with my baby. That’s why the work is not getting done. It’s not because my child is a tyrant or a jailkeeper; it’s that I want to be with her. I’m the jailer. I’m the one keeping myself from writing. I did not expect that at all. But the happy aspects of parenting are actually the ones preventing me from being productive right now.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s fascinating. And so well said. And it’s something Amy Shearn and I talked about in the last episode, that before I became a mother, my husband was adamant that we’d make time for my writing—and I was lucky to have that support—but then, like you, when my daughter was born, I was like, “Well, I just want to play with her,” or stare at her. Writing does take focus, and whether you’re writing for five minutes or five hours, that means your focus is not on your child. And that’s very difficult when time with your daughter is so enticing.

Blair Hurley 

That deep, unfettered focus is essential for writing well, and for diving into those creative ideas, and it’s a constant struggle. I feel very grateful to be in a partnership as well. I’m in awe of parents who are doing this solo, because I can I can even fully understand how one would do it. I have an equal partnership with my husband, and that means when he’s taking care of her—and it’s not like he’s helping either; I hate when people say dads are helping; no, they’re raising their children—then I can feel fully at ease that she’s with her father, and it’s going to be okay. That’s an essential part of the equation. But it’s true that it’s so enticing to think about—whether it’s worrying or thinking happily about—your child. It’s just such a such a draw.

My husband and I have devised a system because we both need time for deep, deep work where we don’t have to think for a few a couple hours about the baby. We have a system where we each have one day a week where we’re the primary parent, and we take on as much on as we can to give the other partner the chance to work in an unbothered way. It seems like a great idea, and it has helped a lot, but the first day that was mine, honestly, I just spent the time looking at videos of the baby. I just couldn’t get back into it. I was still in parent mode. I was missing her, even though she and my husband were just outside my office.

I can see how ridiculous that is. But it takes a concerted effort to find that place, that quiet place that I think is essential for good writing. If you’re only trying to write in little bits while feeding the baby, I don’t think you’ll be able to arrive at bolder and deeper and darker ideas. I think it’s important to have unfettered time periods, however you manage it, and to do your best to honor that time and only focus on writing.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, you know, I’ll say two things. I agree with you that to get really deep into a story, you need unfettered time. But you can use those little chunks of time where your attention is divided, too. I’ve filled those moments with other tasks that are writing related. When I was commuting to work, I would dictate to myself and use an app to transcribe the dictation. When I got home and my husband was feeding my daughter, I could sit with them at the table and clean up the transcription. And that only took like half of my brain so I could still sit with my family. And then when I had the time to really sit and go deeper, that was the time when I would look at what I had on the page and really devote myself to going deeper with it and making it writing as opposed to just a stream of consciousness.

Blair Hurley 

I think that that’s so smart and important because it’s true. There are all sorts of phases of writing work that need to be done that don’t require that deepest of focus. I still write a lot of my drafts by hand first, but then there’s the phase of just typing it up, so that I can do with a very divided mind, I can get that done. It’s when writing those first drafts that I feel I need to get into that quiet place. And sometimes when I’m doing a major revision as well, I need to call my most creative powers into play.

Lara Ehrlich 

We’re coming to an end. But first, I’ll say that it’s really important that you said when we do have those moments during which we can devote ourselves to a story, it’s important to honor those times. That’s really hard. Before the interview, we were talking about mom guilt, and that feeling of guilt that you’re stealing time from your child, or that you are missing out on something, or that you’re being selfish. And it’s often hard for women, too, to ask for something for yourself, or to demand something for yourself. It can feel selfish. But really, it’s necessary. Writing is our vocation.

Blair Hurley 

It’s powerful and tempting to feel that it’s plus or minus, that any time you take something for yourself, you’re taking it away from your child. That can be heartbreaking. I think a lot of women feel that, and it’s so unfortunate, because it’s an illusion. This isn’t a political discussion, but there are so many ways in which I wish our society was set up to support parents better. And on a personal, emotional level, I think it’s so important for women to feel okay about valuing their work and valuing themselves. And ultimately, it’s important for their children to see that as well. It’s better for the child to see a mother valuing herself and valuing her work.

When I think back to my own childhood, I was a very kind of introspective, introverted child who just liked being off with my book or imagining stories with my toys. And I think it was so valuable and precious that my mother and my father just let me have that time to be off in my head and to explore and to be alone to figure out things on my own. And it’s those private moments when I grew as a child, and as a person, I think.

I’m trying to remember as best as I can right now that it’s actually good for my child to allow her those private spaces to grow and to figure out things. Even just in these few months, I can see how it’s usually is the moment that I take a little bit of a step back that she’s able to learn a new skill. A silly example: I kept trying to guide her hands and guide her hands to help her hold her sippy cup, and finally, I was like, “You figure it out.” And then she did. We need these breathing spaces; we need to have private and quiet spaces for our own growth. I’ve tried to remind myself that it’s good for our children to have these spaces of their own while their parents do the things they need to do.

Lara Ehrlich 

Blair, thank you so much, again, for joining us. I can’t wait to see what you do next and I hope you’ll come back because this has just been such a great conversation.

Blair Hurley 

I had such a great time chatting with you, Lara and it’s been great just to articulate some of my ideas about motherhood and parenthood.

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Writer Mother Monster: Interviews with Authoresses, hosted by Lara Ehrlich

Guest: Liz Harmer

Interview: October 28, 2020

Liz Harmer is a Canadian living in California. Her first novel, The Amateurs, a speculative novel of technological rapture, was released with Knopf/Vintage in 2019. Her stories, essays, and poems have been published in Lit Hub, Best Canadian Stories, and elsewhere, and her second novel, Strange Loops, is forthcoming with Knopf Canada in 2022. Her children are 13, 11, and 8, and here’s how she describes motherhood in 3 words: “Challenge and Delight”

Lara Ehrlich 

Hi everybody. Welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m Lara Ehrlich, your host, as well as a writer, mother, and monster myself. Joining me today is Liz Harmer. Liz is a Canadian living in California. Her first novel, The Amateurs, is a speculative novel of technological rapture, and it was released with Knopf and Vintage in 2019. Her stories, essays, and poems have been published or are forthcoming in Lit Hub, Best Canadian Stories, and elsewhere, and her second novel, Strange Loops, is forthcoming. We will talk to Liz about all of those things, as well as being a writer mother. Let’s welcome her right now. Hi, Liz.

Liz Harmer

Hello.

Lara Ehrlich 

Let’s start by telling us who lives in your house.

Liz Harmer

Well, along with my husband, Adam, there’s Fiona, who’s 13; Simone, who’s 11; Juliet, who’s 8. Sometimes I forget their ages, because they seem to grow up really fast. I also have a dog, two cats, and a bunch of rats. They’re kind of part of the family also.

Lara Ehrlich 

Are they your rats or your kids’ rats?

Liz Harmer

Fiona wanted to get a rat, and then the rat got lonely. And then that new rat was pregnant. We had seven, now we have five … you know—cycle of life.

Lara Ehrlich 

I won’t ask. Right before the interview, you were telling me that you came here pretty much straight from the ER. So first of all, thank you for joining us. Are you okay?

Liz Harmer

I am okay. I was having a lot of pain and pain with breathing and a lot of symptoms that I couldn’t understand. I just wanted to sleep a lot, and my husband was like, “I think maybe you need to cancel your classes and go in.” I did not cancel my classes. But I tried to squeeze in an ER visit. But anyway, I don’t have COVID, but I might have it now because I was surrounded by people, which was pretty stressful. I had to get an IV. Apparently, I had a really juicy vein that gushed blood everywhere. So that was fun. And anyway, it was a bit of an adventure. I’m sorry if this is too much information about my body. In any case, I’m fine except that I’m exhausted and having some weird pain. It could be an injury. I may have injured myself doing pushups. You’re learning a lot about me right now.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s the point, right? I’m glad you’re okay. But as I said before the interview, you are certainly welcome to postpone this interview. And as we were talking a little bit about how as women, particularly as mothers, we feel like we have to ‘go, go, go’ all the time, even at the expense of our own health, and there’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.

Liz Harmer5:46 

Yeah, yeah. I wish I would learn it already. You know, it’s taking me a while.

Lara Ehrlich 

Don’t apologize for telling us too much about your personal life. That’s why you’re here. And we’ll get into bodies and women and childbirth, too. I want to start by asking you about the book that’s coming out in 2022.

Liz Harmer 

So that book is called Strange Loops, and I’ve been calling it my doomed sex novel for a while. It’s really a book about transgression. There’s a female narrator who basically has an erotic obsession, and she gives into the obsession at the expense of everybody else and ruins her own life and kind of knows she’s ruining it. I’m interested in women who are smart but still doing the wrong thing and know they’re doing the wrong thing. And I’m obviously really interested in obsession and desire. I became very obsessed about desire for about five years, I read everything I could. The book arose out of all of that.

Lara Ehrlich 

What was the impetus for that obsession? And then, what research did you do, if you can share?

Liz Harmer

I guess I better get some practice talking about this because the first novel is completely imaginative and not really about anything that I could be accused of being autobiographical, because there are portals and things—even though there was autobiographical stuff, obviously. I’m interested in my own desire, and women having desire feels like this taboo thing that we’re confused about culturally. But also, I was raised in a very strict religious background in the Christian Reformed Church in Canada, which is like a Dutch Calvinist subculture. I felt like the messages I got as a kid and as a teenager didn’t really help me sort out my desire. I’ve been married a long time, but I’m not afraid of talking about desire, being interested in desire. I’m interested in different arrangements, and I became really interested in people who are polyamorous and choosing to live outside of monogamy.

The research that I did was mostly—it’s not really research—I listened to the Baz Luhrmann Romeo and Juliet soundtrack while reading Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet and like books like that. I was seeking out a lot of work by people who also were really fascinated by desire. There was this quote that I came across a couple years ago from C.S. Lewis, and it was naming all the loves—I think it’s in a book called The Four Loves—and when he names erotic love, he says, well, erotic love will make you abandon your children and burn down your house and kill your neighbor. I mean, I’m making all of that up. But it was something about what erotic desire can do to us that other kinds of love obviously don’t. And it seems like not super loving to burn down your house and murder your neighbors.

Lara Ehrlich

Maybe not so much.

Liz Harmer

Anyway, those are some of the things I was thinking about. How we can get punished for desire.

Lara Ehrlich 

I’m really fascinated by that, too. You tell us you’ve been married for a long time. How long have you been married and tell us about your spouse.

Liz Harmer

Okay, I’m 39. I’ve been married since 22. We just had our 17th anniversary. At 15 years, I started to lose track of the years, but basically our whole adult life. We had a really intense love affair—like, I fell in love with at first sight with him. I met him in the university bookstore where he was looking at all the philosophy books. We were both in the philosophy class. I was like, “Oh, there’s a guy—I’m gonna go talk to him.” So I just insinuated myself into his life for a couple years. And he is now a philosophy professor, which is why we’re in California. He’s continuing to be the man standing in front of the pile of philosophy books, and I continue to be the person who’s going, “Here’s the guy.” We fell madly in love. I was engaged to somebody else briefly. I was from this background where I was an old maid already at 21—not really, but kind of.

Lara Ehrlich 

According to your religion?

Liz Harmer

Yeah. I mean, you didn’t have a lot of choices, because you can’t have sex outside of marriage. But you’re full of desire. So, you have to get married in order to have sex. I mean, I’m not saying that’s all it was, but there was a lot of pressure on getting married young. And I feel really bad for naming all of that in my community. I’m sure that’s not true across the board, but I felt a pressure. So, while I was engaged to this other really great guy, I just fell in love with Adam. And that was a bit destructive. That was a bit of a C.S. Lewis “burn down the house” kind of thing. But Adam and I have been together ever since. We’ve been through a lot together. And, yeah, 17 years.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s amazing. And I have to share with you: I met my husband in graduate school, and I think the moment I was drawn to him was when he was reading Ulysses in the student lounge. I went over and I was like, “What section are you reading?” And it was the one in the brothel, and I was like, “Oh, I love that part, where all the prostitutes are hitting on Leopold Bloom.” And he was kinda like, “Huh, who is this girl?” And we’ve been married 15 or 16 years. So, tell me: you have three kids; did you always want to be a mom? Or was it something that snuck up on you?

Liz Harmer

I don’t know if I always wanted to be a mom. There were times when I was a kid when I was envisioning my future having children, and there were other times when my dream life for myself was that I would live nomadically without any ties and I would just be a “writer” and travel and have lovers and not have children.

Lara Ehrlich 

Capital ‘W’ writer.

Liz Harmer

Yes, exactly. I never had a strong image of what my future would be, except that I wanted lots of romantic, bohemian situations, which, I didn’t know how to get those. There was no path, like “this way toward Bohemia.” I just wore black turtlenecks. I had Fiona when I was 26. The decision when we got married was very impulsive. I was planning to be an academic. And I was like, well, am I going to have children during grad school? How am I going to have children while I’m on the tenure track? How, while job searching? None of them seemed possible. And I think this must have been something I internalized, that I thought I was so old, at 26, to start a family, when what I found out was I was the youngest mom around. Every other mom that I met was in their 30s, for the most part. So basically: “I can’t make up my mind, and I can’t stop thinking about it; let’s give it a go.” And then, that’s what happened. It was very impulsive. We kind of just do that. And then the chips fall and hopefully we can manage. I guess that’s how we live.

Lara Ehrlich 

I have so many questions to ask you about this because it’s so different from my own experience. And it’s just fascinating to see how people make those decisions about their families. But first, as somebody who was looking for that nomadic life, which really resonates with me, I wanted to have a love affair with a gypsy under the moon and ride off on a horse, like fairy tales, and all these things were part of my dream for myself. And at least for me, like with you, there was no road sign to nomadic life. And I won’t say that I settled or that you settled because I don’t think that’s the right way to put it. But it’s very different than the nomadic lifestyle, to have been married for more than 15 years and have children. How do you reconcile those two diverse paths—the nomadic side of you, the wild side, and the married mother of three, who lives, I assume, in a home with pots and pans and a refrigerator and very unromantic things?

Liz Harmer

Yes, that’s a good question. I’m not sure. I mean, I just thought I was going to be Leonard Cohen. I’m like, maybe I could be him. That’s my top choice. And then I had no other options. How do I reconcile myself to this? Well, I guess I try to have an interesting and rich life from where I am. I do believe passionately that you can have an interesting, rich, not boring, settled, domestic life, just because you have a boring, settled, domestic life. I try to say yes to things, I try to meet lots of people, I do things that scare me a lot. I probably work a lot of it out in my writing by letting my characters do the thing I can’t do myself or that I’m afraid to do. I guess that’s how I do it.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s a great segue to writing and how you use personal experience in writing. Blair Hurley and I, in the last episode, were talking about how women’s work or women’s writing is very much seen as autobiographical, even if it’s not, so people say, “Where are you in the story?”—which is not something that people typically ask men. So when you say that you work out some of these issues in your writing, I hesitate to say, “What’s autobiographical about your writing?” But I will ask: where do you see this coming into play in your books, whether it’s The Amateurs or the forthcoming book and/or the memoir? You’re working on a memoir, right?

Liz Harmer

Yeah, the memoir is the sort of the next thing. The origin of The Amateurs, which is a sci-fi, speculative kind of a book, was that I was worried that I was going to screw up my marriage in some way that I couldn’t fix. So, I kept writing about this character who kept screwing up her marriage and then realizing it was the worst mistake of her life. At some point in this process, I found out that there was a time machine, and what if she could go back and fix it? And then, of course, you can’t. So, I was working out some things with that. I guess it has to do with the narrative of your own life, which is that I believe my husband and I are incredibly well-suited to each other and that our love story was really intense. A lot of these narratives bolster that that narrative, right? Like “this is the one true love.”

With Strange Loops, it’s a lot darker. I also wrote this novel that I’m trying to turn into short stories, which was quite autobiographical in certain ways, because it’s about people who lose their faith and have boxed themselves into a corner with their choices. And then, they no longer believe in the things that made them make those choices. They’re Christians who decided not to use birth control and ended up with a lot of children and then were like, “Whoa, this is not the life I wanted,” too late.

I think that the way that autobiography works for me is that the ideas I’m interested in become things I’m trying to sort out. The characters are not always very close to me or the way that I think or the way that I am. And, in fact, I thought that my main character was based on myself in The Amateurs, but I found out recently that it’s actually more like my husband, which I was kind of shocked by.

Then the memoir. The one thing that happened to me that was very life-changing was that I had a huge psychotic episode when I was in high school, and I was hospitalized. It kind of threw my plans into disarray. I’ve been writing about that experience of mental illness and how I deal with mental illness, trying to be honest about all of that, how my family system is involved, how my faith was involved. So obviously, that sets really deep. I try not to be afraid to see myself in my writing. I don’t think you can avoid yourself coming into your writing. But that doesn’t mean that I’m writing about myself.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, characters can be very different from you but still drawn from something deep inside you, I think, or something you’re struggling with. So that makes a lot of sense to me. Tell me a little bit more about your kids. And I’ll share with you that I wasn’t sure I always wanted to be a mother. It was something I thought long and hard about. I had my daughter when I was 35, I think, and I have one child. It was something that I told my husband very early on when we were dating, that if I never want to have children, are you okay with that? And he said yes. And then we were married for six years before we had a child. So, throughout those six years, he started to feel like maybe he wanted to have a child, and I wasn’t sure. What would that do to my career or my writing career? I felt very much that writing—with the capital “W,” as you said—is a solitary act that demands commitment, and that children might ruin that commitment. So, finally, it was like, “Well, we’re either gonna do it now or never because the clock is ticking.” So I had my child. It’s very interesting to hear you say that it was much more organic. Like, it was kind of like, let’s do this, it’s a life choice, and we’ll see what comes of it. So tell me a bit more about that—and then having two more children! Tell me what life is like with three kids—because with one, I’m a little crazy.

Liz Harmer

Uh, yes, it has not been easy. During the time that we were having our kids, my husband was in a Ph.D. program the entire time, and I was working part-time or trying to be a writer. At some point, I gave up all of my jobs so that I could be a stay-at-home mother. I got really crunchy for a little while, like I was breastfeeding two children at once. Just thinking about all the phases I went through having three kids, I had a very serious postpartum depression after the second. We didn’t have any money, I didn’t think we had any prospects, I didn’t think Adam could get a job as a philosophy professor … so it was really tough for a while.

And now it’s fun. They’re all just running around, and they live their lives. And our parenting philosophy is pretty much like, “We love them; I hope they’re okay.” We don’t have the energy or money to put a ton of resources into turning them into whatever. I don’t know what the middle-class dream is for a child, but I guess getting them into the right school so they can get the right job so that they can get married and have a house with all that stuff that you’re supposed to want. And none of that stuff is possible for us. So, we’ve just decided we don’t want it because you can’t have it anyway. No, we just let our kids be, and so that’s easier, I think. So right now, it’s easy. We’re in the Golden Age.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, and I want to come back and talk about advice for people who are struggling right now with younger kids. Like Blair, who we saw last time, has a daughter who is seven months old, and she’s right in the throes of it. Can we talk about mental health for a second? You mentioned postpartum depression and in high school having a psychotic break. Tell me about your experience as a woman, first of all, with mental health and then as a mother and whether you were taken seriously and what support there was for you. If we could talk about writing too and how this how this may impact your writing or play out in your writing, but start with just tell us about what it was like.

Liz Harmer

The postpartum depression that I suffered was one of the worst things I’ve ever gone through, because when I was depressed before, you can sleep all day, you can indulge your depression. You feel a certain permission to be dark. But you can’t do that when you have a baby. So, the spiral that you get into of guilt and rage—the guilt turns into rage, and you’re so tired. I just didn’t get enough sleep. I am very sensitive to lack of sleep. When I had two babies under two, I was breastfeeding both of them, I was probably anemic, and I had a really traumatic birth with my second daughter and my eldest daughter was having night terrors like three nights a week, and I was getting no sleep. I think that I was really set up for a disaster.

And so, with my third daughter, we prepared better for that. And I didn’t fall into that depression again. But it was really bad. And I didn’t see it coming. My belief had always been that because I had gone through an incredible mental health crisis, how could that happen again? Because I would see it coming, and I would be able to stop it. And in this case, it got on top of me and I couldn’t stop it. By the time I realized I was depressed, I’d been six months depressed and just kind of white-knuckling it. And that was really, really rough. I’m really glad that’s over.

Lara Ehrlich 

I hear you saying that for the third birth you prepared in advance, and that you didn’t let yourself go there, and it sounds as though you’re taking the responsibility for something that really is a chemical. Is that a message that you heard from people? Did you have support in getting through this? Did you have medical doctors believe you when you said, “I’m suffering”?

Liz Harmer

I am really grateful that you asked me that question, because I need to give some context. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was 17 or 18, and I rejected my diagnosis and went off my meds. Most people do that, because it’s horrible to be on. It’s really hard to be on those meds. It’s hard to get them right. And so, I had been for a long time expecting to have another mental illness, you know, a manic episode. And then I just never did. But anytime I need psychiatric help, they know that, and they know that I am not on medication. I had this really great psychiatrist, and there was this women’s health concerns clinic in Hamilton, where I lived in Canada. And she knew that I wasn’t medicated but that I was vulnerable, chemically vulnerable, to all kinds of things.

So, what I mean by prepared is that she prepared everything she could for me, so that I wouldn’t have those chemical exacerbations, like lack of sleep. Certain things that we did had to do with lifestyle stuff in order to give me the best chance, without going to the medication. Partly because if you have a history of bipolar, if you have a history of mania, they don’t want to put you on antidepressants, because that can cause a manic episode. So, you don’t really have the option of going on SSRIs in the same way. Anyway, that’s the context. I didn’t mean to sound like I was blaming myself, although I probably was a little bit, like I knew that I was taking on too much. And I couldn’t stop myself. I often was looking for someone to stop me from ruining my own life, you know?

Lara Ehrlich 

I think that’s a really relatable feeling, mental health notwithstanding, just with women and particularly with mothers that sense that you need to be responsible and in control and that if something spirals beyond your control, it’s somehow your fault, and then you need to work harder to rein it in. It’s a self-defeating cycle, I think.

Liz Harmer

The point is, I actually did have support, but I also didn’t. I also was in a community. I was in the attachment parenting community, and I don’t know if that’s still a big thing.

Lara Ehrlich 

I know I’ve heard of it, but describe attachment parenting for people who don’t know.

Liz Harmer

Well, there’s this book called The Baby Book. And actually, this doctor is also an anti-vaxxer, I think. I got involved with a lot of moms who were really into natural parenting, which meant slings, co-sleeping, breastfeeding until the child decides not to breastfeed anymore. And a lot of that stuff was really beneficial for us. But a lot of it put a lot of pressure on me to just give everything over to my baby. I think the message that I was getting as a mother was, “I’m suffering. I can’t even walk a kilometer because I’m so depleted.” And I’m just like, “Gotta keep breastfeeding.” Nobody’s there saying you don’t. Some social worker was finally like, “You know, you’re allowed to wean them.” Which was nice. Finally. But there was a line that says something like, this is such a short time in your baby’s life—like who are you to not give everything to them, basically. It was in the context of sexual desire, like if, when you’re breastfeeding, you don’t feel like having sex, well, too bad, because this is just five years of your life or whatever. I was breastfeeding and pregnant for 10 years. I mean, that’s a long time. I’ve learned a lot.

Lara Ehrlich 

No, but those messages are so ingrained, so deeply ingrained, I think, in motherhood that you have to give yourself wholly to that little person. And yes, in part you do, because they are vulnerable and they can’t exist in the world without their parents—I won’t say “their mother,” because the father can give a baby formula and they’ll be fine. But the message that we hear is that the mother is the one keeping that child alive, and the nourishment comes directly from you. But not just the nourishment. Breast milk has the antibodies, and you’re keeping them safe from germs. You’re their world. And there’s a lot of pressure, particularly when you don’t know what you’re doing, like with the first baby. For me having one and only one baby, you don’t have anything to compare it to. You can’t anticipate what it’s going to be like. It’s a lot of pressure.

Liz Harmer

Yeah. And I think that Dr. Sears, who wrote The Baby Book, sort of thought this was magical, like mothers were magical. And if you only do this, your baby will never have a tantrum. And they’ll always have such a sense of rightness. It was really dogmatic, and I really bought into it. I thought, well, I’ll just invest now. And then I watch it later.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah. And then when your child doesn’t conform to that, because no baby conforms, and you’re like, what am I doing wrong? So what messages did you hear about motherhood as a writer before you became a mother? I’ll share with you what mine were later, but what did you anticipate your life as a writer mother would be?

Liz Harmer

I was in a Ph.D. program, and I thought I was somehow going to be an academic, a novelist, and a mother. I realized I wasn’t able to do all of that—or didn’t want to have to do all of that. I felt like it would be so easy to just be a writer and a mother. I wouldn’t have to also be an academic. Honestly, I don’t really remember getting messages. I was very supported by my parents in this desire to be a writer. And sometimes when I hear people saying their parents don’t want them to be a writer, I couldn’t understand. One of our hypotheses, my husband and I, is that because I went through this experience in high school, where everybody’s just kind of crossing their fingers, hoping you’re going to be okay—and maybe you’re not going to be okay or have a normal life it kind of sets you free to just experiment with your life, because no one expects anything from you or something. I don’t know. That’s one hypothesis. My answer is I don’t know what my messages were. I knew that I wouldn’t have enough time, but I also was so bullheaded, I was just like, I’m going to do this anyway. So, tell me about your messages.

Lara Ehrlich 

Good for you. I remember this book Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed that came out the year before I decided to get pregnant. It was a book of essays from famous female writers who decided not to have children. And so, it’s like, okay, that just confirms the fact that you can’t be a great writer—with a capital “W” and a mother with a capital “M”—that you’re going to have to skimp on one in order to succeed in the other. I grew up with a mother who was a capital “M” mother. And I felt like that’s what you had to do to be a great mother: you had to be a Mother. To be a great writer, you have to be a writer first, and there’s no room for negotiation there. So, it was very hard to decide that I was going to try to do both and have a full-time job on top of it. You have teaching and writing and motherhood and you’re trying to balance all of those things. It’s very hard. And so how do you do that? You are a professor, a teacher, you have three children, and you’ve written a number of books. How do you balance it?

Liz Harmer

Okay, well, I will tell you, this is the most practical advice I ever got: I think I was pregnant with my third daughter at the time, and I was working a lot of hours in the summer at the library and my husband was working on his Ph.D. And also, I was learning how to drive a stick, which is really stressful for me. I kept stalling. I just was like, I can’t write this summer. I’m just done. I can’t. This is too much to add to my life. I’m allowed to not write. But then I met Richard Bausch, who ended up being kind of a mentor for me. He has this list of advice for young writers, and one of them was learn how to write in every situation. And he described lying on the couch with a baby on his chest and writing with a pencil because then it doesn’t run out of ink. And while I’ve never done that, because that was really awkward for me, I did learn to not have precious writing time, but just to be writing all the time. The downside is that I don’t have a lot of boundaries around work in life now. Just a little bit every day adds up to a lot.

Lara Ehrlich 

I hear you on that. And thank you, Nan Cohen, for supplying the title of the book I was thinking of: Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed, by Meghan Daum. Those are the words that resound in our skulls when we try to do things like writing, which is such a personal venture, it’s selfish and shallow and self-absorbed. But also, those words, I guess, are for people who aren’t mothers and feel like they’re making that choice because they are too selfish, shallow, and self-absorbed to have families. I guess it goes both ways. But this is a podcast about motherhood. So, we’ll do it from our perspective.

Liz Harmer

One thing I do want to say about that is that I remember this calculation that I did when my kids were young, which was that I wasn’t raising my three daughters just so they could have more children. Like what is the point of life? What is the point of anyone’s life? I wanted to model for them that you could have more things in life than just a family. Family was important, and you love the people that are near to you, but also, you have to invest in yourself, because I want them to do that. So that was something I thought about a lot because I just started to get a lot of like generational despair, over just creating generations, and then they’re going to create generations, and what is the point?

Lara Ehrlich  

Tell me about writing as a mother of three girls. Do they see you writing? Where do you write? Do they know what you’re doing? Have they read your books?

Liz Harmer

They do see me writing all the time. They know. And often, I’m just a bad mother, and I’m like, “Get lost, because I’m writing.” They know that I go and do writer retreats and things like that. It’s a really big part of my identity. My 11-year-old is now writing a novel and multiple stories. And the other day, she was like, “I could just drop out of school and be a novelist, couldn’t I?” And so, she has absorbed some of that, I think, although she would claim that I have no influence. She tried to start reading my book the other day, but I think I use pretty difficult vocabulary and concepts. So, they’re not quite reading the novel yet, but it’s something that Adam really supports. He values my time to write, and the kids know that’s valuable to me. It’s pretty long-standing, at this point.

Lara Ehrlich 

How do you communicate to your kids that it’s important to you?

Liz Harmer 

Um, “Get lost kids—doing important stuff now”? I don’t know. I guess I just carve out time, and I tell them not to interrupt me when it’s that time.

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. Which leads us to the fact that you mentioned earlier: the kids are older now. But for people who have really young kids, whether it’s one or two or three kids, how different is it now that your kids are little older than when it was back when they were like 2, 3, 4, or 5, when they’re a lot more demanding of your time.

Liz Harmer

I remember all kinds of different phases of this. When I had one child and was pregnant with a second, I got into a routine, where every Saturday I went out to a coffee shop, and that was my write time. The rest of the time, when I had free time, I would write. So I would be using that time to write and to think about literary community and all of that stuff. But then I would just sit down and write one story on the weekends, or maybe fix up a story. And it started to feel like that wasn’t enough time.

And so later, I “negotiated”—I’m using a lot of air quotes because it’s not like Adam’s difficult to negotiate with—but we rearranged our schedule, so that I could have two hours every morning out of the house. We were in a cramped apartment with two screaming children. I couldn’t write while I was with those screaming children. So, I would go across the street to the coffee shop, and he would be in charge of the kids. And that was two or three hours every day, say from 8 to 10, 8 to 11. And because he was a student, he could work around that. And that was a lot of hours a week—that adds up to a lot. Actually, that seemed like a lot more than I have now.

And I remember when I was kind of holed up with Juliet, who’s my youngest, kind of protecting that time, that postnatal time, sitting on a bed while she was beside me sleeping, and I was writing. So, I would just steal the time that I could. I think that because we had our kids young, and Adam found this too, it looks absurd. When you look at what we were doing, him being a full-time student, me trying to write while having all these kids, it looks absurd. But because we had started that young, time was so precious, we didn’t waste it. I actually feel like now I waste a lot more time. And I feel a lot more guilty about the time that I waste. Because, you know, suddenly I’ll look around, and nobody actually needs me at this moment. I could probably do the dishes. Oh, that’s the other thing. I don’t have a tidy house. And I never will. And I had to reconcile myself to that. I’m just not going to tidy my house very much.

Lara Ehrlich   

Yeah, there are always things that you have to kind of give up, right? Like, give up control over, whether it’s your house or your lawn care or something. But when you were taking those two hours a week, did you feel guilty? If not, that’s awesome. If you did, how did you get past it?

Liz Harmer 

That seemed like a very small amount of time. I don’t even think I went out to get haircuts or go shopping or anything. I didn’t do anything for myself, besides those two hours. I don’t think I really felt guilty at that time. The way I constantly try to not feel guilty is to remind myself that it’s important that my kids see me as a person. I think it’s important for parents to not be the servants of their children. They need to learn to be on their own in the world, slowly, and it’s important that they understand that we’re also human beings who have needs and boundaries. Whenever I feel guilty, I think, “No, I’m teaching them good boundaries.” I guess I’m really skilled at defense mechanisms, where I tell myself I’m doing okay.

Lara Ehrlich 

It sounds like you’re doing great to me. I think those are all really valuable mantras to keep repeating to ourselves. And thank you Becky Kirk, who says, “Liz, you and Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn’t have tidy houses. So, you’re in good company. You have more important things to do.”

Liz Harmer

I wish my house was tidy.

Lara Ehrlich  

Talk a little bit then about raising daughters, specifically. I have a daughter myself, so we touched on the example you want to provide for your kids—that you’re not their servant, that you have things that are important to you. But as the mother of daughters, what messages do you want them to receive that maybe you didn’t, as a young girl?

Liz Harmer

For a long time, my answer to this was that I felt I didn’t feel pretty as a kid and I wanted my mother to tell me I was pretty. And also, we didn’t like vanity in our religious subculture, and I felt confused about that. So, I was like, “I’m gonna tell my daughters they’re pretty.” That was gonna be my thing. But now the tables have turned, and my kids think that I’m vain, and they’re annoyed about that. They don’t value that at all. I guess my work is done there.

I want my daughters to grow up with a very healthy relationship with sexuality. I don’t want them to think there’s anything shameful or bad about sexuality. I want them to be able to freely explore sexually. So that’s really important to me. That’s a value that I feel strongly about. And I guess my kids don’t seem to want to be mothers right now. I don’t know what I’m doing in that regard. I’m really proud of them. They seem to have minds of their own, thinking through things in their own way, and Adam and I both value that. So, I don’t know what else I could ask for them. That’s what I want for them.

Lara Ehrlich 

No, that’s great. I think to small kids, and even to teenagers and 20-something women, certainly to me, motherhood seemed really terrifying. I remember my 4-year-old asked where babies come from, and I explained childbirth to her. And she’s like, “No, I don’t want to do that. No, I’m not gonna be a mother.” I was like, “I don’t blame me.” Like, that is kind of terrifying.

Liz Harmer

Yeah, I think because I was young and fumbling and bumbling my way through everything, sometimes I’ll tell the kids things that I did, like I tell them their birth story, and they’ll be like, “Why would you do that? Why would you make that so hard on yourself? Why mom?!” Anyway, so yeah.

Lara Ehrlich 

Do you have advice for people with smaller children right now? And in a second, we’ll talk about the pandemic and how that changes things. But with the pandemic aside, people who have young kids and are trying to make their way as writers, what would you advise?

Liz Harmer

I don’t want to be like, “Well, just claim your time,” because it’s not culturally possible to do that. I acknowledge that part of the reason I claim my time is because my husband doesn’t give me a hard time about that. So, my answer is I don’t know what to do in terms of your time, however, one piece of advice that I got that was that was really helpful to me was that everything’s easier after the youngest child is 5. It feels endless. You look at the rest of your life, and it just feels like responsibility and difficulty. And you do have this responsibility, but the various things that make it so hard when your kids are young and so much more challenging do get easier. And things get a little bit more fun. And also, you’re more rested.

It was important to me to not get overwhelmed by my ambition. When you haven’t written anything, a book looks really long. How are you gonna finish a book? I got into a routine that was useful to me, which was “I’m just going to finish a story. And then I’m going to finish another story. And then maybe I’ll edit those. And then I’ll slowly get to a third story.” As time passes, you end up with 15 or 20 stories. The habit perpetuates itself.

Lara Ehrlich 

You don’t have to do it all at once.

Liz Harmer 

And I guess, also you forget everything. When I look back, it wasn’t that long ago that my kids were young. But it feels like a different country that I used to live in.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, it doesn’t necessarily get easier; it just changes and that the time you have changes and the things you want to write about change. It’s not really that frightening expanse of future that is going to be exactly the same as it is right now. When your kids are young and you have no time and you’re exhausted.

Liz Harmer

I don’t know if that’s helpful, because I just made decisions. I was too afraid to make them. So I just made them like; I just went for it. And that’s probably not the best way to live. But that’s what we did.

Lara Ehrlich 

My husband and I are the opposite: we over-plan and overthink things because fear holds us back. And then finally, it’s kind of like, we either have to do something or not do something and we’re forced to a decision. So, I think either one has its problems, but its benefits as well.

Liz Harmer

Yeah, when I look back 13 years ago—my oldest daughter just turned 13—all those years ago, I didn’t have a smartphone. And naptime was reading time, and it was so quiet in my soul. Actually, what was has been a harder thing for me with writing is all of the infiltration of social media technology into my brain and eroding my time. And my attention. I look back and it looks like I had a lot more mental space.

Lara Ehrlich 

I think a lot of people feel that too. I definitely feel it. You sit down to write and then you’re like, “I wonder what’s happening on Facebook or Twitter.” So, not to get too heavy here, but how has quarantine and isolation changed the dynamic of your family and your writing time?

Liz Harmer

The pandemic has been really hard for us. Our kids have been home from school since middle of March, and that has been unrelenting. We don’t have family around. And so, we don’t have people to help with child care, although our oldest daughter is getting old enough to help out with that, but there’s not a lot of privacy. I know my husband who’s extremely introverted is struggling with overstimulation and feeling crowded. He’s doing a lot of helping with homework, the kids are constantly needing something, the messes are worse, they need food all the time, constantly having to feed these children. Um, you know, they need help with their technology.

Meanwhile, like I’m teaching three mornings a week, two afternoons a week online, he’s in two other days in his office recording Zoom, or doing Zoom teaching, and it just doesn’t feel like we can get off this ride. Like when is it going to get easier? I’m trying to be okay with the fact that I’m not getting a lot of writing done right now and to treat this as a fallow time, but it doesn’t really feel fallow so much is just full of other junk that I have to do. I don’t really feel well unless I’m writing, oo I’m trying to write a little bit, but it’s actually the worst for my writing that I’ve ever experienced, even when our kids were little.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, I’ve heard that from a lot of people. Also, just the anxiety of the situation is always in the background, even if we’ve kind of learned to live with it, it’s there. Much less the situation of living in close proximity with your kids and your spouse, and there’s no breathing room there and everything has been upended. When you say that you’re finding time, or making time to do some writing, even if it’s like small pieces, how are you doing it?

Liz Harmer55:28 

So one thing I’m doing for self-care is walking my dog every morning. On the mornings I don’t teach, I walk the dog without my smartphone. I just walk outside. I let that be a time of collecting my thoughts and letting my ideas stew. And then I’m just taking notes here and there on the things that I’m working on.

And then probably scheduling, like two to three hours a week of writing time. I Skype with a good friend once a week on Thursday afternoons, and we write while the Skype is on. That is a really precious time. Sometimes when somebody else is keeping you accountable, or somebody else also doing it, you feel permission to do it. On Saturday, when I should have probably been mopping the floors or whatever, I just had a burning urge to work on this novel that I’ve been working on. And I just shut the door. And I was like, I need a few hours. And everybody kind of respects that because it’s longstanding at this point.

Lara Ehrlich 

I think there’s a lot there. I love the idea of those Skype writing dates and holding each other accountable.

Liz Harmer

It also just makes you feel close to the other person in a nice way.

Lara Ehrlich 

It’s a great point that we don’t have to write every day to be writers. Elizabeth McCracken, who’s a mother and a successful writer told me, “Anybody who says you have to write every day as a man.” You grow up with that message that you need to write every day. And it has to be like, between 5 AM and 1 in the afternoon and then you drink whiskey and smoke a cigar and go back to writing.

Liz Harmer 

I heard that John Cheever put on a three-piece suit to bring his kids to school, got home, took everything off, and was naked drinking and writing all day. And then put the three-piece suit back on. The facts don’t sound right.

Lara Ehrlich 

And Stephen King wrote on an ironing board in the back of his trailer. And it’s like, really? His wife was making dinner while he got to like go sit and write on an ironing board.

Liz Harmer

Yeah, that’s right. But we don’t have anyone around here making the dinner. Yeah, that’s the problem here. This is another hot tip: apple slices, peanut butter, and cheese sandwiches are perfectly nutritious enough. You don’t have to make elaborate meals, you can just serve kids a pile of things.

Lara Ehrlich 

My four-year-old eats popsicles three times a day. They’re fruit, right?

Liz Harmer

I think it’s perfect. No guilt.

Lara Ehrlich 

As long as they’re like fed and you know, relatively clean. Relatively.

Liz Harmer

Hopefully they’ll figure out how to be clean later.

Lara Ehrlich 

We have a comment here from Natalie McAlister Jackson, who says, “Listening to you talk about motherhood and writing makes me feel so human. Thank you for sharing.” I’ll say the same: It definitely it makes me feel human and like I’m not alone in this weird venture that we’ve embarked upon. We’ve hit the hour mark, but I want to ask Liz, if there’s anything we haven’t covered yet or that you wanted to talk about or any messages you wanted to relay to people out here who are listening? And if not, that’s okay.

Liz Harmer

I don’t think I have anything else to say. I hope I haven’t exposed myself in the most awkward way possible.

Lara Ehrlich 

I think I think you’ve exposed yourself just enough! I think it’s really great to be open and brave and talk about some of these things. I really appreciate it.

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Writer Mother Monster: Interviews with Authoresses, hosted by Lara Ehrlich

Guest: Tzynya Pinchback

Interview: November 12, 2020

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

Lara Ehrlich 

Welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is poet and mother Tzynya Pinchback. Before I introduce Tzynya, I want to thank all of you for tuning in and let you know that you can now listen to Writer Mother Monster as a podcast on all major audio platforms or read the interview transcripts at your leisure, all on writermothermonster.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please also consider becoming a Writer Mother Monster patron or patroness on Patreon. Your support helps make this series possible, and you can access that link on the website.

Now, I am excited to introduce to Tzynya. Tzynya Pinchbeck writes poetry shaped like prose and essays that would rather be poems. She’s the author of the poetry book How to Make Pink Confetti and has been published in American Poetry Journal, Mom Egg Review, Naugatuck River Review, Raising Mothers, and the Poets in Pajamas Reading Series. She’s also been broadcasted on WOMR’s Poet’s Corner. She often writes about nature, the Black woman body, and motherhood. A finalist for the 2020 Poet Laureate of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and writer-in-residence for The Cordial Eye Gallery and Artist Space, Tzynya is a first reader for the Lily Poetry Review. She also has one daughter, who is 23, and she describes writer motherhood in three words as “primal, theater, and sanctuary.” So welcome, Tzynya.

Tzynya Pinchback

Hello. As you know, I had a great background with my Christmas tree. There are technology issues on my end, so I apologize for the delay, and for the bland background, but I’m literally sitting on top of my router. And there you have it.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s okay! So, you have a daughter who is 23.

Tzynya Pinchback 

Yes, she just finished college last year, and she should be in grad school in Rhode Island, but the pandemic kind of flipped that all upside down. She was going to either work part-time there or do an internship for a year and then go return to school for grad school, but with the pandemic, and because her job would put her in close proximity with the public, and I have a compromised immune system, she had to step away from that. Right now, we’re just kind of loafing around in the pandemic, in this house, probably driving one another crazy. So that’s my home life right now.

Lara Ehrlich

That sounds a little crazy. Tell us about the writing side, about your poetry, and then we’ll talk about writing motherhood.

Tzynya Pinchback 

Well, I have wanted to do essays for a long time. I’ve just been really intimidated by the process. I just started this year working on a collection of memoir essays that cover a period of about 10 years, up to the point that my father died. I’m still working on poetry—I mainly write poetry—and I’ve kind of shifted over the years. I wrote differently when my daughter was young. It’s almost like it was a completely different time or a different life.

I am also two years into remission from cancer. So starting in about 2017, my writing changed, my poetry changed, my voice became a lot more subtle, I think. In some weird way, getting cancer made me a better writer. It made me trust my voice more. It freed me up to write about whatever I wanted. The first piece that I published, I actually wrote during my first appointment with my oncologist to find out what my treatment was going to be for cancer. So much of what I write is about what scares me. I’m an easily frightened person. I’ve struggled with anxiety all my life. So there’s always been an entire catalogue of things I wouldn’t write about. I just wouldn’t approach them. I wouldn’t talk about them.

I guess when you get something like cancer, and you’ve got that looming over you, it kind of wipes out all of those reservations. So I feel like everything up to 2017 is a completely different voice, a completely different landscape. Since then, I’ve written a lot about death, obviously. And I’ve written about motherhood a lot more, and my daughter’s an adult now. In the work that I’m doing right now, the essays, I’m exploring the connection between my mother and me, and me and my daughter—a lot of exploring ways that I have failed as a mother or not lived up to my expectations or desires as a mother and just kind of interrogating myself. So there’s a lot of me, my mom, and my daughter in these essays. It’s very fun, it’s laughable, it’s sad. It’s a lot of everything.

Lara Ehrlich 

You said that your writing has changed a lot, through all of these various shifts and milestones in your life. Can you tell us about how your writing changed before motherhood and then after you became a mother?

Tzynya Pinchback 

Before motherhood, I was very eager. I wrote all the time, every day. It was urgent, like an action item. It didn’t matter if I didn’t sleep, if I didn’t eat. It was something that I had to do all the time. And I remember when my daughter was born, I looked up one day, and I hadn’t written in about a year. And I didn’t notice it, which sounds really odd, because I have a lot of friends who are artists or writers, and for most of them, the idea of stepping away from your practice would almost be a betrayal.

I had my daughter young—I was 25—and I’d only been married for about four or five years, and all my friends were right at that point where they were finishing grad school, and they were publishing, and they were writing, and I was doing exactly the opposite. I was being a mom and having playgroups in a daze. I was so consumed with motherhood and wifehood, and I was so blissfully happy.

I remember trying to force myself over a year, when my daughter was about 2, to make myself write, the way I used to. “Let’s sit down every night at 10 o’clock.” And I would have outlines, and I would have topics and folders half started, and nothing came. I just didn’t have the desire. It just went away. I remember telling someone at the time that I was thinking of applying to a writing program, a close friend who was teaching at the program, and how I couldn’t find the words to capture how big this mothering was. I felt like it replaced the desire to write. So I just kind of let it. I just let it go. I didn’t apply to the writing program. And that was very difficult, very hard. I was very hard on myself about it, because I kept thinking that, you know, I’m acting like a 1950s housewife, baking bread and tending a garden and raising a toddler, when I should be documenting this and writing about it. It was very odd.

Then I got divorced, and I had a terrible divorce. My divorce itself lasted about a year, but all of it lasted 10 years. And then like clockwork, like overnight, I just woke up and I wanted to write something, and I didn’t have the time or the space. So I was still writing, but there was just so much going on. I just had maybe four or five years where I just said, “You know what? I’ll get back to it. I’ll just kind of write and put it aside and leave it in a drawer.”

And in 2007, I made the decision—my daughter was a little older, I had time away for her because she would go spend the summers and different holiday breaks with her dad—and I decided I’m going to do it. I’m going to go to grad school and work on my MFA. I had been writing for a couple of years. And I took that summer while she was away, and I went to a couple of workshops: I went to a workshop in Southern Georgia, I did a masterclass in Florida, and I worked all summer. I worked on my admission manuscript, and I workshopped it. I wrote, I revised, I got all my letters of recommendation, and I knew exactly where I was applying, I had interviews set up.

My daughter came back from summer visitation, and about three months later, she told me she’d been assaulted, and it had been going on for years. And everything just stopped. There was there was no writing, there was no—I mean, everything just stopped. It was like we just hit a brick wall. With all the fallout of that, I made a decision that I couldn’t work and be the kind of mother that I would have to be to get her through that and get her through to early adulthood. So I divorced writing, and just said, “You know what? Someday I’ll get back to it. When she graduates from high school, I’ll get back to it.” And that’s exactly what happened. I had the manuscript that I was going to use to apply to the MFA program, I submitted it to Dancing Girl Press, and it was published. And that was kind of my swan song, I guess.

Lara Ehrlich 

That is such an awful and powerful story. I have a daughter who’s 4, so of course much younger, but I can imagine that if something traumatic were to happen to my daughter that it would take precedence over everything else in my life. And it doesn’t sound like that was a question for you. It sounded like, “This is the type of mother I need to be right now.” Could you talk a little bit about that and about how the type of mother that you expected to be and that you needed to be at different points during your life and your daughter’s life might have changed?

Tzynya Pinchback 

I thought I would be teaching while my daughter was in school—or my children, because I actually wanted four kids. I literally had my daughter and said, “Let’s do this again—like four more times, right away.” So, in my mind, I would have one child walking beside me, one in a sling on my chest, and a double stroller. This was my fantasy. And I would write at night when they were asleep. And I would teach writing workshops, part-time, on the weekend. Everything was going to be perfect. You know, I’d be cooking from scratch and baking and sewing and just doing everything perfect. I had a very unrealistic idea of motherhood.

Despite the precarious relationship I have with my mother at times, my mother was very good at juggling. My mother made it to every PTA meeting, she always cooked from scratch, and we always looked perfect going to school. Everyone loved her, she was very charming, and she was always volunteering. So, I just figured that’s what would happen for me. And somehow, I would also be this very prolific writer, cranking out content all the time. I don’t know where I came up with this. But when I first became a single mom, I let go of some of that.

To some extent, I think I kind of held that expectation. But when I decided in 2007 that I was going to let writing go for a while, I didn’t have it as an outlet—and writing has always been something that I use. I journal for myself. It’s a way for me to understand things that are going on. So when I let go of that, all I did was sit with my own guilt. The first thing I thought, when my daughter started flying out of state to spend summers and holidays with her dad, was, “Now I can write. Now I can work on going to grad school. Now I can get this manuscript together.”

So the first thing I thought was, “Was I too focused on my art to notice that my daughter was being abused when she was away from me?”

Then I started to think of the nights before I put her on a plane or the days leading up to her leaving. As much as I would miss her, and I was preparing to miss her, I was so excited about writing, because my two greatest loves in life have been motherhood and writing. I spent years after that stricken with guilt: How much time was I putting into that? All those nights she called, and I was busy because I was up late writing—because I had to go to my day job—and I just rushed her off the phone and said goodbye and goodnight, was she trying to tell me something? Was I missing something because I was worried about the perfect enjambment in a poem?

So, it took me a long time. And I would say, it’s also what kept me from returning to writing, even after she graduated from high school and went to college. My daughter would call me once a week, every Friday after class, and say, “Are you writing? Are you working on your novella?” And I would say, “I am. I’m going to do it.” But it took that point, from around 2007 until 2017, for me to get sick and to realize that I just got to let some of this shit go. I think that’s why my writing changed a lot. I couldn’t carry everything. So I was forced to let some things go. So it’s probably made me a much better writer, because I can focus on other things.

Lara Ehrlich 

Previous guests have talked about loss of control and how that changed their writing, whether it was a divorce or an illness. It sounds like you’re saying that you had to lose the control that you’d been trying to have over your writing, over your daughter’s recovery, over all of these things—and that might be when the writing could actually come, when you gave into that loss of control. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, but also about the word “guilt,” which you’ve used a couple of times. And, of course, the situation that you’re describing is a traumatic one, but I’ve heard other mothers—I think almost every other mother who’s also a writer—use the word “guilt” in relation to their writing, because it’s taking them away from something else that is also important to them. So can you talk a little bit about the loss of control and that guilt?

Tzynya Pinchback 

I am a control freak. I’m not a perfectionist. I don’t want to control other people, but anything in relation to me, I really need it to move a certain way. And motherhood tears that up it. There are so many ways that so many things are out of control when you become a mother. Even being pregnant, the way you may think you’re going to be pregnant. When I was pregnant, I had my birthing plan spelled out to the T. I knew how I was going to give birth, how I was going to deliver, I wasn’t going to use any drugs, what I was going to wear—all the way down to my socks. None of that came to pass, except my labor was really fast and hard, so I didn’t even get a chance to use drugs, even if I’d wanted to.

But you would think with motherhood that I would have learned to give up some control. My daughter was a fairly easy child. She didn’t push back that much and was very self-maintained, so it was very easy to put these parameters around things. But everything else in my life was out of control. Everything. My day job—I moved across three states because of my job. Just everything. And writing is something that I can control, to an extent, or I guess I thought I could. When I had to make a choice to step away from it, that was that was really it. I needed to control something. I had control over whether or not I would write. So I chose not to. Because if I were writing, I couldn’t write up to my expectations, I couldn’t write as often as I wanted to, I couldn’t enter grad school when I wanted to, if I wanted to. So I made the choice out of my need to have control or maintain some agency in my life. I decided to divorce writing. That can be a feeling of power and authority, in some way, and that kind of took over me missing it as much as I did.

Lara Ehrlich 

You mentioned that you started writing again when you were diagnosed with cancer and lost that sense of control. Tell us about how your writing then changed with that diagnosis. You said you started writing about different subjects and that death became more prevalent in your poetry.

Tzynya Pinchback 

I started writing about nature. I’d never written about nature before. I had a teacher in third grade, Mrs. Grace Williams—great English teacher—and all we read for a year was Robert Frost. Extra credit if we would write about Robert Frost. Extra credit if we would read his biography. And I remember thinking, “I’m never, ever going to write about snow or trees ever in my life. Like ever.” And when I got sick, pain is a very interesting thing. It’s so violent. And it’s like a bull in a china shop. That’s a terrible cliché. I apologize for that. But it’s just—it’s there. It’s loud. It’s obnoxious. So I felt like my writing had to shrink. It’s like I was writing to find peace of mind, writing to get away from all that. I would sit up at night sometimes. I don’t know why pain seems to find you at night. I don’t know what that is about. I would be in so much pain, between doses of pain medication. And I would have nothing to do. I would just read and write.

I was writing about trees a lot, surprisingly. I was writing about seabirds. At the time, we lived right across the street from the harbor, so you could hear the birds every evening. These were the things that comforted me. And there also was some comfort in writing about death—not necessarily my death, but just in general. Not as this looming monster or someone showing up at the doorstep with a black robe. More like, “I’m an inevitable thing, like the sunrise.” It brought me peace of mind, which is what I really, really wanted it at the time, being someone who really has a need for control.

Getting sick just threw all that out the window. I couldn’t rely on my own body. I had no control over my body. Things that didn’t bother me before, bothered me. Things that never hurt before, hurt. And I was in the hands of a whole care team. I had two separate oncologists, a gynecologist, a chemo teacher. I had five or six different people that I was having to see and talk to when reading reports, and it was so overwhelming, that when I was to sit down to write, or when I would think to write, or even things that I would notice—like, I would be in the chair in the treatment room, about to hook up the port for chemo, and I would be watching this person inject a syringe full of chemo cocktail—mine was purple—into my port, and I’m thinking the whole time about the hem on his shirt and just how intricate the stitching is. I’d asked him about it, and he said that he’d gotten the shirt when he was on vacation years ago. A woman had made it by hand. And I start thinking about what her hands must be like if she’s been doing this for four or five years. Were her fingertips raw or calloused? Were her hands like my mother’s hands? And I started thinking about what she does when she’s done stitching. Does she cook? Does someone else cook for her? Things like that. And that’s what I wanted to write about.

I wanted to write about small bits of beauty. That’s all I wanted to write about. I wrote about my aunt’s death. She died years before, and I had never written about it. It was really devastating for me, because I was the closest child. I wrote about her, when I was going through cancer. She died from cancer, as well. I wrote specifically about how my mother and her sisters took care of her. Even though she was dying, they were would play music, and they’d all eat ice cream and sing and laugh.

The sicker I got, the more I just wanted to find and write about beautiful things. I think it really infused my writing. It also made me stop and think and look at different things. I noticed things I’d never noticed before, small things. When you’re really sick, you start to notice little things. Like, you notice, when you’re driving back from the cancer center, someone that’s skipping down the street, like a little 7-year-old, skipping, and you just instantly remember that unbridled joy of skipping through a hopscotch pattern. Then I’d go home, and I write about that memory, drawing hopscotch in front of my house when I was a little girl.

My writing has changed a little bit since then, but I really think that’s where I am now. I’m always trying to find some beauty. Regardless of what I’m writing about, I really want to start with beauty or end with beauty. It doesn’t matter what it is. That’s my dream, my motivation. At this point, it doesn’t matter if it’s an essay, poetry, fiction—it doesn’t matter what it is. I just really want there to be a starting point of something beautiful, even if the only beauty in the work is the language.

Lara Ehrlich 

How do you define beauty? Can you find beauty through language when writing about something that one might not immediately think of as beautiful?

Tzynya Pinchback 

I think that’s where you find it. I have a work in progress, a small collection of poems, a chapbook manuscript that I’m finalizing, if I ever get around to it. Now that we have the pandemic, I’ve kind of used it as an excuse to just leave it to the side and work on other stuff. But a lot of the pieces in there are about illness.

I have a piece about pain. The longest piece in there is a prose poem, and it’s about blood. It’s about the first time I had my menstrual cycle—the very first experience—and the very last time, which was during chemo, because of chemo. It kind of navigates through all these different times that blood showed up in my life. I’m seeing someone attacked on a bus and they have blood smeared on their face. I’m being present when a relative had a miscarriage, and there was no one there and I was 12, so I had to help her. It’s very difficult to write about. The only way to really get into it and get through it is to have the language, the timing of it, the language has to be beautiful.

And there is some beauty in blood, too. Blood is not always terrible. When you give birth, there’s blood. That would be an example. And I’m pretty sure there have been times when we were late, and, you know, seeing blood is actually a relief.

I didn’t know if I wanted to put that in the collection. It’s the last piece that I wrote for it, because I kept going back and forth. And I decided, we’re adults, right? We can read about blood. We can talk about blood. So that is an example. When I wrote that, I knew I was going to have to write it in a way that the language was where you’d find the beauty. Because I wanted to really, really capture the stark, the rage, the first blush of it, the ending of it, the remorse when you lose it and don’t have it anymore—I wanted to be able to capture all of those different emotions, but I didn’t want the language to be weighted down with emotion and pathos. I just wanted the language to be beautiful, when it needs to be, and easily accessible all throughout. I think you always have to fall back on the language.

Lara Ehrlich

That was so beautifully said. I wonder if your daughter has read your work. And if she has read your work, have you talked about it with her? Do you know what she thinks?

Tzynya Pinchback 

You know, Elizabeth used to read my work a lot. And I have one piece that I wrote specifically for her. You would think that I would write a lot about her. I don’t. These essays that I’m working on now are probably the most that I’ve written about her, but they’re really about me and she’s there.

Elizabeth reads amazingly. She’s a well-read girl. She’s very bookish. She’s an amazing editor. Shameless plug: if someone is looking for a young person to edit or proofread their work, she’s great. I’ll go to her when I’m kind of iffy on something and say, “What does this sound like?” But if I am writing something that is about her … that’s something I’ve had to navigate for a while now, maybe 8 to 10 years.

My story as her mother diverges from her story, and there’s a line there. I can’t tell her story. But sometimes there’s a really, really thin thread between my story and my experience, and she’s a part of it. So if I’m ever writing anything that I think may start to intrude on her space or her narrative, then I will take it to her, and I’ll ask her before I even start, and then I’ll show her the final work. I never want to, in telling my story, intrude on her story. I’m really careful. And that’s hard, because I’m the mom and I’m the writer. I don’t want to be accountable, I don’t want to be edited, I don’t want to be censored, but at the same time, I don’t want to do harm.

So we’ll go over different pieces and different work. One of these essays I’m working on is about a time when I had a few lovers. It’s really weird, because she was probably around 6 or 7. I had three lovers at the time—at the same time—just casual lovers that were interchangeable, because that’s all I really had space for, and that’s all I wanted. I was in a workshop, and we were talking about specificity and details and description, and I couldn’t remember what they looked like. I couldn’t remember their hair color. They just became kind of like shadow puppets. I talked to Elizabeth about it, because she’ll notice when I’m kind of aggravated with something I’m writing. I told her, and I thought, do I want to have this conversation with a 23-year-old? But you know, she’s 23, not 13, and she was like, “Yeah, Mom, I knew you had your stuff going on.”

When I’m being really, really open, I’m still her mom, so I still want her to see me kind of the way she did when she was 13. It’s a little overwhelming sometimes to think that she’s going to see me kind of splayed out and writing about my flawed decisions. But at the same time, maybe her reading that and knowing that will help her when she’s got to make a decision in the future. I would rather her think or understand just how flawed and how many mistakes I made, and how I went to bed every night doubting if I’d made the right decision or made the wrong choice. I think it’s great for her to understand that. There’s no perfect way to be a mom or a woman or a human.

Lara Ehrlich  48:06 

You talked a little bit about the expectations that you had for motherhood, because your own mother seemed perfect to you. It sounds like a learning process there. And I’m constantly battling that myself. My mother was the same: she seemed like the perfect mom. And then when you become a mother yourself, it’s this constant doubt of whether you’re living up to that example. And you told me, before the interview started, that you had some thoughts you wanted to share about what you hope for your daughter, as far as her prioritizing career and family and how all of these things can balance out. So can you talk a little bit about what you would hope for Elizabeth?

Tzynya Pinchback 

I always tell her to really indulge her professional desires. My daughter loves school, loves academics. She cannot wait to return to school next year. I tell her to just go for it. Do all of it that you want to do before you make the decision to start a family. Not that you need to do a certain amount of time in school or working on your career before you start having relationships and planning a family, just that when you become a mother, it’s a whole thing. You never know when you might have to make a decision to step away from something else. You might have to give up what you love doing, because you now have this obligation—you have this human that you have to nurture and prepare to be a bit citizen of the world. I didn’t do that.

And it’s really weird, because I don’t regret that I didn’t do it. I don’t even regret getting married, because I really feel that if I had married anyone else, or if I had a child with anyone else, then I would not have had my daughter. I feel like I never could have had Elizabeth with anyone else at any other time. She had to have been born in ’97. And I had to have had gotten pregnant with her father. I always tell her that if I could go back in time, then six weeks after I had her, I would have bundled her up to go to the pharmacy or the pediatrician, and we just would have gotten on a plane and left the country and never turned back. But I would have gone through all that to get her again, as a baby.

It’s not that I don’t think motherhood is important, or parenthood, for that matter. But I’m 48, and I can honestly say, I have the writing career today that I wanted to have at 28—that I thought I would have at 28. That’s fine for me. I’m almost 50 and an emerging writer. I’m really happy with that. But I know there are some things that I probably will not accomplish. There are some goals that I probably won’t be able to reach, just by virtue of age, time, financial obligations.

As a mother, I think you always want your children to be really fulfilled. So if my daughter’s dream was to, you know, work in a bakery and decorate cupcakes all day, then I would say, “Indulge that, and do that, and don’t give up on that, and don’t trade that for anything.” My daughter wants to be a professor of linguistics. Do that. Don’t put it off and think that you can come back to it. I really thought that she would graduate high school, I’d send her to college, and then I would enter into an MFA program, take off work for two years, I’d set aside funds to do it—and then I got cancer. All of those funds went to getting through cancer treatment. Literally, it just jack-knifed, just like that.

So I think, in my Pollyanna, rose-colored glasses, I just want her to have everything she wants. Realistically, that never happens. We know that. We understand that. So just follow your heart. Don’t give up on it. Don’t settle. You will have to compromise, because that’s life, but don’t settle. I probably could have done a little more. I was very enamored with being in love when I was in college, pursuing my undergraduate studies. I could have devoted a little more time to academics, and I didn’t. I was doing other things.

But that’s really what I tell her: Pursue what you want. If you decide, after entering grad school, that you don’t like it, then leave. If you decide you want to study something else, study something else. If you want to get married, and you’re fine, you’re happy, and this is what you really feel and you’re not running away from something, you’re not running toward something … because that’s what I did: I got married at 21 because I was running away from home, I was running away from my mother, I was running away from expectation, I was running away from disappointment. And that’s never going to end well. It’s just not.

It seems like it when you’re 25, when you think, “Oh, I’ll pick it up in 10 years.” A lot can happen in 10 years. So I always tell her, follow your heart, and follow it all the way through. If you just saw that you need to change something up, change it. Just do what’s going to bring you joy and make you happy and make you solid and fulfilled at the end of the day, no matter how many times you have to change it. But I am glad that she’s not married at 23, like I was.

Lara Ehrlich 

I think that’s great advice for young people—for young women, particularly—but also just for any listeners out there. It’s great advice for me, as an almost-40-year-old person, that it’s not too late to commit to something that you are passionate about and move forward. And you might not have the career that you envisioned for yourself at 15 or 16, but it still has the potential to be fulfilling. Thank you so much for your honesty and for your thoughtfulness. And thank you, to your daughter, for allowing us to touch on some of these subjects that I know must have been difficult. We really appreciate your time and your showing up this evening.

Tzynya Pinchback 

Sorry that I had to come in and build a little fort right around my router, but that’s what happens, right?

Lara Ehrlich 

We made it work. And I can’t wait to read the next book that you’re working on. It sounds beautiful.

Tzynya Pinchback 

I need to get off of it and finish it. I just let it sit for three months. It’s time.

Lara Ehrlich 

We’ll all be waiting for it. You have a readership ready and waiting.

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Writer Mother Monster: Interviews with Authoresses, hosted by Lara Ehrlich

Guest: Katie Peterson

Interview: November 19, 2020

Katie Peterson is the author of four collections of poetry, including A Piece of Good News. Her fable in lyric prose, Life in a Field, was selected by Rachel Zucker for the Omnidawn Open Books Prize and will be published in April 2021. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She collaborates with her husband, the photographer Young Suh, and they have shown their work at the Mills College Art Museum and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Katie, Young, and their daughter, Emily, live in Berkeley. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at UC Davis. She has one daughter, who is 3, and she describes writer-motherhood in three words as “always play first.”

Lara Ehrlich 

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and tonight’s guest is poet and mother Katie Peterson. Before I introduce Katie, I want to thank you all for tuning in and to let you know that you can now listen to Writer Mother Monster as a podcast on all major audio platforms or read the interview transcript at your leisure all on writermothermonster.com.

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Now I’m excited to introduce Katie. Katie Peterson is the author of four collections of poetry, including A Piece of Good News. Her fable in lyric prose, Life in a Field, was selected by Rachel Zucker for the Omnidawn Open Books Prize and will be published in April 2021. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She collaborates with her husband, the photographer Young Suh, and they have shown their work at the Mills College Art Museum and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Katie, Young, and their daughter, Emily, live in Berkeley. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at UC Davis. She has one daughter, who is 3, and she describes writer-motherhood in three words as “always play first.” Welcome, Katie.

Katie Peterson 

It’s good to be here.

Lara Ehrlich

It’s good to see you! We knew each other many years ago when you were professor of the practice of poetry at Tufts University. Now you’re in Berkeley; tell us who lives in your house with you.

Katie Peterson 

The people who live in my house are me, my husband Young Suh, who was born in Korea and came here to do an undergraduate degree at Pratt and then ended up doing a graduate degree at the Museum School, Boston. He’s a photographer. He also teaches at UC Davis. And our daughter, Emily, who was born October 12, 2017. She was born in the middle of the Santa Rosa fires. Since then, we’ve had a number of fires in California. But the reason why I always remember that is my labor was very long, like four and a half days, and I was already very late, and we could barely go outside because of the smoke. The great thing was we were in a hospital, protected from the smoke, but the bad thing was it was really like being in a dark tunnel for that whole time. And then when we drove Emily home from the hospital, we were driving down one of the streets on the way to our house—a suburban street three blocks away from the highway—and a stag crossed the road. This beautiful stag, right in front of our car. I think it had been driven down from the hills by the fires. We were sitting there in the car with Emily, and this stag crossed the road on this regular, suburban street. It was incredible.

Lara Ehrlich 

Talk about metaphors. That’s amazing. If you’re comfortable with it, can you talk about what you mean by the labor being long? Four days is pretty intense.

Katie Peterson 

Yeah, it was. It’s fun to talk about. I mean, what an experience. And we haven’t domesticated the experience of labor and childbirth enough that we all talk about it all the time. I think I was 41 and a half weeks. They had let me go that long because I was perfectly healthy, and the doctor was indulging my desire for a natural pregnancy. But finally, they induced me. And nothing worked. Like, they did every single intervention under the sun to get Emily to come out. They finally did a C-section at five in the morning or something.

There are probably some other mothers listening who know that the experience of taking a childbirth class is sometimes completely and totally useless to you. That’s was true for me. Finally, they did the C-section, and she came out, but the other thing that was true was that my doula kind of went AWOL. And so, it was really my husband there with me. He did not sleep—like ever. I barely slept. He was really, really good at it. And all of the nurses in the ward came through and were like, “Who’s your doula? How did you get a male doula?” They all thought he was the doula. So, I think I fell in love with him all over again, through that experience.

Lara Ehrlich

I don’t know if you knew Young back when I first met you. Can you talk about how you met and tell us a little bit about him?

Katie Peterson 

We met at Yaddo. We had the art colony love affair. I think of him as an introverted personality. When we first met, I really admired the way he took pictures, because there was so much quiet around his person. And there was this combination between being really relaxed and being really precise, which is very much a part of his pictures. He did a series of pictures about the wildfires in California that have been exhibited a number of times—this was all from the 2008, and then the 2013, wildfires—and they’re haunting. His eyes were on them, trying to reckon with the fact that he thought they were very beautiful. He tends to find beauty in things that I think feel destructive or dangerous. And his photographs—the California landscape and the American national parks—to me, are very unique, because he finds the whole American nature thing really terrifying. And for me, it’s been such a central thing about my poetry and writing—the American landscape and the West, kind of trying to bring a feminine voice to the West. He loves those landscapes, too, but they’re terrifying to him, so there’s this aspect of the sublime in his pictures that I really admire.

Lara Ehrlich 

You actually hit on the next question I had, because, like you said, your poetry very much deals with the land, nature, and those quiet spaces that can contain deep emotion, like fear or desire. Cn you talk a little bit now about your poetry, for those who have not yet had the pleasure of reading your work? What inspires you?

Katie Peterson 

It’s hard to start with one thing. Sometimes when I look at my own work, it feels like a combination between a classic American nature poet and a sexy, metaphysical John Donne. I think the poems have landed in landscape because I grew up in the West, but by temperament and character, I’m a Bostonian, and I loved living there because I had that fast-paced neurosis.

I talk really fast, much faster than people in California, and here I’m often mistaken for an Easterner, though I know what I am. I remember at some point, at a dinner party in Boston, someone looked at me and said, “Did you know that Massachusetts Avenue is the fastest street in the country?” And I said, “What do you mean?” And this person said, “When I heard you talk, I thought everyone who’s walking down Mass Ave. in Boston talks as fast as that—you must be from here.” And I looked it up the next day, and it’s true that the pace of people walking in Mass Ave. in Cambridge is faster than New York. They’ve clocked it.

So, I really relate to the intensity of being in your head during a Northeastern winter. And a lot of the poets I love, like Elizabeth Bishop, are so Yankee in some way; they have that Eastern sense of texture and intensity and complexity and depth. And that’s all true, but I grew up around the airy landscapes of California and the big vistas at the Sierra Nevadas. So, I think of those things as coming together in the work.

And likewise, I think that, especially in recent work and in the last book, A Piece of Good News, I really wanted to bring together things we think of as extremes of the inner life, like desire and fear and contemplation and these irreducible aspects of our public and political existence, like thinking about who the president is or thinking about the future, or what it feels like to be in an urban space, thinking about rural spaces, or vice versa. There are a lot of poems in A Piece of Good News that take place in a rural space, but the character is thinking about an urban space. And there’s a long poem that takes place in an urban space, which is all about ranging across the rural spaces of the country.

Lara Ehrlich 

What was it like moving back from Boston to Berkeley?

Katie Peterson 

It was a shock. It was the hardest thing I think I’ve ever done, besides grieve. I moved because I loved someone and because I wanted to have a child. And because I got a tenure-track job at a wonderful school with writers that I really admire—all these great reasons. But I left behind the best friends I’ve ever had and the city where I first became an independent person.

And I think specifically of my best friend, the poet Sandra Lim, who was my everyday person. For the first year that I was in California, I can’t tell you how I mourned her not living down the street from me. It was really difficult. And now I think of it and I think, “Wow, what a thing that you could live to love someone that much.” But at the time, I thought, “What the hell am I doing? Why did I do this?” It was literally like a feeling of being unmoored.

When I think about it, I think it descended first as a kind of panic, like, “What am I about here? How do I belong here?” And the other thing I realized, as the months went on, was it had so much to do with confronting the person I had been because I grew up in Menlo Park on the peninsula and had lived my whole life there until I went to the East Coast. So now the idea in my life is I’m supposed to live integrated with my childhood self and my relatives, like I’m supposed to live an hour away from my dad and be okay with it. Like, what? That was not what I had planned for my life. To be raising a child in, essentially, the place where I grew up was nothing I ever anticipated doing.

Lara Ehrlich 

You know, I’m right there with you, having moved back to Connecticut, 15 minutes from where I grew up, with my 4-year-old daughter. It’s interesting, and you see people that you went to high school with at the grocery store—or used to, before the pandemic—and it’s sort of like, “Oh, I never really wanted this to happen.”

Katie Peterson 

I was gonna say, I certainly wouldn’t be the first writer to move to a new place and gain a new persona, right? And to then sort of have to be the person that I was before I was a writer and the writer self at the same time. Well, that’s been weird.

Lara Ehrlich 

Tell me about that self before you became the writer self. And then we’ll get to the self you became once you became a mother. But who was former Katie? And who was writer Katie? And now who is Berkeley Katie?

Katie Peterson 

I don’t know—who was that person? I mean, you know, it’s hard for me to say who I was. I guess it’s easier to say to talk about what the world felt like at that time. Because I think the world felt different. I grew up in the ’80s in California. The California that we think of is a place fueled by the dot-com boom, where it’s too expensive to live and where income inequality has torqued out community to mean that billionaires live in the same zip codes as the homeless. There was boom bust here when I was growing up, but it was definitely more of an ordinary place, I’d say, and it felt beautifully far away from other places in the country, like “unique and special” far away, and there were so many open spaces. All these neighborhoods where there are now McMansions were empty lots, or there would be some lady, you know, with chickens in her backyard or things like that. There was still a wildness, even about the most sedate neighborhoods.

I think that has changed. And that sense of smallness has changed. I grew up in a Catholic family and we all went to Catholic schools, and yet, everyone I knew was some form of progressive Democrat. Is there still that world somewhere? I don’t know. The world has changed, and we’ve changed with it. I know that when I went to the East Coast, one of the things that really changed me was living in a city, because even California cities don’t really feel like cities, in a way. I think there is something about living in a city that lets you think about being a political self, like living in a community with others really publicly, even if you don’t know them, even if they’re anonymous to you. Coming back to California, this weird land of faux homesteaders, I see all the cracks in political community here and all the difficulties we have in California coming together on things. There are other things we do really well. But I think about that a lot, why it’s so hard for people to come together here and the strange mixture between the rural and the urban.

Lara Ehrlich 

You mentioned what you had expected your life to look like. What did you expect your life as a mother would look like?

Katie Peterson 

I think it’s important to say my mother died in 2008, and I miss her every day. She had cancer. She didn’t get as many years as we all would have liked for her to have. And when she died, I was filled with two twin senses: the first, this feeling that I would never be a mother, and the second, this incredible hunger to be a mother.

I lived in that really divided state mentally for like, three years, because I hadn’t found the partner. The summer before I met Young, I had basically decided that I was going to have a baby on my own and had made plans to do it. I’d saved the money to do it. I think I was 38 or something like that. And then I met Young, and all of a sudden, this thing that I both thought was impossible and I really wanted became possible in the eyes of another person who also was a man. Like it was so strange that it happened.

I think it’s less that I had a fixed idea of my destiny than I had gotten to the point where I didn’t think that a traditional life with kids in a house in the suburbs was what I was going to be looking at. I had such good friends, and still do, that my sense of being loved was quite vibrant, and I was already imagining ways in which I could continue to feel loved without being married or having a family. So, no one was more surprised than me. But it was also something I think I really wanted.

Lara Ehrlich 

Was there much conversation, or was it something Young wanted, too, and it was sort of like, okay, we found our person—now we’ll make this happen.

Katie Peterson

I think he was very surprised at how much wanting to have kids with me was a part of the initial discussion. He’s the one who brought it up. That’s the way he saw it. He wasn’t interested in dating me. He was interested in something grander.

I’m in the middle of trying to decide how honest to be… I think a lot of my women friends at the time, including me, were having disappointing encounters with men of our generation who had complicated feelings about what they called settling down. I think of it as a hallmark of my generation that people felt complicated feelings about those things.

I actually think my students who I’m teaching in their 20s feel something else. They don’t always want a traditional life. But I don’t think of the men that I teach in their 20s and the men that I’ve taught as this population of men that me and all my friends seemed to be dating for 10 years. I don’t think they meant anything bad by it. I just think we were raised in a generation with a lot of ambivalence about family.

And then I met someone from another country, from Korea, and family is so important there. He was able to sort of combine a really traditional understanding of that with the wholly new self that he had to be in this country. And he’s an artist, so he doesn’t see boundaries as fixed; he sees them as super complicated. It was not the first time but the most significant time that I was ever able to talk to someone I was in love with about what having a child with them would be like and mean. Then, in the years since, I’ve talked to all these people I know who are married and have kids, and they were like, “Oh, yeah, we talked about that early on.” Especially people I know who are religious. I think that’s conditioned as part of it. But those just weren’t the people I met when I was doing the poet thing for 10 years. And then I got really lucky and I met the right person.

Lara Ehrlich 

No, I’ve heard that from so many people. You’re not alone. I’ve heard from many of my friends who were dating, in their 20s and 30s, these men who, as you’ve said, were ambivalent about not just family but career and a future and what a future could look like. It was sort of this sense, “I live in the present, and I don’t want to think about 10 years out.” To be fair, there are probably a lot of women in our generation who feel that way, too.

Katie Peterson 

I think that’s true. I think I was one. I didn’t always date people with a future in mind. But I do remember the time it changed for me. I was dating somebody, and we were talking about what the future would look like, and this person was like, “Well, I don’t really want to think about the future.” And I remember it coming to my head as a statement: This is really boring. Really boring. I think I said to the person, “I think that would be really boring for me to keep dating you without talking about the future.”

I think about my daughter when I think about this, because my mother didn’t talk to me enough about this kind of stuff. My parents were so much in love, and they were so generous with each other’s foibles. It was both a great model and a terrible one, because I think marriage is for real. I have this great marriage in my imagination. But my mother had no other advice than like, deal. I could have used more advice.

Lara Ehrlich 

Was it because she passed away that you then felt such a hunger to become a mother yourself? Or was that something that had been brewing for a while and came to a head?

Katie Peterson 

I literally didn’t think about it until she died. And then I had to talk to my therapist about that, and my therapist was like, “You didn’t ever think about it?” And I was like, “Yeah. I really, really didn’t.” I think I thought I’d think about it later, and then all of a sudden it is later. But you don’t realize it’s becoming later.

I think at first I just felt a sorrow that my mother was going to die and she was never going to see children that I was going to have, and that was an experience I wasn’t going to get to have. But I didn’t think about it consciously like that. I actually think it came to me. I remember waking up, when my mother was really at the end, at four in the morning and thinking, “I need to have a child immediately, with anyone.” I think of it as the first biological feeling I had, too.

Something that I’ve thought about a lot in the last year is whether to have another baby. I don’t know whether you had this experience, but it was like as soon as Emily was two and a half and getting really oppositional, everything in me was like, obviously, I need to have another baby. It almost felt biological. I actually love being the parent of one child. But it seemed to come into my dreams and into my thinking and into all these other aspects of my life—as a thought and as a conversation, almost without me even. I didn’t think about it rationally. I think it came from my body.

Lara Ehrlich

I love that, and I want to talk about that more. Maybe you and I are alike, in that I am very much an intellectual person who doesn’t pay attention to my body, pretty regularly. So, motherhood was never a biological thing for me either. I never sort of felt the urge to become a mother. It was a lot of conversation and thinking and talking to my husband and my therapist. What are the pros and cons of becoming a mother? And finally, it was like, okay, well, either we’re going to do it or not. So, we’ll just do it, and hopefully, it’ll turn out okay. So, to hear you talking about this biological hunger for motherhood is so fascinating, and I wonder if you could talk about that and how it works in tandem or against the intellectual side of you, the side that creates, that parses words and creates structures within language.

Katie Peterson 

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

And also, so much of it is about whether it works or not. As soon as you’re involved in something that may or may not work, you’re involved in your intellect in some way. And also the way you’re hungry. You’re really hungry while you’re pregnant, and then you have the baby, and when you’re breastfeeding, you’re really hungry. I remember some Berkeley person said to me, “Well, it must be really nice to feel so close to your body.” And I said to the person, “I live here [points to forehead]. When this is over, I’m coming back here.” And the person looked at me like I was a horse.

I feel like I want to go back and kind of correct or edit myself and say I know that people talk about a biological clock ticking, and just to be clear, I was 42 when I had Emily, and I think that surely was part of it. But I think that the part of us that dreams is also the part of us that uses language, and I think that language is all mixed up not just in our subjective responses but in everything else we do. We use it for everything. We use it for politics, we use it for religion, we use it for family, we use it for our work, the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

There was no way I was going to carry a baby and then give birth to it without being ruminative, conceptual, philosophical, desiring of making generalizations about the experience, kind of idiosyncratically obsessed with what was most conceptual at the root of the experience. In my poems, I like to play around with abstractions. The other day, I wrote a poem in which I talked about God, money, and power. And I looked back at it, and I thought, I really have come into my own, if I’ve let myself write a 12-line poem, in which I use the words God, money, and power.

I do remember, when I was pregnant, an abiding interest in all of those conceptual matters kind of mapped on to the experience. Don’t worry, I was also just super sleepy all the time. Biological reactions. I remember having terrible contractions in the hospital and trying to write in my journal and Young took it away from me, and he’s like, “You’re not supposed to be lying on your back while you have contractions.” I was like, “Oh, sorry.” I relied on him a lot.

Lara Ehrlich 

I’ve heard other moms, including myself, say that they had grand plans of cataloguing the experiences of both pregnancy and childbirth, those early days breastfeeding. I had the grandest plans of documenting it all in my journal, so I could come back to it later in literature. I did not write a single word probably until my daughter was a couple weeks or maybe even a few months old. Were you able to write when you were pregnant and during those first early weeks?

Katie Peterson 

I’m trying to think. I wrote two or three poems that I bet will find their way into a next book, if it happens. But for the most part, I wrote notes and things in my journal that I’m glad I wrote down but that were not in the form of poetry.

I have a first-year poetry student right now who’s a mom with two kids, and she’s been writing these poems that are very interrupted, like, they have lots of backslash, slashes, and dashes and everything. She just wrote one, and I didn’t think it was very successful, and then we talked about it. I said to her, “There’s an idealism sometimes around motherhood—everything about it—that you could write poems about pregnancy while you’re pregnant, that you could write poems about childbirth while you’re having the baby.” One person can: Rachel Zucker did in The Last Clear Narrative, a wonderful book, but for the most part, that’s not how my mind works.

I need distance from the experience to talk about the experience. And the thing about being pregnant and having a baby is, I wasn’t interested in thinking about another time in my life. When I think about it, I think it was the time in my life that I was most interested in thinking about the time right before me. Now I wonder whether what I’m trying to say is that the writing of poetry sometimes relies on being in one time, thinking about another. And there was something utterly present about a lot of that time that I was experiencing.

I think that when Emily was asleep as a baby, I really longed for that to be a wonderful time to write poems. And I sometimes sat with a notebook and tried and really wanted to be in the moment of the poem, but I wasn’t. I’d still like to write about those things, as that happened, but I’d like to write about them tumbled into my other experiences. I’d be interested in 10 years to write a poem about the day I had Emily and try to remember and reconstruct that day. I think it might get interesting to me later.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s so fascinating. I think, like you said, not just with poetry but in fiction as well, the distance from those important events can make for stronger writing, rather than being in the midst of it and trying to piece together a narrative. I did the same thing. I sat with my notebook and tried to write while my daughter was sleeping, and then you kind of fall asleep or that’s your one chance to take a shower, and writing doesn’t really take the precedence.

Katie Peterson 

And I think it still happens to me. I’ve been trying to write an essay about the Republican senators and why they’re so evil, basically. I wanted to write something about self-respect. I look at them and think, “Well, you’ve lost your self-respect.” I think with prose, I really feel it, and I wanted to talk to you about this. Poetry can sometimes be a fragment, but when you’re trying to write a piece of prose, say it’s 5,000 words, and you lose track of something, there could be a thought there, and you can lose it. Like motherhood can actually make you lose it. And the thing that I’ve been trying to tell myself is, “But it’s here somewhere.” So, I may just have to jog the thought back by doing something like washing my hands or taking a shower or doing laundry or doing something else.

There are two places that I think right now: one is in the shower, and one is after dropping Emily off at daycare, driving home on my own. Right now, I work at home. In those two moments, there is usually a thought that has to do with the thing I’m trying to write. Just the other day, I lost a thought when I came home because their teacher called me because I’d forgotten something that she needed at school. And I spent the next hour trying to get the thought back. I couldn’t get it back. I finally gave up and went to put a little laundry in, and it came back.

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

Lara Ehrlich 

I definitely felt that way, too. And I still feel that way. Like when I’m driving or showering, those are the two times I think, because you can’t do anything else. Your brain is occupied with this task, and then, in the background, you can be thinking about something else, and that’s when it rises up to the surface.

We have a question here from Brittany O’Duffy: “I would love to hear you all expound on the animal. There’s a visceral element of these primal experiences, but how does or did that inform your creative narratives?” That’s a great question.

Katie Peterson 

I think you should answer first. You wrote a book called Animal Wife!

Lara Ehrlich  37:34 

Well, I’ll give you a short answer, because I really want to go back to you, Katie. But yes, I’m very interested in the animal and the visceral, bodily aspect of being not just a mother but a woman. I feel like as we grow up, we are afraid of—or taught to ignore—the parts of our bodies that are animal. We shave the hair from our armpits and our legs. And we’re ashamed of, and hide, our menstrual cycle—all of these things that animals in the wild experience but that we as women are taught to tamp down.

When you become a mother, it’s the most vulnerable I’ve ever felt, being immobilized on a table with pain and with this very animal experience of giving birth, when all the things we’re taught not to talk about are suddenly laid bare, and torn open in a very animalistic way. That definitely impacted my writing. After becoming a mother, I found this new interest in bodies and in the physical and the animal parts of our being. I want to turn it back to Katie and ask you that same question. It’s a great one.

Katie Peterson 

It’s interesting, because these things are hard to look at in ourselves. And then you’re looking at a child, and I think they’re easier to look at in the child. I don’t know whether your child is like this, but I bet they are. Like, Emily is really fascinated with animals. All children are, right? And for her, the world of animals is daily. It’s moment by moment, constantly checking in with what animal does she feel like, what animal does she want to be, which animals are around? She likes to call us animals. She’ll say, “I’m a baby alpaca. Are you a mama alpaca?” And she goes through the animals.

I think it’s kind of interesting. I think that’s true. I think we have all these reserved feelings about thinking about ourselves as animals, but never in my life have I thought more about another person as an animal than having a little girl.

Right now, she’s in what I read in the books is a stage that a lot of kids go through, which is really wanting to reunite with my body. And I don’t mean to say that idealistically. There’s something that sounds really sanctified about that; I don’t mean that. When she was a little baby, I always found her very independent. She didn’t love breastfeeding. Since the beginning, she has been just as attached to her father as to me. She wasn’t that cuddly of a baby to me, almost like she likes to examine things from a distance. But in the last two or three months, she goes to sleep in her own bed, and then she wakes up at three or four in the morning and comes into ours and literally wants to sleep on top of me every single night and wants to be in my lap all the time. She wants to just be here all the time. It’s so mammalian. It’s so intense. And I also can feel or think that she wants that because it’s going away. So, she always says, “I’m a baby alpaca. You’re the mom alpaca?” Well, she’s also a little girl. Now she’s 3. She can do letters—like almost, you know. She’s becoming a grownup. The animal in her is in time. It’s moving forward in time.

And I’m so glad we’re talking about animals because my next book, Life in a Field, is dedicated to my friend Bridget and her dog, Violet, and also to animals and girls because Bridget has been my good friend for so long and also because she’s the person who’s shown me what a relationship with an animal in its most beautiful form can look like. I’ve been really educated by that, not really being a dog person myself. I wanted to dedicate it to animals and girls because there’s a kind of vision in the book of “what would the world be, if we divided it up into animals and girls and not into men and women?” What if we sort of redrew the lines and instead thought, “Okay, who in a situation is an animal and who in a situation is a girl?”

The vulnerability in animals and girls is accompanied in both cases, I think, by what I would call aggression. Like really being able to see the aggression of other creatures. In the story that I wrote, a girl and a donkey become very good friends, but then they have to marry time. The last section of the book is the marriage ceremony in which the girl and the donkey each decide to marry time. Both characters have a kind of aggressive part of themselves that they have to find a way to deal with.

It strikes me that one of the things animals model for us is dealing with the consequences of our impulses, as opposed to hiding the idea that we ever had them, living not at one with ourselves but living always in struggle. I’ve grown to love dogs because they’re so attuned to the moment. All of their hungers—for people, for order, for food—they experience without shame. And that’s an interesting way of coping with being mortal. Not our way, but an interesting way.

Lara Ehrlich 

I wonder when all of that kicks in with small children. Everything you’ve described with dogs and with animals is very similar to my experience with my daughter, that there’s that lack of shame early on, about bodies and about wanting to be in your lap and wanting to be close to skin and not curbing impulses and so on. We teach kids how to curb those impulses and hopefully not in a damaging way, but that’s tricky in and of itself. I’m interested in this because my daughter, who is a year older, four, went through that stage, and then she became independent again and slept in her own bed for a good long time. But then recently, in the last month or so, she has insisted on sleeping in our bed again. In part, she says it’s because she’s lonely, and she doesn’t want to sleep alone. And how do you tell a four-year-old during a pandemic that she has to sleep alone? So, we’ve sort of gotten back to all sleeping together in the same bed, which feels, again, very much like she’s trying to recapture something that she’s moving away from. With girls, particularly, and trying to instill a sense of boundaries and ownership of your body, how are you thinking about that with Emily and with her desire to be close to you and to be in your lap? With my daughter, I’m starting to have to have those conversations like, “No, this is Mommy’s body. Please respect my space.”

Katie Peterson 

I mean, I haven’t had to do that yet! I just let her do whatever she wants, within reason. But I didn’t breastfeed for that long, so there are things she doesn’t do. Will there be a point in which she’s too clingy? So far, Emily has been pretty independent, and I kind of wonder whether she will direct her attentions towards that independence again, when it’s appropriate.

You asked me how I was thinking about it. One way in which I’m helped in thinking about it is that she goes to a really great Montessori daycare where they talk to them about the integrity of their bodies and not letting other people into their spaces if they don’t feel comfortable. It’s incredible how much she knows about that. All the stuff she knows about it, I didn’t know until I was like, 25. I think she is being raised in a different time, in a different world. I think she has a different sense of her body. I think I probably lived without an independent sense of my body from my mother’s for longer than she’s going to.

Lara Ehrlich 

How has becoming a mother changed your work? We talked about having that narrative distance from the actual act of giving birth, but how have you seen Emily and the experience of being a mother changing your poetry and your prose?

Katie Peterson 

I don’t think we have a great sense in our culture right now about what it means to grow up. We underrate growing up. Many of us don’t want to grow up. I’m sure as soon as I’m saying that, there are people listening who are like, “Ew, gross grownups, I hate them,” right? And definitely, that’s how I felt and still feel, like being a grown up is fundamentally kind of a bad thing. Who are the models for really good grownups—Obama? That’s it. It’s hard to think of that many more. Dolly Parton and Obama are really good grownups.

Lara Ehrlich 

Those are good ones!

Katie Peterson 

Yeah, there aren’t that many. I do think there’s something about parenthood, and I wouldn’t confine it to motherhood, which has to do with putting someone else in front of you, that you have to. I was raised a Catholic, and the spiritual work of selflessness is at the center of many monastic and religious traditions, and I think it changes you because it gives you some authority over life experience and also over things that you can’t always tell to somebody.

You can’t always tell the truth to everyone all at once. That’s something I think about all the time about being a mother. I can’t tell Emily the truth. I can’t reason with Emily about everything. Emily and I can’t stand in the rational truth of things when she doesn’t want me to park in a certain place and throws a temper tantrum. Dickinson said, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant—success in circuit lies.” The truth is something that cannot be dropped on the page unceremoniously, but is its own difficult animal that needs to be cajoled and sometimes restrained.

I think of that as being something that motherhood has made me think about a lot, how many of my own feelings, I now must repress, how many of the things I’d like to say, I have to repress. That wisdom, when I think about the history of it from literature, is not from a woman but Odysseus from the Odyssey, who, more than once, sat and, through tears, listened to a story that he couldn’t react to. And nothing has made me think about that more than this pandemic and also the political situation. The week of the election, Young and I were both on our phones and going crazy and texting people, and Emily was also going crazy and was unmanageable, by the day after the election. And of course she was! Her parents were completely out to lunch. We weren’t good enough or selfless enough to put aside that to just be with her. I’m sure there are other parents who are much better than us than that.

That proved my point, in a way, to myself, which was as soon as something comes into you, as a parent, it’s part of your child’s life, too.

So when I think about being a mother, I think about being a grownup, and when I think about being a grownup, I think about being so attached to others that what you do and say and eat and feel matters in such an embodied way to somebody else. Of course, that’s true if you’re not a mother, but it’s come into relief for me as a result of being one.

Lara Ehrlich 

That leads into another question I had for you about taking the time to write and how you balance motherhood with the logistics of writing. I’ve heard others say the same thing that you were just talking about, that being present with their child is so important but sometimes impossible. Like during the election, my husband and I were also similarly consumed with the news. So, writing is another time in which you need to be consumed with something other than your child, and how do you balance those two, all-consuming things in your life?

Katie Peterson 

You don’t balance them. You unravel. You do it by any means necessary. I feel like I’m constantly letting my ideas go, my idea of how the day is supposed to go, in light of how the day really is. And you have to be educated by that. If there’s something more at stake than writing, you have to be with the fact that there’s something more at stake than writing, and sometimes there is.

I am good at making use of small bits of time and always have been. I’m glad I have that. But it’s also true that at this point in my life, I don’t think I’m interested in being type A or neurotic about getting my writing time in. I’m not sure what we’ll see—the jury’s still out—but I don’t know that I’m the kind of person who could get up to finish a project every morning early, but maybe I will be, at a certain point. It just hasn’t worked for me that way.

Young and I were like, “We’re living one life together,” and for both of us to be right with our work, we have to be right with each other. It’s like a whole system. I know it works differently for different people, but for me, that’s been really crucial.

I would say the second thing is you mentioned driving and the shower. I really had kind of given up hope this spring of really writing any poems this year, and then I started going for walks. On these walks, this poem kind of came. And then it was like, I had to go on the same walk every day. I still go on it, because there might be a poem on the walk. And I become very rigid about this walk that I go on, because there might be a poem on the walk. And I don’t have that many non-negotiables. But that has become this kind of weird non-negotiable thing. Young and I get together and talk about our non-negotiable things that we need to do in order to feel like we’re still working.

Also, I was lucky to have Emily late because I had tenure when I had her. There are things that I didn’t have to worry about, and that’s just fortune that gave me that.

So, like I was saying, I’ll be writing a poem—like, I was standing in the bathroom, writing a poem on my note function on my phone, and Young and Emily came in, and they were like, “What are you doing?” And I was like, “I’m writing a poem.” And they were like, “Why?” And I was like, “You guys are supposed to know me better than anyone. Get out of the bathroom.”

When you asked me for three words, I said, “always play first.” That’s something that I’ve also discovered this year. If I’m not right in my relationship with Emily, then it’s pretty hard for me to write a poem that I care about. Doesn’t mean that I have to be freaked out about my relationship with Emily—I think I’m actually a pretty chill parent—but it’s not like I have yet to have the experience that I know a lot of mothers have, which is having to sacrifice something with their child in order to get their work done.

Poets are lucky. We don’t get anything done. We just don’t. I think writing a novel must feel very different, or a book of essays or an academic book. We’re wasters. We’re the wasters of culture. We beautifully waste time, and it comes out and it does the work of justice. But it’s a mysterious and weird thing. The life of a poet is a lifelong dare. And I’m just in the middle of that big dare, like I jumped out of a plane and I’m still in the jump. I just have really cute company, this little goblin Emily.

Lara Ehrlich 

I had other questions lined up, but that is just the perfect place, I think, for us to end, because we’re at an hour. Katie, this has been such a pleasure. And it’s so great to talk to you again, after all this time.

Katie Peterson 

It’s good to talk to you, too.

Lara Ehrlich 

I hope you’ll come back when your new book comes out. Tell us a little bit, before we go, about the new book.

Katie Peterson 

It’s called Life in a Field, and the cool thing about the book is it was selected by Rachel Zucker, the poet I mentioned earlier who is one of the poets of my generation who’s written beautifully about motherhood. So has Katie Ford, who was written into the chat. And as a very long-time friend of mine, Katie has also written beautiful poems about motherhood.

Rachel chose the book for the Omnidawn Open Books Prize, and the publication date is April 1, 2021, when I’m sure we’re all still going to be living in our houses. We’ll probably have a virtual book launch. And the cool thing about this book is, I wrote it in the aftermath of a pregnancy that I lost in 2015. But it’s a fable; it doesn’t directly treat that topic. I wrote it as a consolation to myself, feeling like I was living in a world that I didn’t want to live in, that was my sense. The question that echoes through it is, “What do you do with the world you didn’t wish for?” It’s a story written in these small, prose-poem paragraphs, and it’s accompanied by four folios of photographs taken by Young. As you move through the four sections of the book, you also move through these folios of photographs taken by Young and arranged by both of us. And there are these two characters, a girl and a donkey, and it’s just about them learning to understand each other

Lara Ehrlich 

That sounds beautiful. I want to read that right away. I will be pre-ordering. When will it be available for preorder?

Katie Peterson 

You can pre-order it now on Bookshop and lots of other places where books are sold, and they’ve done a beautiful job with it at Omnidawn. The book layout is stunning. And Young’s photos are in full color, which is unexpected and wonderful. So please do.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yes, everyone, please. Go buy it now, and we’ll be at your launch party, and will have you back when it comes out. Thank you so much again for joining me tonight and for your honest and thoughtful conversation.

Katie Peterson  1:00:50 

And so great to talk to you about animals, and congratulations on all the attention your book is receiving. I loved reading it myself.

Lara Ehrlich  1:00:51 

Thank you, Katie. You know I’m a fan of your work too. And thank you all for tuning in. We don’t have an episode next week for Thanksgiving, so enjoy Thanksgiving, and you as well, Katie—have a good holiday and we’ll see you again soon.

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Writer Mother Monster

Monday, December 7 @ 6 PM (EST)
Daria Polatin

Daria Polatin is an award-winning playwright, TV writer-producer, and author who is currently developing a TV limited series based on her novel Devil in Ohio for Netflix. She was a co-executive producer on J.J. Abrams’ Castle Rock for Hulu, where her episode “The Laughing Place” was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s Best TV Episodes of 2019, and she has been a co-executive producer on Hunters (Amazon), and writer-producer on two seasons of Jack Ryan (Amazon), Condor (MGM/Direct TV), Heels (Starz) and Shut Eye (Hulu). As a playwright, Daria’s play Palmyra will be presented at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, and her work has been produced at The Kennedy Center, in New York, London and Hong Kong. Born of Egyptian descent, Daria received her MFA from Columbia University and is a founding member of The Kilroys, the advocacy group for gender equality in the American theater. She has one son who is 11 weeks old, and she describes writer motherhood in three words as “stunning, shifting, suffering.”

Lara

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m Lara Ehrlich, your host, and our guest tonight is Daria Polatin. Before I introduce Daria, I want to thank you all for tuning in and let you know that you can now listen to Writer Mother Monster as a podcast on all major audio platforms, or read the interview transcripts at your leisure on writermothermonster.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider becoming a Writer Mother Monster patron or patroness on Patreon. Your support helps make this series possible. Please also chat with us during the interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio, and we’ll weave them into our conversation.

Now, I’m excited to introduce Daria. Daria is an award-winning playwright, TV writer-producer, and author. She is currently developing a TV limited series based on her novel Devil in Ohio for Netflix. She was a co-executive producer on J.J. Abrams’ Castle Rock for Hulu, where her episode “The Laughing Place” was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s Best TV Episodes of 2019. She has been a co-executive producer on Hunters (Amazon), and writer-producer on two seasons of Jack Ryan (Amazon), Condor (MGM/Direct TV), Heels (Starz) and Shut Eye (Hulu). As a playwright, Daria’s play Palmyra will be presented at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, and her work has been produced at The Kennedy Center, in New York, London and Hong Kong. Born of Egyptian descent, Daria received her MFA from Columbia University and is a founding member of The Kilroys, the advocacy group for gender equality in the American theater. She has one son who is 11 weeks old, so she’s right in the thick of it, and she describes writer motherhood in three words as “stunning, shifting, suffering.”

Daria Polatin 

Well, thank you for having me. I’m very happy to be here.

Lara Ehrlich 

Oh, I’m happy to have you. It’s great to meet in person, as well. I’m just gonna jump right in by asking you how you’re doing with a newborn in the midst of a pandemic, with all of the things you’re working on.

Daria Polatin 

It is a lot, but it is wonderful. It is a life full on. And of course, you know, everything always happens all at once. I’m really enjoying my son. He’s just so delightful. And it puts everything in perspective, because everything is new. Every day is new, every movement that he does is new, and he makes new sounds, and it’s just really refreshing. And in contrast to what’s going on in the world.

Lara Ehrlich

My daughter’s 4, so I’m trying to remember back to what 11 weeks was like. Is he rolling over right now?

Daria Polatin 

Yeah, he is. He tosses his hips to the side and flips his body over, and when I try to roll him and do tummy time, he bucks back, like, “I’m not gonna do tummy time right now.”

Lara Ehrlich

He’s getting willful. What was it like being pregnant during a pandemic?

Daria Polatin  

Very isolating. I found out I was pregnant on New Year’s morning. My husband and I got married last fall, and we were on our honeymoon and came back in January. I was working on the show Hunters—the Amazon show about Nazi hunters with Al Pacino—for the beginning of my pregnancy when I would go get nauseous and take naps in my car in the parking lot, because I was so tired and I didn’t want anyone to know. I bought all these baggy clothes so that nobody would see my burgeoning belly.

And then it was very interesting, because that writers’ room was in person to start, and then we moved in March to a virtual writers’ room, and from then on, all the in-person meetings and writing just went virtual. So, nobody knew I was pregnant. I wasn’t planning on shouting it from the rooftops anyway because of bias, conscious or unconscious. By the end of the pregnancy, I was really big, and I would just frame myself out of the picture for my meetings.

But yeah, it’s very isolating. Because the baby’s so young, I still barely go out. I walk around my neighborhood, wearing a mask, and my husband gets groceries, and that’s about it. We just don’t want to risk the exposure. There are so many unknowns with the disease still. And so just to be on the safe side, we’re super careful. I mean, the most exposed we were was in the hospital for four days, when you have tons of people coming in and out. Of course, they’re all wearing masks, and they’re all very careful and very respectful. So, it’s pretty isolating, although it’s kind of nice to not have to go anywhere.

I have no FOMO. I’m not like, “Oh, no, I’m missing this party or this this event because I’m home with the baby.” Most people are home, so in that way, it’s nice to not have to go anywhere and just really get to spend this time with my son because it goes so quickly. Already, I look at pictures of him from a few weeks ago, and I’m like, “Oh, he was so little!” The time flies.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, people tell you that time flies, and it’s hard to quite understand what that means until you become a mother. That’s something you said you want to talk about: How the concept and accessibility of time has changed in light of having a child. Tell me more.

Daria Polatin 

Time is really punctuated when you have a child; particularly a baby. I used to have a certain sensibility of my time and my day and what I could get done, and now the time periods I have are much shorter. I have worked very quickly, working in TV, but having to code switch really is tricky. A few minutes of feeding can feel like hours, and the nap feels like one second. Time just has all these new nuances, even though it is a constant.

Lara Ehrlich 

I’d love to hear more about the differences between writing for TV and for theater, and you’ve written a novel, and now you’re adapting the novel for TV, which must be a whole different ball of wax. So, I’m wondering where to start, because you’ve done so much. Let’s go back to the beginning. Did you want to work in TV? Did you want to work in theater? Did you want to write novels? All of the above?

Daria Polatin 

Well, when I was really little, I wrote short stories. I mean, I started a lot of novels, but they ended up being short shorts. I started in that format, but I got into theater when I was in high school. I went to public school, but it had an amazing drama program, and in that, there was a lot of student-directed and student-written projects. I started writing plays in high school.

Then I went to Boston University for undergrad, and I was in the theater department there, and I studied acting and theater. I was actually majoring in acting. And one day, I was walking down the hallway, and one of the teachers came up to me and he said, “You are a writer, and you need to take my playwriting class.” And I was like, “Oh, I’m busy. I have my acting class.” And he’s like, “No, you need to take my class.” I took the class, but I was really busy. I tried to drop the class, and he’s like, “I’m not signing your form. Not training you would be like not training a ballerina, and you need to finish your play. That’s all—finish the play. That’s all you need to do for the class.”

So, I adapted a short story by Chekhov, as he wrote these beautiful, emotional short stories, and I loved him as a playwright as well. He was one of the first playwrights to write dramedy, and I was very drawn to him. So, I wrote this play for this class, and it ended up being produced for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, and it won this contest, and it got published, and the play got produced at the Kennedy Center in D.C. I moved to New York and kind of landed, at 21, 22, with a published play and this clear door open for me, all because this teacher made me write this play.

I kept writing plays in New York. I was in a wonderful group called Youngblood, a group of emerging playwrights under 30, and we would write and produce plays. I had a couple of productions there. I ended up going to grad school at Columbia, and there, I also studied and really focused on playwriting. As I was finishing up at Columbia, I sold a play to a network and developed that into a pilot, so I kind of dipped my toe into television, and that was also around the same time that TV was opening up and it wasn’t just Law and Order and Friends, you know? There was more nuanced character work—not that half-hour sitcoms aren’t very, very difficult; the writers make it look easy, but those are very hard to write—but watching Weeds and Sopranos and Nurse Jackie… those kinds of stories and characters interested me.

I moved out to L.A. and started working my way up in TV. My entrance into TV corresponded with the first show I stepped on, Shut Eye, which was on Hulu, about a fake psychic with real visions—which was fabulous and really fun to work on. At that point, there were maybe 200 shows on the air, and now there are over 500 scripted shows on the air, so the medium has just exploded. I feel like my timing was really, really lucky.

Lara Ehrlich 

Well, a lot of hard work went into that, too. Don’t sell yourself short.

Daria Polatin 

I still write plays, not super often. I did a program with the Center Theatre Group out here in L.A., and I developed my play Palmyra with them. And I’m writing a short play for a benefit festival in the spring. But I mostly focus on TV now.

Lara Ehrlich 

I definitely want to get to the translation of your novel to a TV show. But first, let’s backtrack a little bit to the timing issue. Talk me through your drafting process and whether you write faster for TV and how that process changed when you wrote a novel. Did you have to slow down? Were you able to keep your pace up? What was that process like?

Daria Polatin 

Good question. I can get into it in a minute, but TV has very different parts of the process. There’s the pitching, and you have to write a pitch and you have to write basically a sales monologue—so that’s one type of writing. Then there’s outlining for an episode, and that’s a 15-page document where you are telling the story of each scene in an episode or for the whole arc, like an outline for an episode. And then you write the script, which is the fun part. And if you’ve done all the work building up to it, then the script is really fun, because you’re writing dialogue.

I can do them all quickly now, because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but they’re all different levels of arduousness. Writing a pitch is very tricky. Every word of a script is finely crafted as well, but that’s the most fun part for me, writing the script, reading the scenes. Writing outlines is tough. I know a lot of writers outline their projects in different mediums, and it’s just not the most fun to do an outline, but it’s the scaffolding for the cathedral that you’re gonna make.

As far as fiction, when I graduated from Columbia, I graduated with a degree in playwriting, and I was like, “Okay, now what?” I ended up getting a job ghostwriting for Alloy Entertainment, and I ghost wrote two novels for one of their New York Times bestselling middle-grade series. Those were under very tight timelines and also a fixed amount of pay. So the faster I wrote those, the more I was getting paid. I taught myself not to belabor that work. And plus, it was a first draft for the author of the series, who was going to rewrite it.

Then, when I wrote Devil in Ohio, I actually wrote the first 100 pages—part one of the book—and I wrote an outline of the rest of the book, and we sold it off of that. I wasn’t working a lot in TV at the time, and then, of course, as soon as I sold it, I got very, very busy. I got my first big job, and I was like, “Okay, I’ll write it when I’m done with this show.” And then I got my second big job, my dream job, working on Jack Ryan with Carlton Cuse, who did Lost, which is one of my favorite shows. So I ended up writing the rest of the book at like, five in the morning and at midnight and on my lunch breaks, and it was very, very difficult. I was just like, gotta get to my deadline.

Lara Ehrlich 

Are you on maternity leave, or did you get maternity leave? Have you been working and caring for a newborn in the midst of the pandemic? What have the last 11 weeks looked like for you?

Daria Polatin 

I took maternity leave, but I’m in the middle of a couple projects. I started back on one of them about three weeks in, just an hour or two a day. I would say there was maybe three weeks, but even then, my reps were like, “Hey, we don’t want to bother you, but, you know, we need to get back to these people about this deal and what do you think,” so they were very respectful of my time, but I put an away message on my email, which was good. Now I’m working as full capacity as I can. My husband’s mother has been here for the last month, helping us with the baby, which has been amazing and has definitely given me a lot more time. But I’m still feeding. We do some bottles, but I have little chunks of time, essentially.

Lara Ehrlich 

Have you noticed your brain working differently, now that you have your newborn with you?

Daria Polatin 

Because of the amount that I need to get done, I need to work quickly, and I guess it’s a good lesson in not second-guessing myself as much. I need to just make decisions and move on, where, in the past, I may have really gone over something—read it over and over and over and improved it one more time. I don’t have time to do that now. Also, I’ve been doing it for a very long time, so for me, it’s kind of about trusting the process and trusting that I’ve been doing this for many years, trusting my intuition, my first draft. I don’t want to say that I’m shortchanging the process, but I can move through the process much quicker now. And I have to; otherwise, I can’t keep up, or I would have to take on less, either as a writer as a mother, and I don’t want to do that. I want it all.

Lara Ehrlich 

That leads us to a great place, where I want to ask you about what has been challenging about wanting it all, because you have such a successful career, and now you have a small child. It sounds as though you’re saying you’ve built up so much great momentum at work that it’s hard to let go of that. So, what is the biggest challenge right now? And what do you foresee as being challenging? Are there things you’re trying to prepare for?

Daria Polatin 

I think the challenge is there’s never going to be enough time for all of the things. And I just have to make peace with that. I’m always probably going to feel like I’m not doing enough in a certain area, whether it’s this project or that project or with my son or with my husband. There are a lot of things that I’m going to have to be comfortable with. There’s only so much pie, you know?

One magical thing is that my son sleeps through the night now, and he didn’t at first. I will say, the first six weeks were very, very, very hard. I also had a C section. I was in labor for 56 hours.

Lara Ehrlich 

Oh my god, Daria.

Daria Polatin 

It was an emergency C section. So, it was a lot of recovery and still recovering. I think that people don’t talk about how much pregnancy and birth affects your body and the pain that women go through. I’m like, “This is insane!” And other mothers are like, “Yeah …”  I’m like, “My back hurts, this hurts, I have acid reflux.” And like, nobody talks about it. I think also, biologically, your body just makes you forget because it wants you to have another baby. I would mention something, and a girlfriend would be like, “Oh, yeah, that did happen to me and I forgot about that.”

Anyway, so he started sleeping a decent amount after that growth spurt—the six-week growth spurt. I’m 6 feet tall and my husband is 6 1 1/2, so he’s a very tall, long baby. And he can hold his milk for a while, so that makes all the difference. I can get a decent stretch of sleep. If I did not, I don’t know that I could do what I’m doing. I can function on little sleep, but it’s trying.

Lara Ehrlich 

You were telling me before the interview started that your book has been picked up by Netflix. Tell us a little bit about that.

Daria Polatin 

When the book came out, I sold the development rights to a studio, and then I pitched the book with the studio, and because of my background as a TV writer, I pitched for me to adapt. Then we sold it to Netflix a couple of years ago. So, for the last couple of years, I’ve been writing the pilot as sort of “here’s what the show would be,” and we’ve done lots of different revisions. We brought in a director, and then finally a couple of days ago, they were like, “Great, we want to open a writers’ room and develop it as a as a limited series.” So, we’ll be starting that in January, which I’m so excited about.

And it’s neat, because I’ve lived with this story for at least five years, and it’s really fun for me to bring it into television, the medium that I’ve spent the most time in, and to tell those stories visually and through dialogue. And another thing: the book was YA and mostly from the perspective of Jules, who’s 15. Jules and Mae will still have that Single White Female relationship between them, but it will also focus more on the mother, the psychiatrist who has this slow developing obsession with helping Mae, and it will continue to cause fissures in her family as the show goes on. It’ll be more of an adult drama, although there are still the teen characters.

Lara Ehrlich 

Congratulations. That’s so exciting. For anyone who didn’t catch the title, it’s Devil in Ohio, a YA novel now being transformed into a Netflix show. I want to get into how that book and how the story might change for you now that you’re a mother yourself, because the book very much is about mother- and daughter-hood and, as you said, the fissures that can be caused in a family when you allow in an unexpected element, which, in this case, is Mae, another 15-year-old girl from a questionable background.

Let’s talk a little bit first just about that adaptation process. And then I want to move into motherhood and how it might impact the writing. But can you talk a little bit about how it might be different to adapt a book that you’ve written yourself into a TV show versus adapting or working on a script from say, Stephen King?

Daria Polatin 

Well, I think you have to have that same ruthlessness that you do with not your baby, not your creation. And it’s kind of challenging to do. It’s a muscle that I’ve developed over the years. In TV, you write stuff, something changes, you rewrite it, you got to throw it out, you kill your darlings—I’ve become comfortable with that process of “that scene doesn’t work anymore—let’s cut it” or “we don’t have the budget for that character,” and it hurts as a creator. But I kind of have that muscle developed.

So even though it’s my work, it’s gotten easier to be like, “eh.” Every minute of TV costs a lot of money to use and a lot of effort and energy to make, so you have to really be relentless in refining every moment on screen. That’s important, because if not, it will get cut for budget, it will get cut in the editing room, if it doesn’t really sync up story-wise. So, I try to do the most work on the script and crafting the story and outlines so that by the time it’s shot, it’s all in. It’s what I want it to be.

Lara Ehrlich 

I’m interested to go back for a second to thinking about a story from the TV perspective, where every word has a cost value to it. I’m wondering when you wrote your novel, did you approach it in a similar way, because of that training from TV? Was it sort of like every sentence has to be packed with significance, every scene has to have action? Or was it different in some way?

Daria Polatin 

I tried to keep that rigorousness. I remember there was actually a chapter that I wrote that I really loved. It was a scene where the mother took the young girl shoe shopping. It was really kind of creepy because she got down and was putting the shoe on her, and it was a real kind of reversal of power. One way to interpret status is by height and who’s standing. You know, you kneel to the queen—I’ve been watching The Crown. Mae is sitting, and Suzanne [Jules’s mother] is literally at her feet, which was kind of a weird, creepy scene, to me, that I envisioned and wrote, and then we ended up cutting it because it just didn’t feel like it had a place. Now maybe for the TV show we have room for that scene. Maybe it’s part of the story we’re telling in that episode.

Obviously, we’re telling the story over the arc of the whole season, but I really love when each episode has an arc to it. The Crown does that really well. Each episode contains a theme, a question, and an answer. So, I tried to do that and make sure everything in that episode was really lining up with that.

So back to your question. I tried to keep the relentlessness of the storytelling, but, you know, there are fewer cooks in the kitchen. There’s my manager, my agent, a couple of friends, the editor, whereas in TV, you’ve got a writers’ room, you’ve got the producers, you have the studio executives, you have the network executives; when we’re filming, you get the director’s point of view, you get the actors’ saying, “I really don’t want to say this line” and “I don’t think my character would say this.” Okay. All right. “Well, what do you think they would say?” You have a lot more cooks in the kitchen, and something has to make it all the way through editing.

In streaming, you can have different length episodes, but on broadcasts, it has to be a certain number of pages, and it has to run a certain length, because that’s all you have. So, things get really, really, really changed in the process of TV usually. I think books are the most direct connection between author and reader. There’s the least interference in that form of written material, which was interesting, to have that direct of a relationship with the reader or with the experiencer, the consumer of the story.

Lara Ehrlich 

What is it like now, to take the book, that you have the least amount of interference with, and then hand it over to a writers’ room and to all of these people who will bring it to life?

Daria Polatin 

Luckily, I’m the showrunner and I’m the creator and executive producer. That’s why I do like TV, because you get to have the authority over the process and hopefully, ultimately, the final product. But yeah, it’s really different. Things come up that are different than I might have thought—people pitching ideas, or the story just kind of evolves, like Peter [Jules’s father] is becoming a much more evolved character than in the novel. And we’re driving a lot more into Suzanne [Jules’s mother] and bringing more to the page that I had in mind for her backstory in life and other things that were going on for her, but it’s articulated more now.

I guess if it were like a “This is me on the page” type of story, it might be trickier, but, though I love my characters and relate to my characters, ultimately, they’re characters, and things are gonna get shifted around. You know, you pick your battles. Some things you fight for, some things are like, “Okay, fine. I’ll take that note for now. But this other thing, I feel really strongly about, and I really want to keep this scene because of this, this, and this.”

Lara Ehrlich 

And as you’re writing the first couple episodes of the show and changing that perspective from primarily the 15-year-old to now the mother’s point of view, and now a mother yourself, are you seeing your experience as a new mother playing into the story?

Daria Polatin 

It’s really interesting because I wrote this book from the experience of being a daughter and sister, and now, I have the experience of being a mother. So I’m interested to see how that changes. I certainly understand now this very visceral, sort of primal, almost monster feeling of doing anything for your child. This sort of Mama Bear. I have a new understanding, a visceral understanding, of what that is.

Lara Ehrlich 

I know you probably can’t tell us too much about what you’re planning for the show, but looking back at the novel, has the experience of motherhood deepened your understanding of the relationship between Suzanne and Jules?

Daria Polatin 

Definitely. And I’m interested to see how that progresses. Of course, any character I write, I emotionally put myself in their shoes, so I can know what they’re thinking and feeling, but I’m excited to continue that process as we move forward in the show. And this show triangulates between the mother and Jules’ and Mae’s perspective, almost like a love triangle, in a weird way. Motherhood is still very new to me, so it’s all kind of unfolding.

Lara Ehrlich 

What’s not new to you that I found interesting is that you said that for the mother and daughter relationship in that book, you could draw from your own experience as a daughter. So, what was your relationship like with your mother? And how did that set your expectations for motherhood?

Daria Polatin 

I grew up mostly with my mother as a single mother and with my sister. So that sort of triangular relationship between the mother and two sister figures like Suzanne and Jules and Mae is similar to me and my mom and my sister. I was growing up with a single mother who worked a lot, and my sister and I never quite got enough time. We just never got enough from her because she was, obviously, stretched in a lot of different directions. That is maybe emblematic of Jules and Mae relationship—both kind of vying for Suzanne’s love and attention and how Jules feels so betrayed that her mother is paying attention to this pseudo sister. So that probably comes from my own psychology and upbringing.

Lara Ehrlich 

How did that set your expectations for the type of mother that you want to be?

Daria Polatin 

I want to be a safe space for my son, and I want to be a grounded place that he can always come to, for comfort in whatever form that would be. It’s sort of a challenge for me to really be present for him. Not to say that my mother wasn’t, but it was hard. And my father was not around very much, and now my husband is the opposite. He’s very present. We both just want to be very present and grounded, for our son to be able to be grounded and present himself.

It’s working so far. He’s pretty chill. He’s able to kind of regulate and settle down, and he knows we’re coming to feed him; he knows his needs will be met. Of course, he speaks up when he’s too tired or too hungry, which is great. But now we’re just trying to provide for him in a really supportive but not overbearing way. And I didn’t feel that as a child, not to any lack of trying on my mother’s part. I won’t say the same about my father. But I’m, of course, always trying to do things in a better way than in the past and what I had. So. Goals.

Lara Ehrlich 

What expectations did you have, or do you have, since you’re still so new at motherhood? What expectations do you have about being a mother and a writer and all of the other roles that you inhabit—TV producer and a wife and a sister and a daughter. How are you putting some strategies in place for balancing those things? Do you have fears surrounding that?

Daria Polatin 

I’m fearful of not having enough time for all of it. But mainly, the most important would be feeling like I’m not having enough time for my son, because he’s the most vulnerable of all of those elements. I was actually talking to my husband about bringing in a nanny, once I start opening the writers’ room. He’s around, he’s a writer as well, but I think we’re gonna bring in someone at least part-time to start, maybe more. I’m just gonna need to be running a TV show. But I started crying, because I think the mom guilt is really very real.

I guess just trying to stay grounded and teach through example, taking care of the things I need to take care of is an important thing to do. If I just sacrificed my career and stopped and became a mother full-time, that’s not serving me, and I wouldn’t be happy, and that wouldn’t be serving him.

Just practically, I think I’m gonna keep my mornings with him, keep that really special time that I have with him from when he wakes up to when I would go to the office, from like 6 to 10, and really spend that time with him. And then spend time with him before bed. So, kind of carving out those periods of time to just really be with him and try not to be on my phone too much and just be present with him for those times. That’s my goal. And then during the day, I have an office in our backyard, and as I have breaks, I will come in and be with him as I eat lunch with him, that kind of thing.

Lara Ehrlich 

That sounds like a good strategy. It’s so hard, especially when they’re only a couple of weeks old. I remember going to the first daycare appointment for my daughter to check out different daycares before she was even born, and we got back in the car, and I just started bawling. It was so hard to think about, but as people have told me, and it’s true, it doesn’t get easier, it just gets different. And that’s helpful, or that was helpful for me to hear that. Like, there’s never gonna be a point where it’s like, “Oh, I’ve got it. And now it’s easy.” You’ll get it and then it’ll change, and then you’ll have to get it all over again. And that’s okay.

Daria Polatin 

It is sort of a revolving door. His needs change very quickly—like, he’s doing that now, and we’re just trying to figure out what he needs and what we need to give to him. Now he loves sitting in his swing, and he looks at this thing going around for like 20 minutes. And I’m like, you know what? He’s fine. It’s just a lot of observation. You have to be very present to be able to assess the circumstances and kind of get out of your own expectations of what he might need, because it might have changed. There’s a real, almost meditative, Zen-like, stepping back and just looking at things with a clear, fresh perspective and not projecting expectations onto him.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, I think that’s very wise. Actually, I have to remember that myself. And I think that helps with mom guilt, too, right? Because that’s where the expectations are. It’s what you expect of yourself as a mother. Taking that step back and saying, “Well, maybe my child doesn’t need that, in this moment”—the thing that I expect of myself, or the thing that I think I should be, that’s not what they need from me as their mother in this moment. So, tell us, where we can get Devil in Ohio, which I have read and I will recommend to everybody, and then where we can watch it and when? What’s the timeline?

Daria Polatin 

The book, you can get on Amazon or at your local bookseller. You probably have to order it. There’s also the audiobook. It’s very weird to listen to it, because it’s like, a different voice than the one in my head. But there is an audio book, and there is Kindle. It’s a fun, kind of quick read, a fun gift to a young reader—I would say seventh or eighth grade, depending on their exposure to thriller. There are definitely some mature themes. And ideally, I think this show would air in 2022. We would write it and make it next year and edit it, and who knows what their slate will be then, but that would be the general idea.

Lara Ehrlich 

Well, it’s very exciting. And I’m glad that we got to talk about it tonight, too. And hopefully people are bookmarking that timeframe so that we can all watch it and then have you back when your show will be out and your son will be older and we can have a whole different conversation.

Daria Polatin 

Oh my gosh, yeah. He’ll be walking around. Probably.

Lara Ehrlich 

Thank you so much, Daria, for joining us. This has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming tonight and for talking honestly and openly about your family and about your work. It’s been wonderful.

Daria Polatin 

Thank you so much for having me.

Lara Ehrlich 

And thank you all for joining us. You can watch the video again, you can listen to the episode as a podcast, and you can read the interview transcript in a day or so on writermothermonster.com. And if you enjoyed the conversation, again, please consider becoming a Writer Mother Monster patron or patroness on Patreon. Thank you all again, and we’ll see you next week.

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Writer Mother Monster

Thursday, December 17 @ 6 PM (EST)
Katie Gutierrez

Katie Gutierrez lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband and two children, who are 2 1/2 years old and 3 1/2 months old. She has an MFA from Texas State University, and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Longreads, Catapult, and more. Her debut novel, More Than You’ll Ever Know, will be published by William Morrow in 2022. And she describes writer motherhood in three words as “never enough time.”

Lara Ehrlich  

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is writer Katie Gutierrez. Before I introduce Katie, I want to thank you all for tuning in and let you know that you can now listen to Writer Mother Monster as a podcast on all major audio platforms, or read the interview transcripts at your leisure, all on writermothermonster.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider becoming a Writer Mother Monster patron or patroness on Patreon. Your support helps make this series possible.

Please also chat with us during the interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio, and we’ll weave them into our conversation. I’m excited to introduce Katie.

Katie Gutierrez lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband and two children, who are 2 1/2 years old and 3 1/2 months old. She has an MFA from Texas State University, and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Longreads, Catapult, and more. Her debut novel, More Than You’ll Ever Know, will be published by William Morrow in 2022. And she describes writer motherhood in three words as “never enough time.” Welcome, Katie.

Katie Gutierrez 

Hi, hello.

Lara Ehrlich 

Thanks so much for being here. Now, to get started, we were talking before the interview about the process by which William Morrow picked up your novel. Can you tell our audience here about that process? Walk us through, from going out on submission to signing that contract.

Katie Gutierrez  

Sure. And if you don’t mind, I’ll go a little bit farther back, just to give some context. So, I had initially gone on submission in 2017, and this was the book that had gotten five offers of agent representation within two weeks of querying. So, I was really excited and thought that a deal was almost a foregone conclusion based on what I’d been hearing from agents. We went out to about 40 editors at the time, and we got a lot of great feedback and some of the nicest rejections I’ve ever gotten. But nonetheless, still all passes. The end of that process was really crushing. I had a lot of fear that my agent was going to drop me. She told me something that I think I’ll always remember, which was that she would stick with me for a hundred books, if that’s what it took, because she believed in me that much.

So fortunately, I kind of had another book idea at the time that I started working on during the submission process, which I recommend. And I started working on that right around the time that I became pregnant—my first pregnancy. I worked on that all throughout the pregnancy, or up until probably seven months, and then the pregnancy was painful and difficult, so I didn’t write from seven to nine months and didn’t write a word for the first probably four or five months after the baby was born. After that, I kind of got back to it.

It’s taken from 2017 to this past September to finish that book. It took about a year to do the first draft, and then 18 months or a bit over to edit it with my agent who put so much work into it. She read that thing probably 20 times. So, we went on submission, and we had kind of a definitive deadline for when the revisions had to be done, because I was, at that point, due with our second child. We were wrapping up, and I think I was already like timing contractions. They were very mild, really sort of Braxton Hicks, but I was at the time where it could happen at any moment. I delivered the baby on Sept. 4. He was due Sept. 11, and on Sept. 11 we actually went on submission with a novel.

At that point, I was ready, she was ready, but we were still apprehensive because it was during the pandemic, so we didn’t really know what that meant in terms of how quickly people were going to be able to give it reads, etc. But at that point, we also thought, well, November was coming up, the election, the holidays … we sort of felt like, if we didn’t go, then it would be a matter of waiting until the new year. And at that point, I felt like we’d been waiting for so long, I was ready to just get it out there.

And on Monday, my agent called me at 9 or 10 in the morning, and she said that she had received emails from two or three editors over that weekend, saying that they had either finished it and loved it or they were still reading it and loving it. I was in bed with the baby and my husband and I, you know, started to cry. And she said she had cried, too, when she saw the first email. She had just put so much of herself into the process as well, I think. So, I said, “What’s next?” And she said, “Well, these editors want to talk to you. So, we’ll start trying to set up phone calls this week.”

That week was kind of like this fantasy week that I think I’d daydreamed about my entire life and couldn’t believe it as it was happening. I think I spoke with five or seven editors that week, including an editor from the UK, who had gotten the book from a scout before we’d even gone on submission over there. And he made a preemptive offer, with what he’d read in six or seven hours. We hopped on the phone at about 11 p.m. his time and then closed the deal just short of midnight his time. It was like this complete whirlwind that day, and on Friday, Jessica Williams from William Morrow made the preemptive offer.

I was at the park actually with both kids, the little one in the carrier and my 2 1/2-year old was climbing structures and asking me to come down the slide—which I couldn’t because I had a baby on me. But that’s when my agent called and said that we’d gotten this offer, and so I basically ran home to tell my husband—that’s being generous, a week after childbirth—but that’s basically how the whole thing happened. It was this whirlwind that seemed pretty unreal when I think about it and talk about it.

Lara Ehrlich 

So, talk a little bit about what we were saying before the interview—this moment of sending a contract while breastfeeding your child.

Katie Gutierrez 

Yeah, during those first phone calls, I was breastfeeding this new boy, which fortunately, that first week, it’s like they’re barely awake. So, I mean, that kid was passed out the whole time. Now it’s a bit different.

This week, I got the US contract and in the UK contract in, and any time I tried to sit down at my computer to actually look at them, it was like, my toddler came in and she was a baby shark. And then, you know, my newborn, my infant, was hungry. So, I ended up just kind of sitting in the dark breastfeeding, looking through the UK contract on my phone and signing it through DocuSign—you know, while breastfeeding my baby in the dark. And like I mentioned to you, you have this fantasy, as a writer, of what these moments will look like, and I never once envisioned it looking like that. But it also felt completely right for where I am in my life right now.

Lara Ehrlich 

Oh, yeah. That’s amazing. And congratulations again. What is the book about?

Katie Gutierrez 

It’s about a woman who is secretly married to two men at the same time in the 1980s. She lives in my hometown of Laredo, Texas, which is right on the border of Mexico. And it’s also about the true crime writer who becomes obsessed with her story today. It explores motherhood, as well as female desire, and also the moral ambiguities of true crime, including what is owed to the subject of any story and who gets to tell which stories. It’s trying to do a lot. And I hope it’s successful at some of it. But yeah, that’s what’s on my plate right now, working on revisions.

Lara Ehrlich 

Well, that sounds wonderful. I’m a true crime fan and, of course, a fan of any book that tackles motherhood and complexities. It sounds great. Talk a little bit more about female desire. You mentioned that as a theme of the book. What’s the interest there in tackling and exploring female desire?

Katie Gutierrez 

With this particular story, I think about how we, as a country, tend to romanticize con men. You know, we make movies about them—Catch Me If You Can cast Leonardo DiCaprio. And it’s this very romantic, idealized vision of a man who’s a rogue and doesn’t go by anyone else’s rules and is smarter than everybody else. And he acts in his own best interest in a fun way, or at least, that’s how it’s shown in the media.

I think about it in terms of men who are living double lives, who are married to two women at the same time and have two families. I’ve always been really fascinated by that kind of story. I realized, at one point, that you never hear that about women. So, I think as a writer, you come across these ideas that kind of percolate in the back of your head for months or years, and this had been in my head for a long time.

I wondered what it would take for a woman to live that kind of double life. And what would make it different than when a man does it? Is anything different? And if so, what? I think in the book, the idea is that, yes, something is different. She’s not doing it for any kind of financial gain, which, I’ve done a lot of research into men living double lives, and that’s a really common through-line. And so, it’s really about the emotion.

She’s a mother, at the time, of 12-year-old boys, she’s a successful businesswoman—a banker—and she meets another manager in her travels, but she still loves her husband. So, for her, what she is trying to explore, I think, is who she is and both of these relationships that her desire is rooted not so much in the sexual aspect of it, even though that’s there, but more about a curiosity about herself and who she might be in these different relationships and in these different lives. I think that is a component of female desire—the desire to be known, to be seen, and to discover who we are in these different environments and relationships. So, it’s just something that interests me.

Lara Ehrlich 

I agree with you. And I’ve heard that from other guests, too, that there is a desire to explore female desire that way, because as you said, men are often very free to explore male desire, and women’s desire is often depicted by men in a very different way than women experience it. So, talk a little bit about creating a female character who is doing something that some may find immoral or unlikable.

Katie Gutierrez 

Yeah, that’s one of the most interesting things about the process of editing this book. It’s told from her point of view, as well as the point of view of this aspiring true crime writer, and on the surface, the woman who has this double marriage is the one who is doing this very taboo, very unlikable thing. But throughout every single draft that I’ve written and revised—her sections are almost untouched from the first draft, and it’s had a few readers, at this point—the consensus, or lack of consensus, has been on the secondary protagonist, feeling as though she is kind of unlikable and she is acting in ways that different readers haven’t quite understood, whereas the woman who lives the double life, everyone who’s read the book so far has been like, “Yeah, I get that. But it’s the other one that I’m kind of confused about. I don’t know how I should be feeling about her.”

I think part of the experiment for me was to look at a person who is acting in this ostensibly amoral way and see if I can portray her in a way that very quickly makes her actions understandable. I think that’s part of the fun of writing for me. If we can do that with a character—if we can take this character who’s acting in these extreme ways or these unlikable ways and still make them understandable in some way to the reader—I think that is when you’re succeeding as a writer. That’s kind of part of the project that I wanted to undertake with this.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, that’s great. This is such a basic question, but did you always want to be a writer and a mother, or did one sneak up on you?

Katie Gutierrez 

Yeah, great question. I always wanted to be a writer, since I was a kid. There was a project in like, third grade to make a little illustrated book in class, and I think that was the point from which there is no return for me. But the mother aspect, I always assumed that I would have kids one day, but it wasn’t that same kind of burning desire that there was to be a writer and for it to be my career.

In my 20s, motherhood was very much not on my radar. I just wasn’t in a rush at all. And then I was diagnosed with PCOS, and so it turned out that I was infertile. So that kind of put this whole other spin on things. I’ve always been someone that when I’m told I can’t do something, I really kind of tackle it. Like, a lot of times. And so suddenly, when I was told that, like, “Hey, you know, you’ve got a 1% chance of conceiving naturally,” it was like, oh, God, well, let me do everything I can to see if I can make this happen.

And even at the time, it wasn’t so much that I just wanted a baby that badly, it was just that I wanted to have that option. I wanted to be able to make that happen for myself and make that happen for my husband and me. It took about a year, maybe more. We tried fertility treatments, and that ended up being a diet thing, to correct my hormonal imbalance, and it was actually the day that we were scheduled to go in for an IUI that I found out I was pregnant. And even at the time, I was overjoyed. But it was also like, right along with that feeling of joy, this feeling of fear and this feeling of, Oh, God, you know … what did I do? Like, what is this? What is this going to mean for my life? That all kind of came up, and it was not as simple of an emotion as getting that phone call from the nurse. Because I still didn’t really have an idea of how motherhood would fit into my life, and I didn’t really have an idea of what kind of mother I would be, to be honest.

Lara Ehrlich 

Did you have expectations for yourself of what kind of mother you wanted to be or what you thought the experience might be like?

Katie Gutierrez  

I think, obviously, I think about having a great relationship with my mom. I’m really fortunate in that regard. So I always thought of the things that I love about our relationship. Our first time was a girl, so I wanted us to have a relationship where she feels safe with me, where she feels she can talk to me about difficult subjects, where I’m able to encourage her curiosity and just kind of give her the space to be herself, which sounds really cheesy. But I want to be able to give her that room to grow into who she wants to be, including making mistakes, but I also want to be able to guide her—obviously, every mom wants to guide their kids in some way.

I think the biggest thing in terms of what I hope for myself as a mother is really just that my kids always feel safe with me, safe telling me about any part of themselves at any part of their lives that they need help or support with. I think that if I can achieve that one thing, as a mother, I would be happy. And also being able to raise kids that are empathetic and good people. That’s top of the list.

Lara Ehrlich 

What surprised you about the experience, once you actually became a mother?

Katie Gutierrez   

So, you’d asked about the writing, and obviously, we’re here to talk about writing and motherhood, but I think my biggest fear around becoming a mother was that suddenly I would no longer be a writer, like I wouldn’t have the time or space.

When we were on submission with the first novel at the time and it didn’t work out, I had this overwhelming sense of, Okay, I’ve got this. I’ve got one more shot. I’ve got to finish this book before I have the baby, and we’ve got to go on submission and try to make this happen, because I don’t know what it’s going to be like afterwards. And I think that I was really wrong about that. I think that I had internalized that being a mother is like anathema to being a creative individual, to pursuing any kind of art.

So that has been a big surprise, in terms of how much being a mother has positively impacted what I do, even though it’s actually getting to work, getting to write, is more complicated.

As far as motherhood itself, I think, off the bat, I was really surprised at the anxiety. I’m not naturally an anxious person. I’ve never struggled with depression. I’ve never experienced anxiety to any debilitating level. And when I first had my daughter, I don’t know if it was a combination of sleep deprivation, postpartum anxiety, or if it was just regular first-time mom anxiety—there’s no way to know—but I all I know is that I spent those first few months not sleeping, and even when I could sleep, I wasn’t sleeping, because all I could do was imagine every single worst-case scenario that could happen to this completely helpless baby.

Being a writer, your imagination is pretty vivid. And I felt like I had to follow each fantasy through to its conclusion. And so I was surprised at the depth of that anxiety, the depth of my fear around losing my child and how that fear never will go away, how it just becomes sort of folded into your daily life as a mother.

If you focus on all of those what-ifs, I think it’s very hard to function. So what has surprised me is the depth of that emotion and experiencing this range of emotion, the love and the fear and how they’re both intertwined, and how much that feeds into the work that I’m trying to do.

Lara Ehrlich 

No, there’s so much there. I also struggled with that sense of anxiety and following those stories from the “what if” all the way through to the conclusion of those horrible daydreams. I totally was right there with you. If I don’t follow it through the course, then it will happen. So, I have to fully imagine it, so that it won’t happen.

Katie Gutierrez 

Yeah, that’s kind of wild to hear you say that you experienced it in the same way.

Lara Ehrlich

Yes. Totally. I think it’s a typical anxiety process where you’re sort of anticipating the the bad thing so that you stave it off, right? If you expected it, it won’t happen. It’s the unexpected things that get you. So how does that feed into your work? How does that depth of emotion, not just love for that small child—or small children in your case, that you’ve brought into the world—but also the fear surrounding their loss fit into your craft?

Katie Gutierrez  

I would like to think that it makes it richer, more complex. Like, when I started working on this book that just sold, I think I was more focused on that aspect of female desire—the marriage—because at that point, when I started outlining it, I wasn’t pregnant yet. So, my head was more in that relationship space, the marriage space. It became a lot more of a book about motherhood, as the pregnancy progressed, and I had the baby and then I’m pregnant again. Nothing literal has made it into the book, but just those emotions and also how contradictory it is at the same time, because you can have this this fear around losing your children and fear about your own mortality and them losing you and the grief of this idea that you might not get to see them grow up because you’re not here, something happened to you.

But then also, for example, I just worked on a story for Texas Highways Magazine. My husband rides motorcycles, and I kind of fell in love with riding with him but hadn’t ridden for years, since I was pregnant for the first time. So, the whole idea for the story I pitched was “how do you manage the idea of risk in motherhood?” Because when you start to think about risk, and you start weighing what could happen to you, what could happen to them, it can become this very debilitating thing, where you end up being very overprotective of them and kind of isolating yourself in order to protect yourself and keep yourself here for them, when in fact, that might not be the best version of yourself.

So I think part of these emotions is very contradictory, and that’s what I wanted to explore in the book. As much as this is my daughter, as much as my protagonist loves her children, she’s also not willing to not have this affair, and she ends up really potentially sacrificing her entire life with them and their life and their psychological and emotional lives by having this completely different marriage with another set of children.

So again, going back to the idea that like none of these emotions are simple and we don’t stop being ourselves, we don’t stop feeling or having our own desires or the desire for adventure. We don’t stop feeling these things because we are mothers. I think it becomes a question of how do you balance these very deep emotions or live with the imbalance? I don’t know if that answers your question. I got a little distracted.

Lara Ehrlich 

I’m not sure if the audience got to see your daughter. I saw her down in the expanded view. She’s adorable. Yeah, I think that was part of my fear, too, of becoming a mother, that you would lose yourself. You’d be subsumed by motherhood and by someone else’s identity, and then you become, simply, Mom—and Mom is not a simple thing. But I was afraid that it would be a monolith, like I would become Mom, and that’s it. But that doesn’t happen. And I don’t think we hear enough from women who maintain their selfhood and their passions and desires and careers in vocations. That doesn’t go away, once you become a mother. But it’s hard to maintain.

Katie Gutierrez 

You really have to sort of insist on it, you know? You have to see the value and the worth in your own identity, and then insist on whatever ways you can maintain. Sometimes it’s 15 minutes a day, but it’s important. It’s all too easy to become subsumed by this role, because it is all consuming. But I think, at least speaking for myself, it would lead to a very unhappy whole person.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, and exactly what you said, speaking for yourself, so everyone, of course, is different. That’s why I’m talking to so many different women about their experiences. And for some women, you know, maybe it’s okay to be consumed by motherhood for a while or for longer, and that brings someone joy and satisfaction. That wasn’t ever something I wanted for myself. And it sounds like for you, too, that you had things you wanted to hold onto—your writing career and your selfhood—and you’ve managed to do that. So, can we talk about how you’re managing the logistics of writing with two small children?

Katie Gutierrez 

The timing of selling the novel was really pretty perfect. For the first couple of months, it was with my editors, and I was waiting for them to give me back their notes and see what the revisions were going to look like. I was in this kind of limbo, where I wasn’t working on anything new, I wasn’t revising, but I had, for the first time in 18 months or longer, nothing to do. And that was a perfect time to not have anything to do, the first two months of having a baby. I got the edit letter right before Thanksgiving, so ever since then, I’ve very much had something to do. It was an intense, really brilliant letter, that kind of relit this excitement to go back into the book and try to make everything that’s in there even richer.

But then the struggle really started. Obviously, we don’t have any childcare right now, and we don’t live in the same city as my parents, so every day, it’s kind of different.

The days when I’ve become the most frustrated, the angriest, and the worst version of myself—you know, the monster, to my kids and husband—are the days when I wake up with this really urgent need and expectation that I’m going to sit down for at least an hour, and revise one chapter or write 500 words or whatever.  When I set these really concrete goals for myself, and then the day kind of explodes and none of it happens, that’s when I find myself extremely resentful of my kids, my husband, the fact that he doesn’t have to have a baby at his boob every two hours.

And my husband is a total equal partner in childcare and I’m extremely fortunate that he can work from home and participate as much as he does in child rearing, child caring, but that’s when this furious resentment happens.

It’s the days when I kind of really let go of control and just kind of tell myself I’m going to touch the work at some point today. That’s my only goal. I’m going to touch it at some point, if it’s working on one sentence, so be it. If it’s 15 minutes, so good. If I get lucky and they both nap at the same time, I get two hours, I’m gonna do that, and those are the days when things go the smoothest for me, when I can appreciate being with the kids but also whatever time that I actually get to work. It’s the days when I don’t set any expectation for myself, except just that I’m going to touch it, I’m going to move it forward in some way.

I was thinking about practical strategies for moms in this position, especially with newborns, and for me, what works best at this time is when I read books that seem to be in conversation with what I’m working on, that feels like I’m touching work, and that helps me. I’ve read more this year than I have in any other year in recent history. It’s a lot of middle-of-the-night Kindle reading, but I’m doing a lot of reading. And it’s also kind of giving myself permission to daydream and to use those daydreams as also touching the work.

I think it was Alice Monro who said that part of her process for months sometimes before she even would sit down to work on a story is just sitting on her porch and daydreaming. And that really resonated with me, because I am not really a fan of sitting at my computer and looking at a blank screen. I am somebody who has always thought best if I’m out on a long walk, or if I’m moving around somehow.

So, I’m taking this time to be really active about using my daydreams for the revision process. That way, again, I’m touching the work. It may not be anything that I’ve done on my computer that day, but it’s in my head, and when I get the chance to sit down, even if it is for 15 minutes, it’s like, straight to it, no procrastination, there’s no going online and looking at Twitter. So that kind of helps me, to give myself permission to use that daydream time.

The middle of the night is a great time for those half-dream connections that your mind makes when you’re in the middle of a story. So those are the mental strategies that are working for me right now. Some days are better than others. Some are extremely frustrating, and other days, I feel okay about where I am and I know the work is going to get done. It’s just going to get done at a different pace.

Lara Ehrlich 

You know, the message that we all hear, as we dream about being writers, is that you have to have a schedule, you have to write every day. And then you see these successful writers, like Hemingway or Faulkner, who are like, “I write from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m., and then I have a long lunch and walk, and then I write again from 3 to midnight” or whatever, and it’s so damaging, to think that that is the way that you become a writer.

And I hear that again and again, particularly from men, although not exclusively, that stringency and the idea that you must be sitting with your notebook, writing by hand for a certain amount of time a day, when that’s not real life, particularly for women, particularly for mothers, where daydreaming is writing and taking a walk and thinking through a plot point is writing and reading something tangential to your own work that is in conversation, that’s writing. I think that’s really valuable to hear, as another writer mom, that all of these things are writing, and that it’s not exclusively sitting in front of your computer for like, six hours a day, because that’s not possible.

Katie Gutierrez 

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, all the other men who do have those schedules, the ones who have kids, like I want to know, who’s watching the kids? You know? What did the children’s mother give up in order to be in that position of primary caretaker? Or do they have full-time help? Are the kids in childcare? All of these things.

I think in the past, there’s been this conversation around writing as this very solitary, strict, strictly scheduled or regimented existence. There’s so much happening in the background in this patriarchal society and sexist culture that was not talked about. I think all of these conversations around what does it really take to make a book happen? Or what does it take, behind the scenes, for a father who is a writer to make that book happen? And what does it take, behind the scenes, for a mother who’s a writer to make that book happen?

I think the pandemic is heightening all of these conversations, because, as we’ve seen, it’s women who are leaving the workforce at a much more alarming rate at this point than men—and it makes sense, because men are paid higher on the dollar for the same work. So when a couple is sitting down to determine who should give up their job to homeschool the kids during a pandemic, it ends up being the one who earns less. It’s the woman, typically.

So I think all of these conversations we’re having now around what it takes to make these things happen are so valuable. When I had my first baby, I was kind of freaking out about the fact that I hadn’t written in months—there was just no time she was napping or sleeping—and I felt like, Oh my God, am I ever gonna write again? Like, how is this ever going to happen?

It was incredibly valuable and encouraging to hear from other writer moms on Twitter who had published books, saying, “I wrote this book over five years during my kid’s nap times.” Okay, five years might be like, “Oh my God—it’s gonna take five years?” But just hearing that wow, this book was written entirely during your baby’s nap times? That was huge, as a new mom, to hear. I think it’s really important and hopefully valuable to people to hear that, how these things are getting done.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, and it’s definitely a counterculture. It’s a minority of voices that are countering this age-old perception of writing, as you said earlier, as being incongruous with motherhood, and that to be a true writer with a capital W, you can’t be a mother with a capital M. Because those are the narratives that we hear growing up. Right before I got pregnant, and I’ve talked about this before, a book came out of essays by women writers who decided not to become mothers and about that choice, and it’s a perfectly valid book to have published, but it just adds to that conversation in that sense that you can’t do both.

And there are not enough voices out there saying, “Yes, you can. And here’s how you do it.”

What were some of those messages that you heard growing up that you’re now realizing are not valid or not applicable to you, as a writer and/or a mother? We talked a little bit about the expectations you had for yourself and about the belief that we hear from above that you can’t be both a writer and a mother. What are some of the other beliefs that you held around writer motherhood that you’re challenging now, by doing it?

Katie Gutierrez 

I don’t think it was anything I explicitly heard as a kid. My mom always worked, growing up. She had a full-time job, and both parents were entrepreneurs. They worked together in a lot of different capacities, but it was always both of them full-time. So, I’ve never had this idea that the mom should stay at home and that’s how it’s done. I’ve always had the example of a mom who took us to and from school and was the PTA president and took us to all of our extracurricular activities, but she also had a full-time job. Now that I look back on it, I really don’t know how she did that. In no way am I writing for 40 hours a week and trying to make everything else work. I don’t know how she did it, but she was the example I had of working outside the home alongside being a very present mother.

I think it was just more internalized. I think that fear of losing myself as a mom—or losing the desire to write, because writing has always been who I am—would I be angry? Would I be resentful? Would I ever be able to be happy if I wasn’t also writing? All of those questions were internalized, but growing up, it was very fortunate that both of my parents were extremely supportive of my writing.

I left my full-time job a few years ago, so that I could focus on my writing, and my dad was really instrumental in giving me that push to do that. I think that I had enthusiastic, supportive voices growing up. So that’s also what I hope to do for my kids. I want to care what they want to do. If they are passionate about something, I want to be able to encourage them to pursue it. I don’t know if that exactly answers your question, but I think it was more about challenging my own internalized perceptions about what it would mean to be a mother and a writer, more so than to challenge anything that I heard explicitly as a kid, because if anything, I got the opposite message.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah. Isn’t that funny, though, that you had those positive messages from sort of external places from your parents and from the world in which you grew up, and yet somehow still internalized these fears and impressions?

Katie Gutierrez 

Yeah. So true.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah. They’re just that strong, I think. So, what do you hope that your daughter will take from you as a writer, from seeing you writing, from reading your books someday?

Katie Gutierrez 

It’s interesting to think of her reading my books eventually. You know, she likes to come into my office, and just yesterday, this feels like one of those bad moments, but I hand her my phone so she can just be on my phone while I work for a little while. If she’s awake and the baby’s asleep, that’s what we do for small amounts of time. But yesterday, she came up and wanted to use my phone, and she said, “Mom, you want to do some work today?” And I was like, “Yeah, I mean, I actually would like to do some work today.” She said, “Okay, let’s go to your office. I’ll use Mommy’s phone. Mommy do some work.”

So, we came into my office, and she kind of came up to my computer and was just, like, looking for really the first time, watching me type, watching the words on the screen. We always read books before bed, but in the last couple of weeks, she started to figure out that I could just make up stories and we didn’t necessarily need books. I’ve been making up stories for her before bed. Today was the first time where I said to her, “You know how mommy tells you stories before bed without books? You know, this is what Mommy does. Mommy is writing stories.” And I held up a book and said, “Mommy’s writing these books.” And I could see her trying to, like, put it together. It was a strangely emotional moment for me, having this small child who was starting to understand what I’m doing when I’m not being present with her.

I felt very proud to say to her that I’m still doing this. Even if the book hadn’t sold, even if I didn’t have that sense of, writer with a capital W, even if I was still working on the book and we hadn’t gone on submission, I felt very proud to show her that I was still working on it, even if it means not being present with her in the same way.

I hope that as she gets older and goes to school that I’m writing more, and when she sees the actual physical copies of the book, and if she is old enough to actually read them, I hope she feels proud, whether or not she likes the books, whether or not it makes her feel weird to read them. I think that’ll be strange in some way, because she’ll be getting access to some parts of me that she obviously doesn’t see as her mother.

But I also hope that when those days come, it’ll bring us closer. Hopefully, she’ll be able to see me as more than just her mother and, I don’t want to say “do it all” … one of my best friends said, “Once you have kids, you can do it all, but you’re to going to do any of it very well.” And I think about that a lot. I think it’s so true. Maybe I’m doing it all, but I’m not doing any of it particularly great at any given time, you know? I’m just kind of doing it. I hope that she eventually sees that and sees that it’s possible, and I hope that she is able to internalize that, if she wants kids one day.

Lara Ehrlich 

I love that. I’ve heard something similar: You can have it all, just not at the same time. That’s really hard for for me to tell myself because I do want to do it all at the same time.

Katie Gutierrez 

I just texted a friend the other day—it was one of the bad days when I had four separate breakdowns of crying—and I said, “I feel like I’m failing on every front.” I was snapping at my daughter and I was so resentful of this baby boy who just wouldn’t sleep. Every time I sat down, I had to get back up. I felt like everything I was trying to do, everything I was trying to be, was a complete failure. Some days are just going to be like that.

From the outside, it does look like these things are at least being managed, they’re moving along, but really, on a day to day basis, it can very much just feel like I’m failing at every everything that I’m trying to do. And then you have to just know that tomorrow’s another chance to try and fail a little bit less.

Lara Ehrlich 

It’s so important to express that and to put words to it, because I think, at least in my experience, as women, we try to look as though we have everything under control, right? Like, we want people to think that we’re under control, that our houses are clean, that our kids are well adjusted, that we’re super women. And we’re not honest with each other about struggling and how hard it is because that shows weakness, or we perceive that that might be weak, and particularly in a male-dominated world, you don’t want to appear as though you’re not managing everything.

So, the more people who say, “I might look like I have it together, like I’m managing, but I feel like I like everything’s falling apart all the time.” That’s the reality of it, right? I’ve never heard one writer mom who said, “I’ve got it all together.”

Katie Gutierrez 

I mean, if somebody does have it all together, then good for them, if that’s how somebody actually feels and is living, but yes, it’s certainly not my experience, and not the experience of any writer I know. We’re just constantly texting each other: Did you get to do anything today? Nope. How about you? Nope. Are you sleeping? Nope. How about you? Nope. It’s just muddling through and doing what you can. When it comes to the work, it’s just trying to trying to do something that feels like you’re touching it every day. And then when it comes to your kids, trying to have at least a couple of moments where you are trying to enjoy them and not just thinking about what they’re taking you away from.

Lara Ehrlich 

We were talking before the interview about the fact that you’ve now gone through the newborn phase twice, and that you learn each time that things change so quickly. And For me, four years old is so different from four months old. I thought, Oh my gosh, my daughter can now play by herself a little bit and I can sit here and get a little bit of work done! I hear five is the magical age. It’s so important to talk to women with a range of children of different ages and experiences and support each other and have these conversations to help us realize that we’re not alone in the challenge that is motherhood and writing motherhood.

Katie Gutierrez 

That is definitely something I keep trying to remind myself of, when it comes to the baby, is trying not to wish this time away, because it does go quickly. I look at my daughter, and she’s so big now. She’s so independent, and there are times that she doesn’t want to be with me, she doesn’t want to play with me, she’s fine playing by herself, or playing with her dad, or when my parents are around, forget it, I’m dead to her. The time when they do need you 24 hours a day feels so long and endless when you’re in it, but when I look at my daughter, it’s proof that that doesn’t last forever, and it’s gone before you know it. And so that’s also something that I try to remind myself when I’m feeling like particularly frustrated—because so much of my days are frustrated—trying to remind myself to enjoy this while I have it, because it’s not long.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, but not to feel bad if you’re not enjoying it, or if you’re frustrated, or if you feel like you would rather be working than building the fifth tower out of blocks or whatever.

Katie Gutierrez  56:38 

Yeah, exactly. I think about how we are living in a very privileged way, and during a very unprivileged time, because we have two parents in the household, who are both equal participants in childcare. And it’s still really freaking hard, so I think about single moms, or single dads, or people who are in abusive relationships, or people who are at more of an economic disadvantage than we are. If things are so hard for me right now, for us right now, I think it’s so much harder for so many other people. And I think that it is good to acknowledge that.

You don’t have to be sitting at your computer to be writing, but it’s also okay to just not be writing. It’s okay to do absolutely nothing that touches on your work, because you’re also a person apart from being a mother, and apart from being a writer, and you need to be able to occasionally take care of that person, as well. Let’s become the monster, right?

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s, I think, a very important point. And I’m glad we’re ending on that point, because it is so vital to be kind to ourselves. And I know that sounds like such a therapy thing to say, but it’s true. This is an unprecedented time that reveals cracks that are so deeply embedded within our society and our culture, as you said earlier, that it’s important to remind ourselves and others who are listening that we don’t have to be writing the great American novel right now or to write anything at all.

Katie Gutierrez 

Right now, I think it’s just about surviving. We just have to get out of this and in whatever ways that we can, while still kind of keeping ourselves somewhat sane.

Lara Ehrlich
Part of that is talking to people—family and friends and doing things like this. So, thank you so much for taking an hour out of your crazy existence to talk with me. It’s incredibly refreshing. I hope you’ll come back when your book comes out, and we can do another talk and your kids will be older. Do you know when it will be up for pre order?

Katie Gutierrez 

I don’t know about pre-order. It’ll be published I believe in summer 2022.

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Writer Mother Monster

Melanie Conroy-Goldman

January 7, 2021

Melanie Conroy-Goldman is the author of the novel The Likely World (Red Hen Press). A professor of creative writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she was a founding director of the Trias Residency for Writers. Her fiction has been published in Southern Review, StoryQuarterly, in anthologies from Morrow and St. Martin’s and online at venues such as McSweeneys.net. She also volunteers at a maximum-security men’s prison with the Cornell Prison Education Program. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, daughter, and stepdaughters. She describes writer-motherhood in three words as “richly entangled identities.”

Lara Ehrlich 

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is writer Melanie Conroy-Goldman. Before I introduce Melanie, I want to thank you all for tuning in and let you know that you can now listen to Writer Mother Monster as a podcast on all major audio platforms or read the interview transcripts at your leisure all on writermothermonster.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider becoming a Writer Mother Monster patron or patroness on Patreon. Your support helps make this series possible.

Please also chat with us during the live interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio, and we’ll weave them into our conversation.

Now I’m excited to introduce Melanie. Melanie Conroy-Goldman is the author of the novel The Likely World (Red Hen Press). A professor of creative writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she was a founding director of the Trias Residency for Writers. Her fiction has been published in Southern Review, StoryQuarterly, in anthologies from Morrow and St. Martin’s and online at venues such as McSweeneys.net. She also volunteers at a maximum-security men’s prison with the Cornell Prison Education Program. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, daughter, and stepdaughters. She describes writer-motherhood in three words as “richly entangled identities.” Welcome, Melanie.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

Thanks for having me on.

Lara Ehrlich  

Absolutely. Now first of all, tell us a little bit about the Trias Residency for Writers?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman

It’s at the college where I teach, Hobart and William Smith College. It’s a year-long residency for a later-career writer, and it provides housing and generous benefits and a generous salary. The writer comes to campus, teaches one class in the first semester, and then is in low residency in the second semester, so they work with a small group of students in a tutorial. It’s designed by writers to give time to a writer, and the end of the residence itself is really lovely. We’ve had Mary Gaitskill, Jeff VanderMeer, Lidia Yuknavitch, Tom Piazza… poets come, too, but I manage the fiction writing half, so that’s who pops to mind.

Lara Ehrlich 

You mentioned that the residency helps writers have the time and space to work on their craft. Talk about how you make time and space for your writing. But first, tell us a little bit about your family. Who lives in your house?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman  

Well, I live with my husband and my biological daughter, whose name is Coco. And then I have two stepdaughters who are 17 and about to launch into applying for college right now. And that’s that. Then I have an older stepdaughter, who is at college right now.

Lara Ehrlich 

So, you have a full range of daughters.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

I do. I have all the daughters.

Lara Ehrlich 

Give us a brief summary of your writing life and career. We are both Red Hen Press authors. Tell us just a little bit about The Likely World, and then about where you came into writing and how you found your way into academia.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

So, this book started in the car. I was driving. I commute an hour to work. And the first couple of lines—in fact, most of the first chapter—just started playing in my head. I know when that happens, nothing else matters—the other drivers on the road, the fact that you’re on a slick, two-lane highway, through the woods where deer leap out. None of that matters. I rooted around on the floor for a piece of paper, and it turned out to be one of my daughter’s drawings, and sacrilegiously, I wrote a couple of words while I was driving. That’s where the novel began.

My daughter was 5 at the time. I had just met my husband. I’d been a single mom up until that point. So that sense of the pressure and difficulty of parenting solo was very much present in The Likely World. I had a draft of it probably a year and a half later. It’s a long book. It’s like, 350 pages. I’m a serious reviser. I probably did roughly 12 full revisions of the book. My agent, Bill Clegg, brought it to Red Hen. I think he’d met [publisher] Kate Gale on a plane or something by coincidence, and they started talking about the book, and she wanted it, and that’s where I ended up. And that’s how I know you. So that’s the story of how this book was made. Roughly. Overview.

I entered academia through luck. It was never my plan, and I know it’s so hard right now, to get in. I always say when I’m reading stacks of applications, where the people are so talented and there are so many wonderful candidates, that I don’t know how I could compete with the people coming up now. But my mentor in graduate school, Peter Ho Davies, pointed me towards an emerging writer fellowship at Gettysburg College, in its very first year, and I applied and got that fellowship. Then from there, I continued to just be lucky. I got a visiting gig at Rhodes College, which converted to a tenure line. Then I applied to Hobart and William Smith and ended up there, where I’ve been for, I think, 19 years.

Lara Ehrlich 

Let’s go back for a second to the beginning of The Likely World. Funny, the novel I’m working on right now came to me in the car with a couple sentences. I have an hour commute as well and use that time to think and generate ideas. Do you remember, or would you consider sharing, those first few words that generated your novel?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

Should I read them?

Lara Ehrlich 

Sure, that’d be great.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

Okay.

The black SUV pulls into my driveway, on the evening of my 29th day sober. Junie is downstairs bouncing in the safari seat in front of her cartoons. Twilight has fallen. But I’ve been trying and failing to work all day. And I have yet to pause to turn on the lamp.

I think, as you can hear, the pressure of parenting and working is right there at the center of the novel. And it plays itself out throughout the main character, who is a recovering addict and newly recovered, and she’s trying to work, but she’s also trying to stay sober.

One of the things that I write about is that entering sobriety is an incredibly demanding life phase, and trying to parent while trying to also do the work of staying sober is an extra barrier that I think hasn’t often been written about, although some people have written about it incredibly beautifully. That act of balancing is both present in work for working mothers and for mothers who are struggling with various kinds of mental health issues, including addiction.

Lara Ehrlich 

We’ll get to working motherhood in a second. But let’s talk a bit more about the addiction side and what is particularly challenging about the addiction that then makes motherhood challenging and vice versa? How do they play off of each other in real life but also, how did you translate that experience for the book?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

Addiction is every addict’s first love. There’s no way around it. Getting high or staving off cravings is just so powerful within the brain chemistry, that the thing that should come first, which is a child, can’t. There’s a sort of central betrayal at the heart of any addict parent, and if you ever hear any person who’s recovered from addiction talk about parenting, they’ll always say that they couldn’t parent in the way that it has to be. It has to be primary. There’s no other way to parent, because the addiction is primary.

And recovery, although it’s necessary for any addict to be able to parent, in some ways has to come first to work. So even though the move is good for the child, there’s this intermediary phase where recovery is going to take the front seat. In terms of translating it into the novel, there are passages where the child isn’t present, long sections where what I hope is that the reader will kind of be troubled. Where’s the baby? Why aren’t you seeing what’s going on with the baby? Although it seems that the character has forgotten, as a writer, I haven’t forgotten. And that anxiety that the reader might feel for where the child is during this time is paid off when we return to the child, and we find out where that child has been. The novel keeps track of the child, even if the character can’t. And that’s a way of kind of demonstrating that tension.

Lara Ehrlich 

You write that so beautifully. I think it’s incredibly challenging to write anxiety. Not just to write about anxiety, but to infuse a book and the prose with a sense of anxiety, to give the reader that sense of anxiety. I think that was particularly thrilling and heart wrenching in The Likely World. We have a question here from Amy Shearn, another Red Hen Press author. She says she loves The Likely World so much. She says, “Is it the first novel you ever wrote? Or are there some other book drafts in drawers somewhere?”

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

Oh, there are book drafts in drawers. I have two. One that I finished writing about a month before my daughter was born, with the intention of picking it back up. But I could not, partly because I was the single mom of a baby who had some health trouble. And I also could not because I was a new person afterwards. The things that concerned me were not the same as the things that concerned that person before. But the narrative is also about a child in peril. It’s also about that tension between parents’ lives and the needs of a child. But it was set in the 1970s in a radicalized women’s movement. And then, while she was a baby, I wrote a second one that’s about a pregnant woman on the run from an abusive spouse. That was kind of like the escapist book that I was trying to write. You can tell I’m not very good at escapism, but it was. It was a set in a kind of post-apocalyptic world, and the narrator is pregnant and leaving her spouse and moving into this unknown territory. It doesn’t take a deep psychologist to read that one. And then I kind of got to the end of that one and felt like, Okay, this was the book I wrote to keep writing. But this wasn’t the book I wanted to bring out.

Lara Ehrlich 

I think we all have those drafts that are in drawers.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

Yeah, probably.

Lara Ehrlich

But let’s go back to what you said. There is something really interesting that I’ve heard from some of the other mother writers on the show, that after becoming a mother, your interests, your themes changed, your way of writing, your connection with characters—all of those things do change, sometimes in subtle and sometimes in pretty extreme ways. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like for you? What do you mean by that, those books no longer interested you?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

The clearest way I can say it is that before I wrote The Likely World, I was writing about characters. And when I wrote The Likely World, I was writing as a character. I found a way to inhabit the character that felt more authentic to me. I didn’t want to talk about things anymore. I wanted to be vivid and live inside of an electric experience. And it just felt like a new way of writing. I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens next, because I’m trying to write characters who are less like myself and trying to embody that same kind of thing. It’s a cool process.

Lara Ehrlich 

What do you think it is about motherhood that made you inhabit characters rather than write about them?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

I think partly it’s the intensity of the experience. As the parent of a young child, a baby, you live so much in the moment. You’re embedded in experience. Maybe other people live that way all the time, I don’t know. But for me, I’m a pretty intellectual person. On the spectrum, my brain was carried around inside of my body. But motherhood turns you into, like, a milk cow. Even if you’re not breastfeeding, you’re the provider of milk. There’s no two ways about it. Your body is first. So that kind of transforms experience.

I also think that there is a desperation to be yourself that emerges from that period of being melded with another human. There’s an intense connection to self that comes. I don’t know if you’re there yet, Lara. When I still had a 3 1/2-year-old, I still felt like there was very little brain space. But when she turned 5 and suddenly could entertain herself, there was space.

Lara Ehrlich 

I can’t wait for that to happen. I’m still very much in the phase of like, if I try to do something on my own or by myself, the little person comes in and says, “What are you doing? Will you play with me? I need a juice. I want a snack.” You know, all those things.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

I want to touch your body.

Lara Ehrlich  21:52 

Oh, there’s so much touching.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

Yeah, there’s not as much touching when you have teenagers. In fact, you have to chase after them. And grab kind of a half hug.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s what I keep reminding myself, as she’s sleeping in our bed now for the probably fifth or sixth week in a row. Someday, she won’t want to snuggle with me, so I should enjoy it—enjoy the sleepless nights—while I can.

So, tell me, how did you actually manage to write a book with an infant? Whether or not you publish that book, you still were writing, you are generating. Did you complete the book? What were your strategies for writing when she was that young?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

First of all, I just want to say, I am no role model. I mean, I found it incredibly hard. I saw your guest last week, and she just sounded like a genius, who was breastfeeding and doing PR at the same time and writing books in a pandemic with the baby. And I was like, that’s just not me. I did a lot of not writing, and I don’t think I could have done it any other way. It wasn’t a lack of will or whatever, I was just nursing a baby. Most of my waking hours were trying to get that baby to sleep or bouncing her because she was crying. As a single mom, especially, but I think dual-parent families have the same thing, it just wasn’t gonna happen.

And then I got this magical thing called childcare. And that’s how I did it. I was on leave from work. I had a maternity leave stacked on top of a tenure leave. I had childcare 25 hours a week, and that’s how I did it. I was so fortunate to have those things. I think everyone should have those things. I mean, every parent should have adequate childcare. I think there are probably lots of people who have kids under five who are barely writing, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Anything else is extraordinary and superhuman. Anyone who’s squeezing out a couple of words a week with a child under five is doing great.

Lara Ehrlich 

Very well said. I want to go back to childcare, because I know it was something that you said you were particularly interested in talking about when we chatted before the interview. And I think you hit the nail on the head: it’s something that is so inadequate in our country and so beyond so many people’s grasp. It should not be a luxury to have childcare in any world, but particularly a well-developed world. Can we talk a little bit about that? What would your ideal childcare revolution look like?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

I mean, I think one of the things that has to happen is cultural, right? There’s still shame around not taking care of your kids full-time, not being a stay-at-home mom, and that’s bananas. I think childcare providers need to be paid well. The money that childcare providers make is criminal. And it needs to be everywhere. It needs to be a given.

I’ve been thinking about childcare as a lens for thinking critically about fiction, and I was rereading My Struggle today, the Karl Ove Knausgård book, which I had cast away because it enraged me in terms of how it deals with childcare. He’s in Sweden, in the first volume, and he has a partner, and he has free childcare readily available. And he’s moaning about how hard it is to be a writer and a parent. And I think, that’s totally legit. It is hard to be a writer and a parent, even if you have free Swedish childcare. But it wouldn’t be a novel, if it were written by a woman, right? Like, the only reason why “his struggle” to be a writer, while also having to sometimes occasionally provide childcare to his own children, is the topic of a novel is because he’s a man.

I know there are many women who are novelists, and many novels that don’t contend with children, but for women novelists, the assumption is that it’s hard to do both. It’s not the subject. It’s not the plot. The fact that it’s somehow elevated to this kind of spectacular thing that he must be both, and that he’s an international genius, made me angry. And I have much more to say on that subject, but let’s get to the questions.

Lara Ehrlich 

No, I love that. Very well said. And I guess we should read things that enrage us, because they’re educational, but I don’t think I could read that right now. I think I would burn that book. I do want to come back to childcare, if others have questions about it, because I think this is such a vital conversation, and it’s something that so badly needs to change in the structure of our country—and the way that women are supported in our creative pursuits, there’s just a lot there to talk about. So, if anyone has further questions, please put them in the chat. Alexis David says, “I’m so intrigued with the idea of the drug cloud in The Likely World. What interested you about the concept of forgetting?”

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

You know, it didn’t start out being about forgetting, but it became that pretty quickly. Originally, it was much more about regret. I suppose what I started out with was a state we all enter, after you’ve done something hideously embarrassing. I know this is gonna sound really trivial, but I’m being honest about where it came from. I know that probably most people have seminal embarrassing experiences that they rehearse over and over again, and Jennifer Egan, in A Visit from the Goon Squad, writes about it beautifully. She calls them shame memories. I thought, what if you could just eliminate that feeling? Just exorcise that thing from your brain? And I think we all think about the brain this way, right? It’s just in our heads, right? I feel sad, but it’s just in my head. There’s nothing really happening that’s making me sad. Or I feel embarrassed, but it’s just in my head. And we live in a pharmacopoeia, where there are drugs for so many things, and we tend to medicate so many things. It felt like a way of thinking about the reality of experience, and also the subjectivity of experience, that paradox. Our own experience is very, very powerful, and it drives our behavior. In this case, shame and shame memories. But it’s also absolutely a theory. I was able to imagine a drug that would eliminate that experience and then think about the “what if?” What would that mean for us if we could really exorcise parts of our experience? So that’s kind of where I started and sort of gathered narratives.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s a great question. Keep them coming, everybody. Let’s talk about shame a little bit more. You mentioned shame in relation to motherhood earlier as well, when we were talking about childcare and how there’s still that sense of shame so many mothers feel when they’re not full-time caregivers, and I’m not a full-time caregiver—or at least, I wasn’t before the pandemic. Now that’s changed for a lot of people. So, let’s talk about that sense of shame. Why do you think women feel that sense of shame when we turn to childcare?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

You know, I’m a feminist. I’m a second-wave feminist, so I’m not even a cool feminist. I was raised by a feminist mom in the 1970s, and that kind of “second wave, Gloria Steinem” situation was very influential on me, and I never really expected that I would grow up and feel that the idealized, heteronormative, patriarchal idea of wife or motherhood would be important to me. I thought, like, I’m charting my own path. I’m gonna do my thing. Equality is good, but I was completely wrong.

I feel affirmed when my house is clean and I cook a good meal. I feel affirmed in this space, where, it turns out, I’m surprisingly insecure. I feel affirmed when I perform motherhood in a way that’s kind of acceptable to the public. You know, when I bake the brownies for the bake sale on time—and I’m horrible at most of those things. I’m a good cook, but other than that, I’m a spacey mom. I am. I am the world’s worst housekeeper.

But instead of just saying, “That’s who I am, we got a messy house, we’re gonna deal with it,” I just carry shame and shame clean every now and then. And shame brownie bake, and all that kind of stuff.

It’s fascinating to me that I was not raised with these ideas. I do not subscribe to them. But I’m not immune. You know, it’s like, body image stuff. It’s impossible to be a woman in America and to not worry about the shape of your body, no matter what you believe intellectually. It is a life’s work to re-do yourself or to minimize that pressure, and it’s insane. So… I don’t even remember where we started.

Lara Ehrlich 

Actually, that harkens back to something. You mentioned my last guest, Katie Gutierrez, something that she had said about the messaging that she internalized. The messages didn’t come from her family or from any clear source; it was just the sense of what was expected of her as a mother, as a writer. And these internalized expectations surprised her when she had to face them as a mother writer. So, I hear you on that, too. No one ever told me I needed to be a perfect mother or do X, Y, or Z. But I feel a lot of pressure and a lot of guilt and shame around those expectations, too. I am not sure where I absorb them from. So yeah, you’re not alone in that.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

I appreciate the way, in Animal Wife, you sort of set up counter narratives to that kind of dominant, patriarchal narrative. For you guys who haven’t read it, it’s awesome. And you should read it. It’s amazing. But, for example, the title story is about a mother who leaves. It takes an expected narrative and gender swaps it and explores the consequences in ways that I think are really powerful. And I see that throughout.

Lara Ehrlich 

Thank you. And I think that’s related to the mother in your book who is grappling with addiction. I think that’s something that we see more often from the male point of view, whether it’s a father or just a man, typically an artist, who’s grappling with an addiction. But there’s something that feels very transgressive about writing a woman who leaves her family or who is addicted to drugs or alcohol—these things that are unlikable for a woman to do but seem somewhat romantic when done by a man. We’ve talked about Rabbit, Run with other guests—that sort of gorgeous fantasy of this man who is no longer happy with his marriage and his small child and just ups and leaves and has this adventure. And yes, it’s at times heartbreaking, but I have seen very few narratives about women who do the same, and I can think of probably a lot of narratives about unsatisfied men. I think that’s a brave thing to do. And I see you doing that in The Likely World as well.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

Yeah. Okay. Let me pitch you my childcare as literary criticism idea: In young adult fantasy literature, it’s a truism that you have to get rid of the parents in order for the characters who are young to go on adventures. And the reason you have to get rid of that is so that they can be responsible for themselves and face true danger.

Similarly, for many narratives, you have to take care of the kids in some way, if there are children in the narrative in order for the adults to go on adventures. So, my lens now is: Does the narrative provide childcare? Does it think about what’s happening to the kids as the adventure takes place?

The Odyssey is crap at that. Eventually, we find out what’s going on, but it’s like, he just leaves, and he’s not really worried about what’s going on with Telemachus. But on the other hand, in the Christian Bible, there’s Mary and Joseph, and they’ve got to bring the kid along with them when they go to the tax assessor. It’s a problem and the narrative has to contend with it.

I think it opens up a lot of possibilities. It might not be like the new Marxist theory, but it’s helped me understand why some books really pissed me off and why some books are really wonderful. And you know, in Animal Wife—not to keep obsessing about your book—one of the things that the childcare lens kind of allowed me to think about was what happens in the absence of adequate childcare. And that is part of the plot. That’s part of the driver for so many of your stories.

The absence of adult supervision, I think acknowledges the importance of good caregiving in ways that the traditional male adventure narrative doesn’t bother with it. Someone else is taking care of that—a servant or wife or someone else. It’s not part of the story.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, and I wonder if readers even question it. Do they notice the absence or question the children if it’s a male adventure versus a female adventure? If we read a book about a woman who leaves her family, we’re always wondering what’s happening with her children and who’s taking care of them. But men, like you said, Odysseus—he can go off. I wonder if anyone really approaches male narratives with that lens, because we’re conditioned not to. We just expect that there’s a woman or caregiver taking care of that child that he’s left behind. I think that’s a fascinating lens to look at fiction through.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of books where it’s really central to the narrative that the man is sick of taking care of the kids, and then he takes off—and I’m worried that this is going to be like the First World male novel, and I’m not here for that. Like, I’m not here to feel sorry for the fact that you have to do 44% of the childcare.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, we can talk about the emotional labor and all of that. Have you seen that wonderful comic by French cartoonist Emma about the mental load? I’ll have to send that to you. I’ll put it on the page with your interview, so everyone can look at it there. It’s really helped frame some conversations with my husband, who is actually really good at the emotional labor—I want to give him credit. But I’ve seen with lots of my friends whose significant other is not as present, that they could bring it to the table and say, “Read this, and let’s have a conversation about it.”

We have a comment from a viewer here: “Relying on childcare may be the one thing that moms feel shame about. There are also the many mistakes we make as parents—some fleeting and some with lasting effects that cause shame.” I think you’re so right. I think that leads into this question from another viewer: “Do your kids read your writing? Or do you want them to? Do you ever think about what they will think of your writing as you’re writing? Or do you ever feel weird about how little you ponder your kids’ possible response to your writing?”

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

I think one of the crazy things is that we feel shame for things that weren’t our fault. We feel shame for every way in which our children’s lives aren’t perfect. One of the things that drove the writing of The Likely World was my daughter’s sickness. She had very severe food allergies, and it took us a really long time to identify them. She lost four pounds between when she was 12 and 16 months old, and it was terrifying. And of course, I felt guilty. I felt like I had done something to cause it. That’s part of how I wrote the narrator of The Likely World, sort of imagining, what if it was something bad that I did that made her sick? So, I think we do feel a lot of shame, and we all make mistakes. Of course, we all make lots of mistakes. But we carry more shame than we deserve. So, I hear you.

So officially, none of my children have read the book. Certainly not the 13-year-old, because it’s very explicit. Maybe off the record, some of the older ones have read it, and they’re nice, but mostly they don’t care. Like, they care if I’m making chicken or beef for dinner. They care if I’m going to let them do whatever they want or give them the $50 that they want. They do not care about me as an artist. I’ve told Coco not to read the book. I hope she won’t read it until she’s older, just because I don’t think it’s appropriate. But I also don’t want to forbid her from reading it ever, because that’s weird. I think about what it’ll be like for them to read. I definitely keep them out of my work. They’re tempting, because they’re cool. I want to write about them. But I feel like that’s one line I can’t cross. I can’t write about my children. It’s complicated. It’s different from how I feel about drawing on other life experiences that I had, that I might have shared with other people.

Lara Ehrlich 

How’s it playing into the novel you’re working on now? And could you tell us a little bit about that? Are you ready to share a little bit about your work in progress?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

I can share a little bit. It’s called The Late Humans of Western New York. And it’s set in an Ithaca-esque town that has a prison and a college. It’s set in an indeterminate amount of time in the future. The main characters are the mayor of the town and his wife, who volunteers at the prison. And the kids in it are five, and they’re very fictional, but I kind of think that’s how I’m managing it—like, the kids are always younger in my fiction than they are in my life when I’m writing it. So, it feels very much like there’s a veil between my experience and my experience of my own children and the fictional children that I’m writing. That’s how I’m managing that.

Lara Ehrlich 

Tell us a little bit about the logistics of writing now that your kids are older. You mentioned how difficult it was when your daughter was between the ages of 1 and 5. What changed after she reached that 5-year mark? And what has the progression of your writing life looked like for the last—I’m bad at math—13 minus five years?

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

Well, the magical thing that happens when they turn 5 is that they go to school. And that’s huge. You can pay for childcare before then, but something about sending your kids to public school, knowing that they’re out there learning, doing something that’s important for them, not just about giving you time to do what you need to do to work or whatever, for me, created a totally different headspace. But the really magical thing that happens is when they learn to read independently, because then they’re doing something awesome for them. And they’re super engaged, so you feel no guilt at all. And you can do your own thing.

It ramped up every year. Every developmental phase, I got a little more time and brain space. And I think it’s not just about time for me. Some people can exit parenting and walk right into writing, and that’s a seamless transition for them. For me, the psychic weight of thinking about my family is also important. I married my husband, so I got another caregiver, and he adopted my daughter, who’s now our daughter. So gradually, I got more and more time.

It’s now possible for me, if I need to, to exit family life for short bursts of time—you know, for 10 days, if I need it. I can have that intense work time, as well as carve out a little space in a given day and a given week. I was a daily writer before she came along. Now I’m not. I write probably four days a week—not necessarily the same days, but I try to get four or five days a week and to spend a little time with my text on the off days, like re-reading or thinking about it, so that I don’t have to restart it again when I return to it. And honestly, with kids this age, I just say this for anyone who has younger kids, it’s not hard. It’s not hard to be a writer and a mom and somebody who works. It works.

Lara Ehrlich 

That is so reassuring to hear. Thank you for saying that. That’s why I think it’s so important to have on the show women who are at all stages of motherhood and writing to hear all of the different perspectives and to share the struggles of the early motherhood with women who are going through it right now, like the last two guests, and then to share with mothers who have a little distance from that time period, although it’s still hard work to be a writer and to be a mother. Whether it’s hard to be both at the same time, that’s a different question, but writing is hard work. And so is parenting. So, thank you for that perspective.

Now, you’ve been through, correct me if I’m wrong, a lot of the different parts of writing a book with a variety of different ages of children. You started The Likely World when your daughter was 5, at that magical time, and you’ve written a book before that, when your daughter was younger. And now you’re drafting a novel again, with older children. Can you talk about the different parts of writing a novel—the generative, thinking part and then the drafting? And then you’ve done 12 revisions of The Likely World. So, talk us through what those different stages of writing a novel look like for you, as a mother, as you’ve moved through all those different ages with your children.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

Now that you asked this question, I realize what has radically changed from the before time to the after time is how I compose.

I used to compose on the page. I was always typing or writing longhand when I was composing. Now, I spend a lot more time in my head and playing around with scenes and even playing around with sentences and words. That’s usually something I do before I go to bed at night. Like when I’m lying in bed, I’m playing with a scene. I do it deliberately, on purpose, because I know it’s productive. And if it gets really good, I get up, and I write it down.

I’ll pick out a scene for a few weeks and either organically or deliberately, if it’s not happening organically, move on to something else. I’ll get it down on paper, somewhere in that process—not right at the beginning, and I don’t wait until the end. But I’ll keep playing with it. After I’ve written it down, I’ve written a draft. And when something good happens in that space, I get it down on paper. So that’s kind of the composing, the generative part of it.

I love narration. I just love it. If it was okay to write a novel that was just someone blabbing—this might surprise you, Lara, but that would be what I would write. It would just be someone being like, “Hey, what’s up?” You know, all voice, no plot. I kind of have to push myself to get stuff happening. I have to think a little bit deliberately about like, okay, what’s the conflict here? How is this scene going to generate action? I have to tell myself to do that stuff.

But eventually, it’ll move out of just the pure, ruminative space and into a set of actions, and they’ll drive the text for a while, and then I’ll get stuck, and I’ll have to ruminate, and usually have to go back and rewrite some stuff to get enough momentum going to push forward the next part of the text. I end up with a draft. I always have the ending, and it always sticks. And I always have the beginning. The middle is murder. So that’s kind of my process.

Lara Ehrlich 

Oh, I’m with you on the middle being the murder. And plot. I love summary, no dialogue, just taking people through leisurely time and describing characters, and if nothing could happen, that would be amazing for me. We do have time for one more question from a viewer: Could you tell us how you choose your structure? You mentioned a gathered narrative, and Alexis says she’s curious about the non-chronological, off-kilter structure of The Likely World.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

I think almost everything that every writer does comes from their faults and proclivities. We were just talking about how neither one of us really wants to have a plot. And the other thing I really wish could be true, is that all novels were just backstory. I want to tell you how the characters ended up today doing nothing. I’m obsessed with our history. I know everything about all my characters’ histories, and some of that material is so completely compelling that I have to figure out a way to like, sneak as much of it into a narrative with energy and drive towards an end as I can.

So, the dual time structure really allows me to do that. To create two narratives—or, in this case, four—allows me to have forward motion but still give a big sweep of time. In the book I’m writing now, I think the structural challenge for me is that I have two narrators, and it’s a lot harder to move back and forth in time if you have two narrators. There’s a book, The Topeca School, that came out last year, which is really interesting structurally in terms of how it moves through time. Each chapter travels through lots and lots of time, using the consciousness of the narrator as a vehicle to move through time.

So: the character is thinking about the past, the character is thinking about two years after that, the character is thinking about the present. And I think that’s a sort of organic way to deal with the same thing. I’m honestly still trying to find the structure that allows me to do what I want to do. I’ll keep negotiating with it. Like, the structure will ask me to do something, and I won’t want to do it. We’ll go back and forth a little bit. Structure usually wins, and I have to give up whatever it is I was trying to do.

Lara Ehrlich 

Thank you so much, Melanie. And thank you all for tuning in tonight, and again, you can watch this video, listen to the episode as a podcast, or read the interview transcript on writermothermonster.com. And if you enjoyed the conversation, please also consider becoming a patron or patroness on Patreon. Thank you so much, Melanie, for joining us. This has just been a fabulous conversation.

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been really great to be talking with you and to have so many wonderful people along with us.

Lara Ehrlich 

Absolutely. Have a good night!

Melanie Conroy-Goldman 

Good night.

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Writer Mother Monster: Creating Community for Writer-Moms, with Scribente Maternum

January 12, 2020

In this special episode of Writer Mother Monster, Lara Ehrlich speaks with community writing group Scribente Maternum to offer actionable advice for how writer moms can seek out, create, and participate in writer-mom communities. Scribente’s cofounders share their perspectives on writer-motherhood, particularly how their personal experiences inspired them to found Scribente Maternum. And we hear about the Scribente Maternum retreat and what writers can expect to gain from attending.

Scribente Maternum is a community of writers that explores our emotions as mothers, provides space to recharge, facilitates connections with other writers, and inspires personal and collective action. The organization is hosting its first retreat for writer moms this February. Learn more at scribentematernum.com.

Lara Ehrlich 

Hello and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m Lara Ehrlich, and I’m excited to host a special episode this evening about creating community around motherhood and writing with my guests, the cofounders of Scribente Maternum.

Before we introduce tonight’s panelists, I want to thank you all for tuning in and letting you know that you can now listen to Writer Mother Monster as a podcast on all major audio platforms, or read the interview transcripts at your leisure on writermothermonster.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider becoming a Writer Mother Monster patron or patroness on Patreon. Your support helps make this series possible.

Please also chat with us during the interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio, and we’ll weave them into our conversation. Now I’m excited to introduce tonight’s panelists, the founders of Scribente Maternum, a community of writers that explores our emotions as mothers, provides space to recharge, facilitates connections with other writers, and inspires personal and collective action. The organization is hosting its first retreat for writer moms this February. Welcome, Elizabeth, Rachel, Caytie and Carla.

I’d love to just go around in the order that we see you here on screen and introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about yourself and about your children and, in some cases, grandchildren.

Carla Du Pree 

My name is Carla Du Pree. I’m the executive director of CityLit Project, a small, literary nonprofit in Baltimore, Maryland. I’m a fiction writer, but I heavily support writers of all kinds. I have three children, mostly adult children, who have all returned home in this pandemic. I have a 29-year-old daughter; twin boys, who are 26 years old; and a 6-year-old grandson, who is very, very active in my home with virtual kindergarten.

Lara Ehrlich 

Thank you, Carla.

Rachel Berg Sherer 

Thank you so much for having us. My name is Rachel. I am also a writer professionally. I write a lot of history and English textbooks. I also write materials that teachers use for classroom use, lesson plans, that sort of thing. And I also help other writers get their projects finished. I also have a boy and a girl. My son is 8 and my daughter is 6. We’re also in the midst of distance learning kindergarten, and it’s entertaining.

Elizabeth Doerr 

I’m Elizabeth Doerr. I am also a professional writer. I mostly freelance with organizations and brands that need regular communications, but I also have a background in journalism and creative writing. I wish I had more time to do that kind of writing, but as we’re probably going to be talking about today, I have one son, who’s 3 1/2. We are luckily not in the homeschooling nightmare, which is really freeing in some sense.

Caytie Pohlen LaClare 

I’m Caytie Pohlen LaClare, and I am the founder of a couple different businesses. Better Smarter Stronger is one of the sponsors for Scribente Maternum, and it’s an organization that is built around reminding women that they are the experts of their own lives. I am a mom of four. I have a daughter who’s 30, a son who’s 28, another son who’s 17, and my youngest son is 15. I’m also grandmother. I have a grandson who just turned five months today.

Lara Ehrlich 

Congratulations! I’m so thrilled to have you all here. The work that you’re doing is so vital and necessary, as we’ll talk about, and you all individually are such inspirations, so thank you again for joining us. And of course, we’ll get into a discussion about community and writer-motherhood, but first, tell us a little bit about Scribente Maternum.

Rachel Berg Sherer 

Scribente Maternum is really a community of writer moms. We are hosting our first event in February, but our events are just one element of what we do. We are really striving to create a community and a network and resources that give moms who are also writers a place where they can share their unique experiences. There is this awesome tension that exists between being the on-call parent and a creative professional.

We realized when we were looking for something like this community that it just didn’t exist. Everyone was either complaining about having children and how they could never write, or—maybe not moms—talking about how life just churned along as usual and it was no problem. We found this really unique sort of dichotomy of being both inspired by and distracted by our children. Living with that balance and finding the time to still be creative and be moms is why we’re here with Scribente Maternum.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s really inspiring to hear, and it’s something I’ve heard from a lot of the mother-writers I’ve had on the show—that dual challenge and yet joy and inspiration of having children. I think often when we think about writer-motherhood, we think about the challenges: how hard it is to find the time or to prioritize our craft when we’re torn in so many different directions. But the joy is something that has surprised me when talking with so many mothers. That is a really vital part of writer motherhood. And Elizabeth, before the interview, you and I were talking about the impetus for Scribente Maternum and inspiration behind it. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience?

Elizabeth Doerr   

The nuggets of inspiration for this really started at the AWP Conference in Portland in 2018. I met Rachel there, and Rachel met Carla there. It was kind of this beautiful amalgamation of inspiration around motherhood and fatherhood and all of that. Rachel was a panelist on a women writers’ panel, and she and I connected and became friends and really bonded over that tension that she talked about earlier, the challenges between motherhood and fatherhood. Our friendship grew from that. She connected with Carla as well.

Then, at that same conference—and Lara, I think you and I were in the audience of the same panel, and maybe Carla was there as well—there was a panel on parent writers and their challenges. It was mostly a panel of dads and one mother, I think, and I just came out of that more frustrated than anything, because it just did not feel true to what my experience was.

I feel that constant guilt for just taking time for myself and getting away to be by myself. I have that weight. I think Carla and Caytie can speak to this more because they have older kids, too, but I feel like I’ve talked to some other mothers whose kids have also grown, and there’s still this kind of weight that mothers carry, this invisible weight.

This conversation started at that AWP Conference with Rachel, and then last spring, somehow a writer’s retreat for mothers came up, and it just snowballed from there, and we connected with Carla. Caytie brings event management experience, and she was the one who really inspired us to do this now, in COVID, virtually, which, in some ways, is actually kind of perfect, because it’s the hardest, it’s the worst, and it’s the best time to do it. We all need that time for ourselves in a way that we maybe didn’t know before, or really didn’t feel to the degree that we do now.

It’s proven to be an opportunity to do it during this period of time. And also, doing it virtually is really great because it’s not as intense, we can involve more people than we could for an in-person retreat, it can be less expensive, and it’s more accessible. We’re hoping this creates a really strong community of writer moms. So that’s where it started and how it’s going.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s awesome. I think you’re right: this is a perfect time to do it. I know I need to retreat, and it’s not quite possible to travel anywhere right now, so this is the perfect time to do it and the perfect way to do it. A little later in the show, we’ll get to who the guest speakers are and all the details of the retreat and the dates and so on.

Yes, Elizabeth, I was at that panel at AWP, and it was my experience as well. I came excited. I devoted a certain number of pages of my notebook to take notes and come away with all these great, inspiring tips and actions, and I really didn’t take much of anything away from it, I think, because it was a panel mostly of men, and fathers’ experiences are very different from mothers’ experiences as writers. Let’s talk about that a little bit. It’s particularly relevant for this show, since this is a show for writer moms, not for writer parents. What is, in your experience, specific about writer motherhood, rather than writer parenthood. We’re both parents and mothers, so we can speak to both.

Carla Du Pree 

I don’t think you ever turn off either one. You’re always a mother, and you’re always a writer. Even if you’re not actually doing the act of writing, when you’re with your children, you’re always thinking about these different personalities, how they show up in the world, how they announce themselves. I think it’s very hard to separate the two.

One of my favorite quotes, something my mom used to say, is “When children are young, they’re around your feet, and as they grow older, they’re around your heart.”

We all know in the pandemic, women are being put upon—they’re at home with their children, they’re doing a good part of the homeschooling while still maintaining their jobs. That’s a lot. I read something I think was on your site, Lara, that said that women are pushed back years from the workplace, because many of them have quit their jobs or have lost their jobs.

The wonderful thing about this retreat is it’s a space where we want to hold them, we want them to embrace their motherhood and embrace the writer in them. CityLit Project has always supported writers at every stage of their journey, and when Elizabeth and Rachel brought this concept to me, I kept thinking, Well, why not? Why not try to figure out how to support mothers in this crazy time, when you’re trying to adjust a lot of things?

Lara Ehrlich 

Absolutely. I don’t mean to generalize, because mothers are not a monolith and neither are fathers and neither are parents, but something I’ve heard from a lot of guests is that feeling of “once we have children” and the understanding of a new depth of emotion, sometimes violent emotion, in the sense that we become, as one guest said, like a mama bear, ready to inflict violence on anyone who would hurt our child.

I know I felt that very strongly from the moment my daughter was born. I would take her, say, to a friend’s house, and the friend might want to hold her, and the physical anxiety I had when someone else was holding my child was something I had never experienced, and it’s something that my husband didn’t share with me. He said, “It was fine when she held the baby. It didn’t really bother me.” I think that is, on a really primal level, a difference between a mother and a father, and that when you’re writing, you still maintain, as Carla said, that sort of primal connection with your child. It’s hard to code shift in that way.

Caytie, can you tell us a little bit about your experience as a mother writer, and what makes it different than, say, a parent writer.

Caytie Pohlen LaClare 

Full confession: I’m not a professional writer, although I have to do writing for the work that I do, whether it’s blog posts or marketing pieces or things like that.

Rachel Berg Sherer 

Caytie, that’s writing. You’re a writer.

Caytie Pohlen LaClare 

That’s a female thing, right? Making excuses.

What I’ve found is that when we talk about balance, it’s not ever exactly 50/50; you’re going to give more time to your children, and your writing is going to drop down for a while, but then you might have times where you can do a little bit more writing and if you have a partner or someone who can take over some of the childcare aspects, that allows you to do that. I don’t think it’s ever 50/50. It’s a give and take, and it might balance over a year or a few years.

The other big thing I would say is it’s really important to not deprive yourself and just shove it away and not do it at all, to completely ignore it. That doesn’t necessarily make you a better parent. What it makes you is frustrated, and it can come out, as Rachel’s dad likes to say, sideways. It can come out in different ways. I think we all need to cut ourselves some slack in how we approach it, and carve out the time to do it, but not beat ourselves up if it isn’t that way every single day or every single week.

Lara Ehrlich 

You mentioned beating ourselves up and the guilt and the tendency to shove things down. Do you all feel like that’s a quality specific to women and mothers, to do those things? Is that something that you’ve experienced fathers doing, whether it’s your spouse or friends?

Elizabeth Doerr 

I think it’s a natural thing for women in particular, not even in parenting roles, to be raised and socialized to kind of take the burdens of the world on our shoulders, generally speaking, and I think that transfers over to parenthood.

I was having a conversation with one of our facilitators, talking about it in the context of even women who are not mothers, by choice or whatever, there’s still this kind of societal judgement and weight around motherhood that is in those women as well. I personally think it is around socialization and how we’re brought up to be serving of the world and, therefore, our kids. There might be some fathers or men who feel differently, but I know in my relationship, we have very different experiences with that emotional load and emotional labor, and sometimes when I talk about the guilt that I feel, he’s kind of like, “Well, why?” I don’t know why it’s there, it’s just there.

Rachel Berg Sherer 

It’s a burden, but at the same time, it’s a blessing. We feel a closeness with our children that our husbands or partners don’t necessarily feel. My son, who’s turning 9 next week, is tall enough that when he stands next to me, he’s the same height as when I used to carry him in a little baby carrier. When he gives me a hug, I’m like, sniffing his hair, and my husband has no idea why this is a big deal. I’m like, he still smells like a baby!

Lara Ehrlich 

I think you’ve all brought up really great points. I’m wondering if we could pivot to the importance of carving out that time and how we deal with the guilt. We’ve acknowledged some of the challenges inherent in being writer mothers. What are some of the strategies you’ve found to acknowledge those challenges and get your work done? How do we hold ourselves accountable for devoting the time and the effort to our craft?

Carla Du Pree 

Women that I know that are mothers try to get up early—I have some friends who get up as early as four o’clock in the morning to make the time to write. I’m an older mom with older kids, so at some point, I learned that if I was happy, they would be happy. If I fed my spirit, it meant that I could be theirs.

It was important to make time to write, which is very difficult and not always the way I want. Sometimes I get up early and there’s nothing to write. And sometimes, I feel like the way I feel about each of them—very strongly, that warrior mom, I’m right there with you—that adds to the work. How you feel about them, some of the changes they take you through, especially the older ones—that feeds your work. I’m not even sure I answered that question.

Lara Ehrlich 

You definitely did, Carla.

Carla Du Pree 

That’s what you do. You show up in the morning. I light my candle, have my cup of tea, and I sit there, and I make it work. It’s not ideal. Some days, I’m dead tired. Some days, it just doesn’t show up for me.

But I also like to change the concept of what is writing. You know, writing can be the physical act of writing. But to me, writing also means paying attention, observing the world in a different way and listening to people with a different ear, taking time to really absorb and observe what’s around you. That’s writing to me. And that’s not necessarily something that you have to pinpoint or structure. You know, this hour of the day could be all day. And we listen to children, the way everything is new to them. They’re like walking scribes. We have to listen and pay attention and be in that moment.

Elizabeth Doerr 

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

Rachel Berg Sherer 

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

I also remember at that same AMP Conference where we all met each other for the first time, Carla, you talked about how you tried to have an office in your home away from your children, and you spent time and money to make that office just gorgeous, and you were just back at the table because that was where the inspiration and the energy was. I love that.

Carla Du Pree 

Toni Morrison used to say, “around my feet.” Children at her feet, and she was still working.

Elizabeth Doerr 

As far as practical, logistical, setting aside the time, I’m very externally motivated, so having a group that holds me accountable, with deadlines or someone telling me that I need to get something done, is how I will force myself to make time. Because the time is there; it’s just a matter of looking for it. For me, that was part of what I was looking for and my reasons for doing this. I wanted community that could help provide inspiration, motivation, and also accountability. That’s hugely valuable, because it gives me this extra component to make me do it.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, definitely. I want to come back to community in a second. But Caytie, first, if you had an actionable, strategic point you could share with everyone.

Caytie Pohlen LaClare 

Well, I think the biggest thing is the flexibility piece. Carla said getting up early, Rachel thinks about it as the day goes on, Elizabeth has external groups. It also changes depending on where you’re at; a baby or toddler is different than elementary kids or high school kids. I think that’s the biggest thing to keep in mind, as it continues to evolve. And just when you think you’ve got it down, it changes again, because they are in a new stage as well.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, definitely. Elizabeth, you mentioned holding oneself accountable to deadlines and getting work done. Can you talk a little bit more about what a community generally offers a writer, particularly a writer mom, and then we’ll come back to Scribente Maternum.

Elizabeth Doerr 

I think community can offer a lot of different things, and I think everyone comes to it for different reasons. I think that by having either a small or a large group of people, you have people who are likeminded, who have similar experiences, while that might diverge, we have that defining factor of being a writer mom, that connecting point.

Then, beyond that, we can learn from each other. I think a community for me is a place to find inspiration, motivation, encouragement, accountability, but also, it’s a challenging space, too. I think that’s something that I really lean into.

I have a background in social justice education and working in anti-racism, where you lean into the really hard questions—you don’t stay away from them. I think that goes for really strong communities, where you’re asking hard questions, you’re creating connections over challenging each other and challenging yourself and diving into questions that are difficult.

There’s also this sense of catharsis about being able to identify with each other and just talk about what you’re dealing with and what your challenges are, in a group of people who are going to understand and also be like, “We hear you, we feel you. Maybe everyone’s at a different place, but we know.”

Carla Du Pree 

Thank you for saying that, Elizabeth, because I think part of it is that you look at the title of our retreat, and we want people to understand that motherhood is messy, it’s challenging, it’s not perfect. In fact, I was a perfectionist until I had children. I realized they taught me you will not be perfect, and you will not have that perfectly clean house, you will not have this rigid schedule—no. To be able to let go of those walls that kind of separate us and know that no, it’s not going to be perfect. It won’t be. But life isn’t either. And neither is writing. Quite frankly, that first draft is usually horrible.

We wanted a real space where mothers could actually be mothers and embrace that motherhood and the idea of rage in motherhood—because there is that, too. Like, “How dare you take up all this time, when all I want to do is this one little thing.” And all the things that come with being a mom, too. We needed a space for that.

Lara Ehrlich 

A space to be monsters, right?

Everyone 

Yeah.

Lara Ehrlich 

Can you all talk about where you discover communities? So Scribente Maternum, obviously, is one great place to go, ready-made, to find a writer mom community. Have you all found writing communities that have spoken to you? And where did you find them?

I can say I found a very small community in two mothers who I met at a conference who became my confidants and my motivators and my inspiration, and we can email one another and talk and do Zoom to keep each other going, essentially. That’s a community on one scale, like a small, friend group community. Scribente Maternum is a larger community without borders. Can you talk a little bit about what people can do if they’re looking for a community?

Elizabeth Doerr 

I’m a natural extrovert. I need to get energy from other people. So, community is like my way of life. I’m also a serial Facebook group starter. I’m part of all of these Facebook groups that are not necessarily writing communities but mom communities. One of the mom groups that I’m a part of, I started with a friend, because we wanted people in our neighborhood to meet people in our neighborhood. Our kids were infants at this point, but within six months, we were up to, like, 150 people. I think it was something that people were seeking. They wanted people nearby. Facebook has its flaws, but that was a really good way to do that.

As far as a writing community, I got a master’s in writing, and part of the reason I did that program was because I knew I wanted to be a writer but didn’t know anybody who was a writer. That was my way to get into that community or to find community in that. I don’t think you necessarily have to do a full master’s program, but you can take writing classes and find the spaces where writers meet.

Carla Du Pree

At our CityLit events, we really are strong on finding your community. When we have an event, even in a virtual event, we realize that sometimes community happened after the event. We call it the Writers Room, where we invite the featured artists to leave the room when they wanted to or stay, and we just talked. And it’s almost like you don’t have to know a person, you just need to know that they’re trying to do the same thing you’re trying to do—fill that empty page, make space to write down what you’re thinking, creating a world on a piece of paper and making sure that when I write this world and you read it, you’re in that world. That, to me, is magical.

We hold large events and small events, but each time, we want people to tap into the idea that they’re not walking that path alone, and eventually, they come to enough community affiliated events that they start to get together or meet each other. It’s a wonderful thing to find a writer who really identifies with the way you write or a poet whose work you really want to support and become writer friends or literary friends from that. There are all kinds of ways to build community. It’s not just one way. It could be an event. I personally had a group of writer friends, five of us, and we would meet when we could. We all were mothers. Incredible group. We don’t meet often now, but to this day, I know that I can pick up the phone at any point in time and have a conversation with any one of those woman writers. That’s treasure to me.

Lara Ehrlich 

Carla, this might be a question for you, but also for all of you about Scribente Maternum. When curating that community, you want to open it up to those who are in need of that connection, but you also, I assume, want to maintain a certain tone and an openness and a non-judgmental quality to that community.

Can you talk a little bit about how you do that? That’s sort of an open-ended question. I’ve been, like Elizabeth, part of a number of Facebook groups for writers and for mothers and for writer moms, and some of the mother groups can turn quite nasty. Judgmental women are our own worst enemies. How do you avoid that when creating a group specifically for women, specifically for mothers who are writers?

Carla Du Pree 

I don’t know if I could tolerate that, to be honest. When you’re a mother, you experience a lot of things. Sometimes your children say things to you that totally diminish you, and you walk in a different way. Even when I see a woman struggling with her bags on the street, all I can think about is that’s a mother trying to get her groceries home. To me, a lot of this is tolerance and empath, you know? Not necessarily walking in someone else’s shoes but feeling past your own world. Get out of your own space to understand what that looks like.

Having never belonged to a group where that kind of thing existed, I think I’d probably have to say a few things. I always think is there’s a way to tone that down, and there’s a way to invite those people out of the room, because it shouldn’t change the intention of the group. If the intention is to hold each other up in a space, where maybe elsewhere in the world, you’re not held up, then they need to go. I will not tolerate that. We won’t tolerate it.

With Scribente Maternum, we hope that our large group events are as powerful and wonderful as our smaller ones. People don’t believe this, but I can be an introvert when it comes to my work. I’m the social animal that many of us are, but there’s an introvert side, if you’re a writer, the side that turns inward. I think there should be space for that. You don’t always have to fill the space with words. Sometimes it’s about listening and taking in what you can.

Caytie Pohlen LaClare 

Part of what we are doing with Scribente Maternum is on Mighty Networks, we have the community. We’ve taken it off of someplace like Facebook, and we’ve got it on Mighty Networks, a place where people, who are part of this group, can go and bring up a question. Rachel has been really great about doing some writing prompts, or thoughtful things to prompt us to have dialogue.

Being a parent can be isolating, being a writer can be isolating, so knowing that there’s a place that you can go where there’s other people who are maybe having similar experiences and giving those words of encouragement—”Yeah, you’re not the only one. I feel that way too.”—sometimes just knowing that somebody else is going through the same thing, it’s huge. It helps you feel like a part of that group but also not so alone in your own in your home, in your individual world. That’s a really important piece of what we’re doing.

During the retreats, there will be small group breakouts, where we will intentionally put people together, and over the course of four weeks, they will stay with their second cohort and hopefully develop a deeper bond that can extend out beyond the retreat.

Lara Ehrlich 

While we’re talking about the retreat, can you tell us a little bit more about it? Who are the speakers? What are the exact dates? Tell us a little bit about the shape of what people can expect if they attend.

Rachel Berg Sherer

It’s the four Saturdays in February beginning on Feb. 6. We’re trying to be very mindful of time zones and not waking our friends on the West Coast up at 5 a.m., so it goes from noon to 2:30 Eastern time, a reasonable hour for those on the West Coast. It’s two and a half hours together every Saturday.

Our first speaker on Feb. 6 is Maria Broom, another Baltimore resident. She’s a Fulbright Scholar, she’s an actress, she’s a reporter—I mean, she’s just the most wonderful, amazing person. She does a lot with meditation, how to find stillness, how to find calm—things that are great for moms, especially moms who write and whose brains are always writing, always going, always thinking. She’s just an absolute blessing.

Other authors and writers, there’s M.M. De Voe, whose first solo book is coming out in February, and it’s all about finding the balance and time between parenting and writing, so that’s just perfect. She is also the founder of Pen Parentis, which is an amazing organization that helps writer parents continue their craft and hold themselves accountable with their writing. S

he’s also training our small group facilitators, so when we do have those small group experiences each week, you won’t just be thrown into a group and hope that it runs well—to your point about what happens if people get off track or aren’t respectful.

Also Karen Houppert, who teaches at Johns Hopkins, also in Baltimore. Elizabeth and I don’t live in Baltimore now, but we have lived in Baltimore for a while, too. I’ll let Elizabeth speak a little bit more about Karen. We’re also rounding out our retreat with some real action steps that we can take, going forward.

Elizabeth Doerr 

Karen Houppert is a personal mentor of mine, and she is the associate director of the Johns Hopkins Master’s in Writing program. She’s just an amazing educator and writer. She has several books, nonfiction books, and she’s an amazing journalist. She was the editor in chief of Baltimore City Paper before it went away, like many of our independent weeklies. I wrote for her at Baltimore City Paper for a while, and she’s just amazing and very connected to this topic. That’s the defining factor between everybody that’s coming to this: we’re all very connected to this topic, and it resonates.

Lara Ehrlich 

It sounds like such an amazing event. I’m looking forward to attending, I hope that our listeners today will attend with me. If you could suggest one takeaway that someone might take away from the retreat, what would you hope it would be?

Rachel Berg Sherer 

One I can think of is this idea of space—of headspace, of physical space, giving yourself the gift of space, and leaving the retreat, not just with those two and a half hours of space but with the desire and the recognition that you deserve to find space throughout the week, going forward.

Elizabeth Doerr 

I think folks can come away with a writing goal, too. We have this focus toward the end on actionable items, and a big part of that is creating the space, but also having a clear goal on what you want, as far as your writing goes—next steps, which means something different for everybody. We’re not going to define that for attendees, but it could be having a regular journaling practice or working on a manuscript that you’ve had sitting on your desktop for a while. I think that very practical thing appeals a lot to writers who want to take the next step on whatever they’re working on.

Caytie Pohlen LaClare 

To add to that, I think one of the things people will take away is the value of time and the value of having some kindness towards yourself in allowing or setting that up as best as you can. This retreat is more about taking care of the whole person. This is not specifically, like, how to be a better writer or a writing workshop. It’s more about taking care of you as a mom, taking care of you as a writer, helping you find community, helping you experience, for four weeks, the value and importance of having that space.

Carla Du Pree 

My thought is to one, make sure that we define mothers in all its aspects—it could be foster mother, it could be adopted mother. Any way that you describe motherhood, we’re not putting those labels on you. You define them the way you see fit. I’m embracing that motherhood as it is. To me, part of this is being a little selfish. It’s okay to take that time. Yeah, two and a half hours every Saturday, sorry—I’m claiming. We’re just talking about four Saturdays out of one month. The hope is that the intention is set that those two and a half hours that you spend each of those weekends means that you’ll make and find the time after February to do it over and over again, as you see fit. We will build that space to be the writer.

I think of mothers always as creative beings—from you created a miracle to your growing a miracle. You have so much to offer, and it’s so important to hear your stories. More than anything, when I think about Black mothers writing, I remember I was on a goose hunt, trying to find stories that had characters that look like my children. That was a huge thing. So for me, I’m supporting every writer of color, every Black mother, every mother, period. If you can tell that story, we need to hear them, we need to see them. Your children need to read them and meet them. And I’m for women being just a little bit selfish, just making sure that they make that time to do that work, too. Because it’s just as important.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, I love that you say we’re doing this for ourselves, we’re being selfish in a good way, but also for our children. I think, Carla, that’s a great point, that we want our children to see us as a whole person, a whole woman, beyond just their mom, that we are seen as creative people, and we’re setting that example.

Carla Du Pree 

If I could speak to that, my son was older when he read a segment of my work. It was like, a year and a half ago. He actually was stunned. He had this idea of who I was, but he didn’t know writer me. And I’ll never forget, he read my stuff, he walked into the room, and he said, “Mom, this is you?” And it’s like that—like, yes.

Lara Ehrlich 

My last guest, Melanie Conroy-Goldman, said something that I’ve been thinking about, which is that it’s a gift to give your child access to a part of you that they wouldn’t have experienced growing up with you as their mother, that our book is sort of a window into a part of ourselves. If we need to think of it that way in order to set aside two and a half hours, then maybe that’s okay.

Rachel Berg Sherer 

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

Elizabeth Doerr 

That’s kind of where the theme of this this retreat came from, cultivating your creativity and community. The first week will be about sitting in this moment of grief because we have to acknowledge Covid and what’s going on and what grief means, in that sense. Then, the next week will be about self-care and telling ourselves, we need this. Week three is about collective care—when we restore our health, what can we be for our families and the world? We’re not just serving ourselves or our children or our families; we’re here to be a part of the world, to make this world a better place, and what that means in your sphere of influence. The last is really about those actionable steps. A really big part of what we’re leaning into is self-care, being present in the world in a way that fulfills us and the people around us.

Lara Ehrlich 

I think this is exactly the right time to have that reminder. I, for one, and I’m sure all of you and our listeners feel completely depleted at this point, with not just writing or motherhood but the pandemic. And as Carla said, those figures of how many mothers specifically have been impacted by this time we find ourselves in. I definitely need to retreat. I need to take that big step away from all of the responsibilities of my life and reflect back on myself for a little bit every weekend in February and see what comes of it. I think we’ve come to the end of the hour, but I want to invite you all, if you have any final, parting words, or listeners, if you have any final questions, please feel free to put them in the chat. But I’m going to open the floor back up for any final thoughts.

Carla Du Pree 

Show up.

Rachel Berg Sherer 

In every sense of the word, right?

Carla Du Pree 

Really.

Caytie Pohlen LaClare 

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

Lara Ehrlich 

This is a great place to start.

Carla Du Pree 

I’d like to say, too, there’s really two pandemics going on here. One is the racial pandemic. One is the virus pandemic. And I think this is a safe space to talk about that, too. I know as a Black mother, it’s been a hard couple of years. I think there’s room for that discussion, too.

Lara Ehrlich 

Thank you for saying that. And as you said earlier, too, for mothers and all the iterations of what that word can mean, it’s a welcoming, open space that I think we all are in desperate need of right now. I know I am. I’ll be there, and I encourage everyone else to join. You can find more information at http://www.scribentematernum.com. And I just want to thank you all again so much for joining me tonight. This has been such a great conversation, and the work you’re doing is so important. Thank you all so much.

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Writer Mother Monster: Lyz Lenz

January 14, 2021

Lyz Lenz’s writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, Pacific Standard, and others. Her book God Land was published in 2019, through Indiana University Press. Her second book, Belabored, was published in 2020 by Bold Type Books. Lyz’s essay “All the Angry Women” was also included in the anthology Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay. Lyz received her MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She lives in Iowa with her two kids and two cats, and she describes writing-motherhood in three words as “creative and chaotic.”

Lara Ehrlich 

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is writer Lyz Lenz. Before I introduce Lyz, I want to thank you all for tuning in and let you know that you can now listen to Writer Mother Monster as a podcast on all major audio platforms or read the interview transcripts at your leisure all on writermothermonster.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please also consider becoming a Writer Mother Monster patron or patroness on Patreon. Please also chat with us during the interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio, and we’ll weave them into our conversation. Now I’m excited to introduce Lyz.

Lyz’s writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, Pacific Standard, and others. Her book God Land was published in 2019, through Indiana University Press. Her second book, Belabored, was published in 2020 by Bold Type Books. Lyz’s essay “All the Angry Women” was also included in the anthology Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay. Lyz received her MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She lives in Iowa with her two kids and two cats. She describes writing-motherhood in three words as “creative and chaotic.” Welcome, Lyz.

Lyz Lenz 

Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Lara Ehrlich 

Hi. It’s great to have you. I loved your book, Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women. Before we start, could you tell us the story you reference in your bio elsewhere that our soon-to-be President Biden called you, was it a “sweetheart”?

Lyz Lenz 

“A real sweetheart.” Something that happens often in my life is men get mad at me. I was so lucky to be able to co-moderate a forum on LGBTQ issues during the caucuses of the presidential candidates at the time. And by luck of the draw—I think they literally did a drawing—they had me ask questions. There were three moderators, and they had me asked questions of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren. It was quite the draw. There were a lot of organizations involved—GLAD was one of them—and together as a team, with the newspaper I was working for at the time and some advocacy organizations, we came up with all of these questions to ask the candidates about their past supporting bills or laws or programs that had impacted the LGBTQ community in some way. I think people who know about the story probably don’t know that I didn’t even write half of those questions that I asked, but they were carefully written and researched, and everybody got a say.

When I got up to interview Biden, I asked him about his support of crime bill. As we all know, crackdowns on crime always affect the most marginalized. I asked about how it had affected the trans community, and he was taken really off guard by the question, which was surprising to me. He kind of pushed back and was like, “No, it hasn’t. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.” And when he was done, I pushed him a little bit—like, the data shows that that’s not entirely the case. We continued from there, but as we were walking off the stage, he looked at me and he goes, “Well, you’re a real sweetheart,” and walked away.

I’m all about accountability for leaders, and while I am so happy he is our president-elect, I did tweet that that’s what he had said. I just tweeted it, put my phone down—because I had to get ready to interview the next person—and by the time the event was over, it had gone viral, and I was getting a lot of feedback about it. So, it’s a thing that happened. My kids think it’s the greatest thing ever. I didn’t even tell them. A lot of other people informed them that this happened. My 9-year-old daughter just thinks it’s great. She’s like, “Remember when the guy who’s gonna be our president was kind of sarcastic to you?” And I’m like, “Yes, I remember.”

Lara Ehrlich

Hard to forget that story.

Lyz Lenz 

Yeah.

Lara Ehrlich 

You know, this ties into some of the themes in your book. I want to get to that, too, about men who have strong opinions about women and what we should act like and what we should do with our bodies. But before we get to that, tell us about your children.

Lyz Lenz 

I have a 9-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son. I’m so lucky to be able to have them in the pandemic. They go between me and their dad’s house, and they’re kind of the only people I see these days, with the exception of one friend who I’m podding with. It’s great to have them. I feel bad for them, in a way, because before, when I could have adult conversations regularly, I treated them more like children, but now I kind of I talk to them like adults. I’m all like, “Oh my gosh, like look at this thing I saw on Twitter. I love it.” And they’re like, “We have no idea why a joke about Mike Pence’s fly would be funny.” And I’m like, “Oh, let me explain.” And they’re like, “Please stop. We don’t care.” The other day, I was explaining performance wool to them because I’d gotten this workout shirt for running outside. I was like, “Oh my god—it’s performance wool. It’s so cool because it wicks away sweat but also has the light underlayer.” And literally, my daughter was like, “Stop. We don’t care. We are children.”

Lara Ehrlich 

It’s funny how the pandemic changes our relationships with our kids in some sneaky ways and some really kind of obvious ways, too.

Lyz Lenz 

Yeah. I think it’s good. I think our relationship has gotten better. My daughter and I have instituted, when she’s at my house, a nightly teatime. We sit and sip tea and talk about things. For our 9- year-old, she’s very interested in when she’s gonna get her period and what’s gonna happen to her body—all those things. And it’s okay to say that because we have a little podcast together, which we started in the pandemic, which I distribute through my newsletter. Those are some of the things she’s very curious about, so we talk a lot about them.

Lara Ehrlich 

Talk a bit more about that podcast and how it works. What’s it called, and where can people find it? They can subscribe to your newsletter.

Lyz Lenz 

I have a Substack, like every shitty media man and me. No, there’s a lot of great people on the Substack platform. I have a Substack newsletter. I really love it. Back in the beginning of the pandemic, when I was listening to kid-friendly podcasts with my kids about Covid, just to explain things and talk about things to them, my daughter got really excited and wanted to start a podcast. At the time, I didn’t have the time, because I didn’t know anything about audio recording, and it was going to require getting a new computer and a mic and all this kind of stuff. Finally, I did my due diligence and talked to people and learned about it, and we started her Rad Ladies Podcast, where she has planned on interviewing mostly rad ladies, some men, about the things she wants to talk about. It’s anything from dinosaurs to menstruation, from Atlantis to witches to … it’s a little random.

I do really want to protect my kids’ internet privacy, so this isn’t like a podcast you’re going to be able to download on Stitcher. I distribute it through my newsletter, and most of the episodes are going to be subscriber only. I love my kids, I want to encourage them, but I also want to really walk that line of giving them their privacy, so we don’t use her name. I try really hard not to use my kids’ names or faces online. That’s been an interesting conversation with her, talking to her about why I want to do that—because she’s like, “It’s fine. I’m fine with it.” And I’m like, “Ohh, but you’re not. You might feel differently about this when you’re 18, when you’re 34 and running for public office.” Right?

I want to be able to encourage them but also protect them. It’s just such a hard space to walk as a parent, and I don’t know if I do it perfectly all the time. But I hope that if I ever screw up, and they get mad at me about it, that I’ll be able to say I’m sorry and be like, “Yeah, that’s a screw up. And I’m sorry.” It’s something that I think a lot about as a public writer and a mother.

Lara Ehrlich 

I think about that a lot, too. I don’t have my daughter’s face or name on social media or anywhere on the internet either. I figure when she’s old enough to make that choice and have agency, that’s when she can choose for herself, although I respect others’ decisions to put their kids online.

Lyz Lenz 

I really try hard not to be prescriptive about my choices. One of the ways that I became a writer was I was very frustrated, and nobody wanted to publish my writing, so I started a blog, like everybody. Then I started having children, so suddenly, my blog became a “mom blog”—just purely by using my uterus, I became a niche category.

In the process of motherhood for many people—I know motherhood is accomplished in different ways and parenthood is accomplished in different ways—but if you give birth to a child, that kid is still part of you, in a way, and your story is still their story. A lot of our political dialogue tries to cleave the two apart, but really, for the longest time, we were the same organism. When writing about my kids in the early days, their story was my story. I clearly remember the moment when I was like, aha! Our stories are now different. And that’s the day I nuked my blog. I literally just hit delete. I didn’t even back anything up, which, in hindsight, maybe I should have.

I remember I was trying to take a picture of them for the blog—and again, I have not done this always perfectly, and if you want to judge me, don’t worry, I judged myself, too—but I was trying to take a picture, and my daughter said, “I don’t want to be in a picture.” She was 4 at the time. And I was like, “We’re done here.” That’s it. I felt like I was pushing a boundary, and she had drawn a clear one. I was like, it’s over, we’re done, and we’re gonna find new ways of telling our stories, while still being honest but also trying to respect them as autonomous human beings.

Lara Ehrlich 

How did that play into the writing of your two books?

Lyz

It’s funny. I’ve been writing books for most of their conscious lives. Kids don’t really remember stuff before the age of 3. They’re like, “Oh, you have two books and two kids, so one’s about each of us.” Actually, I write about other things. And that really kind of offends them. They’re like, “Why are we not good enough?” I’m like, “No, actually, religion’s far more interesting.” I love to troll children—just love to troll the shit out of them. My other favorite thing is to talk shit about kids, too, but we don’t have to do that in this public forum. Not my kids but other people’s kids. Don’t worry about it. Delete it. Delete all of this!

Lara Ehrlich 

Too late!

Lyz Lenz 

But yes, it’s a real hard balance. I also write about my divorce, and I still have to co-parent with my kids’ father and now his wife. I want to write honestly, but I also want to respect boundaries. It’s a weird balance. I know some people who probably think I say too much. I know other people who say more. It’s a constant tightrope.

When I was writing Belabored, that was something I did think about a lot. Like, how am I going to write this? What am I going to say? Because there’s some tough stuff about my relationship with their dad. I really tried to think about when they’re 18 and come to this book, am I gonna be able to say that I was thoughtful and considerate but also honest?

Once again, I’m not gonna claim I’ve done things perfectly, but when I was going through the fact checking phase of the book, I remember going through some of my notes and seeing a little note I had written to myself that just said, “Dear Name and Name—of my kids—your story is my story in so many ways, and I’m so sorry.” I remember reading that and being like, oh, yeah, that’s a tension. I think that’s a tension we have with all of our parents, right? It’s just not always so public.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, and I want to get into the themes of the book and pregnancy and our bodies, but first I wondered, for any listeners who are writing memoir or nonfiction that draws upon their own lives. I’m sure that they and myself, who does that sometimes, are experiencing that tension. Can you talk a little bit about the logistics of writing personal experience? How do you find that balance technically on the page? How do you pull back?

Lyz Lenz 

My approach is to go as far as possible and pull back through the editing. Often too much is really just a writing problem—it’s a style problem, it’s a craft problem. If something’s not ringing, if something feels like too icky or gross on the page, that’s a sign, maybe not that you went too far but that the craft isn’t there, the approach isn’t there.

I’m number two of eight kids, so any time I’m going to write something, it’s gonna have ripple effects onto other people’s lives. I remember back when I didn’t know any writers, in my early 20s, and I was googling “how to become a writer.” I lived in Iowa, just down the road from Iowa City, where, you go there, just spit and you hit a writer. A friend of mine was like, “Here, let me introduce you to this writer, Barbara Robinette Moss, who wrote this wonderful book, Change Me Into Zeus’s Daughter, and she’s one of us. She passed away from cancer a few years ago. But she was one of many kids and writes about abuse, which is a topic I talked about, too. I remember asking her “how much is too much?” Because in families, even if they have betrayed you, you still love them. How much do you sell them out on the page? She said to me, “It’s your story. If it happened to you, it’s your story.” I’ve really taken that to heart. I have had times when I’ve had clashes with my family about the things that I’ve written. Mostly, they’re just upset that I said things that they didn’t want to be said. We all still talk, other than a good year and a half when my mom didn’t talk to me, but that actually was a nice break. It was just really a refreshing time. Sorry, mom. Just kidding.

I think my approach now is to write as much as you can to tell the story in the most compelling way possible. Then you trust your editors to cover your ass and to protect you. When I send things that are deeply personal, I always say, “Okay, has this gone too far.” I also have a sister who’s a victim of assault, and I check everything with her because she’s a victim, and I never want her to feel more victimized.

Another thing that I always think about, too, is nieces and nephews. I remember one time sending in a bunch of writing to my brother who’s 16 months younger than me. We’re very close, and I sent him a bunch of writing that I had done, a lot of which hasn’t ever seen the light of day, about our family. I asked him to fact check me, and he sent me this lovely letter, which I actually talked about and quote in the book, where he said to me, “I might not remember things the same way you do. I might not even agree with the things that you learned from our similar situations. But you need to see say what you need to say.” It was just this wonderful, gracious letter that once again said, “Your story is your story, and you have to tell it.”

And so often, I think the most necessary stories don’t get told because of fear and power dynamics. I always try to go far and then pull back, but it has been a learning curve. And my sisters let me know.

Lara Ehrlich 

Well, that’s good. Right?

Lyz Lenz 

Oh, absolutely. I would say I don’t come from a family of simmerers. We just blow up. And that’s great, you know, because simmering is actually the scariest to me.

Lara Ehrlich 

It’s true. I think my family is a bunch of simmerers, so I appreciate people who just tell you what they have in mind. But speaking of fear and power dynamics, I think that’s a good entry into your actual book here, Belabored. Can you give us the elevator pitch for the book, for anyone who hasn’t seen the jacket copy?

Lyz Lenz 

It is part memoir, part manifesto, about the politics of our bodies during the nine months of pregnancy, and I try to make it as accessible as possible. I acknowledge there are many roads to parenthood, and there’s also a choice not to be a parent. Or sometimes that choice is not a choice. Sometimes that’s just made for people, even if they wanted another choice. I include the four trimesters of pregnancy and birth. I really feel like they encapsulate a political and cultural dissonance about the way we police bodies in America.

That’s what this book is. I talk about the history of pain medicine, I go to Philadelphia and take a serial killer tour, so it’s not all gory birth stories. I have like a whole chapter basically just about turkey sandwich, which is one of my favorite chapters.

Lara Ehrlich 

And it’s so funny, in addition to being educational, political, and thought provoking, your personality and your sense of humor and sense of joy comes through in the book. It’s quite an accomplishment to get all of that into this memoir/manifesto.

Lyz Lenz 

Thank you. That’s very nice. It was very hard to write because when I sold the book, I was one kind of mother. I was married. I was upper middle class in the Midwest, two children, a boy and a girl. I had done it. But then when I sat down to write the book, I was a single mom. I still had my kids, still lived in the Midwest, but I was relying on my parents for money for Christmas presents and really struggling. When I sat down to write in a very different mother. Okay, one second—I’m gonna pick up this dog.

Lara Ehrlich 

We welcome dogs on the show. Kids and dogs. Oh, especially really cute, tiny ones.

Lyz Lenz 

She’s more like a squirrel than a dog.

Lara Ehrlich 

Wow, what’s her name?

Lyz Lenz 

Her name is Jolene. She’s a dachshund Maltese mix. We tried to go for a walk today, but we couldn’t because it’s snowing, and her little paws were cold. But yes, I am a different kind of mother than I was when I proposed the book, and a lot of my perspectives on issues have changed. I think a great example of that was the pain medicine issue. I was like, “I’m gonna write this chapter. It’s gonna be all ‘hell yeah, pain medicine.’ We all need epidurals. Let’s have an epidural right now.” And upon further reflection and further research, I saw that the history of pain medicine is really complicated and has been used for forced hysterectomies, and the way that so many life-saving operations for women have been developed by doctors doing experiments on enslaved women without their consent, and also without pain medicine.

I think what would have been a very different kind of book suddenly became far more nuanced. I almost bought my way out of the book contract, because I didn’t get a lot of money for it, but a friend was like, “Just write it all into the book. Write all the problems with the book into the book.” And so, I did.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s a wise thing to say, actually, because it is not a simple concept or theme. Pregnancy and all of the history of medicine around it, it’s very fraught. Working that out in the book was a brilliant thing to do, I think. Tell me a little bit more about how your perspective changed between selling the book and writing the book. What was it about that period of motherhood or your situation after a divorce that then led you to a deeper contemplation of these issues, a more nuanced approach?

Lyz Lenz 

You know, I think, one, it was a research and actually reading about it and talking to women in my circle. An example of that is I had viewed eating while pregnant as this very restrictive kind of a thing. I found it to be a judgmental experience for people. I think this has a lot to do with my body size before I was pregnant and what my body size happened to be while I was pregnant. I was privileged enough to be able to eat a bunch of Cheetos and not have people scrutinize me because I was—quote, unquote—”an acceptable size,” and all of a sudden, I’m pregnant, and I’m in this world where my eating is scrutinized. I remember talking about this with my neighbor, and she was like, “I found it freeing, because for the first time in my life, I was able to feed myself without people judging what I was eating.” Because of a different body experience, when people were like, “Are you sure you should be eating that?” She was able to say, “No, I’m feeding the child within me. Actually, I’m anemic and I need to.”

I wanted to pay respect to those stories and create a space for alternative narratives, but the fact being that it’s still an issue of control and how we control the way women eat and the way unruly bodies eat. A lot was changing my perspective. I was just throwing myself into the research. I read, like, millions of history of pregnancy books and talked to tons of people and went places and did things.

Also, the way I was getting treated as a different kind of mother was becoming very apparent. This happened when I was researching my first book, God Land. My divorce was in process then, we were still in therapy, and I was experimenting, when I went into conservative spaces, “Okay, I’ll do this interview with a wedding ring on, and I’ll do this one without it, and just see how people treat me.” Obviously, it’s not a scientific experiment, but I was getting treated very differently, based upon whether people thought I was a single mom or a non-mom or married or not married.

Lara Ehrlich 

Can you tell us a little bit about that? Can you think of an example?

Lyz Lenz 

I have two examples. For my book God Land, I went on this week retreat with Baptist ministers and their wives—which tells you a lot, you know, it’s “and their wives.” When I showed up, I was not wearing my wedding ring, and I was having a hard time talking to people. Like, if I sat down next to a minister and started talking to him, it was very like, [no response]. I’m not an idiot. I know what this is about. When I’d say, “Do you want to see pictures of my kids and my house and my husband?” Then we’re talking. You know, was I safe, or was I unsafe? And whether a woman is safe or not depends on whether she’s married, whether she’s performing gender in the way that I want her to perform gender. Now, sometimes, the motherhood is erased, or it’s not helpful to the narrative.

I recently wrote about Amy Coney Barrett and how she uses her white motherhood as kind of as a shield to hide a lot of the really anti-mother, anti-parent policies. We saw a recent ruling that now prohibits women from getting that abortion pill. I don’t want to call it that, but I’m just gonna call it that for shorthand. Now you have to go in and get it, and that’s just absolutely ridiculous.

I had written about that and about how, throughout history, white women have used their motherhood to perpetuate some pretty evil stuff like school segregation, and the Catholics got real mad at me. That Bill Donohue guy wrote this whole thing that was like, “How dare this woman attack motherhood in such a fashion. She must be anti-motherhood.” And I’m like, I would like to have a million kids if it was a good idea. I really love being a mom. I was like, huh, interesting that my motherhood is not convenient for your narrative about the attack on motherhood. So yeah. Those are just little snippets.

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, and actually, now we’re circling back a little bit to something I wanted to talk more about, which is men’s perception and policing of women, particularly women as mothers, and what our bodies should and should not look like. And you said early on that men often get mad at you.

Lyz Lenz

I wanna add a little nuance on to your question, very respectfully, as women often police women’s performance of gender far more than men do.

In the book, I write about how in extreme performances of gender, women are able to ask for things—pregnancy, marriage, planning a wedding. That’s the whole bridezilla thing. All of a sudden, this woman feels empowered to ask for things, and maybe she’d never felt she could before.

Anybody who’s been pregnant, nine times out of 10, it’s not a man sitting there saying, “You think you should be drinking all that caffeine?” I think that’s an important part of the nuance of the conversation. I’m not trying to hashtag “notallmen” here, but I am trying to say that we need to be more nuanced in our dialogue about men versus women.

This is why I have a lot of problems with “hell yeah, vote for women.” Well, no, I live in a state that has a lady governor, and it’s going terribly. It’s just awful. I think it’s kind of true but also a little bit reductive. When we miss the nuance, we miss the ways in which patriarchy is internalized and the way we internalize it and the way we, as women, do corrective behavior on other women. It’s obviously the same with racism, too, right? Like, we can think we’re good, but we need to start thinking about the way we have internalized harmful norms.

What was the second part of your question? Why do men get mad at me? I think, first of all, I’m just a loud person who asks questions a lot. People deserve to get mad at me sometimes. But I do think that there is something about a woman who has nothing to lose, and that happened, I think, when I got my divorce. I grew up very religious and was taught that that was not an option. You don’t do that. And, once again, I will say, my parents, we’ve been on a journey, and they were very supportive of me when I made that decision and are still supportive now. But it was really scary to just say, okay, everything that I grew up learning, I’m now going to turn my back on wholeheartedly. Basically, it felt like jumping off a cliff. And in that process, I learned, I’m gonna be fine. Do you know what I mean?

I learned a couple things. I learned that my happiness was not ancillary, that it was actually the point. And that all people deserve to have good and happy lives. It’s not selfishness to want that. It’s not selfishness to ask for it. It’s not selfishness to take the time you need to write. It’s not selfishness to go for the career that you want. And I think we often tell women that no, you gotta die on the cross, and you don’t have to. Walk down from that cross, go do what you need to do. It’s not great up there. It sucks.

I kind of realized I had nothing to lose, and I started making bolder choices. I started writing more boldly, in a way that I didn’t before I started asking harder questions, not just of myself, but of the people I was talking to. I don’t think it was a sudden change. Maybe it was also getting more confident in who I was, as a writer and a career person. It was trusting myself more. But I do think that there is something very powerful about a woman who walks into a room and says, “I don’t need you. I’m here because I want to be here.”

Doing the podcast with my daughter, we interviewed a witch expert, and she said that the first witch trials were not about medicine and healing. They were just women who were independently wealthy. That was a slap in the face reminder that a woman who doesn’t need all that other stuff is a real threat and a real destabilizing threat to power.

I think that’s some of the dynamics. I don’t want to give myself too much credit. I’m also kind of annoying. Probably that there. I’m sure somebody’s listening and like, “Yeah, but you also kind of suck.” And it’s okay. To the hypothetical person who I just invented in mind, I will push back a little bit and say, what we value as obnoxious in a woman, how would we see it in a man? An antagonist in a man has far more value to characteristic than it is in a woman. But you know, I also might just be annoying, it’s fine.

Lara Ehrlich 

You know, you make it hard to follow up with a question, because the answers are just so amazing. And I find myself nodding, and then I’m like, “Oh, now I have to ask you something.” It’s amazing. I’m fascinated by the nuance that you added to that question. Thank you for doing that, because it is such an important topic to discuss about how women are our own worst enemies, both of each other and of ourselves. I’ve noticed that in moms groups myself, I have an amazing one in Boston that is full of non-judgmental, bold, tell-it-like-it-is moms. And then there were a few others I tried where it’s like you ask a question, and then you get 50 comments about how you’re doing everything wrong.

Lyz Lenz 

Can I tell you about the time I got kicked out of a moms’ group?

Lara Ehrlich 

Please do.

Lyz Lenz 

Okay, this is such a good story. I live in the Midwest, obviously. I’d been taking my small baby to the lake and just walking with her into the water and sitting her down, you know. She’s a baby. She can’t go anywhere. It’s like, dip you in the water, shake you off, throw you on the towel. No big deal. But there’s this woman, and this is a group of very intelligent, successful women, and they were like, “We’re taking our three-month-old baby to the lake. What kind of life vests should we get?” And I go, “Well, as long as you don’t toss her overboard, I think she’s gonna be fine.” And people just ignore my comment. And they’re suggesting all these other things. This thread goes on for a couple days, and then she got a life vest for her baby, and she posted a picture of her baby floating in the bathtub with the life vest on. She was trying it out. And I’m sure she’s an amazing mom, but I replied, “Is this cruelty to babies?” And then suddenly I couldn’t access the group. It might’ve been a little bit more snarky. I think it was like, “LMAO is this baby cruelty? Should I report?”

Lara Ehrlich 

Oh, yeah. That’s not out of line with the type of things I see—or I did see, because I did not stick around in those moms’ groups.

Lyz Lenz 

No, you got to find your people. I mean, that’s true for all aspects of your life, right? It’s not just parenthood. It is your writing—you have to find the people you trust to critique your writing. You’ve got to find your people. And yes, we people are very good at policing choices. And obviously, the problem wasn’t that she was getting a little life vest for her baby, which is wonderful; the problem is when you say, now all people need to do it my way, or I’m somehow morally superior.

I think there’s something in this, if we look at the system. It’s easy to blame women and write viral posts or blow up in a mommies group or mom bloggers, but I think we also need to realize the way in which women have limited power. When you raise somebody to say that your whole goal in life is to have children, and now you have children, and that’s also the only way you can exert control over your world, then of course, we start fighting about baby Boppies. My youngest is now 7, so I don’t even know. I recently learned that we don’t do Rock N Plays anymore, because my friend was having a baby, and I was like, “You have to get a Rock N Play,” and she was like, “They’ve killed babies.” And I was like, “Oh. Don’t get a Rock N Play.” Things change.

But when you create this closed system where women can’t have power and can’t access power, and that their status as a mother is the only way in which they can access power, I think that’s the real problem to critique. That’s a real source of the behavior. It is funny, I always click on those posts when the mommy bloggers are fighting, but I do think it helps us to put it in the context of let’s look at the system that we’ve created and critique that shaming behavior.

Lara Ehrlich 

That’s a great point. I want to take a leap back and ask what inspired you to write this book in the first place?

Lyz Lenz 

Well, I gave birth twice. Back in 2015, and probably 2014, I was writing a series for Jezebel about mythology and motherhood, and I was talking about myths and non-myths, like the “wandering womb” and those kinds of things. I fact-checked them to see where they came from and ask: Do these exist now? And what kind of myths do we rely on? I was trying to sell a very different book, and nobody would buy it. In fact, I think this is about early 2016 that I’m sending this book out, which was just a book on womanhood, and I remember editors being like, “Oh, this has too much religion in it. Americans are not interested in religion”—sad trombone—because then the 2016 election happened.

But a very wonderful editor who was at Norton at the time was like, “I like this book, but I can’t sell it. But also, I want you to take your writing from Jezebel and turn it into a book, because people pitch us books on motherhood all the time, but I don’t see books like this. I want a book that really gets to the heart of things.” We worked together on a proposal, and that’s what the literal genesis of the book came out of.

But, you know, I’ve heard Maggie Nelson, the wonderful writer, say, “Every story is a story of a body.” I think about that too often, and I think pregnancy is a great way of really encapsulating that and talking about that, how you cannot separate flesh from reality and your reality. I think about that often when I’m writing: How does this interest me? Why am I interested? Why do people care? And how does this affect the body, like the fleshy reality of our lives? I think that was the theoretical motivation of the book.

Lara Ehrlich 

Did you always know you wanted to be a mother?

Lyz Lenz 

No. I think I was always kind of like, no way. I’m not gonna be a mom.

Lara Ehrlich 

That was me.

Lyz Lenz 

But first of all, by the way, choosing not to be a mother—that it was perfectly wonderful, fine choice. Absolutely no shame for that. But I married somebody who wanted kids, and also, I don’t think I was fully against it. I just knew that I needed to do a lot of self-work, and that was really hard work to do. I was in therapy a lot. I had to go through some things with my lovely mother. We had to talk about things and come to some understanding. I think part of that healing made me excited for kids. Everybody’s journey is so complicated. But I’m so glad I did.

Lara Ehrlich 

How did you change when you became a mother? And that’s such a big question.

Lyz Lenz

I remember my mom asking me on my first Mother’s Day—my daughter was born in March, and then it was May—she was like, “How do you feel now that you’re a mom?” I was like, “I feel like myself but fatter.” I actually put that in the book. I don’t know. Maybe people who know me might think differently and fight with me on this. Of course, my perspective on some issues changed, and things that I thought I would always do, I don’t do them now. Like I was never gonna give them sugary yogurt. And now I’m just like, “Please, eat a protein. I don’t care if it’s chock full of sugar, just eat a frickin’ protein and stop yelling at me.” My patience for battles was dwindled. Obviously, it changes your cell structure, and it maybe made opinions that I might have been softer on a little bit more extreme.

Lara Ehrlich 

Can you give an example of one?

Lyz Lenz 

I always kind of just believed a doctor. You know, there’s science, there’s medicine, and we can trust the doctors. And I’m not trying to undermine faith in science and medicine, but we do need to understand the ways that science and medicine fail us, and how a lot of it’s built on misogyny and white supremacy. I remember feeling very let down by the medical establishment after the birth of my daughter, which was very traumatic. I had postpartum hemorrhaging, but nobody would tell me what it was. All I knew was I was just bleeding and passing out. I didn’t know anything that was going on. They wouldn’t even tell me how many stitches I got. And I loved my doctor, but she was so condescending about that. I remember just gaining tons and tons of weight—like almost 80 pounds with both pregnancies. My body was just like, Boom! Now you look like a kid in the Chocolate Factory who chewed the wrong gum. It’s fine. But so many nurses were like, “Lay off the milkshakes.” I’m like, “I haven’t had a milkshake in 10 months.” And also, even if I’d have had a milkshake, like, leave me alone, you know? I had gone in with this blind trust and acceptance of the medical establishment.

It shouldn’t take personal experience for people to listen and change and grow, but some of those things were very helpful. My perception of women and work and the emotional labor we do and the loads that we carry, that radically changed. I was always like, “Yeah, this sucks.” But I think it changed from me being like, “this sucks,” to like, “let’s burn it down!”

Lara Ehrlich 

Yeah, it’s funny. That’s how I feel, too, very radicalized about motherhood, and particularly women’s right to be creative while being mothers and women’s right to have jobs while being mothers, that we need to be well-rounded people if that’s what we want. I have friends who want to be home full time, and they should be able to do that as well. There should be structures in place to make that possible. I think I’ll just wrap up with some actionable advice, since you are a mother who is balancing motherhood with writing with advocacy and work. Can you talk a little bit about how you prioritize your craft?

Lyz Lenz 

It changes. My kids are older now. I remember reading a blog post when I was pregnant with my daughter that talked about, like, my writing is my career, and it is a priority, and that means it’s a priority over folding clothes, it’s a priority over raking the lawn, it’s a priority over all those things that we somehow think we need to do that are really just ancillary to the task of living. I need to take care of my kids, obviously, but also part of taking care of my kids is being a fully well-rounded human being, and they need a mother whose life is not all about them, because one day, they’re gonna leave me, and they’re gonna be like, “Get a friend.”

So I prioritize my writing. Especially in those early days, because it is my career, I’d wake up at 3 and 4 a.m., and then my stupid babies would wake up with me. It felt like stealing time—but you’re not stealing that time if it belonged to you in the first place.

In my bedroom right now are baskets and baskets of unfolded laundry, and I don’t care. I don’t match socks anymore. We have this thing called the sock basket, and I just dump. Screw matching socks. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t do and I refuse to do, and if I have time, maybe, but I need to sleep. It doesn’t all get done.

I have just chosen to prioritize my work over other things. Does that mean that some days I don’t work out? Yeah. Does that mean some days, emails don’t get answered? Yeah. Phone calls don’t get returned. Text messages don’t get returned. Because this is my time, and I worked so hard to get here, and I’m so grateful that I have it. I feel like my career totally blossomed in the past couple years, and every day, somebody thinks I’m important enough to have on something like this. I’m just thrilled. Because, you know, hopefully, that means that I’m doing work that interests people. I just want to keep doing that and doing it to the best of my abilities, so I prioritize it. Does that mean that I don’t go on dates a lot? Yeah. I don’t know that people are doing that right now anyway. It wasn’t great before the pandemic, so let’s just blame it on that. Who cares? I’m doing fun, exciting work. There’s not one way to do this, but I always tell people, you’re not stealing time; that time belongs to you. Take it, and don’t apologize for it. Because your contributions to this world matter; you as a full human being matter. Go for it. Balls to the wall—no, labia to the wall, ladies.

Lara Ehrlich 

I just pictured that. But before the laughter—you brought tears to my eyes with this anthem of solidarity and empowerment, so thank you for both that and then the laugh. This has just been amazing. Thank you so much for joining me tonight.