Archive for the 'motherhood' Category

Circling Loss

Published on April 23, 2012 in miscarriage and motherhood. 0 Comments

Creative Non-Fiction by Amber Jensen

Sunday, March 9

I thought the process of bleeding away my second pregnancy was over. Dressed in dark jeans, wedge heels, and a fitted black v-neck that exposed the freckled skin of my chest, I bounded down the stairs in my mother’s house, surprised at the easy flight of my feet over carpet. I can do this, I thought to myself. I can be happy.

But then, as I hopped down to the final stair, a clot of blood plummeted from somewhere inside me, stopping just before it escaped my body. This isn’t over yet. I felt my body reel back against the momentum of acceptance I had been trying to build. My belly hung heavy, throbbing, and empty.

With thick red threatening the fresh denim that hugged my hips, I froze at the bottom of the stairs facing a framed collage of photos from my wedding day. I pleaded with my husband’s dimples, his squinting, cloudy eyes. When can I leave this behind?

Then from my left I heard a deep, primitive yowl. I turned to find the tiger eyes of my mom’s large ginger cat peering at me from his lowered head. His whiskers extended towards me as he tracked the scent of blood.

Thursday, March 6, morning

Having called the doctor, my sister, and Blake, I replaced a heavy, red maxi-pad with a weightless, white one. I changed from blood-stained grey cotton into fresh, black lycra pants. Then I waited. For my sister. For the doctor. For Blake. For the news. But I already knew. Nothing so small could survive this.

I crawled into the living room and lined the seat of the recliner with a tan towel before climbing in. Then I covered myself with the quilted patchwork of pink and blue calico my grandmother made for my high school graduation. When I closed my eyes, I pictured Blake, driving home from work after receiving my call: “Can you come home? Something’s wrong . . . Erin’s taking me to the doctor.” His response had been simple—“I’ll be there soon.” He didn’t ask any questions or make me say, Blake, I’m losing the baby. He just came. He couldn’t have known what was wrong, still, I imagined his eyes following the painted white border of the interstate over hills, around curves, and beyond the horizon, squinting toward a place in the future where everything will be all right, seeing that place like he always does, even when I don’t believe it exists.

When I felt my two-year old son squirming up under the thin weight of the quilt, I discouraged him, saying “Mommy feels sick. George, please . . .” Then I gave in, slid my hands around his chest, feeling the ridges of his rib cage as I guided him up unto my lap. He squeezed out from beneath the blue floral border, nestled his blonde head against my shoulder, and raised his thick-lashed brown eyes to meet mine. Forcing a giggle, he said, “See mommy, we are happy.” As I drank in his expression—his dark eyelashes, raised eyebrows, lips pressed into a smile—I knew he was right. But I couldn’t admit it yet, so I closed my eyes and watched spots of light dance behind my eyelids. I envisioned the black, plastic bag slouched beside the dresser in my bedroom. I remembered what was inside: maternity clothes, still dangling price tags. I told myself, We have George. It will happen again. And even if it doesn’t . . . we have him. I closed my eyes and rested against his small strength.

Thursday, March 6, afternoon

By the time I heard the words—“we can’t detect a heartbeat”—I had already begun to move from mourning to acceptance. Maybe this is best, I told myself. Maybe something was wrong with the baby.

I lay back against a stiff mattress, abdomen exposed, eyes closed. I imagined George sleeping over Blake’s shoulder in the waiting room outside, his body ironing wrinkles into his dad’s button-up plaid. I summoned the soft static of Blake’s fingertips circling the surface of my skin to replace the hospital sheets scratching my lower back, the hot weight of George’s sleeping body to protect me from the cold air that poured from a vent overhead. I tried to imagine away the steel and ceramic, machines and measurement, but the slather of thick gel, the shocking cold of plastic, and the smell of sterilization grounded me there. Eventually, the even voice of an ultrasound technician, barely audible above the hum and click of technology, commanded my attention. “The fetus stopped growing at about five weeks.”

Five weeks. I inhaled the reality, felt it echo in a hollow space at the base of my throat.

I heard the crackling static of the black and white monitor to my right and couldn’t help but look. Its glow reminded me of my first ultrasound and the pixilated image of George’s fingers flexing across the screen, but this time I saw no hope, no miracle there. Only fuzzy, grey flecks spitting shadows.

When I closed my eyes to the eerie darkness of the room, my mind traveled backwards. Five weeks. Was the baby was still alive those nights in February, when I fell asleep under the weight of my Shakespeare anthology, when I worried that I couldn’t keep up with work, school, and pregnancy? When I finally started dreaming about a baby girl with my dark eyes and Blake’s wide grin, was I picking out names for a lifeless child? Then as my memory moved forward, I remembered the muscle-wrenching that I shrugged off as morning sickness, the relief I had felt that my breasts weren’t swelling so much this time. Maybe my body had been preparing me all along.

Still, I doubted myself, wondering, Was it my fault somehow? Should I have known something was wrong? Then a whispered thought: Would it have mattered if I did?

Ever since I had seen the cotton fibers of a pregnancy test swell, watched a pair of pink lines sweep across a plastic window, I had been telling myself that it was the second baby, that I was under a lot of stress with graduate school, and that it just didn’t feel the same. Now I began to wonder, had it ever seemed real? My stomach fluttered.

Saturday, March 8

For two days after the miscarriage, I perched in a nest of blankets and pillows, pressing a heating pad into my stomach as my body anchored me in loss. As long as I had to sit still, muscles twisting around a void inside my abdomen, it was impossible to move on. While my head moved back and forth to maintain the steady rocking of the recliner, my thoughts rolled between acceptance and guilt. I fixed my eyes on the tan walls, striped curtains, and shadowed blinds of my living room. I fixed my mind on facts and statistics. Seventy percent of women who miscarry go on to have normal, healthy pregnancies. Now, with early home pregnancy tests, we detect pregnancy so soon—before, women probably didn’t know when they lost early pregnancies. I returned to the idea that something must have been wrong. Maybe this was never a viable pregnancy. Still I asked myself, shouldn’t I feel sadder? What kind of a woman, what kind of mother, am I?

When Blake talked to his boss, his end of the conversation comforted me: “No, actually, she’s doing all right, really good, I think . . . but you know, this happens sometimes, and really, we’ll be fine.” It made me believe he understood, that he wouldn’t blame me for being ready to move on. But when my own phone rang, I ignored it, trusting that my sister would tell anyone that needed to know, not wanting to convince anyone that I was fine, doing well even, not wanting them to know that my only wish was for the cramping and bleeding to end.

You should feel sadder. Mourn longer, I told myself. It had only been a few days and I already felt myself wanting to move out of my chair and leave this loss behind. I remembered my friend, Angie[1]. It was the first week of our Intro to Graduate Studies class, when we knew each other only from in-class introductions and a few minutes of casual conversation, when she scooted her chair around the corner of the table that stretched the entire length of the classroom and asked, “So, how old is George?”

“He’s almost two.”

“That’s great,” she smiled. “Tom and I want to have children, but we lost our first baby.”

Her voice quivered and she lowered her eyes, but she went on to explain that after the miscarriage and after beginning graduate school, she wasn’t sure when she would be ready to try again. I felt uneasy about the personal conversation I had just shared with a near stranger, guilty about having shared stories about my son—his love of books, baseball, and trains—with a woman who wanted but had been unable to experience motherhood.

But now our roles had reversed: Angie was five months pregnant, and I couldn’t help but wonder if now, when I returned to work and met Angie in the hall, she would feel ashamed of her pregnancy, the way it might remind me of what I had lost. I wanted her to know that the promise of her bulging belly wouldn’t bother me, but I knew I couldn’t explain. I was afraid to discuss it because I feared my eyes and voice would betray my secret—that I didn’t feel like crying, that I really thought it was better this way.

Tuesday, March 11

It’s Tuesday, and I’m back at work. On my desk, I discover a bulky manila envelope—sealed, no name written on it. I pry open the metal fingers, tear back a layer of yellow, paper skin, and tip the envelope over my desk. Out falls a lavender book. On the cover, above the fringe of a plaid baby blanket, the title reads: When Your Baby Dies: Through Miscarriage or Stillbirth. A green sticky note matching the book’s soft colors carries a message from Angie. “Here is a little book that may or may not be of some use to you. May God comfort you in your time of grief.”

I don’t cry. I don’t smile. I don’t open the book. I tuck it back into its envelope, seal it up again, and slide it under a pile of scratch paper and junk mail in my desk. Closing the cold metal drawer, I pause to think about Angie. Even now, five months into her second pregnancy, she mourns the loss of her first one. Only five days have passed since my miscarriage, and I no longer think of the pregnancy I have lost as my second pregnancy. I have erased it. This one doesn’t seem to count. I’ve only had one.

It must have been different for her, I think. She didn’t have another child to give her hope, to make her believe it could happen again, to console her in case it didn’t. I try to imagine the desperation I would have felt if this had been my first pregnancy, but I can’t. Maybe she needed a book to give her hope, needed to talk about it, needed to remember the baby she never knew, but I don’t. I have George. George, whose heartbeat echoed through a Doppler monitor, making my skin tingle months before I ever heard him cry or saw his lips opening in an awkward smile. I can’t equate the loss of a pregnancy to his life, this emptiness to his presence. I don’t need a book to tell me the difference. Without opening the pages of the book or acknowledging Angie’s carefully chosen words, I wrap a fleece scarf around my neck, button out the cold, and race to class feeling convinced that no one understands, that everyone expects me to be broken, that no one believes I can be happy with what I have.

Not until almost a year has passed, not until I have begun to write about the experience of losing a baby will I open my drawer, notice the corner of the manila envelope hidden beneath a pile of junk, and pull it out. When I slide the book out and begin to turn its thick, waxy pages, I will find a series of prayers and stories meant to encourage and comfort me. And I will be glad I waited to open it.

The book outlines the “painful clichés” people fall back on when trying to comfort women after a miscarriage; these clichés—it’s for the better, there was probably something wrong, you can always have another—are the things that continue to comfort me. The things I continue to believe.

The book also suggests that mothers who miscarry “view the remains” whenever possible. View the remains. Ask a medical professional to help search for these remains. If no remains can be found, look at pictures of a fetus at that stage of development. This will encourage acceptance and aid in the grieving process, the book says. When I read this, the first thoughts that enter my mind are, I didn’t need to view the remains. I felt each clot of blood as it escaped my body and imagined in it a small mass of tissue, an undeveloped face, limbs that would never grow. But eventually, I will become curious and search the Internet—first for information, then for images. I will find some form of comfort in learning that the baby that passed from my body was the size of a raisin; that its heart may never have begun to beat; that like most early miscarriages, this one probably resulted from chromosomal abnormalities. And I will allow myself to continue believing in what others may see as painful clichés. I will not insist that others believe them, but I will hold onto them myself.

Only then will I reread Angie’s words—“a book that may or may not be of use to you”— and realize: we doubt ourselves enough; we have no need to start doubting each other.

Saturday, July 12

I am leaving the screaming, splashing chaos of the public pool with my red-cheeked son hanging limp in my arms when I see Sasha, a high school friend, emerging from the bathroom. The olive undertones of her deeply tanned skin and the waves of blonde hair that she flips onto her back remind me of cheerleading and math class. I begin to smile. But then her cute paisley sundress stretching over her round belly catches my eye, reminds me that I was pregnant, that I would have been that big by now, too. I feel a throbbing sensation in my ears.

As Sasha beams towards me, I shift George from one hip to the other, preparing my escape. “Look at him! He’s getting so big,” she begins. “Yeah, he’s wiped out—the sun and all the swimming,” I explain. “I better get him home, down for a nap.” We say goodbye, promise to get together sometime soon, and then I set out across the park toward home, running away from something I thought I had forgotten. Maybe too easily, hisses a voice inside my head.

I recognize the pursuit.

Suddenly, I find myself back at the bottom of the stairs, sense narrowed eyes upon me, see the cat with its weight balanced on thick pads of paws, whiskers tracing the scent of my loss. For five months I have hated that cat, but this time, as I replay the scene in my mind, I watch his muscles flex as he stands from his predator’s crouch and skulks away. This time I realize that it is not the cat, but the woman at the bottom of the stairs that terrifies me: the way she hesitates, holds herself back. It is the woman who pursues me, seething with self doubt.

Not today, I tell myself, and I slow my steps until I can feel the tickle of grass reaching up over my flip flops. I concentrate on the sleepy weight of George’s head on my shoulder, his dangling limbs bouncing with each of my strides.

As I pass the steel structures of a play area, our duplex comes into view across the street. I notice Blake’s car in the driveway and feel myself eager to get home. When the gleaming yellow plastic of George’s toy loader and flat bed on the front step catches my eye, I quicken my pace. I leave the dizzying swirl of voices, the screech of swing set chains behind. I allow myself space. A warm breeze rustles the leaves of the cottonwood trees, George’s soft hair flutters on my cheek, and I relax. I am happy.

Amber Jensen is a wife, mother, teacher and writer. She will graduate in May with a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans’ low-residency program. Her essays, poetry, and reviews have been published in North Dakota Quarterly, Ellipsis, Assissi, and Terrain.org.

[1] The names of people outside my immediate family have been changed to protect their privacy.

April, An Excerpt from A Million Tiny Things by Kenna Lee

Published on April 16, 2012 in birth, family and motherhood. 2 Comments Tags: eco-feminism, green mom, motherhood.

Editor’s Note: I met Kenna Lee when our children attended the same school for a stint, and “met” her again online, impressed not only with the quality of her writing, but impressed that she was working, midwiving, and mothering three children, all while “blogging to booking.” Having chosen “April” to run (pulled in by this birth chapter’s beautiful blend of the forthright and the lyrical), I realized this excerpt happens to be missing the eco-query that dominates the majority of Lee’s book.

By eco-query I mean the kind of contortions one goes through in one’s mind with children in utero, on hip, underfoot and the future (theirs) suddenly matters, as do the choices we make as consumers: wooden toys? recycled plastic? cars that run on veggie oil? worth the choir of fighting that goes on in a smaller hybrid vs. the notorious mini-van with AC?! Lee tracks these interior monologues and more, by turns relentless and hilarious, in A Million Tiny Things. I still, however, stand behind this lovely chapter as well. Enjoy.–Tania Pryputniewicz

Year One, April By Kenna Lee

Bright Eye’s roses are blooming, bringing the first year of her life full circle. No, they’re not on the rose bush we planted over her homebirthed placenta, California hippie-style, because said placenta is tucked half-forgotten at the back of the freezer still, languishing in typical third-child neglect. We’ll plant it someday, when we remember, when we muster up some of those elusive items that such tasks require, namely time and energy.

No, Bright Eye’s roses have come to be called that because they were blooming when I was in labor a year ago. These baseball-sized white popcorn roses are improbably right outside my bedroom window; improbable because our house is built onto a hillside, and so my bedroom looks out into the treetops on the downslope. This particular rosebush, in order to survive, has reached up through the canopy of trees to claim its ration of sunlight. In most locations, a sky-high rosebush would be wasted, its blossoms inaccessible to human enjoyment, and from the ground below one would never suspect the exultant profusion of blooms lurking above the tree limbs. But here is my window, from which I can almost reach out to pick them, and from here, one year ago, I pondered them for many hours as my contractions became less and less manageable.

I was reluctant to leave the bedroom when I was in labor, as it’s the room farthest from the neighbor’s house, the same neighbors that called the cops, suspecting some domestic disturbance, during my last, nightmarish labor, during which my repetitive, Psycho-worthy screams let everyone know that I was definitively not a strong, silent, capable baby-haver. This time, knowing that I lacked the self-discipline to endure the agonies of childbirth quietly, I hid out in the bedroom, encouraging The Pragmatist to distract the boys elsewhere. I paced the short feet of floorspace left between the king-sized family bed, now protected by a plastic sheet tucked beneath our least-cherished bedding, and the padded turquoise birthing tub set up hastily that morning after I woke with surreal surety, announcing, “We’re having a baby today, boys.” Within this cramped space, I paced, and stopped, and moaned, and stared at the roses.

As skeptical as I’ve always been of the idea that having a focal point would make the intense pain of contractions more manageable, it worked. Probably because I didn’t plan it and wasn’t trying to focus on something, I was just, well, staring at the roses. And of course, it only worked until I reached that “I can’t do this anymore” stage which was the secret code by which The Pragmatist knew to call the midwife, even though I had expressly forbidden midwife-calling until I was really quite farther along, having gotten very tired of having a midwife around during that first, 49-hour, self-esteem destroying labor.

But by the time the midwife showed up, I had mostly forgotten about those instructions, and about the roses as well, and was just trying to imagine how anyone anywhere is able to endure torture without immediately divulging any and all pertinent information. I knew then that I would never, ever be able to become a spy, because I would have told anything to anyone if it would have made the pain stop. I became unbearably self-pitying and bossy, to which The Pragmatist responded by announcing that if I ever had another baby, she would divorce me unless I got an epidural.

I bellowed and shrieked, and the boys, playing with our friend Rachel in the kitchen, dug out the industrial workman’s ear protectors I had bought them to prevent them from incurring early-onset hearing loss from The Percussionist’s drum set, and came dancing through the bedroom to show them off. “We’re going to Rachel’s house to sleep, mom,” they giggled in my panting breaks between the contractions, “because we are tired and you… you are TOO LOUD.”

“And it would just be too uncomfortable to wear these earphone things to bed,” The Percussionist explained.

Before they even completed the five-minute drive to Rachel’s house, we’d called them to turn around if they wanted to see the baby come out, as the baby was on the way any second. They got back just in time for Mowgli to state his preference to sleep and immediately do so, and for The Percussionist to see everyone gathered around the birthtub, watching me squatting in such a way as to prevent anyone from seeing or knowing that the head was coming out, except by the fact that I was clutching between my legs and ordering the midwife to “HELP ME BREATHE NOW.”

Once the velvet head slid out under my palm, and it was a sliding motion, though that particular verb fails to convey even a slight sense of how incredibly torturous the moment was, I sat back on my haunches and announced, “The head’s out,” somehow expecting someone to do something about it, you know, like deliver the rest of the baby. But I believe I had cowed them all into such submission that they all froze, waiting for their next order, so I shrugged with intense frustration, and thinking, “for god’s sake, MUST I do everything myself?” I pulled my daughter out of me and up into my arms.

So tiny (at 8 lb, 6 oz the smallest of the three), she nestled there, wet-warm and cheesy, head out of the water, while I suddenly shed the shattering terror of laboring and embraced the more tender terror of motherhood again. The pain behind me, I could stop fighting, lay down my arms, and surrender to the awe of her first breath of air. Not the most articulate person during times of great stress, I kept breathlessly repeating, “I’m so happy. I’m so happy,” over and over, as if I needed convincing of it.

The Pragmatist and our midwife supported me as I stood to move onto the bed for the delivery of the placenta, and I paused, towel-wrapped babe in arms, noticing with intense gratitude the treetop cascade of roses hovering just beyond the window. Even now they remind me that behind pain can lurk unfathomable beauty, just as behind the burning and fear of birthing my daughter, a great healing lay within the experience of bringing her into the world with my own hands. Something that had broken in me during my first too-long, too-scary birth was put back together by that sensation of feeling her muzzle-soft crown swell into my palm, the impossibly smooth skin bloom into her face. For days, weeks after she was born, I repeated the motion, sliding my palm over her soft hair, down her temple, and in doing so I was telling myself without even realizing it at the time: that which is broken can be healed.

It is a message she does well to bring with her, accompanied as she is by my load of eco-anxieties. Her roses are blooming again, and for her first birthday, I’ve managed to pull a few down from up high to cut for our kitchen table. On her actual birthday, as if aware that I won’t be able to remember the milestone without this coincidence, Bright Eyes takes her first reeling steps toward me, my only-yesterday newborn girl, walking. I greet this new child, this toddler, with the same words I used when I first looked into her face one year ago: “Hello, Bright Eyes. I’m so happy.” Happy, and scared shitless, but still walking forward, step by careful, brave step.

Full-time nurse, part-time environmentalist, and all-the-time mother, Kenna Lee lives in Sebastopol, California, with her three semi-feral children and several domesticated animals. Her book, A Million Tiny Things: a mother’s urgent search for hope in a changing climate (Mole’s Hill Press, 2012) is available now through your local independent bookseller; for more information, visit her website.

Exploring the Fictional Worlds of Poet Tasha Cotter

Published on February 6, 2012 in birth, interview and motherhood. 1 Comment Tags: mothers and daughters, poetry, women's clinic.

Tasha Cotter

Your prose poem, “A Lack of Power at the South Central Women’s Clinic” opens with a clean, crisp image of “men in hard hats dart[ing] like bats in a gray air.” Can you talk to us about your process of writing this poem? How you decide when to use the prose poetry form? (Or to blend traditional stanzas with prose poetry, as you do in “Description of a Figment and a Letter to Imagination?”)

Even now A Lack of Power at the South Central Women’s Clinic seems strikingly different from much of my other work, the language and scene feels more raw and exposed. The poem came about when I was in a lobby, waiting to get a physical (it was a requirement before I could work with kids in the schools). Like so many of my poems, I used one element of reality to begin sketching a fictional world. For me, it feels like taking the essence of something and building a world to anchor it.

The poem began like this: I got a journal out and began braiding threads together–segmented thoughts and abstract concepts all started fitting together. The man at reception, the discomfort that arises from the most trivial things. I asked myself what if you were very scared? I tend to be a very discreet person, very secretive too, and so I used a voice much like my own in this prose poem–a form I associate with Baudelaire and the french, that’s being reimagined and redefined by contemporary poets like Sarah Manguso, Laura Kasischke, and Ann Carson.

I sat there scribbling for a while, hoping that I didn’t seem too strange, lost in my frantic little world in the Professional Park Plaza. It was rainy and cold out–a combination that always puts me in a gloomy mood. I remember feeling better once I got most of the poem on the page. It felt like I’d had a parallel anxiety that only found relief once there was something on the page. Odd, I know. The whole business of writing continues to alert me to aspects of myself I didn’t know existed….

You preface “Description of a Figment and a Letter to Imagination” with a few lines by poet Sarah Manguso. Can you talk to us about what draws you to Manguso’s work?

Sarah Manguso has been a very important influence on my own work. My two favorite books of hers are “Siste Viator” and “Captain Lands in Paradise.” I still remember how I felt after first reading her poem “Address to Winnie in Paris.” Dickinson said that she knew poetry by the sensation of “her head being taken off” and whenever I read Sarah Manguso’s work, that’s how I feel. My other two favorite poems of hers include “What we Miss” and “Love Letter (clouds).” The world gets re-ordered when I enter her poems and that’s what I look for in poetry. I was always drawn to the surrealists and the dada movement in Paris always captivated me for that same reason. I love Man Ray’s work and Duchamp’s—when I view their work it’s like something in me is being fed. Poets like Rusty Morrison and Ilya Kaminsky are other poets who just continue to inspire and astound me. They infuse my life with beauty and so I return to them again and again.

The poem Description of a Figment and a Letter to Imagination is something I’ve been working on for about three years now. It’s one of those poems you put away for a while and re-visit every six months or so, tweaking a line-break, checking the language, and basically improving it incrementally. The poem arrived too fast–I’m always suspicious of anything that comes about too easily, even if it feels nearly right. I don’t know where the idea for the poem came from, but when I re-read it a few months ago, I had a new take on it–it felt spacious and airy.

The white space seemed to operate like stage lighting for the beginning half of the poem. For some reason I kept imagining a white landscape when reading the poem–a blank modern shell of an apartment that comes off as distant and cold. The poem seemed to defy intimacy and inhabit it all at once. Now, more than ever, I see the poem being about the possibility of fertility–there’s something about life giving rise to life that seems so mysterious, so unexpected to me. Sometimes I just sit and meditate on what feels magical in an effort to understand it better: the notion of birth, some technologies, computer languages… I am endlessly fascinated by these things.

One of my favorite lines in “She Shouts at the Absence,” is the one that suggests, “Talk like a cowgirl who has chased an animal / For days, in a lonesome expanse of burnt orange country.” How did you arrive at this image? Any desire to discuss the writing of this poem?

I wanted to begin with a directive of sorts. I’d seen it done before and I liked the effect of pulling the reader into this world. I begin with “Go to a party…” and I wanted to continue building this world and guiding the reader. At the time I was living out west, surrounded by a burnt orange landscape. Mountain sage grew wild. I’d never seen anything like that vastness—it’s an image that still stays with me because of how compelling it all was—it just made a big impression. I was living in Colorado and I couldn’t help but think about how land—spectacular places like that—have this ability to minimize all other preoccupations and really transport you out of yourself and out of all that is human. You can’t help but feel small and a little awestruck. You start to question the great mysteries when you’re living in the shadow of a mountain range.

It’s that feeling I was trying to capitalize on when I was writing the lines you mention in your question. When you’re facing something that vast—when you’ve lost something that could by now be anywhere—you can’t help but feel lost and a little hopeless, but it doesn’t keep you from searching, even if what you need remains unreachable. I’ve always looked to the land for contrasts in my work. Naomi Shihab Nye has this line in her poetry about inheriting the ability to stand on a piece of land and stare. She’s not changing it, not transforming it, but looking as if to find something—to receive something just by that gesture of being present. I grew up in the rural south—I’ll always crave a certain amount of distance between myself and the rest of the world.

Some say it’s necessary to find “one’s voice” in their work. They work and work until something stabilizes–the voice, themes, language. To an extent, I understand what they mean. But when I look over my own work there are several personalities present: contradictory theories on life and lots of literary forms at play because I’m constantly experimenting. Maybe there’s a common denominator that I’m missing, I don’t know. The truth is I pay little attention to genre, focusing almost entirely on whatever it is I’m trying to communicate. I’ve written a three page poem before and I’ve written a hundred word story. As a writer, it feels like society wants to find a label for each piece of writing, though I think journals are getting more comfortable with accepting pieces whose form is irregular and resists classification.

Any mentors you’d like to share with us?

I was an undergrad at the University of Kentucky when I met Nikky Finney, who was a hugely important figure in my life. I took two of her courses—Poetry 407 and 507. She was a constant inspiration. She made me think of myself as a writer, constantly treating me like I was a peer. I’d never met anyone like her. Her comments and feedback on my work were exactly what I needed. I remember she had us all keep a word journal in which we were to turn in ten new words each week—a short definition and a sentence on why we chose each word.

I kept my words in a black moleskin journal—I still have it. I remember I logged a lot of hours at the William T. Young library that semester, trying to find the most interesting, most poetic words to include in my journal. I still have that journal—it’s like a treasure chest. She motivated me to think differently and to observe everything. At the time my poetry was rather cryptic, not anchored to the ground at all. She opened my eyes to narrative and accessibility in poetry. I was thrilled when I heard she received the National Book Award in Poetry—it couldn’t have gone to a more deserving poet.

For a long time I called poetry home, though I never, ever called myself a poet. I didn’t even like the term writer. I surrounded myself with books by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Plath, and Joyce growing up, so I don’t think I’ll ever feel right referring to myself as a writer or poet. I remember in June of 2006 getting a package of books in the mail from Nikky–(all by Guy Davenport) she’d written ‘Poet’ after my name on the front of the package she’d mailed to me. I’ll be honest: seeing that title after my name thrilled me, but, despite being immensely flattered, I rejected the whole thing, opting instead to identify myself as teacher, educator, advisor. Anything but writer. Anything but Poet.

What are you currently working on?

For the last two years I’ve been in the midst of writing fiction. When I heard that The Fertile Source wanted to feature three poems, I felt a bit like a prodigal daughter, finally home after a very long trip away. I re-read the work and began to recall the choices I made. I remember who I am when I return to my old surroundings. There was poetry, waiting for me though I’d been away for some time. There was something comforting about being back–after all, poetry was what started it all for me. It has personally defined me for so long now. It’s been a lens I’ve used to give shape and meaning to my life.

Right now I have two full-length poetry manuscripts in need of a publisher. I’m not very good about entering contests–the whole thing can get pretty costly in no time, so I’ve been doing research on small, independent presses. Although I’m mostly working in fiction, I almost always have a poem I’m polishing–at this point it’s an act that I’m convinced is bound up in my identity. I like the element of understanding and the process of discovery comes with trying to capture the nuance in what I see and what I feel. In terms of publishing, I try to always have some of my flash fiction or poetry circulating among the literary journals. I’ve found that having a background in poetry can be a very useful skill-set for a fiction writer. I’m convinced that working in more than one genre can only improve upon the other.

And Tasha, for fun, we noticed the guitar in the photo on your website. Is music part of your poetry?

The picture on the website was taken at Normandi Ellis’s PenHouse Writer’s Retreat in 2011. It was an open mic event. I will say, though, that the idea of flight and music play a big part in one of my poetry collections. I’ve always been fascinated by bird imagery—Booth published a poem of mine titled “Goldfinches” last year. Some of my work seems to orbit both of those elements. It’s also true that I listen to music a lot when I’m writing. Right now I’m listening to Bon Iver, Lana del Rey, Vetiver, and The Shout Out Louds.

I want my work to be sonically pleasing. Without fail I always read my poems aloud as I’m editing them. I want the sounds to sort of inform each other. If a line feels clunky, or I leave out a word when I’m reading the poem aloud, I know something needs correcting and I’ll work to smooth out the language.

Tasha Cotter’s work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming in Booth, The Rumpus, Contrary Magazine, and elsewhere. Her fiction was recently nominated for a story South Million Writers award, and her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net Anthology 2011. You can find her online at www.tashacotter.com.

Three Poems by Tasha Cotter

Published on January 30, 2012 in motherhood. 0 Comments Tags: motherhood, poetry, women's clinic.

A Lack of Power at the South Central Women’s Clinic

It looks like the power lines are being restored. Outside, men in hard hats dart like bats in a gray air. This time I’m not worried about my medical records or what my hypothetical political rival would leak to a hypothetical media. The man in front of me wants to know which insurance carrier is better: Humana or Anthem? There are more men than women in the office. I hate it when men are in lingerie stores, tampon aisles, and women’s clinics. It’s 2 PM on Tuesday and it’s unseasonably cold. No one wants this more than I do.

Description of a Figment and a Letter to Imagination

Where are you if not outside the enclosure?
Only figments live inside.
I am colorless and cold, I am my own figment.
–Sarah Manguso, “The Black Garden”

Small—as you would imagine.
Immaculate and white
Like a light beam of memory
Focus until I see a tiny blank
Body the size of a keyhole.
You are unspeakably clean.
So pure, I’m scared of you.
But this is where my emptiness
Goes. You are the address
I muster after sight settles down.
My body is adrift, we pace
This room. I notice someone
Faint through the wall
To wall windows.

***

I am told to be realistic by everyone but you and so I thank you and each piece

of dandelion wing I see in wind oddly departed from its weeping stalk. How does it feel released from cell—weaker parts get me down. You can’t be located biologically, but I say what about all those endless shivers and wakes that speak for themselves (loudly & within). Watch what you read: unreliable definitions cause panic. Think of the light as coming from within. Think hard on what you are.

She Shouts at the Absence

Go to a party of mothers and daughters.
It’s just that you are motherless.
As you listen to the sound of braiding hair,
As you listen to pepper jelly recipes
Don’t tear up.

Hold that bird your heart.

In the basement they are searching
Their skin tones for clues, propping
Themselves on beige furniture.
You pretend you’re fine, lightly laugh,
Accept wishes, whatever they are.

Talk like a cowgirl who has chased an animal
For days, in a lonesome expanse of burnt orange country.
The animal escaped, passed a point of no return.
Sit wondering how it happened.

(Cowgirl thought it wanted to stay).

Act like the blood that escapes
The bullet hole is not physical, not seen.
Dab it with a handkerchief of lace.

Bastard babies are born with broken hearts: an interview with Leslie Worthington

Published on January 23, 2012 in adoption, birth mother, motherhood, pregnancy and sexuality. 2 Comments

Interview by Jessica Powers

Last week, we published Leslie Worthington’s short story, “The Beach House,” a story about a young woman, pregnant and unwed, and trying to deal with her emotions as the father of her baby arranges an adoption. This week, I spoke with her about the spark for her story; about the realities of young women and pregnancy both today and back in the 1960s, when the story is set; and about why writing about these issues is important.

1. What was the spark for your story?

The spark for the story came from a single sentence: “Bastard babies are born with broken hearts.” That popped into my head, and I liked the alliteration and the oxymoronic nature of the phrase “bastard babies.” We don’t use the word “bastard” in its original sense much anymore, so it added a shock to the statement. At first, I thought the sentence was a line of poetry, but it eventually became the story “The Beach House.” I wrote the story around it.

2. Setting (time and place) is critical for this story. Can you give us a little bit of historical background for women who found themselves in your protagonist’s situation (unwed, pregnant) in the 1960s, when this story is set? The 1960s are an interesting bridge between cultural mores since the so-called “sexual revolution” was happening yet it was before Roe v. Wade.

Women find themselves in this situation even today. Their options may be different, but sometimes when they are young and poor as Cecelia is, things aren’t all that different. I set the story in the 60’s partly because I wanted the reader to think about that. At first glance, you can say “oh, thank goodness it isn’t like that anymore.” But is that really true? Yes, as you say the sexual revolution had begun, but yet women didn’t have access to reliable birth control, there was no planned parenthood, and the options were, keep the child or put it up for adoption. I think most women got married whether they wanted to or not. Those who put their babies up for adoption were often hidden away as Cecelia is. These girls were kicked out of school and sometimes sent off to homes for unwed mothers or to live with family far away so they could come back and pretend nothing had ever happened. No one spoke of the child, and the girl could never speak of what had happened to her. Another option was sometimes to give the child to a family member as Cecelia’s mother had left her to be raised by her grandmother. Most of the time, these women never had a voice or avenue for release, a way to deal with their loss and pain over the huge thing that had happened to them. They just had to shove it down inside themselves.

Dr. Leslie Worthington

Despite easy access to birth control, despite additional options, despite the lessened stigma on pregrancy without marriage, women, not just girls, still find themselves in this situation. As a college English professor, I meet them all the time. They are in my classes, they miss exams to have babies, and they write essays about babies they’ve lost and given up. And society now, in the twenty-first century, isn’t as forgiving as we might like to think; these women aren’t always as forgiving of themselves.

For Cecelia, she isn’t going to get married. The baby’s father doesn’t have that in mind. Her family thinks she is, so she can’t even go home without humiliation. Can she go home to her grandparents with a baby, as her mother did? It’s obvious she doesn’t have the means to keep the baby and care for it by herself. It’s also obvious that she doesn’t want to give that baby up. She’s decided on the baby’s gender, given him a name, and a future. She’s imagined his future without her. She’s fallen in love with her child before he’s even born, as mothers do. Cecelia faces a horrible dilemma.

3. I love the ending, where we don’t know if Cecilia dies or just imagines her death and, later, makes it to shore. Metaphorically, however, she felt as though her life was essentially over. Can you talk about how you crafted the ambiguity and the metaphor into that ending?

I guess I haven’t thought much about intentionally crafting the ambiguity of the ending. I’ve displeased some readers who couldn’t believe I’d create a woman who would kill her child. I think the ambiguity comes from the fact that even Cecelia doesn’t know what she’s going to do. She doesn’t set out intending to commit suicide. She doesn’t go into the water intending it. Maybe she thinks she’s letting fate take over, and the universe will decide. She’s been in denial, not thinking about what’s going to happen. She’s a very adaptable person, as we can see from her memories of her life before the baby. She’s alone, and her future is uncertain, but she’s making the best of where she’s found herself. She’s enjoying the leisure, her reading, the beach. Being able to adapt to change and stick it out through hard times is a desirable and even admirable quality, but sometimes it hurts us. Sometimes we need to be able to say, “No, stop this” “or I want out of this. I’m not going to take this anymore.” Wes’s remark about this being over soon sets her thinking more deeply about her situation. So when she sets out for her walk that day, reality is flooding over her. She does not want to give up her baby, and maybe killing herself and taking the baby with her is the only control she’s ever going to have over her own life.

One thing I did want the story to have was metaphor. I wanted the things she sees on her walk along the beach to have meaning to her, as our surroundings take on life and meaning when significant things are happening to us internally. Yellow houses become symbols of a happy life. Birds protecting their nests become young mothers who have to give up their babies. The world around Cecelia becomes infused with meaning as she becomes more emotionally aware.

4. Why do you think it’s important to probe these issues surrounding sexuality, pregnancy, and motherhood in literature?

These issues are part of our common experience, and art is a cultural experience as well as an individual one. I don’t believe literature has to be didactic, but it does need to be about something, something important. Sexuality, pregnancy, motherhood are all important to who we are as women, and the sharing of these experiences and feelings joins us. Sharing can sometimes lead to healing.

5. What are you working on now?

I’ve just finished an academic book about intertextual connections between Mark Twain and Cormac McCarthy entitled Cormac McCarthy and the Ghost of Huck Finn. It was released a couple of weeks ago. I’m currently working with a colleague on an anthology of essays about images and definitions of home in the work of Appalachian artists.

With my own fiction, I’ve been working on a collection of short stories for some time now. It will probably be called Odes of Solitude. Each piece has a female character who imagines, remembers, or hallucinates the story, yet she’s the only character who is actually present. “The Beach House” is part of the collection. And I continue to write poetry, usually about the experiences of women: career, love, children, grandchildren, and balancing all our many, many roles.

Hundred-Year-Old Soup

Published on December 5, 2011 in birth and motherhood. 1 Comment

An essay by Amy Amoroso

For Duncan

I made a pot of carrot lentil soup the day before going into labor. It was big enough for dinner that night, plus two nights during the week. But instead of easy meals for my final days of pregnancy, the soup came to the hospital with us, where it would sit in glass jars on a shelf in the Labor and Delivery refrigerator for days. We never ate the rest of it. And for some reason that lentil soup is one of the details I can’t ever forget.

Duncan came four days early. He came without crying. He came without breath. And after all of our childbirth classes and birth plans, we couldn’t have been prepared for what happened during his birth. On the short ride to the hospital, I thought of all the things I’d left undone. There were boxes of baby clothes that needed sorting, the sixty-year-old family bassinet that needed painting, and the cloth diapers that needed another round of washing and hanging in the sun. I assumed, since Seth and I are perpetually late, that our child would fall into line and that I’d have plenty of time to get these things done. I also imagined that after a healthy and hard labor, I would welcome my child immediately into my arms and onto my chest like I’d seen in the DVD’s we watched in class. It turns out that I was wrong, and maybe I should have taken my early broken water as a sign.

Seth and I expected to spend most of the early labor at home, but since my water broke, our midwife thought we should meet her at the hospital. At first we were giddy and excited about meeting our baby, but as the hours went by, time became warped and we stopped exchanging words. Orange leaves dropped from a maple tree outside our hospital window and the sun was high in a blue sky, but I had no real sense of how long we’d been there. Yes, there was pain, but I can’t access it anymore. Not in a concrete sense. I remember breathing like the sound of waves, loud enough to push my thoughts away and deep enough to dampen the sharp edges of my contractions.

Before I knew it, the sun was gone. An entire day had almost passed and I was still laboring. Most of the details are fuzzy, but I remember chicken salad, a red rose on the windowsill from my sister, and Van Morrison singing Astral Weeks. I wound my way inward to a place inside my body I’d never been before. Numbers, time, even food had left my consciousness. I moaned and moved according to the rhythm of my body. I floated in a Jacuzzi, squatted over a toilet seat.

When it was finally time to push, I was on the floor. Seth and our midwife were there too. Their faces weren’t in my view, but I could feel their hands and hear their words. With my knees bent and my head bowed, I felt like an animal. It didn’t matter that I was in a hospital on the corner of State and Spring streets in Portland, Maine. I could have been in the woods on a bed of pine needles or in the middle of the ocean.

Duncan’s head came while I was there on the floor, and I felt immediate relief. But the rest of him didn’t slide out like I’d seen in the birthing DVDs. I didn’t know this at the time, but he was stuck, and our midwife had started to panic. She tried moving me to different positions and then finally decided to help me up onto the bed. I was reluctant to heave my pregnant body, complete with a newly born head poking out, back up onto the hospital bed. It was the one place I had decided early on that I did not want to give birth. When I was squatting on the ground, I could push every one away and focus. I could imagine I was an animal birthing in the woods the way we talked about in one of our childbirth classes. Up on the bed, plastic monitors flashed digital numbers, numbers I had no concept of at that point. People in scrubs swirled around the room. And the gray institutional doors and florescent lights brought consciousness back to me. All of it lifted me from my birthing trance and I suddenly became rationally aware of what was happening.

When I was in graduate school for writing, a professor of mine would say, If the sun and moon should doubt, they would go out. He was talking about us as writers and the natural flow of a story. It’s only when we start to doubt what we’ve written, when we stop to break down the components of the story before it’s done, that the whole magical gift of storytelling goes out like a light. Giving birth is similar. You work yourself into a trance and you flow there until the job is done, until the pain of it is over, and you have the first draft of a beautiful life. But if you stop in the middle of it and think about what it is you are actually doing, you risk putting the breaks on the whole process.

So there I was, surrounded by nurses, by Seth and my midwife, and by the reality that it had been 22 hours since my water broke and at 24 hours it wouldn’t be as safe for the baby to be inside me anymore. I wasn’t sure what kinds of interventions they would try, but I saw in their faces that it was time to push the baby out. Except that now I was suddenly conscious of how much time it’d been since I last slept and how utterly exhausted I was. They were all cheering me on as if I were twelve years old again and swimming in a race. That’s the one, Amy. That’s the push. I wished they would stop. I wished I was back in the middle of the ocean by myself, birthing my child. I told the midwife I couldn’t do it anymore. I knew in my heart that I wasn’t giving in to anything yet, but for some reason I had to say the words and see what kind of power they had.

It was then that I saw Seth’s eyes. I mean, actually saw them. Blue, blood shot, determined. He moved his head into my line of vision and somehow lifted me from the hospital room, the bed, the day that had slipped away from us, and said, “Aim, we need to get this baby out now.” He wasn’t mad or scared, just matter-of-fact, like he always is, pulling me back to the work that needs to be done. Somewhere between consciousness and dream, I pushed, and the others in the room chanted, I pushed, they chanted. It went on forever it seemed. But finally, with a nurse shoving my legs back toward my ears and the midwife pressing hard on my belly, Duncan was born.

He came into the world silent and blue. Before I could catch my breath, Duncan’s cord was cut and his slippery soul was whisked away to a plastic cart beside my bed. A nurse pressed on his tiny chest and blew air into him. For seven minutes we waited, suspended between life and death.

Flashes of what I knew about babies in the womb came to me like tiny dreams, messages from the gods. “Go to him,” I told Seth. “Let him hear your voice.”

My knees were heavy. My arms numb from pushing the bed, the floor, the tiles in the shower. But I held each limb with such intensity that I was almost hovering above that hospital bed.

Our midwife yelled to call anesthesia, to get the baby intubated, but the nurse refused. She was calm. She’d been here before. “He’ll breath on his own,” she said, quietly. “He can do it.” Two fingers pumping, lips blowing. Nothing.

Seth moved from my side to the cart. He took Duncan’s tiny fingers in his own.

This couldn’t be happening, I thought. After all of that, he had to be okay.

If the sun and moon should doubt… There was a space just above the light of the warmer, a space full of air and breath and the energy of all the women who’d given birth before me in that room, a space where the sun and the moon had shone, where everything merged together. It was that force, like water coming together at the mouth of a river, that I focused on during those minutes of limbo. I held it with my whole being, that God of the moment, and begged it to give me my child. To make him cry. To fill the room with the missing sound I ached in the center of my chest for. It was worse than what I imagine being starved of water or food would be like, my own flesh and blood nurtured and loved for 40 weeks, tucked safely under my heart, now limp on a plastic hospital cart that seemed miles away.

The room was painfully quiet as Seth leaned down close to Duncan’s body. “Hey, little guy,” he whispered.

And then I could see a foot move. Fingers curling. Then, full of the gusto of life and fight, Duncan parted his lips and screamed. He screamed a blood curdling beautiful song. And we all took a long, slow breath, as if we too were tasting air for the very first time. Even though it seemed the whole world had been in suspension a moment before, we now didn’t have time to doubt the animal instinct inherent in all of us: to simply fill our chest cavities with air and breathe.

Hey, little guy. I still hear those words like a prayer in my mind.

Duncan screamed for almost an hour. We cried, too, and laughed, and held him so that his little lips were pressed against our skin. Feeling the warmth of his breath was like feeling sun on my body. When it was over and we were sure he was okay, I walked down the hall to the hospital refrigerator. I was starving. There on the middle shelf in two glass jars was the lentil soup we’d brought from home. It was just as orange as it was the day before. And it reminded me of all the undone things I had on my to-do list. It reminded me of the bassinet, and the piles of clothes, our dirty bathroom and all the things that didn’t really matter. Everything had changed since I last ate that soup. I’d been out to the middle of the ocean, to the woods, to a place only the animal brain can understand. I’d hovered in limbo for what seemed like hours, waiting for my baby to come to life. And I wasn’t the same person. I would never be who I was when I made that soup again. It seemed like the soup was 100 years old as I stood there in my slippers, with my uterus shrinking.

That night, Seth told me he felt something different in his heart now. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “It’s like waves pulsing in my chest.” He put his hand on his heart and his eyes filled with water. Perhaps he’d been to the woods and the ocean and back, too. We didn’t eat our lentil soup that night. Instead, my sister brought us sushi and champagne.

Amy Amoroso is a writer and mother of two. After leaving medical school, she completed an MFA in Creative Writing and went on to teach writing at George Mason University and the University of Southern Maine. She currently works as a ghostwriter in Portland, Maine and helps women write about their birthing experiences. Amy is working on a novel and several nonfiction essays. Her fiction is published in Alligator Juniper and Upstreet.

Celebrating the Foregoing of Motherhood: Poetry in the Service of Spiritual Quandary, Lineage, and Teaching Adolescents with Poet Lisa Rizzo

Published on November 14, 2011 in family, interview and motherhood. 0 Comments Tags: foregoing motherhood, poetry, teaching.

Lisa Rizzo

Editor’s Note: I first heard Lisa read “Daughters” at a Women on Writing (WOW) conference in the Bay Area three years ago and thought the poem belonged here at The Fertile Source; no coincidence then, that several days into this summer’s 2011 A Room of Her Own Foundation (AROHO) Writing retreat, I found myself sharing breakfast with Lisa, talking poetry. Once we realized our earlier connection—that we’d first met at WOW–I had the opportunity to ask her again for the poem, along with “Uneasy Grace” and “Childhood”. I left in Lisa’s nods to me (forgive the indulgence), drinking in a little return acknowledgment for the time and hours spent here, with gratitude. Enjoy—Tania Pryputniewicz

I read these poems looking at the question of foregoing motherhood as a series, assuming a common narrator. As a trio, they present a moving look at the process of such a decision, and oddly enough, the dual finality and opportunity to connect in other ways. The childless narrator of “Uneasy Grace,” in reference to the gift of time with her niece, ends the poem on a haunting question, “What other spirit could I need?” Can you talk to us about how the process of writing poetry might lend itself to such decision? (Or what does poetry offer that other forms might not?)

For me, poetry is about being brutally honest with myself. When writing a poem, I can’t hide from myself, but rather have to face myself head-on. A friend just wrote to me: “You manage to tear out parts of yourself and stand back and appreciate them. I wanted to say analyze, but that is too harsh.” That is exactly what I want to do with my poems! So perhaps this art form has allowed me not just to accept my childless stay – a decision that in our society is often suspect, but to embrace it as a positive thing.

It amazes me how many words referring to spirit or religion I use in my poems. As I described in this poem, I have a real quandary about what I think of spirituality. It’s one of those gray areas in my life I prefer not to analyze too much, even though I write about my unresolved feelings all the time. In the same way, foregoing motherhood kind of crept up on me unawares. I think I had made the decision long before I realized it. As with most women, it was and is a difficult thing to explain. I do know that it was only after I became comfortable with my life without children that I decided to become a teacher. Are those two events related? I’m not sure, but I do think the progression rather interesting.

In a delightful turn, nested within “Uneasy Grace,” we witness the lineage of poetry itself passed from aunt to niece as they compose haiku together. Can you talk to us about the role poetry plays for you in your daily life?

I find it interesting that you used the word “nested” in your question – it brings us back to the idea of mother/caretaker. Thinking about this makes me realize just how much poetry is intertwined with my interactions with the children in my life. I’m lucky that I get to share in both sides of the poetic dance in my writing as well as with my day job. Being a middle school teacher, while challenging to my writing life in many ways, also allows me to share my love of poetry with the young people whom I teach. Adolescents are just awakening to their own place in the world and as a result, they are learning the power of words. So many of them love poetry. I enjoy the interplay between us when we read and write poetry together. It is that sense of wonder that I got when I wrote the haikus with my niece that day in church.

How did you arrive at the metaphor of the ribbon (appearing in both “Childhood” and “Daughters”) and were there other metaphors you considered along the way?

Until you asked this question, I had never even noticed the connection of the ribbon metaphor in both poems. Isn’t that amazing? I love it that other people can see things that I as the poet don’t! To be honest, I’m not sure how I came up with these metaphors. I do know that in both poems I was exploring the idea of where I come from, how my background and family has influenced who I am today. Those ribbons hold me to the past while giving me enough “line” to move on into my future. This is something I write about often.

Have you encountered work by other writers along this topic line that you’d recommend to us? Any desire to address the range of ways you see mothering still finding expression despite a decision to forego having a child (either in your life or the lives of others)?

This is a very interesting question. I really have not come across poems along this line. Once at a poetry reading, another poet read a poem about her unborn children, but that is really the only one I can think of. I believe this is such a sensitive topic in our society that many women don’t talk about it – or if they do talk about not having children, they have to excuse themselves. I know I have to be careful not to do that myself. I think this is why the poem “Daughters” has such an impact whenever I read it – I am always amazed at the deep emotions it seems to stir in other women. I feel quite honored by some of the stories women have shared with me after hearing this poem.

In “Childhood,” the lines “my future self tucked / dormant and waiting/ packed for my journey” struck me as an eloquent ovarian metaphor, in the context of the green suitcase the child is carrying. Can you talk to us about the process of writing this poem?

The photograph (view here) I wrote about is one of the most evocative images of myself that I have. It’s hanging on my bedroom wall right now. There is just something about the look on my little four-year old face that draws me back to it. I looked so hopeful about the world around me, yet also a little afraid. (The way I still feel most of the time even today!) Another very provocative part of the photo is the small fragment of my childhood friend that appears behind me. This has always intrigued me because she was wearing what appears to be an identical dress. Because so little of her can be seen, it looks almost like a ghost image. And why was I carrying a suitcase? I wrote this poem when I was just beginning to take myself seriously as a writer. The idea that this poet self was there all along comforted me.

Any writing mentors you wish to share with us?

My most important mentor is Charlotte Muse (her real name!). She’s a local poet with whom I have been taking poetry workshops for many years. She is an amazing teacher; gentle and encouraging while at the same time incredibly honest in her criticism. I credit her encouragement in helping me overcome my nagging self-doubt about my poetry.

And then there are all the amazing women writers I met at AROHO (like you, Tania!). I now consider every one of those women to be mentors. Since attending that retreat, the support I received there has helped me find a new commitment to my identity as a writer.

How do you balance teaching and writing?

With much effort and difficulty! It is always a struggle to meld these two parts of my life so that I don’t feel like they are at war with each other. To be a teacher means to be on stage for most of the day, a very extraverted activity. Then I often don’t have any energy left when I go home to tap into the introverted poet in me. Since coming home from AROHO, I’ve done a better job because I won’t let myself off the hook as much when it comes to carving out time for my writing. When I was at Ghost Ranch, I bought a stone that had an image carved into it. There were many of them with various images. The first one I was drawn to had a carving of a half moon/half sun. When I read the description of what this image was supposed to represent, it said it showed an eclipse. This is symbolizes power and union. I think it is a perfect metaphor for how I am trying to balance the union between these two sides of myself.

What are you currently working on?

I am working on a variety of things. As far as my poetry, I am currently at work on a series of poems about my trip to the Serengeti this past summer. Being there was awe-inspiring. I am also trying to “outline” a vision for a poetry manuscript that I hope to write. I truly hate outlines, but I want to be more intentional about finding the connections between my poems so they work together to form a book. So far, that means a great deal of musing but little black and white on the page!

Recently I started my own blog Poet Teacher Seeks World. I never thought I would blog (I do hate how we have made this a verb) until I met you, Tania. Also, I’m working on our collaborative interview project, AROHO Speaks: Writer to Writer. Again, this is a new type of venture for me and I am enjoying it immensely.

Lisa Rizzo is a poet and middle school language arts teacher who manages to combine her love of words and poetry with her day job. She was born in Texas, grew up in Chicago and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Lucid Stone, 13^th Moon, Writing for Our Lives, Earth’s Daughters, Bellowing Ark and Calyx Journal. In the Poem an Ocean is her first chapbook publication. She recently entered the “blogosphere” with her blog Poet Teacher Seeks World and the collaborative project AROHO Speaks: Writer to Writer.

Childhood, Daughters, Uneasy Grace: Three Poems by Lisa Rizzo

Published on November 9, 2011 in family and motherhood. 2 Comments Tags: foregoing motherhood, poetry.

Childhood

I begin with a photograph:
find a face
much like my present one
peeping out
shy, unsure of its welcome.
A tree stands behind –
shading scrub yard and gray steps.
My dress white
organdy.
On my head
a hat of plain straw
with black band and flowers.
Its yellow ribbon grasps
my neck firmly.
On the back I read:
“Lisa in Mt. Pleasant 1960?”
The question repeated
in my face.

In the upper left corner –
on the half hidden porch
a snippet of another girl
in a white dress
in a straw hat.
Since she has no face
I imagine her to be
my shadow
refusing to cooperate.
The smile I can see –
half formed,
head dipped
seeming to say: “Please.”
Carried in my hand
a child’s round suit case.
It is green.
Into this
my future self tucked
dormant and waiting,
packed for my journey.

Daughters

I bear a thin red ribbon
around my wrist. This flows
from me to my mother
and back. I am
the eldest daughter of
an eldest daughter of
an eldest daughter.
This embrace I can never
unwind. Instead I
have chosen to cut my own
daughter free – the bond
never begun.

On my 38th birthday gazing
at a bowl of daffodils I
forced to bloom, I conceded
I would never have a child.
I shed no tears, but simply felt
hot wax seal the ribbon’s end.

I am a woman
who will never have children,
who never expected to fall in love
with the sweet hair and baby grasp
of her brother’s daughter.
Still I have no tears, only
now I understand what
I have foregone.

Uneasy Grace

Ensnared into church by my mother’s faith
and Christmas wishes:
that old Methodist feeling of
remorse and regret
blended with a tinge of guilt.
Uncomfortable tug of a past
that no longer fits
even if I might want it.
Sitting silent during prayers
so I don’t feel a liar.

And then a gift:
My brother and his daughter
slid into the pew,
she in her little girl finery:
spangly dress and slippers
I brought her from Istanbul,
their cardboard soles soggy
with Portland rain.
She and I amused ourselves with
counting hymns and syllables
for haiku:

Winter is wonder.
Winter is snowflakes in the air.
Winter is cocoa.
By Felicity Grace, age 9

Winter is wonder.
When mist marries mountainside
Cedars sprinkle stars.
By Lisa Grace, age 51

What other spirit could I need?
This is something I know how to hold.

Lisa Rizzo is a poet and middle school language arts teacher who manages to combine her love of words and poetry with her day job. She was born in Texas, grew up in Chicago and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Lucid Stone, 13^th Moon, Writing for Our Lives, Earth’s Daughters, Bellowing Ark and Calyx Journal. In the Poem an Ocean is her first chapbook publication. “Childhood” was previously published in 13th Moon; “Daughters” previously appeared in Writing for Our Lives. All three poems published here today also appeared in In the Poem an Ocean. Rizzo recently entered the “blogosphere” with her blog Poet Teacher Seeks World and the collaborative project AROHO Speaks: Writer to Writer.

The Empty Cradle

Published on October 31, 2011 in birth, family, fertility, infertility, miscarriage, motherhood, parenting and pregnancy. 0 Comments

Photo by Kathy Leonard

Kathy Leonard says, “When I photograph, I do not consciously search out particular types of images, but I find that there is a surprising similarity in many of my photographs. There is dark and light, great contrast, or “chiaroscuro” as the Italians call it. I find this juxtaposition of light and shadow very appealing in black and white photography, especially when it serves to highlight the angles or curves of some object. These are the elements that drew me to photograph the wooden cradle. The natural light from the window cast dramatic shadows on the hand-carved cradle and I knew that the resulting image would be stark, simple, and beautiful.”

Kathy Leonard is a professor at Iowa State University. She studied photography at the University of California, Davis, and at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she received a degree in Fine Arts with specialty in photography. Her photographs have been published in numerous magazines, websites, online journals, and in textbooks and have been exhibited in various venues in California, Nevada, and Iowa.

Limitations, Imitations, and Haiku as Form of Expansion: an Interview with Poet Stephanie Lenox

Published on October 24, 2011 in birth, breastfeeding, interview, motherhood and pregnancy. 1 Comment Tags: bedrest, breastfeeding, childbirth, poetry.

Stephanie Lenox, Photo by Sabina Samiee, Oregon Arts Commission

In “Confinement: A Haiku Sequence in Ten Parts,” (published earlier here at The Fertile Source) the narrator speaks to her unborn child, “My fears feast on you / But even the leaves let go.” This beautiful line in particular seems to hone in on the way a mother’s brain has to rewire itself to accept the responsibility of loving someone we can lose at any moment. The rest of the poem also documents this process (which starts in utero). Can you talk about how the images came to you? And why you chose the form of haiku? How did the conditions of bedrest figure in to the psychology of the narrator?

I was inspired to start this haiku sequence after taking a workshop with Ce Rosenow, president of the Haiku Society of America. Her workshop reminded me that a haiku is so much more than simply a 5-7-5 syllabic form. Since haiku traditionally include images from nature, I wanted to do that in my sequence, but for the most part my imagery is confined to those things I could see from my bedroom window – telephone wires, a few treetops, the sky. I invited nature into my haiku through other images, but for the most part I aimed for images that reinforced the cramped, claustrophobic feel of pregnancy, especially a pregnancy spent on complete bedrest.

I started with haiku in part because motherhood and the preceding 70 days in bed was such a monumental experience – it completely rearranged me – that I wasn’t sure where to begin. So I started with five syllables, then seven more, and I slowly built and layered one image on top of another. (It was also a writing project I could chip away at between feedings, diapers, etc.) The formal restrictions of haiku helped focus me. I also discovered in the process that haiku, while appearing small, is a form of expansion. Without punctuation, it is intended to unfold and expand in the reader’s mind. I liken it to one of those toy capsules you drop into the bathtub that transform into a sponge dinosaur.

In “Last days of nursing,” the metaphor of the magician strikes me as a clever way to point to the intermediary nature of motherhood—part God, part magician, yet so rooted in tangible and impossible acts, like weaning a child. I believe every mother who has had to wean her child will relate to this poem! Were there other metaphors you considered along the way? Poetry by any other writers you’ve seen covering this topic you’d like to share with us?

This poem is a direct response to the poem “The End of Nursing” in a beautiful book called Out of Refusal by Carter McKenzie. Her poem begins: “Interminable nibbler, attached fish, when / does this end?” My poem, in its last line, answers hers.

I felt so empowered to write about this topic after reading her poem that I practically stole her title and started writing my own version. I’m sure I considered a lot of metaphors along the way, but I settled on the extended use of the magician because magic is messy, or at least that’s the way I envision it. From the audience’s point of view, it’s all illusion, but for the magician and the assistant it’s a rehearsed performance, one that begins with awkward practices and risky errors and that eventually works its way toward mystery.

We understand you are at work on a new series of poems inspired by the birth of your daughter. Can you give us an inside peek at the range of topics you’ll cover? (And let us know when it comes out so we can alert our readers and support your work.)

I have been fortunate to receive an individual artist grant from the Oregon Arts Commission in support of new work inspired by my daughter’s birth. My first book of poetry, Congress of Strange People, will be coming out from Airlie Press next fall. I’ve always been intrigued by bizarre characters and events, and my first book explores this in large part through the use of persona poems. But in my new work, the strangeness has come home with me. I find it in the middle of the night during a feeding. I find it in the ants crawling through my kitchen cupboards and across my newborn’s tongue. I find it in my dog whose severe separation anxiety caused her to consume baby bottle nipples and parts of my breast pump.

I’m also experimenting with imitations of other poets. Theodore Roethke has said that “Imitation, conscious imitation, is one of the great methods, perhaps the method of learning how to write.” I’m a perpetual student of poetry, so imitations are my way of tracing my poetic lineage through poems that have changed the way I think about what language can do. I like to think of my poems as “offsprings” of the originals.

Any mentors you’d like to share with us?

I’m a member of a poetry response group known as The Peregrines (named so because we meet twice a month at a different member’s house). They apply the gentle pressure I need to keep writing in spite of all the competing obligations. I’ve likewise been grateful for the mentorship of the editors at Airlie Press, the nonprofit poetry publishing collective that is publishing my first book.

Has your experience of motherhood changed your relationship to your writing or your editorial work?

Motherhood has made me more honest about my time: either I do it, or I don’t, no excuses. I’ve actually been more productive since my daughter was born than I was in the years before she arrived. I work during naps and by the good graces of babysitters. My daughter has a bedtime of 6:30 pm, which used to give me a lot of time to work. However, since I’m now expecting my second child, I no longer have the creative energy to write in the evenings.

I wish I’d realized how good I had it when my daughter would sleep in my lap as I compiled an issue of Blood Orange Review or read submissions. I miss the days I could read an entire book of poetry at 3 am while rocking my daughter back to sleep. Now that I have a toddler on my hands, there’s no working while she’s in my presence. But what I’ve learned most from motherhood is to constantly adapt to today’s challenge rather than forcing yesterday’s solution.

Any programs for writing mothers you’ve found helpful or that you’d’ like to see developed?

The grant I received from the Oregon Arts Commission has been especially helpful for me as a writing mother. It’s paying for the babysitter right now as I answer these questions. Another thing that helps is finding other writers with young children. It’s extremely useful to share one’s frustrations and accomplishments as a writer while the babies roll around on the floor together.

As for more programs for writing mothers, I’m dreaming now, but I’d love to see more daylight poetry readings, ones with a separate room with childcare provided. I think one reason you see poetry audiences aging (at least in my corner of the world) is that young families face a lot of barriers to attending evening events. This has been the part of my literary life most impacted by motherhood. If I’m going to spring for a babysitter, I want it to be for my own writing or a date night with my husband.

Stephanie Lenox lives in Salem, Oregon, with her husband and daughter. Her chapbook, The Heart That Lies Outside the Body, was published by Slapering Hol Press in 2007. The work published here was written with the support of a 2010 Oregon Art Commission artist fellowship. She teaches poetry at Willamette University and edits the literary journal Blood Orange Review. For more information, please visit her website at www.stephanielenox.com.