Eula Biss, Suzanne Buffam, and Lisa Olstein offer an in-depth look at what it means to be a working writer and mother. Excerpted here is Olstein on the difficulties of reconciling her vocation as a poet with the devotion she has for her child:
...I remember, just before going onstage to read, being asked very earnestly by a friendly woman whether I felt “so guilty” for traveling to the reading and thereby being away from my then two-year-old son for two days. Although taking time apart from him is never simple, my immediate reaction was, “No!” and I bet a father—my partner, for instance, who travels regularly for work—would not be asked the same question.
The (hopefully) less pedestrian effects of motherhood on my writing dart in and out of my understanding like slippery fish. On the one hand, the things that have changed and the things that have remained the same are so fundamental—cellular, I think you said, Suzanne—that they’re difficult to isolate and impossible to predict. On the other hand, I’ve become aware of having real trepidation about writing from a place of motherhood or “about” having a child, a sense of “beyond this point there be dragons.” I realized this when at a friend’s wedding just over a year after my son was born. A writer I hadn’t seen in a long time asked after my family and my writing, saying “Your poems must be full of babies!” My immediate and truthful answer was, “No, not a one.” And then I thought, uh-oh. Just as I hold tight to the conviction that there’s nothing I have to put in a poem, I also believe there shouldn’t be anything I can’t put in a poem; and here I was, very much not integrating into my work this major shift in reality. So, I began to wonder, what are the dragons, what are the internalized judgments? Fear of sentimentality, marginalization, being too close to see, being autobiographical in a way I wasn’t interested in, or possibly, wasn’t comfortable with...
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Currently reading:
Orphan Hours: Poems (Stanley Plumly)
...I remember, just before going onstage to read, being asked very earnestly by a friendly woman whether I felt “so guilty” for traveling to the reading and thereby being away from my then two-year-old son for two days. Although taking time apart from him is never simple, my immediate reaction was, “No!” and I bet a father—my partner, for instance, who travels regularly for work—would not be asked the same question.
The (hopefully) less pedestrian effects of motherhood on my writing dart in and out of my understanding like slippery fish. On the one hand, the things that have changed and the things that have remained the same are so fundamental—cellular, I think you said, Suzanne—that they’re difficult to isolate and impossible to predict. On the other hand, I’ve become aware of having real trepidation about writing from a place of motherhood or “about” having a child, a sense of “beyond this point there be dragons.” I realized this when at a friend’s wedding just over a year after my son was born. A writer I hadn’t seen in a long time asked after my family and my writing, saying “Your poems must be full of babies!” My immediate and truthful answer was, “No, not a one.” And then I thought, uh-oh. Just as I hold tight to the conviction that there’s nothing I have to put in a poem, I also believe there shouldn’t be anything I can’t put in a poem; and here I was, very much not integrating into my work this major shift in reality. So, I began to wonder, what are the dragons, what are the internalized judgments? Fear of sentimentality, marginalization, being too close to see, being autobiographical in a way I wasn’t interested in, or possibly, wasn’t comfortable with...
*
Currently reading:
Orphan Hours: Poems (Stanley Plumly)
I totally facebooked this. Eula Biss is so awesome. *Sigh*
ReplyDeleteWhat a great, great discussion -- we need more of these!!!
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