Chelsea Rathburn and Teresa Wong explore the challenges, complexities and joys of being both mothers and writers. Chelsea’s Still Life with Mother and Knife is her third collection of poetry, while Teresa’s memoir Dear Scarlet marks her debut.  We’re pleased to share their vulnerable and brave discussion about being mother-writers.

Teresa Wong: Do you think writing about your postpartum experience was more about self-healing or were you looking to reach out and connect with others?

Chelsea Rathburn: Oh, definitely to connect. One of the hardest parts of early motherhood for me was the profound isolation. I felt like I had disappeared, and it took me a long time to acknowledge that I was experiencing something beyond the “baby blues.” When I was young, the women in my family spoke very frankly about having had postpartum fantasies—as I write in the poem “Postpartum: A Fairy Tale,” an aunt said she’d hoped to find my cousin drowned in the washing machine, and my mother secretly wished that her Siamese cat would smother me in my crib. When my daughter was born, I never once wished harm upon her, so I thought that I couldn’t possibly have postpartum depression—my experience didn’t match these terrible stories I’d heard growing up. Instead, my experience sounded like the one you describe in Dear Scarlet. I was frequently suicidal. I had difficulty getting dressed or feeding myself. And I felt utterly alone and invisible. I suppose that when I began the book, I was trying to counteract that sense of invisibility—I wanted other women who read it to feel understood and seen.

Teresa Wong: Well, your work definitely resonates with me. I was especially struck by your poem “Postpartum: Lullaby” and how closely it mirrored some wordless images in my book, which depict me bouncing my baby endlessly on an exercise ball, wishing time would pass quicker. When I read your words, “And still they rock and rock and rock / beside a cold indifferent clock,” I thought they could’ve been the narration to my illustrations.

Chelsea Rathburn: So what inspired you to write your book? Since the title addresses your first child, I wondered if you were writing it primarily for her or for other women, or as a way of coming to terms with your own experience.

Teresa Wong: For me, Dear Scarlet began as a way to work through my feelings about that time. When I was pregnant with my third baby, I had many flashbacks to the delivery room and to Scarlet’s newborn days. The scenes were so vivid they made me cry. I knew I wasn’t done with it, even after all my counselling and treatment, so I thought perhaps writing about it would help. After I had jotted down some initial ideas, I realized that the story needed to be a letter (maybe even an apology?) to my daughter. It ended up helping me focus on the things I’d want to tell Scarlet if she was ever depressed.

It actually surprises me the response I’ve gotten from other mothers who’ve read the book—how much they relate to it—because I didn’t write it with that intention. I just wanted to tell my story honestly, and I guess that resonates with some women, whether they had postpartum depression or not.

Chelsea Rathburn: When I came across a description of Dear Scarlet a few months ago, I remember thinking “where was this book when I needed it?”  And then I read it, and I realized I still needed it. So thank you. It’s an incredible book: tender and tough, honest and wise. heart-wrenching and funny all at once.

Teresa Wong: Thank you for saying that! I wasn’t seeking books on the subject back then—I only found the time to read one measly book during Scarlet’s first year of life—but I realized while doing research into publishing opportunities that there is a real lack of books that address postpartum depression in an artful way. There are lots of self help–style books written by medical experts, but I’m not sure those would’ve appealed to me as a reader. I’m much more drawn to personal stories and open-ended interpretations.

Chelsea Rathburn: Me too. I have a clear memory of picking up some heartwarming, inspirational book on motherhood someone had given me and flinging it across the room.

Teresa Wong: Ha! Scarlet, who is now nine, has read several drafts of my manuscript. She says she likes the story, but I don’t believe she’ll understand it fully until she is older.

What about your daughter? Do you think she’s old enough to read your work? Would you actually want her to read it?

Chelsea Rathburn: My daughter, Adelyn, just turned seven and reads everything she can get her hands on… except poetry. For a long time, she swore that poetry was boring (my husband is also a poet and she gets dragged to a lot of readings), but she recently wrote her first poem and was very proud of it. “Maybe you’ll be a poet too,” we said, and she corrected us: “I AM a poet.”

At this point, she knows that the book is dedicated to her, but she hasn’t read it. I’ve been honest with her up to a point about my experiences with my pregnancy (which was complicated) and new motherhood, but I don’t want to traumatize her.

Teresa Wong: That makes a lot of sense. It’s a real balancing act to be a mother-writer, especially when you choose to write about motherhood.

Speaking of balance, do you find it difficult to balance your work and being a mother?

Chelsea Rathburn: Oh, yes. But I find that it’s gotten easier over time. Adelyn’s at the age (finally!) where she enjoys entertaining herself with toys or books, though she naturally wants my complete attention whenever I have an idea for a poem. When she was born, though, I went from a fraught pregnancy to caring for an extremely fussy baby: the only time she wasn’t screaming at me was when she was nursing or in my arms. I couldn’t put her in a swing; I couldn’t wear her; she didn’t like being held by others; she was unhappy in her stroller. I got no rest. And I thought it was all my fault. There’s a page in Dear Scarlet labeled Diagram of Mom Guilt where you detail all the ways you imagine you failed your daughter by not breastfeeding. That really resonated with me because I was convinced that it was my fault Adelyn was an unhappy baby. My thinking was that because I’d had such a difficult pregnancy (my cervix was sutured shut at seventeen weeks to prevent preterm labor, but it kept shortening), I’d been pumping her full of stress hormones. (I realize now how ridiculous this sounds, yet on some level I still suspect it was true.)

Teresa Wong: I think that crazy-making guilt is baked into modern motherhood, unfortunately. It’s even built into the language surrounding motherhood, as you note in your poem “Incompetent Cervix.” Even supposedly innocuous medical terms seem to place blame on the mother. And when you’re a brand new mom, you just internalize that blame because you haven’t gained the confidence to question it.

I enjoy how much you play with the language of pregnancy and postpartum in Still Life with Mother and Knife. Do your poems usually build from words and phrases?

Chelsea Rathburn: I think every poem teaches me how to write it. I often have a subject that I want to explore, and I begin jotting down ideas, sometimes in prose sentences, sometimes in awkwardly chopped up lines, until something strikes me as urgent and true, and then I start writing in earnest from there.

When you’re working on a graphic narrative, what comes first? The narrative/dialogue or the illustrations?

Teresa Wong: Many of the scenes in Dear Scarlet came to me originally as images in my mind—random and unbidden—but I am definitely a writer at heart, so I needed to draft a script before I began drawing. Once I had the narrative sorted out, I then worked back and forth between the words and images to make the story work, fine tuning as I went along. It felt like a very organic process.

I imagine it’s much more difficult to build a collection of poems? Were your poems written over a long period of time? What connects the poems in your book?

Chelsea Rathburn: That’s funny that you’d say poetry seems harder, since I can’t imagine writing a single sustained narrative. With poetry, I don’t have to tell the entire story at once. I wrote Still Life with Mother and Knife over about a four-year period. That’s the fastest I’ve ever written a book, which is wild to me because in the year or two after my daughter was born, I could barely brush my teeth. I wasn’t capable of producing anything. Initially I began writing poems about childhood dangers—a lot of my postpartum issues involved irrational fears about Adelyn being injured as a baby or as a girl, so my mind kept going back to all the narrow escapes in my own childhood. Then in 2015, when my daughter was three, I discovered Eugene Delacroix’s paintings of Medea, and began researching and writing poems in conversation with the painting; Delacroix’s paintings of this monstrous, mythic mother somehow provided a framework for me to work out what I saw as my own maternal failings. Eventually, the book evolved into interlocking sections about girlhood, motherhood, and PPD.

Teresa Wong: I love how your collection moves beyond the baby years too. One of my favorite poems is, ““On Reading Maurice Sendak Instead of Anaïs Nin,” which, to me, pretty much describes how difficult it is to do anything—especially creative work—when you have a little one running around the house.

Do you think becoming a mother has been good for you as a writer?

Chelsea Rathburn: These days, I think being a mother opens me up to the world. My daughter and I read books together, and I’m loving our conversations about books and language and joy. I suspect that being a mother hasn’t made me a better writer, but it’s made me a better person.

How about you? How do you manage with three children?

Teresa Wong: I believe that I’ve experienced a “deepening” through motherhood, a greater awareness of the complexity of life and how little I really know, coupled with a greater desire to examine and tease apart all those unknowns. Having three kids in five years (they are currently four, eight, and nine years old) was pure chaos at first, but now that they’re no longer babies, it’s gotten a lot more manageable. I’m always telling new mothers it gets easier: hollow-sounding words during desperate times, I know…

I also have to credit my kids with kick-starting my foray into illustration. I drew a lot as a child, but had given up art when I realized I was no artist. Making little pictures for my children helped me rediscover my love of drawing.

Chelsea Rathburn: I know it can be hard to think about the next big project when you’re preparing to launch a book, but do you know what’s next for you? 

Teresa Wong: I am trying (and failing, most days) to begin a second book. It’s about my parents, who both escaped from Chinese communes during the Cultural Revolution, and my fraught relationship with my mother. So far, I have a structure in mind, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to proceed and whether I’d even be able to draw the story. How about you?

Chelsea Rathburn: I’m in the earliest, earliest stages of archival research for a project that explores Florida history and personal history. I don’t want to jinx the process, so that’s probably all I should say.

Teresa Wong: I can totally identify with not wanting to jinx anything! Some days, I feel like Dear Scarlet was a small miracle and the conditions leading to its creation will never be duplicated, but that’s probably just my debut-author anxiety kicking in.

Still Life with Mother and Knife is your third collection. Do you have any advice on how to move past the first-book jitters?

Chelsea Rathburn: I would say be patient with yourself and trust that the words and images will come. I remember a mentor reassuring me that he never got any writing done in the months leading up to and just after a new book by saying, “You can’t get pregnant when you’re pregnant.” That sounds funny coming from a male writer, but for us mother-writers may be a good way to think about it! 

Main image courtesy of: Janko Ferlic

 

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 Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three poetry collections, including Still Life with Mother and Knife, published in February 2019 by Louisiana State University Press. You can find her poems in Poetry, the Atlantic, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other journals. A native of Miami, Florida, she currently lives in the mountains of north Georgia with her husband, the poet James Davis May, and their daughter. She teaches English and creative writing at Young Harris College, where she directs the creative writing program. Follow her on Twitter @chelsearathburn.

 

 Teresa Wong is a Canadian writer who had three children in less than five years. At first, she feared motherhood would destroy her, but is pleasantly surprised to find herself continually remade. When the kids are asleep, she writes and draws pictures. When she is asleep, it’s never for long. Dear Scarlet is her first book. Follow her on Instagram @by_teresawong, where she posts drawings for her children.