Writer Mother Monster: Beth Ann Fennelly, "My daughter came home from daycare smelling like another woman’s perfume. I had this sense of betrayal."

(February 25, 2021) Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, has published 3 books of poetry and a book of essays, Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi, and describes writer-motherhood in 3 words as, “monstrous, magical, mind-bending.” In this episode, Beth Ann talks about how reading about vomit led her down the poetry path, bartering haikus for hamburgers, and why society’s romanticized representation of mothers is damaging. Plus, she shares what makes motherhood more dramatic than Greek myth.

Writer Mother Monster is an interactive interview series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice as we make space for creative endeavors.
 

Transcript

Writer Mother Monster: Beth Ann Fennelly

February 25, 2021

Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, is a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She has received grants and awards from the N.E.A., the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil, and has published three books of poetry: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, all with W. W. Norton. Her poetry has been in over 50 anthologies, including Best American Poetry and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and in textbooks. She is also the author of a book of essays, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother. She lives with her husband and their three children in Oxford, Mississippi, and describes writer-motherhood in three words as “monstrous, magical, mind-bending.”

Lara Ehrlich  

Hello and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and with me tonight is Beth Ann Fennelly. Before I introduce Beth Ann, I want to thank you all for tuning in. I also want to let you know that you can now listen Writer Mother Monster as a podcast on all major audio platforms and read the interview transcript on writermothermonster.com. Please also consider becoming a patron or patroness on Patreon. Right now, this podcast is a one-woman band, so your support helps make this series possible with things like transcription and hosting and other such services. Please also chat with us during the interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio, and we’ll weave them into the conversation. 

Now I’m excited to introduce Beth. Beth Ann Fennelly is Poet Laureate of Mississippi and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She has received grants and awards from the N.E.A., the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. She’s the author of six books, most recently Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs from W.W. Norton. She lives in Oxford with her husband and three children and describes writer motherhood as “monstrous, magical, mind-bending.” Please join me in welcoming her. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m so happy to have you.

Beth Ann

Thanks.

Lara Ehrlich  

How old are your three kids?

Beth Ann

Our youngest is 10, our middle one is 15, and our oldest one is 19.

Lara Ehrlich  

And you all live in Mississippi. Are you from Mississippi originally?

Beth Ann

No, I actually grew up in a suburb of Chicago, but we’ve been here 20 years now. My husband is from Alabama. We met at graduate school, the University of Arkansas, and I really like the South, so it’s a good fit for us.

Lara Ehrlich  

I first discovered your work through an article that you wrote in The Washington Post about your mother during this unprecedented, challenging time. That led me to look you up and to read more about you and to read your work, and I was so thrilled to discover you that way. Tell us about that article.

Beth Ann

I’m so glad that that brought you to me, Lara, thank you. Well, my mom has been suffering dementia the last couple years, growing forgetful. We kind of joke about her being batty, but it seems in control and manageable. She had house in Illinois, where I’m from, and lived for a couple months every year in Florida in the winter. Then the pandemic hit, and all of a sudden, everything that she did started closing down. She couldn’t go to church, she couldn’t go to bridge, she couldn’t go to the movies with her friends, she couldn’t get a coffee, and she couldn’t come to visit us. And that’s what she really wanted to do. She would call and ask me all the time. And I said, “Mom, you know, you can’t fly. You can’t come. The kids might kill you. You have to stay.” And her world was closed down. 

I started hearing on the phone that she was getting more forgetful, and then she would tell me these stories where I get phone calls from her friends, like she gave money to an internet scammer or she locked herself out of the house. All these things were happening. I realized that the isolation of Covid was making the dementia worse because she wasn’t having any interaction, so my husband and I made the kind of gut-wrenching decision to move her into assisted living, which she didn’t want to do. We went up and sold her house and brought her down here, and now she lives just down the street from my house. 

Today, we had really good news. The assisted living in Mississippi has now decided if you leave, when you come back, you don’t have to quarantine for three days. So up until this point, my mom has not been able to leave to come visit our house—we could only visit her outside, behind a glass shield and have these kind of terrible, weird conversations behind our masks. But on Sunday, because my mom has had her shots, she can come to dinner.

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, that’s wonderful. The shots are starting to happen, and she’s in the first wave. Congratulations. Tell us about writing that piece.

Beth Ann

It’s funny, because I’m not a big social media person, and I’m not really good at the things writers need to be good at nowadays. Like, I just want to go back to a barter society where if I want a hamburger, I’ll write you a haiku. You know, I hate technology, I hate these Instagram things, I can’t do any of it. All I do is Facebook. And I’m only on that because my editor said I had to do one kind of social media, so I got on it reluctantly and late. But I have found several really good things about it. 

One thing that was interesting that happened was I ended up writing a post about moving my mom to Mississippi and how hard it was. I just put it out there for my Facebook friends, and so many people wrote to me, either on the post or sent me personal messages about how it reminded them of what they were going through or dealing with dementia and Alzheimer’s and the death of loved ones. The messages kept coming in, and I was thinking, you know, I’ve really touched something here. I don’t know if I would have known that if I hadn’t put it on Facebook. I thought, I’m still thinking about this problem, and it sounds like other people want to talk about this problem, so I should try to write something. 

I decided I would try to write a “Modern Love” piece, which is, like, the dream of all writers, right? To land in The New York Times for “Modern Love.” And so, I did. But it wasn’t really about the kind of love they really write about. It wasn’t about romantic love. So anyway, then I sent it to The Washington Post, and they took it and I heard from so many people. It was actually a really deeply moving experience.

Lara Ehrlich

Oh, I can imagine. It was a deeply moving piece—the articulation of your mother’s situation and her emotional and mental state and how that impacted your family. You touched on, in that piece, what it’s like to be a mother, although the focus was more on your relationship as a daughter to your mother, which is an angle that I’m interested in exploring a little bit with you here. We talk so much about children, about writing about our kids, but writing about our parents, about our own mothers, is a different aspect of writing motherhood. Have you written about your mother in other contexts, or was this one of the first times?

Beth Ann

You know, I don’t very often because she doesn’t like it. When you’re a writer, you get used to being vulnerable and honest, and I really value honesty. I’m interested in explicating my emotions to try to figure out what the truth is and valuing the truth almost above anything else. And that’s not how I was brought up. I was brought up to value beauty. 

I was brought up Irish Catholic in a very conservative Irish Catholic neighborhood and went to Catholic schools and with a Catholic, all-girls boarding school, although I didn’t board, and the emphasis was always on being ladylike. Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t come to writing earlier. I think it’s because when I was in high school, writing was really something you did to be a lady. It was like a finishing school thing. We weren’t exposed to contemporary writing or contemporary poetry at all. The only Emily Dickinson poem we read was, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you - Nobody - too?” 

My mom comes from, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything” and “Children should be seen and not heard.” She doesn’t want to be talked about, so I try not to talk about her, which is really hard, because we spent a lot of time together, and we’re very close, but our styles of parenting are very, very different. I’m not invested in my children being ladylike, or my children being seen and not heard. I’m interested in teaching them to be confident and assertive if something goes wrong. One of the hard things of parenting, when you are trying to parent in a different way than you grew up, is you feel like you’re recreating the wheel. A lot of the advice my mom had given to me isn’t stuff I really feel like I could draw from, even though I know it was well intentioned.

Lara Ehrlich  

Was it difficult to write this particular piece—not that this was not a respectful piece, but when you had been so respectful of her space and her wishes not to be written about? What was the process of writing this piece? Did you have to push yourself to do it? Did you talk to her about it? What was the process?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

I didn’t have to push myself to write it because I actually was really driven to write it. I didn’t think about whether I was going to publish it. And if I was going to publish it, I was going to show it to her first. I did show it to her. The funny thing is, of course, it’s about her dementia, and the parts she didn’t like were because she didn’t remember them. She’s like, “I didn’t get in a car accident,” “I didn’t get locked out of my house.” She didn’t remember it, so it’s weird because I’m in it with her, except our take on it is completely different, because she doesn’t remember it. 

It’s a blessing, really, that she doesn’t recall a lot of the hard parts—for example, selling her house and putting her things up in an estate auction was really difficult for me, and I don’t consider myself someone obsessed with possessions or materialistic, but there were family pieces, they were ties to history, but I can’t take them. I don’t have a house that can take little China figurines or antiques. My mom didn’t remember any of them anymore, and it was so important to her growing up, those collections, the Waterford and the Heron, China, all those things. And then she just didn’t even really ask about them. We were gone when they had the sale, and she didn’t even ask about it. I thought, this is the one good thing about dementia. The terrible thing is you forget your happy memories, but you also forget the things that would cause you so much pain.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah. I can’t imagine what it’s like to watch that process. My parents, similarly, collect antiques, and they collect things that have a history that’s both personal and beyond their own personal interest. If they could no longer feel that connection to those items, it would be very devastating for me, but a blessing that they don’t realize what they’ve lost. I see what you’re saying. Tell me a little bit more about the finishing school version of writing and how you broke free from that to discover an interest and a love for words, specifically poetry.

Beth Ann Fennelly  

The way I was taught in high school was a moral thing that you did. I wasn’t particularly encouraged by my teachers, and I didn’t seem—to myself or anyone else—to have any particular talent for it. When I got into college, I took my first creative writing workshop and I read my first contemporary poetry. I still remember reading a poem by Denise Duhamel about a bulimic woman eating a wedding cake, and it was so shocking to me that there was vomit in a poem. I just couldn’t believe that someone had written something that was so intimate and personal and revealing. It was, in a big way, a door into the path that I was going to follow, where I wasn’t interested in any type of mask. I was interested in figuring out how I feel and how other people feel and what we’re doing here on planet Earth.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, I imagine that was startling. Tell me more about that visceral connection to words and the bodily connection to words with your personal experience and figuring out where you fit in the world. Talk a little bit more about how you investigated that. Once you realized that what words could do, what a poem could do, how did you study it? How did you practice?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

I studied it by just eating poetry all day long. I also began the practice that I still have now, these many years later, of memorizing poems and reciting them—just to myself, not on a stage or anything weird—and training my ear through the art of hearing the words coming up my windpipe and out of my mouth. I do feel that writing is physical—as physical as dancing, really—and as rhythmic is dancing. I think that human beings are rhythmic creatures, from the patterns of eating and breathing and sleeping and making love. And when we’re writing, we’re putting our bodies back in touch with the old ways, the rhythmic, natural world, and finding pleasure there.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, I love that. That’s really beautiful. How soon after this discovery of language and poetry did you then become a mother?

Beth Ann

Quite some time. I was in college for four years, and then I taught abroad in the Czech Republic on the Polish Czech border. Then I came back after one year, that was 1994, and I went to the University of Arkansas. That’s where I met my honey on the first day. We were there together four years, and we got married when we graduated in 1988. I was in Wisconsin for a year and then at Knox College and Galesburg, Illinois. At that point, we were thinking about starting a family, and then we had our first daughter, and my husband got offered a position here at University of Mississippi, the John and Renee Grisham writer residency—because he’s a writer—and we came down here, I had my little baby. She was five weeks old, and we were just supposed to stay for nine months, and here we are, 20 years later.

Lara Ehrlich  

You had quite a stretch there for becoming a professional writer, for studying and practicing. How did becoming a mother change your approach to writing?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

Well, before I was a mom, when I wanted to write, I had to have my desk clean and my favorite pen and the right mental space. Now, looking back, it was so precious to me. When I became a mom and my time got so attenuated and condensed into these weird little pockets, I would lunge into any opening that presented itself. I didn’t care if my desk was clean. I didn’t even notice. My brain was able to not notice anymore. 

Obviously, like it is for all mothers, motherhood took a lot of my time. There are a couple things on the positive side though. 

One is, motherhood allowed me to focus much more quickly because I only had these pockets of time. I didn’t waste time. I was able to get more quickly into the heart of something. 

In a bigger sense, I think motherhood made me a deeper human being. And just to clarify, I don’t think you have to become a mom to be a deeper human being. I mean, there’s plenty of people out there who don’t need that and don’t choose to or can’t become moms. But for me, personally, I think it deepens my connection to history, for example, to genealogy, to the future and to the past, and it made me feel more a part of the world around me. I think that was ultimately beneficial for my writing.

Lara Ehrlich  

You hinted at how your perspective on motherhood is different than your own mother’s perspective and methods. How did your perspective of her change immediately upon having kids? When you first became a mother, what were some of the things you were grappling with, as you looked back at your own childhood and started crafting, if you will, the childhood that your daughter would have, and then your next two kids?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

Because our experiences were so different, I don’t think I could like compare and say I’m doing this and my mom’s doing this in a certain way, because my mom was a stay-at-home mother who had more resources. My husband and I were scrappy, trying to be writers, trying to teach, trying to keep it together, like gig economy, like working this thing and that thing and just patching it together day by day with this kind of zany, exhausting energy of “what is the day going to hold?” I can’t say that becoming a mom made me evaluate my mom’s job of mothering. In a way, that like was like an apples-to-oranges situation. It just felt different.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, definitely. Let’s talk about the content of your writing and whether there was a shift once you became a mother. And through the last 19 years, what are some shifts that you’ve seen throughout that time?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

Well, I ended up writing a whole book about my daughter’s first year. I think the big shift is that I would even do that. I had no idea I was going to do that or that I was going to be interested in it. But I’m kind of a research-type person, a Type A, an A student, so when I got pregnant, I thought, I want to be really good mom—I want to get an A—so I’ll just study. I’ll read. I’ll approach it like a Ph.D. exam. Like, I read the books, so I knew when my daughter would come, I would have no questions. I would have this nailed. And of course, I was completely unprepared, emotionally and psychologically, for all the shifts that I was going through. I was filled with questions. For me, writing is the best method of articulating my questions to myself and trying to understand my own emotions, because we think our emotions are perfectly clear and transparent and accessible, but that’s actually rarely the case. I think it’s hard work to know how you feel in a certain situation. I use words to help me do that work. I was writing poems about what I was going through, when I realized I was written writing a book. And that book, Tender Hooks, was published by Norton, quite some time ago now, I think 2004 or something crazy. 

Then I ended up writing a nonfiction book on motherhood, which is also insane. But I thought, okay, I’m done with these mommy poems. I’m gonna try to write something new. But I wasn’t writing anything. I was just going through this dry spell. 

I had a student who unexpectedly got pregnant and was moving to Alaska, her mom had recently passed away, and she was feeling like she was floundering. She didn’t have a computer, so I started writing her longhand letters, and she was writing me back longhand letters. I just thought I would try to provide for her some type of community through words, but I actually think it was good for me. I think that I had more thinking that needed to be done, and the slow pace of writing by hand was kind of helping me think about some of the bigger issues of motherhood. I wanted to think through not just the itty bitty dailiness of how she had her medication and what she ate but the bigger picture stuff. So that clip that ended up being a long process of our letters back and forth. 

And then my editor said, “You know, I thought you’re gonna have another book of poems by now.” I’m like, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m not writing.” And I tell her I’m writing two hours a day but just these letters, and she says, “Tell me about the letters.” So, I told her, and that became a book called Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother. 

Then I’m like, I’m not gonna write about motherhood anymore, and then Tommy and I collaborated on a novel that is all about a mom who loses a baby and then gets a baby, kind of via adoption. It was set in 1927 in the flood of the Mississippi River. Then I was like, okay, I’m really, really done. 

But, as it turns out, I’m never going to be done with it. I’m just going to take it on from different angles, like fiction. My last book was a book of micro memoirs—little, tiny, true stories about my life—and a lot of those are about motherhood. In that book, I’m also trying to find or explore really some of the funnier parts of motherhood, which I think is sometimes not written about all that much, maybe because it’s a private space, but it’s also a sacred space and a romanticized and frequently sentimentalized space, which is dangerous. To sentimentalize something is to simplify it and weaken it. I write about some of the complexity of motherhood, and there’s a lot about it that’s funny, so that’s what I was trying to do my last book. It turns out, despite my best intentions, I’m always going to be circling around motherhood but through different genres, approaches, and names.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, it’s fascinating. I love all of the complexity of these pieces, and I have so many questions about all of them. I want to start with the humor. Can you tell me what’s funny about motherhood? And how did you translate that humor to the written word?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

Sure. I mean, there’s so much funny about motherhood, because we’re only allowed to talk about certain parts of it in a way that’s socially acceptable. For example, in that very first book on motherhood I wrote, I had this really tiny piece about the first day at daycare, when my daughter comes home smelling like another woman’s perfume. I remember when she came home and because it was her first day, I was smelling her, and I just had this sense of betrayal, like the jealousy that another woman had held her that close. That’s a crazy, crazy emotion, but it’s also an honest emotion. That’s interesting to me, because it’s not so often represented as a part of motherhood.

Lara Ehrlich  

I love that. And I remember that viscerally, too. The first couple days at daycare, we brought our daughter home, and she had this very school-roomy smell, like cleaning supplies or something. And I was like, she doesn’t smell like herself or like us anymore. By the end of the weekend, she would smell like herself again, but then she goes back to school. So yes, and it’s a very visceral, physical feeling, and jealousy is a good word for it. It’s also a violation, like your child doesn’t feel or smell like themselves. That’s really interesting and very powerful. I love that example of humor and motherhood. Talk a little bit more about the danger of sentimentalizing motherhood. I think I everybody can probably think of examples of that, but tell me what you mean.

Beth Ann Fennelly  

I think in so many ways, our view of motherhood is still this post-romantic vision of the mom alone, feeling nothing but bliss for her child and feeling completely content in the relationship, desiring nothing more. I think portraying motherhood that way allows new mothers, in particular, to feel like they’re insane. You know what I mean? They’re like, this has not been portrayed, how messy and sometimes painful and crazy breastfeeding is, for example. That was not one big part of any movie I ever saw when the babies are happily eating. And then when you’re in it, there’s so much about it that’s hard and gross and amazingly blissful and mind-blowingly profound. It’s like all the complexity has just been sanded off so that what remains is the woman in the beautiful nightgown holding her sweetly suckling baby, and that’s like 1% of it.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, absolutely.

Beth Ann Fennelly 

Yeah, so I just wanted to look at the other parts of it, because they’re interesting, because they’re not overwritten about. I did it for my own sake, but I felt a lot of readers responding to me with such gratitude, thanking me for writing about this or saying they hadn’t seen anyone write about this, or this is how I felt or now I’m not so alone. Sometimes women talk about reading my books even in the hospital after giving birth, and it’s just a cool thought that someone would want my voice with them in that very vulnerable moment.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, and I think it’s an important voice to have at a vulnerable moment, a voice that tells you that everyone’s experience is different, but it’s all normal and that there’s no one natural way to do something. I remember in our birth classes, they show you the videos of the breastfeeding and it looks so easy, and they say it’s natural, “breast is best,” all this stuff. And then you get this baby home, and you don’t realize that they don’t know what to do. Like, you think they’re born and they will automatically know, but they don’t you don’t know what to do. A couple weeks ago, my sister and I were talking—she does not have children yet—and I was sharing with her, probably in too much detail, breastfeeding and how you get these slices in your nipples and then you know that your child is drinking blood along with the milk, and she was just horrified. She’s like, “Why didn’t anybody ever tell me this before?” I’m like, “Yeah, I didn’t know, either.” So, thank you for writing that honestly. Was that also part of the letters that you were writing to the new mother?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

It was only because I feel like we’re making a community by sharing our honest experiences with each other, for the first-time mom who brings home the baby and isn’t prepared for it to be hard, and her husband certainly has not been prepared for it to be challenging for her. We have no ethos that has presented the complexity of motherhood and validated the true emotional and physical difficulty of a lot of it. I think it makes people feel alone and maybe more ready to give up. Maybe if people knew breastfeeding is going to hurt but we’re also focusing on how awesome and transformative it is, and they could be better prepared for the difficulties, people wouldn’t maybe give up after a couple of days or even a couple weeks if they’re struggling and alone. Of course, it would be nice if we lived in a culture, like Britain, that provided at-home nurses who come and help a nursing mother with lactation advice. There are so many cultures all over the world that just do a better job by mothers, taking care of them and supporting them with medical knowledge and supplies.

Lara Ehrlich  32:25  

Yeah, not to mention, postpartum depression. If women were educated, if people talked about that more, then we would know the signs and seek out help and not feel as though we’re alone and there’s something wrong with us if you’re not happy or you’re not bonding with your child or you’re not able to feed or nourish your baby in the way that you’ve expected to and all of those emotional and mental things that go along with new parenthood.

Beth Ann Fennelly  

Right. Even that the American healthcare system is so eager to get women out of the hospital, because it’s so expensive. Even another extra day or two for people to work out the kinks or the onset of postpartum depression, having people monitoring the signs more.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah. Why do you feel compelled to write about motherhood? What keeps bringing you back to it, even when you say you’re gonna write about something totally new and different?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

I think it’s the essential mystery of it, and also that it’s always changing. Even if you figure out one part of the mystery, your child is a one day older the next day, or if you have more than one child, they’re all different ages and they’re relating to each other and to you. It’s a fascinating, complex mechanism that’s always changing—this growth organism of the family. I think if I got it figured it out, I would stop writing about it. But unfortunately, or fortunately, that will never happen.

Lara Ehrlich  

What preconceptions did you have about motherhood or about writing about motherhood before you became a mother? Or did you have any preconceptions about literature that touched on motherhood?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

There wasn’t a lot of it, and what there was, I wasn’t really interested in. But now, I have found so much more. It was there all along but not celebrated to the point it should have been. I found a lot of mother poets. What’s really exciting is how many young mothers, including yourself, are interested in it now and working through the creativity and the challenges and the terrible dance of balancing all that. Mother writers are finding each other in lots of ways, including, of course, your beautiful series.

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, thank you. Growing up, the stories weren’t all that visible to me either. And I don’t know if that’s because I was not looking for them, or similarly, I just wasn’t interested in them. But when thinking about writing as a younger person, I thought largely about big male stories, like the great American novel. Those are the books that are lauded. Did you feel the same way?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

Oh, yeah, totally. When I was in graduate school, everybody was writing about the Greek myths—like, here’s my Perseus poem, as if I care. All the books that were lauded, that giant novel, the Hemingway, Roth/Franzen model, or the novel that’s about war … all the drama that is in those books that people are seeking elsewhere through fighting Odysseus, or whatever, is in motherhood. There’s so much drama in the act of being a mom. It’s all there. 

When you asked me for the three words to describe motherhood, I could have given you many, many hundreds of thousands, but one of them, I think, was mind-bending, just because your boundaries are exploded and your capacity for joy is exploding, your capacity for fear is exploding—just all the extremes. You’ve never felt such extremes before. I never was someone who yelled until I had my second child. Motherhood is the only time I’ve yelled in my life. There are new emotions, new actions, not all of which are pretty, new fears—all of the hugeness of this crazy thing that is so everyday, and all around us people are doing it, and yet we somehow aren’t quite aware of how miraculous it is.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, and I question why it was never considered dramatic or worthy of one of those big fat novels, you know? And why motherhood or women’s lives or domesticity was relegated to this sort of secondary, or probably even lower than secondary, tier of writing, like “women’s fiction.” There’s nothing wrong with women’s fiction, but not every book about a woman is a beach read. That has been very frustrating to me, as well, so it’s nice to hear you articulate that. Have your kids read your books at all?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

Yes and no. My oldest has read my writing but doesn’t really want to talk about it, and the 10-year-old, I think, is still too young. But the 15-year-old seems kind of open to it all. They’re all in different places. I definitely don’t force anything on them. One of the great perks of itinerant paths is you get to go to all of these fun places for writing workshops and retreats and stuff. We’ve taken the kids on some pretty cool vacations that were not exactly vacations, but we brought them along to do the fun stuff. So, they’ve been around a lot of writers, they’ve heard me talking a lot about writing, they’ve been in the back of an auditorium with their Legos while I’ve been onstage blathering about this or that. It’s through osmosis. It’s definitely a big part of their awareness that my husband and I are doing this thing and engage in these issues. But it can’t be Pokemon Go.

Lara Ehrlich  

I think you might be the only woman I’ve spoken to so far whose spouse is also a writer. What’s that like? Do you feel competitive with one another? Do you have to share your writing time and sort of parcel up the time that you’re parenting versus writing? How does that work?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

The best part about it is we completely understand what the other one is up against. Especially when everybody was little, and it was really a matter of getting only two free hours in the day—you’re going to take the baby, and he’s going to write, and then he’s going to give you the baby, and you’re going to write, and then you get the nap—we manually figured it out. But there’d still be times when one of us would have a good writing session and need to keep on going, and the other would get it. Also, to be in the weirdness of writing, which is sometimes lonely, because you’re alone with your thoughts and the blank page, to have someone to share that with has been a real blessing and a joy. I wouldn’t say that we’re competitive with each other, mostly because we’ve usually written in different genres and often had different interests and subject matter. Tommy, for example, is not interested in motherhood. Of course, there are some challenges, and part of it comes from the pressures that this lifestyle puts on you—and then to have two people trying to figure it out and doing all the balancing of finding the writing time and carving it up for yourself and trying to be generous and trying to be selfish, trying figure out every single day where it’s not a nine-to-five thing where you know what you’re going to do every single day. But I wouldn’t trade it. I wouldn’t trade it for a second. I feel so lucky that I’ve been able to find a way to keep writing at the forefront of my life—sometimes not making money on it, or never making money on it probably—but being able to prioritize it and to have a husband who wants me to has been wonderful.

Lara Ehrlich 

How do you prioritize it? Let’s talk about that and the elusive word “balance” that you mentioned earlier, which I’m finding might not actually be a possible thing. Do you think it’s possible to find balance?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

Absolutely not. I think maybe bigger picture, it helps a little bit. My problem is I want to do everything well. I want to be not just a mom but a really good mom, and not just a writer but a really good writer. I want to be really good friend, and I want to be really good teacher. I want to do service work and be a good human being. You can’t be good at everything, but some days, I’m good at one thing and not another. Some days I’m not such a good mom, but I’m a good writer. Other days, I’m really giving it all to my teaching and then I’m exhausted when I come home. I try to keep it in balance in the bigger sense, instead of that micro-sense. I think it’s the No. 1 challenge of writing moms. I think it is the single most essential and unending discussion that we have.

Lara Ehrlich  44:29  

Yeah, definitely. I am right there with you, where one day I am a much better writer than I am a mother or much better at my day job than I am writing. How do you keep perspective, that maybe this day, I’m not the best mother, but that doesn’t mean that I’m a bad mother? How do you keep perspective on all of these different things and not allow them to define you? 

Beth Ann Fennelly  

The word perspective has a lot of different meanings. In novels, when a character has perspective, and the character can say, “I didn’t know then that in 20 years, I would be doing such and such.” I kind of played that trick in my own head to get perspective. Like, if I’ve just had a day in which I had to prioritize one thing over another, I try to think, how will I look at this in a year or in 10 years? I can zoom out and get a bigger sense of what this day was. Like, this day, I didn’t get any reading time, and I feel really bad about it, it makes me feel colorless and unhappy and frustrated. But then, I did get time this day, and overall, I’m finding the pockets of time. So just trying to zoom out.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah. What do you think about that old adage that you should write every day?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

It’s the dream for me. I try to. I think everybody has to find their own way. I think any prescription is bound to fail. For me, in the dream life, I do write every day. I’ve become a morning writer since becoming a mom. That’s another way to change. It used to be that when time was there to be taken, I could write at night or do whatever I wanted. And then after becoming a mom, when it was harder to parse out my own time because I had more demands, writing in the morning was the time easiest to make sacrosanct or keep to myself a little bit. I actually trained myself more to become a morning writer, to the point where I never even try to write in the evenings. Evenings, I’m kind of cashed. I feel like I’m like a steam pill, and it’s all gone. My ideas don’t even come in the evening. It’s not like I’m batting them away; it’s almost like I’ve trained my brain. My deal with myself is to wake up, and nowadays, my kids are in school, so it’s have breakfast with them, get them ready with their backpacks and get them on the bus, and then, I try to go to my desk. 

This contract I have is to be at my desk and in the right mental space, which means I cannot have checked email, I cannot have looked at internet banking—you know, all the things that bring people into my life that need things, because if someone needs me, there’s something in me that has to start worrying about that. I just have to go to my desk as close to my dream life as possible. I do think that kind of dreamy headspace helps there at the desk. If I’m there, and nothing happens—if I can’t write, that’s fine. I was there. That’s all I asked of myself. I’ve come away thinking that there’s something really there for me if I can get myself there and be in the right spot. Maybe something will come, and if not, that’s fine. I’ll try again the next day.

Lara Ehrlich  

I love that. Has the pandemic changed your writing at all? And you mentioned your kids are in school? How has the pandemic changed your family life, and secondly, how has it impacted your writing?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

Like everybody, the pandemic has really put a strain on every aspect of life pretty much. I have three kids. I feel actually worse for my daughter who’s in college because she missed her second year of college and had to come home and do her classes virtually. She is back at college now. College was such an amazing time for me and I’m just sorry for the kids that missed out on any of that. The boys—it didn’t seem quite as hard. I never thought I’d say the words “thank God for Xbox,” but the 18-year-old has been able to meet his friends in that virtual world. In terms of my writing, it’s been complicated in a lot of big and little ways. Just the fear and anxiety takes a toll on worrying for people I love. 

Also, I get a lot of ideas for writing by going places and being with people and traveling and seeing new things and thinking new things, and I just feel like everything is bleaching a little bit around me. I don’t go anywhere. I don’t see anybody. I don’t do anything. That’s not quite exactly the case, but I do feel the narrowness of the pandemic has taken a toll on my ideas. So, I’m very eager, like we all are, to try to open back up to the world.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah. Is there something you’re really looking forward to doing when everyone’s vaccinated and you can travel again and not wear your mask? What’s something you’re sort of dreaming of doing?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

You know, it’s just traveling. I love to travel so much. And I like languages and language study. And I like art. And I like food. And I like all the things that happen when you travel. This summer, I’m doing my first month-long residency. When I became a mom, there were certain things I was willing to give up and certain things that I wanted to cling to. For example, I decided I’m still going to travel in small doses for short amount of time, and I would be able to go away from my kids for a couple nights or, as they got older, even a week. A couple years ago, I had a really cool opportunity to do something in Prague for two weeks, and I did that. That was the longest I’ve been away from my kids. 

Now this summer, when the youngest one is 10, for the first time, I’m going away for a month. I’ve been offered a residency at a chateau in Switzerland. I can’t even believe it. Like, are these words actually coming out of my mouth? That’s a dream. It’s an international writing residency, with six writers from around the world. You write all day, you have your own bedroom, and in the evening, you gather on the plaza for local Swiss white wine, and the chef prepares your dinner. Isn’t that crazy?

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, that’s amazing.

Beth Ann Fennelly  

And my husband is awesome and says I should go. I think it’s gonna be really hard to be away from the kids. I think it’s gonna be hard for them and really hard for me, but I also think maybe we’re ready.

Lara Ehrlich  

First of all, congratulations, because that sounds absolutely amazing. Second of all, what has changed or shifted in order to make that feel okay? Because I’m looking forward to that day, and obviously, my daughter is much younger. She’s 4. I think the longest I’ve been away was maybe four nights, five days, and that feels like a long time still. At what point did you feel like maybe that was okay? What changed with your kids or with yourself and getting older?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

This is not me criticizing any mama who’s watching this thinking, “I would leave my kid for a month.” But when my children were 4, especially if I only had one, I did not have the bravery it would take to go away for a month. Now that they’re older, and the two boys get along so well and entertain themselves and have this local summer camp that they can go to, and my daughter wants to come home and hang with the boys for a bit, it just seemed like if I was ever going to do it, now would be the time.

Lara Ehrlich  

That makes perfect sense. Rachel Zucker and I were talking about residencies and about these longer ones and how they can be restrictive to mothers for those reasons, when you have young kids, but I also want to echo you that yes, there’s nothing wrong with going on longer residency. I just feel the same way you do, where I just don’t feel ready for it, although my daughter is resilient, and she’d be fine, and her father would be fine. We just have a few minutes left. I wanted to hear a little bit more about what you hope your kids might feel about your writing. I love the visual of your son doing Legos in the back of the room while you’re on stage, talking about writing. What do you want them to take from those experiences from being included in your writing life in that way?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

Honestly, I think all I want is for them to be able to value things that are not valued in dollar terms. I want them to be part of the gift economy. I’m not saying they have to be writers, I’m just saying, I never want them to value their lives based on how much money they’re making. They’ve grown up with a model that was quite different, so whatever they choose—maybe they’ll become stockbrokers, God forbid—but whatever they choose, I’ll know, they had the opportunity to know that there was a different way of valuing things.

Lara Ehrlich  

I love that. Tell me a little bit more, if you’re comfortable doing so, how do you live in that way. How do you and your husband maintain this amazing philosophy on life and the value of your work and what you’re doing, and then logistically, how do you survive?

Beth Ann Fennelly  

Yeah, well, logistically, we’re professors. So that’s a big part of it. The other part is remembering that time is more valuable than money. When I have opportunities to do something to make money during the summers, like teaching summer school, I just try to make sure it would be necessary in all the different kinds of senses. Like, would more money mean we can just have nicer scotch? Or is there a reason why I want to have a particular teaching opportunity, because I actually really enjoy teaching. I can’t help it. It takes my writing energy, but it also feeds me, and I like being with people. So sometimes I just want to accept teaching opportunities, but I want to make sure that I maintain that the primary value in my life is the way I spend my time. Spending my time is like voting. In other words, spending my time with my family or my writing or my friends or arts—any way of looking at arts or experiences like that—that’s what’s valuable to me, not a designer handbag. But if you live in a culture that’s always showing you designer handbags, and the only question you’re going to be asked today is “confirm purchase?” or “go to checkout,” you have to kind of struggle to keep your eye on the prize, when the prize is time, beauty, and truth.

Lara Ehrlich  

I love that. Yeah. In my career, there are a lot of opportunities that are starting to open up where somebody says, “Will you judge this?” or, “Will you do this?” And I feel like I need to say yes to everything because of where it might lead me, even though there’s no financial gain involved. But as you said, time is money. And I value my time with my family and the writing time, and those types of projects detract from the time you have to actually sit and write or to be with your family. How do you approach opportunities, both large and small? How do you look at an opportunity and determine if it’s something that you should take on, or is it something that is a distraction from the real priorities in my life?

Beth Ann

If something is an offer for money, that’s actually easier for me to say no than if someone is asking me for a favor. I get a lot of requests for blurbs and in different genres, and it’s really hard for me to say no. Frankly, I do feel mentoring young women writers is a priority of mine, and if a young woman writer, especially a young writer of color or someone who’s queer or non-binary, is reaching out to me, I honestly have a hard time saying no because I feel like any assistance would be so useful, so helpful. I probably say yes more than I really should. 

In terms of stuff that would not help someone else but help my career, I try to keep in mind always a statement by Emerson. He said, “Guard well your spare moments, for they’re like uncut diamonds. Spend them and they’re worth will never be known.” So, you know, just those moments that we give away, what could we have done with them? What could we have written? What amazing time could we have spent with our family? If we give it all away and use it up, we’ll never know what those moments could have been. 

I work hard to remind myself of that, because I am someone who likes to say yes to people and yes to life. That makes me happy to feel like I’m a generous person. But I also know that I’m remembering to guard my spare moments as it repays me in the long run and keeps me strong for giving again another day.

Lara Ehrlich  

Thank you. I think that’s a perfect place to wrap up. And that’s really valuable advice. I think I’ll print out that quote and put it right above my desk, so I can look at it every time I’m making a decision about how to spend my time. Thank you so much for joining us. It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you and to get to know you in this way.

Beth Ann

Oh, my goodness, thank you. The time flew by. I’ve really loved your questions. I’m wishing you and your series the best of luck.

Lara Ehrlich  

Thank you so much. And thank you all for joining us, and have a great night.