Ann Putnam on Ode to Motherhood

I'm trying to write a story called “Zoe’s Bear,” which has a deadline right around the corner. It will eventually become part of the novel, I Will Leave You Never, which will be published this May. I began it on the drive home from Glacier National Park, where we'd taken the children not knowing a grizzly bear had just killed three people. The experience of the bear was far more real to me than to them.  They thought it was a grand adventure and loved wearing bare bells tied to their shoes. The terror of that bear has never left me, nor the sense that I would never be big enough or brave enough to protect my children from it, however it came. It began my thinking about motherhood and peril, and thus the urgency of writing this story.

I had worked for weeks in the margins of my life, ideas written on cereal boxes while cooking breakfast, on receipts, restaurant napkins, my car registration. I’ve become so interruptible that the expectation of interruption has become a habit of mind. But if I could just have a single day completely alone to get the fragments of ideas, phrases and lines, even a word here and there into some kind of magical and revelatory combination, I could go deeply into the very heart of what I most need to say.    

This is the story of that day.

I’ve cancelled classes, the kids are all at school, and at last I’m alone.  The day stretches out full of possibility. I sit at my computer and take a deep breath of gratitude.  But I hear voices that do not speak, footsteps and no one's there. Unaccustomed as I am to this silence, I hardly know what to do. Yet this day is what I've wanted for so long—uninterrupted, unambiguous time, hour after precious hour. 

I had decided ahead of time that I was not going to answer the phone. Yet when the phone rings an hour later, of course I answer it. It's my little girl’s school.  She’s in the nurse’s room, throwing up, could I please come and get her?  She was fine this morning!  But with kids, these things turn on a dime. So of course I’m out the door, only stopping for my purse and a towel and pan for the ride home.  She’s lying curled up in a ball on the cot in the nurse’s room, hugging her coat. Her face is damp and flushed. When did this happen?  She’d danced out of the house and slid into her carpool’s backseat, blew me a kiss.  

But now my little girl is in her bedroom, fast asleep. I’ve checked on her about a dozen times, telling myself that if she had a fever, it’s gone now, but keep a lookout. I don’t trust this strange suddenness. Then it’s after lunch, and I'm settled into my writing space. I look out into the woods, crack open a window and the air floats cool over my skin. I can do this after all.

My dog, my eighty-five pound black and white shadow friend, is lying under the computer table, chewing on an old tube sock. Time flies, then stops, as she crawls out from under the table. She's making a funny noise, sort of like choking or gagging. I start to rush her outside, but whatever was going to come up must have gone back down, because now she's standing there, looking up at me, wagging her tail. Then I notice that the sock is gone. Bring her right over, the vet says.  I scoop up my daughter, who’s still half asleep, buckle her into her car seat, and hand her the pan and towel. Her eyes look funny.  She really is running a fever. 

The X-rays, examination, and diagnosis pretty well took the rest of the afternoon. It was lucky you were home today, the vet said, this could have been life-threatening. Ah, there it is—the presence of that bear and the necessity for my constant vigilance. But I get weary keeping track of it all. I look at my daughter in the rear-view mirror. She’s fallen asleep, which is just as well. The dog is nestled as close to her as she can get.  We’re all tucked in now. All safe.  At least for now. I’ve done everything I can to keep that bear away, with my secret chants, tokens, charms, cruciferous vegetables, vitamins, seat belts, mittens, and scarves—incantations all, against certain unspoken things.

I pull into the driveway, and just sit there, looking at the waiting house.  It’s about time for my little boys to be coming up the hill from the bus top.  Party’s over.                    

We would watch to see if the sock reappeared, which I'm happy to report it did quite unceremoniously, the next day.  Well, you can't live real life with pets and kids without, say,  somebody putting a bean up their nose, though all of this makes me feel that there really is too much of everything. I do not know what the answer is to this conflict between one’s attachments and one’s work in the world, because I have never learned how to be two places at once and I do not know how to love either any less. Other than death, I do believe that having a child is probably the most life-altering experience a person can have. Certain ways of feeling and thinking are changed forever. What I do know is this: even as they diminish my capacity for work, the tugs and pulls of those I most love have enriched that work in strange and wondrous and continuously surprising ways.

Ann Putnam is an internationally-known Hemingway scholar, who has made more than six trips to Cuba. Her novel, Cuban Quartermoon, came, in part, from those trips, as well as a residency at Hedgebrook Writer’s Colony. She has published the memoir, Full Moon at Noontide:  A Daughter’s Last Goodbye (University of Iowa Press), and short stories in Nine by Three:  Stories (Collins Press), among others. Her second novel, I Will Leave You Never, will be published this spring. Her literary criticism appears in many collections and periodicals. She holds a PhD from the University of Washington and has taught creative writing, gender studies and American Literature for many years.  She is finishing a third novel, The World in Woe and Splendor.

Kathie Giorgio on How To Handle Writing The Hard Stuff

By: Kathie Giorgio

“You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.”

― Allen Ginsberg

When you ask writers why they write what they write, you will get as many answers as there are to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” We writers write for every reason imaginable, and some of us change those reasons with every project, while others gnaw at the same bone our whole life through. 

And then there are writers like me, who basically just can’t keep our mouths shut.

I’ve been called a “dark” writer, a “disturbing” (thank goodness not “disturbed”) writer, a “fearless” writer, an “honest” writer. Of them all, I like “honest” best. I tend to write about the things that people have very strong feelings about – and consequently, if they see something that defies that, they get angry.

I’ve written about abuse and infidelity, rape, and especially the treatment of women involved in all of these. In my nonfiction, I wrote about being assaulted by a man in a Make America Great Again hat, a few days after Trump’s inauguration. Most recently, I’ve written about suicide, not about the people left behind, but about how those who choose to end their own lives feel, and how they are treated. 

There have been times I’ve wished I could be a “light” writer, and some of my favorite writers are exactly that. But I find that what most often makes me run for my computer is something that twists my heart and my psyche, and I write about it in order to find out more, to learn, which is what I hope my readers do too. And ultimately, I write to help.

There are some drawbacks to this, of course. These are things you have to learn to deal with, if you’re going to do this kind of writing. First, look at how I am described as a writer, that I just listed above. Hearing yourself called dark and disturbing is…disturbing. You may question why you write such things, why you’re interested in them, and I’ve certainly done a lot of that. And sometimes, it’s right in your face. I was teaching once at a writing conference, and I happened to be close by the book-selling table when I saw a woman pick up my novel, Rise From The River. This book is about a young single mother who is raped, and it covers the issue of 39 of our states giving the rapist and his family more rights than the victim. Someone standing next to the woman who was looking at my book said, “Oh, you should get that. I’ve read it, and it’s amazing!” The woman put the book back down. “No,” she said. “It’s just too dark.” And she wiped her hand on her jeans like she’d been holding something dirty.

That hurt. And these things will hurt. I write, and other controversial writers write, with a sense of sincerely wanting to shed light on something, usually something that needs to be changed. So to be treated as part of the problem, and not part of the answer, can be difficult. So what do you do?

You do your best to not remember the woman who put your book down, and remember all those that picked it up. 

That’s a universal problem, it seems, across the board of writers. From the writers I know, to the writers I teach, to myself, it is somehow much easier to remember the rejections and insults than it is to remember the acceptances and praise. You might have to print out some of these good comments and keep them somewhere where you can readily see them. 

And you always need to remember your motivation. You don’t write to hurt; you write to help, and to try to make the hurt go away.

Another issue that arises when you write about controversial issues is, in a sense, battle fatigue. Writers sink into their characters. We are immersed in them. When we’re not writing, the characters follow us around and tap us often on the back, reminding us there’s a story to be told. But when you have a “dark” story to tell, it’s very possible to start feeling pretty dark yourself. 

The solution? Take a break. Write something else entirely different. Don’t write at all. Spend a week reading nothing but comic strips. Walk in the sun. Hug your favorite person. Let them hug you. 

And then remind yourself that you’re a good person and get back to it. 

If you’re writing about controversial issues, you’re doing so because you care. Because you want to make a difference, because you want to help. You want change. And the most important thing about writing on these topics is to keep doing it. To keep reminding yourself of your motivation. You aren’t writing for shock value (some writers are), you aren’t writing for attention (some writers are), and you aren’t writing to hurt someone (some writers are). The most important thing to do when writing about controversial issues is to be true to yourself. Remember who you are and why you’re writing. 

And then just keep going. 

Kathie Giorgio is the author of seven novels, two story collections, an essay collection, and four poetry collections. Her latest novel, Hope Always Rises, will be released on February 28, 2023. She’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in fiction and poetry and awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, the Silver Pen Award for Literary Excellence, the Pencraft Award for Literary Excellence, and the Eric Hoffer Award In Fiction. Her poem “Light” won runner-up in the 2021 Rosebud Magazine Poetry Prize.  In a recent column, Jim Higgins, the books editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, listed Giorgio as one of the top 21 Wisconsin writers of the 21st century. Kathie is also the director and founder of AllWriters’ Workplace & Workshop LLC, an international creative writing studio. 

Facing Childhood Trauma Later in Life

Deciding to face the upsets, challenges, or straight up traumas of childhood is not easy. Choosing to do so at the age of fifty-five, maybe even less so, but who’s to say when the best time will be to circle back to adversity?

There were a lot of coping skills I tried on between the age of five (onset of trauma) and fifty-five (bike accident). 

At the time of my accident in 2018, some of my coping mechanisms were still in place: denial/silence/diversion aka dance. Others were left behind as I had grown out of them: substance abuse/eating disorders, self-harming. And more recently to help with normal ups and downs I had found meditation, counseling, and wellness schtick.

Occasionally, a situation presents itself however, requiring deeper survival skills. Like that moment when your world suddenly shifts, shuts down, and becomes the size of a pin hole, and as it is rapidly evaporating, you feel as though you’ve been reduced to only one basic function, which is finding your next breath. (That’s what it felt like to me.) Once that happens, like that Humpty Dumpty crash and burn bike accident, lifelong coping strategies no longer feel accessible. 

The accident revealed two things. As a survivor from way back, after the initial shock of catastrophe, I instinctively began charting toward my what next. Mangled on the asphalt underneath the totaled road bike, I trained my thoughts toward rational ones. Morphined up, and an EMT escort to the Emergency room, led to a few surgeries and decent supply of hardware for my upper limbs. On the mend, I turned to small repeatable patterns, baby steps of realistic goals, tiny, doable, toddler-type milestones to reach for. Like the quiet young girl who attempted to protect herself from abuse growing up, I narrowed my focus to those minute-to-minute accomplishments. And I prayed. Ok. I may have been a tad bit impatient at times, and experienced an occasional emotional meltdown, but mostly I was relentlessly disciplined on a path toward returning to full and robust health. 

While braced in thermoplastic splints from shoulders to knuckles, I hummed melodies in sync to my stretching fingertips, in, out, in, out, jazzing up the circulation in my arms. I tapped finger pads on countertops, opened fingers, closed fingers. I begged my physical therapists to (please) push me harder. It wasn’t what I couldn’t do, (and didn’t for a very long time) it was what could I do. 

But the fact was, (the second takeaway) emotionally and psychologically I had been stripped of my default self, the identity I’d nurtured from way back, and relied on. What had saved me so long ago (dance) I began to understand, had also buried me.

Creative movement, sweaty calisthenics, therapy band, and body weight drills, twenty-mile bike rides and 5k runs, dance – these were still my tried-and-true identity markers.  The trauma of my childhood had been packed tightly into a highly disciplined girl who eventually became a professional dancer. What the aftermath of the accident helped revealed was, this disguise beautifully and tragically hid that little girl’s broken and betrayed heart. 

In the first six months post bike accident, mostly in bed, mostly drugged, I no longer knew who I was. 

Without much else to grab on to, I picked up a pen. At first, it was just ugly, messy, confusing, remembering. But I kept going, opening fresh journals, running out of pages, waking up in the middle of the night to write something down. I asked for a laptop and began saving documents. I landed in a writing circle on Zoom. (It was Covid at this point, the lockdown and onset of social distancing began two years after my accident while I was still recovering.) I felt like the Phoenix rising out of her ashes. I began to embrace miracles, the most important one being I could let go of how I had identified myself all my life and begin again.

By hunting down and writing out my stories, I saw my past obstacles differently, and I sat with my perceptions of those obstacles for a long time. My writing allowed me to unlearn and relearn the knowns and unknowns of my past, and ultimately, gave me a chance to employ a more loving lens there, on a history previously gripped mostly in fear. I understood how dance enabled me to move forward and protected me but that I had a chance now to be more than a silent performer.

With my writing, I unearthed that intense inner focus I used to overcome the aftermath of abuse. With my writing, I unearthed how I leaned into the whelm of joy, and that I trusted those experiences of joy when I was a young girl and turned them into my salvations. With my writing, I learned that my creative expression as a dancer, was how I tapped into my inner stillness, a place of beautiful longing. I could “participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world” – Joseph Campbell

And so, at the age of fifty-five I circled back and studied my past. And with the new tool of writing, I found a different way to move and be, empowered instead of ashamed, included in life instead of separated away from it. My writing, like my dancing before it, spelled out longing. But when longing accompanies sorrow, and is then held with care and reverence, it can invite transcendence. * 

My writing, in fact, was bringing me home.

*Inspired by Susan Cain’s Bittersweet

Antonia Deignan is a mother of five children by choice, a dancer by calling, and a writer by necessity. She was born on the east coast, but lived primarily in the Midwest, where she danced with multiple dance companies and raised her children. She opened her own dance studio and directed a pre-professional dance company before a bike accident wish-boned her path, and her identity. She has multiple publications in magazine and online formats. Her memoir, Underwater Daughter, will be published in May 2023.