For several weeks, Meghan Sterling and I were in conversation about motherhood, lineage, and the nature of love. Her book, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press, June 2023) is a trajectory of memory that begins with her Ukrainian grandmother and culminates in her young daughter. My book, Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, May 2023), is a series of epistolary poems in the voice of Mary Shelley. Many of these poems are addressed to her mother, the feminist and activist, Mary Wollstonecraft.

JC: I just finished reading your fluid and beautiful new book, Comfort the Mourners. I was struck by the mother/daughter relationship in the poems (that is a central theme of Yours, Creature too) and the way the poems capture the overpowering love for a child with the overwhelming demands of being a parent--and not just the demands of time, but those of the body. Could you speak to this tension?

MS: I think that as I have aged, I have begun to recognize the ambivalence in absolutely everything–all we do is a giving up of something else. This job means we aren't doing that job, living here means we aren’t living there, the giving required with the intense love and care of a child is paired with intense loss, and with motherhood in particular, this so easily slides into loss of the self. Is she brushing her hair, brushing her teeth, getting dressed, eating enough, drinking enough water, getting to school on time? Can I meet the bus, keep her busy with craft activities, keep her from too much screen time? Is she getting outdoors enough, does she have time with friends, when are her doctor appointments? All woven with her intense and passionate love and rage and lack of separation from me, all woven with me working full-time and having a writing career. Sometimes I forget that I have a separate body, that I am a separate person. Writing poetry is the way I reclaim myself. I write first thing in the morning every day–sometimes for 15 minutes, sometimes for an hour, and it is a gift I give to myself, a gift of myself to myself, each day. It creates some kind of balance in the overwhelm of having a self-hood in the midst of working and parenting a creature who wants your everything, your attention, your approval, your heart, your soul.

Funny, how I just used the word creature to describe my daughter! Or not funny–interesting. How did you come to write your deeply moving collection as an epistolary work, with most of the poems (especially at the beginning) written to Mary’s mother? What was that process?

JC: I was reading the biography Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon. It’s a dual biography that alternates chapters between Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. I’d entered a state in life where reading poetry or fiction before bed was too stimulating and kept me from sleep so I tried to find non-fiction that didn’t get me too engrossed. I thought literary biography would fit this bill. I had no intention of writing this book—I was in the final stages of completing Liar—but the biography was so compelling that I checked out several more biographies on Shelley from the library and immersed myself in her life for the summer. The poems came very quickly—in a span of a few months.

There are a lot of reasons her life drew me in: desire, poverty, abandonment, creation, but I realized only after the book came out that the primal core of the book—the part that fired off that obsessive hot poet vein in me—was the idea that a child could be monstrous and repulsive to its creator. A child could even kill its mother. Wollstonecraft died eleven days after giving birth to Shelley. I sense that Shelley carried this awareness her entire life and that it was aggravated by the severity of her father, William Godwin, and the hostility of her stepmother. Percy Shelley ran from their first dead infant and seemed unable to cope with the pain of the women he was hurting. Victor was in fact a name that Percy Shelley sometimes used to refer to himself and when we look at the repulsion that Victor Frankenstein feels toward his creation I don’t think it’s a stretch to draw parallels. The monster desperately wants love and companionship, but is rejected because it is grotesque. I think there is a continued horror at women’s experience and pain as something grotesque. People want to stuff it back inside the corners of the home and keep it hidden. Like Rukeyser said, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” The creature’s deepest pain is that Victor Frankenstein does not take responsibility for creating him—which of course leads to greater violence and pain.

This is an idea about our responsibility to our own actions, but also one of lineage and what we inherit from our ancestors. I noted that Comfort the Mourner has a strong theme of lineage within it, particularly with the grandmother figure.

MS: Oh yes. The maternal figures loom large in my life, more even since I became a mother and stepped into the line myself. I often feel that every decision I make, every poem I write, every choice in words I use on the page or from my mouth, is an attempt to be a better steward of the line of mothers, the ones I come from, the ones that will come after me. So many of us women were such hurting little girls. I want to be a source of light for my daughter. That when she says the word mother, it doesn't sting in her mouth. I inherited so many things from the women in my family–intelligence, ambition, rage, power, but there was always this soft small flower growing through the cracks in the cement. Every day I am trying to nurture that little flower, in myself, in my daughter. Writing poems are the main way I do it–tending to the sweetness, working through the rage, to better love my family. And I don’t blame my mother or her mother or any of the women who came before me for their rage and cruelty–I see and feel how hard it is to carry all of the things–the hearts and well-being and running of the home and family, it can be maddening, even destructive. But I am determined to do it differently–and poetry is my way to do it.

I really related to the character you created in Mary, the longing for mother, the writing of poems as a means to communicate to the dead, to sort out feelings of grief. How do you feel as a mother writing these poems to a mother?

JC: No one wants to be near the word blame or have it associated with them. It’s so heavy with the villain in it. Yet, I did want to look at what women were like, who they were, and I am still looking and still writing about it because I don’t fully understand it. Why it is hard to love? Why is there pain with those we are closest to, not strangers, especially for past generations? I mean, I know the answer, but the answer doesn’t help me understand it. The Wordsworth idea that poetry is strong emotion recollected in tranquility has been with me for years, but in a way that gnawed, and I finally see that it’s because it was not true for me. My emotions are not recollected in tranquility. They’re recollected in grief and pain.

The question about writing as a mother is interesting because I don’t feel like a mother when I write. It’s like I am nothing. Maybe it reveals a delay in my own poetry, that it is still several decades behind my life, because my art was so shut inside me. Certain experiences I did not allow myself to feel, and when I became a parent and a teacher, both of those practices were with a deep deliberation and intent, separate from the shut part. I have always loved children. I’ve been babysitting since age twelve. It’s how I bought everything through college and high school—clothes, a drink with friends, things like that. And I was (and am, but less) immersed in being a mother, but my poems have not caught up to that stage. They are back in the past, still shedding light back there, still trying to make sense of the experience before I was a mother.

I like your point about engaging with the dead, which is one reason I’ve been drawn to literature from the beginning. A book is an entry into an intimacy—whether the person is present or not, dead or alive. Books have always been a stay against loneliness and an opening toward the unsaid. Of course, I can’t ignore the fact that letters to the dead can go unanswered.

Your response that you “are determined to do it differently” reminds me of the lines from your poem “What to Yield” that go “I wrench myself out of / dreams that wish me sorry for what I’ve done, that remind me // of who I thought I was when light was a ceiling traced with the fingers / of angry mothers, when I believed in heredity.” There is a line, too, from your poem “Back Before I Was Tethered, I Saw the Desert” where the narrator describes rescuing a cactus, “How it rewarded us by launching its spines // whenever we drew close. I used to think love was like that: / toxic leaves reaching from a dry and dusty pot.” These lines suggest that shifting ideas of inheritance and love are at the core of this book.

M.S.: Absolutely. Every poem I write is a love poem, but it is also a means to rewrite my own story, to restart the direction of my own life. I look to the women before me, the mothers I came from—I see their frustrations, their unmet needs and desires. I dreamt a few months back that one of my grandmothers was living her life over as a painter in Paris (instead of an angry wife), and she was so joyful. She was free. Writing poetry allows me into the parts of myself that feel everything—the joys of motherhood, the frustrations. It keeps me from becoming a monster. For me, being a mother informs my writing, as writing informs my motherhood. I almost wrote “feeds” instead of informs, which brings us back to the mother/monster. There is a kind of devouring in motherhood as there is in writing. We devour our subjects, we sprout heads, we embody and reinvent. And of course, women are so often devoured by motherhood. I think of the line in your poem, Dear Mother [Outside the door], you write, “the house is gone that killed you”, and I think that more than a womb, it is so often the stifling expectations of domestic lives (and the demands of men, i.e. Outside the door while your father raped your mother) I remember that when I was pregnant, so many people told me that motherhood would end my writing life, that creativity and motherhood were not synonymous. I write my poems to make my own reality, to create an inheritance of joy and celebration at motherhood, rather than having it be the cause of my unspent art. I think of your line, “A child can kill its mother,” and it makes me consider how there are so many ways to die, and not all of them fatal.

In the next stage of your book, when Mary meets Shelly, she enters into another kind of prison. I think of the line, “I fell / to earth like the bird who / banged / against our window frame.” As a mother of a young girl, I want to tell my daughter to stay away from most men! I’m curious about how writing the relationship of Mary and Percy was for you, was there any reflection there?

JC: Another kind of prison—yes! I’ve been judged for taking my husband’s name, but it was simply one man’s name for another and I hated carrying my father’s name. Yours, Creature touches on the relationship between Mary and Percy sparingly; a few poems cover the desire she felt, the alienation when he abandoned her in her grief, and also the admiration and pleasure of mutual creation. He is represented only as the initial P in the book and I don’t view the book as his story. He is peripheral, like the men in fairy tales. Mary Shelley’s story is about the domestic realm—men often elude the pain of the domestic.

I love this dream about your grandmother. I hope there is another world where our female ancestors get to live out their dreams freely. It’s strange, but the birth of my second child is what made me get serious about my writing. I felt an urgency at her birth and I began writing the spare poems that would go into my first book while I nursed her in bed. Having children taught me what time was. It taught me to focus intently on the time I had.

In your work, I notice that the act of writing is often part of the content, like in “Ode to My Writing Practice.” Many of the poems in Comfort the Mourners are sonnets, many are in couplets. Could you talk a little about your choice of form and how it connects to your writing practice?

MS: I’ve always loved the sonnet form—the way it tells its story in a short little tangle like a puzzle, the way the volta shoots off the end like a rose from a briar. I used to write traditional sonnets obsessively, so I got hooked into the form, and I loved the way the couplet at the end was like another voice added to the layers of the sonnet. I use couplets when I feel a poem needs space—to let the images resonate, hang in the white of the page. Also, when there is a dialogue between images. A tension. They draw more attention to the particular. I use sonnets when I am narrating something, to draw myself and the reader along into the folds of the human brain. I always felt that sonnets were most like the way the brain works—the question, the observation, then the volta at the end that leaves us with no answer, but a sorrow or hope or longing. The ellipses, the trailing off at the end. All the poetry I write is an asking, asking, asking. I choose forms that I feel serve best the kind of asking I am doing at the moment. And I know if it is the form that fits if I feel the poem lift a bit off the page—has its own life. Then I know I chose right.

2023