QWF Writes

Tag: mother

  • Writing, Mothering, and the Wild In-Between—By Gillian Sze

    Writing, Mothering, and the Wild In-Between—By Gillian Sze

    My first reading of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was as a parent. Growing up, I somehow managed to miss this childhood classic, which I now recognize as surprising given its widespread popularity. I was given the book as a gift when I was pregnant with my son, and even then I didn’t read it until after he was born. I kept it safe, waiting on a bookshelf along with the other picture books we received.  

    After my son was born, we were advised that it was never too early to start reading to him. We filled those tiny periods when he was awake with reading. I reacquainted myself with books I hadn’t picked up in years: Mercer Mayer, Robert Munsch, Margaret Wise Brown, Eric Carle. My husband, who took the advice to heart, started with Beezus and Ramona, Charlotte’s Web, and The Hobbit. (It took weeks but we eventually completed them in small increments.) Included in our stack was, of course, Where the Wild Things Are. 

    I was struck by the sparsity of the opening pages of text, words just hanging on their own like Sapphic fragments, sentences spilling across pages. With each page turn, the white frames of the illustrations shrink, the images fill up each page until we follow Max into his dream. When Max announces the commencement of the wild rumpus, what follows is three illustrated spreads of the boy reigning over the beasts. Time passes on those pages, without a single word in sight. 

    *

    When I entered motherhood, I simultaneously found myself entering a period of wild wordlessness. Bleary eyed, I was keenly aware of time and sleep. I saw time racing along as my son filled out his onesies. I saw time cherished as much as it was squandered as I lay beneath my sleeping son, not daring to move lest he wake up again for the thousandth time. I saw time slipping away as more (if not all) of it became devoted to caring for him. I oscillated between too little time (his naps were either short or nonexistent) and too much (nursing in the dark, exhausted and impatient as each passing minute stole from what was left of my own slumber). Moreover, I struggled with how to use my time as both a writer and a mother—the former of which I had identified with for much, much longer. I didn’t know how to fill—or not fill—that time with words as I once had. 

    Sendak’s illustrative spreads in the middle of Where the Wild Things Are remind me of what Anne Carson says about the middle section of To the Lighthouse. Carson describes Woolf’s book as “a novel that falls asleep for twenty-five pages in the middle” (22). Set at night, Part II of To the Lighthouse is entitled “Time Passes,” and describes the changes that affect the characters, their lives, and the house. As the characters in both Sendak’s and Woolf’s works go through their necessary transformations, I realized how possible it was to hold these books and sense Time passing both in words, as Woolf had written, and wordlessness, as Sendak had drawn.  

    In truth, I didn’t know how to “read” those illustrations when I flipped to them with my son. At first I felt compelled to fill the silence with my own commentary, and so I did. “Howling at the moon! (page flip) Swinging! (page flip) Marching!” Eventually, I learned just to observe my son take in the pages, looking at the images without my input.

    However which way Time moved (Mr. Ramsey stumbling in grief along a passage, or little Max riding triumphantly on a wild thing, or my son letting go of the table edge for his first steps), it just did. My anxiety about never writing again lived along with me through those day naps and night feedings. I accepted that becoming a mother meant having to lose myself as a writer. This primal and sleepy period of adjusting to a new person was tinged with mourning. My husband, supportive if exasperated, would remark on my melodrama. But at the time it felt true. It’s only now as my son is approaching six and his toddler-sister is starting to sleep through the night, that I recognize this tumultuous era as something transformative for me as a writer. I think of Carson’s wise assertion of the chapter “Time Passes”: “Virginia Woolf offers us, through sleep, a glimpse of a kind of emptiness that interests her. It is the emptiness of things before we make use of them, a glimpse of reality prior to its efficacy” (23). 

    Words, much like Max voyaging towards wakefulness, eventually “sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day.” It may have taken a little longer, but we arrived together… changed, relieved, and a little sleepier. 

    Works Cited 

    Carson, Anne. Decreation. Vintage Canada, 2005. 

    Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. Fiftieth Anniversary ed., Harper Collins, 2013.

    Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry books, including Peeling Rambutan, Redrafting Winter, and Panicle, which were finalists for the QWF’s A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Her forthcoming prosimetrical collection, Quiet Night Think, explores the early shaping of a writer, the creative process, and motherhood, and will be published next spring with ECW Press. Since becoming a mother, Gillian has started writing picture books and has two books forthcoming with Philomel Books (Penguin Random House USA). Her first picture book, The Night Is Deep and Wide, was recently released in March. www.gilliansze.com

    Photo credit: “Where the Wild Things Are” by Skinned Mink is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 (header banner); Nadia Zheng (headshot)

  • Writers: The Truth Can Set You Free—By Tamara Jong

    Writers: The Truth Can Set You Free—By Tamara Jong

    Ma was so many things; a Jehovah’s Witness preacher, an alcoholic with a troubled past, and an avid reader, poet, and writer. When she was sober she was engaged, a bright star in our neighborhood and religious community. But then she was also a yeller: when she kicked her sisters out of her life, she literally cut them out of any photos she had. Ma would punish me because I chatted in class, ate pumpkin seeds during Halloween, and was sent to the corner by the teacher. Lying wasn’t an option to save my own hide.

    TamaraJongreadingyouth
    A younger Tamara Jong.

    I escaped by reading fiction. Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik was an early favorite for me. In the first set of stories, little bear’s mum makes him clothes when he is cold and throws him a birthday party. Nine-year-old Pippi Longstocking took me on all her adventures with her monkey Mr. Nilsson on the South Seas. Although she was parentless, she seemed resilient and nothing could stop her. I related to A Wrinkle in Time’s Meg: she never seemed to fit in anywhere and was devoted to her father; my dad was my idol until Ma kicked him out for his infidelities. I moved on to the worlds of the Brontës and Austen, where I felt safe and where the ending always seemed to work out. I would write and draw pictures of my stories and plays. There was no such thing as writer’s block.

    My first attempt at writing fiction as an adult came under the guise of autobiographical fiction. I mixed up truth and fiction so no one would know that it was mostly me I was writing about. My story was about Keaton, a suicidal fourteen-year-old. Keaton’s angelic mother worked all the time, made a hell of a bunch of tea, and didn’t really know her kid or see her for who she was. Keaton wrote lousy poetry, had a bestie, and obsessively liked a boy named Josh. She ended up getting help after being hospitalized, taking anti-depressants, and undergoing extensive therapy. I wrote it after my own stint in the hospital after a suicide attempt. But there were truths missing in the story that I couldn’t write down yet. I made the father the alcoholic and the mother a loving TV mom, a cardboard cut-out of a mother. There was nothing about religion anywhere. Then I got stalled and didn’t work on it.

    Things didn’t really click for me until two year later, when I decided to try out a non-fiction writing course with Ayelet Tsabari. God, she made me fall in love with it. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I couldn’t stop. The words came easier than in fiction for me. The only things that interfered with my writing were my day job and sleep. Ayelet introduced me to her stories and so many other great diverse writers and made me realize that there were so many ways to spin a story.

    I took a second course with her, and then another. It was the first time I had written about being a Jehovah’s Witness and my parents, my siblings, and our lives. Once I had a taste for non-fiction, I didn’t want to let go. I started reading less fiction and more non-fiction. I submitted to contests and literary magazines, and revised my stories. When my creative non-fiction piece, “Father Hallowed Be Thy Name” got accepted at RicepaperMagazine, I was ecstatic. Ayelet encouraged me to write a memoir. I had only started writing non-fiction in her classes and she believed in me! Something had started shifting for me.

    In an earlier creative writing class, I had written fiction about a Catholic girl who got pregnant, a dog called Jehovah, and Medusa. Nothing was really wrong with those stories but they lacked a depth of what I really wanted to say. They were starting points that were necessary for me to get where I had to go. Testing out the waters until I could go in myself, immerse myself in the work.

    I realized I had been hiding behind fiction so no one would know about my real life and who I was. What if others judged my life choices or no one wanted to read my stories, or they thought that I had nothing original to say? I was terrified of people’s reactions. I had been so good at hiding my trauma. When I was penning fiction, I could take those risks. After all, it was imaginary. No one would ever know it really happened.

    When I shelved the idea of writing a fiction novel, non-fiction stories emerged in its place. I’ve been working with them for months now, reading them, revising them, losing and finding Ma, collecting our stories together. Non-fiction freed me to tell my real-life story on the page in a way that fiction couldn’t. When I was growing up fiction had protected me by letting me escape in stories, to live another’s narrative.

    Tamara_Jongph_Photo_Credit_Charles _MarschuetzTamara Jong is a Montreal-born mixed-race writer of Chinese and European ancestry. Her work has appeared in Ricepaper, Room, carte blanche, The New Quarterly, Invisible Publishing, and Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio (Simon Fraser University) and recently had her piece “Thanks for All the Lice, Pharaoh” longlisted in The New Quarterly’s 2019 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. You can find her on Twitter @bokchoygurl.

    Photo credits: Tamara Jong (header image); Charles Marschuetz (headshot)

  • Amazing Grace: A Literary Friendship—By S. Nadja Zajdman

    Amazing Grace: A Literary Friendship—By S. Nadja Zajdman

    I was sitting by the gas-lit fireplace in my local library when a book on the table caught my eye. It was the collected correspondence of the novelist Marjorie Rawlings and her editor, Maxwell Perkins. As I read their letters I could hear their long-stilled voices speaking to each other, and to me, across the expanse of decades. I tried to check out the book, but was told it was a reject from a book sale, and if I wanted it I would have to buy it. So I did.

    At home, I looked up Maxwell Perkins on the Internet. A link led me to Perkins’ granddaughter, the novelist Ruth King Porter, who lived in rural Vermont. Ruth was giving away her novels, asking nothing in return but that readers post reviews on her website. I sent for Ruth’s books, and a correspondence began. Soon, we wanted to meet in person. I scheduled a visit to Ruth in spring, then her mother’s dying began. I rescheduled to autumn, then my mother’s dying began.

    Instantly I cancelled travel plans and let go of my already-purchased bus ticket, but a friend with a car offered to take me on a shorter day trip to Vermont. Encouraged by my mother, I accepted.

    “We are two middle-aged women, both wearing glasses.” I wrote to Ruth. “My friend is a blonde with dark roots. I still think of myself as brunette, but there is more salt than pepper in my hair, now.” Ruth wrote that she would be waiting for me under the clock tower of Montpelier’s City Hall. I knew what Ruth looked like from the photographs on her website.

    PerkinsRawlingsBookCoverWe rode into Montpelier on a gloriously warm day at high noon. I saw Ruth sitting on a bench under the clock tower, scribbling in a notebook. Main Street was packed with tourists, and we couldn’t stop the car in front of City Hall. We found a parking space down the street. My friend waited in the car, while I ran down the block. “Ruth?” The woman on the bench looked up, and then leapt up.

    Ruth was a pre-hippie Back-to-the-Lander, in her early seventies when I first met her. At our first encounter, she wore a white work shirt, faded blue jeans, and a black money belt slung over her shoulder. She walked like someone who rode horses.

    “Where’s your friend?” Ruth called through the crowd of tourists blocking the sidewalk.

    “She’s waiting in the car!” I called back. I led Ruth to the car and the friend in it. Ruth led us both on a tour of the golden-domed state capital building. “I hope we don’t run into my son.” Ruth twinkled. “He’d be embarrassed by the way I’m dressed. My son Louis works as an aide to the governor.” When the tour was over Ruth led the way in her battered old car out of Montpelier and higher into the Green Mountains, where another world awaited.

    Ruth’s husband Bill and a second son, Robbie, rode their tractors out of the woods to greet us on the porch of a rambling farmhouse. Nearby, three large dogs stiffened in alert: Ellie and Flora danced in attendance to the top dog, Chief. Ruth’s daughter Molly, an artist who lived, Thoreau-like, in a cabin she built with her hands, bounded up a hill to join us. The open and friendly faces of Ruth’s family smiled at me kindly. I’m sure they were aware of my situation, though no one referred to it. Taut, lean, Alabama-born Bill wiped the grime off his hands and stepped forward to shake mine. I felt as though I’d stepped into an illustration by Norman Rockwell.

    As an early darkness fell my companion and I crossed back over the border, returning to Montreal and my mother’s apartment. “Hello sweetheart.” My dying mother smiled tenderly. “How did it go with the lady in Vermont?”

    What could I say? I felt guilty at having left her, even for a few hours. I didn’t feel like relaying the details of an excursion to Vermont.

    Six months later I returned to Montpelier by bus, alone. Once more, Ruth met me under the clock tower. For a few days I curled under Ruth’s wing, sunning on her roof, sleeping in Max Perkins’ bed, waking to birdsong and skimming the staggering array of autographed out-of-print books dedicated by grateful authors to their engaged and caring editor. “Grieving is hard work,” Ruth would say in greeting when, after a nap, I descended a steep staircase into her dark country kitchen. As we stood side by side in the verdant meadow which was her front yard, Ruth added, as much in amazement as in sadness, “A year ago this time, both our mothers were alive.”

    Ruth King Porter is an American blueblood whose antecedents hark back to a woman who held a door open for George Washington. I am the Canadian-born daughter of refugees. My mother, a woman who survived three invasions and the Warsaw Ghetto, later in life became prominent in Holocaust education. Many people find my mother’s story repellent and turn away from any mention of it, whereas Ruth and her husband Bill were fascinated. Ruth did for me what I had done for my mother; she listened. And she encouraged me to tell my mother’s story.

    Six months after that, I was back on the farm. Ruth and Bill acknowledged what would have been my mother’s birthday by lighting large candles in a spectacularly tangled chandelier made entirely of logs. Through the wall-sized picture window we watched the cold autumn rain and wind lash the last leaves off a forest full of trees. As we ate hot squash and a pot full of peas grown in Ruth’s garden, the lit log chandelier shone, the tree-bark-shaded lamps glowed, and the wood stove burned.

    I have been back to Ruth and Bill’s farm several times since. In between visits Ruth does for me what her grandfather did for Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Marjorie Rawlings: she writes to me and elicits writing from me, reads and critiques my material, encourages, cajoles, indicates where and when she believes I have veered off-track, and gently nudges me back. Clutching the psychic lifeline tossed to me by the descendant of a legendary literary editor, I live and work alone and in growing peace in my suburban Montreal apartment, producing a memoir of my mother. My mother knew that my writing would sustain me after she was gone. Ruth Porter’s mentorship sustained me during the darkest days of my life.

    S Nadja Zajdman_HeadshotS. Nadja Zajdman is a Canadian author. Her short stories and non-fiction pieces have been featured in newspapers, magazines, literary journals and anthologies across North America, in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. In 2012 Zajdman published the related short story collection Bent Branches, which spans four continents and seventy years in the life of a family. Recently Zajdman completed a second short story collection, as well as the above-mentioned memoir of her mother, the noted Holocaust activist and educator Renata Skotnicka-Zajdman, who passed away at the end of 2013.

    Photo credit: MaxPixel (header banner)

  • Death is Why I Write by Kate Henderson

    Death is Why I Write by Kate Henderson

    When my grandfather died, it was as if his thoughts were transferred to me. All those years he said I had itchy feet, I’d thought he was criticizing the fact that I changed jobs every year or suggesting I’d had too many boyfriends. But no, he just wanted to see me settle down while he was still alive. I wrote a story about him, and found myself for the first time in a place where it didn’t feel like I was being told what to do or trying to please anyone. Death cuts through the clutter.

    From then on I had to write.

    Now both my parents have died. If it weren’t for my day job, I’d be writing all the time. I wake up early to clutch at details before they are erased by waves on sand. I recall how my mother smiled for a camera, the way my father used to swear through clenched teeth. Small gestures are all that’s left, isolated incidents, and the broad strokes of their lives.

    I used to think that writing about real people was a phase. But then it seemed frivolous to invent characters when they were sitting right in front of me, rich and fully developed. When they stopped living, well, I realized I couldn’t possibly improve upon the compelling arc of a life. My work is to distill. I gravitate to the restraint of truth.

    “If it weren’t for my day job, I’d be writing all the time. I wake up early to clutch at details before they are erased by waves on sand.”

    My mother tried to be a housewife, but she was never comfortable with domesticity. The four of us knew she loved us because she tried so hard. One year, she joined the women who formed a phone chain to keep the price of vegetables down at the local Dominion store. While she talked, she doodled on scraps of paper, creating labyrinths of shapes that eventually took on a life of their own. We all remember the time the face of Batman emerged from the page.

    My mother landed a job reading the news on television. It was how she supported us after divorcing my father. Like Neil Armstrong, Betty Friedan, and John Lennon, she taught us anything was possible. Early morning shifts and dressing for the public ate up a lot of time. It wasn’t until after we’d left home that she went back to school for the degree she’d always wanted and started writing stories and plays.

    I knew my mother would die eventually; there had even been a couple of false alarms. But when the time came, I treated it with the nonchalance I suspect children require to carry on. I have to be at a meeting, I said to her that morning. Can you wait? Yeah, I can wait, she answered, her tone shifting, sounding as if she had waited before. Surely I added I love you—it was how we said goodbye on the phone.

    “It wasn’t until after we’d left home that she went back to school for the degree she’d always wanted and started writing stories and plays.”

    The morning after she died, I woke with the sensation that I’d been left to contemplate fathers. My mother never really got over my father, even though it was she who’d left him all those years earlier. Or was it that she never got over missing her own father? I’ve learned that while adults maneuver around broken connections, children absorb the intensity of missing into their flesh.

    All those years, my mother loved my father. Even after she found out about the affair. Even after another husband. In conversations with us, she had started to refer to him as if they’d kept in touch, each knowing how the other had changed. As if he didn’t have another wife.

    When my father died, my mother’s vision, already clouded, deteriorated. It became harder and harder for her to breathe. It was as if without him in the world, an important part of her was no longer accessible. The last entry in her journal, dated a couple of weeks before her death, recorded a dream where my father had kissed her, just like in the old days. “Wow,” she had written. “I’d forgotten how good that felt.”

    The desire to capture my mother’s essence after she disappeared is more profound than anything I’ve ever felt. I write to sit with her, remember textures, and relieve the missing for a while. I write to piece together meaning. Death is her closing chapter. Writing allows me to sift through the pages of our life together, looking for clues.

    Headshot 2-2.jpgKate Henderson lives and writes in Montreal. She recently published a story about her thesis advisor, who died too soon, and is currently working on a memoir about her mother.

    Photo credits: Lisa Henderson (Batman doodle, drawn by Lynn Henderson); Vanessa di Gregorio (headshot)