"becoming a mother has taught me a lot about being present"
Jennifer Case, author of WE ARE ANIMALS, on learning to be flexible in her creative routines and how writing and caregiving both help us experience the world more deeply
Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. If you’ve found inspiration in the good creatures series, I think you’ll love my new book, The Good Mother Myth, about motherhood, ambition, and making art. (And it’s still under $20 over at Amazon, though you can also get it at Bookshop or anywhere else books are sold!)
This is a good creatures interview, a series that explores the intersection of caregiving and creative practice. If you know (or are!) a good creature whose work we should feature, send me an email—you can just reply to this newsletter.
Today’s interview is with Jennifer Case, whose new book We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood, speaks directly to the obsessions of this series. Her essay “A Political Pregnancy,” about an unintended second pregnancy, was The Rumpus’s most-read essay of 2020. That essay beautifully captures so much of what Case does well in her writing about motherhood, which manages to combine the intimacy of personal narrative with the political stakes of our lack of support for mothers and families. Below, we talk about the need to be alone to enter a deep flow state and learning to adapt a creative practice across different stages of caregiving.
Who do you care for?
I have two school-aged children–currently 8 and 12 years old. I also care for a dog, our three backyard chickens, and a large garden. In addition, I teach creative nonfiction at the college level. I care about my students and their work. I also do my best to care for myself.
What kind of creative work do you do?
I primarily write creative nonfiction, tending toward the lyrical and environmental. My most recent book, We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood, came out this fall from Trinity University Press and explores motherhood, feminism, evolutionary biology, and reproductive justice.
I’ve also found great joy in creating collage postcards, such as these. My current work-in-progress integrates collage postcards into a literary exploration of care work (from childcare to environmental care).
What’s changed in your creative life since becoming a caregiver?
Before I had children, I would wake up every morning, make a cup of coffee, and sit down in an armchair with my writing journal and a book of poetry. I would read and write for an hour or so before I even turned on my computer or looked at email. It was a lovely routine that centered and grounded me. Indeed, I still have fond memories of those mornings, when poetry started my day and I watched the sun rise through the window.
After I had kids, however, that routine wasn’t possible. My son has amazing antenna, and to this day he will come out of his room and crawl onto my lap the moment he hears me in the morning–even if I’ve woken extra early, believing I can claim an hour or two to write before the day begins.
As a result, it has become much harder to find those long, languid hours to immerse myself in my creative life. When my children are grown, it might become easier again, but in the meantime I’ve had to adjust my routine.
What is difficult about being creative and a caregiver?
Caregiving takes time, as does the creative process, and those things can’t always occur in the same time and space. When I am deep in a project, I disappear from the world for a while. I shut the world out and become 100% focused on the essay I’m writing, the thought I’m engaging, and the words I’m trying to pull from the ether. Or rather, the boundaries between my body and the world blur, and I enter that creative energy–my body becoming a conduit for the project. That kind of “flow” is a lovely part of the creative process, but it does mean I’ve sometimes forgotten to eat when drafting–and it also means I’m not paying much attention to people around me…including my children. It’s not a particularly good state to be in if you have a toddler at home, especially if you are the one who’s supposed to be keeping that toddler safe!
Having my kids around when I’m trying to write either means I can’t enter that state due to interruptions, or it means that I’m not being present for my kids. When I need to work deeply on a project, I largely need to be alone.
I’ve found it useful to consider how everything might become a creative practice. I am a writer, but that doesn’t mean writing is my only means of nurturing my creative muscles.
What’s an adjustment you’ve had to make to your creative process, and an adjustment you refuse to make?
I’ve had to adjust when I write and my expectations for how long a project takes me. Rather than writing every morning, like I used to, now I primarily write on Tuesdays and Thursdays after I’ve dropped my kids off at school. I’m lucky enough to be able to protect a few hours both mornings–provided a child isn’t ill or has an appointment, of course. When life interferes with those two mornings, as it inevitably does when you’re a caregiver, I’ve had to accept the need to be flexible.
That said, I refuse to let go of my creative life entirely, even in situations where I have had to be very, very flexible. During the pandemic, when my kids were home all day, every day, and I needed to care for them while also teaching online, I really didn’t have time to write (let alone the space! My home office doesn’t have a door). As a result, I had to drop my writing for a while. However, that didn’t mean I dropped my creative life. I put a lot of energy into the garden that year, as well as evening meals. My daughter and I drew birds with watercolor pencils, and I made collage postcards. I’ve found it useful to consider how everything might become a creative practice. I am a writer, but that doesn’t mean writing is my only means of nurturing my creative muscles.
Is there something specific you do to jumpstart creativity?
Oddly, one of the benefits of having limited time due to caretaking is that when I do sit down to write, I rarely have trouble getting started. The need and desire to write has built so much that I’m primed and ready when I finally sit down with a few hours in front of me.
That said, I make a concerted effort to exclude the outside world from my writing time/space (no checking my bank account or responding to work emails!). And when I’m struggling to get started, I always find it helpful to immerse myself in the creative work of others. Reading an exquisite poem, essay, or book will invariably rekindle my own desire and drive to create. Most recently, Shayne Terry’s Leave: A Postpartum Account did that for me. It’s such a beautiful book, and it reminded me how powerful short, lyrical work can be.
❤️️ clicking the little red heart at the top or the bottom is a great way to help new creative caregivers find us! ❤️️
What are some creative milestones you’re looking forward to? Or ones you “missed” due to the both/and aspects of your life?
I’m pretty content at the moment with my creative life–and grateful for that contentment! When my children were infants, I felt much more tension between caregiving and parenting. That tension has eased–in part because they are older and don’t need my body as intensely as they did those first few years, and in part because my expectations for myself as a writer have shifted.
However, I’ve spent the last year preparing to launch and then launching my essay collection We Are Animals. There are publicity opportunities I could have pushed harder for but didn’t because I have school-aged children and needed to consider how much travel I could handle, personally, financially, and logistically. I’m not resentful of this (nor judgmental of writer-parents who make different choices!), but I recognize I may have “missed” certain book-related milestones because of the circumstances of my life. As it was, my son started to cry one evening this fall and said, “You’re going to miss bedtime again??” I’ve spent a lot of time discerning–and then accepting and owning–my choices.
What’s your creative philosophy and how has it expanded with the addition of caregiving?
Becoming a mother has taught me a lot about being present. Really being present. I’ve gotten better over the years at allowing myself to fully be in the moment with my kids, whether we are gardening, reading a bedtime story, or folding laundry. (In the past, my mind definitely would have wandered during some of those activities, and occasionally it still does.) Yet learning to be present–because my children demand it–also makes me a better writer. Yesterday, I brought my kids to soccer practice, where I spent an hour and a half sitting on the grass, feeling the closely mown turf, soaking in the sun, watching my kids do drills, listening to the conversations other parents were having, and observing the birds. I was there, and it was lovely and calming, and the ability to be “there” so thoroughly opened my sensory perceptions and allowed me to take in more of the world–which in turn gives me more material to work with creatively.
Writing at its best makes us feel and experience the world more deeply. Caregiving often–and perhaps inevitably–does this, too.
Jennifer Case is the author of We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood (Trinity University Press, 2024) and Sawbill: A Search for Place (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared widely in journals such as The Rumpus, Orion, Ecotone, Literary Mama, and North American Review, among others. She teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org. You can find her at www.jenniferlcase.com and on instagram at @jennie.case
Check out We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood here. In addition, an interview Jennifer ran with other environmental mother-writers is available here.
Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’m so glad you’re here.
If Write More has helped you in your creative life, you can support me by sharing it online or with a friend, or by ordering my new book, The Good Mother Myth.
I am putting this book on my to-read list too!
This is SO RELATABLE. I can’t wait to read this book!