"Caregiving forces you to look away, to look up and out, to understand that nothing we do is in isolation."
The Leaving Season author Kelly McMasters on the classroom as a space of creativity, the first person to give her a journal, and a perfect writing weekend
Hello there! This is a good creatures interview, a series that explores the intersection of caregiving and creative practice. I’m so excited to showcase people doing lots of kinds of caregiving—people caring for kids or pets or other family members and/or caring for space through gardening or community work or activism—and lots of kinds of creative work.
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 Kelly McMasters, whose book The Leaving Season is out this week in paperback with a gorgeous new cover. The Leaving Season is about marriage and motherhood and divorce and making a home in all the places you find yourself. When it was first published in hardcover, I shared a writing prompt inspired by a particularly lovely memory Kelly describes in the book—but which turns out not have happened at all!
But you don’t have to take my word for it! Lots of other people love Kelly’s writing, too. Emily Raboteau said that The Leaving Season “shows us how when our dreams unravel, we may restitch them anew.”
wrote that “This book, written by a complete stranger, made me feel a sense of community.” And Lenz said that “Kelly McMasters paints a delicate portrait of love, home, and what happens when it all falls apart.”Below, we talk about a favorite aunt whose writing and care for her community inspired Kelly, why she’s found it’s easier to write “out in the open,” and caregiving as an “expansive” force.
Who do you care for?
I care for my children, my parents, my partner, my friends, and my students.
What kind of creative work do you do?
I am a writer and a writing teacher. I write primarily nonfiction, both books and essays. I teach mainly nonfiction, but also some fiction and poetry, along with classes on publishing. The writing is obviously creative, but I would argue that the classroom is a space that can, at times, rival the page in creativity.
Who provided a model for you in terms of combining caregiving and creativity?
My father’s sister, with whom I share initials (KMM), was the first person to give me a journal. It was a simple spiral notebook, post-it sized, and came with a pencil in a little white pouch with one of those sad Pierrot clowns on the front. My aunt was a newspaper reporter and photographer in Vermont. Her disabilities made it so that near the end of her short life she had to cart around an oxygen tank with her as she tracked down sources and followed stories. She investigated deeply, had a strong belief in justice, and in her last winters she would load her oxygen tank into her little hatchback and wait for the plow to pass by so she could get out to report. She never married and lived alone in this beautiful, ramshackle red house on a hill surrounded by rosehip brambles. She never had children herself, but she had cats and dear friends and was, in every sense, my Auntie, in that special way that gave her the distance and point of view to both see me for who I was and could be, to meet me where I was. I never felt like I was a kid, or a bother when I was with her. I was a full person, worthy of attention. This kind of familial love was so new to me and I felt like a flower being watered every time I was with her.
Even as a child, I was able to sense the way she saw and cared for not just me but the world in her photos and her writing. Her level of care and concentration, of seeing—truly seeing—people and places around her was astounding. She died in her 40s when I was very young, about thirteen, and left me her journals in her will. I still have them and feel so lucky that I was able to continue to get to know her after she died through these books, which showed the same deep care and attention to the world as her photos did. Now, as an adult, I can name that curiosity she had for others as care, see how it fed her, the reflexive nature between what she gave and what she received in return, how her heart came through her creative practice, strengthened it.
What are some creative milestones you’re looking forward to? Or ones you “missed” due to the both/and aspects of your life?
My first book came out the year before my first son was born. I was living in rural Pennsylvania without much of a support system and was moving through what likely today would be diagnosed as postpartum depression. My writing practice, which had always been a lifeline for me, quickly felt like something I used to do.
Three weeks after my son’s birth, an invitation arrived: Orion was hosting a gathering of environmental writers and would l like to join? My first book had been a finalist for the Orion Book Prize and the magazine has always been a dream pub for me. I tried to figure out how I might make it work—children weren’t allowed at the retreat and even if I could somehow secret my son and his father nearby, we couldn’t afford a hotel and my baby’s feeding schedule was too intense to manage at a distance, since he was still refusing the bottle at that point (he’d arrived a month early with some complications). Frustrated, but undeterred, since I had the editor’s attention I pitched a reported essay about the fracking situation in the area I was living and was thrilled when she commissioned the piece.
Anyone familiar with my book, The Leaving Season, probably knows what comes next: nothing. I wasn’t able to write again for a very long time. And when I did, it was so long after that essay had been commissioned, that I felt utterly embarrassed to approach her again. I still have the opening of that story on my computer and it is one of my greatest regrets that I never finished it. I also still have the commission letter—sent through the mail, on letterhead, because it was 2009—folded in my desk drawer as…a reminder? A taunt? A promise?
A full 15 years later, I am again working on an essay, what I hope will actually be my first for Orion. I’m on the heels on a different book entirely, and the editors have changed, but they again agreed to commission an essay. The topic is different, though some of it still takes place in those same hills as the first. Maybe I’ll even find a way to nest in a sentence fragment from that old essay, to honor that little loss.
What’s an adjustment you’ve had to make to your creative process, and an adjustment you refuse to make?
While I am able to accomplish some writing in the pediatrician’s waiting room, sitting in the stands at track meets, or idling in carline, much of my work requires a level of emotional excavation that requires me to go under and stay under. This can only happen in isolation.
In a recent piece by Jessica Grose called “The ‘Impossible Life’ of Equal Devotion to Art and Mothering” [ed: that’s a gift link, so click away!] (sent to me by another mom-writer friend, the brilliant Lizzie Stark), she writes: “Motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible.” When Lizzie texted me this link, I wrote back: Damn. I want to read all of that right now. Of course, I’m running between work and then a math tutor and therapy.
I tried for many years to cram into a closet or another room to write, but I’ve come to the conclusion that while home, I work better out in the open. Usually at the kitchen table. Like right now—I am typing at the kitchen table and have a sick kiddo tucked into the couch. He knows I’m here, has eyes on me. And I want to be here, for him to feel that. If I run down into the basement and try to close a door, he’ll suddenly need some water, or a snack, or for me to look at the thermometer because isn’t 99.9 a fever? He’ll need to confirm I am, in fact, still there. Even if he were at school, I know I have to change his orthodontist appointment and email his guidance counselor and check if he has black shoes that for his concert next week. It is a long and laborious process to untether, one that my children can immediately sense, like a dog whistle.
To make space for the work I cannot do at home, I find other places. My public library has study rooms I like to reserve—you can only sit for two hours at a time, but that forces me to concentrate and dig in quickly and efficiently. A few times a year, on long weekends my kids are at their father’s house, I like to rent little cabins upstate. I do a big food shop when I get there so I only need to leave to hike. My perfect writing weekend is one in which I never speak to or see another human, just deer and frogs and fireflies. I can read and write and cook and eat…or not. I play music very loudly, take candlelit baths, leave the dirty dishes in the sink. I eat pie for breakfast, if I feel like it. If there is more than one bedroom, I sleep in both beds. I take up space, get messy. It’s glorious. I don’t have to clear the table for dinner or even wonder if it is time to start cooking dinner. Instead of being tethered to my home, I am tethered to the work, to the rhythms and schedules and emotional frequencies required only by me. This freedom gets me in a headspace so that I can go places in my writing that feel a little scary or unhinged or dark, places that take time to recover from. On those few weekends a year, it is a luxury I have: to write and to recover from the writing.
I will say, if I had the luxury to do that anytime I wanted, I don’t think I’d want it so much or be able to hook in so deeply. Desire’s ache is born of absence. I don’t actually want to eat pie for breakfast every day. I also like my tiny bowl of Grapenuts. But I love the feeling of wanting the pie. And I love remembering how sweet it tastes.
Caregiving has made both my heart and my work stronger and more expansive.
What has caregiving given you / taken away from you?
Caregiving has only given to me. It is so expansive. Before my children, my creative practice was like a fine needle. An image of a tattoo artist just popped into my head: A woman bent over staring closely with a monocle, concentrating on a space the size of a cell, using delicate and specific tools to inject color and design where there was only a blank space before. This was writing for me for much of my early life. Each letter was a strike of that needle. And it was wonderful! But it was so granular, so close up, and I forgot to look away. I forgot to think of the whole human body, the way the cell connects to the whole. I was just worried about my tiny square of beauty. Caregiving forces you to look away, to look up and out, to understand that nothing we do is in isolation. Caregiving has made both my heart and my work stronger and more expansive.
a question for you
I’ve been thinking a lot about aunts lately, partially inspired by Romper’s phenomenal Aunties issue and by the good friends who’ve been an important part of my kids’ lives. (I talked to one of those dear friends, Ana, for
about navigating the kids/no-kids divide in a friendship.) So I loved the way Kelly talked about her aunt here as someone who really saw her and who encouraged both her curiosity and her creativity.I’d love to know: Did you have an auntie or perhaps a teacher who saw you and encouraged you? Do you play that role now for any younger people in your life?
Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother, and former bookshop owner. She is the author of the Zibby Book Club pick The Leaving Season: A Memoir (WW Norton) and co-editor of the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, an Orion Book Award nominee and one of Oprah's top 5 summer memoirs, is the basis for the documentary film ‘The Atomic States of America,’ a 2012 Sundance selection. Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The American Scholar, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Oprah Daily, The Paris Review Daily, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, and Romper, among others. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in NY. Find more at kellymcmasters.com.
Check out her new Substack, The Magpie, where she writes about books, creativity, caregiving, hope, and other obsessions.
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I just discovered your Substack, and I just want to say thank you for writing it and sharing this. It is so inspiring and practically helpful to see how mothers have made caregiving and a creative life possible. I am grateful.
Hello Nancy, I would like to answer your questions about caregiving and creativity. I was a caregiver extraordinaire for over thirty years - caring for sick babies and my own three children. I did not begin writing until I retired at age 64. I like writing, but find it difficult to do well. I have enjoyed reading many Substack articles written by mothers, who are writers or psychologists, about mothering. I had no such outlet when I was coming up.