"The mother-artist is a great ghost."
poet and nature photographer Violeta Garcia-Mendoza on the invisibility of writing and mothering and her first book, SONGS FOR THE LAND-BOUND
Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. My next book, The Good Mother Myth, will be out in January 2025, and you can pre-order it now!
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 Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, who I got to know several years ago when she signed up for a course I was teaching through Blue Stoop about shaping a poetry manuscript. Violeta immediately impressed me with the quality of her own work, which she’d been writing while homeschooling three kids, caring for a huge crew of rescue and foster dogs, gardening and doing nature photography, and the breadth of her reading. Those poems are now a book, Songs for the Land-Bound, out next week with June Road Press. Below we talk about the invisibility that often goes along with both mothering and writing, and how Violeta’s creative philosophy has evolved from focusing on external validation to seeing the process itself a “life raft.”
Who do you care for?
I care for my three teenagers, my husband, and our crew of rescue dogs. Some of those humans and some of those dogs have or have had health issues that need extra care and attention. I’ve also been living with Type 1 diabetes for almost three decades, so taking care of myself is a priority too.
What kind of creative work do you do?
I’m a poet. Though I’ve written essays and short fiction in the past (and, who knows, maybe I will again someday), poetry is my save-it-in-a-fire genre. My first collection, Songs for the Land-Bound, is out September 24th from June Road Press.
I’ve taught for the past two decades, a variety of subjects in a variety of venues—online, in community centers, in traditional K–12 schools, and most recently homeschooling my kids for the past dozen years—which definitely requires a heavy dose of creativity!
And I’m a serious hobbyist nature photographer, though I don’t know if I think of that as creative in the same way. It combines technical knowledge with presence and tranquility and openness, though, and those things do cross-pollinate with creativity.
More practically speaking, caregiving has made my writing more emotionally weighted and forced me to become more patient with my creative process, and creativity has made me a more fun, curious, and flexible mom.
What are some ways caregiving fosters creativity and vice versa?
I started writing seriously after college, and I also got married and became a mom pretty young—in my early twenties—so I don’t think I’ve experienced the two as competing aspects in the same way I might have if one had definitively come first. The way they present in my life makes me think of a vine, tendrils that need to wrap around something to climb. Both my creative practice and my caregiving are concerned with the same things: growth and light, so they mutually shore up each other (and me). But more practically speaking, caregiving has made my writing more emotionally weighted (I feel like motherhood especially has turned the volume knob way up on both beauty and panic) and forced me to become more patient with my creative process, and creativity has made me a more fun, curious, and flexible mom.
What is difficult about being creative and a caregiver?
Day to day, time management is the biggest practical difficulty, and that gets the air time it should–but I think invisibility is also a kind of curse of the creative and caregiving life, especially for women. Because both writing and mothering are mostly made up of so much invisible work happening in the background, the roles can be reduced to a humming magic that keeps things going but that other people don’t see. The poem or essay or story gets written, meal after meal gets planned and made, the kids get shepherded through all their growing pains, and everyone shows up on time to all the activities and appointments, and it’s easy to not ask how it happens. The outcome shows, but the full person who makes it happen doesn’t.
Or, let me put it another way: This life I’ve chosen, this life I love, has also often made me feel so invisible. I want to give credit to my husband for being someone who sees me and continues to look for me, but in general, in society at large…that does not happen. Society needs you to be a man, a good machine, and/or an easy answer to a fill-in-the blank question in order to see you, even briefly. The mother-artist is a great ghost.
That invisibility has been a profound experience for me, especially as I’ve “stayed home” mothering and homeschooling my kids for so many years and taken a long time to publish my first book.
Is there something specific you do to jumpstart creativity?
I don’t think any of my creativity would exist without a history of childhood reading or staring, so I start with that; then, freewriting on my laptop is my go-to. Because I think at the speed of my typing (much faster than I can write longhand) and I had years of piano lessons (and practice) that built an association between an at-the-keyboard posture and a daydreamy in-my-own-little-world-ness, I find that typing without stopping or editing or self-judgment for 10 to 20 minutes is a really helpful way to access my internal thoughts and music. I keep a document of dated freewrite fragments like a journal, even though I don’t do them every day, and I regularly mine those for material. As the header to that document, I have written: “Nothing Comes from Nothing” (a lyric I love from The Sound of Music’s “Something Good”) and “It’s Okay to Make Bad Art” (from this post of yours).
It also often helps me to do something with my hands, like play piano (even though my ceiling is kind of stuck at intermediate level), or do some reverse coloring, or clean while blasting music in my headphones and dancing around like no one’s watching.
But when activity doesn’t jog writing, I know I need something that’s more restorative than energizing. I spend slow, observant time in nature (our yard, which we turned into a certified wildlife habitat, and our local woods are both sources of endless wonder for me). I get out my Merlin app and identify birdsong. If I can swing it, I take a nap.
I think of creativity as a life raft, a process that buoys me, rather than a product.
What’s your creative philosophy and how has it expanded with the addition of caregiving?
When I was first writing seriously, my creative philosophy was in service of external validation. I treated writing like it was an extension of school because I had done well in school, and I wanted to “do well” in writing to justify my not going into something more traditionally useful or profitable. I spent time thinking about what might be impressive and marketable. I cared very much about being considered productive. I was hypercritical more often than I was open and enthusiastic. What I read and wrote at the time reflected that kind of mindset.
This was also happening: I was in an MFA program for fiction (see: “serious writer,” see: “marketable,” see: trying to turn writing into an extension of school) while holding down a part-time teaching job and caring for three tiny kids and managing a chronic health condition. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that that stew precipitated a major health crisis and forced me to press pause on everything that wasn’t my health and my family. And when I did, I realized that not one of the people that I had been trying to impress really cared about me, and that, worse, I had lost the solace of creativity that had seen me through other difficult times in my life (a lonely childhood, moving countries and switching primary languages, medical issues, and more).
For too long after I dropped out of grad school, I didn’t like to read or write anymore, and it made me so frustrated with the culture of MFA programs as well as with myself for being such an easy mark for the worst aspects of them.
Recovering from the state that those years put me in and reclaiming the joy of the creative process that I experienced as a child and teenager has taken a long time (and therapy! and stubbornness!). Getting to inhabit the universe of my children has helped me reshape my creative philosophy. Because why does a little kid fingerpaint or play dress up or make believe? Why does a teenager love music or draw manga or play an RPG? Because something inside tilts them toward it and it feels good; because it’s so elementary to them that creativity helps with life. That’s such a necessary reminder.
So now I think of creativity as a life raft, a process that buoys me, rather than a product. I think that buoying effect holds for the audience as well as the artist, and I think that matters; that curiosity, attention, imagination, presence, humanity that you put into the practice matters deeply, and it gets passed on into someone else. Just like with caregiving.
Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, teacher, and suburban wildlife photographer. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, and in 2022, she received a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is a member of the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops at Carlow University. Violeta lives with her husband, children, and pack of rescue dogs on a small certified wildlife habitat in western Pennsylvania. Songs for the Land-Bound (June Road Press, 2024) is her debut collection.
Violeta’s Songs for the Land-Bound is officially out on September 24th, and you can pre-order it through June Road Press or Asterism Books, if you haven’t already! You’re also invited to her virtual book launch event, coming up on September 27th at 7pm EST.
You can read more of Violeta’s writing, browse her nature photography, and keep up with her virtual book tour through her website or follow her on Instagram @violeta.garcia.mendoza.
🎶creature report 🎶
🐙 what’s new with past good creatures, to the tune of the Octonauts song🐙
🦑 Wendy Wisner’s new book, The New Life, is out now with Cornerstone Press. I read an early copy and loved it!
🦑 Sherisa de Groot’s Raising Mothers is open for submissions. If you’re part of the Global Majority and are writing about mothering and/or the experience of being mothered, check out her submissions guidelines and send some work their way. (And if you, like me, don’t fit in that category—subscribe anyway! I’ve loved reading Raising Mothers in its previous iteration, and I’m so excited for all the cool things Sherisa’s doing now that she’s on substack.) Sherisa talked about Raising Mothers and her own creative life in her good creatures interview.
🦑 There’s a new season of the Postpartum Production podcast, hosted by Kaitlin Solimine, and it’s so, so good. I tuned in for the most riveting birth story I’ve ever heard, and I’m excited to hear everything else she has on tap. Kaitlin also recently interviewed fellow good creature Remica Bingham-Risher.
Mental Health and Motherhood 2024 Conference
This looks so great—on October 11, the 2024 Mental Health & Motherhood Virtual Conference will feature live-streamed speakers with backgrounds that include psychology and health. You can read more about the sessions and speakers and buy your tickets here.
Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. You can find my books here and read other recent writing here.
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Wonderful interview. Thank you both.
After reading this, I found Violeta's poem "Incomplete Abecedarian of Autumn Equinox with Body" and loved it, it's so gorgeous and surprising: https://psalteryandlyre.org/2024/04/08/incomplete-abecedarian-of-autumn-equinox-with-body/