"you will find your way, because the pull of your creative work will continue to be there"
a good creatures interview with poet and health and parenting writer Wendy Wisner about remembering to include yourself in your caregiving & creating through the life-altering experience of parenthood
Hello there! This is an entry in a new section, good creatures, 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 Wendy Wisner, a writer, lactation specialist, and health and parenting writer who lives in New York. As a journalist, she’s written about everything from swaddling and breastfeeding to mental health, sex, and marriage. Her new book of poetry, The New Life, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in fall 2024. Wendy says “the poems are set against the backdrop of new motherhood and explore childhood, sexuality, pregnancy loss/child loss/stillbirth, intergenerational trauma, and what it means to raise kids in a volatile, violent world.” A recent poem, “Lines,” published in SWWIM, closes with a question I think lots of us can relate to:
How many lines can I write between the baby’s cries?
Below, we talk about managing different kinds of writing, carrying the emotional load of your children’s confidences, and needing absolute quiet to write.
Who do you care for?
I care for two kids, a tween and a teen. They are both pretty self-sufficient and independent, yet I’m still surprised how much time and energy parenting takes, even once you have big kids. I work from home and my husband is a teacher, so I’m the parent who gets the kids out the door in the morning, and I’m the one who’s here when they get home. I have a super involved husband, but there is still so much caring to do. My jobs include cooking meals, homework help, communicating with school/teachers when needed, remembering important dates, buying all the things (groceries, school supplies, clothes, etc.) and managing schedules.
Probably the biggest and most intense part of raising older children is the emotional work that happens. I’m lucky in that my kids readily share their emotional lives with me, and consider me one of their most important confidants. But as you probably remember, the tween/teen years are complicated, scary, and harrowing, and there’s not much about my kids’ lives I can share with others, even friends. So it can sometimes feel like a pretty heavy load to carry. I would never not want to carry it, but it’s a lot.
I also care for my husband, my parents, my sister, my house … and myself (!). Those are different kinds of care burdens, of course, but they definitely count. I have always been the “carer” in my family. I am the oldest child, and both of my parents grew up as the younger sibling in their families. I’m also a child of divorce, and did a lot of caring for my younger sister growing up, as she and I were shuttled back and forth between our parents’ houses. Caring for others is so ingrained in my psyche that I often have to remind myself to take care of myself.
What kind of creative work do you do?
This is a complicated question for me. I am a writer and all the work I do is creative in nature. But there’s my paid writing work, which is one thing, and then my creative writing work, which occupies a completely different part of my life and my psyche.
I make my living as a freelance writer specializing in health and parenting topics. I have a background in health—I’m a board certified lactation consultant (IBCLC)—and I’ve always been a writer. About a decade ago, I realized that I could write about babies and feeding and parenting, using my IBCLC background, and earn a decent living. Since then I’ve branched out into writing about mental health, and all kinds of other health topics, including topics like hair transplants and diverticulitis. I enjoy the work—and the best part is that I do it all from home.
I’m also a poet. I have an MFA in poetry from Hunter College, and I’m author of two books of poems, both from CW Books. I have a new book coming out in 2024 from Cornerstone Press, at the University of Wisconsin Stevens-Point. It took me ten years to write this new book and there were many years that I didn’t write any poems at all. I need total uninterrupted quiet to write, and I’ve learned over the years that I need to feel safe to write, to open up in the way I do when I write poems.
The stresses and time constraints of the past decade—the sleepless nights when my children were little, the hours spent caring for young children, living through the Trump years, then living through the pandemic—made it extremely difficult for me to write. But I did write, and somehow I published. It was just very slow.
Last summer I sat down with all the poems I’d written over the past ten years and figured out that I had a book. I worked on it for about six months and then started sending it out. I was very lucky that it was picked up by Cornerstone quickly. One of my requirements for this book was that I wanted an independent press that had been around for many years, or a solid university press. Cornerstone is a university press that has been publishing books since 1984. They are lovely so far and I’m very grateful.
What’s changed in your creative life since becoming a caregiver?
Definitely the time and headspace I’ve been able to dedicate to my poems. Before kids, I taught part-time at a university and the rest of my time was spent writing poems. Most mornings, I would sit in my small office in Brooklyn for a few hours, writing, revising. It was a very fruitful few years. Without kids, I was able to go into myself—into what place where my poems come from.
But since I had my first child 16 years ago, so much has changed. I don’t have those writing hours anymore, and it’s been hard to find them. I work full-time, and the rest of my hours are spent caretaking. Then there’s the headspace thing. I wish I was the kind of writer who could write amid chaos. I know some writers thrive in noisy environments. But not me. I need quiet. I need to be alone. I need to know that everyone is cared for and happy. I have so many conditions that need to be created for me to really write!
But what hasn’t changed is the drive to make poems. Poems for me usually start with a few words or a phrase in my head and then a drive to make something with them. I still hear the words, I still feel the pull. I still feel like my life doesn’t really mean anything unless I made art out of it. So somehow—I’m not sure how—I’ve still written.
What’s an adjustment you’ve had to make to your creative process, and an adjustment you refuse to make?
Although I can’t fully immerse myself in my poems unless I have a quiet, uninterrupted few hours, I’ve learned to jot down notes on my phone in the midst of the chaos of raising kids. And I’ve learned that I can revise poems on my phone—make little tweaks here and there. So I’ve been able to get some stuff done that way, while I’m in the messy middle of my life as a parent.
But I’ve learned that I still very much need that quiet, alone time. I was hoping my writing needs could adapt to my life as I parent, but this really isn’t the case. I figured this out a few years ago, when my family started going upstate without me for a few days each summer. Each time that happened, I wrote poems in a fury—usually for the first time in months. I needed to be alone. It was like magic.
Over the past year, I’ve been making time each week for that type of time. I make appointments, where I tell my family not to disturb me for a certain number of hours, usually on the weekends. I’d prefer if I could do this during the week, when they are at work/school, but I don’t yet have that flexibility with my paid work. Still, I’ve been making it a priority and it’s been really good for me. I’m thinking I’m the type of writer who probably should do writing residencies, but I’ve just never applied for one or gone on one. I’m also a horrible traveler. We’ll see if that’s something that makes sense for me in the future.
What advice would you give someone who has a creative practice and is embarking on becoming a caregiver?
I can mostly just speak as a parent, because that’s the caregiving role that I am most familiar with. I would say that becoming a parent is a life-altering experience, and that you shouldn’t downplay the impact it will have on your creative practice. I think people are often taken by surprise by how intense parenthood is, and that parents—especially women/mothers—believe that somehow they will be able to “do it all” or “have it all.”
I think it’s important to be realistic and blunt about the fact that that’s basically a lie. The early years of parenting especially will suck up all your time and energy and you will likely be functioning on very little sleep. It’s totally normal and okay if your creative life is extremely different then, or even almost non-existent. But you will find your way, because the pull of your creative work will continue to be there.
I think every parent sort of just figures it out as they go along. Each stage of parenting is different and the demands of your life in general change. I remember something a fellow poet told me years ago about making a life for yourself as a writer. It wasn’t just about being a parent/writer, but I think it applies. She said, “You are a creative person, and you will use your creative mind to make a life that works for you.”
Wendy Wisner is the author of two books of poems, Epicenter and Morph and Bloom. Her third book of poems will be published by Cornerstone Press/University of Wisconsin Stevens-Point, in 2024. Wendy’s essays and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Review, Passages North, Tar River Poetry, Nashville Review, The Washington Post, Full Grown People, The Manifest-Station, Lilith Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in New York with her husband and two kids. Recent poems include Reading the News, Breadcrumbs, and My Father’s Life in the Sun.
You can read more at her website, www.wendywisner.com, and you can find her on facebook, twitter, and threads.
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. If you’d like occasional dog photos, glimpses of my walks around town, and writing process snapshots, find me on instagram.
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So true to my experience. Thanks Nancy and Wendy!
LOVE this advice --> “You are a creative person, and you will use your creative mind to make a life that works for you.”