Welcome to The Village! I’m Kate – an essayist and mother fascinated by the ways we create community in our lives, inspired by those who do it well, and convinced that thriving communities are what makes for a joyful world.
Hello hello!
Since my last post, so much has happened - I finished my MFA in Creative Writing thesis, graduated, my Best of the Net nominated piece “Later” from Literary Mama was re-published in Short Reads, and our family moved to just outside Washington, D.C. again. It’s so good to be back to one of my favorite cities in the world, even if the last days of summer are even more of a sticky swelter than I recalled. If you’re local or in town for an event, please let me know! I’d love to say hi.
Since finishing my degree, I’ve been binge-watching prestige TV (The Bear, Abbott Elementary & Shōgun are all favorites) and of course, still reading everything I can. One particular book I loved is The Mother Artist by Catherine Ricketts, a thoughtful, immersive look at the way motherhood influenced the craft of some of our modern artistic and literary luminaries: Toni Morrison, LaToya Hobbs, Leslie Jamison, Aimee Koran, and many more.
Throughout the work, Ricketts asks: “How might our world be humanized by work—art work, any work— made through a mother’s eyes?”
It’s a question I’ve often asked myself, navigating through cities meant for cars instead of parents on sidewalks with strollers, at playgrounds stripped of the trees that provided them shade, in uncomfortably stifling storage rooms where I hunched to pump milk for my son alongside the hum of our office computer servers. Parenting often changes the way you view the world, and I appreciated the insight Ricketts approached this question again and again through scopes broad and specific - how could our world look if we prioritized caring for the vulnerable first?
And for any mothers looking to the lineage of artists who came before us for answers on how to accomplish all our dreams - how to create the art we love while caring for the people we love - Ricketts looks to the many ways women have carved out paths for creativity and care, through often difficult circumstances and with and without formal support.
The book was a joy to read, and another joy was to chat further with Ricketts about her work. Our discussion below ranged over many topics - I hope you enjoy!
KL: A question you ask throughout the book is what our world might look like if shaped by mothers - how looking through a lens of care for the most vulnerable among us might shape our art, our policy, our cities. Were some of the answers you found surprising? What are some of the organizations doing this work well?
CR: I am in awe of organizations that provide home health care to women and babies in pregnancy and early childhood. Locally in Philadelphia, I think of Maternity Care Coalition and Nurse Family Partnership. Families who are at risk for birth complications and medical difficulty in the first years of life but who receive this kind of personalized and holistic care tend to have much healthier outcomes than those who do not. This is an example of what can happen when those in power (in this case, medical practitioners) see like a mother, which is to say, behold others as worthy of curiosity and tenderness and attention, the way a mother sees her child. Imagine if all healthcare were practiced this way!
KL: In your chapter on Advocacy, you write about the visual culture of motherhood, and how it’s important to share not only the beautiful parts of the motherhood experience, but the grueling, difficult parts too, in order to shape public policy. How can a more comprehensive look at all of the realities of motherhood through our art and in our public artistic and creative spaces, including Instagram, help make these much-needed policy changes?
CR: I love this question. My mind goes right back to my first pregnancy, when motherhood was only an abstraction and my expectations were primarily shaped by the visual culture surrounding the baby registry. It was all soft, neutral colors; wooden Montessori toys; muslin swaddling blankets; plush bamboo towels; modal layettes with matching bathrobes for mom. Everything about it said "Cozy." "Ease." "Bliss." This visual culture, which is pervasive and persuasive, did not prepare me for what would be grueling about motherhood: how mean I would become when sleep-deprived, how harrying it is to keep toddlers from harming themselves, how hard it is to see siblings fight, or how much it would hurt when my husband received a difficult diagnosis and we began to imagine the implications for our children. Nothing will break your heart like motherhood. And my experience of motherhood is swaddled in safety, and in generational and communal wealth. It doesn't begin to illustrate the whole picture of motherhood in America, where only about 25 percent of workers in the US have access to paid family leave, with the lowest-wage workers least likely to have this benefit, and where many mothers of color worry everyday that their children will be victims of brutality. If our visual culture presents motherhood as cozy and easy, policy-makers will not rise to action. But if instead, our visual culture presented the full picture of what is joyful and what is harrowing about American motherhood, policy-makers might be persuaded to shape a society that protects children and buttresses mothers in their care work. We need artists who are mothers to produce this visual culture and show us the full picture.
KL: Your work anchors questions so many of us encounter in our parenting journeys, and as a fellow writer-mother, this one felt especially resonant: "Will I always feel that to face the public is a threat to the health and intimacy of my family?” What were some of the things you took into consideration in deciding your answer to this for yourself and your family for this work?
CR: Facing the public to engage with readers (via Instagram, in my planning for and presence at promotional events) takes significant time and energy, and as someone who keeps a full-time job in addition to parenting and creative work, this engagement needs to happen during hours that I would otherwise spend with my family. So I put boundaries around my ambitions for public engagement. For instance, I dedicated January and February of this year to an aggressive email campaign to reviewers, bookstores, and event partners to try to generate as much buzz about the book as possible, and then I stopped. I had to trust that I had done enough, and that some of my queries would bear meaningful fruit while most would go unanswered. This spring and summer, I'm doing a handful of book events that connect me with my ideal readers, but I'm expecting a baby and I'll pause promotion while I'm on leave from my paid work. The possibilities for engagement are endless and can make me frazzled, and I need clarity around my goals in order to preserve time and loving energy for my family.
One of the great joys of the life-cycle of this book was including my kids in the book launch party. I partnered with Paradigm, a gallery in Philadelphia that was fully supportive of a kid-friendly event. I asked the Wellspring Mother Artist Project to create a children's art-making space on the gallery's second floor, while an exhibition of work by mother-artists and a wine reception took place on the third floor. My sons, two and four, were thrilled to be there. We had talked about it for weeks, and they were excited to attend a big party "at a gallery in the city." When I gave a reading, I couldn't believe that my four-year-old sat perfectly still and quiet in the front row, soaking up every word. I'd love to find more ways to include my children in my engagement efforts so that time facing the public is not mutually exclusive with family time, and to create spaces where other parent-artists can do the same.
KL: Your chapter on Ambition particularly resonated with me, especially in the ways the work of the parent and the work of the artist are often deemed unimportant by society. You wrote:
"Having a child is perhaps the most ambitious thing a person can do. Motherhood is so ordinary that we have trouble seeing all that is extraordinary about it […] But to birth from our flesh a human person, body and sacred soul—that’s ambitious. To be tasked with stewarding that body and soul, to foster not only our children’s survival but the development of virtue and the cultivation of talent so that they might be a blessing to the world— that’s damn ambitious.”
I wondered if you’d share some of the ways you lean into ambition and also whether there are ways you lean away from it in your parenting and in your work?
CR: Becoming a mother made me more ambitious in my creative work. For better or worse, I felt struck with a sense that if I didn't work extra hard to write and to share my writing, I'd be swallowed up in the labors of motherhood and never return to my creative practice. So in the first few years of motherhood, I've had an almost manic energy around writing. This may have been different if I had published a book and established relationships with editors and readers before I became a mother. Now that I've done the thing--written and published and connected with readers who are helped by my words--it is easier to lean away from my creative ambitions and toward my maternal ambitions. I haven't written anything since finishing the book manuscript, and I don't feel anxious about that. I sense that the coming years are for caregiving, which for me means both nurturing my children with my presence and earning money via my paid job to afford our home, insurance, their schooling--to create a world in which they thrive. There may not be much room for creative ambition in this chapter, and that's ok; I know I'll return to it before too long.
KL: Finally, your book is a love letter to so many of the artists and writers and mothers who inspire you, which is part of why I loved it. In your research and work on the book, was there an artist or organization you weren’t able to include that you found particularly inspiring?
CR: I adore the work of Philadelphia artist and mother Aubrey Levinthal, and want to introduce her work to any of your readers who don't know of her yet! I love her colors, the psychic depth of her subjects, and her focus on ordinary, often domestic moments. Her work makes me calm and curious--two traits that I need more of in motherhood.
Thank you so much, Catherine, for your words and your work. We’d love to hear more about your experiences with caregiving + art in the comments below!
To pick up your copy of The Mother Artist, check out my Bookshop with this & other recommended titles on parenthood, craft + previous interviewees here.
About Kate Lewis
Kate Lewis is an essayist and poet whose work appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, Men’s Health, Romper, The Good Trade, Literary Mama, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and elsewhere. She lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband, their two young children, and a mischief-making dog. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and supported by the Perry Morgan Fellowship from Old Dominion University. At Substack, she writes The Village, conversations on craft and community. Find her online @katehasthoughts.