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As the release of this book baby edges closer and closer, I've been thinking about the process of writing it and the strange journey it encompasses. Most of it was written in early to mid 2018. The first section was the hunger palace: a beast of a series that sometimes is rough to read. Starting tenuously while my mother was hospitalized, the bulk of it came out like blood flow over my holiday break from the library. I remember writing and freezing--a cold snap that made my apartment chillier than usual, so much so that even the space heater was failing me. Free of daily obligations of work and commuting, I would move back and forth from my bed, where it was warmest, to my desk in the living room and then back to bed. The entire series was super rough and needed much more work than other parts of the book. plump for example, written for our library Grimm project came rather quickly and easily and were urged on by the accompanying visual images. the science of impossible objects had been an idea for a long time before I put pen to paper--the imaginary daughter--but when I did, progress through them happened swiftly at a time when I was writing daily. swallow was a little more drawn out, but again, it seems to be the case the more personal and raw the impulse behind the poems. the summer house, which took it's inspiration from the visual pieces, and is more an allegory about childbearing and changelings was, comparatively, a breeze.
I've often said certain obsessions tend to begin constellating work around them. Suddenly, the puzzle comes together. Suddenly, it was conceived (no pun intended) a book about mothers and daughters, about their bodies and the legacies we inherit from women in our bloodline. About body issues and growing up female. About the choice to be childless as a woman and what that means from a mythical and literal standpoint. As someone who does not identify as a mother to anything but books , it's a bit tilted a perspective--the idea of the artist giving birth to changelings and imaginary children is an apt metaphor for creation perhaps. And also, a book about grief, about working through the grief of losing a mother and all those motherless girls of myth and fairytale. (the line in hp "I've killed more mother's than I've revived.")
I'll be finishing up the design aspects in the coming week and aiming for a December release (it will be available in the shop and also going out to books & objects series subscribers via Patreon.
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