The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Mia Ayumi Malhotra are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University. Thanks for reading.
Process Note by Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Mothersalt (Alice James Books, May 2025)
I wrote this book during a period of time when my children were very small, when I lived with the perpetual feeling that my time was not my own—that I had to beg, barter, and steal to make it mine. Motherhood made me a thief and a beggar, or so it felt. It makes me angry, the way patriarchy makes motherhood into this zero sum game. That in order to be a woman and an artist and a mother all at once, a person must grow hard, in a way—selfish and hungry enough to steal what she needs from the mouths of others. I feel this hardness is something Rachel Richardson has talked about in relation to her gorgeous book Smother, which (like its title) exists in some of the same / overlapping dimensions as Mothersalt.
Along with the anger, though, I feel a kind of wonderment that this book exists. In its finished form, it’s such a slim volume—barely over fifty pages, the industry’s “definition” of a full-length collection. Like blood drawn from a stone. Grace unfurled from the razor’s edge, that narrow line I walked for nearly a decade, trying to mother and write and make art from life. Why, in revising it, I whetted its lines almost compulsively, demanding perfection. Because it’s a fighting book, and these are fighting poems.
This poem appears in the first section of Mothersalt, with quotations from Miranda Field in Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections and Barbara Einzig in The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood:
“On Mothering”
Tell me again about mothering. About the form it takes.
Interruptions, fractured sleep. The weird circularity of the days, accreting toward some hazy, impenetrable distance.
After I left the birth bed, I began to want a poetry in which motherhood was not so much its subject matter but its growing medium—the infrastructural condition of the poet’s feeling and speaking mind.
The self, no longer a contained or containable thing, became multiplicitous—an overspill.
Along with that, a darkening of the armpits, the knee and elbow flexes. Deepened sweat glands around the nipples and the appearance of a dark line, reaching from navel to groin.
Some days I feel monstrous. Chimeric. As though I am that impossible beast, that mother who also writes.
The writer-mother senses a particularly urgent need to define herself, even with whole portions of her physical and psychic life designated to another’s development. At times, it steals from itself to feed itself.
When I published my first book, a beloved teacher gave me an air plant—elegant, spiderlike. Like you, dear, she said. That impossible thing.
For a mother to be wholly a mother while being a writer and not an angel would create a new literature.
Revising these poems, I was ruthless—compared to the hundreds of pages from which the book was whittled down, there is almost nothing left. Just that impossibly narrow ledge I refused to back down from during the days and years of this book’s making, which included those surreal pandemic years, during which work on the project stopped entirely as I cared for my children, developed chronic migraine and an anxiety disorder. I’m being overly confessional, but in this context, it’s the point I need to make. That this book exists in spite of itself. That I love being a parent and exist more fully in my mothering than I do anywhere else, but also that the institution of motherhood will erase you—or at least it will try—and that this book is the ember I clutch in my hands as I emerge from the fire.
“Deliver”
de·liv·er | \ di-'li-vər, dē- \ (transitive verb) 1 : to set free : At first, I paced up and down in a gown that did not close at the back, trying but failing to Progress Labor. 2a : to take and hand over to or leave for another : CONVEY : When they induced me, it was with jagged, spiky contractions. The fear: an eerie, bottlenecked sensation. Bent into a C-shape, I shivered from the epidural’s sudden chill. b : HAND OVER, SURRENDER : Handled in this way, birth became managed, procedural. c : to send, provide, or make accessible to someone electronically : Years later, I request my medical records but, reading them, find no trace of myself. 3a (1) : to assist (a pregnant female) in giving birth : The second time, I arrive in active labor, breathing hard and zeroed by contractions. The midwife kneels on the floor beside me, hands firm on my back. (2) : to aid in the birth of : Take it low, the doula says, she’s coming. b : to give birth to : When I close my eyes, I see my vulva, stretched and swollen, its purplish red—and in the center, the dark of her head. 4 : SPEAK, SING, UTTER : My body, fighting to deliver despite itself. That band of scar tissue, the doula says. If only we’d known. Dear Body— I want to say. Tell me your story. 5 : to send (something aimed or guided) to an intended target or destination : They say most mothers want a natural birth but fail because of inadequate labor support. A third of all births end in C-section because of Failure to Progress. 6a : to bring (something, such as votes) to the support of a candidate or cause : Our vision is that every pregnant person should have an empowering birthing experience. We seek to empower birthing people to claim agency over their bodies. b : to come through with : PRODUCE : Bring it low, the doula says, and PUSH. (intransitive verb) : to produce the promised, desired, or expected results : Time to birth a new narrative. To put our bodies back in the story, and the story back into our lives.
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Mothersalt (May 2025) and Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, Nautilus Gold Award for Poetry, National Indie Excellence Award, and Maine Literary Award. She is also the author of the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year. Mia teaches and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a founding member of The Ruby, a gathering space for women and nonbinary artists.
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