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 Rachel Richardson 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 Rachel Richardson, Smother (Norton, February 2025)
“JDM automatically rejects any poem with the word ‘mother’ in it.”
Those were the words I had written in my notebook. I had been taking notes, like the diligent aspiring poet I was, at a publishing panel at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. One of the editors, J. D. McClatchy, of the storied Yale Review, had answered the audience question of whether there was anything he hated to receive in his submissions pile. Mother poems, he said, immediately and with glee. Anything with the word “mother” in it!
The year was 2009, and I had not yet become a mother, so I probably laughed in surprise, maybe felt slightly miffed on behalf of my gender, but didn’t think much more about his comment. I wouldn’t send him poems about my mom, then. Okay. Good to know. But the comment never quite left me because of its shrouded lesson that I hadn’t decoded: What was so automatically awful about a poem with a mother in it?
I dug up that notebook in 2020, ten years into motherhood, when I felt absolutely blocked from writing. The pandemic raged, so there was suddenly time to sort through all my years of thinking about poems. I went back, tracing my early education in the art, all the advice I’d taken in from poetry teachers and guides. I had never really followed McClatchy’s rule: once I became a mother there seemed no way to exclude this identity from my writing. My life was my material, and I saw the world from the position I occupied. But I didn’t proclaim it too loudly, either. The pressure between my artistic life and my parenting life was a source of burning frustration.
In McClatchy’s mind, I could now see, a mother poem was a sentimental poem. Whether the speaker was the child or the mother, if motherhood was invoked it became a poem of adoration and nurturing—or maybe resentment!—but never complexity of feeling, never surprise in the images. McClatchy (and many others, I now knew) thought that motherhood was a simplistic idea.
But wasn’t motherhood the site of all the most interesting conflicts? I loved my kids, but I wanted to run away to the forest. In motherhood I had found my most empathetic and most brutal selves, and they often asserted their claims in my body at the same time.
My book, Smother, began to be a book then. I had been writing about my life, but mostly I had tried to focus the lens outward: I told others I was writing a book about technology and wildfire. I finally realized I would have to bring myself in, and use McClatchy’s statement as fuel, not as a map of the landmines to avoid. Who else had written about motherhood? I was going to write the most mother-ful poem imaginable.
I have never had so much fun in an assignment—I collected dozens of poems about mothers, and eventually collaged many of them into a cento. Just the act of compiling all of this art made me feel I had gathered my people, and now I could see I had the bigger and more talented cast. I had Zbigniew Herbert, Robert Duncan, Sharon Olds, Saeed Jones. I had Louise Glück! Lucille Clifton! Sylvia Plath! Dismiss me, fine, but who could dismiss them?
At some point in this process I realized that I was writing with, and for, people who were interested in the real complex lives we could write from, rather than trying to gain approval from those who would assess my poems based on some external and likely patriarchal criterion for entry. I stopped thinking of my audience as a vague and judgmental general public, and suddenly I had a lot to say. I started writing poems directly to my women friends, calling them by name. I started invoking my poetry forebears—Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, C. D. Wright, and more—claiming a place in a conversation I wanted to join.
I let McClatchy’s words be the epigraph to my book, in which I wrote the word “mother”—I’ve just counted—23 times.
Links:
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/02/a-poem-by-rachel-richardson-domestic/681646/
https://lithub.com/tamarack-fire-a-poem-by-rachel-richardson/
https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2023/04/14/856-the-i-want-song
Rachel Richardson is the author of Smother (W. W. Norton, 2025) and two earlier poetry collections, Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave. She is the co-founder of the Berkeley, CA literary arts center Left Margin LIT as well as a former Stegner and NEA Fellow. In 2024 she was awarded an inaugural Artists-in-Fire Residency with the Confluence Lab and has now completed FFT2 wildland firefighter training.
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Maw Shein Win's latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other literary journals. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, and the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awardee. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com
