"Is This The Best Use of My Time?"

A Conversation with Catherine Ricketts

Another day, another essay lamenting the difficulty of reconciling motherhood with artistic ambition. This time it’s Jessica Grose writing in the Times opinion section about Maggie Doherty’s The Equivalents: A Story of Art. Female Friendship and Liberation in the 1960s, a book that has been on my TBR list for too long. In the essay, Grose focuses on the writer Tillie Olsen, who once described trying to create as a mother thusly: “It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity.” (n.b. I was interrupted twice while writing just this short paragraph AND the brilliant

Amanda Montei

is teaching a class this week on embracing interruption while writing as a parent.)

When Grose’s essay came across my feed, I had already been thinking about the impulse toward lamentation among writer-parents, having just read Catherine Ricketts’ wonderful The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity. Catherine’s book considers artists from a wide range of disciplines – writers and painters, but also sculptors, musicians, floral designers, filmmakers, and dancers – as a way of exploring the interplay of art and motherhood. The book is a balm and an inspiration, particularly its gorgeous last chapter on perseverance.

There is angst in Catherine’s book but I felt surprised by its relative lack in many of the passages dedicated to non-writers. Like the dancer/choreographer who, after giving birth, starts her own company, conceived as a joint venture with her child. At first her daughter only watches and exists among the dancers but as a teenager she becomes a full collaborator, dancing and creating with her mother. Or the married folk musicians who take their baby on the road; the baby nurses to sleep on a futon in the back of a tour van ten minutes before the show starts and her mother says she “loves the rush” of trying to make it to the stage on time. Another songwriter finds it hard to sustain the focus needed to write music during her toddler’s nap time so she takes up photography as a way to channel her artistic energy.

The sections on writers felt more…familiar. Take, for example, Madeleine L’Engle, who, upon receiving a rejection slip on her fortieth birthday, felt that it was an obvious sign from heaven that she should stop trying to write and give up on the literary ambition she blamed for her deficient domestic skills. Or Toni Morrison, who, overwhelmed by her parenting, professional, and artistic responsibilities, narrowed them down to the two that were absolutely necessary: mothering her children and writing books. “If I can’t do these two things,” she thought, “I will disappear from the face of the earth.”

We’re kind of a melodramatic group, is my point.

Or perhaps we just work in the medium best suited to externalizing the unavoidable conflict between parenting and artistic creation. Instead of taking up photography when we have little kids who make it impossible for us to focus for long periods of time, we take up the writing of an essay about how hard it is to write when we have little kids who make it impossible for us to focus for long periods of time.

Does this feel true to you? Are writers more prone to these difficult feelings or do we just talk about them more? Read on for Catherine’s answer to this question and our conversation about building a platform to get a book deal, the economics of making art as a parent, and trying to set artistic ambition aside for a season.

I love the range of artists that you feature in this book. It was interesting to see how the challenges of creating art as a parent can vary depending on the medium and it strikes me that they also differ based on an artist’s timeline. There are those who were established artists before they had kids and now have to fit the kids into the work but then there are people for whom having a child knocks something loose and all of a sudden they're like, ‘oh, now I want to make art’ or ‘now I understand what, exactly, I want to create.’ I'm thinking about that quote you have from the choreographer Anito Gavino, who said she never really had her own voice until she became a mother. What was your process like?

I think in maybe the five years before becoming a parent, I had begun to really understand my artistic voice and what I wanted to say. I had experienced two really significant losses in my immediate family and had done a lot of writing around those deaths. And I felt like I was figuring out how to understand- my voice is very lyrical, I want what I write to be beautiful, and I think in those years surrounding those deaths, I was trying to understand how can I write beautifully about things that are awful and how is there actually beauty in the experiences of things that are awful? So a lot of my voice as it developed was interested in these questions of how do we see the world? Through what aesthetic prisms do we take in the experiences that come to us? I felt like I had gotten to a place where in college I was just practicing the craft of writing but I was writing about sorority life and, I don't know, things that are not that. Now I look back and I'm like, well, those were not super substantive. But probably just in the years right before I became a parent, I started to say things that I felt like were really worth saying.

And where were you in your writing career at that point?

When I conceived my first child, I had just gotten my MFA. I had published in a few very small literary magazines, but not very significant, not big national publications. I had no social media following. I just hadn't done any of the career building stuff as a writer. So as a parent, I really found myself saying, I have books, I have things I want to say that I want to put out there, but I don't have the avenues yet to put them out there. And I think that's where the crunch came for me in becoming a parent in the outward facing nature of a career in artistic practice; not just the practice itself, but the connecting with audiences. That's what felt hard and what made me feel like, is this the best use of my time? I just became a mom. Do I also want to try to get famous on the internet?

Yeah, that kind of performance and doing something that's not the writing itself.

I still know that the time that I spend in that space for the most part isn't making me a better person or a better parent. It does feel like a distraction or a diversion from other things that feel are more soul shaping in a good way.

But necessary? They say that if you want to sell a nonfiction book, you need a platform.

And I will say that I have really enjoyed the relationships that I've built through that. And I think this book will land in the hands of way more readers that are actually interested in the subject because of the time that I've spent building an audience and connecting with readers there.

A necessary evil?

I don't think I would even call it an evil. I think it's been good for my career, but I don't know if it's good for my spirit.

It often feels like the opposite of what we're trying to do when we write, which is an attempt at something authentic that's going to connect with a reader in a certain way. But you're saying that it’s a kind of performativity that has led to authentic connection, which has often been my experience with this newsletter.

I think the way that I chose to engage on Instagram was through interviews. And I just love being in conversation with people, that's very life-giving to me. And probably same for you. How can we enter this world in a way that actually will fuel us? And then the interviews ended up being actual research for the book. So all that was really great, and I'm very grateful for the people that I've met and that are now reading the book because of Instagram. But I'm playing that game in a way that does feel pretty authentic to me, which means that I'm never going to get super famous on it because I'm not creating the kind of content that really fuels the algorithm. I'm doing enough to connect with a few people that really care about what I'm doing, but most of what I'm doing is pretty interior and intimate.

So talk me through the genesis of this book and how you got the actual writing done.

I started writing a few essays in the pandemic. I don't know that I had a book in mind yet, but I think the first person that I came across was Becky Suss, her work. Some of my colleagues in contemporary art were beginning to plan a show of all Philadelphia contemporary artists, and a couple of her works were on the checklist of artworks that would be included. And I just got really excited about thinking with her about motherhood. I think my baby was nine months old when I came across that work. So that was just enthusiasm about how a visual artist might be a point of departure for me in my own reflections about motherhood and what I was experiencing. I'm trying to remember exactly how it all went down, but I had just received some feedback from a mentor and a couple of writer friends that I really admire that were like, ‘oh, I would love to hear your voice, explore that question, explore those topics.’ So I got some affirmation there, and at that point I was querying literary agents for this first project that was about grief and beauty and was just hearing nothing and nothing and nothing. And then eventually I did finally land an agent and we tried to sell that first book and had a full round of rejections. And that first book was purely memoir, whereas the second project that I had in mind that I had written two chapters of so far was- this is kind of getting into the weeds of the writing and publishing world, but nonfiction that has appositional material to memoir as opposed to just memoir often sells better. And so after that round of rejections, my agent said, ‘let's really go hard with this mother artist idea and see what comes up.’ So part of it was pure interest in the subject and part of it was this could be a way to connect with readers and then eventually sell that grief memoir. And then my second son was probably seven months old or something like that when I got a contract to write this book. And then I really went hard in earnest in writing it for a year. And the process of writing it was really intense because I had a seven-month-old and a two-and-a-half year old at that point.

So easy.

I was still nursing.

By the way, I was just telling someone that I think that was my hardest stage – two little kids, a toddler and a newborn. Because they don't play-

Two totally dependent, but with very different needs. So you can't even cut up the same dinner for them.

Nothing together, correct. And then the book is its own-

Yeah, its own baby. So that was really hard and I was working full time, but working from home. So I had no commute and I had the flexibility on days when the day job was light to squeeze an hour or two of research and writing in, and then I went away. Thank god for my husband and our network of grandparent caregivers around us. I would go away for at least one night and sometimes two nights about once a month. I called them sleep and writing retreats because I would try to sleep the whole night, which I was not doing, and I would try to write for a whole day and then the whole day after that. Those retreats usually gave me enough of a starting point with the chapter. I would usually try to go at the beginning of a chapter so that I could do a ton of the research and write- even if it was a bad 2000 words, write 2000 words so that when I reentered in those shorter moments when I had two hours or when I had five hours on a Sunday afternoon or something, it was easier to dive back in.

I love this. Knowing what works for you process-wise is so key. I also find that once I'm already in something, once I'm revising or dealing with something that's at least in part already there, I can dip in and out. It's with the getting started that you really need those stretches.

One really great piece of advice that I got was from the author Sarah Sentilles, and she suggested finding ways to keep your head in the world of the project even as you're doing other things. If I was driving somewhere, I would find a podcast that was related to the research that I was doing. So even if on that day I didn't write anything, my head was still in the space. And sometimes that was annoying. Sometimes that was like, it's two o'clock in the morning, I just got up to nurse my son, I put him back down, I can finally sleep, but my head is in the project. But for the most part it was really good to get those jumpstarts and then just keep my head in it.

That's great. In your author’s note you write about the decision to use the present tense for the more personal narrative sections as opposed to the past tense you use when you're engaging with the artists and their work. Even though you weren’t writing all of it as it was happening, it does feel like new motherhood feels, which is a wonderful effect. I love that choice. Was that always the plan or did that kind of develop as you went along?

Those first early essays, the Alice Neel one and the Becky Suss one, I actually did write in the moment that I was living it, and then I put the project down for a long time. I was like, I don't want to have another whole manuscript of a book sitting on my desktop, not going anywhere. So I'm going to pause this project until I know that it will have a home and readers. But I wanted to write the book about my entree into motherhood so I really wanted to write about that first year and keep the chronology in the first year. The rest of it was written two years after living it. I love the infancy years and I loved my first pregnancy. I loved where we were living at that time. I loved the world of that moment. And so I really enjoyed returning to it in a way that I don't know that I would want to return to the world of my third pregnancy because it's such a different bodily experience. And I say that to say if you're a mom who would never want to return to the world of your pregnancy or your children's infancy, I feel that too. But I really did love that season and I loved getting my head back into it and living it again in the present tense.

Talk to me about actually getting this book published, especially because the artwork in the middle probably makes it more expensive to produce. What kind of roadblocks did you encounter in trying to get it out into the world?

Again, the platform thing was a roadblock. I think we sent this project to 22 different houses and I got one deal, and that was the deal that I went with. All of the others were extremely kind rejection letters saying really nice things about the project and about my writing, but we don't trust that this author can connect with the audience. I could have made an entire endorsements list based on the rejection letters.

Can you use them as blurbs?

Exactly. It was a very funny thing. And then they would always say “However.” So I wrote those on my wall just to remind myself. So it was encouraging to know people are interested in this project and I was so happy to work with the publisher that I did work with. My editor is named Valerie Weaver-Zercher at Broadleaf Books, and she and I had had conversations about my first book, but her house doesn't publish straight memoir, so she was kind of like, come back to me any time you have another project. So she already really believed in my work and I knew that she wanted to work with me, and she really understood that visual art needed to be a part of it. And they've just been amazing to work with. I'm so happy with the cover design and how the design team- I threw out a few contemporary artists whose work I really love that I would love to see on the cover and they hired one of them to design it.

That’s amazing.

Yeah, and I'm so pleased with the artifact that the book is and, editorially, Valerie was really respectful of the work that I had done and then tweaked- I think I did 10,000 line edits. They were just small, but really meticulous and thoughtful edits to make the prose really sing. So yeah, very happy with where I landed.

I loved the chapter where you talk about trying to figure out how you experience desire and that that's something that you started thinking about only after becoming a mother. It feels like it bears some kind of relation to figuring out who you are as an artist after becoming a mother. There’s been a lot of cultural conversation about what motherhood does to our bodies and desire and also to our ambition and our ability to make art and all that stuff and so I really appreciated your conversation about the interplay between those two. What do you think art can do to address the problems that come out of a culture in which women feel alienated from their own desire?

Well, I think art did a lot to cause the problem. I just think of how much of our sexuality is shaped by visual culture. I was pretty involved in Christian youth groups in high school. Of course there's sex ed in the public school but if I really think about what shaped my sexual imagination as a teenager, it wasn't like the scientific training that I got from school or the moral training that I got from church. It was movies, it was works of art. And then there's the whole canon of visual art that is elevated in museums and other visual art spaces. And most visual art that we see in those spaces is made by men, made from male desire. And it wasn't until I started reading about women's sexuality for the purposes of writing this chapter that I was like, oh my gosh, there is really robust research now behind the fact that women just don't experience desire the way that men do. And yet everything in our visual culture has trained us to think that we should experience desire the way that men do. You see a hot body and you want to have sex. That may happen for many women, that doesn't happen for me. And so beginning to think, well, what if visual culture was shaped more by women and gave us a better imagination for women's desire? What if men were being trained to understand women's desire because women were creating as compelling a canon of visual art as men had. And that was fascinating and really liberating for me in my own marriage and my own relationship. It's funny how reading about it and thinking about it from an intellectual perspective could have an impact on something so visceral and embodied in my life. But that is what happened.

I actually think my desire is more textual but that’s a conversation for another time. You mentioned loving where you lived during your first pregnancy and in the book you describe moving out of that neighborhood, out of the city, to be closer to family. It sounds like you were able to go away to write in part because of that network, the people who were close by and could help with the kids, and I was thinking about that trade-off, where you moved away from your artistic community in order to be able to make your own art and how sometimes this work can only happen when we make those kinds of difficult choices.

Yeah, trade-off is the word. A good friend of mine, their adulting motto is there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And that really resonates with me and my husband. We moved to a place that I feel no cultural resonance with except for the microculture of our family. And I think your question kind of strikes the nerve of the economic situation that our generation finds itself in, that in order to live, in order to be an artist or a nonprofit or higher ed type of person, if you want to live in a cultural center, you have to make some pretty significant sacrifices. I know artists who have made choices I wouldn’t so they can live close to where exciting things are happening artistically. And they're just these trade-offs that we have to make. We live in an area with an extremely low cost of living, but we've lost a lot.

Yeah, I think that’s an under-discussed part of doing this work and I appreciated that you talked about it in the book, that it became part the story of the book.

I didn't realize when I started this project was how important economics would become as I was doing it. Part of that was because at the time we had childcare completely covered by grandparents, and so it didn't occur to me that most parents are paying the same amount as their mortgage or the same amount as their rent for childcare. And then our grandparent situation shifted and we now do have to figure out how to pay for childcare. And that has just really brought into relief for me how insensible it is to have an artistic career. It's just really, really hard to do.

Right, and I think your book is so important because it offers us a glimpse of the stakes of losing this whole swath of potential art by people who need to be able to pay for childcare in order to do it. I think we need to have more open conversations about the economics of it, what that takes and what we're losing if we don't find ways to support artists who are parents.

I don't know that the expression “starving artist” is useful because the reality is we're probably not starving, but we're probably-

That phrase makes it so much more dramatic than it actually is in real life. It's those trade-offs of like, I am going to live in this place, far from my artistic community, so that I can make the art because I can actually afford a home in this area. Or, it’s going to take me 10 years instead of three to write a book either because I only have so much childcare or because I had to take this other job so that I could afford full time childcare and feed everyone. Nobody's starving, but also some art is not being made, or it’s being made over a longer period of time.

Yep, and I will say that I think I am entering a season right now of shifting the focus from my underpaid work in writing toward paid work. I've always worked lower salary jobs that are very flexible and that give me a lot of bandwidth for my creative work, but I can't raise a family to the standard that I want to in terms of school district and other things that I really value. We can't keep operating at that level. And so I've just taken a job that is going to pay significantly more and I sense that my work for the coming years is parenting and earning money. Fortunately, that job also taps into things that I really love and it will be very vocationally satisfying, but I'm not going to be doing as much creative work as I was.

Yes, on that note, sometimes I worry that the writer mother beat, such as it is, is a little too prone to complaint and anxiety and frustration. For good reason, obviously, but while reading your book, I felt like I was witnessing this kind of joy in creation, both in your writing about all of these artists and in the artists themselves. But I think I felt it more from the visual artists and the musicians you describe than I did from the writers and to what degree you think that difficult feelings are more writerly than they are representative of other disciplines.

Yeah. I have two thoughts. One is I think there are some visual artists that can actually paint while their children are in the room. That is something that most writers I know would never dream of because the thought patterns- I think of the writing process may be different than the thought patterns of some visual artists' processes. Some visual artists may really need that deep, deep immersion in their own mind but some of them are not really accessing the logical plane, and they are deeply in the intuitive embodied plane. Whereas I think many writers are either more in that logical intellectual plane than they are in the intuitive embodied plane, or there's a nice blend of all of that. So yeah, there are some artistic practices that I think are just- some are easier to dip in and out of than others, and writing may be one of the hardest to dip into and then back out of. So there's that piece of it. The second thing that came to mind when you asked that question is there are stories of artists and writers like Doris Lessing, who end up just not being able to persevere in the motherhood piece. And they leave their families and they go full force into their artistic life. So there's that. And then there's also a tone, as you've said in some writing about motherhood that is just dark. It almost seems like in order for me to be allowed to write about motherhood, which is so often considered sentimental and unimportant, I need to go dark artist on this. And I just didn't want to write that book because, I really do love being a mother. I love my body in this season of life, I love my children's bodies so much. I just want to look at them all the time. So I wanted there to be a lot of joy in this book. And maybe because of that I was drawn more to artists who also were expressing that joy and that love of the body, even as they struggled as I do, with being bored by their children and being exhausted by their children and wanting some days to run away or at least get some time out of the house.

You're pregnant with your third child. Is there a different feel to this pregnancy because you will have gotten a book out into the world? Do you feel more settled somehow, or less antsy? When I was pregnant with my third, I had just finished my PhD. And of course very soon other desires and ambitions entered the chat, so to speak. But at that time, I'm like, oh, finally I'm having a baby without always thinking, am I going to do this thing? Am I going to finish it?

Yeah, that's a great parallel. And this may change, but right now I feel like if I don't write another book for 10 years, that's fine. And I even feel it not related to this pregnancy, but when I'm putting my kids to bed right now, I'm like, I could just lie here all night. And a year ago when I was putting my kids to bed, I was like, would you please just go to sleep so that I can finish that chapter? And I don't feel that now. I feel much more relaxed with their pace, and that feels really good, and I hope that that's true for my daughter's infancy as well. I don't know what ambition will creep in after this. And I think I knew. I was like, motherhood’s not going to get easier from here on so this feels like a good time to work really hard and make myself a little crazy for a year, two years, and then have that out in the world and then be able to build on- I don't know how this book will do, I'm not expecting giant crazy sales on it, but I'm expecting to connect with enough readers to be able to publish more books in the future.

Order Catherine’s beautiful and essential book here.