(Update: giveaway extended to 11/30)
I
usually remember how I first came into contact with a writer, but there
are online writing friends who seem to have always been there. Was it
Facebook? Mutual blog appreciation? Writing friends in common? Were
we fellow
contributors to an anthology? In the case of Kate Hopper,
all of the above – maybe more. No matter, I'm simply grateful our paths
criss-cross, and like so many who value her writing, I made my way quickly, and
with much admiration, through Kate's memoir Ready for Air: A Journey Through Premature Motherhood. Kate is also the author of Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers, and
she holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of
Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in Brevity, Poets &
Writers, the New York Times online, and Literary Mama, where she is an editor.
Kate teaches online and at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.
After
a busy month of blog tour, events, and appearances to mark her memoir's debut,
she agreed to answer my many questions.
Please
welcome Kate Hopper.
Q:
How did the book begin? Did you know from the start it would be a book,
or did that creep up on you as you accumulated material?
A. In the early weeks/months of writing, I was
just vomiting out images and memories and impressions to get them down on
paper, which felt urgent to me and really helped me process our experience with
prematurity and Stella’s hospitalization. But I knew I would be returning to
graduate school the following fall to finish my MFA, and I knew I’d have to
write a thesis, so I really began to think of it as a book pretty early on.
Q.
The book is in the present tense, almost exclusively except for
flashbacks. Was that a careful decision in terms of craft, or did that just
feel organically right for you, for this material?
A.
Both actually. It felt organically right, but I was also really determined to
keep it in present tense for the narrative urgency that present provides. But
present tense can be tricky to maintain over the course of a book. There is no “now” narrator looking back and
making sense of what happened; there is no other voice, as Sue William
Silverman writes in her essay “Innocence and
Experience: Voice in Creative Nonfiction,” that is “reflecting back on the story
and guiding the reader through the maze of the experience.” There is only the
“you” experiencing it in the moment.
So
early on in the writing of the book, I worried that the narrative would become
episodic, that it would be plot and nothing more, that the book would exist
only in the situation, on the “this happened and then this happened” level.
So
as I was working on the book (which was over a number of years—I started
writing it ten years ago) I had to make sure that I fleshed out my character,
the “me” on the page, as a thinking, reflective person. So the reflection
enters the narrative not as my now,
writing self thinking back on the events, but instead as an in-the-moment
version of myself who is reflecting and trying to make sense out of things as
they are happening in the narrative.
Q.
In the book you write that you were almost wholly unable to take notes
at the time, which was unusual for you. What, if any, written documentation
helped with the writing – hospital charts, emails, calendar entries, etc?
A.
I didn’t take notes while Stella was in the hospital, except for recording a
few details (weight change, major changes in her status, etc.) on a baby
calendar I’d been given before she was born. Everything was very fresh in my
mind when I began writing a few months later, but as I got deeper into the
writing process, I ordered all of our medical records and printed out the
emails I’d sent and received during that time. I also did a ton of research to
verify medical facts and better understand prematurity and the major risks that
preemies face. And articles I read later about PTSD in preemie parents also
made their way into the narrative.
Q. How much of an effect did your being
a creative nonfiction student in an MFA program have on your ability to mine the
experience as it unfolded? Did you find
yourself "essaying" events as they happened, even just in your own
head, sort of storing it away for future?
A.
During those early days in the NICU, I wasn’t consciously storing away the
experience—I was simply too overwhelmed. But as Stella stabilized and we
settled into a routine, I definitely remember writing the events in my head. And
I experienced many of those “remember this” moments. So I’m sure that being immersed
in the writing life prior to Stella’s birth had an impact on how I was
experiencing those events.
Q. Continuing on that idea, was your
sense of observing life influenced by so much memoir and personal narratives in
your reading and teaching? Perhaps a
feeling of "I may write about this one day, so I'd better pay
attention"?
A.
Absolutely. I think it’s difficult not to
do that as a writer—we’re always on the lookout for material. One of my
favorite things about being a writer is the way it makes me pay attention and
slow down. I remember one day early in my writing days when I was devouring a
bowl of strawberries and I thought, hey, slow down. How would I describe the
taste and texture of these strawberries if I had to write them? Whenever I find
myself rushing through life, I remind myself of that moment. Stop, look around,
describe.
Q. Can you talk about the way you used details
and objects, such as the Pee Jug, the rice sock, and the foaming antibacterial
(among others), to evoke and heighten the narrator's experience?
A. I always tell my students to focus on
concrete details as they’re crafting their scenes, so during the writing of Ready for Air I often heard my teacher
self asking my writer self if I’d done the same. I know that some of my readers
will be intimately familiar with the NICU, but most of them won’t be, so it was
really important for me to focus in on those details in order to put readers in
my shoes. In the rewriting and revision process I tried to push that even
further and ask how certain objects and details might work on a metaphorical
level.
Q.
It seemed the lack of much backstory in the early pages helps amp up the
immediacy and sense of urgency for the reader from the start. How much thought
and/or revision was involved in crafting that in-the-middle-of-things opening?
A. Lots of thought! That was actually always
where the book began for me, but I played with starting in different places,
and none of those alternate openings worked for me—I always came back to that
doctor’s appointment in which I learned I might be developing preeclampsia. Those
early chapters are partly about loss of innocence and adjusting expectations (and
also about denial). But I also want readers to get to know Donny and me before
Stella is born, so there is quite a bit of writing about our relationship and
how we work together as a couple.
In
a later draft, I did cut back on back-story (condensing what had been chapters
4 and 5 into two paragraphs). My inclination is to include too much back-story,
so I try to always go back to the question What
is this book really about? If the back-story I’ve included doesn’t serve
the book’s purpose, I cut or seriously condensed it.
Q.
When in an MFA program, I wrote a research thesis on how women memoir
writers navigate representing their spouses on the page. I'm curious about how
much you included your husband Donny in that process. Did he read early
drafts? Was there an agreement about how
much he'd feel comfortable with you revealing about your marital relationship?
Any other ground rules, practices, etc.?
A.
He didn’t read early drafts. In those, I was still trying to get us both down
on the page honestly and in a way that felt three dimensional, so it didn’t
make sense to have him weigh in at that point. My husband’s a private person,
but he’s also very willing to let me write about our lives. He read later
versions and he knew that if anything made him uncomfortable, we could talk about
it. He’s my biggest supporter, so I wouldn’t put stuff out there if he wasn’t
okay with it. And he had veto power over anything I wrote about his family.
Interestingly, he only suggested one small change in the whole book. We had
remembered a detail differently, and changing it didn’t alter the emotional
reality of the scene for me, so I changed it. It was the least I could do.
Q. I was curious to learn that
"ready for air" refers to when a preemie is ready to breathe normal
room air on his/her own. I also noticed
many references throughout the book about breathing, air, feeling short of
breath (physically and metaphorically), and claustrophobia.
A.
For me, “ready for air” is both about a preemie’s lungs and about me feeling
stifled and overwhelmed in my role as an isolated new mother. The title was
pulled from the line in the book that referenced Stella’s lungs, but I really
wanted it to reverberate through the whole narrative on a metaphorical level.
Q.
I read your book during a week when I was teaching a memoir class in
which a few students were struggling with too many secondary characters in
their stories, and I noticed your book's author's note includes, "…I occasionally omitted a person
from a scene as long as that omission did not compromise the veracity or
substance of the story." This crystallizes a powerful but hard to
learn aspect of memoir craft – knowing what to leave out and why. Did you
realize instinctively that you'd have to make these omission decisions, or did
they reveal themselves to you in the writing and/or revision process?
A.
They revealed themselves to me in the writing and revision processes. Sometimes
I realized that introducing a new and sometimes periphery character in a scene
would just bog it down. Those were the cases in which I just left that person
out, as long is it didn’t compromise the emotional truth of the scene. It’s so
tricky to learn that, and for me I had to be in the thick of writing before it
made sense.
Q. Near the end of the book, you explain
how, during your child's first year or so, you began to build a writing routine
into your new life as a mother, which, premature birth aside, is one of the
most challenging times for a woman to continue writing. If I'm remembering
right, you began with one morning a week, then built up to four mornings a week,
cobbling together relatives pitching in, paid childcare help, and daycare.
Since you've also teach classes and have written a book about writing through motherhood, can you talk about this a bit?
A.
It’s challenging to balance writing and motherhood. It’s even more difficult if
on top of being a mother you have to pay bills and juggle paying work with
creative work (which is usually unpaid, at least at first). My students are
always struggling to find a balance that works. I always ask them to think
about what’s realistic in terms of a writing schedule. (Don’t say you’re going
to write three days a week if that’s not feasible.) I make them write down
their schedule, and then I stress that writing needs to be a priority if they
really want to write. It doesn’t need to be #1 on the list, of course—that’s
unlikely—but at least it needs to be on
the list.
I
can’t imagine motherhood without writing or writing without motherhood. Before
Stella was born, I actually didn’t write very much. Clearly I wrote enough to
get into an MFA program, and I did my assignments, but I also spent a great
deal of time procrastinating, waiting for inspiration and generally wasting
time.
But
motherhood—and the need I felt to reflect on the larger issues that came up in
my life as a result of me becoming a
mother (isolation, marriage, writing itself)—made me into the writer I am
today. And now, if I have two hours, I write for two hours. I no longer have
time to wait for the muse to shine her light on me (and she’s incredibly unreliable
anyway).
Flexibility
is also important, though. Over the last couple of years (when I was working
full time in addition to teaching and leading retreats, etc.), I wrote very
little. And I just had to be okay with that. I knew I’d get back to a schedule
in which writing would be possible, and I finally have.
Notes
from Lisa: Kate would love to answer your
questions! Leave them here in comments, and she'll stop by a few times
over the next couple of days to answer.
Kate will also give away a signed copy of Ready for Air to one commenter, chosen at random (whether you ask a
question or not). Leave your comment before midnight on Monday, November 25 Sunday, November 30 to
enter (must have a U.S. postal address).
To follow Kate's blog, go here.
