Author Interview: Kate Hopper on Writing, Craft, Motherhood, and Her Memoir, Ready For Air

(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.

Guest Blogger Susan Ito on AWP Day Two: Tapas, Tears and a Literary Heroine

Susan Ito, who wrote yesterday about her first day at the AWP Writers Conference in Chicago, is back to bring us up to date on her activities.

Please welcome Susan Ito.

AWP Chicago: Day Two

I think it is going to be tough to beat this day of AWP. It was a standout wonderful day. I started at the great fitness center in my little hotel. I am feeling more and more glad about not staying at the Hilton. Then breakfast with my dear friend Masha Hamilton. The tapas restaurant turns out to make awesome omelets. It was good to have a leisurely morning. I skipped the first two morning sessions, but it was important to pace myself because I had a long afternoon and evening ahead.

At noon I attended Masha's panel, Writing Your Passions: Forbidden Topics. It included authors writing across racial lines, about sexuality and adultery, about writing as a scientist when one is not a scientist, and about the Other, in her case, getting into the mind and heart of a killer. I saw people wiping tears. Several parts of the panel were totally brilliant and all were provocative.

Next I went to Approaches to Historical Fiction. It was structured in a good way: instead of having the four panelists speak one at a time, as usually happens, each panelist first read a brief excerpt from their novels. REALLY brief but well chosen and interesting to hear. Then the moderator asked questions about research, and each answered, ABCD, briefly. Then they moved through other topics, marketing, other details, and the discussion was so dynamic it was impossible to get bored. One tidbit that stood out for me was somebody's notion that a character who is set in the 1940's will have memories of the 1920's, of their youth and growing up, so we must not only research the time they are living in, but the time that they remember. (I groaned inwardly at this.) "Characters ruminate, remember… we are caught in our pasts." Good point, but more work.

After that I hurried up to a reading by my literary heroine, Marilynne Robinson. I had not realized she was going to be here until I arrived this week and I was so excited. Let me explain: her novel Gilead is my favorite book EVER. My husband and I have one tattered copy that we have each read about four times. We pass it back and forth. It has moved us to tears over and over. It's one of those rare books whose sentences are new, and startling, and very moving, every single time. So I was thrilled to hear she was going to read from Gilead. I had heard her speak in San Francisco this year, but it was a conversation/interview, not a reading.

She skipped throughout the book, mainly focusing on passages that evoked a sense of the Midwest (the book is set in Iowa). I started tearing up a bit. Then I realized she was reading from the last two pages of the book, which never fail to break me up. I can't even describe how beautiful it was, the cadence of her voice, how it softened every few seconds, it was the perfect vehicle for those sentences. I had excitedly bought an audio version of the book a few years ago, and it was read by an actor, supposedly to evoke the elderly male narrator. It was SO WRONG. My husband and I listened for about three minutes and had to return it, it felt so not authentic, so NOT what we envisioned when reading.

But Marilynne Robinson's voice was It. I was reduced to a blubbering heap on the floor. I was madly texting my husband about this experience while gathering myself up and walking out the door. My face was completely wet. I looked to my right and who was standing right next to me, but Robinson herself. She kind of looked at me in that "Are you all right?" concern, and I just blurted out how Gilead was my favorite book of all time, how it had moved me so much, and to hear her read it had been just… incredible. She was so gracious and kind. We were the only two people standing there. She thanked me and then we both walked away.

It was hands down one of the best reading experiences I have ever had, and I have been to hundreds of readings. I don't think it can get better than that, and it made this AWP unforgettable and amazing.

I sat around and recovered for the next hour. Then it was time to hop in a cab with nine other Literary Mama writers/columnists/editors for our reading at Women & Children First bookstore (totally awesome bookstore! I wish they would move to California!). We first ate dinner at a fantastic "Japanese country" restaurant, with no atmosphere – just a hole in the wall – but the best food and incredible service. I felt like I was being served by my grandmother.

The reading was wonderful – so moving and exciting to finally meet Literary Mamas I've known for years, but only online. People came from California, Michigan, Alaska, Chicago, Oregon, and South Carolina. It was quite heady and emotional to all be in one room, to hear each others' voices. I was floating. One of my dear friends who moved away years ago was there, and we got to catch up after the reading.

It was a good day. It was the BEST day, and I seriously don't know how it can be topped. And I STILL haven't made it to the Book Fair. Tomorrow, I hope…!

Note from Lisa: Jealous, jealous, jealous. And happy for Susan.

Guest Blogger Susan Ito on Exhaustion, AWP, and Why it Might Help to be a 20-something MFA Student

At the 2008 AWP Conference in New York last year, one of my favorite presentations was by a group of women nonfiction writers who discussed writing about family matters. One of the panel members was Susan Ito, who I had already come to admire for her work on Literary Mama, where she chronicles Life in the Sandwich, caring for both children and elderly parents. She is also the co-editor of A Ghost at Heart's Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption, and her work appears in anthologies and literary journals. Recently, Susan and I crossed online paths, found we have a few friends and interests in common, both writing-wise and beyond. I asked her to provide some on-the-scene morsels from the AWP Conference in Chicago this week.

Please welcome Susan Ito.

AWP Chicago: Day One

Yesterday and this morning involved so many travel snafus that I will not bore you with the details, but I have never had SO many things go wrong, travel-wise, in such a short brief period. They included, but were not limited to: delayed flight, cancelled flight, emotional meltdown in a certain airport, hunger, having one's luggage lost and missing pajamas at bedtime, having one's hotel reservation cancelled under one's nose and having to find a new hotel.

All that happened. And more. But now I am comfortably ensconced in the (in my opinion) nicer hotel across the street, and I have a comfy king bed on which to collapse, and all is more or less resolved on that end.

But I missed the first session because of having to tend to the pesky details above. I went down to Registration around 8:30 this morning, and about six thousand other people decided to do the same thing at the same time, so the line literally snaked around and around the floor about six times. It was worse than Disneyland during Spring Break week. Needless to say, I missed the 9 am session.

But it did give me time to peruse the entire AWP catalog and to meticulously fill out my Personal Planner for the conference. The AWP catalog, if you have never held one, weighs as much as a gold brick and contains 340 pages of literary goodness. It can inspire awe, excitement, overwhelm and exhaustion. My heart did go pitter-pat as I opened the pages and read excitedly through the offerings. Then my eyeballs began to melt and my vision blurred and by the time I reached Saturday I was officially numb.

The personal planner is a lovely tool for nerds. It's a grid with seven blank spots for each day, and as you go through the calendar you fill in your choices. There are sessions scheduled basically from 9am to 10pm Thursday, Friday and Saturday, with only a short break from 6-8pm. There's no lunch break, or pee breaks. You have to write those in for yourselves.

I think I remember from past AWP conferences that it's a good idea to go to no more than three sessions a day, but do I learn? Not very quickly. I wrote seven sessions into my planner, but hunger and fatigue only allowed me to attend three. Which was just fine.

All of the sessions I went to today were excellent in their own ways. They all inspired me and stoked me up and made me think about my writing in ways I haven't in a while.

My first session was "Writing as Parents: Our Children as Subjects." This featured Literary Mama writers Shari McDonald Strong and Sonya Huber, as well as the wonderful Kate Hopper, Jennifer Niesslein of Brain, Child, and Jill Christman. They pondered the ethical, moral and literary issues to consider when writing about one's own children. They all spoke with great candor and humor, but I wished they had at least one panelist whose child was older than ten. I do think (and in my own experience) these things change a lot when you have teenagers and young adults.

After that I went to a session of "Memory of Wounds: Memoirists Tell Truth, Lies, and Memory." The room was packed, overflowing. I couldn't even get in. It was a little painful to think that there were so many wounded memoirists around (including me, I guess?). I sat on the floor in the hallway outside and every once in a while caught a word that floated out. Usually words like, "truth," "story," "healing." I really wanted to get into this because my dear friend Joy Castro was speaking. Thankfully, I was able to squeeze myself into a little patch of carpet in the floor right as she began. She is so calm, poetic, brilliant and kind. The last part of her talk really put a lump in my throat, when she said, it's not enough to write about the pain and the loss, the damage, the horror, but that every life includes moments of joy, seeing the blue sky, and it is important to reflect life in its wholeness. I didn't do justice to her actual words but her delivery of it was so evocative and beautiful.

I was going to go to a Loft Literary Center reading with Charles Baxter, whom I have always admired, and Sun-Yung Shin, whom I really wanted to meet (she's one of the editors of the awesome anthology Outsiders Within), but I was starving and tired so I went to lunch with Joy and Rebecca Kaminsky, whom I've know for years through Literary Mama but with whom I've never had more than a five minute conversation. We're always seeing each other at busy literary events and never one on one.

Then I went to ANOTHER memoir session, "Aftershock: What Happens When You Throw Off the Veil of Fiction in Rendering Long-Hidden Truths? Strategies, Advice, and Practical Tips from Four Writers of Memoir" (whew, how's THAT for a subtitle?). Only it turns out there were only three writers. They had pretty good things to say about the real consequences (familial, legal, emotional) of writing about people, and how you really can never predict who you will piss off and why. But it only strengthened my resolve to write my story.

After that, I was fried. I really wanted to go to another session, but I couldn't do it. I had to gather up my luggage and drag it across the street. I was overjoyed to find free Wi-Fi in the new hotel, which in my opinion is far superior to the Hilton.

Tonight there is a big event with Art Spiegelman. It is allegedly about six blocks away. I have not had dinner yet, am waiting for my roommate to arrive from the airport, and I just don't know. I think I might settle for the tapas restaurant downstairs.

The thing about AWP is that there are always wayyyy more things to go to than one has reasonable energy for. Unless one is a twenty-something MFA student, which I am not.

More tomorrow.

Note from Lisa: Thanks to Susan, I remember the exhaustion of AWP, as well as the high spots.

INTERNETeresting Bits

An occasional round-up of links to stuff out there to make you smile, smack your forehead, shake your head, nod and pump your fist, react, act, or pass it on. Enjoy.

►The first lecture I recall as a freshman journalism major at Syracuse University, was about Marshall McLuhan’s then still-debated pronouncement, “the medium is the message.” McLuhan was talking about the “global village” and “new media,” as far back as the 1960s, and ignited controversy and debate for the next 20 years with nearly every book, lecture or interview. One of his more prosaic quotes was about judging a book by a single page – page 69, to be precise. Well, now another Marshal (Zeringue), over at The Campaign For the American Reader, has taken up McLuhan’s challenge. He contacted more than 200 authors of contemporary books, collected their reactions to their own page 69, and has been posting the results.

►Those blank pages sometimes found at the ends of books? Should they – will they – one day be covered in advertisements? And would that help or hurt the publishing industry? That’s what Scott Karp, whose thoughtful media blog, Publishing 2.0: The (r)Evolution of Media, ponders in a recent post.

►Missing Miss Snark? Must have your quota of jaded New York-centric literary agency rhetoric? Try The Rejecter – just like it sounds. She (he?) claims to swim the slush pile by day, and does a fair job of demystifying bugaboos of submission. Keep handy that grain of salt, and make sure you are wearing your thick skin.

Shameless self-promotion: One of my poems, “Flight of Fancy” is up over at Literary Mama.