This interview was conducted by Katharine Blair between the 26th and 29th of May, 2023 via email.
The questions and answers appear here in their unedited form.

For context, I last looked over these questions on the tenth anniversary of the death of my mother to ‘complications from early onset dementia’. Please note the euphemism. The truth is her brain saw an exit and took it. The truth is that the hand we played in that was a grace. Some lives are hard and end lovely. Others whip back at their farthest. A moon tied in orbit. A new season, maybe, but still the same cycle, still the same course. She taught me to be and love monsters, that empathy can save us but not in our lifetime. She taught me to fold under my anger and keep sharp my knife. She was my favourite person. She was flawed, and I am her creation.

I’ve sat on these questions for too long.
Forgive me, Jessica.
I haven’t been ready but I feel ready now.

JC: Katharine, this is a beautiful tribute. I’m so glad that twitter connected us and that my monstrous mother poems spoke to you.

Mary, Mary, that rigid story.
Mary had never had any particular attachment Mary chose
Lisbon rather than France Mary followed them Mary was
struck with awe Mary started Mary’s precautions
Mary had not said much Mary was obliged Mary Shrank
back Mary rose early Mary endeavored Mary was
petrified What a sight for Mary! Mary kept up some little
formality And Mary waited
(p 39)

We never know our mothers, I’m convinced of it. We know them as mothers, sure, but never as people. There’s a glimpse that comes once the gaps between you shrink in adulthood. You parent, quit your job, buy a house and the math becomes easy. I was twelve when she did this, eighteen, twenty two. I remember distinctly the day I did the math on one of the more ridiculous of my mother’s decisions and realised she’d been only 26 at the time. Ancient to my child self but now a child in her own right in my eyes. There is an empathy that sets in if everyone does it right. God, you were an idiot but, at that age, so was I. Still though, the distance. At mom’s wake people told stories about her that made her feel so unreal. At sixteen and giggling, pigtails and farm dogs, and each new unknown pushed her farther from me. Who was this woman? What did I really know? Mary is there from the outset. I cannot imagine the gulf of that absence. “Tell me of her,” she asks but what is she hoping they’ll tell?

JC: This passage is from a poem composed of lines from the novella Mary by Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley who is the (imagined) writer of the epistolary poems in Yours, Creature. I read Mary in this fantastic undergraduate 18th century literature class taught by James Basker. I will never forget the class and how much I disliked this book at the time. How can I explain it? How can I explain what appeals here to me and what I imagine Mary Shelley sought in her mother’s work? Her mother died 11 days after Mary Shelley was born. What painful repetition that Shelley’s first baby also died 13 days after birth. Did Mary Shelley feel that a murderous quality was attached to her very being? Within two weeks, the people she would have loved most, died after being a part of her (or their) body. In Frankenstein, I think of how a life is made from the parts of the dead and how the creature murdered others in his pain. But I’m getting lost! I return to Mary, which is a somewhat tedious book. The poem is made up of syntactically restrictive lines from Mary and I think it’s because it was as close as Mary Wollstonecraft could get to the restriction of her circumstance and her feelings. The restraint weighs on the sentences.

Mary Shelley read her mother’s work as a substitute for her mother and as a way to know her mother. When you speak of how we cannot know our mothers as a people, perhaps a mother who leaves behind a collection of written work offers a gift. It is a gift into the intimacy of her mind. Of course, it is no substitute for the day-to-day to lessons, words, and affection of a living mother. It is as if Shelley knew the opposite of what you mention: she lacked the mother, she had the person.

Creature, how female
I made you

peering at the family
& gathering their wood–
But they don’t want you
(p 59)

*taps mic* “I guess this is more of a comment then a question, but I’d love your thoughts”

I’m obsessed by the hidden mothers phenomena of Victorian children’s portraits. If you’re unfamiliar, children being children are notoriously hard to pose for long exposure photographs and a solution the era came to was to hide their mother in upholstered obscurity to help keep them still. There is no better metaphor for mother/womanhood than this one and I’m begging you to turn away from these questions and go take a look: Hidden Mother Photography. To be mother/woman is to be helpmeet. Safe harbour and nursemaid, forever to be shamed for wanting more. What of a child of a child who also revolted? “I who copy you” she signs off to her mother then two pages later, to her Creature, “Your monstrous creator”. I want to have hope for the end of our erasure but I’m nowhere in my children’s history. Scroll any of these hellsites and you’ll see plenty of children posed, bright, and smiling, their mothers as shadows, carefully framed to not taint the scene.

JC: My god! Thank you for sharing that! The one where the face is covered is startling in its violence and erasure. It evokes images of women who’ve been killed. Strange too that at times the body is allowed, but not the face as our faces give us humanity above all else.

What’s interesting about the take on mother and creature in Yours, Creature is that the creature in Frankenstein, the child so to speak, is rejected by its creator, Victor. Victor runs from its grotesque form and lives in denial as the monster wreaks havoc around him. He never takes responsibility for what he has made. It wasn’t until two years after I wrote Yours, Creature--when I got my first print copy--that I recognized one of the central obsessions of the poems is that of the abandoned child, the child that is too monstrous to be loved by its mother. Shelley was abandoned by her mother’s death, which was complicated by her own role in that death--she literally caused it by her birth--but Mary was also abandoned by her father Godwin who rejected her when she ran off with Shelley. Her stepmother, Godwin’s second wife, was also cold to her, and during Shelley’s adolescence, Godwin and his wife shipped Mary off to Scotland to get her out of the house. So, the book touches on a taboo of motherhood, which is that not all mothers can mother. Either they are dead, or poor, or unable to find the emotions necessary to nurture another being. And it’s not a stretch that this inability comes from the very phenomena present in these “Hidden Mother” photos. If women are not allowed to exist as people with needs, if they must erase their presence, how can they summon the love necessary if that love comes at the expense of their own life, literally the risk of death, and the denial of their personal needs?

There’s a book I’m trying to avoid reading called Better Never to Have Been: The harm of coming into existence by David Benatar that posits that the only ethical stance is to be anti-natal. To have never created another is the only way to ensure one won’t perpetuate harm. He’s not wrong. At the time of this writing we have 8,035,234,081, 8,035,234,090, 8,035,234,095… (sorry, I got stuck there a minute. Lucky for you, I don’t suffer alone: World Population Counter) people living the proof. Mary, herself, was a mother. What do you think she took forward? Having spent so much time in her life now, how has Mary changed motherhood and daughterhood for you?

JC: Three of Mary’s four children children died in childhood. Two were toddlers when they died and the fourth died 13 days after it was born. Mary also had a miscarriage that nearly killed her. All this grief had to be born alone. Percy Shelley ran away from their first infant when he saw it--just like Victor Frankenstein ran from his creation. Percy abandoned Mary frequently, leaving for lengthy periods of time, sometimes with Mary’s stepsister, sometimes to escape creditors. The nature of grief is that it gets aggravated by subsequent griefs--especially if it is repressed. The grief Shelley felt as a mother would have been layered over and compounded by her girlhood grief. Mary Shelley was 16 when she fell in love with Percy and she became pregnant shortly after. I’ll also add that while motherhood was a source of intense suffering for her, it’s clear that she was a loving mother.

The second question has a dense answer. First, there’s no way you can read her story and not feel grateful. It’s hard to imagine how she endured such pain.

Poetry is always an act of discovery for me. I follow my obsessions because there’s a relief in doing so. This was not a book I intended to write. It came by accident after reading a biography. Often I am not fully aware why something is tapping into that poetic impulse. If it changes motherhood for me it’s only in the way that I become more aware of what I think or feel about experience. It’s akin to dreaming. I like to look back on a dream that lingers and pulses with meaning. I look into the images to find out what the dream already knows--which is what I already know. But I look to bring it out into the light.

A child can kill its mother,
Baby wet and monstrous, slipping
with eyes opened: black and white,

the stewed creation
not asking to be born,
but requiring _______
(p 9)

I have a long held belief that we are the fault of our parents and if imbalance exists (and it does) then it’s as children that we are owed. This notion of parental expectation, I don’t get it. Why would we owe them for having been unconsentingly brought into the world? And yet so many live their whole lives trying to make up for the simple fact of their being. A child can kill its mother but only when a man fires the bullet and she or the forces that rule her don’t still his hand. Motherless now, a mother, I try hard to hold this thought present. My birth brought my mother to a new low, forced a full scale tear down of the life she’d been built. My own gave me cover and allow me a chance at a safe social world. How womanly of me to push back in my interest only to recenter myself in new guilt. Is there a way to ever come clean of it? So long as motherhood exists under patriarchy and power imbalance will we forever find ourselves some variation of monstrous and wet?

JC: This poem refers to the fact that Shelley’s mother, Wollstonecraft, died 11 days after Mary Shelley’s birth. Mary Shelley also nearly died from a fifth pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage. In 2023, giving birth can still kill you. In fact, I live in a county (Onondaga in NY) where the maternal mortality rate has increased, not decreased. It is 85% higher than the national average for birthing people. Giving birth is still a dangerous activity and of course, now it is more so with the Dobbs decision.

You make another resonant point: motherhood is so demanding that women give up the self. There’s a Jason Isbell song, “Children of Children” that I hear in my head sometimes: “I was riding on my mother’s hip / she was shorter than the corn / All the years I took from her / Just by being born.” Isbell’s mother was 17 when he was born. Mary Shelley became pregnant at age 16. My mother became pregnant at 19. This is the age when people begin dreaming about the future. Motherhood changes that.

Weirdly, I started writing seriously, and by seriously I mean with an eye to publish, when my daughter was born. I think I became afraid of what I had already given away in my life and what I was about to give away caring for her.

I very much, very decidedly don’t talk to my mother. Lest you missed the intro, I can’t. She is dead. What I mean is that my internal monologue refuses to shut up. I think every word first in a kind of narration. Every thought I’ve ever had has had a purpose built ‘you’ and I tell her nothing. In the chorus of people who watch me, judging my actions (oh, yes. Who needs a bully when you can be one yourself?), she’s notably absent. I don’t know what I fear more, her disappointment or recognition. Did she expect better of me? Does she see how I’ve hit all the same potholes? Did she (we) want more? For Mary there is a similar tension. How does one talk to The Mother abstracted? How can one measure up to unknowable? Did navigating the tension of her uncertainty give you any insight into your own?

JC: This question is at the heart of this book and speaks to the epistolary form as a form that is essentially one-sided, but also as a form that allows the writer to be fully heard without interruption, and without silencing. No one can yell over you, tell you you’re wrong, or prevent you from finishing all you need to say. Underneath all my poetry books, is a deep yearning for voice and the struggle to overcome the suffocation of voice. Such is the beauty of writing for many of us.

There’s a poem right at the start of ‘I Dangle From His Word, My Life Hangs in the Balance’ where Mary signs of “yours at 16 years, Mary Shelley” and I want so badly to hug her. In those two lines you can read how badly she wants for a solid. ‘This is me, he is mine’, an unending litany, ‘I am real, I am real’. Tiptoe-faced, as you name it, such a perfect description of ‘Please no one take this. I’ll stop breathing to keep it. I’m begging the world to stand still.’ “He was my shiver, blood on the outside”. A person as liferaft, as anchor, as proof that we’re people also. Do we all have this? If a tree falls in the forest but it’s just your own voice in a room full of people. Does everyone need proof of their impact to know that they’re real?

JC: Oh, I love that the poem makes you feel compelled to touch her, such a compliment. I hoped to make her real and sympathetic in these epistles. I wrote in fear of putting self-pity into her voice--I don’t think she was self-pitying, but I do think she deeply grieved her losses.

Such a good question--one I have asked often. Do we need others to feel existence? I don’t know the answer. I am overly familiar with the painful longing to be acknowledged by others. I feel certain this must have been a recurrent emotion throughout Shelley’s life as she was rejected and ignored by nearly all the people she loved at one point or another. I also believe that there is a peace beyond that longing found in solitude. Perhaps the best idea to come out of romanticism is that communion with nature and its awe-filled presence. The monster recognizes it while he is in the mountains. There is, also, a peace in the creative act that eliminates all painful craving for the other. The creative impulse is one of connection without the individual need that can be so gnawing and painful.

The monstrous and womanhood, the meat of us, the blood, milk, and gore.. The monstrous and disability, disfigurement and disgust, this fear of ourselves being ‘other’ we save all our best insults for. The monstrous and queer love and queer bodies, how dare you step out of the confines, defy our conventions, prove we could be more? As a TransMad woman I wake every day monstrous. Is it any surprise that I spend so much of my time delving into that darkness looking for kinship and solace alike?

Early in the pandemic my eldest and I watched Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller swap out doctor and monster on the small screen thanks to The National Theatre: Live and there’s just something so ridiculous (telling? ironic?) about the casting. To have a man who has said there’s a “blessing to having a weird face, something between and otter and something people find vaguely attractive” when he knows full well he’s adored for his offbeat beauty play a ‘monster’ while a woman in his position would never have the same chance. In Monsters, Claire Dederer contrasts the relative monstrosity of men and women (the binary is useful here but trust that I also hate it from my vantage, a little to the left and outside). Dederer opens the book with Roman Polanski and, horrific as his crimes are, they are only the start. When she eventually gets to the section on women she’s hard pressed to come up with worse than a handful of notable women who took flack for not wanting, distancing themselves from, or giving up a child. This is all it takes to be monstrous. To withhold your duty as baby maker, to guard your own peace. I listened to Monsters while working on my shed conversion. After 21 years of baby making and rearing I’m carving out a silence and creating a physical distance between me and my kids. I am becoming (even more) Monster and I have no regrets. How do you see yourself monstrous? How do others? Are there ways in which you’ve managed to push back on those thoughts?

JC: I used to see myself as monstrous because of various elements from my childhood. I viewed myself as repulsive for years. It helped me as a teacher though--that sense it gave me of being on the outside. Students who need to feel accepted often gravitate to my classroom. The bell hooks’ statement about queerness echoes in my head from time to time: "‘Queer' was not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”

Something else: the monstrous in me was also beautiful to me. Don’t the monstrous intuit deep-down that the monstrous within them holds joy and beauty, that it has been shunned precisely because it threatens the order? I think it is the same as the unclean, “l’immonde,” that Hélène Cixous speaks of in her essay “The School of Roots.” It is outside the law. Whether that’s sexuality or gender, or poverty--look how disgusted people are by the poor, they don’t even bother to hide it--and sometimes the monstrous is simply to feel deeply.

In the creature Mary gives us the other embodied and doesn’t subvert it. Hers isn’t a tale of empathy and redemption. There’s no ‘and they recognized within their own hearts a monster, and the humanity in his’ moment. There is only the monstrous and unavoidable truth of our fear. That goth girl at Thanksgiving, the way it feels to be the elephant in the room always. What if I cut out my soul and set it on the table? What if I made it corporeal, separate, so obvious, would you have invited it to sit here next to me? We have so many words for contortion—masking, closeted, stealth—and so few for comfort. Two hundred and five years on—on the edge of June again, ‘Pride’ again—I’m watching flags go up around me and wondering, this long for comfort, how long for joy? Horse to water or whatever but Mary really did put our noses right in it, are you hopeful the fear and hateful will ever give in and drink?

JC: I am hopeful often. I could not be a teacher if I were not. I keep showing up every day as if the potential for love is there in each kid. (there’s despair too)

Are we still here? Are we through it? Thank goodness because that was a lot. An easy jog to the end now then we’ll be all done.

Tell me (us, our readers/writers/poets/publishers themselves) a bit about how you came to write Yours, Creature. We seek motivation and insight. What is your writing/editing/submission process? What did you like, struggle with or learn from or about publishing through your work with Jackleg Press?

JC: I sent a query to JackLeg because it was free and because I admire the poetry editor, Simone Muench. My submission process is ambitious, but I also have limited funds so I am judicious. JackLeg has been very very good to me. This is my 4th press, and I should add that all of the presses I’ve worked with treated me very well. I’m lucky. It has taken me a long time as a poet to be seen, to promote, to participate in this poetry world. That impulse to hide comes from the monstrous part of me that feels unwanted. It has taken me four books to insist on being seen. It has been a slow process to do more than the writing of poems--to say I have written these books, please read them. I didn’t even know for a long time that the poetry community was out here, that all these poets knew each other and helped each other. The monster in me did not know how to ask for help. To this day, it pains me to ask, but I’ve been doing it nevertheless. I appreciate so much your warm invitation, your personal and heartfelt thoughts. Thank you for this chance to think about my book in a new way.

Thank you for your words and the terrible timing.
Yours, Creature is a book that’s going to live with me for a good chunk of time.

Yours in monstrosity,
Katharine