The forces in our lives are constantly colliding—sometimes in ways that work out well and sometimes in ways that don’t. This interview series is an exploration of what it can look like to work with the collisions, rather than against them. By digging into how humans and nature interact–from our relationships with other humans, to those with our non-human neighbors, to our relationship with ourselves to our relationship with the landbase–we can uncover how to best step fully into our role in the story of the world.
Welcome to the next installment of the Ordinary Collisions interview series. Today’s guest is poet April Tierney, who I met via our shared publisher Homebound Publications. Back in the spring of this year, we both released poetry collections and had the good fortune of being able to enjoy a joint event put on by Birch Bark Editing. It was a delightful evening of reading from our work and discussing inspiration, process, and more. (You can view that conversation here: BBE InConversation with Heidi and April.)
April is the author of three full length collections of poetry, including her most recent book, Memory Keeper (that you can hear April read from at the BBE link in the last paragraph). April's work has been featured in The Wayfarer Magazine, Orion, and Real Ground Journal, among others. She lives in the foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains with her husband, young daughter, mischievous dog, and wide web of kin.
Heidi: April, thanks for being here with us today. It’s good to chat with you again (even if it is virtually)! To start, I always ask the same question: What are two forces that are colliding in your life right now (or that have in the not too distant past)?
April: That’s an easy answer for me right now (although certainly not easy to live). Early motherhood and writing. These two things seem to be colliding and competing for my attention all the time. Whenever a poem comes barreling through, I often don’t have adequate space to tend to it in the way that I would like. So instead, I scramble to grab a piece of paper and jot some of the lines down in a real rough, almost illegible kind of way, and then my baby comes screaming or tugging at my leg for some food, so I have to set the page down and pray that I can even find it at a later date.
This is so counter to how I’ve written in the past. Whenever a poem would arrive, I’d stop whatever I was doing to fully devote myself to it; I would sit for however long it demanded of me. Now, I have many random notebooks and loose pieces of paper scattered all over the house with fragments of poems waiting for who-the-hell-knows-when I will actually be able to saddle up to the computer and begin fleshing them out.
It feels quite chaotic at the moment, but at least I’m still writing! Before becoming a mother, I was honestly afraid that my creative capacities would be completely maxed out after growing and birthing a human life; but that has not been my experience at all. Now my daughter is almost a year and a half, and I’ve been writing from very early on. It’s just having the uninterrupted time (which every writer really needs in order to sculpt a piece) that I don’t have the consistent luxury of right now.
It’s helpful to keep in mind how fleeting this phase of life is (at least that’s what parents with older kids keep telling me). It takes a bit of the edge off of the inner conflict that I experience sometimes around wishing I had more space to be with my work. But remembering that it won’t always be this way, allows me to acknowledge the preciousness of it all; to turn toward this little growing life in front of me and feel a deep well of gratitude for the privilege of being able to be with her from so early on. I know not every mother, or parent, has this privilege. My mother certainly did not. So I don’t take the position I am in for granted, although the friction it creates inside of me is also real. Not to mention (or perhaps, to wholly mention) the lack of support that parents receive in this modern area with the breakdown of the village and an over emphasis on the nuclear family––which is enough to crush any parent, no matter how great their capacity for gratitude truly is. So, admittedly, there are times when I feel crushed, too.
Heidi. Oh, I can relate to this so much. My daughter is ten, and I remember the snatching of moments and hurried scribbling on random bits of material vividly. I’ve found that my child and my writing have grown up together—not something I could see in the thick of it, but something that I notice now.
How are you navigating the conditions this collision of motherhood and writing is creating? How does the dissonance created impact your choices?
April: It seems to be applying some pressure on my writing in a necessary way. I used to wander into the woods for hours, and wait until things got really quiet for the Muse to visit upon me. Now, I can get hit over the head with some epic line in the middle of changing a diaper or while chasing my daughter outside, trying to keep her from falling off our deck. In other words, it’s showing me that poetry is happening all the time. It isn’t only occurring out in the woods (although it certainly lives there too) but it’s in the grit and ordinariness of our days. I am finding that the boundary between what is sacred and ordinary is becoming more and more blurred. It’s also grinding down my understanding of what poetry actually is.
Heidi: I love that: Poetry is happening all the time. Indeed it is! I’m reminded of these words by Christian Wiman: “Nature poets can’t walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.”
What has this collision taught you about yourself? The world?
April: I would say that I’m still very much in the midst of it, so my learning feels messy and perhaps not even ready to be put into words. But if I could say something, it might be about how essential it is to live poetically, rather than just always trying to write the next great poem. Writers forever have their ears tuned to a story or piece of inspiration, but when your whole life is saturated by beauty and grief and rigor and longing, it’s not so clear anymore what wants to be written down and what must simply be lived. I can honestly appreciate that kind of uncertainty.
Heidi: Poetry as a lifestyle.
Can you tell us about a collision you explore in your latest work?
April: I am working on a new collection of poetry centered on mothering, which is probably no surprise. I only know how to write from my embodied experience, so clearly this is the landscape that I am embedded in now. I am allowing these collisions to take place inside of me all the time while deepening into my roles as Mother and Writer. They don’t have to be so separate; although they certainly ask different things from me, they can also influence one another’s way of being.
So when I sit down to write while my daughter is napping, I’m viscerally informed by the way we were together when she was awake. And when she wakes again, our time together is informed by my willingness to sit down at the computer instead of taking a nap myself, even though I often want to and sometimes must. But I’m quite committed to the world that my daughter is growing into, so writing helps me not only to stay a part of that world, but to contribute to the place that I long for it to be. I do not write for self-expression, it is activism. So by continuing to show up to the page in the limited moments that I am granted, I am doing so as a prayer—not only for my daughter, but for all of the young ones coming up now—that they might have an honest, kind, and sane world to live their way into.
Heidi: What a gift to your daughter, and to those who are still to be born. What else would you like to share about your current projects?
April: Well, my last collection of poetry, Memory Keeper, is something that I wrote while pregnant. I certainly never imagined being able to gestate a human life and new body of work simultaneously, but I’ve since learned that our capacity for creativity is far more vast than we are aware of. I mention it here because that book is what gave way to this next phase that I am in as a woman and writer. It also wizened me to the process of submitting oneself to the work, no matter how troublesome or improbable it might seem. Really, my job is to simply get out of the way so that whatever wants to come through me at this particular moment in time can, and must.
*from Memory Keeper
Have a collision you’d like to explore in this space? Send me an email at heidi@heidibarr.com.