HoboEye Q&A:
Christy Stillwell, Bozeman, MT

McInnis: “Amnesia” is a wonderful title. And the title poem certainly lives up to it and more. I love the way motherhood informs these poems. Tell me more about how "Time is a wretched spoiler" emerges from a mother's point of view.

Stillwell: That line is really the heart of that poem; the clutching hands of time around one’s neck, choking out the joy in the very same way the baby’s hands are grasping at his mother’s hair….motherhood brings time into a surreal focus. The only other experience that came close was writing my first novel, which was shopped around with an agent, but passed over ultimately. I wrestled with time in that book, the time span of the story—it went from two years, to one year, to one summer—and I wrestled with time in the writing of it: I was in graduate school. My husband was working so I could stay home and write. I pretty much had nothing but time to write and it almost drove me mad. Then, flash forward about ten years, and I have these two children and time is just slipping through my fingers. “Amnesia,” the title poem, is about my son, so, my second child. I had already been through the great forgetting. It’s almost creepy: you simply cannot remember your children at any time other than the present, or, how they are now. You can, as a parent, remember a certain time, but you tend to replace the child’s face or body with the one you know now. I don’t know if this will be true as they move on in to adulthood, but infancy, as such, is like this delicious new love affair, one you know will age just like everything else. The honeymoon will end. You just get the one chance to introduce your baby to the moon, you see, and then he knows it, shapes it for himself, learns to call it by its name. As I put it to a friend, motherhood demands that you mourn the present as though it were already the past. Every stage is delicious, of course, but there is something about that first year, about infancy. It’s harder, more intense, and more demanding than anything I’ve ever done. And knowing that it will soon vanish completely, that really amps up the experience.

McInnis: I wonder how that sense of time, that heightened sense of time, has affected your sense of poetry. How does one alter the other?

Stillwell: Well, I can tell you that I had only dabbled in poetry before having children, and that something about that segment of my life absolutely required it. Due in large part, I think, to the superawareness of time. Essays tended to feel overblown and heavy handed. Fiction, well. Fiction, which was my main form, that is, the one in which I had the most experience, it just wasn’t possible for me at the time. It’s only been recently, in fact, that I’ve been able to return to fiction, suggesting that I HAD to write those poems in order to move ahead with my writing at all. Let me explain: as I mentioned, I’d written this novel that I finally had to let go of. I’d reached this place with my work that I’d call an impasse. I couldn’t see not doing it, but I really didn’t know why I was doing it anymore, other than because I had to. I was facing that age old artist-in-a-capitalist’s-world dilemma: who am I doing this for? Is it worthwhile if there isn’t going to be an financial gain? Would I be better off putting my energies somewhere else, say, a shop of some sort, or teaching seventh grade English? Having my first child kind of forced all these questions to a halt. There was only one thing to do: care for her. And then came the second one, before the first was out of diapers, and time for me, as I’ve alluded to, was stripped bare of all frivolities. If I was going to write, it was damn well going to mean something. To me. And it did. I bought a large hardbound journal, one of those black over-sized sketch books. I’ve written in the smaller version of those for years, keeping a journal. But this time I bought the bigger one and thought I’d better go into this surreal landscape of motherhood and really take a look around, try to record a little of the scenery, the images, the ideas, the absolute ardor and the grueling loneliness. At the end of about 18 months, I had over sixty poems and I determined to collect them, at least some of them, for not all of them held together, or were at the same level of completeness. Honestly, reading over those poems, editing them, making them say precisely what I wanted to say, the time spent doing that, and the brevity of each moment I chose to write about, all of that has made me a better writer. Better poet and better prose writer. Kids have made me a better writer. Time is not something I dink around with anymore. It either matters to me, or I don’t pursue it.

That suggests that my earlier work didn’t matter to me, which isn’t entirely true. But I think if you’ve got the time to write and you are still wondering why you’re writing what you’re writing, you’ve got problems. Having said that, I must also admit that I agree with Norman Mailer when he says (I’m paraphrasing), in The Spooky Art, you have to write the novel that gets you in your chair. Even if you know it’s a bad novel, you must write it if it gets you writing.

There is value in all these horribly difficult lessons; years spent on the wrong project; turning inward and shutting out the world to spend time with your babies; and shutting even them out to write it all down.

Purchase Christy Stillwell's book online >



Amnesia

What happened with your sister
will certainly happen to us—a
steady, slow erasure of this

entire year. You watch as I cross the room,
pulling back my hair and opening
the curtain. My heart breaks

as I bend to kiss you; your mouth
opens wide, your hands tangled in my hair.
It can’t be! Don’t go!

Time is a wretched spoiler,
Fingers around my throat even as
I laugh, touching your hair,

your skin like the oldest sheets.
I feel it slipping through my fingers,
This stuff of happiness, the

raw taste of joy,
weightless ooze of delight.
It runs through me, draining like

the last of life’s blood, settling finally
in some cortex that probably has a name.
I will lose this.

You will be lost to me. The
little O of your mouth
the gentleness of your first voice

these tears falling
on the back of my hand.


Poem courtesy of Finishing Line Press and the author. All rights reserved.


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