Editorial Assistant Laura Broadbent Interviews Nancy Huggett whose story "I am a good mother. I am a bad mother. I am no mother at all." won our 2024 Creative Nonfiction Contest and was published in Issue 301 (Autumn 2024)
Laura Broadbent: On the liberating constraint of genre: What constraints does creative nonfiction afford you to speak in ways you otherwise couldn’t?
Nancy Huggett: I don’t think of genre as a constraint. I do think of different forms as offering shapes for a story or a feeling or an insight or a series of questions. I often play with those different forms (lyric, hermit crab, flash, triptych, palimpsest, prose poem, visual poem, sonnet, or abecedarian etc.….) to see which one opens up ways of learning something new or answering a question I didn’t know I had. It is not so much about speaking in ways I otherwise couldn’t, but about forms offering ways to explore and answer a burning question or a random series of connected thoughts that have been simmering for a while under the detritus of daily living.
LB: How interesting! I've always thought of genre as a certain parameter from within which the artist divines what form space and time are going to take. I particularly love the idea of playing with forms like the hermit crab along with the lyric--you've just widened my horizons! Now I want to write an oak leaf poem. Curious as to what visual forms inspired you for this piece: did you see it coming together beforehand and/or does the form reveal itself to you in process?
NH: For this piece, the form was not established beforehand. I rarely set the form, the form either emerges from the material, the writing of it I mean, i.e., emerges from the words that I am writing as I am writing them. OR I have a bank of ideas, often a word map around an idea with memories/research etc… (see attached, the first step AFTER the gathering of ideas over years, and how I began writing), and I see what form they might want to take. OR I have an idea bank and think, well, let’s try a diptych, what might work for a diptych? Or a speculative nonfiction flash, what story here can I push the boundaries on? And most of it emerges from play or necessity (I need to write about this, it has been hanging around in the back of my head for a long time now and is asking to be written).
LB: In your Fiddlehead piece, there’s a relation between time and the “mothers” dividing the text—“good mother,” “bad mother,” “mother mother,” all leading to the refusal of “no,” then the affirmation of [I am a mother] “after all.” Following each ‘title’ is a disjointed memory of what ‘mother’ was to you, what daughter was. The structure reminded me of Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, where large spans of time—with events unspeakable—pass in parentheses. Could you talk more on this chronological relation and structural choice?
NH: First, delight & embarrassment. Anything I’m writing reminding anyone of Virginia Woolf. Hope it wasn’t a bad imitation. But also, thank you for that, for reminding me of Virginia Wolf and prompting me to go back and read her again. I loved all her writing when I was just a young thing in my 20s. But, on with the question…. The piece started as: I am a good mother. I am a bad mother. I am no mother at all. I wanted to explore the multiplicity and complexity of motherhood, how good, bad, indifferent can exist together, at the same time, in the same person. I used the “good, bad, no” refrain to separate and link each section until someone mentioned that it felt like a mosquito buzzing around and perhaps I could keep the subtitles/breaks but play with the words. Break them up a bit. This worked so well for the piece, as there is a bit of a shattering and a putting back together. (Also, shout out to writer friends and feedback & accountability partners.)
I also knew with this piece that I needed to present the fragments in chronological order, because of the key crisis—where my daughter has brain surgery and a stroke and mothering takes on a whole different set of requirements. Out of chronological order would confuse the reader and I am careful not to have readers conflate Down syndrome with the challenges related to the stroke. But I also knew I did not want it as a straight narrative. I wanted to drop the reader into each section as deeply as I could and then pull them out again, give them a chance to breathe. So, each section/vignette had to be relatively short, like a series of core samples of a life.
I also didn’t want to have to explain everything, go into a long intellectual parsing of what it is to be a mother/parent/carer. But I wanted the reader, any reader who is a mother or father or carer of any kind, to find a small piece of themselves here, a small dark piece, and to feel like they could own that, even if they couldn’t speak it out loud themselves. That my speaking/writing it would allow them to see themselves and still love themselves for being imperfect. This is the gift and beauty that poets and writers offer us—the gift of recognition and then a sense of not being alone in the wasteland of our own minds. Also, how to pull from that wasteland a small piece of light or a flame or an ember. How diving down into the depths of the places we don’t want to go might give us a way to inhabit our lives with more honesty, love, and gratitude.
LB: It’s this aspect that’s done so particularly well in your piece, when you said above, “I also didn’t want to have to explain everything, go into a long intellectual parsing of what it is to be a mother/parent/carer. But I wanted the reader, any reader who is a mother or father or carer of any kind, to find a small piece of themselves here, a small dark piece, and to feel like they could own that, even if they couldn’t speak it out loud themselves.” Without explaining itself, your writing enters the heart of so many lived experiences and forges their unfathomable wildness into an impossible cohesion, so very like life. To me this is an artistic sleight of hand, to have the reader inhabit, be shaken up by your writing to such a degree that their own, often invisible labours feel seen. For newer writers, I’m curious if you have any advice or methods you use that wards off the tendency toward the expository? Or to say more plainly, how to ensure your work is showing, not telling? It is a skillset that works with such subtlety.
NH: Well, I’ve never done expository well, I’m not a natural storyteller, although I love to read stories! I often get the order mixed up and am really bad at telling jokes and get the timing all wrong. Telling a story kind of bores me. This happened, then this happened, then this happened. So what? What does it mean? Also, I have, by this point, told the story of our daughter’s stroke so often to people, it becomes this meaningless sequence of awful events that make people feel sorry for you. They get that “poor you” and “I can’t imagine” (which they can’t) look on their faces. But I want them, in my writing, to imagine. And I can only get them to imagine by image and metaphor and the senses, and so that is where I go. But not in one long narrative, because that would drown them. I don’t want to drown them, they are trusting me to keep them safe, and that is what I try to do. That is the unwritten contract between us. Or what I work with when I am revising.
In terms of developing the capacity to “show not tell” (although tell has its own delightful and important place), it is about playfulness and discipline in playing with and learning a craft. Word banks are my friend (i.e., how many ways can you describe the hm sound? Or how many creatures/things hum; OR how many verbs, nouns, adverbs, etc... are there for fracture?), as is the thesaurus (thank you poet friends!—I have the Random House Word Menu, the Discriptionary by Marc McCutcheon, The Thesaurus of the Senses, etc…), and certain exercises that mentors have taught me (I don’t have an MFA and only started writing again over the last 5 years). After a class with Ellen Bass, I spent 2 months writing metaphors every morning as my warmup writing exercise. I do a bit of freefall, take a sentence, and then just write a long list of metaphors (for example, she fell… and then a whole page of metaphors: she fell like a b—bad, good, indifferent, it didn’t matter. It was just an exercise, but very generative and freed up my thinking and very useful later when trying to come up with a metaphor or simile in piece that might bring home the feeling in a unique but true way. I knew I didn’t have to find the right metaphor, I just had to write a whole bunch and the right one would appear.
There are two other exercises (one new to me) that I use right now. One is from Lynda Barry’s book (highly recommended! Syllabus, p. 80 and also available as a led exercise on YouTube. It’s called the X page and it basically leads you back into a situation and your job is to observe in detail: what’s in front of you, what’s behind you, what is above you, what does it smell like etc... etc... etc.. (set questions). You focus and randomly write these down on a page with an X on it, then after a set time, turn the page over and write the image up, staying in the present tense and first person, for 8 minutes.
The other was taught in a class I took with Katrina Vandenberg (through Orion), from an article by Mary Carroll Moore about writing into emotional gateways. A 6-step process based on Robert Olen Butler’s work and mishmash-passed along in various classes by various writers. The exercise focuses on remembering smells and sounds—because the processing centres for these senses in the brain are very near the places we process emotions—and on body memory. Basically, it is a 6-step process where you write an event or scene using the sense of sound ... and then dive down into sense of smell, and are prompted by various questions.
I use these exercises to dive into the sensations related to what I am telling. I want the reader to feel with me, not just to watch from afar (although that has its place too).
Perhaps, also being a poet, I am less of a teller than a dunker. But also, I think how I write (in snippets, diving into experiences) is a product of the life of a caregiver, in that I am always pulled away from what I am doing to do something else that someone needs. So, I don’t have the time to tell a long story, I only have time to dunk you into bits of the story. And so, I have to dunk you deep, so you’ll come with me to the next part. And I have to give you enough time to breathe in between.
LB: You write, “All this letting go exhausts a body.” I’m curious—if the voice of the piece could answer, does she know if there’s ever an end to the letting go? What about recovering from the exhaustion?
NH: The voice of the piece, or what Sharon Olds calls “the paper ‘I’” knows that there is never an end to the letting go. Until, of course, the final letting go, which is death. There are moments of having let go, but letting go is something she leans into daily, it is her Sisyphean task because she can’t help clawing it back, that need to control, to make things right. Also, there are layers and layers of letting go. Let go, peel back one layer and there is another one underneath. Let go of trying to cure an incurable situation, and there is a moment of insight, freedom, and breath, and then that clarity reveals another layer to be peeled back. Sometimes the work is joyous, sometimes a slog. Always a surprise if you are willing to keep going. Always an outbreath.
As to recovering from exhaustion, I am a strong proponent of community care and not such a fan of self-care (or the way it is often talked about or prescribed). From my own personal experience, recovering from trauma and exhaustion required an embodied approach that included (for me) restorative yoga led by a tender and compassionate teacher, and massage by an equally tender and knowledgeable body worker. Everything was stored in my body (that’s another essay), and I needed support from others to begin to process and work through all the tension and blockages to be able to continue to provide care for my daughter. I also think that community care—that includes friends, social support systems, creative and/or faith communities, music groups, meal trains etc..—is key. As well as long walks along the river! I believe that recovering from exhaustion requires the care of the world around you—people, air, the more than human being that inhabit this planet—and a lot of breathing! Creatively, I was only able to finish this piece and actually come to the final insight when I was away on a two-week retreat where I was fed, housed, and surrounded by beautiful mountains and woods and an incredibly supportive creative community of women (it was mostly women while I was at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts) thanks to a fully-funded fellowship for caregivers (The Barbara Crooker Caregiver Fellowship). Again, community care allows for recovery, but also creativity.
Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes, lives, and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Find her work in American Literary Review, Prairie Fire, Passages North, and The New Quarterly. She’s won some awards (like RBC PEN Canada’s 2024 New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.
You can find Nancy Huggett's story in Issue 301 Autumn 2024. Order the issue now:
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