what's that Mommy Wound you got there
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For months I’ve been working on an essay that I think of as an exploration of, if not my own mommy wound, then an exploration of who mommies are exactly, who they were before becoming mommies, and then the long after. The name of this newsletter, Mommy’s El Camino, is a play on one of the identities I inhabit—”Mommy” or as my kid now texts me, “Mami”—and the dream I have of driving around in an El Camino like my dad had, one day, in this long after. The fact that I go through life with one person who thinks of me as “Mommy” is continually shocking to me, whether because of its mundanity or its profundity.
Thinking back to the first two or three years of my kid’s life, I remember a feeling of ultra-smoosh. Of feeling moosh-y, squishy, like all my previous edges had been dulled and then moistened with the constant drippings of toddler spit. A part of my life was over and another part had begun and in this ‘after’ I was molting, melting, sweating, morphing into another creature. This experience has made me—someone who has often been repelled by “Mommy blogs” and the labor/birth stories of strangers—want to think about the ways I had perceived all the different mothers I came into contact with in my early life. That is, once I became cognizant of them as people who had once had lives before they were ‘mothers’ and eventually, as people who were more than just the mothers I was faced with. As I continue writing my hybrid essay about these Mommies, it forces me to consider my own mommy wound, and the mommy wound I may be unconsciously creating in my own child.
When I came across Mommy Wound on Katie Brewer Ball’s instagram, of course the title intrigued me. I know Katie from a writing class I facilitated at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. I reached out to get a copy. What arrived was a compact riso book with writings on the mommy wound, featuring Jina Kim, Jayson Keery, Britt Rusert, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Franny Choi, Cassie Peterson, Lucas De Lima, Francis Lo, Amber Musser, and Lou Cornum. There is something provocative and multi-dimensional in this beautiful piece of art. I reached out to learn more. Katie Brewer Ball and Vick Quezada generously replied.
Mommy’s El Camino: How did you (all) conceive of the project? Did you and Vick open the project to submissions or did you have specific writers in mind? (which makes me curious about the conversations that occurred about what you had in mind--anything you want to share about the process?)
Vick: Well we were talking about my therapist… but no really, there were so many connections between parents, mothers, caretakers that we were trying to get at. We, in the more general sense, are all products of the people who raised us and who we wanted to raise us.
KBB: We had many iterations of the project before this one came together, versions about invasive plants, and trying to figure out how visual art and poetry or creative non-fiction go together. And then we talked about the book Vick was reading, Mother Hunger.
V: When we started dating in 2019 is when I started thinking more about attachment theory. (KBB and I are exes and now ride-or-dies.) Relationships have been the thing that always brings me to my knees, it wasn’t really the alcohol (10 years sober), but it was a relationship. There are things about dating that make me feel out of control. When I am at my lowest emotional point, I viscerally feel like dying. Over the last 10 years I’ve done a lot of healing. That is when I started thinking about relational compatibility, attachment styles, and all the other things that have formed the way I am in relationships. Although it also felt heavily gender essentialist and surface at times, I deeply resonated with this book Mother Hunger.
And it turned out to be a really important book for me. Whenever my one month old baby starts crying I just tell myself that they are scared and want to feel safe. And the book brought me back thinking about my relationship with my mother. We humans are such basic bitches, we tend to mimic the dynamics we had/have with our caregivers. Like when I date I’m often looking for a mother and some of my dates have similar characteristics to my mother. In spite of this, I feel like I am outgrowing some of these dynamics.
K: I was having daddy issues at the time. I remember sitting in my yard last summer as we were gearing up for the first part of this mommy wound project, an overnight trip to nyc. I was on the phone with my therapist and she asked me something like, “what do you want from a daddy,” or like, “is this about your actual father?” and I cringed and groaned like a sullen teen because of course that’s the last thing I wanted to actually talk about. I was working something out with a friend that felt very paternal or erotic, it was unclear. And right around the same time I started to really have more textured and nuanced feelings toward my own father who lived in California for a big chunk of my young adulthood on the east coast. Like i have never really let myself be very angry with him. Growing up, I was always too worried that if i were angry with him he wouldn't ever come back. So, when Vick started talking about Mother Hunger, I was like, well we’re queer right? And in a queer context maybe mommy issues are a little more nuanced, not interchangeable with daddy issues exactly, but with mamas and babas and niblings and guncles, maybe mother is a capacious-enough category to hold it all.
Vick and I also had had a pretty intimate relationship or triangulation with my own mother. We had only been dating for 6 months when the pandemic hit and suddenly we were living together in a totally new Airbnb style house in western mass and with my mother. It was extra-ordinary, but it was wild. And there is a ton to say about that period, but we thought a lot about mommy triangulation and how in those like 8-or-so weeks of us all living together Vick quickly got slotted into the role of my brother. And they developed a sweet and close and not uncomplicated relationship with my mom. It was a moment. So when Vick playfully turned mother hunger into mommy wound, it felt pretty right for us. My mom even helped copy edit the final version and we thanked her in it, ha.
V: This book is about all these writers coming together and talking about heartbreak - from their mothers/caretakers being the first to break, having a baby and becoming a mommy/daddy, to failures of care infrastructure, to being disappointed by the isolation of growing into a parent, to failed queer mentorship.
K: We wanted to reach out to writers we both knew in our community. And basically anyone we thought of could write under the topic of mommy wound because most of our friends have grown up, somehow.
MEC: How did you get connected to Shandaken Projects? Did you start the project with risograph in mind?
K: Another collaborator, Svetlana Kitto, and I had hosted events as part of our Adult Contemporary reading series at Shandaken Project’s Storm King residency. Nicholas Wiest, the director of Shandaken Projects, has been a huge supporter of Adult Contemporary over the years. He had reached out to us to see tell us about the new printshop wing of Shandaken Projects and how they had gotten ahold of the risograph printer and were starting a print studio project at their Governor’s Island location. Svetlana was busy with a number of other editorial projects, so she gave me her blessing and I asked Vick if they wanted to collaborate with me on something. Vick and I had always talked about working together in a more official capacity, but we never had. I mean I guess cohabitating during high early covid really gave us some key skills for working through things. So I reached out to them and said something really vague, like do you want to make a riso book with me? And they said yes. So we took a trip down to Governors Island last summer, in 2023, and met up with Nick and a class he was teaching to local nyc high school students and he gave us quick intro to risograph printing. Learning what the risograph was capable of and developing a specific project that pulled from both of our practices was definitely a process of trial and error.
V: First, we started taking pics of plants. We were looking at streets where the plants are still thriving in between the cracks and on top of cars. The plants will eventually take over. So we were talking about healing and thinking about plants. But it took us a process to move through all these spaces and the project didn’t really cohere until January at Shandaken’s relocated print shop in Catskill, New York. Although the collection focuses on caregiver grief, healing and thriving are also important themes.
K: And the actual printing process was a lot of trial and error. The whole process of learning how to use a risograph was super involved— figuring what images would work best, how many colors we could use and in what combination, how to collate the images to print well together. And through it all we definitely had to work together and figure out how our strengths. And we had our favorite upstate herbalist, Lauren Giambrone, come in at the last minute to pep talk us and help when we felt totally flooded in pages and how to orient them and make them print perfectly in purple on top of the green run.
MEC: Can/will the project continue? I can envision an ongoingness/endlessness to this project and wonder what might next be in store, if anything!
V: Maybe we do another one with different people. Or maybe we write something more substantial, like a more academic piece… we could even do something like a photography book with poems and try to reach into each others genres a bit and its something we could collaborate on easily. Like photography poem book. We do want to keep collaborating.
K: It hadn’t even occurred to me that we could do another edition, but I kinda love that suggestion. Vick has a piece that is about to open at Socrates Sculpture Park, Juan Deere, where they are currently an artist fellow. And I am working on some writing about my grandpa who was a permafrost scientist on the North Slope of Alaska in the 1950’s. So we have some shared interests in land, legacy, and stewardship—especially as they are shaped by ongoing settler colonial violences.
You can buy Mommy Wound here or in-person at Win Win in Easthampton, Ma. All proceeds from the book go to Palestine Legal.