“[She] Made Us All Feel Like Poets,” – Interview with Laura Brown

You probably know that it was Mother’s Day last Sunday. What you might not have known, is that for several weeks my new pal Laura Brown’s book was circulating the blogosphere because it happens to be the perfect thing to give your mama on Mother’s Day.  

Here’s the lovely catch, though: Laura wrote the book so that the child who gives the book, writes their own stories.  So Laura offers memories of her mother which will prompt the reader to remember his or her own memories and write them down. 

Since being in graduate school, I’ve become interested in how stories come about, so I asked Laura if I could ask a few questions about Everything That Makes You Mom: A Bouquet of Memories, and she generously took the time to tell me about how this all started.  

1. How did the idea for the book come about?

I wrote an essay about my mother, a mosaic of fifty sentences. It found its way to an editor who liked it a lot. So did the other folks at the publishing house. There’s something about it that implicitly invites people to craft their own sentence-length memories. “It made us all feel like poets,” she told me. So we started talking about a book that would enable people to do that.

2. I’m always interested in a writer’s process, and I’d like to know how long the book took to write, did the book start out as something different, did you have to walk away from it for awhile, etc.

This book is very unusual in how quickly it came into being. It was about eight months from the day I met my editor to the night I held a copy of the book in my hands. It takes longer to gestate a baby than it did to conceive and deliver this book, which is very unusual.

I didn’t have time to walk away from it. It was a little less than eight weeks from the day the contract was signed to the day I turned in the manuscript, and there were two weekends of travel in that time and some smaller deadlines to meet. I worked in the mornings and evenings and weekends, around my day job. I remember being pretty focused and able to resist the usual distractions, because of the time pressure. It’s possible I had help. Certainly I had the absorption that comes when we are immersed in a project — in the zone, it’s sometimes called.

It actually took longer for me to write the essay (which later found a home in the Iowa Review, and which will was republished on Slate on May 9) than it did to write the book. Readers, I highly recommend you read Laura’s essay (link above). It is gorgeous, and also, if you’re like me, it will inspire you to try your hand at structuring an essay the way Laura did here. 

3. The “you” in the title – can you comment on the decision to use that word, instead of say, Everything That Made My Mom, Mom?

I didn’t know this, but publishers are usually the ones to write book titles. Of the nine words in Everything That Makes You Mom: A Bouquet of Memories, I contributed only one word: bouquet. But the “You” is appropriate because, while it begins with memories of my mother, it ends with your mother becoming the main character, so to speak.

4. Along the same lines, you offer questions for children to reflect on in regards to their own mothers. I love that. How and why did you come up with that idea?  

I provide a snippet of memory about my mother, ask questions to open your memories, and you answer by writing in the book. I like to say that I provide the ferns and baby’s breath, but the person filling out the book provides the blooms in this bouquet. I would clarify, questions for grownup children. It takes a while to accumulate the memories called for, and called forth, in working through the book. But then I’ve read your Q&A with your daughters. I bet together they could fill some of this out for you right now. And I would absolutely love to read what Hadley and Harper would fill in for those answers. 

I’ve worked at a newspaper for nearly 18 years, and I’m good at asking questions. Inviting the reader to remember, and then write, is more hospitable, I think, less workbookish, than providing a memory of my own and then providing a written instruction on “go and do likewise.”

5. One thing you write, I believe it’s in your introduction, is “I see you.”  That sort of stopped me in my tracks because as a mother, I think it’s something that I yearn for – to be noticed.  And then you have these lovely anecdotes of your own mother that are palpable. Clearly, she was SEEN by you. Was this a deliberate decision as you wrote, or did you find this emerging as you revised?  (So many books about mothers are actually about the children, and yours doesn’t seem that way.)

There are all kinds of ways that moms feel invisible, I think. And ways that a mother’s work is quiet, unseen (not unlike an editor’s work). And we go through phases (aka teenagerhood) when we are studiedly indifferent to mom. I think the idea that this was a collective act of seeing — that part of the gift is letting Mom know “I do see you, I do know you, I was paying attention” — came as I was working on the chapters.

 6. In your introduction, you write about the power of telling stories and I wonder if you can talk a little about that.

I’d love to talk about that! If I asked, “What are your mom’s virtues?” you might draw a blank. But if I tell you about playing the trust game with my mom, falling backwards and letting her catch me, and then ask, “How has your mother demonstrated her trustworthiness?” you’ll probably think of several things.

We are all storytellers. Persistent memories are tiny stories. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote. In oral cultures, stories were how they transmitted and preserved their histories, their myths, their beliefs. A family is, among other things, an oral culture.

A story can make us laugh, make us cry, make us feel fear, give us hope … and we are all full of stories. It takes very little to write some of those down. There’s something about a very short story — a poem’s worth — that allows and invites people to fill the silence around it with their own stories.

I could go on …

7. The topic of motherhood seems, to me, overwhelming.  I mean, I can write little snippets of my own experience on my blog (which I do), but to write an entire book seems daunting.  Can you talk a little about this? 

Oh, goodness, it is overwhelming and daunting. I never thought about taking on the whole topic of motherhood. You know that saying about how some people can’t see the forest for the trees? I say that sometimes I can’t see the trees for the veins in an individual leaf. I focus very tightly on things sometimes. But write one leaf at a time and eventually you have a tree’s worth.

To connect that question to the book’s structure, I looked at the vignettes of memory I had written and then thought about how they might be grouped, about what categories of identity a mom has. That’s what led to the chapters — Mom in the Home, Mom in the World, Virtuous Mom, Playful Mom, Educational Mom, and Mom: The Final Exam. It’s not exhaustive. And your chapters might be different.

 I think a lot about why I write and at my worst, I think it’s because I’m navel gazing. But at my best, my hope is that I’m sharing something. Let me revise: I’m offering a story to share.  I think Laura’s book is the perfect opportunity for not just children who want to celebrate their mothers, but for people who are interested in writing and want to know the grace there is in sharing a story with someone. Thank you, Laura, for stopping by to tell us more about your book, but also for writing Everything That Makes You Mom: A Bouquet of Memories.