Postpartum Production

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“She said, ‘I don't think a hero can be a mother. I don't think a mother can be a hero.’ And I felt this terrible irritation and frustration that made me realize I want mothers to be heroes. I want them to be heroes, not in the slaying-the-dragon sense, but I just want them to be the heroes of their own stories.” ~ Julie Phillips

Join Kaitlin as she chats with Julie Phillips, an American biographer & book critic, and the author of The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem, which feels like the perfect topic to launch our second season. Julie's previous book, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, received several honors including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hugo and Locus Awards, and the Washington State book award. She currently lives in Amsterdam with her partner and their two children.

Kaitlin and Julie spoke about:

• Julie’s new book, The Baby on the Fire Escape.
• How we think about motherhood and intellectualism together, and also how we think about motherhood as an intellectual concept.
• What it means to Julie to be sitting at the intersection now of mothering older children and writing biographies of mother writers.
• The concept of maintenance work in relation to the political activism of women and caregivers.

More about Julie Phillips:

Website:https://www.julie-phillips.com/

Instagram: @julievanphillips

Facebook:@JuliePhillips

Order your copy of Julie’s latest book here:  The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

For regular updates:

Visit our website: postpartumproduction.com

Follow us on Instagram:@postpartumproductionpodcast

Subscribe to our podcast newsletter on Substack: https://postpartumproduction.substack.com

“I feel like I have the most internal struggle when I recognize that my work doesn't have value in a traditional sense and that my creative work and the work I do as a mother is not valued in this system. And trying to remind myself of the values of that, trying to say, Okay, I'm going to spend time today working on this literary fiction that I know will not pay our bills. Does it matter?” 

~ Kaitlin Solimine

I don't know, listeners. Does it matter? I'm really curious to hear how you engage with this struggle and how you define seasons. 

You can either shoot us an email at [email protected] or write us a note on our Instagram page.

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In season 2 of the Postpartum Production podcast, we will be taking a little bit of a bird’s-eye view - sort of a step back - to examine some of the bigger picture questions that we dug into in the first season.

So while there will be sprinklings of practitioners, writers, poets, artists, etc. who will join us primarily because they have a work that is coming out soon and it makes sense to talk to them while they're engaging with an audience more deeply at this particular time, we are really stepping back and talking to a range of what we see as experts on specific subject matters to examine this particular moment, and to just have a slightly different angle on things for a little bit. 

This mini-episode is a teaser to the season and includes a little bit of a preview of recordings we've already done to hopefully give you a sense for what's to come.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating. This will help us reach more listeners like you who are navigating the joys and pitfalls of artistic and parenting identities.

For regular updates:

Visit our website: postpartumproduction.com

Follow us on Instagram:@postpartumproductionpodcast

Subscribe to our podcast newsletter on Substack: https://postpartumproduction.substack.com

"What an immense privilege it is to be able to put words on paper."~ Annabelle Kim

This episode is a special dedication to a dear writer-mother-friend, Annabelle Kim, who passed away in September of 2021 after a battle with stage 4 cancer.

Annabelle, a mother of four, was a mechanical engineer, an inventor, and a novelist. She was the author of Tiger Pelt, published by Leaf Land Press, a small independent publisher. The novel tracks two individuals' intertwined lives through the Japanese occupation of Korea, World War II and the Korean War, and it was based in part on her father's life.

Join Kaitlin as she shares a few pieces from Annabelle's writing that speak to what it means to be a woman and a writer and a caregiver who's navigating all of that and doing so with a refreshing and inspiring perspective.

Related Resources: 

• Tiger Pelt, Annabelle Kim: https://www.amazon.com/Tiger-Pelt-Annabelle-Kim/dp/0997609001
• Returning to Writing After a Stage Four Cancer Diagnosis, Annabelle Kim | Lit Hub:https://lithub.com/returning-to-writing-after-a-stage-four-cancer-diagnosis/
• Imagining the Unimaginable Truth (Q&A with Annabelle Kim) by Sonya Chung | Bloom: https://bloomsite.wordpress.com/2017/12/13/imagining-the-unimaginable-truth-qa-with-annabelle-kim/

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating. This will help us reach more listeners like you who are navigating the joys and pitfalls of artistic and parenting identities.

For regular updates:

• Visit our website: postpartumproduction.com
• Follow us on Instagram: @postpartumproductionpodcast
• Subscribe to our podcast newsletter on Substack: https://postpartumproduction.substack.com

**This episode is sponsored by Full Spectrum Features, a nonprofit social justice organization that uses film to inspire dialogue and create impact. They’re a Chicago-based 501(c)(3) committed to driving equity in the independent film industry by producing, exhibiting, and supporting the work of women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ filmmakers.

You can find out more about Full Spectrum Features and their support of artist caregivers in this episode and on their website at fullspectrumfeatures.com as well as their Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.**

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We’re excited to share with you this season finale compilation episode that draws together the voices and insights from this season. Together, we've examined how we wrestle with our conceptions of motherhood, the constraints of patriarchal structures on caregiving and art, and ways in which the fractured inevitability of early motherhood could perhaps provide new frameworks for creative production that work against existing norms and provide wholly new opportunities for expression, empowerment, and community.

Timestamps:

11:51 - Namrata Poddar, EP 13

12:32 - Sara Petersen, EP 08

13:09 - Heather Powell, EP 07

14:08 - Nancy Reddy, EP 12

15:02 - Amanda Montei, EP 15

15:27 - Namrata Poddar

15:45 - Nora Fiffer, EP 11

16:57 - Sarah Chaves, EP 01

18:18 - Nora Fiffer

20:30 - Emily Pérez, EP 12

21:27 - MM De Voe, EP 09

22:04 - Dani Rowe, EP 06

22:34 - Vanessa Hua, EP 05

23:17 - Jackie Leonard, EP 02

23:58 - Sarah Chaves

24:57 - Vanessa Hua

26:40 - Amanda Montei, EP 15

26:57 - Minna Dubin, EP 15

27:16 - Cindy DiTiberio, EP 15

27:47 - Heather Powell

28:30 - Sara Petersen 

29:38 - Emily Midorikawa, EP 14

29:51 - Erika Lee Sears, EP 10

30:18 - Katherine Duclos, EP 03

31:59 - Emily Midorikawa

33:09 - K. Lorraine Graham, EP 04

Visit our website at www.postpartumproduction.com for the complete show notes.

This episode is a quick update from Kaitlin in which she checks in with you, dear listener, and shares what’s on her mind and what creative and early postpartum challenges she’s grappling with. If you’re a regular reader of our Substack newsletter, you’ll be familiar with her “Recent Musings” section; this is an audio version of the same. And if you have no idea what we’re talking about, no need to feel left out. Go on and subscribe to the newsletter right now by following this link.

Kaitlin also shares a sneak preview of season 2; what to expect, whom to expect, and what will make Season 2 different from Season 1.

This is a short and sweet one - only 5 minutes of your time.

PS: We want to be mindful of your time and interest, so your feedback will be very valuable to us. Let us know your thoughts through email, [email protected]

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating. This will help us reach more listeners like you who are navigating the joys and pitfalls of artistic and parenting identities.

For regular updates:

Visit our website: postpartumproduction.com

Follow us on Instagram: @postpartumproductionpodcast

Subscribe to our podcast newsletter on Substack:https://postpartumproduction.substack.com

A wonderful resource that's come up on the podcast is the Artist Residency in Motherhood organization, which artist and mother, Lenka Clayton started in 2012. Kaitlin didn't know much about the organization until last year(2021) when a fellow writer and mother, Amanda Montei mentioned it in a class of hers Kaitlin was taking, and then alerted the class of a Facebook group that was spawned out of this residency.

Kaitlin joined the group and was linked up with a Bay Area group of caregiver artists whose work runs in and around topics of motherhood and art in the modern era. 

In an attempt to capture some of the zeitgest of one of their most recent residency gatherings, Kaitlin set up a recording space so each participant could weigh in on their experiences and thoughts of the collective residency in real-time.

Amanda Montei, Cindy DiTiberio, Patti Maciesz and Minna Dubin were the participants; and this episode is the result of these collective voices, which feels like a dreamscape of the artist-mother mind of what residencies afford those of us privileged enough to build the time and space into our lives, to devote ourselves solely to our artistic and creative pursuit.

Find out more about them in the show notes here.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating. This will help us reach more listeners like you who are navigating the joys and pitfalls of artistic and parenting identities.

For regular updates:

Visit our website: postpartumproduction.com

Follow us on Instagram: @postpartumproductionpodcast

Subscribe to our podcast newsletter on Substack:https://postpartumproduction.substack.com

“There's a tendency when talking about narratives of female empowerment to want historical figures to be wholly good or wholly villainous. And I think there's not always enough opportunity to look at people [for whom] maybe it's a bit more of a grey area, perhaps— they're complicated. They did some things that we could admire and maybe some are not so admirable. To me, that wasn't really an issue. They were still fascinating figures.” ~ Emily Midorikawa

Emily Midorikawa is the author of Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voicepublished by Counterpoint Press. Emily is also the co-author of a Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontё, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf written with Emma Claire Sweeney and published in 2017.

Emily's the winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. Her journalism has appeared in the Paris Review, TIME, The Times (of London), and the Washington Post. She teaches in the writing program at New York University London.

Emily and Kaitlin actually have been connected virtually for almost a decade, and Kaitlin followed her writing career with interest.

Kaitlin and Emily spoke at length about:

• The women Emily covered in her book;
• Some theories she has about how their circumstances enabled them to find platforms for expression;
• Emily’s process of creating Out of the Shadows while pregnant with both children. 

This conversation was edited down a bit, but you can hear the whole episode by following this link.

Find out more about Emily:

Website: https://emilymidorikawa.com/

Instagram: @midorikawaemily

Twitter: @EmilyMidorikawa

Check out her book: Out Of the Shadows

Related Resources:

Out of the Shadows: https://bookshop.org/a/86159/9781640095298

Secret Sisterhood: https://bookshop.org/a/86159/9781328532381

An article about the Fox Sisters: the-fox-sisters-and-the-rap-on-spiritualism-99663697

Emma Hardinge Britten: http://www.ehbritten.org/

Susan B. Anthony: susan-b-anthony

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating. This will help us reach more listeners like you who are navigating the joys and pitfalls of artistic and parenting identities.

For regular updates:

Visit our website: postpartumproduction.com

Follow us on Instagram: @postpartumproductionpodcast

Subscribe to our podcast newsletter on Substack:https://postpartumproduction.substack.com

“I'm still trying to make sense of a culture of caregiving that ‘good mothers’ are good caregivers…A ‘good mother’ is someone who doesn't question or resist caregiving, whereas men are never socialized into that narrative.”Namrata Poddar

Namrata Poddar writes fiction and non-fiction, is an editor for Kweli journal and teaches literature and writing at UCLA. Her work has appeared in several publications including Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Longreads, The Kenyon Review, and The Best Asian Short Stories. Her debut novel, Border Less, was a finalist for Feminist Press’s Louise Meriwether Prize, and is longlisted for The Center of Fiction First Novel Prize.

Namrata joined Kaitlin in this episode to talk about:

• Her book, Border Less - a novel about the migratory journal of Dia Mittal,an airline call center agent in Mumbai who is searching for a better life.
• Becoming a Mother-Writer: Notes on Reconciling the Personal, the Professional, and the Political - an essay she wrote for Poets & Writers.
• How she experiences her mothering identity as a feminist living in a patriarchal society.

More about Namrata Poddar:

Website:http://www.namratapoddar.com/

Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/writerpoddar/

Related Resources:

• Find out more about Border Less -https://bookshop.org/a/86159/9781736176788
• Namrata’s essay, Becoming a Mother-Writer | Poets & Writers: https://www.pw.org/content/becoming_a_motherwriter_notes_on_reconciling_the_personal_the_professional_and_the_political
• Camille T. Dungy’s 2017 nonfiction book, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History - https://bookshop.org/a/86159/9780393356083
• Angela Garbes new book, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change - https://bookshop.org/a/86159/9780062937360
• Sylvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: https://bookshop.org/a/86159/9781629637976

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating. This will help us reach more listeners like you who are navigating the joys and pitfalls of artistic and parenting identities.

For regular updates:

Visit our website: postpartumproduction.com

Follow us on Instagram: @postpartumproductionpodcast

Subscribe to our podcast newsletter on Substack: https://postpartumproduction.substack.com

"I think of all the arts, poetry is a really good one to pair with motherhood, because you can do something that feels complete in the fractured time you have, and then you can revise it in fractured time." ~ Emily Pérez

Have you ever been at a conference, totally energized and excited, but you leave and have lost all that momentum?

Thankfully, this was not the experience for poets Nancy Reddy and Emily Pérez. They shared in a panel conversation at a writing conference, then took all of the energy and support they received and channeled it into being co-editors of a new and inspiring collection of writing in and around motherhood called “The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood.”

“It seemed important at that point to present views on motherhood that would be like all three of those things - difficulty, ambivalence, and joy - because I think both of us, at that point in our writing and mothering journey, didn't feel like we saw the real complexity of mothering and trying to write while mothering represented in the work that we saw, or maybe we did see that work and we wanted to find a way to gather it together and to talk about it.” ~ Nancy Reddy

Emily is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize; House of Sugar, House of Stone; and two chapbooks. She teaches high school in Denver, where she lives with her family.

Nancy has authored Pocket Universe and Double Jinx, among others, alongside her day job teaching writing at Stockton University.

Nancy and Emily joined Kaitlin on the podcast to chat about The Long Devotion, the inspiration behind it, and the many amazing writers that generously contributed to it. They also spoke about poetry and how it intersects with and enriches motherhood.

Visit our website at postpartumproduction.com for the complete show notes.

More about Nancy and Emily:

Nancy’s website: http://www.nancyreddy.com/

Nancy’s Instagram: @nancy.o.reddy

Emily’s website: www.emilyperez.org

Emily’s Instagram: @theemperez

Order your copy of their book here: The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating. This will help us reach more listeners like you who are navigating the joys and pitfalls of artistic and parenting identities.

For regular updates:

Visit our website: postpartumproduction.com

Follow us on Instagram: @postpartumproductionpodcast

Subscribe to our podcast newsletter on Substack:https://postpartumproduction.substack.com

“When I became a mother and the work deepened and changed, part of that was because if you're gonna spend the time on a project, it better be worth it. It better be important.”

~ Nora Fiffer

Nora Fiffer is a writer, director, actor, and producer based in Chicago and New Hampshire. In New Hampshire, Nora co-founded Firelight Theater Workshop, dedicated to creating innovative theater experiences. Nora is currently working on her debut feature film, Another Happy Day, planned to release in 2023.

In this episode, Kaitlin and Nora discussed how she has navigated postpartum and her relationship to motherhood, acting, filmmaking, money making, and her artistic practice. In addition, they explored how Nora’s postpartum experiences influenced the creation of her upcoming film, Another Happy Day (currently in production).

They also talked about:

• Nora’s life before children, and how she navigated her transition into motherhood, given all she had to put on hold.
• How Nora came to dig in so specifically on the postpartum experience and why it was so compelling to her in her creative journey.
• Nora’s upcoming film, Another Happy Day and the inspiration behind it.
• How our capitalist culture shapes the way that we view productivity, and how much of what we deem truly productive to us as caregivers goes unseen.

More about Nora:

Website:http://www.norafiffer.com/

Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/norafiffer/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nora.fiffer

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating. This will help us reach more listeners like you who are navigating the joys and pitfalls of artistic and parenting identities.

For regular updates:

Visit our website: postpartumproduction.com

Follow us on Instagram: @postpartumproductionpodcast

Subscribe to our podcast newsletter on Substack: https://postpartumproduction.substack.com