Finding friendship between my poet-self and the prose writer I’ve become
Nancy Reddy joins Cave of the Heart and answers 5 questions about self-trust
Welcome to Cave of the Heart, an interview series where writers trust-fall into the depths of inner-knowing, creativity, and the craft of writing. Are you ready to get curious about the cultivation of self-trust, give a warm nod to our child selves, and celebrate inspiration in all forms? Come with us into the cave of the heart.
is the author of The Good Mother Myth, forthcoming with St. Martin’s in spring 2025. Her previous books include the poetry collections Pocket Universe and Double Jinx, a winner of the National Poetry Series. With Emily Pérez, she’s co-editor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. She writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful.Describe the setting where you’re answering these questions.
I’m sitting in my favorite spot in the house: a turquoise loveseat in our front room with a cozy blanket over my lap. Our dog, an enormous rescue greyhound, is kind of sniffling and sighing in his crate, and one of my kids is watching TV in the other room. It’s quiet and relatively peaceful after a long-ish, jumbly day of picking my kids up from a half day and driving them various places, attending a couple meetings, and trying to do some of my own writing in the gaps in between.
Childhood
Q: Given a choice, were you the child who would run barefoot outside or were you inside reading?
Inside reading, for sure! Some of my most vivid memories from childhood are of reading–not necessarily the specifics of the books, but of being totally immersed in the world of a book. I had both a babysitter and a teacher tell my mom at different points that they thought I read “too much.” (In the case of my teacher, that’s probably because I was reading under the desk instead of paying attention in math, but oh well!) I definitely got the message that I was a little weird–but I was pretty undeterred by those comments!
Influences
Q: How do you recognize when someone or something is a positive influence on your writing process and self-trust? What changes inside you and on the page?
A: That’s such a good question, because I think I’ve gotten better at identifying the bad or just unhelpful influences (the world is full of wonderful writers! But we can’t find our way by just following in someone else’s path!) and it’s still harder for me to identify the really right direction.
I can think of a few moments of clarity, though. My dissertation advisor was really good at asking the right question to get me to just keep going, and he was also always asking how my scholarly work was connected to my creative work. After the third or fourth time, I finally started to realize that it was! And my agent, Maggie, has been such an incredible resource in my writing life in the couple of years we’ve worked together. She was the one who saw what I was doing in my newsletter and encouraged me to bring that voice into my nonfiction book proposal, and, ultimately, the book. (I wrote a little about our work together on the proposal here.) Though I didn’t realize it, I’d assumed I had to draw a boundary between my poet-self and the prose writer I was trying to become–and she helped me realize I could bring the habits and architecture of poetry into my prose.
Creative Spark
Q: When you get an idea for a new essay or project, what does your first instinct look, sound or feel like?
A: Spark is a good word, and so is buzz, I think. For me, there’s a sense that there are tendrils–there’s a key concept or image or question, but there are also branching ideas stretching out from that center. I’m always more interested in projects that start with questions than with answers.
For my next book (coming out next year), The Good Mother Myth, I experienced an unfolding series of questions. At first, it was like I just came up from the early motherhood haze and looked around and felt like, “What just happened to me?” I spent a good chunk of that first summer working on the book, just writing and writing to record everything I had of those early years while it was still fresh. At that point, my question evolved to be something like: “If motherhood is supposed to be natural, why is this all so hard?” And that question sent me down some really wild research pathways, like trying to unpack the history of our ideas about “natural” motherhood (I mean, dying in childbirth is natural, but of course that’s not what the attachment parenting folks meant when they said “natural”) to trying to figure out what “animal mothering” can tell us about humans and nature.
In its finished form (it still feels so wild to think of the book as “finished”!), my book is trying to unpack what we think it means to be a “good mom” and where those ideas came from. (Hint: it’s basically never about what moms and babies and families actually need!)
Writing Process
Q: Were there any habits or beliefs that you had to let go of in order to more deeply trust your writing process?
That there’s a “right” way to do it, whether that “it” is related to process or publication. Self-judgment and fear of others’ judgment is so incredibly stifling to creativity.
There are important genre differences–I’ve had to learn to be more direct in some ways in prose, while in poetry I think you can get away with leaving a lot of mystery and being like, “Reader, you figure it out.” (I think of that as the kind of “jazz hands” ending to a poem. The editors I’ve worked with in prose have not been impressed with that move, and I’ve had to learn to spell out my thinking a little more and make connections more explicit than in a poem I would have left more open.)
But when I’m thinking about that kind of judgment and self-judgment, it’s really about the performance of writing and being a writer. Like, am I publishing fast enough and in the right places? Do I have a zippy takeaway to describe my project? Do the cool kids like me? All of that is so damaging to the actual work of writing, and it’s something I have to kind of continually, consciously put aside.
Since moving from poetry into prose, I’ve had to make peace with the parts of my writing process that are just a little chaotic, no matter how much I try to plan and organize in advance. There’s always a part where I think I’ll never be able to finish, and there’s always a part where I have to print out a whole draft and literally cut it up and tape it back together. I end up feeling a bit like a mad scientist, but I always get to the other side.
Resources
Q: What’s one surprising or unlikely resource that you turn to again and again to bolster your writing life?
I don’t know if this is surprising or unlikely, but walking and just being in the material world is really essential to my writing life. If I’m feeling stuck in a writing project, a walk will almost always unstick me. And I just get such pleasure out of really noticing the world around me. I saw the first daffodils of the year as I was dropping my kids off at school this morning, and I felt so grateful to be attuned to that change of season. I like to walk and just kind of mentally note the things I see–a neighbor’s dog, a squirrel jumping out of the dumpster, crocuses blooming, and think, in the spirit of Ross Gay, delight, delight, delight.
Join Nancy in the comments!
Nancy shares about shifting from poetic writing to prose and some of the differences in what readers expect. What experience do you have with crossing between genres of writing?
What is a moment of “delight, delight, delight” you’ve experienced recently?
"Self-judgment and fear of others’ judgment is so incredibly stifling to creativity." What truthful and beautiful words, Nancy. Ones that I needed today. Thank you for sharing so openly here. I cannot wait to read your book next year. And thank you, Amanda, for your questions. I love Cave of the Heart and The Editing Spectrum tremendously. Much gratitude. —Stacey
Oh, I am looking forward to reading Nancy's book!