Fresh Take: Kate Baer, HOW ABOUT NOW

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0:31Amy Wilson:Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Margaret. And this is Amy. Today, we're talking to Kate Baer. She is the three-time New York Times bestselling author of the poetry collections What Kind of Woman? I Hope This Finds You Well and And Yet. Her work has also been published in The New Yorker, Literary Hub, Huffington Post, and The New York Times. Kate is also the mother of four. Her latest collection is entitled How About Now. Welcome, Kate. Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor to be here. I love your poetry.

1:06It's deeply personal and deeply relatable. And How About Now is in that same vein, and it took shape during what you call a season of unexpected change in your life. So can you tell us a little bit about that time in your life? This book was actually delayed a year. I keep saying this, and I'll say it again today, that I've always been a really late bloomer to life in so many ways. But this time I was very green and very early to a midlife crisis before I even turned 40. Hey, congratulations. Thank you. I kind of got it out of the way. That's kind of the silver lining here. But I was 39, almost 39, when I went through a whole bunch of health issues, which really made me face my own mortality.

1:45And this book really was born from that, kind of influenced the shape of it. Although, you know, it explores a lot of different themes, but it's about midlife and specifically facing ourselves and our changing bodies and all the wonderful parts and all the difficult parts. I think that kind of sums it up.

2:02Amy Wilson:And you also talk about your transition in motherhood, which is very resonant to me. You talk about taking off the kind of young mommy hat. We talk sometimes about like the river is flowing and you're just on the boat and everything's moving fast and it's hard to notice the way things are changing. and you're like, oh, these kids will always need me so much. And then you find yourself with kids who you're like, where are they? I haven't seen them in a while. Talk a little bit about that transition for you and how it affected your writing. Yeah, I have a high schooler and a middle schooler and then two still in elementary school.

2:34And it's all new to me. It's such a different season of life. It's such a different way of communicating their different needs. Now, a lot of it is hands off, which is so different from the younger years where there's so much physicality. And now it's a lot of emotional burden, at least for me, and trying to hold myself back from stepping in.

2:54Amy Wilson:How's that going? Not amazing for me, the holding myself back. Not great. No, I'm finding it quite a challenge. I'm so glad I have other women in my life who are going through the same thing. Because just the other day I was saying to my husband, oh my gosh, none of our kids are taking baths anymore. And isn't this so sad? Like I was getting rid of all the bath toys and he was like, oh, I never thought about it. I'll never think about that. But I'm such a nostalgic person, or maybe it's just the role of a mother to kind of internalize that. You know, I'm not losing sleep over not taking someone out of the bath anymore, but there is a morning of these little things that, especially when there's four, I've been doing bath time for like 15 years.

3:33And so there are things like that that I've really had to let go of and try to embrace all the new things, like being able to watch The Office together or do grown-up stuff together and take trips and go on road trips where we can all hike at the same time and not have someone wait back at the house for nap time. So I'm really trying to look for those really great milestones instead of hitching my wagon to the past and being sad about bath time. Right. Farewell to each bath toy. Don't you think, though, that that's the privilege of being a writer or a poet, I imagine, is that you see these moments as meaningful?

4:06It's nice that you call it a privilege. I think, especially as like an Enneagram 4 and a poet, and extremely annoying to people. I think that my nostalgia and my, oh my God, bath time and the baby clothes and having to cry over this and write poetry, I think is kind of a drag, but that's nice that you are seeing this as a silver lining. I like that. That's nice. You make art out of it. You take your broken heart and make it into art. Exactly. Will you read us The Invisible Hand? It's one of your poems that really got me in the gut when I read it. Absolutely. The Invisible Hand. Time dripped from the faucet until late 30s.

4:40An invisible hand reached down and turned the tap to a steady stream. I couldn't begin to understand it, the sudden brevity of seasons. One minute cutting a watermelon, the next a Christmas tree. I stood at the sink and wondered how to spend my life. There was no answer. Instead, a voice from behind the curtain. We only have so many summers with our children. Like a good mother, I made plans.

5:04Amy Wilson:The line, one minute cutting a watermelon, the next a Christmas tree. I think I have to write on my whiteboard. It's just like this whole feeling of time speeding up. And let me tell you from the future, it only gets worse. I can't imagine that. It just goes faster and faster. My best friend said to me, she had a baby when we were 18. And she said, it's crazy. Every year is faster than the next. And because I was so far behind her having kids, I don't think I had that sensation in my 20s. But now I just feel it's happening right now. It's the holidays all of a sudden. It takes my breath away. And we often kind of make fun of the imaginary woman who comes out of the shadows at the grocery store to be like, enjoy every moment.

5:51Amy Wilson:It goes so fast. And you're like, leave me alone, you crazy hag. Yeah. But then you become the crazy hag. And I see people with little babies and I'm like, you better. And I hated that. I hated that pressure to enjoy every minute. And then all of a sudden I'm thinking about my child going to college. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait. I wasn't ready for this. I'm not ready to say goodbye yet. Yeah, I'm finding right now I pick my kids up from middle and high school. Every time I pick them up, we drive past their little elementary school with the hundreds of kids pouring out. And I'm doing the thing where I'm like, you guys, it was yesterday.

6:28Amy Wilson:You were there. Look, there's your little teacher. And they're just like, lady, please stop talking to me. And please don't let any of my friends see that I have a mother. That would be humiliating to me. I always kind of was joking, I feel like, about the sentimentality of it to Amy because my kids were a little younger and I was like, I'll never be that person. Guess what? I'm here. I'm soaking in it. It comes for you. Kate, there's a whole series of poems in this book. I want to try to describe them so the audience can picture them. And I guess you will do a better job than me. But they're forms, the kind of forms that we fill out all the time as women and as mothers.

7:03One is a gynecology intake form. One is a school emergency drill record. The kind of thing where you go through and you check what happened and you circle yes or no. And then you write poetry on top of them. You're putting the truth on top of these small boxes that can't really contain the truth. You're putting it there anyway. So tell us what gave you the idea to make these into poems and what that represents to you. I did a whole book of erasure poetry, my second book, I Hope This Finds You Well, which was a really fun, creative challenge. It carried over to the next book and then into this one.

7:35I really enjoy playing around with poetry in that way visually. And so I can't help but put it in. It's one of my favorite parts. those are some of my favorite pieces just because even though they're heavy topics, it's kind of a spirit of playfulness as well to stretch creatively and also make you stop and think about these things that just come our way all the time, but the seriousness that can come with it and the heaviness and the real thing that we're doing. We get those emails all the time and that paperwork all the time about those shooter drills. And it almost makes us numb to it because we're like, oh, it's just another Thursday.

8:09We do this every March. We do this every September. But I want to stop and say, well, wait, we don't need to do this. This isn't necessary to do this. We could take action to not even have to send these papers home. So that's kind of the background behind those.

8:22Amy Wilson:It really is visceral. I had an experience where I was helping, volunteering on the school play when there was a drill. My kid was in maybe first grade and I ended up in the lighting booth of the little theater with the kids hiding. It was a drill. But having signed a million of those forms and seeing the email. We had a drill today. It just goes by on the river again. Yeah. And I sat in that closet with these little kids and there was a kid who had a cough and they were coughing and the other kids kept saying, shh, shh, to this little kid with a cough. And I just found myself in this room sobbing, like heaving out of control, ugly cry and trying to kind of hide it from the kids because I didn't want it to land for them how absurd and terrifying and awful and what this moment was the tip of.

9:09Amy Wilson:Yeah. And thinking about that poem and then my moment with that, how do you find dialing into those moments as a mom? I think a lot of times as a mother, we have to let those things wash by for our own emotional health. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Do you find it challenging to kind of find yourself double clicking on those moments that I think we don't internalize because it's too painful? That particular topic is really difficult for me. I don't often read those poems on my tour. I'm happy to talk about it today, but I have a really hard time separating myself from talking about it objectively when I still have four children in school.

9:46And it's something I have to deal with on a regular basis. Every time I put them on the bus, I think about it. There's not been a day I've not thought about it since December 14th. I think it was, is it 2012? 2012. 2012. It's really hard. I've had to do a lot of internal work to be able to write about it, to talk about it. Something that's been really helpful for me is to be involved in with Moms Demand Action. And I've recently signed on to be part of Ceasefire for Pennsylvania. So those kind of action steps have really helped me beyond the poetry, just being in my community and trying to make change, little changes with background checks and that sort of thing.

10:22That's really helped me be able to write about it, talk about it, and just exist in a world in which this is possible. Possible anywhere, not even our schools. It's a really tough topic, but it keeps resurfacing in every book because, like I said, this is something that's daily in my mind. In that particular poem, there's a space on the form that says, lessons learned. Having that form sort of in the background of the poem, it's the opposite of tying it up in a bow, right? Your poem does the opposite of like, and here's the lesson learned. I guess we just have to live with this. You were refusing to do that.

10:52That lesson learned, unanswerable question is just hanging there looking ridiculous. That really spoke to me. The impossibility of what's being asked by these forms, that you can cut things down into acceptable phrases. Something that's big and terrible. Yeah. Let's take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about female friendship. After an afternoon at the pool, my mom's skin needs a hydration reset. The perfect solution? Osea's Ondaria Algae Body Oil. It has an amazing citrus scent and a non-greasy texture so my skin feels silky smooth and stays that way.

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13:55Spring's calling. Ross, work your magic. Kate, will you read to us your poem, Women Talking? Of course, this is called Women Talking. The dog gets sick all over the carpet, makes us late to school. My daughter wailing in the backseat that this is my fault, even though I got this dog to help her manage all her problems. In the parking lot, I send a message that sounds like I hate my life, even though I don't, and this is just another morning in the casino hall. Carrie says, I know the feeling. Bethany says, you're almost there. Mo sends a photo of two toads making love in her small koi pond. Milf, we all write back.

14:36Man, do I love frogs and go about our days. Do you receive those messages as poems? How do you receive this idea of women texting each other what we kind of mean, what we don't mean, how we sort of rescue each other? Because my female friendships, and I think this is true for a lot of women, are such a savior to me on a daily basis. and just kind of the way that I help process motherhood and marriage and life in general. It's such an easy backdrop for me for poetry because it is so much of my world. And there are so many times where I'm texting or I know a lot of people use voice notes. I use apps that basically do the same thing.

15:14Boxer, Marco Polo. I'm talking to my friends all day, whether talking or texting. And there are so many moments almost every day where I think, oh, that's poetry. Oh, that right there. That's poetry. No one's meaning to do it, but it is because we're connecting over the little things, not the small top catch you up on what I've been doing the last six months and talking about youth sports, but real things like my husband's an idiot and my teenager wants Snapchat. Those kind of conversations are so poetic. Female friendship is something that has come up in all my books because I can't live without it.

15:46Amy Wilson:You're writing a lot about motherhood, and we obviously talk a lot about motherhood on our Motherhood podcast. In talking to so many talented, brilliant women we know, writing or exploring motherhood as a theme can sometimes be dismissed by other people. Yeah. Oh, she's a mommy blogger. She's a mommy podcaster. How do you find that? Do you find that something about how people receive your poetry as like a mom poet? Oh, my goodness. Yes. Do we need to extend the podcast by an hour for you to answer? That could be a different podcast, a whole other podcast hour. I will say that in 2025, I feel much better about this topic than I did in 2020 when What Kind of Woman came out.

16:29Amy Wilson:I feel like I spent every interview defending myself, every press podcast interview, trying to talk my way out of that and be like, no, that's not just who I am is being a mommy and talking about mommy things. Motherhood and the experience of motherhood has been labeled such a niche topic when we all have a mother. All of us, for better or for worse, whether she was there or not there, we've all had a mother. Motherhood is one of the most universal topics in the world. And to label it to be so niche is ridiculous to me. How many coming-of-age novels about baseball have we all had to read in the eighth grade?

17:04And yet motherhood is niche. It's unbelievable. So I've really tried to let that go. And I will say, you know, I got really mad. I was in People Magazine once. It was like a little book blurb, and they called me a former mommy blogger. And I was really mad. After that, I tried to really look at why I was so angry. And I realized I also had so much internalized misogynism about this topic. Like, I also was like, no, no, no, that's not me. When I should be like, yeah, I did write about motherhood. It was great. I connected with a lot of women. I was able to build an audience. I'm talking about something that so many people care about.

17:38I also need to embrace it instead of try to erase that from every bio and instead be like, yes, I talk about motherhood. We understand. And I mean, three bestsellers later, four bestsellers later, I think that the interest is clearly there. There's a lot of us out there that want to talk about something that's central to our lives.

17:55Amy Wilson:This is the most important work of a lot of people's lives. This is the work that goes into your children's bones that will be in their grandchildren's bones long after you've left the planet. Like, what is the accountant doing that's more important than making a recipe that was made by my great grandmother on a farm in Ireland? Like, that's the most important work of being alive. And I refuse to have it be made small by people who don't understand its worth. Exactly. I could not have said it better myself. I'm going to write that down. I'm going to use that on my book tour. Just send me a nickel every time you say it and we'll be we'll be even.

18:30I will. There's another kind of erasure poem that you do that isn't the forms. It is like there's a block of text. I'm sure people can picture what we're talking about. We'll, of course, link to the book in the show notes for this episode. But it's like a block of text where almost every word is crossed out except for a word here and there. I feel like those poems tend to either slyly reveal what the underlying text doesn't realize it's saying or completely undercut and reverse what the underlying text is saying. So when did you start doing those? And how do you know when you see a block of text?

18:59Oh, this is I see what I'm going to do here. Does it come to you or do you try it first and see if it works? It really depends what poem. There's a piece in there called Box Breathing that's actually really hard to read in the final copy because of how it was printed, but I have it memorized. I actually said it to myself. I woke up in the middle of the night four nights ago, just really panicked. And I said it to myself and it goes, I am alive today. I have quieted the narrator. There's nothing I must do. There's no one I need to talk to. I am here and unafraid. And when I was kind of going through some of my medical issues, I remember saying things like that to myself.

19:35I would have these little mantras like, I'm okay, I'm alive. There's nothing I need to do but figure this out. There's no one else I need to talk to but myself and checking in with myself. So when I wrote that piece, the backdrop was kind of a lot of the things I was going through. And so I kind of built that poem differently. There's also a piece in there from Alice in Wonderland, which is one of my favorite stories. That one I just took from the original author. And then there's another one. I think there's one more. It was from a novel I wrote. I didn't edit that text, but I thought that novel will probably never be published.

20:06But why don't I take a page and turn it into a poem? And that was just for fun. Were you a novelist first before you were a poet? I think I'm just a writer first. You know, I was writing novels when I was 10 and poems when I was 10. So I don't think there's really one that I am before the other. I do think a poet was always something I was going to be, but I would love to write a novel. That would be fun.

20:26Amy Wilson:Poetry feels to me like the ability to sing. I mean, Amy and I are both writers. Amy's published a bunch of books. I've written some things. But poetry feels more like being a singer. You have to have a special ability to do poetry. It feels like a mystery door to me, poetry. Well, I write by ear. I write poetry by ear. And so that really makes sense. Interesting. Yeah. A lot of people ask me that, am I choosing what looks better and I choose what sounds better? It pains me. There's so many sentences and words that I've had to cut because they don't sound right. That makes a lot of sense to me.

21:00Oh, that's interesting. There's this distillation of meaning that happens with poetry. It's boiled down storytelling, which is my favorite part of poetry, that you can tell a whole story in 30 seconds because you're just getting right to the middle of it.

21:13Amy Wilson:I teach poetry sometimes, which is hilarious because I don't write it. I just read poetry with my students. But I always say there's like a scarf pulled from your chest feeling that you get with a good poem sometimes where you literally get that drip turning into a stream from the faucet. It's the thing where you hear it. Yeah. You've felt it a million times and no one has ever said it out loud to you. To me, that is the magic of poetry. And it's just like music. You listen to a song and you have that same feeling. Even if you can't hear all the words, you might hear some of it. You know, when people say they don't like poetry, I think, oh, you just haven't read the right one yet.