Sarah Dickenson Snyder’s books include The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019). Her work is in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. Her poem “Unable to Imagine Myself as a Mother” appears in the Summer 2022 issue of Carve.
The mother/child relationship is very intimate. In this piece, you’ve managed to replace the child with a car battery and still retain this feeling of intimacy. In your beautiful second stanza, the speaker braves the cold and holds the “warm & alive” car battery “close to [her] chest in both arms” in a familiar gesture of maternal tenderness. What works or experiences inspired your depiction of the mother/child bond, and what inspired you to subvert the expected by replacing the child with an inanimate object?
I loved the motherhood poetry of Eavan Boland and Sharon Olds after I had my own children. As a young woman who was not drawn to being a mother, I found myself overwhelmed by the spiritual power of it when it happened. In this piece I tried to find places or times I felt such a tenderness before. Was there any precursor for how much I would embrace being a mother? The caring for the life of my VW battery in Maine every subzero night seemed strangely maternal in retrospect. It definitely makes me smile to remember how careful I was with that heavy battery.
You show a masterful ability to include only as much detail as necessary. This is evident through the specificity of your images and the economy of your syntax. Talk me through your writing process. Do you pare down a lot in editing, or do you naturally lean towards this precision in early drafts?
I always begin writing in my journal. Handwriting is important to me. I’m a calligrapher, a carver in stone and a letterpresser. Once I explore on the page (after freewriting from assorted prompts for a specific amount of time), I use the microphone option on a Word document, to speak what was on the page into a document. That was a life-changer, finding that microphone icon! Then comes the fun of creating a structure and playing with the language, figuring out what needs to go and what needs more power. So, I edit a lot, both paring down and exploring further in hot spots, seeking places for more music and sound, assessing line breaks and structure, always looking for surprising language.
Fear is a driving force in your poem. The speaker fears herself and her own inadequacy as much as she fears external forces (a “venomous bite,” a “car accident,” a “dramatic fall”). Fear, both inside and outside the home and the self, is so acute for many women. Can you tell me more about the divides between internal/external and domestic/public in this poem?
You’re right, fear is a driving force. I remember wanting the nurse in the hospital to come home with me when I left with my daughter, so afraid I might kill her. Fear seems to live inside for me, in my mind, especially in my imagination—imaging the venomous bite, the dramatic fall. I always envision worst case scenarios. My mom even gave me a tool to keep in my glove compartment in case my car plummets into water and I need to smash the window to get out.
In the second stanza’s description of a Maine winter, you created a beautiful and specific sense of place. Can you speak to the inspiration you draw from specific locations in your work?
The places are mostly real in my work. I’ve lived all over and have been fortunate to travel quite a bit. I write down a lot of observations about place in my journal. I feel lucky that I have a very clear memory of the past, from the glossy kitten sticker on my cubby in kindergarten to the roughness of the tweed sport coat of a boy (I remember his name) I danced with in middle school to the opening of day at sunrise on a mountain near me in Vermont.