Berkeley writer pens poems on motherhood, wildfires and friendship and loss

As an award-winning poet certified wildland firefighter parent and co-founder of Left Margin Lit one could say Berkeley resident Rachel Richardson wears a lot of hats The author s latest poetry collection Smother W W Norton hit bookshop shelves in the last few days so we took the opportunity to hear more about her work Responses have been edited for length and clarity Q Smother is such an evocative word How did you decide on it as your title A The book is about smoke and motherhood primarily as its two subjects Once I realized smother is a portmanteau of the two subjects it seemed inevitable as a title But I also like the tongue-in-cheek aggressiveness of it because it sets a tone for the whole book that lets you know that this isn t going to be a demure book People often assume poetry books will be beautiful full of lament or awe and this book intends to be a little more gritty and in the real world The epigraph to the book is an annoying and dismissive comment by an editor at a major magazine that says he s perfectly uninterested in poems about mothers or poems with the word mother in them I m also using the title to gesture in immediate defiance of that idea There s going to be a lot of the word mother in this book Q Tell me more about the poem Smother and the smoke metaphor you use A That poem is my play on the idea of the smoke as the idealized and unattainable mother There s an unattainable and damaging and also limiting idea of motherhood that we re communicated to aspire to and it is impossible in a real experience of being a human mother Similarly smoke can be everywhere but invisible this dangerous thing that s in our midst and you can t really get away from it like you can t get away from the patriarchy I started thinking about things that annoyed me about what I was notified about motherhood and I replaced all the mothers with smoke as the character That poem let me get out a lot of my frustrations and make fun of selected of those ideas Q I saw a minimal different themes in the book motherhood context specifically the Northern California experience of wildfires and friendship How did all of those fit together for you within the collection A As I was writing this one of my closest friends died and so I started writing elegy poems to her She was when she died and I was feeling devastated at her loss I started writing to her and in the process of writing those poems all of these other societal elements kept coming in like the smoke from all of our fires and the distance that I felt from my friend after death and from other people by technological means Then COVID happened which exacerbated all of those things and brought it to a head That felt so isolating and demoralizing to me that I started making more proceeding efforts to find and hold on to other women and value those friendships because we are mortal and we are far away from each other a lot of the time I started writing love poems to my female friends in the latter half of this book and that ended up being my answer to selected of the losses I write about Smother is a new poetry collection by Berkeley poet Rachel Richardson W W Norton Courtesy W W Norton Q Are there Bay Area-specific moments or experiences locals should look out for in your book A I mention my kids in going to the same school that Kamala Harris integrated Selected squirrels made a little nest in my backyard and we exposed in their building materials part of a Warriors flag Two of the poems deal with the Caldor fire and its aftermath The City of Berkeley owns Echo Lake and Tuolumne Camp in the wilderness near South Lake Tahoe and Yosemite respectively The Tuolumne camp burned down in the Rim Fire and the Echo Lake camp was threatened by the Caldor Fire which burned right up to the edge of the camp That started to feel symbolic because these are our population estates things owned by all of us and generations of Bay Area and Berkeley kids have grown up in these spaces Q That s right your last poem talks about replanting trees to help restore Tuolumne Camp What do you hope readers take away from your book A That poem ends with a tempered hope You ve planted these trees and hopefully they ll grow Hopefully they ll live in their new spots and will grow tall enough and we won t have another fire here so that in a generation or two they can give back this family camp to the next generation of kids at Berkeley s Tuolumne Camp But it s tempered hope right Because the engineer who was telling us how to plant the trees declared One in might make it I thought that was really depressing But she declared it in this hopeful way and the more I thought about that and sat with it for this poem the more I thought that it is in fact hopeful You do more with the hope that you ve done enough that a few will make it There were multiple tree plantings and people planted enough so that if even just one-tenth made it we d have a good forest But the amount of effort is not lost on me and I think that that possibly is what you come away with at the end That the effort to replace it and come back from this is not going to be small but it s a good idea to be hopeful about it At the camp there are all these little trees that we now get to go back to every year They were a foot when we planted them and now they re nine feet It s exciting I think the hope is justified but effort is also required Q Other thoughts to share A This book is very much about public I run a literary arts center with my husband called Left Margin Lit which is a co-working space for writers This is a single-authored book but I wrote these poems in a more communal way than I ve ever written before That s another source of hope and optimism for me that there are a lot of people who love the arts here and we can do this stuff together CREEK FIRE The dark comes in on my girl s tenth birthday Fire bearing crow feathers no ash It comes with its big breath sun without light Cold morning in the surrounding counties everyone blinking looking around phones lifted to the horizon Excerpted from Smother Poems Copyright c by Rachel Richardson Used with permission of the publisher W W Norton Company Inc All rights reserved Richardson will be participating in the following Bay Area Book Festival events on June - p m a panel discussion called Our Beautiful Burning World at the Marsh Theater Allston Way Berkeley - a poetry reading called Women Cyborgs Revolutionary Petunias and Other Creatures at Kittredge Avenue at Harold Way in Berkeley Her book Smother W W Norton is available now