A Vasectomy Sonnet, Fathers in the Birth Room, and a Poetry of Fatherhood Exercise

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Only you’d joke through a vasectomy, / 

Sitting up to view the clamp pinching shut / 

Your vas deferens (of its lobe fished free… / 

—excerpt from Paybacks, by Tania Pryputniewicz, A Year in Ink, San Diego Writer’s Ink Anthology, Volume 8

A Year in Ink,San Diego Writers, Ink Anthology, Volume 8 is now out and available for purchase (prose editor Dean Nelson; poetry editor reg e gaines, cover image by Margaret Larlham). The anthology holds 145 pages of prose and poetry and includes work by Jill G. Hall, Jim Moreno, Judy Reeves, Ron Salisbury, Anitra Carol Smith and 43 more authors. 

In his introduction, poetry editor reg e gaines offers this fabulous reminder regarding the role of a poem’s title: “It must allow the reader freedom to imagine, not serve as a sign leading to an exit ramp.”  What great advice; I’ll be revisiting all of my poem titles with that in mind! 

The anthology also includes the rest of the vasectomy sonnet, Paybacks, for my husband; he’s fond of saying that if I would just write poems about him, the clouds might drop their bounty of dimes upon our roof. We’ll see!

I was going through a “forms” frenzy when I wrote Paybacks. I also loved the challenge of writing about a male process from a female perspective. The sonnet form doesn’t leave leeway for rambling; it forced me to radically distill the memory of witnessing the vasectomy. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was already composing the sonnet back then, but I certainly couldn’t shut off my poet’s mind that day. There I was, sitting at the foot of the operating table, nursing our third child while the doctor snipped and cauterized: “proof of potency”—our baby--colliding with “bye bye potency”—stitched husband. I had the best view in the house, just as my husband had the best seat for the labor, birth, and follow up episiotomies we endured for our three children. I figured I owed him a “witnessing” or two.

Fathers in the Birth Room

Photo by Royn Beattie

I take it a bit for granted my husband could (and did) accompany me in the labor and delivery rooms; I can’t imagine not crushing his hand through contractions, not having him there as each infant crowned. But when I asked my own father about his access a scant fifty or so years ago, he wrote:

When you were about to be born I was allowed in the room during labor, but they kicked me out before the actual birthing.  This was at St. Luke's.  When I took your Mom to the hospital in Rochester for your brother’s debut I expected the same… and was dismayed when I wasn't even allowed to go up to the maternity ward!  I remember standing outside the elevator in shock as the doors closed.  I can only imagine how that felt for your mother.

By the time your little sister came along I was allowed in the delivery room for the entire event.  St. Luke's again.  I remember a very festive atmosphere. Your sister looked luminescent, silvery and pale violet.  Her voice sounded like music.  The doctor quipped, "$250, please!" (the fee for prenatal care and delivery at that time). We all found that hilarious!

What about you? Would love to hear in comments from other mothers and fathers. I also set about to find poems about tubal ligation. Do you know of any? Do tell, in comments, if so.

Poetry of Fatherhood Exercise

Here’s a related writing exercise for you to try from my Poetry of Fatherhood Class:

Consider landing on a parallel metaphor for the experience of circumcision or vasectomy, as Thom Ward does in, “Vasectomy” (May 1996, The Atlantic online). Brainstorm a list of potential metaphors and images before you start writing to jumpstart your process. If neither of these experiences figure for you, your father, or your child, write about any other tangentially related experience located in the male body that has to do with fatherhood (“couvade” syndrome, for example, vicarious pregnancy, a term from the French term “couvee”—to hatch).

I also used a poem by Greg Wrenn, “Circumcision” (I was not able to find it online; it was published in Crazyhorse, 2011). See also a poem by Phillip Appleman, Vasectomy.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

The Moon and The Devil at Tarot for Two

Mary Allen and I continue to co-blog at Tarot For Two. Here are excerpts from our Card of the Month writings. Both of us refer to the Thoth deck, painted by Lady Frieda Harris, and the Rider-Waite deck, painted by Pamela Waite Smith:

Tania on the Moon Card:

I think of Frida Kahlo’s bathtub portrait (What I Saw in the Water, also known by the title, What the Water Gave Me) painted from inside pain’s hyper alert state of slowed time. We could say it is Frida’s Moon map, memories bobbing on the surface of the water, stilled for her to see. And for us to witness, looking over her shoulder, blessing vicariously her story and our own buried sorrow wicked to the surface in resonant sympathy.

Mary on the Devil Card:

The Devil in the Rider-Waite deck has harpy feet, bat wings, and a reversed pentagram on his forehead, and the Devil in the Tarot of Marseille (this was the first tarot deck I ever had, bought on a whim when I saw it at a bookstore, the images turned out to be way too abstract for me to even begin to make heads or tails of) – that Devil has boobs, a face on the belly, eyes on the knees, male genitalia, and its own set of bat wings.  What could all these images possibly be telling me during the last month?

Read rest of our post: The Moon and The Devil.

Saddle Road Press News:

ARCs of RuthThompson’s new poetry chapbook Crazing are here; here is a review by Jendi Reiter; you'll find two poems from the chapbook there as well, "Mary Speaks" and "Losing the Words." I love the cover image and the poems by Ruth Thompson (my editor for November Butterfly at Saddle Road Press). We will be running a poem from Crazing at Mother Writer Mentor shortly and I will share the link with you when it is up.

November Butterfly in Santa Fe

Facing Forward, Looking Back is the title for a reading I’ll be giving with two other poets and dear friends: Barbara Rockman and Robyn Hunt. We will read on Sunday, August 9, 2:00 p.m. at Garcia Street Books, 376 Garcia Street, Santa Fe. The event is free and open to the public. I'll be reading from November Butterfly; here's what you can expect in Santa Fe:

Sharing a passion for the journeys of family, marriage and poetry’s power as renewal through myth and story, the poets will read from collections that transform individual quests to make sense of love, grief, trauma, history and an unsettled world. They will read from their recent books as well as from new work.

Here are bios for my fellow readers Robyn Hunt and Barbara Rockman:

Robyn Hunt ran offset printing presses and owned a bookstore in California before returning to her native Santa Fe where she is Development and Communications Director for Las Cumbres Community Services, serving families with social emotional challenges and disabilities. She obtained her degree at California State University at San Francisco and on the streets of that city in the seventies. Her poems resound with the landscape and language, images and rhythms of northern New Mexico.  Robyn blogs at “As Mourning Doves Persist.” Of her debut collection, “The Shape of Caught Water,” Jimmy Santiago Baca said, “These poems strum the lyre strings of the heart to conjure olé music.”

Barbara Rockman has taught poetry and generative writing workshops since 1999 when she earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts after a career as an arts education program developer and theater director. Her widely published work has received numerous prizes and her collection, “Sting and Nest,” received the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. She is workshop director for Wingspan Poetry Project, bringing writing classes to Esperanza Shelter for Battered Women.  A frequent collaborator with artists, her poems have accompanied installations and exhibitions. Of her work, poet, David Wojahn says, “She has the capacity to wrest celebration from our failings, sorrows, and confusions.”

Related links:

To see more of my poetry movie collaborator's photography, visit Robyn Beattie's website.

Patterns of Incandescence, Indigo Grief and Sky Girl: Tracking the Body When the Book Goes Live

Catherine Daley, Aurora #313
Photo by Robyn Beattie

"...in deeply introverted, self-reflective states, brooder and brooded become one in egg-like nuclear processes of crystallization..." The Book of Symbols, Taschen



Fool’s dog, rose, abyss.

Blank book in velvet pouch, spines

Braced for fertile fall.

Heart light, yellow smock,

Red happy boots. I could stop

Or start, sleep, or dream.

When I fall, I wake 

As you, rowan moon silver,

Citrus in my hands.

--Three For the Fool (from this year's Haiku practice)

Just before November Butterfly launched (November 1, 2014, Saddle Road Press), I said to a girlfriend, I wish I could hold this book up to the sky and say: Here are my poems about sunflowers and unicorns!

She, sage and lovely, responded: Why would your poems be made up only of sunflowers and unicorns? Life certainly isn’t.

Another asked, Are you sad? You’re saying goodbye to something that used to belong just to you. 

They’re both right.  Still, I don’t let go or grow any more gracefully than the next human. Lately I’m uncomfortably aware of a woolly impulse to cocoon or perhaps hibernate in a velvet-lined cloak.

But when you put a book you’ve held close to your heart for years finally out into the world, you have no choice but to grow.  And you certainly can’t hide. I’ve been thinking a lot about a question one of my favorite “sane-media-for-writers” experts Dan Blank (We Grow Media) posed in one of his newsletters five months ago, “What are writers afraid of?”

Tania Pryputniewicz

My answer would be: “Annihilation.” I know it sounds extreme. But the fear of annihilation stems from a fear of exposure directly tied to the content of a handful of the poems in November Butterfly based on rape (both imagined through the eyes of a historical figure and actual). Intellectually, I know better than to fear annihilation, and I know the handful of poems I'm allowing to cause anxiety sit wreathed and far outnumbered by poems focusing on the beauty of earthly incarnation, motherhood and love.

Earlier on blog tour, before the book was out, I was able to address this issue calmly and rationally:

When private writing about trauma, however altered or housed in genre (memoir, creative non-fiction, fiction, or even poetry) goes public, for the writer there’s a re-enactment of exposure. But what differs from the trauma and one’s work appearing is the agency one has as storyteller, the distance one is away from the triggering event, the support of loved ones, and eventually, one hopes, the joy of a kind readership.” (Read rest of First Poetry Book Publication, Fear of Exposure, and Astral Rubbernecking.)

But just as the book materialized from ethereal template on a computer to physical object--poems out of my head and into heads of others--the body had a thing or two to say. As I vacillated between two selves (the self thrilled to be moving on to write new poems for a second collection and the self panicked at thought of moving out of the familiar, suppressive corridors of the past), I came down with a cold.  

Forced to rest and be still, unable to sleep thanks to accompanying fever, I found familiar metaphors visiting one by one: bruised throats, fistfuls of lillies, a murky indigo blue sorrow like the grief that surrounded me just after the birth of my second child in the first days after an encounter with a midwife triggered memories (Sheila's Vine, in Labor Pains and Birth Stories). So palpable, those hoops of shame, lit up like arcs of the Northern Lights above me. 

So of course I haikued my way out…

Indigo griefs—old—

Night’s rainbows, like bruises bloom

Once witnessed, loved, fade.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

I wish the “fade” part would speed up. Days when I’m down on the process, I just want to be whole, another woman capable of desire and joy without intrusion of past. Which of course, for many hours of many days, I am (whole and happy, that is). Which leads me to a sterling concept from another of Dan Blank's newsletters in which he challenged writers to prepare for success. Because both failure and success signal change, require growth. 

I remember years ago (in my tiny flat on Morningside Drive in Iowa City) using paint to create visuals for where I felt creatively blocked. In broad strokes of dark orange against a cobalt sky, the figure of a woman floating took shape, mostly an outline of head and shoulders slimming without feet to a point like an astral projection. I called her "The Fear/Joy." Were I to paint a new woman, embodying the psychic block, as Blank helped me articulate it, I think it would be: "Annihilation/Success."

Butterfly Shadow by Peter Pryputniewicz

As always it matters to cultivate the image garden, to surround oneself with beautiful words, arts, and minds. I love the relaxed and kind way Blank urges us to grow into our goals as writers at a pace that makes sense for one's life and for the long haul. I fill my journals with an eye towards patterns of incandescence, light within mirroring light without. Body as geode, crystallizing. Needing to balance  awarenesses of shadow self and light self. I think about this, driving at night, noticing the way we can't stand to let the night have its dark, filling the countryside with ambient light...


Ambient light's haze
Milky Way's geode blue masked,
We lose sacred dark.

...and so I fill my journals with reading notes about comets seeding the Earth with DNA, (The Book of Symbols), Aurora the Roman Goddess of the dawn crossing the sky to meet brother Helios (Auroras: Fire in the Sky), and lines about Virgo's Three Goddesses (Eve, Isis, and Mary) from astrologer and healer Bonnie Orgren's Stardust Seven Ray Services Soul Centered Astrology Reports.

One final insight about that woozy fever night: eventually the body relinquished its image train. And the Northern Lights morphed from metaphor for shame to unhindered memory of physical beauty I remember witnessing so long ago, gazing up into the Illinois sky as a child: 

Sky girl’s apron falls

Hem first rippling crimson

Orchard of stars hers.

I don’t know who she is, but I love her, this Sky Girl. I’ll climb her apron strings and into the pocket she surely wears just over her heart. Worth the risk of the climb, if only for the view, that orchard of stars to claim.

Related Links

Here are links to the work of a few of the women writers I lean on for strength as I move through this writing/exposure/vulnerability cycle:

Hand-painted Prompt Cards by Suzi Banks Baum

Suzi Banks Baum, of Laundry Line Divine, editor of An Anthology of Babes: 36 Women Give Motherhood a Voice: in a post titled Serendipity Tromps: Quest 2015:

"I will shake loose of my own expectations to look like I have my act together.

I will work, regardless of a confident measured plot, but work with loyalty to my devotion at a pace that supports my roles as writer, maker and mother."

Dora E. McQuaid, Poet, Teacher, Activist, Remarkable Women: Profiles, Art:

"Tell the truth of your own life, your own story, however challenging or uplifting it may be. You never know whom you might change or effect, including yourself."

See also Dora's website for poetry, resources, and more. Dora's latest poetry book is the scorched earth (with companion audio version).

Ruth Thompson, my editor at Saddle Road Press, author of Woman with Crows and Here Along Cazenovia Creek, in an interview conducted by TCJWW:

"I know from my own experience that what you come to, through the death of the self, is a place where the light pours in."

Michelle Wing, Saddle Road Press sister and author of the poetry collection, Body on the Wall, is also one of the editors of the newly released, Cry of the Nightbird, Writers Against Domestic Violence. Wing, in an interview with TCJWW: 


"I am still writing poems about things that happened many years ago. This is not because I dwell in the past, or because I spend sleepless nights worrying about these things. It is because when I can pull up one more memory out of the vault, turn it over in the light, find both its ugliness and its beauty, and then limn its shape in the form of a poem...I can put that demon to rest."

December 30, 2014 addition:

Ginny Lee Taylor, blogger at Women of Wonder: write. breathe. heal., offers a beautiful post with some hands on suggestions for a livable pace of working with memories and healing:

"And why should we risk triggering and more pain?

Because doing so helps us along on our healing journey, helps us to let go of those sticky threads holding us in the past. By journaling or talking to trusted others about our shadow bag contents, we not only unburden our stories unto someone else or our journals, but more importantly we create a new personal narrative about that memory or feeling, the creation of which is a powerful force in healing from our wounds."

See her simple and sane suggestions here: 

Diving into Your ShadowBag, part 2: #Quest2015

Upcoming January Classes I'll be Teaching:

Luna on the Majors

The Wheel of Archetypal Selves: From Fool to Visionary (The Major Arcana from 0 to V) Online with Story Circle Network

I’m very excited about this class…for some time now I have wanted to take a gradual writing tour through the Major Arcana to follow on the heels of The Minor Mentors class I taught in the spring. Thanks to Story Circle Network, we embark in January 2105. We start with the first six Majors in this class. We’ll write to medleys of images starting with the Fool and end six weeks later with The Hierophant. Approaching the Tarot from a relaxed and open-hearted stance, we will journal and write to prompts and focus on connecting our prior experiences to the archetypes. 

Course runs January 12 to February 23; cost is $192 for members and $240 for non-members. For a unit by unit description and to sign up, visit The Wheel of Archetypal Selves. 

Wether or not you sign up for class, if you love the Tarot, I hope you’ll check out the Wheel of Fortune Tarot’s website. Special thanks to my friend Barbara Rockman (author of the poetry collection Sting and Nest, reviewed here by the Mom Egg) for sharing the link with me. I am stunned not only by the deck’s black and white photographic montage/images, but I am in love with the Wheel of Fortune Tarot's three-dimensional installation (Burning Man 2104). A series of adjacent doors form a perfect ferris wheel round Tarot house or sort of open sky/scarved temple. Each door hosts on its inner side one life-sized Major Arcana (facing into the room the doors form). Anne Stavely and Jill Sutherland are the designers and creators behind the deck. 

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Beginning Blogging 

In person at San Diego Writers, Ink

I’ll be offering a four part blogging series of classes (from Beginning Blogging to Advanced Blogging) in person through San Diego Writers, Ink, starting in January, 2015. Here is the link to the first series of classes for Beginning Bloggers. I welcome bloggers at any point on their blogging trajectory, and former students are always welcome to join us again for blog support. I tailor my courses to fit the needs of each forming class.

New Perhaps, Maybe videos with Liz Brennan

Maybe in the cool morning of fall when the brightest jewels of the hummingbird’s garden fan out from twining vines…. Read text of The Hummingbird's Complaint. Or watch Liz and I reading The Hummingbird’s Complaint.

Maybe like a fish in a bowl in a house of cats…Read text of The Unasked Question. Or watch Liz and I reading The Unasked Question.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Latest Poetry Prompt for November Butterfly:

I'm enjoying writing poetry prompts for the poems in November Butterfly. The Nefertiti on the Astral prompt signals the end of Section 1 prompts; up next, Mordred's Dream. Come write with me here if you love the Queen of Egypt:

Nefertiti on the Astral

And if nothing else, read this amazing Clive James poem, Nefertiti in the Flak Tower

For beautiful photos of the Auroras, see Auroras: Fire in the Sky

Dan Bortolotti, with photographs by Yuichi Takasaka.

Image Credits: As labelled, by Robyn Beattie; additional artwork by yours truly, Peter Pryputniewicz, and Suzi Banks Baum as labelled. 

If you are still reading, and have the heart, I'd love to hear in comments how you navigate your fears as a writer, your exposures, and your vulnerabilities. Blessings to each and every writer in my life.

Out of The Chrysalis: Feral Mom Attempts November Butterfly Book Tour Sans Kids

I am still basking in the warmth of a beautiful homecoming trip to Sonoma County where we celebrated November Butterfly’s arrival—I left Southern California with a bag full of books and returned with a scant three copies that were spoken for before my plane landed in San Diego. I traveled alone, having celebrated with my husband and my children at San Diego Writers, Ink the week prior. How odd, but lovely, a bit alien, to escape as writer self and leave mother self behind.

Or try. Within two hours, texts from the kids and husband trickled in… “Where are the car keys?” “When are you coming back?” “I miss you already!” And one graphic photo of a bloody toe…all gently eclipsed in San Francisco by my brother, his wife and my niece. They kindly whisked me off for a beer—even though I am not much of a drinker and fruitflies tend to get the better portion of any quarter glass of wine my husband pours for me.

But this was The Trappist, and in the bronze dusk of the unassuming low-lit hallway that makes the venue so cozy, I converted, sipping a very fine, dark, foaming 8 Wired I-stout, admiring the miniature tree limbs advancing up the wall above us with evenly balanced tendrils. I was further spoiled each day of my visit--omelets by my sister-in-law, Italian dinner out, and girl-time curing toes of their winter pall. Finally, by night, in the slightly freaky and deafening silence of putting only myself to bed, I succumbed to the pleasure of losing time between the covers of The Book of Symbols:Reflections on Archetypal Images, (Taschen), table of contents pulling me in with incantatory list: Egg, Breath, Star, Sun, Moon, Crescent, Eclipse, Comet….

Further north at my father’s home, my collaborator Robyn’s chrysalis artwork greeted me on the table. Inside, tucked in a butterfly pocket, she and my father had collected “magic words” (bookmark sized quotes to lift the mind).  At nearly a foot tall, the chrysalis card is a delight to hold and open, serving as a three-dimensional out-picturing of this year’s process.  After some superb seven-secret-ingredient pancakes (my father’s specialty), we headed out to Shiloh Park for a morning hike which is just what I needed in order to ground before the afternoon workshop and reading at Coffee Catz (thank you Debbie and Keli!).

The vibrant reds and golds of the changing leaves and sprawling oaks still linger in my mind’s eyes as do the heartprints of the friends and writers circling the workshop table and back room at Coffee Catz, and again, in Berkeley at Moe’s Books, where I had the honor of reading with Ruth Thompson (Woman with Crows) and Michelle Wing (Body on the Wall) to a full house at the invitation of Poetry Flash (which meant lovely introductions for all three of us poets by the generous and thoughtful Richard Silberg and venue set-up and arrangements thanks to Joyce Jenkins).

I also had the privilege of meeting Don Mitchell (A Red Woman Was Crying) for the first time in person (after months of email correspondence).  Don is the other half of Saddle Road Press (located in Hilo, Hawaii) and the man responsible for the book cover magic and logistics of poems on the page plus all the hand-holding during the thousand invisible decisions that signal final stages of book-making. Ruth Thompson, pictured here, is the other half of Saddle Road Press, and the woman responsible for editing November Butterfly and seeing it through to completion.

Other collateral joy: time with my poetry steady Liz Brennan—she’s already put up one of our new short prose Perhaps, Maybe video collaborations we had time to record over the weekend, The Hummingbird’s Complaint.

I am in the process of mapping out new book tour events and will announce dates as we confirm them; I am overwhelmingly grateful for the love and support of my family and friends.

Additional Links:

January Blogging Class:

I’ll be offering a four part blogging series of classes (from Beginning Blogging to Advanced Blogging) in person through San Diego Writers, Ink, starting in January, 2015. Here is the link to the first series of classes for Beginning Bloggers. I welcome bloggers at any point on their blogging trajectory, and former students are always welcome to join us again for blog support. I tailor my courses to fit the needs of each forming class.


November Butterfly Prompts:

As promised to workshop participants, I am still writing poetry prompts for the iconics in section 1 of November Butterfly--I will have one up for Nefertiti in the next couple of days. Visit this link to see all ten prompts up so far (from Marilyn to Jeanne d'Arc).