Katherine Gaffney’s poem “Likewise, Here” was a finalist in Variant’s 2022 Pizza Prize Competition and also appears in her first full-length poetry collection, Fool in a Blue House which won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. I spoke with Katherine in July 2023, a few months after her book’s release to discuss the domestic and caregiving themes in her writing and the process of writing and publishing a full length collection.
This interview was conducted over Zoom in July 2023 with Megan Nichols and Katherine Gaffney. It has been edited and arranged for clarity and length.
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Megan Nichols: I love your book and I have to tell you – I found it so kismet because I have a whole series of poems of my own about living in a blue house. Tell me about your blue house.
Katherine Gaffney: This book in a much younger form was my MFA thesis and originally it was called “No One Thought of Birds” which is a line from a poem that has since fallen out of the manuscript. Corey Van Landingham, who is faculty now at University of Illinois, had just come in her first semester as a visiting faculty member. We were talking about the manuscript because in its really early stages in 2018, it was a semifinalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize. She was surprised that the title made it past that point because birds have such a buzz about them – like “Oh, God, don’t have another poem about a bird!”
MN: We can’t write about birds or moons or anything fun anymore.
KG: Right, birds are no longer poetic.
Even though she liked the title, she worried the baggage of birds and poetry would hold the manuscript back. So she suggested “Fool in a Blue House” as the title. When she said it, I was like, that makes so much sense.
“Fool in a Blue House” is where the five part structure for the book came from because in our conversation, she said it kind of creates a theater vibe–the figure of the fool in theater spaces. The five act structure is sort of born from the title. It had sections already when she saw it as No One Thought of Birds, but – I can’t remember – it might have been three or four sections rather than five sections. Borrowing from theater, the title Fool in a Blue House kind of gave it that more theatrical staging framework.
MN: I have a chapbook out called Animal Unfit. Many of the poems are about my relationship with my mom and my young son. There’s this kind of ghost of a previous partner and domesticity.
KG: It sounds like “animal” is a more ominous presence in your book. Unless I’m misunderstanding you?
MN: No, that’s right.
KG: In this book, animals are points of solace. I do feel like there is more hope in the manuscript than maybe comes off initially. The Blue House, for me, is not entirely a restrictive, ominous space. It’s a more complex space than I think I expected walking into a domestic partnership. The “fool” thing for me is more of a foolish notion of what work goes into domestic partnership, goes into romantic relationships, goes into navigating familial and romantic relationships. That’s where I see the speaker as “foolish” –in navigating, and also in relying more on expectations of those relationships rather than the reality of those relationships.
I think the book is about beginning to root oneself in the reality of day to day machinations of interpersonal relationships with humans and with animals. Animals are a really big presence in the book.
MN: Similarly, I think Animal Unfit definitely has an ominous title hinting at unfit motherhood. I considered it a book ultimately about hope, and yet it felt totally appropriate and correct to start with a title that suggested something a little bit darker than it actually was. Sometimes I think of the title as the first poem of the book.
KG: It’s interesting because this manuscript ideates about being on the precipice of potentially being a mother but I am not a mother to any human being at this point. But I have another manuscript that I’m working on that ideates more deeply about motherhood. But [in Fool] I was really interested in the idea of beginning to take on that caretaker role which then invites really deep reflections on relationships with mothers and/or grandmothers or other motherly figures or parental figures. And I think something about that intergenerationalness permeates Fool in a Blue House.
MN: Fool made me think about the first time I lived with a partner – and I’m wondering if you relate to this – living with a partner for the first time without roommates was like playing mother. For me it was the first time I ever felt really responsible for somebody else’s needs in such a strong way (despite having had a younger sibling, having babysat, etc).
KG: Absolutely. This book starts to ideate about being sort of charged with the assumption of motherhood.
I have a younger brother who’s about five years younger than I am. My mother was 40 when she had me. She was 45 when my little brother came into our lives. Once I was ten to twelve years old, it was easier for people to assume I was his mother than it was to assume my mother was his mother. And so from a really young, formative age, not even quite a full tween, still somewhat a child, I heard “Oh, your child’s so darling. They’re so cute”. I took on this mother persona. That gets really complicated when you’re just starting to become a sexual being.
Partnership is not a maternal space. It’s a caregiving space, but it’s not a parental space. I think in this book and in the course of my relationship with my partner, I’m figuring out where caregiving impulses fit in, but also, how does that fit into this kind of relationship that is not a parental relationship – that is a partnership. It’s a really hard thing to calibrate.
It gets doubly complicated when you’re also trying to navigate what I kind of term, a near loss of my own mother, who I’m incredibly close to. That’s where “On My Mother’s Recent Heart Attack” poem comes in. It was terrifying to almost lose her. It was this weird storm of ways to process that aspect of my identity in relation to both my mother and my partner. How do I get that pendulum right where I’m still a daughter and not having to mother my mother in terms of caregiving for her but also serve as a partner and not as an overbearing figure in my partner’s life?
MN: That is so interesting and another similarity. My aunt had a son when she was 42 so her teen daughter or I would be assumed to be the mother when one of us held him. I was thirteen and just couldn’t believe that people would imply I was a mother – a person who had had sex. And then there is the way motherhood can almost be subtracted from sex. I live in a really conservative area so it’s common to experience that.
KG: Again, when you’re witnessing your parents interact or you’re witnessing the women in your life interact, you’re witnessing nurturance a lot of the time or motherhood, but you’re obviously not necessarily witnessing the sexual nature of those things. And again, when you have those first experiences of living with somebody else, it’s like, “Well, I have this model of how to be a mother.” But you don’t know how to fold the rest of that in.
My mother was there when these moments of being charged with being my little brother’s mother would happen. And I think I would have these flashes of emotion where it was like, I was proud of being twelve and being like “Oh, you think I’m mature enough to have a child?” but then there were these moments of real guilt. “No, my mother’s the one who does the labor of caring for us.”
Isn’t it better to assume the inverse? If you assume it’s grandma, compliment grandma? It was very strange. It desexualizes motherhood and at the same time you’re also sexualizing that person. Clearly they must have body parts that communicate to you that they are no longer a child. So you are objectifying them and charging them with a certain capacity for sexuality that we often cleanse out of the concept of motherhood but that are inherent to it.
MN: At that age I would forget sex and motherhood were connected. I remember being fifteen and finding out a classmate was pregnant. Someone I was with explicitly said she had sex – they were probably making an unfortuante crude joke. And I was shocked. I could imagine being a mother, I could imagine taking care of a baby, but I had forgotten about the sex part. I couldn’t believe my peers were actually having sex.
KG: I’m currently nannying right now and I think nannying particularly encapsulates that ability for a young person to be able to imagine, “Well, I could be a mom” but minus all of the physical encounters that go into producing a child. So I think we’re strangely habituated to the caretaking before we experience the corporeality that comes with parenthood.
I think through animals, this book is meditating on that charge of caretaking that comes with parenthood but then also wrestling with embracing one’s corporeality. In this case it’s a heterosexual relationship, but I hope it doesn’t necessarily restrict itself and some of its realizations to a strictly heterosexual relationship. Whether you’re straight or queer, we’re all inheriting heteronormativity to some extent, whether we fully reject it or whether we come to find that we identify with it as one thing or another. But my hope is that in investigating this heterosexual relationship and exploring what that looks like, it’s at least teasing out some of those inheritances and allowing for us to be more critical or push back against those inheritances.
MN: What you’re saying reminds me of another question I had, which is about the tension in domesticity. Both wanting to take care of others, wanting to have a home, wanting to do chores and feel adult. Yet it can be a slippery slope depending on the relationship.
I’m thinking about the bundt cake poem, “The World Is the Goat Who Ate My Dress Clear Off My Body”, and this idea of cooking and serving and having people around, but there is tension of expectations and not wanting to be boxed in. I found that your book explores that in a really interesting way.
KG: There’s a difference between one seeking out domesticity and one being charged with it.
I remember a faculty member asking me to send an email or something. Something very like, what I might term (which I think is really a ghost term now) but “secretarial”. I remember in the moment being like, “Oh, yeah, sure, no problem. I’ll send the email.”
And then I walked away from it being like, hang on a second. Like, fuck that. Why can’t he send the email?
There is this very old fifties/sixties mentality about, oh, well, “Women do the typing and women do the emailing” and that still permeates. And it wasn’t a big deal – it wasn’t a big email, but it kind of triggered this response in me.
I think the writing of these poems has led me toward the work I’ve been doing in terms of scholarship from the PhD program here at University of Southern Mississippi. I’ve been reading a lot about Dorothy Wordsworth and reading her journals. This is William Wordsworth’s sister. And I think a lot of feminist scholars at one point in the history of her scholarship really wanted to resist her domesticity as something productive.
I think some of that comes from Mary Wollstonecraft, who was basically a contemporary (a little bit earlier than her [Dorothy]), who was like, yeah, fuck domesticity. I don’t give a shit about that, I hardly want to be a mom. I have a kid, but it’s not really my bag. I don’t want to maintain a home, whatever. And other people like Hannah More and Charlotte Smith, who ended up being breadwinners for their family through their writing, and yet they were still charged with this domestic work. So they’re dealing with this duality of being like, I’m the one bringing home the bacon, but Tom over there, (whoever the spouse is) isn’t wanting to bake the freaking bread or put dinner on the table.
So there’s the Virginia Woolf adage of like, you have to kill the angel of what it means to be a woman in order to be a professional writer. Part of what this book [Fool] was trying to wrestle with is do we have to kill the angel entirely?
Some of the critiques in the scholarship about Dorothy are that she was serving William. She often actually was his scribe as he wrote poems aloud. But she was also incredibly generative in her own journals and in my interpretation saw the process of baking, gardening, and housekeeping and all of that, as very generative for her creativity.
I think it’s a matter of domesticity not being the expectation, but being sought out by the individual. It’s a matter of agency. If you have agency in relation to domesticity your relationship to domesticity is so dramatically different. It can become a joy. The book wants domestic processes to be a fountain of creativity and solace rather than a charge or a duty. That’s where the domestic plays into it. It’s reclaiming it in the context of a being that has agency.
MN: Share some advice you’d give new writers who are curious about publishing.
KG: Just because it’s not in print yet doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile poem. Just because you don’t get it published immediately after you’ve written it doesn’t mean it’s not going to find a home. I wrote poems in my MFA – three or four years prior, maybe five years prior, to publication. It can take years sometimes for a poem to find a home.
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Katherine Gaffney completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared in jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. She has attended the Tin House Summer Writing Workshop, the SAFTA Residency, and the Sewanee Writers Conference as a scholar. Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, was published at Finishing Line Press. Her first full-length collection, Fool in a Blue House, won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. She now lives and teaches in Champaign, Illinois
