Interview with Claire Taylor: “Returning to Writing as a Mother”

Melissa Ashley Hernandez
April 30th, 2026

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               I sent out a query on Bluesky asking for people who wanted to talk about their experience with motherhood to reach out. Three people responded and asked to participate. I conducted these interviews more as conversations, which felt more personal and, by extension, more appropriate for the vulnerability that can arise when discussing this topic. I went in with no prepared questions, just an open mind and a desire for humanness through the stories of strangers.

[Content Warning: This interview mentions experiences with depression and PPD.]

(You can read our Mums issue here!)

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Interview with Claire Taylor

WILD WILLOW MAGAZINE: Hi Claire! Wonderful to be able to do this interview with you. We didn’t talk much beforehand, which means we can jump right into it! What led you to want to do this interview in the first place?

CLAIRE TAYLOR: I am always interested in conversations about writing and motherhood because becoming a mother was the primary catalyst for my return to writing. I was surprised by how much motherhood opened me up creatively and helped me clarify and define what I wanted most for myself and my writing practice. But at the same time, being a mom is the main thing that steals the time and energy that could otherwise go toward my writing. I don’t think I would be writing at all if I hadn’t become a mother, but I’m also often not writing when I wish I could be because I have to prioritize mothering. I think it’s an interesting dichotomy that the thing that inspires me to write is also the thing that keeps me from doing so. 

WWM: What led you to want to write about motherhood? Please talk a bit about that!

CT: For much of my life I have suffered from depression and have always used writing as way to process that experience and my emotions. When I had my first child, I was very cognizant of my risk of postpartum depression, but was not prepared for the degree of postpartum anxiety I experienced. My initial desire to write about motherhood was mostly about needing a way to try to make sense of and release everything that I was feeling–the highs and the lows, the love and the rage, the sheer intensity of all of my emotions. Becoming a mother dismantles your being and creates a new and different version of yourself. I needed to work out who that person was and get to know her. I chose to do that through writing. 

WWM: “Becoming a mother dismantles your being and creates a new and different version of yourself.”

That’s a really powerful statement. We often go through many metamorphoses throughout our lives, but carrying a child has been proven to physically (and majorly) alter your body and mind. With something as physiological as that, can you explain what you mean when you say dismantled? Having a baby is much bigger than breaking up with a long-term partner or landing a dream job. How different was this new you?

CT: I think that all major life changes (good ones and bad ones; breakups, career shifts, losing people we love, marriage, illness, etc.) lead to new versions of ourselves. Your priorities shift, your connections to people change and you need different kinds of support and community. How you come to think about yourself and carry yourself in the world shift in response to all kinds of changes in your life. But motherhood is such a whole body, a whole self change. You have to learn how to care for this tiny, helpless being while also recovering from 40 weeks of increasing physical demands on your body, culminating in the intensity of labor. You have to do it all while sleep-deprived and while your hormones are shifting all over the place in ways you can’t predict. I had to be very careful about the stories I was telling myself about myself as I entered into motherhood. I had to find a way to be softer and more compassionate toward myself than I had ever been at any other point in my life. I had to learn how to let other people really, truly help me when I needed help, while simultaneously trusting and asserting that I knew what was best for myself and my baby and the family and life I was building. There are so many ways to feel like you’re doing motherhood wrong and so few ways to feel like you’re actually nailing it, and I had to learn to just be comfortable with and confident in the effort I was putting out and the decisions I was making. I would stumble more than I would succeed, and that is just the reality of parenting. I think that’s largely why I felt like I could take on my desire to write and be published at that point in my life because, through parenting, I was learning how to be comfortable with the idea that I could survive the struggle and the disappointment, take the wins when they came and feel confident about my ability to keep growing through these repeated efforts. 

WWM: How long did it take you to settle into this new personhood and pick up writing again?

CT: I started writing pretty quickly after having my first baby. I went back to work at 8 weeks postpartum, which was much too soon given the physical nature of my work as a massage therapist at the time. But those quiet hours in my massage studio gave my mind a chance to explore some of what I was feeling and processing and I would come up with story ideas and poems in my head while I was working. When my business shut down during the pandemic, I shifted my attention to writing in an even bigger way, really needing that creative outlet to process that experience, and my writing career has snowballed from there. 

WWM: You say you had to be very careful about the stories you were telling yourself about yourself. Were you the focal point in your creative writing after you gave birth? If not, what kind of subjects did you write about?

CT: Yes, I wrote mostly about myself and my personal experience and the confusing range of emotions I was feeling on a daily basis. A number of my early pieces about motherhood, though, were written directly to my son, sort of like small love letters to him, something he could read if I died before he was able to form any memory of me that would let him know how deeply I loved him. As I mentioned in a response to an earlier question, I had a lot of postpartum anxiety and it manifested not only as a fear that my child would die suddenly or unexpectedly, but that I would. I was very anxious about missing out on the opportunity to know him and watch him grow. For the most part, my early writing about motherhood focused on processing the intensity of my emotions–the intensity of the love I felt for my child, the intensity of the overwhelm I experienced from the daily tasks of mothering. Most of this writing came in the form or poetry or personal essays. I mostly put my fears about death into my fiction. I wrote about people who were grieving, who were recovering from illness, who were processing loss in some way. Many of my characters were mothers whose children had died or disappeared, or never came into being. Fiction is a good place to work out your worst fears while maintaining a safe distance from them. 

WWM: When you say shifted your attention “in a bigger way”, what do you mean by that? And I couldn’t help but notice you used the word “snowball”. Could you dive into your work and how it’s evolved since you first entered motherhood, through the pandemic, to now?

CT: Prior to the pandemic, I had been writing in spare moments, my little pockets of free time around work and parenting. Once the pandemic started and I wasn’t working anymore, the energy that I previously put into my job shifted to writing and it largely stayed that way even after my business opened again. Because I had a young child who was not part of the initial wave of vaccinations, our family had to continue to significantly limit our exposure, so I returned to work very slowly, only doing a few appointments each month. The balance between the amount of time and energy I was devoting to work versus writing remained shifted heavily to writing, and in the years that followed, it moved further and further in that direction, in part out of desire and in part because of some physical limitations I developed that eventually required surgery to treat and led to my moving on from my massage career entirely. As that shift was happening, I had more and more pieces published, and had two chapbooks come out, and just recently had my first full-length poetry collection published. It’s been nine years since my son was born and that initial shift into more focused writing occurred, so I guess it’s not an insignificant length of time, but the amount that I have written and published in that period is well beyond what I could have imagined in those early days. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point, I allowed myself to envision writing as more than a hobby–it was a career I could pursue, a vocation that could bring a greater sense of purpose and meaning to my life. Once I started thinking about it that way, I was willing to devote more attention and effort to longer and more difficult projects, to think about my writing not as a bunch of single pieces but as an expansive body of work that I will carry with me. I was open to trying out a greater range of genres and formats, and starting projects that will take years to complete. 

WWM: Postpartum mood disturbances are extremely common, with something like 85% of women experiencing some sort of anxiety, but PPD is a bit less common. It’s said that about 15% of women around the world develop some form of PPD post birth, give or take 5% depending on the study. And even though there is such a precedent, there is also a lot of shame entangled in it, and because of that, it is all very hush-hush around the topic. Could you speak a bit about your postpartum anxiety (only what you’re comfortable with, of course) and how you learned to manage it outside of writing?

CT: My postpartum anxiety largely took the form of panic attacks. I have always struggled with at least a small degree of generalized anxiety, but not panic attacks like I had after the birth of my first son. I would be walking down the street feeling fine and then suddenly I couldn’t move. I felt frozen with fear, convinced that whatever I did next would create a ripple effect that would somehow lead to my death. I would feel like I couldn’t breathe. Or I’d go to walk down the stairs while carrying the baby and would have to pause halfway down, sure that if I took another step, I would slip and break my neck and die. Things like that, and I would have to pause and really focus on slowing my breath and calming my mind. I guess one positive thing about having struggled with my mental health since a young age was that by that point in time, I had a lot of knowledge about anxiety and depression and had a whole host of techniques to fall back on to help manage them. Whenever I was panicked, I would look around and name five things in my environment that were the same in that moment as they had been the day before. It helped pull me out of my mind and back into the physical space and was a good reminder that I was safe, things were the same as they had always been, and I was okay. 

I was also lucky that a bunch of my close friends and I had all had babies right around the same time, so I had a great network of smart, loving women to reach out to about how I was feeling. Just being in that same chaotic space of early parenthood alongside people you trust is so helpful. Interestingly, this same intense panic returned during my first trimester when I got pregnant with my second child. It turned out that my thyroid levels were really out of balance, and my OB told me that was likely contributing to the intensity of my anxiety, so it’s possible that was also responsible for my previous postpartum anxiety and I just didn’t know it because once you’re postpartum, all care basically stops. 

WWM: It’s really great that you had that community to help and alleviate some of that fear. Earlier in our conversation, you said, “I think it’s an interesting dichotomy that the thing that inspires me to write is also the thing that keeps me from doing so,” regarding motherhood and writing. Can you talk a bit about the balance between making sure you give your writing the attention it needs while balancing caring for your family’s physical and emotional needs?

CT: It’s a hard balance for sure, and one that has, in some ways, become more difficult as my first son has gotten older. He requires less of my time and attention during the day than my three-year-old does, obviously, but he has a lot more going on in the evenings and during the weekends than he used to, and that has diminished my ability to use those hours as additional writing time.

I am very lucky in that I have some childcare help during the week, but it is limited. I have about 18 hours a week of dedicated childcare coverage into which I have to fit my own writing, the work I do for the magazine I run, any additional editing projects I’ve taken on, and anything I want to do for my own health and sanity. It’s a lot to fit into not that many hours, but I use the time well. I’m good at sitting down and getting straight to it, not overthinking early drafts too much and not feeling overly precious about my work. I also carry a notepad and pen with me most of the time, or add ideas to my Notes app while I’m sitting around at my son’s sports practices or piano lessons. I think that becoming a mother teaches you very quickly how to multitask and how to move in and out and back into activities in a way that feels pretty seamless. Your attention is so often being pulled in multiple directions at once. So I can start a piece, get interrupted, and then get right back into it without too much trouble. 

Sometimes I purposefully tell my kids that I am not available for them because I am busy writing – I want them to see me actively dedicating myself to my work and my passions. I think it’s important that they know there are multiple facets of my life that give me a sense of meaning and purpose. But I also will let the writing fall away for stretches of time if my family is in a period of greater need. I know I will get back to it eventually, and sometimes these pauses prove really helpful in solving problems with a piece I’ve been struggling with, or put me in a different headspace that leads to new project ideas. Stepping away from a piece of writing and giving it some space is sometimes more useful for me than digging in and trying to force it to become something it doesn’t want to be. 

WWM: I can see it being important for your kids to see you managing your passion and a family successfully. Do you feel like that adds extra pressure to you at all?

CT: No, not pressure really, but I think maybe a greater sense of purpose. It’s tough to build a life around a creative pursuit, especially in the US where the arts are so underfunded and undervalued. I have no delusions that I will be able to turn my writing into a lucrative career and I am lucky to be in a position right now where I can still pursue it without having to rely on it financially. I want to model for my children that creative endeavors are worthy pursuits, that doing work that brings you joy and intellectual stimulation and sense of connection with the world is worth the effort. I want to show them that you can have a happy, fulfilling life that balances a wide range of needs and desires. You can carve out space for creativity and passions–it may not always be as much space as you’d like, but any little bit helps to fill you up, helps to make you feel whole. 

WWM: And some less existential questions: what are your favorite pieces of work? It could be books, specific poems, a short story, or even a piece of visual artwork. Just your favorite!

CT: Oh, gosh, this is a hard question. There are so many. There are a few books that I come back to again and again, especially when I need to feel inspired or need help reengaging with writing. Ordinary People is the first book I read as a kid that made me want to be a writer. It’s not a book for kids, and I probably read it much too young, but as a child who was only a few years away from being diagnosed with depression, I really connected with the depiction of sadness and hollowness in the characters, and was amazed by the way writing could convey those feelings. 

I love Evvie Drake Starts Over and read that book whenever I need a good reminder of how to build romantic tension or write relatable, realistic dialogue. 

I love stories about complicated families, and Flight is probably my favorite book in that specific genre. 

There are too many poems and poets to list here, but Kate Baer’s poem, “Idea” is one that really speaks to how I am trying to live my life, especially as I get older. I just want to take everything in, appreciate what I have and what I’ve learned and whatever lessons are still to come, pull everyone in my orbit into a tight embrace, and find a way for all of us to love our lives a little more.

WWM: And in the same vein, because of the nature of this interview: are there any pieces of art, visual or written, that you really connect with as a mother?

CT: “Rain, New Year’s Eve” by Maggie Smith. It’s in the same vein as “Idea” but specifically tied to motherhood.

“Let me love the world like a mother.
Let me be tender when it lets me down.” 

Right now especially, I am trying to apply a mother’s hope and tenderness to all aspects of the world and my life. Let me not lose my optimism that care and intention lead to healing. 

WWM: One last question: If you could speak to the version of yourself just before becoming a mother, what would you tell her about her writing and about herself? 

CT: About her writing, I think I would tell her that everything you write now is practice for the things you will write later. It’s all leading in some way to all your future writing. Every discarded draft, every truly embarrassingly crappy piece of writing is needed to build the skills that you will come to rely on in the future.

And about herself, I would tell her that the sorrow will continue to come and go but she’ll learn how to better manage it, how to turn it into words that will help her understand herself, appreciate herself and that will bring comfort and understanding to other people in their moments of sadness. I would tell her, don’t worry, you build a good life and, more often than not, you are immeasurably happy.

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A huge thank you to Claire for granting us the time to conduct this interview! If you’d like to support her, you can visit her links here: Website | Newsletter | Bluesky