Nadia Prupis: Fecund starts off with a section titled “Hysterical Pregnancy,” which was itself published earlier this year as a standalone chapbook. What is the throughline between the two texts, or the idea behind separating them and then later reabsorbing for this larger project?

Katie Ebbitt: Fecund started in 2018 and has been re-written many times. The second section of the book, the “I-XL” portion, was part of the original project, and “Hysterical Pregnancy” came later. Partially, I was influenced by reading Jacqueline Frost’s book Young Americans, which is divided into two sections that feel connected but separate. Lisa Robertson does this too—divided a book into modules almost, or the book is sectioned out in terms of tonality. Fecund’s thematic resonance grapples with autonomy and positioning itself in space and time, and maybe the fascia of the book is trying to position oneself in time and feeling unable to do so, and how time relates to biology or how biology can steal time away, or gift time. “Hysterical Pregnancy” is more narrativized meditation on autonomy as opposed to “I-XL,” where there’s more externalization of that contemplation. I guess I would say the first half of the book is kind of internal, the second half of the book is external, and the entire book is grappling with autonomy and selfhood and the limits of autonomy.

NP: I noticed that too, that it goes from internal to external, which I thought was interesting considering how heavily pregnancy is a theme in the text. You write a lot about fertility and these sort of corporeal and somatic kind of experiences and questions. What inspires these themes of the body to come up in these cyclical ways?

KE: This book began really in response to Brett Kavanaugh being placed onto the Supreme Court. I’ve always been really interested in reproductive rights and access to abortion, and I’m a healthcare worker myself. When this project started, I was in a school-based health center working in their mental health department, but it was predominantly focusing on teen sexual health and access to various resources, and one of those resources was abortion services. And I’ve been following the way in which abortion rights have been stripped away. And with Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, it seemed like this concerted political campaign from the Right was taking hold in a way where there would be the potentiality of Roe V. Wade being reversed. The first poem written for this project, which actually isn’t even included in this book, was this prayer of fecundity I was writing as I was reading the news and feeling really disembodied and fearful.

It’s a strange thing when you are fearing for your body because of an external force. You’re contemplating the possibility of needing care that you will not have the potential to access and ways in which the state strips away such basic autonomy. So the book started thinking about that. At first, it was all kind of prayers directed at potentiality and fecundity and choice, and reflecting on what choice means and kind of the limitations of choice and the things we decide for ourselves versus the things that we don’t.

I come from a background which is heavily influenced by Catholicism, and the book had this religious tonality to it that I think is still embedded within the text, and I can’t get away from it. But I didn’t want it to so explicitly be a book of prayer. I was also playing with this idea of writing a book that’s ostensibly about abortion, and not actually ever using the word “abortion.” I don’t know why that was something that I was focused on. It just seems that so often people don’t talk about the experience of abortion, and that’s part of why the Right was so able to do what it did. Because the experience of abortion—similarly to birth or menopause, or so many things that happen to individuals with a certain kind of biology—these biological developmental phases aren’t really talked about.

I was also interested in vocalizing a helplessness, while retaining that helplessness by not naming the thing that I was writing about. Fecund started with that kind of intention and then I just kept rewriting it over and over again. And Roe v. Wade obviously was repealed. Before then there was the Covid pandemic. It was a book that was hard for me to write, and in some ways is something I want to be out in the world now, but also feels very strange, because it is a compilation of all this writing over such a long period of time, so I feel very removed from some of the poems, or like some of the voice or sentiment doesn’t echo where I am now. I think “Hysterical Pregnancy,” which was the last piece which was written for this book, is maybe a more emblematic representation of where I am as a writer today. And the writing that I’m doing today is more narrative and internal as opposed to this more externalized prayer, or more explicitly political sentiment.

NP: Everything is political, even when it’s not, so it’s hard to get away from it.

Outside of Brett Kavanaugh’s instatement, how much are you writing about personal experience, versus engaging in a dialogue with social conditions and conditioning? I’m thinking particularly of the “death of the mother” sequence:

the death of the mother at the clinic

the death of the mother at home

the death of the mother in the car

the death of the mother in the bathroom

the death of the mother in bed

the death of the mother, premature

the death of the mother

the death of the mother

the death of the mother

On the surface, that stanza seems like it could be a reference to your clinical work, but it feels much more intimate in a way.

KE: The “death of the mother” is trying to do two things: the first is a nod to family abolition and the death of the mother within a capitalistic context. And the second is explicitly thinking through “mothers” dying during childbirth or dying because they are unable to receive care for abortion. I was thinking about how the U.S. continues to have the highest maternal death rate, with the rate of Black women being by far the highest, of high-income countries. I was thinking about how a potential life is being prioritized over an actual, embodied person. As far as the line’s relationship to my clinical work, I suppose I am thinking about the health care industry and how ironically fatal it can be.

NP: I find that, even though your voice has evolved, your style consistently has this very thin physicality to it on the page, like it’s almost trying to slink by you, while whispering everything you need to know if you listen closely enough. It feels like the reader has intercepted a radio transmission from the abyss where it’s so far away, sometimes it’s just a word at a time being projected, but every word is so critical. In their blurb of your book, Anne Lesley Selcer describes Fecund’s environment as “the ambient violence of patriarchal time,” which I thought was a really apt description of that texture. Do you feel like you intentionally write to sort of obscure your voice in a way? How do you hear your voice?

KE: I think the feminine voice—this is a generalization—can be deeply distorted and obscured, and some of this is just by nature of patriarchy and capitalism. It’s hard within an oppressive system to actually have a clear voice. So there is a degree of play within that. I also think some of it stems from control, and that whisper is really wanting the reader to quiet themselves. I try to be very intentional with the way that I lay out the work, and the way that it is on the page is the way that it is intended to be read aloud, through the specifics of the line breaks, or where things are supposed to be paused. I think it’s an intentional distance, because those who decide to look are going to have to actually look and hopefully focus. I think it’s a text that could almost be overlooked, because it isn’t immediately resonant when you look at it—it is a whisper, it is a lot of lines, and there is a slinkier quality to it. So some of it is about control and demanding a certain degree of attention, and some of it is just a vulnerability of what it means to speak about something which relates so personally to oneself. And the instant intimacy related to something that also involves sexuality or desire and the ways in which that’s confusing to articulate.

Part of the reason it took so long to write this book is I was just having an impossible time finding the language. I’m trying to talk about something or write about something which is really important to me, and how to make that important to other people. And I do think sometimes, when you’re talking in a more feminine voice, there is a fear of dismissal, and my own psychology is very involved in this book. I’m someone who is not frightened to share vulnerability, but knows that vulnerability also comes at a cost. You can be hurt. So I think it’s true, what you’re saying about feminine voice or something outside of male identification. It’s both dealing with embodiment, and also really struggling to find place within that embodiment. Because feminine identity is so fluid, it’s hard to place yourself within the definition of what it means to be feminine. And I also think there’s a very specific confine of femininity. I think that’s very felt by people who have a feminine identity.

NP: It's interesting that you said fluid, because I felt that as well, where the voice is—yes, it’s detached, and it’s floating above you, but there is this desire to be snatched down as well. Like the line, “reach / through / myself / into / another / to say yes / to degradation / repeat / yes, yes.”

It starts off almost like theory—“reach through myself into another”—which could be read in a lot of different ways, but it has a sort of spiritual, rather than physical, essence. And then the next line immediately is very much in the body. And so it almost feels to me that the voice is saying, “I’ll only float away if you let me. I don’t want you to. I want to be pulled down to earth. Someone please pull me down to earth.” And there’s another section that says “to drown / myself / in a lake / looking for / a star / that was / in fact / the moon.” That really felt like an encapsulation of what I was sensing, that extreme desire that’s being presented in a whisper, these themes almost blend into each other like an enmeshed relationship, where the desire and mistrust, intimacy and trauma, are at equal power.

KE: Totally. It’s so interesting in some ways, because I’m currently working on another manuscript which I think is more explicitly dealing with the desire to ground. And I think that people always write the same thing over and over and over again. And so it’s interesting to confront the themes that you probably will carry throughout your lifetime. That last line you mention, I very specifically remember writing it, I was in Mexico City at the time, and I was trying to write about water lilies because I grew up in Michigan, and my grandmother would pluck water lilies out of the water when we were on the pontoon boat, and there was something about that act of plucking, and the pull of the waterlily out of the lake, that had this very specific tension when I would do it for myself. And it’s always really delightful to find these water lilies that were in blossom. There’s some kind of myth of the waterlily and someone accidentally drowning themselves because they’re trying to find a star in a lake, when it’s only a reflection of the moon. To look in the wrong direction for the thing you desire to the point it hurts you. I do think that the book in a lot of ways is clearly dealing with trauma, and I think some of the trauma is also more explicitly detailed, but I also wanted it to not be so direct. I wanted it to reverberate in that way that trauma often reverberates, which is a space of voicelessness.

I think the way in which we try to locate ourselves within trauma so often is through the body, and it’s a strange thing of trying to locate yourself through something which has been hurt. So I think a lot of the book and my writing generally is trying to figure out how you reconcile the frustration of relying on something that has hurt you. This book in particular has to do with my body, and how my body has hurt me, and also how it sustained me, and that dialectic. I think some of it has to do with the codependency that we have on ourselves, and the unrealistic expectation of what we can give ourselves, and also throughout this book, of how the body can fail you. I think for a lot of people, pregnancy can obviously be a tremendous gift, and for a lot of people it can feel like the body has failed them. And that something has happened that they wished did not happen, and basically their pleasure was taken away from them because there was a consequence that wasn’t intended from an active desire and all of the complications and potential shame that can come from that.

And I think the book was a larger reflection of—the body is obviously political. Everything is political, but with this very specific question related to abortion, something that doesn’t necessarily even have to be political becomes deeply political, because it’s being stripped away from you. Medicine is always political, but it is kind of interesting the tiers of politics that exist within the medical industry.

NP: There is a medical theme in your writing, probably most explicitly in this line, “when the / room is / white and / instruments / silver,” as well as “I don’t want to / talk about / my dissociation / I don’t want / to take away from / my credibility.” Another motif that kept coming up for me was the idea of lineage, both in personal family history, or generational trauma, or the experience of motherhood or having a mother, but also in these circles that get bigger and bigger and start to encompass—even just in the name “Hysterical Pregnancy,” there’s a reference to hysteria as diagnosis as an era, which may itself even be cycling back now, with the rightwing shift, but also references as far as mythical creatures that embody ancient patriarchal fears, like the siren. It feels like tracing a cyclical continuance of inscrutable social conditioning of womanhood. How much of Fecund is a deliberate reference to this explicit political history, and how much of it is speaking to personal experience that happens, by itself, to reflect that history?

KE: I think some of it is that there’s no escape from time. And I think it’s really interesting to experience the way in which certain belief structures continue to persist, despite maybe a more concerted social undoing, and that happens very evidently within a medical setting, particularly if you have what is identified as a feminine body. And it’s hard to contemplate feminine experience in some ways without thinking about mythology and history, and all of the ways in which a feminized form was created. In referencing family, or a direct lineage, the influence of what it means for someone to deeply care for you and have such a decided involvement in your life—I think the decision of motherhood is a really fascinating endeavor. And as people have more of an option to not have children, it’s ironic that certain rights are being stripped away while simultaneously abortion rates have actually gone up within the last two years within the U.S., which I find kind of fascinating.

I find it interesting the ways in which, within the present, people are making the decision to have children, take on the mantle of motherhood, in terms of identity and choice and relationship to one’s own form, and also potentially regret, or a lot of different things. And maybe certain kind of emotions that you have to let go of in order to be a caretaker. I think part of that reflection is just that I’ve been so deeply impacted by my work as a care worker. I think we all labor in a way where care work is explicit and implicit, and we’re all care laborers, really, at the end of the day. Care labor is so distinctly human. It’s interesting to be in a profession where someone is paying you to perform a very specific form of emotional labor for them and that you have this kind of continuous relationship with this individual. Which is obviously deeply confined within the structures of capitalism and bureaucracy, and all of these various things.

NP: It's so interesting to me, therapy and mental health care and these things where the emotional labor required is so much of your entire profession. And yet you’re expected to put it in a little box and not let it affect you. I have so much respect for anyone in healthcare of any sort but because mental health can be so abstract, the stakes feel so different, and they feel higher and more precarious in many ways, especially because we don’t really respect mental health in the same way that we do physical, as a society.

KE: I’ll oftentimes describe the healing process to people like this: if you really severely broke the leg, and we’re doing PT, even after a year of PT, you’re going to feel that impact. And it’s not that mental health conditions are an accident. It’s hard feeling sick and not understanding why or not having language. It’s very easy to dismiss oneself. And therapy often is a space to remember yourself, because perpetually throughout the day we’re just forgetting who we are and what our needs are.

I feel very lucky to be a therapist. There are so many different forms of labor that I know I just couldn’t do. It’s hard to find something you can do that will sustain you to some degree within a really oppressive system. So it’s funny because I think finding therapy as a vocation was deeply therapeutic for me. I’m a much more confident therapist than a poet. I still kind of feel deeply embarrassed being a poet.

NP: Me too. When you said therapy helps us remember to come back to ourselves, I thought that spoke interestingly to Fecund—my ultimate sense is that it’s not about the choice available, it’s that having lost, or having experienced trauma or betrayal or these difficult circumstances, the speaker comes to realize it’s impossible to abandon oneself. Even when detached, even in that feeling of floating away, but then finding something in the language that pulls you back down. That was something that was grounding me the most throughout the text. And it felt similarly interesting to this journey you’re describing where you can still feel the impact, but the process of healing is still occurring, and the self being the ultimate grounding force.

KE: I feel very seen in that. Again, it’s so funny, because the manuscript I’m working on currently is much more specifically about this attachment to self and ultimately relying on self and giving oneself enough space in order to exist, and basically just how to walk in a straight line. So I think through the contemplation of pregnancy and the limits of control, and also simultaneously, I’m also asking, at the end of the day, what am I going to look like? Why is the limit the thing that is controlling me? “Why” is sort of the dominant thing I’m focused on.

And I think just trying to figure out how not to be trapped within one’s own perceived existence and understand the plasticity of existence and perception. And there’s some ways in which that simply cannot be ignored with pregnancy or biological things that can happen to us. And I also think reconciling the fact that just because your body is being unruly does not necessarily mean that all control is stripped away. And thinking through a binary mindset, and trying to make that more expansive.

NP: Can you speak a bit more about the manuscript that you’re working on now?

KE: It is much more explicitly personal than any writing I’ve done before, and has a prosaic element to it, and is linked to trying to find grounding, and let go of certain people. I also feel very much a child of the 90s, and I really like mythology as well, so I was thinking I would call it Incubus, which is the sex demon that sits on your chest. So I’m writing that narrative into cohesion. And it’s funny because it took me so long to finish Fecund, and it felt like a project that just wasn’t ever going to see the light of day, and for some reason I feel really compelled to finish this current manuscript quite quickly. It’s kind of a continuation in some ways of Fecund, but I think it’s more explicitly grasping at personal psychology. And being outside of language and feeling choked when it comes to articulating self.

NP: You described Fecund in part as a “book of prayers,” and mentioned that there was an original fecundity prayer-poem that ultimately wasn't included in the text. What is your creative relationship to religion like now?

KE: The book did start as prayers and morphed into something less defined. Prayer for me is deeply grounding. I call myself culturally Catholic as the church wasn’t a forced staple of my upbringing, but there was a Catholic ethos permeating my childhood. I have always been spiritual, and ritualism has always been part of that spirituality. Historically, Catholicism has morphed in so many ways and taken on so many different cultures as it moved across the world. Religion is a deeply porous thing. You can change it and make it your own, which is why it’s so dangerous, too. I like ritualism, and I like the body, and contradiction, and Catholicism has all these things. Creativity exists in focus, and focus for me is religious.