I Can’t Be Your Mother

The ICBYM Project began as a concept in 2020 when I first envisioned writing a chapbook of poetry that attempted to reckon with the complex emotional experience of deciding not to have children as an able-bodied, single woman of childbearing age. After several rounds of revision and with consideration of the marketability and reproducibility of chapbooks in the current publishing climate, it became clear to me that I wanted my work to exist as a full-length collection of poetry. I wound up with 45 pages of poetry that I felt were strong and fully captured my personal experience, and I am proud to say that 12 poems from the original manuscript have been published in the last five years in literary magazines such as The Southern Review, Pinch Literary Magazine, and The Great Lakes Review, among others. 

Feeling like I had said all that I could say about my own experience, I sent the completed manuscript to a dozen or so publishers, but unfortunately received only rejections. As many of you may know, publishing a book of poetry in 2025 through traditional publishing is no easy feat, particularly due to the saturation of wonderful poets writing wonderful poetry that they want the world to see. While I love that writing is such an accessible art form and that so many people find solace in the writing of poetry, the sheer number of writers competing for publication makes it hard to get eyes on your work. The other problem is that the general public doesn't tend to buy a lot of poetry books anymore, making it hard to profit in the industry. As a result, most publishers charge a fee to read manuscripts, which can make it hard for people (like me) who don't have disposable income to even submit their work for consideration. A dozen rejections were not just emotionally difficult to accept; it was also a financial blow that made me seriously reconsider whether the work was truly ready for publication. 

Something in the back of my mind kept telling me that the manuscript wasn't complete. Yes, I had exhausted my ability to articulate my own experiences in new and different ways, but I still felt that I hadn't captured anywhere close to the true breadth of considerations and experiences of the purposefully child-free women of the world. There was something powerful in the hyperfixation on my own experience, but also something myopic and diminutive about the work when it came to my ability to accomplish what I really wanted to accomplish, which was to create a collection of poetry that perpetuates a conversation about the child-free choice and its many complexities, particularly in the current socio-political climate. 

With all these things considered and some encouragement from friends, I had the idea to meld this project with another that I had once fantasized about pursuing. Prior to entering my MFA program, I thought I might construct a series of interview-based poems with other women about their social-sexual experiences, considering things like sexual awareness and bodily autonomy as formative in shaping understandings of the self and relationships with others. After a little workshopping and contemplation, I worried that my idea was too similar to the Vagina Monologues and placed it on a back burner. Now, with a new frame for the interview process, I have decided to return to this idea as a way to build out the considerations of my manuscript on deciding to be child-free. 

My intention is to conduct 40-50 interviews with purposefully child-free women or female-identifying people about how and why they made their decision and the effects it has had on their lives. All of this information from the interviews will be kept in a databank that will be used to construct a set of 15-20 new poems for the collection. The poems will mostly work in the persona mode, meaning that I will take on a fictional identity as the voice of the poem and attempt to capture in poetic language the diverse experiences of the interviewees. Importantly, the poems will not function as a 1-to-1 mirror for the interviews, and I will never take on the voice of a specific interviewee as a persona; rather, the collected experiences of many interviewees will be used to create a variety of entirely invented persona voices for the poems. Through this collection of invented voices, I hope to expand the current work of the collection to encompass a wider range of considerations and experiences that speak to a woman's choice to be child-free.