We who are about to breed: Sean Patrick Hill.

 [In which WWAATD asks writers and other artist types about life as breeders/parents/kid-keepers.]

Name: Sean Patrick Hill

1.    What is your kid’s name, age?

My daughter, Teagan, just turned two in July.

2.    How do you balance your time between parenting and writing?

This is actually a significant question for me, the reason being my own work, school, a book contract, and parenting schedule often, even consistently, conflict. For work I adjunct classes, which has its own challenge as far as scheduling; for one thing, I only have to show up, as of this fall, two days a week to actually teach the classes, but then I have to factor in time while I’m home to get the planning and grading done. Now that I am working toward an MFA at Warren Wilson, a program that expects some 25 hours of week devotion, all that reading and writing must be scheduled as well. At the same time, I’m working on a hiking guide for the Red River Gorge of Kentucky, which will take about a year; this requires me not only to do the writing, prepare the maps, and pore over photos, but to actually drive the nearly 300-miles round trip every so often to actually hike the trails I’m writing about. My wife works close to full-time, which means I am home with our daughter most of the week, and this is where the time gets tight.I’ve learned that any spare time at all has to be spent on my writing. I try to get up early, before the family, and get things done then–usually the actual writing, since I tend to be more clear at that point; writing, by the way, can include not only poetry, but my essays for school and the occasional freelance job, as well. Reading waits until night, after my daughter is in bed; reading, too, is varied, from the books I have to read for school (fifteen or more for this term alone) to the magazines I subscribe to: Harper’s, The Atlantic, and National Geographic. This has worked so far for the summer, but I haven’t started teaching my writing classes yet. With my wife starting college in the fall as well, I expect a challenge, to put it mildly.

3.    What is the best piece of advice about being a parent and a writer?

Donald Justice once said something along the lines of this: if we love something we make time for it. He meant poetry, of course, and he may have been talking about trying to write in relation to working as, say, a tenured professor. For me, the best piece of advice I’ve been given and I’ve given myself is, “Make the time.” For the last year or so, the best schedule for me has been to write in the morning and read in the evening, and because it seems to work I stick with it. Years ago, I used to always wake up in the middle of the night, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I happened to mention this to a friend, the poet Christopher Luna, and he said that maybe that was just my time, meaning my writing time, and that I should use it. So I’d say a parent should first establish when their most creative time is and try to stick with it. And you really have to think in hours. Just the other night, I sat down to do some “quick” edits on a poem and ended up sitting in front of this poem for an hour.And a parent should never forget a few things: parenting is extremely tiring, and there is more to do than just being a writer and a parent than necessarily comes to mind. For me, washing dishes jumps to mind. The only major dishwasher in our house is human-powered, and so I spend a lot of time doing that. Food, in general, is time-consuming. Because I am home the most I also do the majority of the cooking and shopping. Good advice? Cook easy meals. Shopping, too, gets cumbersome, not to mention the ever-growing list of errands and things that need attending to: flat tires, running out of diapers, going to the bank, the usual. All of this has to be factored in.

As last pieces of advice, I’d say first it’s important to make the day as fun as possible, by which I mean have fun with your kids. Teagan and I go to the park a lot, play with her toys, read massive amounts of books. I’ve even taken her hiking. Secondly, have at least some time for yourself to go for a walk, read the paper, have a coffee. Even if that time is only nap time, but I’ll tell you, nap time is a crucial part of the day. A lot of stuff gets done then. Most importantly, you have to remember to spend time with your spouse; I know that for me, the combination of work, errand-running, and being a working writer often crowds my marriage. I assign importance to things that need to be done for degrees and pay rather than more abstract things like “love,” which has caused me undue grief.

4.    How has your writing changed since becoming a parent?

I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I still don’t think I can answer it to my satisfaction. By and large, I have considered that being a parent changes you, and that will necessarily change your writing. What I mean is a complete shift in sensibility and perspective. I look at the world now as a parent, as someone who wants his daughter to grow up healthy and stable. This draws attention to things that are faulty in the world, and so this may be the cause of my writing certain philosophically-bent poems. My poem “Tannin,” for example, which was published at DIAGRAM, is to my thinking a kind of effort to deal with a world that will not conform to my ideals. The other poem in that issue, “Utah,” points to something else that a lot of parents may know, which is this movement toward nostalgia, thinking back to where I wasn’t a parent, when I was “free” or whatever. Finally, my poem “Rimbaud at 40,” which is at Drunken Boat, is just pure frustration with getting old, with having all these responsibilities. The finer points of form and style I don’t think I can answer to, yet. It may take time for me to look back and clearly see my development. One thing, though, is for sure: my writing has gotten faster.You see what I mean: writing changes your subject because the subject of the poem, which is always from the wellspring of your identity, is a largely changed you. Strangely, I find I have not written extensively about my daughter or about being a father. Though she comes up in my poems, I haven’t written about the actual, specific experience of being a parent. I can’t say why. Perhaps I have a hang-up over that, a feeling of inadequacy. For this reason I have seldom written love poems; I always fear they will come out sentimental. I may simply be avoiding the subject because it is to big to handle. I think about the Yeats poem to his daughter, and how I sometimes just slip into my daughter’s room to watch her sleeping. But what can I say about it that hasn’t been said, and better?

5.    Tell us something we don’t know about you and being a writer-slash-parent.

If there is one thing people don’t know about me as both a writer and a parent, it’s that I quit a full-time career–a risky move, obviously, given the economy–to do so.I moved to Louisville, Kentucky just after my daughter was born to take a job in the public schools here. I taught high school English in an urban district and it nearly killed me. I was stressed out, couldn’t sleep, my health suffered. My writing was wrecked; the only time I had to write that year, really, was over a two week span for winter break. I took the job to assure my wife a year off with our daughter and to take advantage of the health insurance. I figured the money and job would allow me the freedom to write, but I was wrong. I quickly grew resentful of the 40-plus hour weeks, the stress, and the loss of my writing time. So I quit. In the spring of 2010, in the midst of this job, I found out I had been awarded a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center for that summer. My wife called me at work; it must have been a particularly tough day because I wept when she told me. I spent a month in Vermont, writing, reading, talking with other artists and writers and it was there I made the decision to resign. My family, my in-laws, even my wife to some degree, all thought I was crazy to do this. But what has haunted me for years was a quote from Woody Allen’s Manhattan,where Meryl Streep’s character says of Allen’s something to the effect of his being scared to make the sacrifices necessary to be a real artist. I couldn’t help but believe I would never be happy, parent or not, if I did not simply follow my path and be what I had wanted to be for twenty years, a working writer. Creeley pulled it off, and still lived a kind of bohemian life; not that I want to do that, but there is always a possibility.Since then, we’ve lived a life that, though more or less comfortable, has not been without its struggle. We are decidedly not middle class. Money is always a concern, the multitudes of bills, the loss of family health insurance. My daughter and wife are taken care of now–my wife works now–though I am still without it. Despite what people say, it is expensive to live in Kentucky. But I remember, too, a neighbor in Portland who made a living of being a writer, and she had always told me that you just adjust your conceptions of household economy, to wit: so you give up state health insurance/steady income/etc., OK, you find something that works for you, you say I’m going to have to do it this way. Granted, the freelance pay I make is mostly pocket change, and adjuncting classes is the price for paying rent, but my writing, as well as the recognition for it, has expanded. Indeed, I do not think I would have gotten into Warren Wilson without the firm commitment of being a writer, which certainly included going to Vermont, as well as getting up before dawn to write the poems that would eventually be published in the past half-year.

In short, I may or may not be an anomaly in America: the parent who eschews full-time careerism in lieu of being an “artist.” Or, at least for now. What most don’t know too, is that I am now 40 years old. Maybe I’m a bit late, but it was kind of Tony Hoagland, my adviser, to tell me I was young, and to tell me that he adjuncted for over a decade before he landed a gig. But there are plusses, too: I spend time with my daughter. My wife and I both got scholarships due to our tax year. As to that, I’ve learned things most writers don’t know about the tax code. I have a good accountant who has consistently gotten us large refunds, simply by the amount of things a writer can write off: mileage, paper, postage, equipment. At any rate, I am not a high school teacher any more, though I went into it years and years ago. In identifying myself as a poet, it has opened up numerous opportunities I never would have seen, and for that I am grateful. I don’t know where all this will lead, but I see that it is leading in the right direction.

And, most important, it is my conviction that my daughter know her father not as an embittered man who gave up his dreams to work a job he didn’t care for, if not outright hated, but as someone willing to take risks to be who he is, do what he loves, and find the rewards in that. If I can model this for my daughter, so that she can be happy in whatever she becomes, I will be doubly grateful.