Life Bearers and Culture Makers

A Conversation with April Tierney
on Shifting the Paradigm of Motherhood

April Tierney is a poet, activist, craftswoman, mother, and lover of stories who has spent most of her life along the foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The author of four volumes of poetry, she describes her creative practice as listening “to the many voices spilling over the body of the world.” 

Her most recent collection, Matter / Mother (Homebound Publications, August 2024), explores the mysterious and complicated terrain of early motherhood. In these poems, penned during the first two and a half years of her daughter’s life, Tierney revels in the wildness of her new role as mother. She also rejects the fantasy of modern motherhood, rebuking a culture that stretches mothers beyond what is reasonable, shames them for taking up space, and isolates them from the wisdom of their ancestors.

I was honored to receive an advanced copy of Matter / Mother this spring. The 42 poems in the collection deeply resonated with my own experiences as a mother, and I found myself wanting to know more about Tierney’s life, her vision for a more communal culture of motherhood, and how the natural world informs her responses to the world's brokenness. She agreed to a conversation, and we corresponded in writing for several months, responding from whatever quiet moments we could glean within our beautiful, untidy lives. We temporarily paused our exchange when a wildfire forced Tierney and her family to evacuate their home—a potent reminder of the cost of our culture’s way of life for Mother Earth and the Mothers who call her home.

Lucy Bryan: The poems in Matter / Mother portray early motherhood in such a raw, intimate, and vulnerable way. As a mother of two young children, I often felt that you—or perhaps I should say the speaker—were directly addressing me. And sometimes I had the uncanny sense that I was the speaker, or at least that I could have been, so true were your words to my own experience of becoming a mother.

But I also know that your poems—this whole collection, in fact—sprung from particulars of your life. Reading your book made me want to know you better. Would you be willing to tell us a little bit about yourself and the context and conditions from which Matter / Mother emerged?

April Tierney: I’m touched that you would like to learn more about me, and it’s also slightly bewildering given that Matter / Mother is the most revealing collection I have put out thus far. As a writer, it’s a good reminder that regardless of how much I say, there are still worlds that live behind my words. 

I live along the foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains in the Territory of the Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapaho with my husband, three-year-old daughter, mischievous dog, ponderosa pine, sage, elk, and deer. I was born not far from where I live now and have spent my entire life in this rugged and increasingly dry landscape. I sincerely love these hills and high peaks. They are my family. 

I used to spend endless hours wandering in the woods, listening for poetry. It’s really the only way I knew how to write. Then I became a mother, and of course, so much had to change. I gave birth at 35 after years of wrestling with the decision of bringing new life into this beautiful and broken world. It is not a role that I have always envisioned for myself, although I am grateful to have said yes. While I continued to hike with my baby strapped to my chest or my back, writing felt compressed in a way that I had not experienced before. Thankfully, that compression gave way to some wild generativity. Working on poems while my daughter napped became my lifeline. It helped me forge a path through some really big questions and emotions. 

I appreciate hearing how these poems intimately spoke to your experience of being a mother. While writing them, I often had to confront my fear of judgment once the book was released; wondering if I would be labeled (like so many women have been labeled) as ungrateful or unfit to be a mother when expressing grief, desperation, or rage about raising children in these times. On the other hand, I have come to believe that being silent about the realities of mothering within an anthropocentric, capitalistic, nuclear family paradigm only contributes to our isolation and feelings of inadequacy. 

So, about halfway through writing this collection, I built up the courage to begin sending out poems to some of my friends who were also new mothers. Their responses were quite similar to what you have conveyed here, which showed me that by writing into some of the most revealing and vulnerable moments of my life, I could brush up against the archetypal. It helped me see how my personal experience is actually not personal at all, but something that is shared by many mothers within the privacy of their own homes and hearts.

Bryan: I am grateful you took that risk, April. And I am glad that your vulnerability has helped you connect with a community of mothers who are also wrestling with the complex and contradictory states of being that motherhood entails. I am part of that community, and I know how very isolating it can feel to go it alone. Thank you for putting words into the world that affirm the interior lives of mothers and draw us together.

Now that I think about it, your poems not only reached out to me—as reader and as a mother—but they also portrayed a continual reaching toward other mothers. In the poem “Silver Haired Beauty” you speak of a time when people told stories about women that “became legends / and then they shape-shifted into the starlit sky // which every other woman looked to to navigate the dark and stormy oceans of her life.” Your collection strikes me as an effort to resurrect such stories, or perhaps to remake them.

The first poem of the collection, “Birth Story,” speaks of our “Grandmothers”—the long line of people who gave birth before us—and how, in the midst of our own births, “they bless our bones and help our bodies to open.” In one poem, you identify a mother goose as a fellow “life bearer.” In another, you describe night as a mother with “dark, holy arms.” You write of your own mother, who died before your daughter was born. You summon her bravery, strength, and kindness into your body and into your daughter’s body. 

I’ll note, here, that you capitalized the word “Mother” throughout the collection, much like people capitalize the words God and Yahweh. There is something vast and perhaps even divine in the way you represent motherhood. This is evident in the poem “Rage/The River,” in which you write, “We are reclaiming our Mother tongues, / we are remembering the breadth of us.”

Would you be willing to elaborate on these ideas? What do you envision when you write “Mother,” and what does it mean for us to “reclaim our mother tongues,” either individually or collectively?

Tierney: I chose to capitalize “Mother” as a way of challenging the Christocentric paradigm wherein only father receives this distinction. It was a decision that I made about halfway through writing when I was a little over a year into my motherhood journey and really sinking into the world-shifting, embodied power of this role. Yet, at the same time, I often found myself feeling quite powerless. On many sleepless nights, I would lie awake in bed, thinking about the ways in which Mother, as life bearer, has been desacralized. This led me to draw a connection to the desecration of Mother Earth, which felt both staggering and silencing. 

To me, reclaiming our mother tongues means breaking through the silence. While working on these poems, I often found that I actually did not have the language to convey what I was experiencing, as I had seldom heard it talked or written about in much depth before. But as we know, in order to be fully human, we must be able to tell stories about our realities. And if we can not tell these stories, how can they possibly exist? How can we exist? 

So in this collection, I had to continually stretch beyond the language that I had access to in order to arrive at something that felt honest and humanizing. I had to put my experience as Mother back in the center of life itself, instead of minimizing it or deflecting to some other, seemingly more important reality. I had to pause and say, this too is important. It’s important in the same way our treatment of the Earth is vitally important, which is reflected in our relationship with all mothers and is what allows life to keep on living. 

Bryan: Well, the collection certainly succeeds at centering Mothers. And, from my vantage point, you capture the sacredness of being a mother with language that is often as startling as it is apt. I’m thinking, in particular, of the poem “This Body, An Altar,” in which you write:

I think I will walk through my days naked,
this body a flame, a holy altar to make offerings to,

a sacred site from which new life springs.

The diction you use in that poem, as well as others in the collection, clearly draws upon religious imagery and terminology. But, as you mentioned in your last response, it also challenges—and maybe even subverts—Judeo-Christian conceptions of divinity and womanhood. 

I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about your religious background. I’d also like to hear about how your religious or spiritual identities and experiences might have informed the poems in Matter / Mother.

Tierney: My mom was Christian and my dad is Jewish, so I was raised with two vastly different religious and cultural influences. Growing up, my mom took my brother and I to a Lutheran Church on Sundays. I was baptized as a little girl and went through confirmation as a teenager. I spent a lot of time in Sunday school asking questions that the teachers did not know how to answer. I often referred to myself as being half Christian and half Jewish, until I got a bit older and realized that you cannot be half of a religion. In college, I took a World Religions class that opened my mind and engaged some of the questions that I had been carrying around for most of my life. I went on to study yogic traditions, read Buddhist philosophy, explore Kabbalah, and drank deeply from the well of many mystics and poets. Eventually, I realized that while I had been raised within two distinct monotheistic worldviews, I actually did not believe in one God, but many. 

In my mid-twenties, I was introduced to wilderness rites of passage ceremonies and enacted my first vision fast. It was then that I truly fell in love with the animate world and came to understand that the Gods and Goddesses I pray to are not otherworldly beings but deeply embedded in the wild, wooded, and watery world of which we are already a part. 

I am an Animist. I believe that everything is alive, holy, and fiercely intelligent. I try to live a life that is in direct relationship to and in honor of my ancestors, both human and more-than. I try to remember the old ways of inhabiting and stewarding this beautiful Earth and to allow my heart to be broken open regularly by the maddening disconnection of modernity. This brokenheartedness is the way that I know how to embody a spiritual identity. 

Bryan: I can only imagine the courage and creativity it took to forge that identity for yourself. And this idea of a spirituality rooted in the “wild, wooded, and watery world” resonates with me. One of the many things I had to renegotiate upon becoming a mother was the way I connected to the natural world. I no longer have the freedom to set off on multi-day backpacking trips. Spending hours in a canoe is a very different experience with a curious and wiggly toddler. Planning a day hike at a nearby state park sometimes feels not worth the effort. Do we skip nap time or try to work around it? How far can I go carrying a kid, water, snacks, wipes, and diapers? What if one or both of my kids has a meltdown on the trail and refuses to go any farther?

I acutely felt the loss of time alone in the woods after having my children. I think that’s part of what motivated me to leave a hard-won academic job and to move to a wooded ridge in Appalachian Ohio. My family lives in the same community of Mennonite homesteaders where my husband grew up, and I’m drinking deeply of foggy mornings, fireflies, swallowtail caterpillars, the wild flight of bats, baby turkeys, ospreys and eagles, and the sound of wind in the trees. I miss the adventures that really allowed me to disconnect and lose myself (or, really, find myself) in the woods. But I’m figuring out how to connect in small, simple, everyday ways.

I’m curious how the transition to motherhood has changed the way you commune with the animate world. What have you had to give up? And what have you discovered?

Tierney: Oh, I really feel you in this loss. I’m currently mourning all those long stretches of uninterrupted time in the woods. And even though I know they will always be a part of me, it does not make me miss them any less. I admire how you are finding small, simple, and everyday ways to connect with the Earth. It seems to me that the small and ordinary things are what make up the bulk of motherhood, or perhaps, an honest life. But they’re also things that are not always easy to be present for. It’s much more seductive to look toward the horizon than to be with what is two feet in front of your face. 

In some ways, I think hiking tall peaks as a young adult made it difficult for me to not love the horizon. I adored the sweeping beauty of those views so intently that these past three years have been a tough schooling for me in turning my gaze downward and being far more particular with my attention. But, thankfully, there can be a lot of depth and richness in the particulars.  

My daughter and I still hike in the woods together. Sometimes she is on my back, and sometimes she is out wandering in front of me. We stop often to bend down close to the plants, to marvel at their uniqueness, to learn their names and their edible or medicinal properties. I love that she knows Oregon grape and juniper, bluebell, and sage. I love hearing her call out their names like friends, how she knows to give space to cactus and squeals with delight when their flowers begin to bloom. Right now, wax currents are at their peak, so she’s been eating them by the handful. It is such a life-giving thing to watch her nimble fingers pluck tiny berries from the bushes and then pause to thank those bushes for their sweetness.

So, while I have had to give up much of my solitary space on the land for writing, I have discovered wonder and joy in helping to foster my daughter’s relationship with the Earth. I am grateful that some of her first naming rituals have been plants and animals, instead of Disney characters. I am delighted that she knows the shape and sound of magpie, hawk, and owl. I am bolstered by her love of moss, bunny, fox, cactus, and the moon. I know that falling in love with Mother Earth leads to a path of advocacy for Her health and wellbeing. I know that respecting and caring for the land that sustains us creates whole and trustworthy human beings. So, raising my daughter within this particular worldview is my way of caring for the future of our planet, and while it is often hard and lonely work, it is also quite purposeful. I wonder if this has been your experience, too?

Bryan: Yes, I know exactly what you mean. It is a joy to see my children so at home in the woods. I don’t begrudge their dirty little feet or the rocks and sticks they bring indoors. I admire their fearlessness when it comes to bugs and bones. And they constantly remind me of the delight that can accompany slowing down, paying attention, and being present. Children are the best teachers and examples of “beginner’s mind.” 

Your response to my last question reminded me of one of the things I appreciated most about your book: how well it was able to capture the complex and contradictory states of mind and heart that can accompany motherhood. At times, it can be euphoric, and it can also be maddeningly monotonous. It can simultaneously imbue us with purpose and strip us of sources of meaning. It can fill us with gratitude and also grief. As you write, “A Mother’s body is the birthplace of paradox.”

While I loved the poems that allowed me to see motherhood as a source of power and something to be revered, I also felt deep kinship with the ones that spoke honestly about how disorienting and difficult and even enraging it can be. You write, “I can barely remember what it feels like to be full, / to be un-expectant, to blossom and shimmer.” You write of madness, loneliness, and crushing tiredness. In the poem “Spilling Forth” (one of my favorites in the collection), you describe mothers as reservoirs of giving, and you offer these lines:

Because isn’t it true, a reservoir is always a river

that has been damned and diverted, a glistening body

of water utterly prevented from flowing in the direction
of her longing? And even then, Mother, when all is lost,
including the shape of your name and fading desires,
your heart still beats, it still ticks off every second
of every day like a bomb waiting to blow apart
the walls that keep your life from spilling forth. 

Upon reading this poem, I immediately sent it to my best friend. I knew she needed those words as much as I did.

I imagine that writing so candidly about the dark sides of motherhood required not only self-awareness but also bravery. Would you be willing to tell us a bit about what it was like for you to write about those topics and why you think it’s important to share such poems with the world?

Tierney: It definitely required bravery. I knew it would be taboo to write about some of these things, but I tend to be the kind of poet who gravitates toward the taboo. I long to hear and tell the stories that are not told often or loudly enough. I believe in the wisdom that these stories hold.

Only a handful of narratives seem to receive much attention within the dominant culture of North America. You won’t hear about the real experience of mothering on the news. It’s not shiny or sexy enough, and yet, it is the foundation of any true culture. So, what happens when we stop paying attention to our foundation? I think we are currently living the answer to this question. 

I also think there is a fantasy of modern motherhood that is quite different from the reality of it. I actually felt gobsmacked after crossing the threshold into this role, wondering why my mother friends had not shared the darker, desperate, or more complex aspects of it with me. Although, maybe they tried, and I did not know how to listen. This has made me think a lot about what it means to listen to the mothers, the life bearers, the culture makers––to make space for their stories. And I do not mean more space for the clichés of motherhood, but the lived reality of it. The things that we often do not want to hear because we want to hold onto our ideals of what this role could be, but those ideals are entirely unreasonable within the fragmentation of our current way of living.

I think more than self-awareness, having an understanding of culture and history is what allowed me to write this book. I know that we were not designed to do this work of world-making and child-raising within the isolation of nuclear families. My bones remember a time of togetherness, of village tending, where every act of mothering stood alongside dozens of other people each day and night. Our bodies and psyches were not made to bear the weight of what is being asked of us now. Holding onto this perspective has been incredibly helpful, as it has allowed me to redirect my attention toward the times we are mothering within instead of collapsing into feelings of guilt or personal inadequacy. So, I’m really grateful that you felt a kinship with these poems. This is my prayer for other mothers, too––that they/we can know we’re not alone.

Bryan: I really appreciate your ability to take that broader perspective. My point of view was much more limited when I first became a mother. I was so exhausted and barely functional, and I kept thinking, “Why is this so hard for me? What is wrong with me?” By the time I had my second child, I’d learned to ask for (and sometimes demand) help. As you point out, we are not meant to do this alone.

I want to return to this idea of mothers as life bearers and culture makers. For me, that conception of motherhood feels right—in no small part, because I was raised by a loving, nurturing, creative, and generous mother. But the word “mother” doesn’t evoke feelings of warmth, security, and sustenance for everyone. What about people whose mothers abandoned or abused them? What about people who desperately want to become mothers but have been unable to do so? What about mothers who have lost children or children who have lost their mothers? What about caregivers who do the work of mothering but don’t identify as mothers? 

I suspect you have grappled with some of these questions—one of your poems mentions a friend’s miscarriage, and another alludes to the broken relationship between your mother and her mother. Would you be willing to talk about your decision to orient your collection around the concept of motherhood, despite its potential to alienate or distress? And what do you think it looks like to both honor mothers as life bearers and culture makers and to acknowledge and support those who associate the word “mother” with trauma, grief, or dreams deferred?

Tierney: I think most mothers walk around wondering, “What is wrong with me?” instead of, “What is wrong with the culture we are mothering within?” It’s a sneaky way for the dominant culture to subvert accountability––to continuously blame mothers for the world’s dysfunction, so we learn to blame ourselves, too. I am interested in widening the perspective to include communal accountability as well as context. It feels important to place ourselves in relation to the times we are living in so that we can better understand the patterns and narratives that shape our realities.

Like you, I was blessed with an incredibly loving and generous mother. I feel fortunate since my mom was able to give my brother and me what she had not personally experienced. My maternal grandmother was cold and self-centered, and she ultimately walked out on her three children. My mother and her were estranged for most of my life. Eventually, at 30 years old, I built up the courage to find my grandmother because I wanted to hear her side of the story. Looking into her eyes, which were also my mother’s eyes, was both heartbreaking and humanizing. Her story told me as much about her own heart as it did about our family’s history and the fractured world she birthed her children into. It gave me a glimpse into the ways in which this culture had failed her and also opened up more questions about the consequences of broken lineages and forsaken ancestral traditions.

Stumbling through the early years of my motherhood journey has helped to provide a new layer of understanding for my grandmother’s story. The sheer relentlessness, exhaustion, and isolation have entirely brought me to my knees. I think this is another reason why it felt important to write the book from this lens––not to alienate people who may have had less than adequate experiences with their own mothers, but to help humanize the ones who raised them within a society that does not tend to their embodied realities in an honest or ongoing way. 

I have several friends who either want to become mothers or who wanted to have children but were unable to for a variety of reasons. I wholeheartedly stand alongside them in their longing and grief, just as I feel them standing alongside my grief of mothering within these times. So, I don’t think our heartbreaks need to be separate, and in many ways, I wish they could be knitted closer together. I think that by not perpetuating the fantasy of modern motherhood, we can best honor these complex realities and also re-imagine the shape of this role in our lives. We need village aunties as much as we need parents, and tending to the younger generations, no matter whose bodies they come from, is a true and noble act of mothering. It is culture work at its finest. I love the way my daughter looks to my friends with kindred eyes. I love how they teach her about what it means to be fully human by being in reciprocal relationship with the wider world. I long for more creative and communal ways of raising children. I long for these ways to take root and rise up to infiltrate the current order, since it clearly is not serving us well. 

Bryan: I feel so moved by your compassion and your open-heartedness, April. Your vision of how things might be different gives me hope. Something I’m curious about is how your connection to and experiences within the natural world have informed that vision. What do plants, animals, ecosystems, and forces of nature have to teach us about mothering?

April: In the book, I look toward many other beings for inspiration on how to mother within a changing world––Canada goose, killer whale, fox, deer, the night and the ocean, rivers, forests, lightning, bluebells, and a pear tree. They all have taught me so much about creativity and resilience in the face of immense adversity. They have shown me how to stay open when my heart insists upon contraction. They have modeled wisdom, courage, and eloquence. 

Not only is the Earth teaching us how to mother, but we are also being mothered by the Earth. 

It is beautiful and mysterious and deeply life-serving. It is what has given me the strength to go on in some of my most desperate and depleted moments. I am utterly grateful for this relationship and also for the ways in which my daughter knows, trusts, and loves the Earth. It helps to remind me that we are a part of a much larger story, one that is imbued with belonging, nurturance, and wonder.

Bryan: Amen to that. It has been so helpful to me to realize that I am surrounded by non-human mothers—and that they can be company to me, can teach me, can help me see the long view. 

I have so appreciated this conversation, as I’m sure other readers will too. In closing, I’m wondering if you could offer some words of wisdom to those of us who want to advocate for broader changes in the way our society sees and treats mothers. What individual or collective actions might we take that might play a part in shifting the paradigm?

Tierney: It seems to me that these kinds of conversations are what give way to cultural shifts. So thank you, Lucy, for your soulful approach to dialogue and inquiry, for hanging out with me awhile as I meandered my way through the responses, and for bringing your own heart-centered experience into our exchange as well. It’s not every day that I am asked such depth-oriented questions. They have felt like a particular kind of medicine to an allergy that I have for society’s impulse to collapse complexity. I think deeper questions are what help us think deeper thoughts, and if we stop asking more of one another in these ways, then how can we possibly stretch our minds past the narrow places they settle into? 

So, I suppose I’d like to invite people to ask bigger questions of themselves and of one another. Then, as Rilke suggests, we can begin living our way into the answers. Thank you for this opportunity. It has been such a gift.

April Tierney is a poet, activist, craftswoman, mother, and lover of stories. Her work follows threads of ecopoetics, myth, culture, and lineage. She is the author of four full-length collections of poetry and a contributor to several anthologies. April also teaches nature-based writing circles for adults and kids, as well as seasonal art-making workshops. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been featured in Orion Magazine, Deep Times: A Journal of the Work that Reconnects, Clarion Poetry Magazine, and Real Ground Journal, among others. To learn more visit www.apriltierney.com.

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