The Chaos Agents
A Conversation with Caitlin Horrocks and W. Todd Kaneko
Caitlin Horrocks and W. Todd Kaneko | April 2024
Caitlin Horrocks, W. Todd Kaneko
The Writer’s Chronicle recently asked Caitlin Horrocks and W. Todd Kaneko, married writers and the parents of three young children, if they would be open to discussing the intersection of parenting and writing, life as married writers, and whatever else these topics might lead to. What follows is their honest and far-reaching conversation.
Caitlin Horrocks: I get annoyed when I read something about parenting and I can’t tell who’s actually taking care of the kids, or whether the family is living off ancestral wealth, so to provide some context for the rest of this conversation: we’ve got an eight-year-old and twin three-year-olds. We both have full-time teaching positions. We’re both tenured, so we have more job security than the vast majority of working parents. Our teaching income is stable (unlike writing income), and we spend a huge portion of it on childcare: the older one goes to school aftercare (and some part-time programs during the summer), and the twins are in full-time daycare. (Which, for the first one and a half years of daycare-borne illnesses, meant maybe fifty percent of days both were healthy enough to attend at the same time.) We do not have family living locally. Our employer, at the time our kids were born, offered two days of paternity leave and six to eight weeks of maternity leave, which I was able to combine with some months of alternate duties and rearranged teaching loads.
W. Todd Kaneko: Yeah, in so many ways we enjoy a lot of privileges that it’s irresponsible not to acknowledge them up front. And yet, I think most people in the academy would agree that the university will happily eat whatever time you have, regardless what you have to give. And I think most parents who pay for daycare will agree that childcare will eat whatever money you have. Those variables are different for everyone, the measure of work versus childcare versus the time given to children. But when one of those things surges, the others refuse to give—I’m thinking specifically about how sick kids bring everything to a standstill regardless of what’s happening. And I’m not even talking about writing yet.
Horrocks: Shout-out here to writer-parent Ander Monson, who, when I asked how he managed to still get so much done after having his daughter, gave a one-word answer: “daycare.” He also warned me we’d all be sick all the time for the first year of daycare, and I assumed “all the time” was an exaggeration. It was not.
Kaneko: No exaggeration. None of it, right? Kids and work take up all my time and instead of writing on a schedule, I’m constantly trying to figure out how to steal time to write. I try to steal time where I can: a little bit during meal prep, thirty minutes from grading, an hour or so when I could be sleeping, and things like that. This was how it worked after our first kid was born, but since the twins arrived, I am not even sure where to find the time to steal. Like, the number of hours in the day are the same and the job isn’t really all that different—but generally, I get to the end of the week and there has been no writing at all and it’s really kind of awful. So I guess I am wondering how you would answer this question, given similar parameters: we had our first kid and we slowly started to figure out how to get words on the page, but since the twins were born, things are very different. How do you navigate writing time with parenting time?
Horrocks: Howl despairingly into the void? There are never enough hours in the day. I carve out as much time as I can during work/daycare hours without doing a disservice to students. I try to wake up really early, but I usually get sucked into all the other tasks that also haven’t gotten done. The days are a long churn of rousting children and yelling about shoes and going to work and then picking everyone up and getting them fed and dishes washed and bedtimes, and all our kids hate sleep. And that’s a good day, when no one’s sick and we’re not scrambling to reconfigure our schedules.
In what way does writing time feel “stolen” to you? Is that just a turn of phrase, or do you feel like time spent writing is always time that should rightfully belong to someone/something else? Does writing time always feel illicit once there are kids in the picture? Guess I’m asking because I don’t want to voluntarily buy into a value system that doesn’t recognize creative activity as having inherent worth, or thinks that mothers, in particular, are stealing any time they aren’t spending with their children, but it often really does feel stolen to me.
Kaneko: For me, the term “stolen” is accurate because I am deliberately taking time and energies away from one thing to benefit another thing. Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor (allegedly), but from where I’m sitting, everything is impoverished and deserves the time it’s not getting. I feel as though I’m rarely the best teacher or husband or editor or father that I could be because I have this thing called writing that’s important to me, both in terms of what I do and who I am. And yeah, I do steal time from my kids, occasionally—just not very often for writing, because I feel guilty parking my kids in front of the TV so they can watch Octonauts while I draft a poem but also, I need to make dinner for them. For me, stealing time is less about a value system and more about mortality, the temporal economics of living. The clock only has so many numbers on it, and I want to spend them on my kids while stealing a couple for myself. That’s the way it feels, anyways. Depressing, huh?
But value systems that demean creative activity and say that a mother can’t both write and parent are damaging and stupid. I know I can get a pass, culturally, because all I have to do is pat my kids on the head, get them a Happy Meal, and someone out there will be like, “Oh what a great dad”—the expectations are lower for fathers than for mothers, and unfairly so. But still, we are in this battle together, this quandary about how to be a parent who writes. What have we done that you think has been beneficial to navigating parenting and writing? How do we continue to work together on this?
Horrocks: I think it’s helped that neither of us are art monsters. We might be ambitious, but not at each other’s expense or our kids’. Like, if someone’s making dinner, the other person is refereeing the twins, not disappearing upstairs to write. We care about our work, but we don’t assign it some mystical weight that’s greater than the other person’s or greater than our family. Back to stealing, I guess. I’m not going to steal from you. When people ask us whether we read each other’s work, I never quite know how to answer because we used to, and I think we’re decent readers for each other, and I certainly don’t keep my work secret from you, but I’m acutely aware that any time I ask you to spend giving me edits is time away from either your own work or work that keeps the household going, and that feels like a prohibitively big ask.
Probably having twins during a pandemic clarified this dynamic, because we were equally deep in the shit, on our own, and had to just both pull as hard as we could in the same direction. I think we also do pretty well with from-each-according-to-their-abilities and to-each-according-to-their-needs style of dividing responsibilities. I plan things, you cook things. I am endlessly grateful that you cook things.
Kaneko: You’re a good cook. Much better at cooking than I am at planning things and being responsible for paying bills and stuff (which isn’t saying much, I know), and I’m grateful that you are good at things that I’m definitely not good at. It helps that we can see how the puzzle of responsibilities needs fixing and where the different pieces come from. You ever wish the writing and parenting puzzle was as easy to see as the parenting and parenting puzzle?
Horrocks: An anecdote from Aimee Nezhukumatathil that I think about a lot is that someone (she didn’t name names) ominously told her that every kid she had was a book she’d never write. According to Aimee, she thought: “Okay. Sounds fair. I’ll take that trade.” I never actually look at our kids and think, “Well there are three books I’ll never get done,” but even if I did: okay. Sounds fair. I don’t think the universe will be some fundamentally poorer place without more of my words in it. Our kids have given me joy and made my world bigger, and I have to trust that’ll show up in my writing eventually, in whatever postkid amounts I manage to produce.
So, because I worry all this hand-wringing is making us sound like whiny, bad parents: What is something awesome about having kids? How have they made your world bigger?
Kaneko: I also don’t equate each kid with a book I’ll never write, because while I do feel the deficit, grounding the writing life in the number of books you publish feels more like a life of capitalism than one of art. Because where does the trade-off end? For every two movies you watch, that’s one story you’ll never write? At the end of every workweek you can collect your paycheck and say goodbye to that 7,000 words you should have written? The argument is faulty because it’s not just about kids. It’s life. What terrible pieces for that puzzle!
I listened recently to an interview with a pro wrestler who’s a dad. He said he and his pro wrestler wife acknowledge that neither of them can parent at a ten all the time because, you know—they have to work and are human beings with human needs. Sometimes one of them needs the other to parent a bunch more than the other and it’s not about pulling weight but about helping each other navigate their lives and their work. Sure, their work is pro wrestling, but work is serious and important no matter the venture, you know? So if someone says I sound like a whiny bad parent, that’s fine, I guess. That comment probably comes from that person’s place of privilege or pain and is really more about the commenter than it is about me.
I’ll say one reality is that living with our kids has made me a better (though slightly more yelly) person. Three kids means I have three more points of contact with the world, three more conduits through which I’ve learned greater empathy and a greater consideration for the future. Also, my need to believe the world will be a safe place for our kids to live is overpowering. Parenting has me more thoughtful about what it means to be human in this world. Being a dad feeds into how I think as a writer. Maybe three kids does mean three books I’ll never write, but on the flip side, I’m a better person for having three kids. That’s also a trade I’ll gladly accept. They are three awesome little people I’m glad I get to know. What’s your take? What’s something good about these three kids? And also, do you see a path to writing from where we are now?
Horrocks: I love the moments of big, goofy joy, like the impromptu dance parties. I love thinking in different ways about language, about the world, about becoming a person. I have to try and explain so many things I’ve barely noticed or thought about. On President’s Day, I ended up having to try and explain who George Washington was to three-year-olds, and then D sobbed at Washington being dead. And at first it was kind of funny, and then it was kind of exhausting, because it was so late and he couldn’t calm down enough to sleep, but there was also a clarity to it, about death and grief: someone was once alive, and now they aren’t, and we can’t ever meet or talk to them again. Death, man. Death sucks! It’s that Will Baker essay “My Children Explain the Big Issues,” but every day around here.
The other day L said, “I’ve got this idea for a monster in my head. It’ll be really hard to draw. I don’t know how to do it. But it’s only in my head, so I’m the only one who can try.” That’s every book everyone’s ever tried to write, right there. And there are still (good, weird) monsters in my head, so I guess I’ll keep trying to draw them, somehow.
Kaneko: What an apt metaphor for the relationship between our kids and our lives. We have these beautiful monsters in our heads: monsters that we fantasize, that we invent for ourselves, but also monsters that are crucial to who we are as people. Because I can’t imagine L without all the monsters and stuff he invents. He wouldn’t be the awesome kid he is without that.
Horrocks: I think the twins have beautiful monsters too, that they can’t yet tell us much about. Except that they’re usually named Poopy GuyGuy or DoodyButt. Which for me connects back to what you said about books being a weird measure of lost time. I stress all the time about publishing another book, but that’s not the same stress as the stress of doing justice to imaginary monsters. Related, but not the same. I struggle to separate the two. I also struggle with what you said about wanting the world to be a better, safer place for our kids—I feel that, but I also feel like I’m an actively worse advocate for anything I care about because I have these kids and these jobs and no time. My world is bigger in thought and smaller in practice.
You say “path back to writing from where we are now,” but we’re both actively writing at least a little. So is there some quantity of writing, or different place of writing in your life, that you’d feel restored by? Also, re the pro wrestlers, how are they at ten at least some of the time? I feel like I exist in a constant state of failure.
Kaneko: I think the sentiment was that instead of being about pulling weight, parenting is a partnership in which we can count on each other to get stuff done on any given day. Like, one can only muster a three that morning, so they ask the other if they can bring a seven to round things out. Is that how math works? I’m not sure, but it feels a lot like the way we try to protect one another’s writing time when we can. Like when I was working on a tight deadline last summer, you took the kids away for a few afternoons to give me space. I hope you know how much I appreciate those gifts and your partnership. I don’t think that book would have made it to press on time if not for your help.
Do you remember that panel we did at AWP years ago where we talked about parenting and writing? We just had the one child at that point, and I felt like I knew my relationship to writing. For example, I knew that I could draft one poem a day for about thirty-five days before my brain shut down and I had to do something other than writing to recharge. Then after the twins were born, there was a period of time between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m. when I could squeeze some writing in, stealing time from my sleeping hours. But more often than not, I now wake up in the middle of the night and my brain is too fatigued to do much more than fumble the Wordle real quick and then stare at the ceiling until I fall back asleep.
I will say that in the last month or so, I think I’ve started to figure something out: a poem on my laptop between sleeping twins or tapping something out on my phone in the dark because, you know—if I get up, the boys wake up. I remember Aimee Bender talking about having twins too, how at some point, her work started to happen in very short sections because that’s how she portioned her writing time in relation to the demands of being a mother to twins. That’s what I remember her saying, anyways, and it gives me hope that I’m rediscovering and reinventing my relationship with writing, too.
What about you? Is there some quantity of writing or altered relationship with writing that would feel restorative? Is there an overlap between your identities as writer and mother that might be conducive to your work? And how do you find time to read? Because I feel like my reading time is gone, along with my writing time, and I need both.
Horrocks: From that AWP panel I remember Jess Row and Kate Tuttle saying useful things, and we were the people with the toddler who ran up the aisle and pooped in front of everybody (in his diaper—not on the floor). How I find the time to read, in practical terms: audiobooks (while commuting, cleaning, erranding, yard work, etc.). Also, having Libby (public library) and Kindle apps on my phone, so when I reach for my phone for the umpteenth time, books are at least an option. I’ve also always got a queue of books I’m reading for professional reasons, like to write a blurb or prep a class.
But forcing myself to make time for reading by mentally framing it as career essential or career adjacent feels like the productivity trap all over again, in this space that should be kind of holy, or just fun. Reading refills my well and feels essential to me, often more than writing, but I’m back to the ugliness of “stolen time,” maybe because my kids are of course awesome and I want the time spent away from them, mentally and/or physically, to feel suitably worthwhile. I don’t think of myself as a mom with major daycare guilt, but it’s in there somewhere. The parts of the parenting discourse that are “Put on your own oxygen mask first, or you won’t be able to help your kids” still hinge on “It’s okay to spend time away from your kids if it makes you a better parent to them at the end of the day.” Which requires the things that feel sustaining for me to also be things that make me a better parent, and if those don’t align, the system glitches.
In the reading you do manage to do, do you feel you’ve found books that speak to your experience of parenthood? I ask because I feel like there’s been a recentish explosion of books evoking the chaos and strangeness of early motherhood (e.g., Helen Phillips’s The Need or Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch), plus books that explore intersections of motherhood and dystopia (Joanne Ramos’s The Farm or Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers), plus nonfiction staring straight at many of the questions we’re wrestling with here (Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat or Anna Prushinskaya’s A Woman is a Woman Until She Is a Mother or Maggie Nelson’s work or Kate Zambreno’s). And these books generally speak to me (I can’t recommend Sarah Vap’s Winter often enough or loudly enough), but I can’t think of many recent corollaries about fatherhood. Not that parenting or gender roles or gender exist always along these binaries, but I feel like we’re all still stuck in conversation with traditional roles and identities, even when we’re pushing against them, or trying to reenvision or remake them.
Kaneko: One book in particular I love is Kendra DeColo’s I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World. I think the book is mostly about how the speaker is feminized and sexualized by men in ways that are counter to her personhood, but there is also a lot about motherhood in the book, too—how there is an individuality that the world tries to strip from a woman socially and culturally once she has children. Like, you have to be a mother, so you can’t also be the person you were before you became a parent. It’s an experience I can’t relate to directly, because I’m not a woman or a mother, but DeColo’s treatment of it is so lovely and oppressive and palpable.
Is there a corollary in books about the fatherhood experience? I don’t know that there is a traditional role or gender identity that fathers push against the way that women have to in order to claim their personhood. For example, I’ve heard mom poets criticized for being too soft or too feminist while a dad poet gets to be empathetic and a good dad. It’s an uneven conversation, if it’s a conversation at all.
I do read books by fathers, but they don’t speak to my experience per se. Immediately, I think about Oliver de la Paz, whose book The Boy in the Labyrinth deals with being father to a child on the spectrum. Amorak Huey’s Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy is about raising kids in our dangerous contemporary world. Jay Baron Nicorvo’s Deadbeat targets the insecurities of presence and absence when you become a father. Also, Ben Tanzer’s book of essays Lost In Space is about fatherhood and masculinity too, and I can’t help but feel like my ability to talk about books about fatherhood hinges on my memory of books I read a long time ago. I’m unsure of how much of that is because of what people are writing and how much is the fact that most of my reading now involves books about Muppets and cartoon animals.
Horrocks: Any fave / least fave kids’ books? Since that’s what we’re reading these days?
Kaneko: I don’t feel a lot of positivity toward kids’ books in general, because that’s the reading that has taken over my reading life. There are so many books I want to read and live with in my head, but instead I get anthropomorphized trucks and puppies. If I had to pick one I like, it would be Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?, partly because the stories in there are short and I like the drawings, especially that one at the very beginning of the book showing the characters in their workplaces. The poet and story writer are in their windows with their pen and typewriter, and it’s both charming and terrible because the characters are cute and my life has never looked like that.
Horrocks: I actually like a lot of the books the kids like, but reading to the twins is exhausting because they fight over things like who gets to pluck which illustrated food item from the page and pretend to eat it. I like [Richard Scarry’s fictional town] Busytown; to steal an observation from Sandra Beasley, it’s like “Bruegel the Elder for the preschool set.” I think what I’m most jealous of that cat and raccoon for isn’t their writing time or their tiny typewriters, but just . . . stillness. A silence where I can mentally follow ideas around and see what they do without anyone literally spitting into my eyeballs and screaming so loudly my ears ring because he wants a different toothbrush. Returning to kids as books not written (that terrible self-defeating capitalistic idea!), I’m thinking of what a writer friend once told me about her own decision to have (more) kids: “I imagined myself ten years in the future, and I figured I’d have regrets either way. So what would I regret more?” That was meaningful to me, in its acknowledgment that there’s always something to regret, some trade-off or path not taken.
The vast majority of people eventually have at least one kid, and they don’t get interviewed about that decision or its impact on their lives. But I guess there are some unique pressures created when the equation isn’t just trying to make time for kids plus work plus all the other ordinary things a person might have going on in their lives, but when one of the variables is this creative practice that has tentacles in our professional lives, our financial lives, our spiritual lives, our artistic lives, our friendships, our mental health, our identity. So writing is the place where I feel the time crunch most deeply. But to reframe the trade-off, if kids represent not unwritten books but more generally chaos for stillness, which loss would/do I regret more? And I’ll give up the stillness hands down, because I love the chaos agents way too much, even if I don’t always love the chaos. (Also chaos agents: lack of societal supports and structures for working parents of all stripes.)
Kaneko: I never imagined having kids. Not at least until we started talking about kids, and then when L was born, I couldn’t imagine not wanting a kid like him around. Regret isn’t something I feel at all. Frustration and FOMO for sure, but not regret. I think that’s because with kids has come an understanding of where I want to be in the world. Like, my mother has this story about an old writer friend (she also never named names) who would hole up in his basement office to write every night at 7:00 p.m. no matter what. She said they were at his house once, and after dinner, he said good night and went to the basement, leaving my parents with his wife, who they didn’t know very well. My mother said he ended up publishing a bunch of books, but he also got divorced. And yeah, there was a time where I was that kind of person who sacrificed everything for writing time, for band practice, or whatever—and I’m not that person anymore. I have different priorities and agendas that revolve around my family now that don’t supersede my desire to write and make art, but instead require me to reckon with both things because I can’t lose either of them. I refuse to.
As we wrap this up, I’ll say that I’m grateful that we’re neck-deep in this together. I feel everything you’ve laid down here. No stealing. Pull hard in the same direction. Divide and conquer, or at least try to keep the advancing armies away from the candy before dinner. I’m wondering how you see the future unfolding.
I’ve been thinking about how Li-Young Lee describes the two lives of a poet: the life of scarcity (one of contests, jobs, and publishing), which is finite, and the life of abundance (one of writing and art), which is infinite—Lee says that we can’t let our need to participate in scarcity define us, because it will destroy our ability to live in abundance. Do writer-parents live similarly? Is there a life of writing and life of parenting in which the person can learn to navigate both lives without letting either destroy the other? Because I feel like this is what we are talking about, ultimately—how to live our parenting lives without destroying our writing lives. Is this even possible?
Horrocks: Something else I remember about that AWP panel is how many veteran parents were in the room with significantly older children, who have been living all this longer than we have. I feel like parents of young children get asked about writing and parenting most often, maybe because we all look so freshly run over by the parenting truck, but I appreciate every parent of older children who’s given me either solid advice or just general amorphous hope and solidarity. We aren’t the first people, or the bazillionth people, to try to figure this out alongside each other. It’s sort of unusual, I guess, to be figuring it out right alongside each other, without anyone’s career or creative practice taking a major back seat. I trust you not to ask me to destroy part of myself so you can escape unscathed. Also, anyone who goes through pregnancy has risked or experienced a degree of physical damage or rearrangement, which maybe gives me a different relationship to that idea of self and destruction. Mostly I just know the current level of screamy, spit-in-my-eyeballs chaos will eventually lessen and turn into a different set of challenges, and we’ll keep muddling through.
Caitlin Horrocks is the author of the story collections Life Among the Terranauts and This Is Not Your City, both New York Times Book Review editor’s choice selections. The Wall Street Journal named her novel The Vexations one of the ten best books of 2019. Her stories and essays appear in the New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, the Paris Review, One Story, and other journals and anthologies. She teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan with her family.
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of This Is How the Bone Sings and The Dead Wrestler Elegies, Championship Edition, and coauthor with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology and the chapbook Slash / Slash. His prose and poetry have appeared in Poetry, Alaskan Quarterly Review, the Massachusetts Review, the Normal School, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, he lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he teaches at Grand Valley State University.
