By Jill Christman
Nearly twenty years ago, I wrote an essay called “Weaning Ella” for a now-defunct magazine I loved called Brain, Child. In early 2006, a few months after our first child—the titular Ella—had turned two, I left on a three-day work trip to Washington, D.C. This was my first time away from Ella—ever, in her life—and my husband Mark and I decided this separation would open the perfect weaning window for our well-attached toddler.
Here in 2025, I’ve been thinking about time, and I’ve been thinking about loss—and this month, I’ve been struggling with my need to make things make sense in a world where I wake up each morning, blinking into the dim light of my phone’s latest news notification (I know I shouldn’t, but I do), and thinking, no, no, no. In the midst of this, I help twenty-one-year-old Ella pack her bags for a four-and-a-half-month journey to Chile, happy and proud that she is game for such an adventure so far from home: Our girl is flying to the tip of South America! But also I am vibrating with a fear I clench inside my body, a body that right now feels as if it’s never been anything but Mom, determined to not give Ella any of my terror to carry on her big adventure. I am fighting my own cells to be the mother I want to be, rather than the mother I am.
This is the dream for our children, right? This intrepid soaring from the nest is what we hoped for during those years of co-sleeping and baby carrying. Something like these 5,171 miles away—or so Ella’s dot on my iPhone tells me, sometimes, unhelpfully, offering a graphic of the great curve of the blue planet stretching between me and my girl—is the ultimate goal of so-called attachment parenting, right? To raise a human who feels so securely attached that she will boomerang boldly out into the world with the clear knowledge that she can return. That she is safe. (For the love of all the penguins in Patagonia: Is she safe?)
Into this moment, comes Steve Harvey—the Humble Essayist, River Teeth contributing editor, former low-residency MFA program colleague, and friend. I ask Steve to zoom into my literary editing class to talk to the graduate students who serve so magnificently as interns for the magazine you’re holding in your hands. Having Steve Harvey visit one’s class is not unlike inviting Yoda himself: Steve is that wise. I have an opening question about the range of ways in which Steve has served our literary community for half a century, but Steve—wisely—asks to begin another way.
On a gray day in February 2025, as Ella makes an appointment to get her typhoid vaccination and double checks her three-pronged power converters—and the U.S. government freezes foreign aid—Steve asks over email: I was wondering if I could start off by talking a bit about why I write. To which I respond: Absolutely. I want to know.
Later that morning, a three-foot-tall version of Steve’s face beams onto the screen at the front of our classroom, and I ask: “Why do you write?”
Steve says a series of smart things and then: “I write to compensate for losses.”
Oh, I think. Yes. I write to compensate for losses.
I have been thinking about time and I have been thinking about loss—and now I’m thinking about Steve’s words. From time to time, someone will ask me how I handle writing about the hard stuff. Why do you prod the pain? Isn’t it traumatic? How do you protect yourself? And after twenty years of writing essays—tumultuous, spectacular, terrifying years in which we also raised our children from babies in need of weaning to grown-ass humans with the nerve to, say, move to South America—I know that writing hard stuff, writing change, writing loss, has far more to do with comfort than courage. Writing is how I protect myself. Writing is how I give shape to all the amorphous nonsense in the world. Writing is how I keep myself whole.
When I write an essay, I am almost always returning to a moment that won’t let me go—a wide spectrum of emotional tug ranging somewhere from something that sticks in my brain in a curious way to a full-on haunting. Returning to these moments—which may be events, but also may be people or worries, unrealized inspirations or loves, regrets or wounds or something I read—feels different every time, but I am confident in my tools and process. Like stirring a teaspoon of yeast in with the honey and the warm water I have tested on the tender flesh of my wrist and watching the bubbles rise. Like reaching up to grab the sturdy mane of a good horse and swinging myself up and over, settling into my seat, giving a squeeze with my knees. Like smoothing open a soft notebook and touching the paper with the sharp tip of a pencil.
Moving through time with the tools of language I’ve practiced using all my life—words, images, syntax—I exercise control in a way that feels anything but traumatizing. Writing offers us a path to discovery and meaning that tumbling through a day in real-time does not. Writing gives us a chance to breathe, to let in air and light. To remind ourselves of things we have forgotten we know. To ask better questions. In writing, as Steve says, we can compensate for the losses that just keep coming.
I read for the same reason—and I know I am not alone. In the essays you’ll encounter in the fifty-second issue of River Teeth, so much has been lost, but here also we find compensation, and even redemption. The writers in these pages bring us to childhood homes and the parents who made them real. Together, we lament a dad’s loss of youth, time spent and unspent: “Later, when I had kids of my own, [my father] said he was sorry he spent so little time with me” (Michael Wiley’s “Orchid Trees”). In Katherine Larson’s “Wedding of the Foxes,” she asks us “[t]o contemplate repair over destruction; to honor diverse intelligences, weddings, and ways of being beside our own; to reject the illusion of human exceptionalism—these are acts of revolution.” Traveling through the language of this beautiful lyric essay, we break and come together again, and Larson sends us out the end with a question to carry: “Would you ask forgiveness of the foxes? Would you open the door?”
In a life there is so much to lose—lovers and trees, health and freedom, youth and memory, daylight and jobs and dreams of what the world might be with us in it. Whole ecosystems. Sometimes, of course, loss is enormous, too huge for compensation—and then, perhaps, we write to hold that loss more closely, like a beloved child, as in Lucy McBee’s “We Are Made of Numbers”: “And were you every really mine? I wonder how many I’m sorrys I need to say before I can forgive myself. And I wonder if that number even exists.” Or to remind ourselves what we still have under our feet: “And if the answer here too is nothing, nothing can save them no matter how desperately anyone fights to stop the bleeding, at least when the end comes we will have lived on volcanoes with sand between our toes and the ocean on our skin, caked in salt from a trillion ancient stars” (Cathy Humikowski’s “Thursday’s Child”). Over and over, as I reread these stunning essays, I feel as if I’m being reminded where to look, what I care about, what matters.
We end this issue with “East Alvarado,” a new essay from the inimitable Janet Burroway, which closes with an exercise we can all try:
I used to give my writing students an exercise: Thinking only of your first seven years, jot down whatever comes to mind in these categories: People. Places. Things. Events. Ideas. God.
Now circle in each category anything that still concerns you.
That, I would tell them, is your subject matter.
What is my subject matter? What do I care about at eighty-seven?
Female sexuality and male dominance. Class. Race. War. Separation of church and state. Clothes. Houses. Work in which the lines are straight and the corners true. Acts of unexpected kindness. Performance. “Pieces,” like this one. Ambiguity and subtext. Water. Trees.
What is your subject matter? What do you care about at age [fill in the blank]?
In “Weaning Ella,” I wrote my way to compensation for my then-self, but also a kind of guidance for my future self. The Jill who was a new mother navigating weaning—a cleaving such as I had never known—was able to figure out something about what was coming up, “what would replace what [Ella and I had] lost, what we’d grown beyond”:
. . . motherhood is about letting go—first from our bodies, then our arms, then our sight, then our homes—and then? Weaning falls hard on this spectrum, forcing me to see the life Ella will live far beyond me, where she will learn to find her own sustenance, her own comfort.
I have never seen a child of mine grow up. I am starting to see what this looks like.
And so it goes. In “Permeable Membrane,” Adrienne Rich tells us that “Art is a way of melting out through one’s own skin. ‘What, who is this about?’ is not the essential question. A poem is not about; it is out of and to.”
I hope you find some of that here. I hope you find what you need.
Thank you for reading.
—JC
