An interview with Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, author of 40 WEEKS, by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer
Interviewer’s Note: I first had the pleasure of encountering Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s work my senior year at Bryn Mawr College. One night, I made my way through Philadelphia to the Kelly Writers’ House where Julia was part of a panel discussion and reading with my mentor Airea D. Matthews and Keetje Kuipers on the poetics of motherhood. I remember how struck I was by her verse, and after the reading when I got my books signed, I was even more struck by her kindness. There was no doubt in my mind, even after a conversation that lasted all of five minutes, that Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach was a kind, kind poet, and a relentless advocate for the work of post-Soviet writers and mothers everywhere. Her poetry expertly weaves subjects like the painful but rewarding work of mothering and intergenerational trauma with hope for generations to come. It is close to the bone and a balm. It exacts, it soothes. It challenges you. It was truly a thrill to interview Julia for our second review/interview double feature about her newest collection of poetry, 40 WEEKS, which is just out from YesYes Books.
Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer: Julia, hello! It’s such a pleasure to be able to sit down with you, albeit virtually, to discuss your new book. To get us started, would you mind telling us about how the collection came to be, and your process getting it into the world?
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: I’m thrilled to be able to talk with you, and share a space again, engulfed, as my life and work perpetually are, by motherhood! When I was trying to get pregnant with my second child, I was already consumed by parenting my neurodiverse older one as well as helping to manage my husband’s chronic health issues that only seemed to be exacerbating by the day. I felt my life entirely consumed by caretaking, for the bodies and minds of others, and really neglecting my own. So, I decided this would be my self-care, my way of maintaining my identity as a writer amid everything else. My way of holding on to the bit of myself that wasn’t only mother, only caretaker. I gave myself the task of writing a poem-a-week for the duration of my pregnancy and because I found the weekly emails from BabyCenter—comparing the baby’s size to a seed, fruit, or vegetable—at once very generative for metaphor-making and problematic in the way they objectify and gender the body, I thought they’d make for a great prompt.
And as for getting it out into the world, that is a story of poetry community and friendship. I met Kelly Grace Thomas in the pages of Muzzle Magazine, and we both fell completely in love with one another’s poems. Hers was taken by YesYes Books through the Pamet Prize, which reads only ten poems of a work in progress and then semifinalists are asked to submit a full manuscript. In February 2019, when I was five months pregnant, Kelly asked me if she could nominate a selection of the poems I was working on for the prize. I was very unsure, being only half way through my pregnancy and unsure whether I could keep this going the whole way through, unsure whether this project of weekly poems was really anything, let alone a full-length collection. But, Kelly believed in me and my work so much that I believed in us too.
A month before my child’s birth, I got the email telling me I was a semifinalist and that by July 15th, I’d need to submit the full book. My daughter was born June 19th and I wrote “Week 40: Pumpkin” in the hospital, talking and typing into my phone, while the baby remained on my body. During the next few weeks of newborn haze and exhaustion, I put the full manuscript together. Unlike my usual writing process full of many revisions, I revised very little. I wanted the book to really be true to the experience of pregnancy and motherhood, unfiltered, at times incomplete or rushed, and messy in all the most beautiful ways. It was an exhilarating experience to write it and see it come together, to make my process of writing out of immediate experience an intentional craft choice.
KBP: One of the things I admire most about your work is your attention to language, to the failings of it as well as the meaning we derive from it. It’s evident your poetry is inspired by a multilingual mindset and preoccupation. Could you tell us more about how you became fascinated by etymology, and how that manifested in 40 WEEKS, where each poem through the book’s poetic conceit is an act of naming?
JKD: Oh, etymology has been a fascination of mine since graduate school, so I’ve been obsessed for over a decade, with the origin of words and how they name, or more so, fail to name the human experience. I first turned to etymology to write about my husband’s beginning chronic health issues. It was my way of showing that even when we break language apart to its multilingual and transhistorical origins, it is still incapable of grasping or explaining the experiences of the body. No matter how deep, how past I went, language did not provide the answers to my husband’s ailments, not their origin or diagnosis or cure, nor did it help alleviate his pain. And yet, as a poet, language is all I have.
So I use etymology to show the limitations of language, hoping the affect and effect is one of empathy. A kind of awareness about how far we are from another’s experience when we can hardly put into words our own. I felt this deeply as my body housed another body throughout pregnancy and my husband’s body could barely support his own. Each of us going through something that is beyond language and yet I needed language in order to endure it, to record and process and name even what refuses naming.
Perhaps etymology is another attempt at care, for others and the self. A way for us to realize our own limitations and not be so hard on ourselves for them as they are a part of our humanity just as language, and all its failings, is what makes us human. Perhaps I got a bit too philosophical and grandiose there, but it’s certainly something that is on my mind often as I keep turning to language for answers, to etymology, and leaving with only more questions. And this too, is something I want out of the poetry I write and read, not necessarily answers, but more questions.
KBP: I’m so intrigued by the juxtaposition of these more fragmented sparse poems with poems that stretch out the line. From the first poems, which depict the frustrating process of trying to conceive, to the last poems, which herald the arrival of your daughter Remy and discuss the act of having children itself as the world veers closer and closer to climate catastrophe, the poems breathe and expand on the page. How did the style of poetry change, in your mind, throughout the course of the book?
JKD: You know, the style and form of the poems was really reflective of what I was going through at the time, what I had energy for. In the beginning, conception and that first trimester, it is a miracle I even got things down on the page with anxiety and then the exhaustion and nausea and the severe sciatic pain I experienced from early on in my pregnancy. That’s why there are weeks without poems, just the name and week number. I didn’t want to fill these in after the fact, I wanted to show that this week, I tried, I was cognizant of the task of writing, but I just didn’t have it in me.
Later on, into the second and third trimesters, I had more room, like you say, to breathe. I found a better rhythm with my body, caring for my son and my husband, while also committing to these poems. And particularly later on in my pregnancy, when my husband’s condition got to the point that he was unable to work any longer, I really needed the room to show both the experience of my body and of what I was observing about his.
And when it comes to the final two poems of the book, the ones written in the postpartum weeks, those I added to much later, letting myself sit with and revise them, letting them grow into what they needed to be and perhaps fill in some of the gaps the earlier poems left or maybe open up new gaps that future books may or may not fill.
KBP: A major concern in the collection in my mind is the duality between creating new life and not losing yourself in the process. In “Week 32: Jicama,” the speaker writes, “It’s not / for you, he says, pointing / to your belly / & you think / nothing ever is / or will be again” (59). Could you talk a little more about how you navigate this balancing act of mothering and honoring the mother as a person in need of care, too?
JKD: As I mentioned, writing is one important part of self-care for me. Whether I get to sit down at the computer or with a notebook or talk into my phone while walking the dog or type furiously into it while sitting on the toilet—a longed for moment of quiet, only sometimes behind a longed-for closed door—writing is always an escape out of my present reality and at once deeper into it. It’s how I figure out what I’m thinking or feeling. How I find my way back to myself when I give so much of me to others.
And on a non-writing related not, exercise is my other act of self-care. Just a few months after having my son, I joined Fit4Mom and started teaching for them shortly thereafter. Mamas with strollers running outside and doing strength training while our kids watch the whole thing. I did this throughout my pregnancy with Remy, even write about it during “Week 7: Blueberry.” And after she was born, putting both kids into a double stroller and doing a fitness class or running for miles and miles was such self-care. Such calm and release and the perfect way for me to be with them and with myself at once. Now that they are both out of the stroller, I take long runs for myself most of the time, reminding myself not to feel guilty for taking the time for my own body. But, my older son has also taken to accompanying me on his bike as I run alongside him, so I’m sure my daughter will be joining us in no time.
KBP: Additionally, familial relationships act as a touchstone for the book. The text moves seamlessly from the relationships between mothers and children to the relationships between husband and wife, to the relationship between fathers and children, reaching out towards that inherently human debt, that question we are always asking ourselves: what do we owe each other? How do you approach writing about these relationships in your work?
JKD: This is a fabulous question and not one I’ve thought about since I think, to some extent, all writing is navigating relationships, because as you say, this is also part of our humanity, our interconnectivity with others. I guess I’d say I approach relationships from a lyric impulse, from a single moment or image and then let that open up into more of a narrative, a story about the person. For example, my father isn’t in many of my poems in general, but “Week 11: Fig,” took me to him because I recalled the fig trees in his mother’s orchard in Odesa. And the poem emerged really from that connection, between my father and the fig, which opened up into me and my father, my experience of teeth grinding and my father’s of having terribly rotten teeth, like many immigrants from former Soviet territories, given the lack of proper dental care and hygiene for the majority of their lives.
So all this is a longwinded way of actually showing that the way I write relationships is through associative movements, one image or moment, sparking a connection with another and then another and somehow, they thread together to make a poem. It sounds quite romantically organic, and of course, when it comes to building poems, this kind of organic composition is more often the exception than the rule, but 40 WEEKS is an exception, and I’ve never been one for rules when it comes to poetry, more like know them so you can break them with intention.
KBP: Reading your books is always an exercise in witnessing. Your subject matter spans the post-Soviet diaspora and the atrocities committed there to Philadelphia and back again, reaching always across the water, towards a homeland under attack, towards family lost. In 40 WEEKS, the dead are always present, even more so in the creation of new life. How was the experience of writing into that relationship between homeland and family while writing this collection?
JKD: You know, I’ve called this my least overtly Jewish book, because I only mention Jewishness in one poem and my Ukrainian origin in three, I think. But perhaps, it is actually my most Jewish and most Ukrainian book in that these aspects of my identity are in every single poem regardless of whether I call them out explicitly or not. It is a book where I don’t have to reiterate these parts of my history and present identity because I have grown more confident in my ability to have them come through in my writing. With my first two books, perhaps I was always justifying to myself, and my reader, that I have the right to the stories I am telling, to the ancestral losses even though I did not witness them directly. In this book, I am bearing witness to my own body in a way that recognizes the long and complicated history this body carries.
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, “The dead don’t go anywhere. They’re all here. Each man is a cemetery. An actual cemetery, in which lie all our grandmothers and grandfathers, the father and mother, the wife, the child. Everyone is here all the time.” As much as 40 WEEKS is about new life, about survival and hope and most of all love, it also carries within it all the dead I come from and passes them down onto my children. In Jewish custom, we name after a deceased loved one, so my son is named after my great-grandmother, and my first book, The Many Names for Mother, as you well know, is concerned about inscribing him into our intergenerational trauma. The whole book is anxious about this inscription and trying to find a way out of this cycle.
However, by the time I was writing the poems for 40 WEEKS, with three years of parenting my son under my belt, I’d learned to embrace this inscription as inevitable and instead, let the poems reach for light and laughter, for levity, in other ways, not away from the past but through it. I realizes our past is not something we can ever be free of, no matter the generational distance, we carry it in our bodies, just like I’ve carried my children. Remy is named for my grandmother Rosa, the one whose Odesa garden I mentioned, a woman I hardly knew but whose wild spirit , me and my children. My poems, like my children, are the nexus between past and present, ever-reaching or perhaps speeding towards the future, no matter how fraught or uncertain. They, my children and poems, whirl with all the temporalities inside them, all our generations there as we create the next one.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach is the author of three poetry collections: 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023), Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize, and The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (The Kent State University Press, 2019) and finalist for the Jewish Book Award. She is currently working on a poetry collection as well as a book of linked lyric essays that grapple with raising a neurodiverse child with a disabled partner under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia's birthplace. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and AGNI, among others. Julia holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and a PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. She is an Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing at Denison University.
Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer’s work has previously been published or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Crazyhorse, Poet Lore, Beloit Poetry Journal, and others. The child of United States Foreign Service officers, their work is rooted in a global consciousness, having lived most of their formative years abroad and studied at Trinity College Dublin. They have a degree in Russian language, literature, and culture from Bryn Mawr College. The recipient of a 2023 Pushcart Prize, they have won awards from the Ledbury Poetry Festival and Bryn Mawr College, as well as received support from The Seventh Wave and Tin House. Their chapbook, Small Geometries, is forthcoming with Ethel Zine & Micro Press in April/May 2023. They are a second-year in Syracuse University's MFA program. Find their work at Home | Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer (kcbrattpfotenhauer.wixsite.com).