Molly Peacock

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I’m a widely anthologized poet who has published eight volumes of poetry, including the forthcoming The Widow's Crayon Box (W.W. Norton and Company). I’m also the author of a memoir about my choice to be childfree, Paradise, Piece by Piece (Riverhead). As well, I’ve written two biographies about the creative choices of women artists: Flower Diary: Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door, about a 19th-century artist who was married without children, and The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work At 72, about an 18th-century artist, the inventor of botanical collage, who also was married without children. The Paper Garden was named a Book of the Year by The Economist, The Globe and Mail, Booklist, The London Evening Standard, The Irish Times, and The Sunday Telegraph. I’m also a poetry activist, the co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses, the founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series, and the founder of The Secret Poetry Room at Binghamton University. I live in Toronto but maintain close ties to New York City, where I lived for many years.

2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B? 
It’s Plan A! I’ve been writing since I was ten years old, and my choice to be childfree evolved from my feeling that I couldn’t have it all. I could devote serious attention to writing poetry - and then to prose - while earning a living, and I could devote myself to a partner, but I could not become a traditional wife and mother while also having to nurture a gift for writing. I come from a working-class family where the only books in the house were Popular Mechanics, the Bible, and my mother’s library books: usually six or seven popular novels, which she devoured. It was not a literary or educated household. I had no role models for women who had children and managed to write. I never thought writing would be my hobby, the thing I did after my kids grew up.

It happened that I learned to write the alphabet before I learned to read. I started writing to get the attention of my mother, the reader. My mother, a farm girl who came to Buffalo to marry my father who worked for the power company reading meters, instilled in me the idea that I had a choice about having children: that having children wasn’t inevitable, that I could determine the course of my life. In other words, I could realize my mother’s dream.

3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
Usually, I’m thinking about something that happened, something big, like my husband’s death, or something seemingly little, like finding a cracked mixing bowl at the back of a cabinet. Why hadn’t I thrown it out? The poem discovers why. After my husband died, I was so full of emotion that I wrote sonnet sequences—one poem wasn’t enough. But for my memoir about my choice not to have children, Paradise, Piece by Piece, published in 1998 and still available as an ebook, I took a chronological approach. It began when I was four years old. My mother was cooking dinner, my father was drinking a beer, my little sister was screeching around the kitchen on her wheely toy when my grandmother looked at me with exasperation and said, “Don’t ever have children, Molly!” It was her voice, and the concurring voice of my father, and my mother speaking over her shoulder from the stove, “Molly, you can do anything you want” that I heard as I made—and remade—my decision to be childfree.

4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
I write organically, by hand at first, on a purple pad, with a mechanical pencil. Once I get going, I turn to a laptop, type in the draft, and with prose, work on the laptop after that. I write poetry even more by hand. Once the purple pad draft is complete, I type the poem into my laptop, but then I print out each revision and work by hand corrections.

Psychologically, writing involves my being as candid as possible. I have to examine myself, and to bring myself to a question with the whole core of my being.

5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
A whole sense of beautiful identity.

6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
Seeing my work in print confirms the value of my writing, work I know wouldn’t exist if I were also to be a mother. It has given me greater and greater confidence in my choice and my NoMo status.

7. Tell us about the wider reception that you’ve had to sharing your story - has it changed how others have viewed you and your identity as a non-parent?
The response to Paradise, Piece by Piece has amazed me. The book was published in 1998, a quarter century ago, and it has remained in print in some form ever since. It is now available as an e-book. Over the last twenty-five years I have received heartfelt letters from readers, and the book has inspired two independent documentary filmmakers. Renee McCormick made A Life Outside Convention in 1999 which featured me and my book along with two other women who chose to be childfree. Recently, in 2023, Therese Shechter of Trixie Films made a documentary called My So-Called Selfish Life. The film’s title comes from my memoir, and the film’s sassy attitude comes from the many young women’s voices that Shechter features. My book and the responses to it over time are considered in the film, and I’m interviewed as well. The fact that people are still posting online reviews about Paradise, Piece by Piece is deeply gratifying.

8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?
I think that J.D. Vance’s line about “childless cat ladies” has done more for the general sympathy for the childfree choice than any piece of literature, essay, testimony or film! The outpouring of positive opinion for and defence of the childfree has been so vigorous that I am heartened about the current representation of childfree people. Yet, the representation by those who do have children still has the perfume of pronatalism about it. And there is always a faint sense of feeling that we’ll be sorry or regret our choice - which we know isn’t true. I’m 77 years old, still waiting for the so -called regret to emerge…

9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?
Interestingly, the publishing world is full of non-parents, and I would like them to own their own stories. If they did, they would be able to insist on round characters in novels making this important choice. They would also be able to counter pronatalism on the part of their non-fiction writers, especially biographers who can tell the stories of the full, productive, joyful lives of those who chose not to have children.

10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?

Since my new book of poems is launching in November, all I can think about is The Widow's Crayon Box!