Willo Drummond

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.

I’m an Australian poet and I teach creative writing in a university context.

 

Like many NoMos, my path to non-parenthood involved a complex synthesis of choice, circumstance and (in my case) failed fertility treatments. I’m currently going by ‘childless by circumstance’, but given the amount of choice involved in my journey, I’m leaving the door open for this to evolve and shift over coming years.

 

2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B?

My writing practice was in place before I knew that I wasn’t going to be a parent, so it is not a Plan B in that sense. It was and remains, however, an essential tool for me to make sense of my arrival in this unanticipated place and to enfranchise and process the grief associated with that arrival.

3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?

My process is very dialogic and entwined with my reading. Often poems will arise in response to lines I read in other poetry, non-fiction and fiction. Sometimes this happens kind of organically, and sometimes I actively pursue this kind of exchange to see where it takes me. I also keep a journal and jot down fragments and thoughts that might start a ‘conversation’ on the page at some point down the track.

4. What does the process of writing involve for you?

Some of the poems in Moon Wrasse (my debut collection published by Puncher & Wattmann in early 2023) arose from reading poems on motherhood followed by a kind of ‘speaking back’ to the ideas (and sometimes the inherent assumptions) in those works. In hindsight, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this as an act of self-care, but it did allow me to speak some unspeakable truths in several of the resulting poems, so it was worth it creatively, and also as a process of voicing and processing grief (once I was ready for this). I guess, to expand back out to a broader sense of my process, I’m often casting around in my reading and notetaking, looking for a strong feeling to tap into via exchange on the page. Whether or not this specific ‘feeling’ remains evident in the final poem, the strength of it will serve to sharpen the images produced and to give the poem momentum and coherence.

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5. And what does writing then also give you in return?

My sanity. It is absolutely necessary for me to meet the page creatively in a regular or semi-regular way in order to feel whole and grounded. If I leave it too long between exchanges, things tend to go pear shaped.

6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?

Having a book out in the world has certainly felt different to being someone with a range of poems published in individual places. I do feel more deserving of the title of ‘writer’ or ‘poet’ now. It has taken a long time to grant myself that permission, even as someone who has been publishing poems and articles for around a decade, who researches and writes about writing and who teaches writing to aspiring writers! Perhaps this is a class thing, a gender thing, or even an ‘Australian’ thing, but nevertheless it has been a very real thing for me, this finally granting myself permission to call myself an artist.

To answer the second part of your question, there was a sharp learning curve associated with promoting and publicly speaking about a book that touches on childlessness. Writing about a topic - in poetry no less! - is a very different matter to speaking about it in public. Being a public advocate in this space has been much more challenging for me than writing the actual poetry, which was quite healing. There was possibly a reason I used poetry to address the issue of my childlessness: it is a topic still so stigmatised and misunderstood, still quite ‘unlanguaged’ in many ways, and poetry allows you to say the unsayable.

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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?

What I’d hoped with publishing this work (as distinct to writing about it, which was for my own sake) was to spark conversations around the experience of childlessness, as well as the other themes touched on in the collection, including gender transition and ideas around intersubjectivity and becoming. Overall, the response to the work has been very positive, and recently (to my absolute astonishment) it was even commended in a national award for debut poetry collections. To hear the depth of engagement with the ideas in the book from the judges of this prize as well as from readers and reviewers has been deeply gratifying. I’ve also done several public readings across the year, and while reticence to discuss the topic of childlessness persists in some spaces, I’ve also had some great conversations with audience members. The conversations are starting and I’m looking forward to seeing them gain momentum.

8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?

More please! Just as for any other minority, both the childless and the childfree (and everyone in-between) need more representation across all media and more nuance in this representation. It is incumbent on us NoMo writers to write ourselves out of limiting tropes and into existence on the page and screen, both for ourselves and for the sake of broader society. People cannot understand what they cannot see.

9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?

1. There are a million ways to tell the story of a life; 2. complexity and difficulty do not preclude joy; and 3. think of your potential audience: in Australia alone 24% of cisgender women will end their childbearing years without having had children. Factor other gender identities into this count, and that is a large percentage of your readership! We are here, and we want (and need) to see ourselves as a valid part of the fabric of the world.

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

In terms of my own poetry, I seem to have a few more things to say in this space, so will keep writing poems on the topic as they arise. I’m also working as an editor on a project at the moment, with ideas for a few more things down the track, and I’m looking forward to embracing and amplifying childless and childfree voices in all of these projects.