Matrescence is a Long Season: A Conversation with Amy Bornman

A Year Postpartum

a six-zine series by Amy Bornman

Imaginary Lake

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Amy Bornman is a writer, artist, and parent living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is the author of two books of poetry, There is a Future (Paraclete Press Poetry, 2020) and Broken Waters (Fernwood Press, 2024), and co-author of How to Sew Clothes (Abrams Books, 2023). Bornman publishes zines as part of her home-based press, Imaginary Lake. Bornman also writes the Substack newsletter My Candle Burns and designs sewing patterns for All Well Workshop. Both her writing and textile work focus “on themes of domesticity, self-regard, caregiving, place, and spirituality.”

In conversation with Heidi Fettig Parton, Bornman discusses her recent series of six zines, collectively entitled, A Year Postpartum, which she published through her press, Imaginary Lake. A Year Postpartum explores the theme of matrescence: the process of becoming a mother.

The conversation has been edited for content and clarity.

Heidi Fettig Parton: Matrescence is a term I’ve learned recently, despite having been a mother for 32 years. What does the term mean to you?

Amy Bornman: Thinking about matrescence has been such a comfort to me in these years of great change and great responsibility. I could sense it in my first pregnancy, the way my brain was shifting in ways that felt out of my control. I feel a little obsessed with the idea of transformation and the way that motherhood, in particular, is universally transformative. It’s something I want to hear from every mother I meet—how are you different now than you were before? What feels good, what feels hard? Bringing the idea of matrescence into early motherhood invites us to not define ourselves immediately, to take time coming into focus. To learn! That’s what I needed, to not have to change into “mother” the second my baby was born. Motherhood accumulates. Days stack on days, stack on days. Four years into motherhood, parts of my life as a mother are just now coming into focus. Matrescence is a long season. The transformation is ongoing.

HFP: The title track of this series, the zine A Year Postpartum, consists of short essays. In the essay “Labor,” you write, “[n]othing ever feels like it’s for me. Everywhere we go, I have to do the most labor” (italics in original). Has the work of creating helped you hold on to your identity as a separate, distinct person?

AB: Oh my goodness, I don’t know where I would be without the tools of writing and making things in my life. My mind feels very much governed by my emotions. It is hard to process my life through thinking. I write to find out what I think. I don’t really know until I put words on the page. In the seasons of my life when I am not writing very much, I can feel the time running over me like rushing water. I can hardly catch my breath. Every mother knows the feeling of being just utterly consumed by the 24-hour cycle of care. It’s “survival mode” or that “nothing ever feels like it’s for me.” Writing is for me. Writing brings me back to myself and unites my disparate parts. I sweep out the stale air in my body and my mind through morning pages or journaling, through writing poems, through essays or zines, or through the novel I’m working on now. The shape of the writing changes, but the intention is always the same. I want to know what is happening to me. I want to exhale.

HFP: In the essay “Desperate Self” (from the zine A Year Postpartum), you write:

She only visits when it’s the middle of the night … and the baby won’t sleep for an hour or longer. She enters the room, assumes my position, and steals the baby from me. Angry, sweaty, monstrous, afraid. What can she do? Where can she go? Who will help her? No one …. the mother is responsible for the child—but she is still there, fully human, just as the baby is. The Desperate Self roars her personhood.

This “roar of personhood,” like so many of your themes, feels so “of the moment.” Since becoming a mother, have you thought differently about the unpaid emotional and physical labor of motherhood?

AB: So much. I had no idea how intense the emotional, physical, and intellectual labor of motherhood was until I stepped into it. With small children, what shocks me most is how easy it is to do all the things they need, all day and all night, every day. The never-endingness of it. My own devotion is really moving to me, the way I don’t think twice before going to my babies in the night, making them food, or providing them with safe places to play. That devotion feels so natural—but it is costly! My body is exhausted, my mind is run ragged, and my own self, my inner child, is neglected because of my unending devotion to my children. When I don’t care for myself, I am a more reactive, tense mother, worn thin by my own devotion. If anything, I really need to figure out how to be devoted to myself too, and that has proven the biggest challenge of motherhood—harder than the never-ending labor.

HFP: In A Year Postpartum, you mention your recently published poetry book, Broken Waters, which you wrote while pregnant the first time. You commented that it is “strange to try to market it because … I’ve changed so much since I wrote it.” Can you tell us more about how you’ve changed?

AB: I think a lot about a quote from Shannon K. Evans’ book, Rewilding Motherhood, “Motherhood is an imposing figure in the room of the soul.” That imposition, the space motherhood takes up inside of me, used to be filled with other things. What other things? I can hardly remember now. Maybe that’s the biggest change, and biggest surprise, always operating at full capacity, feeling filled to the brim with joy and struggle in equal measure. I don’t think I lived with the same intensity before. The other huge change is a very personal one. Broken Waters is as much about pregnancy as it is about faith and my religious origins in Christianity. Motherhood brought with it a huge wave of spiritual doubt that is still looming large in my life. Faith in God (or lack thereof) feels like another “imposing figure” for me. Either way, I wrote Broken Waters in 2020, just before my first son was born, and now, four years later, I have experienced another pregnancy and birthed another baby, deconstructed my lifelong faith in a very destabilizing way, and walked through so much matrescence.

HFP: Can you tell me more about how you allowed zines to push creative boundaries and cross genres?

AB: In my mind, an artist lets the process determine what is ultimately created rather than aiming for a certain product. Publishing the zine series was a really fun project for me because I could let each publication take the shape of the content and find the best way to share the thing I was trying to share in each zine. No rules, no expectations, and a blank slate each time. That felt exciting to me. I like to feel free to dabble and build skills across genres and categories. I’m a poet, I’m an essayist, I’m writing my first novel—all of it is interconnected.

HFP: Are there any non-obvious differences between self-publishing and traditionally publishing your work?

AB: I think the biggest thing is immediacy. That, and light-footedness. Traditional publishing takes so long and requires the collaboration of many people. If I think about my poetry book that was just published—I finished writing it at the end of 2020, and it just came out in 2024. It took a while to find a publisher, and then, once it was under contract, it took a while to make it to publication. I have found self-publishing zines to be much more immediately satisfying. I can go from an idea to a finished zine in a very short time, usually one to two months of fragmented working time. That, compared to over three years, is light years faster! But these two publishing modes serve two different purposes in my career and produce very different finished products. I look forward to continuing to work within each framework.

HFP: The zines comprising A Year Postpartum are gorgeous works of art. How did you acquire zine-making skills? Have you ever taken a book arts class?

AB: No, I haven’t. The first zine I made was a collaborative project with some college friends shortly after we graduated. The zine was about how we felt in our early twenties in Chicago, and the finished zine now feels like such a special artifact from that time. After that, I didn’t make zines for years. I was inspired to pick it up again by Amelia Greenhall, my long-time collaborator in our sewing pattern design business, All Well Workshop. She and her husband started a small risograph press (digital screen printing) and created open-source software for risograph printing and zine layout that I wanted to check out. Amelia and I wrote and designed some quilt pattern zines for All Well. Once I got back into it, I was hooked!

HFP: In Objects: an Inventory, the collection’s zine-length essay, you write about Imaginary Lake, your basement laundry press—where “[t]he printing, the folding, the cutting, the stapling, the fashioning of stacks of finished objects to send … readers” takes place. Is there significance in the name Imaginary Lake?

AB: I named the press Imaginary Lake because I needed a retreat. I’ve always been drawn to lakes, and there is one lake in particular where my husband and I effectively fell in love and then later lived beside early in our marriage. I think of that lake in my mind as a big spiritual mirror, a surface on which to float. I think about being in a canoe in the middle of that lake, drifting, watching loons. I needed that feeling in my art and writing practice, in my life as a worker, while I devote so much labor every day to mothering. I needed a place to float and be quiet. This laundry-room press feels like a place to float around and make things, maybe even waste time beautifully, if that makes sense.

HFP: Do you have any words of wisdom for others balancing parenthood with their creative lives?

AB: Fight to find the “right size” for your creative work in your life. Mothering can easily consume all your time and energy, especially if you are the primary caregiver. To maintain a creative practice, you must carve out a sustainable space for that work. I have found the experience of motherhood to be extremely creatively generative, but I have had to find ways to use that energy at the “right size” without burning out or taking on a crazy project that takes me away from my children so much as to be counterproductive. This means saying “no” a lot, doing less, and trying to stay present where I am. I feel privileged that my creative work is my job, but to keep it that way, I have to do it! It’s not as simple as shutting myself in the studio and making it happen. The flow between the different parts of my life needs to be fine-tuned and approached with care. It can’t be viewed as a binary but rather as a flow of organic give-and-take. My mothering seeps into my creative work, my creative work seeps into my mothering, and it all exists in a kind of symbiosis. Keeping that balance is the tricky part.

HFP: Will you keep A Year Postpartum in print, or was this a limited run? Can Literary Mama readers still order this collection?

AB: Yes. All six of the zines in the series are still in print for the time being. I love sending zines in the mail. Each zine is also available as a digital download to be printed at home or read as a PDF.

HFP: Given your wide range of creative abilities, what project(s) are you turning to next?

AB: I started writing a novel in 2021 and recently picked it up again in earnest. I’ve never written fiction seriously before, and it has felt so exciting to explore a new form that I’ve long enjoyed as a reader. I’m taking a break from making zines until I finish my novel draft—and after that, I’m hoping to publish something new for Imaginary Lake. I’m interested in continuing to develop new publications about birth, matrescence, domesticity, and caregiving. There is so much to write about these subjects and not enough places to publish it, especially in print.