Interview with Shayne Terry
I love telling the story of how I met Shayne Terry—we’re both from Rockford, she’s now based in Brooklyn, and we met neither place, which has always felt a bit like magic. But that’s a story for another time because I want to focus on her incredible book, Leave, which is officially in the world today!
I struggle giving a quick blurb for this postpartum account because, while slim, it tackles so much, and in a way that’s quite profound and stunning. Yes, it deals with birth, but also death, our broken healthcare system, care, pain, intergenerational trauma, and family leave. Anyone who had a less than ideal birth experience needs this book, as do those who want to better understand others’ pain. (Getting on my soap box here: that should be anyone striving to be more compassionate people in the world, which, I think, should be all of us right now.)
I got the chance to talk to Shayne about it (in person! in Rockford!) for Brooklyn Rail if you want to check out a longer conversation about these themes and making art.
I’m so glad Shayne agreed to this interview!
Can you share a bit about this book's path from concept to publication?
Leave began in July 2019 as notes on my phone. Note taking is almost an unconscious habit, and it's very much a part of my writing practice. I use an app called Bear that syncs across mobile and desktop and allows you to group notes by hashtag and easily search them. My notes are grouped by project, and then I have more general categories like #Titles, #Names, #StoryIdeas, and #ThoughtLog. I drop ideas into my phone all day long and then when I sit down to write, I can look at my recent notes, pick one, and get started.
Way before I knew Leave was a book, I was simply taking notes on what felt like a bewildering life experience. I had the idea that I might use the notes for something later — an essay? — but they were just general observations about how I was feeling, questions I had, things I found odd or frightening or comforting. They all went into my thought log, to be sifted through later.
Before long, I felt compelled to turn my notes into something. I wanted to go deeper, and I had questions that I felt called to answer on the page. I also noticed that these notes about my birth experience were in conversation with notes I had been taking under #MomsAndGuns, so I decided to merge all the fragments and write toward my unanswered questions. The result, which I finished sometime in 2021, was the first draft of Leave. (I should say, it wasn't my primary project; I was working on a novel at the time, and Leave was the project I worked on when I needed a break from that.)
It was long for an essay — around twenty-five thousand words — and I spent a while trying to figure out how to revise it down, but I didn't want to cut anything, so I began thinking of it as a very short book. Some of my favorite books that deal with the postpartum period are also very brief — Rivka Galchen's Little Labors, Sarah Manguso's Ongoingness. Books that are small yet hold so much. I revised it with "book" in mind instead of "essay" and shared it with a few trusted readers and my agent in the fall of 2021. (You were one of my first readers, Rachel, and I will be forever grateful for your thoughtful feedback!)
My agent and I agreed that I would take this project out on my own. It was going to be a tough sell for trade publishers, and I also felt very strongly that working with an independent press would give me more control over how this sensitive, personal story was marketed. In 2022, I submitted the manuscript to a contest with a press whose aesthetic vision I admired, and Leave was one of five finalists. In 2023, I found out it hadn't won that contest and I sent it to Autofocus.
When Michael Wheaton at Autofocus called with the offer to buy it, everything about the situation just felt right. I knew my book had found the right home when he said, "It pretends to be a book about birth, but it's really a book about death." He just got it. He also told me on that call that his wife Amy, who does all the gorgeous Autofocus covers, had gone through the same birth injury as me around the same time. To know that she would be doing my cover was so meaningful to me.
Working with Michael on edits was great. He let me do a big revision on my own before giving me notes, and then he had a team to help copy edit and proofread. It all felt very collaborative, very in line with my vision for the project. I feel so lucky that Leave landed where it did.
I brought up the notes part of the process because many lines in the finished book are exactly as they appear in my notes from July, August, and September of 2019. A lot of my revision process for this project involved protecting certain pieces, not touching them too much while also allowing the story's fullest version to emerge. I would almost call it a preservation process more than a revision process; I wanted to preserve that original "account" as I'd recorded it while it was happening. I have novel projects where revising means scrapping everything and starting over, and this was not that at all.
I’ve long admired how you reassess and tinker with your writing routines as you’re working on different projects and changing circumstances (like inviting your kid to your writing time). Could you share how you approach prioritizing, or fitting in, writing amid life stuff?
This is the big question of my life, Rachel! I have a kid and a fairly demanding day job and you know better than anyone, if you don't prioritize writing it's never going to happen. I don't have a great answer on how to do that, but what I can say is that I value being the best mom, partner, friend, colleague, neighbor, etc. I can be, and I have found that having a committed daily writing practice actually helps with that. When I'm not making time for my writing, I get cranky and anxious.
As you mention, though, prioritizing that practice has required flexibility and experimentation. It's a little easier now that my kid is five and generally happy to chill next to me with an iPad if he wakes up early, but when he was two, three, four, it was tough. I kept trying to get up earlier to get some precious morning solitude, but the earlier I woke up, the earlier he would wake up. At one point I was getting up at 3:30 in the morning and that was... not sustainable.
What I would tell the me of three years ago: "Just read. Spend a year or two just reading. Look at art. Keep the practice, but don't try to produce anything. This tough season is shorter than it feels." This has been my approach during book promotion. I'm not writing every day right now, and that's okay. This is a short season, and soon it will change.
Any reading recommendations?
This is a preorder recommendation! I just read an advance copy of Erica Stern's Frontier: a memoir & a ghost story, which comes out from Barrelhouse in June. I have never read a book like this before. Frontier tells three stories: one is the author's birth experience, which resulted in a temporary brain injury to her baby; the second is historical fiction about a frontierswoman who dies during childbirth and becomes a ghost who haunts her husband's next wife; the third, woven in, is a researched history of the industrialization of birth. I have started telling people, "If you like Leave, you'll love Frontier."
Is there a song that ties into your book in some way?
The book includes a selection from my birth playlist, which to me reads like a poem. The full playlist was nearly 15 hours long, but probably my favorite song on it, and the one whose meaning has changed for me again and again, is Fruits of My Labor by Lucinda Williams.
Thank you, Shayne!