A Conversation with Rachel Richardson
BY MARA FINLEY
Rachel Richardson is the author of three books of poetry, Smother (W. W. Norton & Co., 2025), Hundred-Year Wave (Carnegie Mellon, 2016), and Copperhead (Carnegie Mellon, 2011). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her poetry and prose appear in The New York Times Magazine, Lit Hub, Yale Review, APR, Kenyon Review Online, at the Poetry Foundation, on The Slowdown, and elsewhere. Rachel received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award and the Theodore Roethke Prize. She also holds an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in English from Dartmouth College. She has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Stanford, and University of San Francisco’s MFA in Creative Writing. She is currently Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary’s College of California’s MFA in Creative Writing Program.
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Mara Finley: First, thank you so much for making time to talk to me about Smother. I adore the title. It encompasses the central themes of the book—motherhood and wildfire—with ferocity and humor. Can you talk a bit about how you landed on Smother?
Rachel Richardson: Sure. The most obvious thing is that it’s a portmanteau of “smoke” and “mother,” which I thought was funny. I was drawn to the tongue-in-cheek aggression of it. When I realized this was a collection with these themes at the center, I wrote what became the title poem. I just started writing all these lines about smoke, and smoke started to be personified to me as the unattainable mother. She became a myth, a female nemesis. Smoke is the most pervasive and powerful threat because it’s air, it’s everywhere, and you can’t get away from it—it can permeate everything. And you don’t have to be directly in the crisis to be enveloped in this smoke. Which is also like how you don’t have to believe in the patriarchy or have a patriarchal marriage to be stuck inside the system anyway. We’re all in this natural environment, this social environment, whether we agree to it or not. In these last several years, living with megafires in California, that has felt like what the smoke was doing to us and showing us. It kept coming back relentlessly, summer after summer, so that became kind of the central figure for me. It became animated in a way, and it drove the book forward.
MF: The title poem comes at the midpoint of the book. The voice up until that poem feels autobiographical, but when the speaker becomes the smoke, would you say that she is not only a nemesis but also an alter ego? You and I have talked, privately, about the power we feel in middle age. A power in invisibility that’s rarely spoken of. There’s an amazing gender reversal in the poem, “Domestic.” “Brutal creature that I have become, destroyer,” you write, whereas the husband has “gentle hands.” Can you talk a bit about the brutality of motherhood as well?
RR: Do you remember the Atlantic article 10 years ago or so that became a big social question–“can women have it all?” I feel like, as women, we’re asked that question all the time, especially in middle age. We are asked to make ourselves invisible but also to take on every societal necessity. And there is a power in knowing how capable you can be, how you have acquired skills and capacity. I’ve never felt more capable in my life, really: as a poet, as a mother, and as a citizen; and in that poem as a gardener and someone who cares for the living world around her. Yet there’s also brutality in all of these things, right? Even in pruning trees, in disciplining children, in editing a poem. And I feel a certain ruthlessness in that now. I don’t apologize for doing it anymore. Sometimes I feel like embracing that hardness.
MF: I feel that too, as a writer and a mother. Ruthlessness, hardness, and a lack of apology for both.
RR: It’s probably that you realize that people in the world around you are willing to eat up everything, every bit of your time if you give it away. So, in order to have any self, you have to be uncompromising. Especially to have any writing self. You need to preserve that self for a creative life. I’ve always felt that being a writer is a funny position to occupy in society, don’t you? It’s not specifically gendered, it’s just a desire to preserve a part of yourself. To have that selfishness to hold some of yourself apart from everyone else. I am not willing to compromise that, and the only people who I share that feeling with are other artists, really.
MF: Absolutely. Can you talk a bit about process? What was it like, occupying the voice of the smoke?
RR: I had so much fun writing it. I wrote a bunch of lines trying to characterize idealized motherhood and cut them up and rearranged them on the floor for hours until I had something that moved in ways that interested me. Some lines, like “The smoke writes her novels in the bath,” were written directly to my parents, and to all of those good people who love me but don’t understand why I want to make art out of my life and theirs. And I just thought it was funny, giving the smoke a line like, “The smoke has had enough of your bullshit.”
MF: I want to ask you about structure, too. The book is structured chronologically, around actual fires that took place. But also there’s a cyclical nature to the way the book moves, a sense of destruction and renewal. And at the midpoint in the book, there’s a birth and a death—the birth of the speaker’s daughter and the death of her friend. There’s a sense that everything has burnt to the ground and begun again.
RR: Yeah, I wanted to structure the book chronologically in terms of the fires. So they increase in amplitude as they go. And the very last poem is “After Fire.” I’m trying to show a period of time that can be defined through public markers in that way. None of these things are private events. All of this was happening to all of us, especially all of us in California. It happened to communities who were living in the path of a fire and those in the smoke of it, which is not always the same place. The smoke drew a larger circle. But in my private life, my friend starts dying as my child is being born, right? So life is happening inside, in the quiet, in the experience of my own singular self and body. And yet it’s in the context of the public always, of the collective emergency. The long, slow emergency that we’re living in. I do want it to have a bit of a documentary feel.
MF: Speaking of the shared events of the collective, the pandemic is definitely present in this book. I wouldn’t say it’s a central theme—it feels more like a pervasive atmosphere, like something that permeates the narrative, like the smoke.
RR: Yes. I’m not interested in being ambiguous about that. I wanted to chart what it was like to be alive in that moment. And, you know, it’s funny, because I finished most of these poems by 2022, and the book is coming out in 2025. I mean, there’s Twitter in here, right? Twitter doesn’t exist by that name anymore, you know? And there’s no AI in the book. This specific technological moment is already dated. But I’m trying to be accurate to what that moment was like, and our next moment is based on what happened here. It’ll have different technological players and different environmental events, but it’ll happen in the environmental condition that’s been built by these factors.
MF: I love the way that you use technology throughout this book. There’s this porous boundary between technology and the natural world, and an inescapability to our relationship with technology. Like in the very first poem, “Creek Fire,” you have this line about “phones lifted toward the horizon.” And later, in “The Houses Anchored on the Hillside,” the houses “fasten themselves to the edge of the woods. Which used to be all there was.” It feels like the relationship between technology and the natural world is also related to this idea of domesticity and wildness, in these images of the speaker interacting, at a distance, with coyotes and wolves. “The coyotes don’t know this in language, but wilderness is threaded in their bones,” you write. “The woman sits in her car at the top of the hill in front of her house, punching the numbers on her phone.” Can you talk a bit about how you threaded technology throughout the text, and about your relationship to technology as a writer?
RR: Early on, I didn’t really think I was writing about fires because most of the fires hadn’t happened yet. I started writing this in 2017, and I thought I was writing about the death of my friend, which had just happened. I was thinking about death as a kind of distance that you can’t come back from, a kind of lack of communication. Nina Riggs and I were neighbors in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I had moved away to California a year before she died, so I already felt really distant from her during her illness and that was painful. Our main form of communication was through phones, mostly texting. And while she was dying I would get videos of people at her bedside in hospice, singing and things like that. My updates tended to be through digital means, through a screen. We used to text a lot and then I could still text her for months after she died and my texts didn’t bounce back. They just went into the ether. I kept texting her because I didn’t want to stop. And I thought about that void. Where does that digital data go in the world? And what does it mean that it’s just sort of floating out there in some data center, some no man’s land?
MF: I love the poem, “Questions,” which addresses Google like an oracle.
RR: That was the first poem I wrote for this book. At the time, I thought I was writing about Nina and robots. I thought, if you don’t believe in God, who do you turn to for answers? Google, I guess. So I looked up the most asked questions on Google, and people ask these really big meaning of life questions like, when will I die? What’s the meaning of life? And then they also ask really silly questions. We ask everything of the digital gods. And I thought about that more and more, that the interface between all of us now is screens. And then the pandemic came along and suddenly Zoom contained all the faces of our lives, and our children went to school on a screen. It changed entirely not just the way we communicate information, but also the way we interact and feel communion with other humans.
MF: And all the while, on the west coast anyway, fires were burning all around us.
RR: Right. Suddenly the air was dangerous in every way. The air was the virus. The air was smoke, it was particulate matter. Not just trees, but also burning buildings and other toxic stuff. And so everyone was afraid of the air, the world, nature. And so we retreated into human-made stuff. Even if we were against it. Just like we live in this ether of patriarchy, we also live in a technological world, whether we want to or not. It’s everywhere. Individually you can make choices against it, but that doesn’t change the fact that we live in it. So everybody’s boundaries changed during that time. Technology took this huge leap forward in terms of its presence in our lives during those years.
MF: But something beautiful happens later in the book, which is that there are all these “Girl Friend” poems (after C.D. Wright) where female friends break through the technological barrier and still find a way to communicate and form community.
RR: Yes. One of the great comforts and entertainments for me during COVID was this text thread that started among my college friends. We live all over the country and we were texting each other like 30 times a day for two years. It was this amazing gift, having women who were talking about what life was like in other places, just in these short snippets. But we were all kind of in the same place. I mean, most of us had kids. Most of us had spouses and we were all in lockdown. Some version of that, in our different states and different policies and different family structures. We were all going a little bit nuts. We all really needed each other during that time. So the “Girl Friend” poems in the end are like individual love songs to women who I felt I could almost touch across great distances because we had known each other so well, and for so long.
MF: There’s this beautiful utopian moment when the speaker and the friends create a sort of alternate universe for their children, and they go back and forth between each other’s houses.
RR: Which is beautiful, except that it was on the eve of the 2020 election. There was this great risk all around us. It was such an anxious moment, such an anxious time. And yet, as long as we were going to be in our little pod, in our little bubble, we were going to do as much as we could to make it a beautiful place to be.
MF: You do such interesting things with the trope of beauty and the quotidian, too. So often that idea is treated in such an earnest way, but in poems like “Fishbowl,” you approach it with a lot of humor. I love that, because so often the quotidian is brutal and not really beautiful at all. The title, “Smother,” reflects that idea so well.
RR: I think there are two primary emotions in this book: anger and laughter. I hope people read a lot of these as funny poems because they are. I mean, they were to me, as experiences. I have thought that there were funny moments in past poems of mine, but humor was never a dominant mode. I think I go for it a little bit more here.
MF: Yes, I love that. I’m not a poet, but I love reading your centos and thinking about the poets who influenced this book. Can you talk a bit more about collage, influence, and the literal or figurative books on your nightstand during the writing of this book?
RR: There are always poet ancestors who you write back to. Guiding spirits for the work. I’ve loved C.D. Wright for a long time and I’ve felt her influence tonally in all of my books, but in this one, she became a really important guiding figure in part because she had just died. And she died right around the same time as Nina died, so we had lost all these voices, my literary friends and my real life friends, you know. That felt like an added emptiness. The centos are maybe the most direct example of this. This book really wants to talk about the public sphere, the space that belongs to us communally, whether that “us” is humanity, or Westerners, or Californians, or women in middle motherhood. I really want to speak to collective feelings more than to any sort of individual private world of the poet, you know? The “I” in this book is less interesting to me. It was more interesting to have a conversation and to be with others. And C.D. Wright is the poet of the commons. She is interested in others too. Her poems are always really peopled. So that was a shared impulse for me, to just look at and write about other people. There’s an autobiographical “I,” in this book, but she isn’t that interested in herself. I’ve positioned the “I” in a way that allows me to see from a particular angle, or set of angles, and there’s a sort of secret power of this position in which you’re invisible and yet you can see a whole lot. Like, I’ve been around for a while now and I understand how things work and intersect in a way that I didn’t before. I mean, you just get less interested in yourself over time. I was very interested in myself in my first book!
MF: I love that. In looking outward toward Nina’s death and C.D. Wright and fires and the pandemic and the potential death of the planet, would you say that the poems in this book are elegiac? The speaker has lost so much, but still, in poems like “The I Want Song,” she is filled with desire.
RR: I think this whole book is about wanting more than you get. And about not apologizing for that desire. And wanting more than you get is what an elegy is, right? It’s an unwillingness to stop caring for the person after they’re dead. An unwillingness to stop the conversation that you were having with them. I don’t have any complete elegies to Nina in this book, but I guess you could read all the poems to her as her as parts of an elegy. An elegiac impulse to preserve her in some way. But what I’m really interested in, by the end—those “Girl Friend” poems were some of the last ones that I wrote—was life. I was thinking, you better love the people you love now, you know, while they’re alive. Sing to them now. So I guess that part of me wants to resist the elegy in some ways. I want to write the living love poem. Which is also to say this is not an elegy for the world. I resist the idea that things are over or that the world is wrecked. I have children. It better go on! And that’s what the ruthlessness is about, right? I mean, we’re not going to get on the rocket to Mars.
MF: Speaking of ruthlessness and lack of apology, can you give us a bit more backstory on the epigraph (“I automatically reject any poem with the word ‘mother’ in it.” –J.D. McClatchy, editor, The Yale Review)? In the acknowledgements, you thank J.D. McClatchy for giving you “a wall to push against.” Can you talk about the place of resistance in this book?
RR: That line had been in my notebook for 15 years. He said it at a publishing Q&A, as if it was some kind of gospel. It was mysterious to me when I first heard it from him. I thought, why does he hate this kind of poem so much? I mean, he was being provocative. I don’t think he really hated the idea of mothers or motherhood. But he believed that it was shorthand for cliché. That the concept of a mother was the fastest route to sentimentality. And that’s funny to me when I start actually thinking about it. It’s this view that motherhood is sweet, that it’s uninteresting because it’s two dimensional. I think that’s the opposite of what’s true. I mean, in my experience, it has felt very rough-edged and complicated and, as we’ve said, brutal at times. Not just brutal for me, but also I’ve had to acquire brutality to occupy this position. And so I just think it’s a hilarious lack of understanding of what there is in that subject.
MF: Yes. I wonder, though, if you’ve ever resisted writing about motherhood, even in all of its inherent brutality? If you’ve internalized some of that wall? Because as writers, we’ve all been warned against it.
RR: I was once told by someone who I won’t name here that writing poems about motherhood was artistic suicide: no one would publish them. But it’s the central adult position in many of our lives, right? When something is so immersive in your life, I don’t think you can avoid it. At least in my experience of being a writer I can’t pigeonhole anything. This is a book that weaves all these different things through it because they were all happening at the same time in my life. I kept trying to write about Nina or technology or whatever, and then the smoke would come into it. I finally stopped resisting it and thought, okay then, how does it add a dimension to the story and my understanding? It’s the same thing with motherhood. It’s just there, and if you’re avoiding it, you’re not writing good work because you’re keeping some huge part of your experience out.
MF: Anything in your current lived experience that might make it into your next book?
RR: Well, right after finishing this book, I did some firefighter training. So I am certified as a wildland firefighter now.
MF: What? You’re just going to throw that in at the end? That’s incredible. This is one of my favorite things about you, your humility.
RR: I did the training through this really interesting environmental humanities organization, The Confluence Lab at the University of Idaho. I went through 40 hours of wildland firefighting training and then I’ll go participate on a prescribed burn. The opportunity came along and I wanted to change my relationship to fire and to this landscape. I don’t think Smother is a book about victimhood, really, but it did feel like the fires were this force that just came at us. An oppressive force, smothering. Now I want to see if there’s a different relationship to be had with fire. And with the position of being a mother, and a woman in patriarchy.
I think there’s a story about patriarchy in firefighting, too. Maybe traditional firefighting policy has not been the right way to deal with forests because it has gotten us to the point of having these massive fires. Prescriptive burning, on the other hand, is often led by local Native groups and women; even kids can participate. It’s preventative. So it gets no glory—you’re not going to be on the news for jumping into the fire from a helicopter. But you’re preventing the terrible, completely destructive thing. And you’re actually rejuvenating the forest, you know, you’re returning to a way in which humans can be a part of the ecosystem rather than taking over the ecosystem and dominating everything. It speaks to the power and quiet confidence I was talking about earlier. I don’t know if there’s another book to be made out of that, but there’s more that I want to learn from it.
