1. Sophia Shalmiyev Mother Winter
2. Sophia Shalmiyev
3. Sophia Shalmiyev Instagram

Overview

Sophia Shalmiyev emigrated from Leningrad to NYC in 1990. An MFA graduate of Portland State University, she was the nonfiction editor for the Portland Review and is a recipient of the Laurels Scholarship and numerous Kellogg’s Fellowship awards. The release of Portland author Sophia Shalmiyev’s debut memoir, Mother Winter, comes at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment is teetering on the edge of hysteria, funding for birth control.

The back cover and the first page of Sophia Shalmiyev’s Mother Winter explain that Russian sentences begin backward—so to understand Shalmiyev today, we must start at the beginning. The book describes 1980s Leningrad, anti-Semitism, her mother’s abandonment, and her emigration to America with her father. She writes about the early Riot Grrrl days, becoming a mother, and becoming an artist. Shalmiyev’s writing is brutal and lyrical— I kept stopping, awestruck, to absorb what I had just read. We caught up over email for this interview.

Let me start bysaying this line of yours, from page 237, perfectly describes being a mother andwriter: “This is the perfect exclamation of what it’s like to be a mothertrying to write holding one thing inside all gushy warm and the other thingfailing to come out against all odds.” I read that, underlined it twice,starred it, and put a bunch of exclamation points next to it. Because yes.

Iam glad that the very corporeal and seemingly indecent line appealed to you. Itmay not grab everyone for the very reason it was poignant for you. Erasureoften occurs when a thing is gory and profound but doesn’t belong with how wewish to see ourselves, or when looking at others, mothers especially, is toogross and takes away from the comforts of our benign narcissism.

Thatis my actual experience as a person with strings of empty cans loudly draggingaround behind me like a car announcing a celebration: Mother. The children inmy head and the children in my life are louder than my thoughts and ideas forthe most part. When I do get that god-like quiet behind my eyes and begin totype, paint, sketch, take notes, it is still a major tick-tock race back tothem. Always back to them. Until they are gone, and I realize that thisstructure and this container that frustrated me also got me through the wavesof a writing life. It’s like keeping in a tampon while taking a shit as quicklyas possible and getting yelled at by a tiny needy person to come help her. Unlessyou are writing an “edgy” novel, or a poem where anything is fair game becauseno one is buying, most nonfiction isn’t allowed to be so real. And I am usingthe word “real” here ironically to slap my own hand from the cookie jar ofpossible clichés, because it is a loaded one, the way the word “natural” isfull of holes that make us wince. The point is that you can’t use poetic,pedestrian, crass, bodily, street language in memoir, unless you get a passsomehow. I slipped this through the cracks, mainly by asking my editor from thestart of the revision process to let me write about my female body with morecandor and anger than I was used to seeing on the page. Zack Knoll is a rarebird and knows deeply what marginalized representations on the page can looklike. I did set the reader up in the first few pages to let her know I am goingfor vaginal discourse, for my mother and for my daughter, and that there willbe no epiphany, we will swim in our collective blood, shit, urine, discharge,whathaveyou, together. I do hope men also read that line and think: I am lazycompared to any woman out there and I should do more. Or, as I believe, moststraight dudes should quit the arts game and start a day care center TODAY. Doart as a hobby or a side job the way mothers were and are forced to, yesterday,today and tomorrow, it seems. Thank you, Eileen Myles, for saying it in theNYT.

What was your processfor this book? The form is interesting—at times, it feels like intimate journalentries; other times, stream-of-consciousness; and yet other times, you’re addressingyour mother directly. Did you consciously choose your form(s) or did you letthe book decide?

I don’t really know what a journal entry is comparedto what belongs in a finished and published book. I do not journal. Kerouac wasalright at journaling though, as were a few other men we call Great writers. Itis supposed to be a recording, unvarnished and unedited, which isn’t in thisheavily edited book. I get that the implication of journaling privately vs.publically is to move through your feelings, look at them later forperspective, at a distance, and learn something about yourself, then maybe condensethat into your behavior to better your relationships and advance in life. Ifthe writing is hot, heavy, bruised, brutal, and quick-tempered and it comesfrom a feminized body, we place it in a category much sadder than what we allowmen to express. Maybe because it is just too close to the bone. Maybe this ismy version of an action flick, of a buddy movie, of a chase scene, of montage. Butas I say a lot: I am a character in this book. So is the mother I hardly know.So is my father and so is Luda. They are all written based on my memories and informationand I play with throughout the text, in the form, in the scaffolding, which ishow the book is constructed. MotherWinter is about exile and obsessions. Claire Dederer calls it a “motherlessgeography.” In order to slap it out of the hand holding tightly ontointeriority, I must also build outward in the second person and sing it asthough I am channeling the Bulgarian Celestial Choir.

What have you done to maintain a space for yourselfand your work (writing and otherwise) within motherhood?

I left my husband over four years ago. I was stillin love with him when I asked him to move out and I will probably continue tolove him from far away (a fifteen-minute walk in Portland). I didn’t do this tomaintain my writing space, but the thing you are not allowed to say is that noman is a practicing feminist when it inconveniences him. Also, our modern mandoesn’t know how to pay a bill on time, research a pre-school, apply to it, getthe scholarships there, acquire health insurance, make dental appointments,anticipate needs, find a good therapist, discuss uncomfortable feelings, plan acalendar of any sort… I can go on. Their independence is a farce. They aresubsidized by women—emotional labor, domestic labor, and for many in my life,financially, as well. They may have this knowledge, magically, when they go todo paid work, but when it comes to unpaid domestic labor and romance, they suddenlyget more disorganized and distracted than ever. I buckled under the weight ofbeing the matriarchal force who was not just taken for granted but was receivedas hostile and mean for not loving to repeat myself over and over and get nonew results. The muscles around my spine went out after my second kid and Istarted to walk my life back to when I wasn’t taking care of a man and hisfragile ego and could only find pockets of solitude bracketed by nurturing: askingquestions, teaching basic concepts and being patient with boys and men until Iblew up, until they shrugged, and I collapsed. The men can deny it, but if I amnot speaking about you or to you then please do go on being the present andresponsible partner that you are. I still struggle around this due to basiccircumstances of the straight woman—our choices suck. My pal Melissa Febos saysshe thanks her lucky stars she doesn’t date men every single day. She is notwrong to be grateful for her queerness. Men have either not figured out how toseduce women without the rape model or are so lazy, afraid, and anxious thatthey make us do all the amorous work, too.

My time can be arranged differently since my ex andI, rightfully, split the parenting time with our two children in half.

On page 32, you say “Icould buy the ticket, take the ride, but never arrive at my body, clean andfed. Not until I cleaned and fed children of my own.” Do you think we need tobecome mothers ourselves before we can start to understand our own mothers, onsome fundamental level?

Notat all. I love her fiercely, but I do not understand my mother, and I have beenone for over a decade now. I kind of had an over-abundance of empathy for mydad and stepmom and I think that snaked away my porthole to a protectedselfhood. They are both so mercurial and gorgeous and strange and needy and I gotthem on every level, so having patience for them didn’t leave much for me toexplore. Always a caretaker. I think what we need to cultivate in order tounderstand mothers is a domestic revolt. An actual revolution. I think that wewon’t care about mothers until the men do that work and do it for generations.The men will decide that raising humans is a job once they all do it full-time,read the research about raising kids (Mahler, Klein, Winnicott, Erickson, AnnaFreud, Maslow) the way they seem to want to absorb Steinbeck or Saunders orphilosophy. They can form bonds over this knowledge and take it off our platesso that we are no longer the cold fish with no maternal instincts, or the hair-on-fireshrew with twelve arms to hold everyone. It is all on the masculine culture toshift. Stop asking feminine people to do more housework. And by the way, thescope of “housework” has expanded, not shrunk, with the advent of technology.Then we can think of mothers as humans. No one will ever like or understand a victim.That’s mother. A good mother is a good victim.

I really loved howyou’d intersperse these memories about Riot Grrrl. As a fellow woman of acertain age, I remember those emerging days of the movement—connecting withothers overs zines, music, writing on our bodies. Now that many Riot Grrrls areparents, do you think this can help change the landscape of traditionalstereotypes of motherhood? Do you see things changing with how society or womenview the institution of motherhood? (Loaded question, I know.)

No,I don’t. To add to the above, I believe that our culture is completelyfragmented by capitalism while counterculture is eating its own head in thecomments box. I feel extreme pessimism about stereotypes changing for mothers,because there will continue to be poor mothers. I think that even someone likeMaggie Nelson, whom people idealize and revere and hold up as an antidote toboring old tropes of a mother-writer (and who describes only the very best andmost tender aspects of her own later-in life parenting in her last book) might comeout and write that it is way harder for whoever takes on the woman-role in the family.Which is Silvia Frederici’s point: It is still a misogynistic system and astructure present even in queer and trans relationships—the woman-role, thewomb-role, the lower-caste role, still exists and gets played out. But thatallows me to feel hope in return. If I can admit to how terrible things arethen I have the power to address the solutions fit for the named problem. Friedan, a rich lady, knew that we needed to give ita name to yell at and study. The truth is that only well-off women withchildren are ever ok, or they would have the chance to be so if they tried halfas hard as an actual bohemian or working-class—or the disappearing middle-class—woman.They are called the idle rich for a reason, like a running car idling outside aschool, poisoning our air until we must go home with a terminal headache.

Myentry into punk rock culture was very naïve and didn’t feel like a rebellion becausewe were on food stamps and I worked at Burger King, a catering hall, and Itutored and babysat. I shared this money with my family. My parents wanted meto be a respectable kind of girl who had a part-time job at an office or anywhite-collar space, then hung around with idiots whose parents could get them intoan elite college. I was to align myself with power, casually, as though that isever a possibility for a poor immigrant girl. That kind of casualness availableto the wealthy is what disgusts me and scares me about those who enter thecounterculture and are “slumming it.” They can and do codeswitch and blendwithout repercussions. They have every advantage of safety nets braided of andby their servants’ hair, and I am to go sell my body for food and state schooltuition and then chill and pretend we have a kinship because we like the samebands, or both think that dressing as sexy objects really sucks. I think theyshould make themselves known instead of lurking and loitering; they shouldstart throwing their money into a pot to give to mothers who are selling theirbodies to survive. Then we can all have an honest talk about feminism andmotherhood. Those with a lot to say on the subject are silenced, traumatized,and have zero time. Time is money and money is hoarded or used as bribes toshut us all up. You couldn’t pay me enough to hang out with inherited wealthjocks.

You mention that “theart means we are going to do much more than survive the journey ahead.” How hasart helped you survive, and thrive, throughout your life?

Itmay be no accident that each of these questions precedes the answer to somedegree. I don’t have a formed thought about how art has helped me survive,exactly. Painting and writing have always been important, but I have rarelydone it for mass consumption or with an idea of a career until fairly recently.That is definitely part of the sexist construct I was fed around the scarcitymodel for women, with a storyline about those who make it as hungry artmonsters stepping over others or sad drunk losers who die early or aresensationalized. Having access to feminist art has been absolutely everythingto me. After decades of being a professional underachiever, I told myself thatthere is a chain, a conversation, an anti-canon, a feminine life externalized thatI want to be tied to for that exact reason: it is all about access, camaraderieand mentorship.

The passage you quoted is layered. My father, who weighed our suitcases to the ounce and still had our valuables confiscated at the airport for being over the limit, built crates and paid with borrowed cash to ship the art he collected in the Soviet Union to our future destination. He made many bad and extravagant decisions escaping our homeland and he knew this, but because he grew up so very poor and the idea that he could ever become an art collector of any sort was so ridiculous, he was willing to do dumb shit to stage this possibility. A woman from a family of scholars, of Jewish intelligentsia, whom he briefly dated, way above his station, was the inspiration for this strange and courageous ambition. The dog we brought was also like a drag show, right? We are either so secure and capable that bringing a fancy dog along to emigrate is no big deal, or we wish to simulate this destiny and act as if we will be, someday. Like buying good wine to go with stale bread as your paycheck runs out. Art with a capital “A” is still for the rich though isn’t it?

How do you think the creative community can supportwomen, and mothers especially?

We need more grants and more spaces for parents. Oneconcrete way is to offer childcare at every art and literary conference, or topay women to cover their childcare at home if they are on your panel or arerunning an event. It is all pay-for-play at the core anyways, but even that hasan extra fee attached to it if you are a mother. Why doesn’t AWP or thePortland Book Fest, or any other literary event have a budget line forchildcare built-in, yesterday? There are science conferences galore that makesure there is adequate childcare. I am very disappointed in the answer AWPgives out about liabilities. This is a reality and there are ways to handlethis with a lawyer and contract work. We need to leave empty chairs with namesand photos of every parent who wanted to but could not come to a book fest andcontribute their voice because of a lack of access to childcare. This is beyondbasic and no one will even touch it. Storm the palace; have a walk out. Dosomething about this now. We can’t all just peddle our wares to the highestbidder, people.

What are you struggling with, as a parent and as awriter, right now?

I have many traumatized women and girls writing me to ask how to deal with having been raped and abused, how to become articulate and seen and heard, basically, an artist with a platform, despite feeling speechless and ignored. This is a struggle I am lucky enough to have because it means I am a safe harbor for someone out there, but one which I must point out, men will never be usurped by. I would love to see that dumbass who wrote about His Struggle, and made his wife crazy doing so, try to answer my inbox of raped women for one week and not be admitted to a psychiatric ward in a straightjacket. I would even visit him and write about it while he recovers. I, willingly and anxiously, spend many hours giving out resources, advice, suggestions and encouragement to women who are flooding and depleting their cortisol, burying them alive, so that they may live in their bodies without needing constant escape and eventually write about it and find community. Someone very close to me was recently raped and I am having a difficult time with that feeling of helplessness. It is an epidemic and we have no monuments and no memorials and no national holidays for all of us girls and women who have been brutalized and treated like objects then told we are liars. I want a Washington Monument where our names are etched in cursive on a long red wall. I bet it can extend to every single state and wrap the world. That is the only wall we desperately need right now.

What books inspire you, and what are you reading rightnow?

Conflict is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman is what I am reading right nowand so should everyone! All of her books have given me much levity and I havewhiplash from nodding along. I talk in my book appearances about the choice tohave so much white space on the page as a metaphor for multiple white sheets ata morgue. I have never done this for my mother. Never had that closure. Schulmanwrites this way, but in reverse. Her generation buried so much genius, so muchmagic, so much promise, so much fun, so much community, so much love and wisdomthat cannot be replicated, and her record-keeping and eulogizing and writingover those white sheets is necessary. I learned so much about mourning and theresponsibility of the living though her. I hope she sees this interview and glimpsesher influence on this Brooklyn immigrant girl, by way of the early ’90s punkand club kid days, reading her writing about AIDS, about our cities, and aboutcultural slaughter. I watched it on the news and barely understood why andwhat, with only a few years of American speech in me, but I listened and dancedand worshiped gay nightlife and grew up changed by it.

Anything by Eileen Myles, Renata Adler and GracePaley, forever.

What advice would you give to a writer trying tojuggle parenthood and writing?

Sophia Shalmiyev Mother Winter

Open your document any time you can; just look at it.Women—get selfish and sacrifice your romantic relationships if that person isnot willing to support you and be your muse and housekeeper from time to time.Find other single parents and trade time. Write at any inconvenient moment anidea strikes you but more clipped, as notes. Know you will not be forgiven forbeing visibly and erratically busy and overwhelmed with your writing life, andyou will not be forgiven for seeming like a vessel with nothing but the familyand day job to tend to. As Myles said at our reading: We are all motherless. Wecan’t have a mother because she is a sleeve of all the generations of abusebefore and is never going to be good enough or available enough for some andwill be smothering and have not enough boundaries for others. And remember thatthe aftermath of writing the book is much worse than writing it, just like withbirth. Enjoy every sentence even when it feels terminal.

Sophia Shalmiyev

What’s next on thehorizon for you?

Myart exhibit at Powell’s in Portland. It is sixteen paintings based on Mother Winter, some direct responses toscenes on the page and some as pre and post book ideas painted as a way of enteringthat story using a different language. It is up through AWP, which may be toolate for when this comes out, but I hope to tour with it a bit so if someonewished to curate an art show about hybrid bodies of work and hybrid bodyrepresentations, I would love to continue to show the work.

I am finally writing my next book, I Married the Butcher to Get to the Bone. It is hard to talk about a work-in progress, but I am fully in the womb with this one and it feels like home.

Sophia Shalmiyev Instagram

Photo credit: Thomas Teal.