At one point in my life, I seriously contemplated becoming a midwife. This urge predated the PBS show and my own kid’s birth by many years. The art of helping women give birth, of delivering babies, and easing a new life into the world was so powerful to me and seemed to perfectly capture my desire to nurture and support women on this most intense journey.
Obsessively, I researched various programs to see how one might become a midwife without first being a nurse (because, ack, I’d have to start school all over again). So I read like a fiend: books on the United States’ deeply compromised and monetized approach to birth, the homebirth movement, water birth, midwifery in Britain, histories of birth, feminist views of birth and lactation….you name it, I inhaled it.
As I said, this was years away from the birth of my own child and from editing a literary anthology of birth and parenting called Mamas and Papas, yet the idea of assisting women on this maternal voyage in an empowered way was profoundly moving to me. My aim, had I not gone into teaching, was to train to be a lay midwife and specialize in home or birth center births in low-income communities.
Ultimately, however, the call to go into teaching was louder, and I got hired as an English professor at San Diego City College. But the urge to midwife persisted, something which was only enhanced later on when I spent my pregnancy with midwives who supported me through my son’s birth.
Since that time, birth for me has expanded beyond the literal popping a kid out into the universe to something more metaphorical. I’ve moved from seeing myself do the bloody, physical work of midwifery to assisting in the delivery of the intellectual and literary—i.e. helping people manifest whatever is percolating inside of them, be it creative, emotional, philosophical, what have you.
As a writing instructor I work at helping students externalize the creative voices in their heads, even if it’s just for an English 101 essay on the Politics of Food. So many of the folks I teach struggle with expressing themselves. Writing is hard-going, tortuous work for a good portion of them, yet they brim with ideas and stories that just need some nudging to come out. As with birth, folks benefit from a guide, a warm hand and voice, someone deeply knowledgeable about the journey they’re on.
There is nothing like working with a couch-surfing genius whose father kicked her out of the house when he discovered she’d enrolled in college. Full to bursting with complex philosophical observations and hungry to express herself, this student just needed a supportive and knowledgeable midwife to help her burst out with some of the most brilliant writing I’ve ever come into contact with.
Or there’s my single mom killing herself day in and day out with a full school schedule and two jobs but who has been freed to express her most sophisticated views in the assignments I’ve given her. In the first class she took with me, she was frightened to write almost anything; now she’s an English major and awaiting word on where she’ll be transferring.
Men can benefit from some midwifery too. Working with a formerly incarcerated poet to unleash his amazing gift on writing about The Canterbury Tales so that he could better prepare himself for the rigors of studying literature and Creative Writing at a university was deeply meaningful. It also enabled him to blossom and frame the world much more effectively.
These stories and more emphasize to me the delicious power of this kind of literary midwifery. As with bringing a new life into the world, helping someone find their words and express themselves is profound.
It is with this attitude that I approached my self-created role as Managing Editor of City Works Press, the small, non-profit, all-volunteer literary publishing project several of us dreamed up in 2005. I get to usher our books into the world—working with our designer, connecting with printers, assigning ISBNs, and so forth. As a person utterly smitten with the physicality of books, midwifing them into the world is a kind of birth too with all of its struggle and joy.
Thus this new project of ours, The Jumping-Off Place, has offered me another tempting opportunity to midwife words and ideas into the world. I relish working behind the scenes to realize the efforts of others. As Doug mentioned, we’ll make mistakes and learn from them in delivering JOP to your inbox, but I can think of nothing more satisfying than helping to give voice to the chorus of stories out there that need telling and a place to do that.