Today’s guest, Dr. Tara Mulder, gets real about the challenges of writing while moving between temporary jobs, juggling a ton of teaching, and struggling to find a tenure track position. But also told me why that struggle brought a surprising amount of freedom and led to a much more creative and entertaining book.
These days, Tara is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, although she did not get that position until after her book was nearly published. She’s a specialist in medicine, sex, and gender in antiquity, and her book is called A Womb of One’s Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome. In it, she brings the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth of Roman women brilliantly to life, turning scraps of archival materials into richly detailed narratives. In addition to her teaching, Tara also previously worked as a managing editor of Eidolon, an online classics journal that brought classics scholarship to the public in a playful, easy to read voice. You’ll hear more in our conversation about how that experience shaped Tara’s writing. We also talked about how her lived experiences, especially as the daughter of a homebirth midwife, helped her read the archive, and how keeping her writing going means trusting in her future self.
Heads up: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. If you buy books from these links, the podcast gets a small percentage—it’s an awesome way to support our guests and the show at the same time.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Tara Mulder, A Womb of One’s Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome
- Eidolon archives
- Scrivener
- Anna Bonnell Friedin, Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome
- Anna Tatarkiewicz, The ‘Cursus Laborum’ of Roman Women: Social and Medical Aspects of the Transition from Puberty to Motherhood
- Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”
- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:02
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. This is a podcast about the craft of writing history, and I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. Today's guest gets real about the challenges of writing while moving between temporary jobs, juggling a ton of teaching, and struggling to find a tenure-track position. It's a struggle I think a lot of listeners can relate to, even if you're not an academic, but you'll also hear about why that struggle brought a surprising amount of freedom and led to a much more creative and entertaining book. I'm very happy to welcome Dr. Tara Mulder as my guest.
Tara Mulder 0:34
Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here
Kate Carpenter 0:37
These days, Tara is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, although she did not get that position until after her book was nearly published. She's a specialist in medicine, sex, and gender in antiquity, and her book is called A Womb of One's Own: Childbirth in Ancient Rome. In it, she brings the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth of Roman women brilliantly to life, turning scraps of archival materials into richly detailed narratives. I was completely fascinated by this one. In addition to her teaching, Tara also previously worked as the managing editor of Eidolon, an online classics journal that brought classics scholarship to the public in a playful, easy to read voice. You'll hear more in our conversation about how that experience shaped Tara's writing. We also talked about how her lived experiences, especially as the daughter of a homebirth midwife, helped her read the archive, and how keeping her writing going means trusting in her future self. Here's my conversation with Dr. Tara Mulder.
Tara Mulder 1:39
I think it was a really long time before I started to think of myself as a writer, and I'm sure a lot of academics can identify with that feeling, though when I reflect back on it, I've always been writing, and I think for me what was key is that writing was something I did for fun from the time that I was a very young child. And what I mean by that is writing fiction, writing poetry, and just having it be this fun activity, and I think I got that sense that writing was fun from the women in my family. My grandmother got a high school diploma, but she, she never went to college, and yet there was always this narrative in our family that my grandmother was a good writer, and she would write for the family, she would write for events. She would write letters. She died just over a year ago now, and right before she died, my mom unearthed all these, all of the Christmas letters that she had written. Starting from, I want to say, the 1960s, she would write a Christmas letter every year about what the family had been up to, and then send it out to all their friends and relatives, and so one of the things my mom did right before my grandma died is went through and read all of those letters out loud to my grandma and to the rest of us, any of us who happened to be there in her last few weeks and days, and they were so engaging, and so funny, and just like they could rival David Sedaris, you know, and here she was, just this woman with a high school diploma, and she wrote for fun, and she wrote for this really intimate, limited audience, and yet I could see this, these letters, like speaking to a much, much greater audience. So that was my grandmother, and then my mom, too, has just always been a good writer, quote unquote, even though that's not her profession, she's a midwife, but again, she would just write for fun, write the family Christmas letter every year, write cards, write for special occasions, and so I picked up on that from a very young age. The very first thing I wrote was a novel when I was in the second grade. I wrote it on loose leaf pieces of lined paper and kept it in this - I remember I kept it in this like envelope, this, you know, large mailer envelope, and I would subject my second grade classmates to weekly installments, like weekly new chapters of this, of this novel. I wish more than anything that I still had that. I don't know what happened to it. It got lost at some point over the years. Yeah, I just remember, like, I would write poems as gifts for people, and I would, if there was ever a chance to do the creative project in school, I would do that. I attended public school in Northern Michigan in the 90s and early 2000s and had some really great teachers that just fostered that love of reading and writing in me. Just allowed me to engage in these creative expressions. And then I guess just to give one more example of what I'm talking about, when I was a freshman in college, that was the first time I had exposure to the study of the ancient world as a discipline. I went to the University of Michigan, and I took the great books course that was required for all of those who were in the Honors College at Michigan, and that's where I had my first exposure to the Iliad and The Odyssey and The Aeneid. They're these great texts of classical literature, and I remember that I, as the creative finale for the year, I wrote a parody of the Aeneid called the Bushid, about the Bush dynasty and their movement through America, and eventually landing in Texas. You know, seeing writing as this fun thing, and then realizing that I could study classics as a career path that took me to Brown University to do my PhD, and I don't remember thinking of myself as a writer so much during those years. I think I was just trying to survive graduate school, I was trying to become proficient in Greek and Latin and German and French, and you have massive amounts of scholarship that have been produced about the ancient world since the 19th century, and so while I was writing papers, I didn't think of myself as a writer, it was just the kind of the thing you had to do to get through the program, and it wasn't until I finished my PhD, and I was working for Eidolon, which was a an online classics journal that ran for about five years. That's when I really started to think of myself as a writer again, and to kind of go back to those those early roots, that early love of creativity, and that early love of writing.
Kate Carpenter 7:03
What was it about working with Eidolon, both as a writer and as an editor, that really sort of shaped the way you saw yourself as a writer?
Tara Mulder 7:11
There were a couple of different reasons why doing that work made me think of myself as a writer. The first is that Donna Zuckerberg, who was the creator of Eidolon, really wanted the journal to have a sense of creativity and playfulness about it. We were doing what it turns out was quite serious scholarship at the end of the day. Eidolon has had an enormous impact on the direction of the field, but at the end of the day we were just trying to have fun with it. So that was one piece, is that it made engaging with the ancient world fun in a way that it hadn't always been when I was doing my graduate degree. And I think the second piece is that it was just the sheer volume that we were putting out, so we were publishing two articles a week, we were the editors, so we would write some of the articles, but a lot of them were coming in from outside writers, and we were editing them and getting them ready for publication, and just the fast pace of that publishing schedule just made me get over any hang-ups I had as a writer, because I was constantly rewriting convoluted prose that came in from academics who weren't used to writing for a general audience, or I was coming up with a creative click-baity title for a piece, so that when I, because I was the managing editor, so I did all that social media advertising for the, for the journal, but at the same time making sure that the all the scholarship underlying these pieces was was rigorous. And just moving at that fast pace, creating great, entertaining, appealing scholarship just made me get over any sense of I can't write, or this is this is something that has to happen like really slowly and painfully and agonizingly, which is, which is still true, that's still true about it. But when you have a publishing schedule like that, you just got to get it out there.
Kate Carpenter 9:20
Do you feel like editing other people also impacted your writing?
Tara Mulder 9:23
Definitely, definitely. I think nothing makes you a better writer than doing a ton of editing. Well, the combination of doing a lot of reading and then doing a lot of editing of other people's work really helps. It at least helped me to become, to become a better writer. We were also doing a lot of reading long form journalism, nonfiction, and fiction, because at a certain point we were doing the journal, we started putting out these weekly links of things that we had been reading over the past week that we enjoyed that we wanted to recommend to other people, so that meant we had to be doing a lot of reading around in literary journals, in, you know, news outlets that published long form essays and writing, and then a lot of reading of books to fiction and nonfiction, and so that combined with this intense editing and publishing schedule just really accelerated my growth as a writer.
Kate Carpenter 10:29
Well, I want to talk with you today about your new book, A Womb of One's Own, which is a great title, but I want to talk first about you, you write really frankly about the conditions under which you wrote this book, which I really appreciate, because I think that they are very relatable to a lot of both academics and non-academics. But you talk about having a heavy teaching load while you were working on this book, moving frequently, and you say that you wrote this book one hour at a time. What kept you working on it? What kept you going? I mean, aside from tenure,
Tara Mulder 11:01
It's an interesting question, because I, I haven't actually been in a tenure track research position until 2024 and I finished my PhD in 2015 so it wasn't actually, it wasn't tenure itself that was motivating me, but the prospect of getting a tenure track track job that was, was just even a step back, right, a step less motivating, if you will. Yeah, it's, I like that you zeroed in on that in my acknowledgements, because as a reader, I'm obsessed with acknowledgements. I always read them first. I'm so interested in where the person wrote this book, who they were in conversation with when they were writing it, what kind of resources they had when they were writing it, and just their trajectory of creating the book is one of the most interesting things to me, just why I love this, this podcast too, because you get that that same sort of journey in podcast form here. But I think that paragraph where I talk about the conditions of my writing was as close as I allowed myself to get to a kind of anti-acknowledgments section. I wanted to keep the acknowledgments really positive, but before I did that, I did have to sort of write out a shadow anti-acknowledgments section that will never be read by anybody but me, that just details all the obstacles that I had to overcome in writing the book, and all the people that stood in my way or told me I couldn't do it, all the logistical difficulties, or you know, all of the traumatic things that happened to me in the 10 years that I spent essentially trying to wrangle these ideas, and then write this book. Yeah, when I read other people's acknowledgments, I would often see them say things like, I thank such and such institution for giving me a year free from teaching to work on this, or I thank this fellowship for having a semester to live and work in Rome, and and write this, and I didn't. I never had anything like that. Nobody, nobody ever paid me to work on the book. Nobody ever gave me any time off of teaching. I worked at four different institutions while I was writing the book, which I think is not that unusual these days as an academic. So, I don't, I don't say that it's like unique or unusual, but it does kind of acknowledge the conditions under which this was written, and so I said, okay, I didn't have any fellowships, I didn't have any institutional support, I didn't have any sabbaticals. I had people telling me not to write the book because I didn't need to, and that what was the point of writing a book when you didn't have to write one to get tenure? So, what did I have instead? Well, instead of all that, what I had was a bunch of great friends that I made all over the United States, from Massachusetts to New York to British Columbia, and now in Wisconsin, who encouraged me and supported me and read my work and created a writing community that kept me going. I also had all these amazing students, and I can't remember the number right now, but at some point I counted up the number of unique courses that I have created and taught in my career, and it's over 30, right, 30 unique syllabi and courses. In all of those different courses, I was of course trying out my ideas on the students, and also just trying out different methods for entertaining, appealing to, instructing what would come to be my ideal audience, which is undergraduate students or your general educated interested reader who's not a specialist in the field. And I was like those things were really, really valuable too, and of course, like, because I wasn't on that research tenure track pathway, I had more time to luxuriate in the book, too. Right? I think people that are on a tenure track job, they can, you know, feel this pressure, they can feel rushed to get that done. And I just was able to kind of write the book I wanted to write, because nobody was telling me that I needed to write something particular in order to meet my next career goal, or to, you know, meet that next stepping stone of my career, so that that was a huge gift to just always be like I'm writing exactly the book that I want to write, and I've met a lot of really cool people along the way.
Kate Carpenter 16:02
I realize that the answers to my questions have probably changed over all that that time and those different conditions, but I do want to know about the basics of how you work. So, when and where do you like to do your work?
Tara Mulder 16:15
I have no rhythm or routine, the all-- and I think that's why I wanted to put in my acknowledgments that this was written in intervals of one hour a day, because the only constant through the many years I spent writing this book was that I wanted more days than not to spend an hour working on it, and I definitely achieved that, but when that hour was, where that hour was, absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. Right? I have written this book in offices, in coffee shops, sitting on my couch, sitting at my kitchen table, in tents, in cabins, on boats, on planes, any anywhere you can possibly imagine. The only constant was I was going to take an hour a day and sit down and work on writing some piece of this book, and so I think because of all the upheaval in my life that commitment to that hour a day, no matter the time of day, no matter the circumstances, is what really kept me going to finish it.
Kate Carpenter 17:25
I love that. Are there tools that you've used to organize yourself or to do your writing?
Tara Mulder 17:30
I write first in Scrivener. I really like Scrivener because it kind of mimics the old index card method, right? You can always create a new Scrivener page, and then embed it in whatever section of the book you're working on. So, I find that that platform just works really well with the way that I organize my thoughts and the way that I organize my sources. So, I always start in Scrivener, and then once I feel that a draft has gotten complete enough, I'll move it over to a Word, Word doc, and that's, that's always like an exciting kind of definitive moment when it moves from like the messy Scrivener pile into, into being a Word document.
Kate Carpenter 18:16
What is the relationship for you between your research and your writing? Do you write as you're researching? Do you wait until you've sort of gotten everything assembled and then start writing?
Tara Mulder 18:26
I start writing almost immediately. Somebody told me to do that when I was in graduate school. I don't, I don't remember who, one of one of my teachers or mentors, but I like to, I like to start free writing based off of even a single source or a single piece of evidence as soon as I can, and then I'll usually pause and go back and do some outlining, and that sort of thing, but I like to get writing sooner rather than later, and I like to just generate a lot of writing, like I like to have a lot of raw material that I can then whittle down and turn into something that I'm happy with, but for me, I'd rather just have a bunch of bad writing than have nothing at all on the page.
Kate Carpenter 19:14
What does that process of whittling down look like?
Tara Mulder 19:18
Very practically, it looks like I am just constantly cutting pieces and moving them into other documents. I never like to delete anything, I'm always afraid that no, that's where the gem of truth was, and I need to, I need to come back to it someday. So I'm always creating sub documents that are like chapter three, section two, extra bits, right? Or chapter three, section two, extra bits, number two, where I'm cutting out those pieces and putting them, putting them in these other, other documents. So that's kind of what it looks like, very practically, I guess. I will say, too, in terms of my writing process, I draft and I free write in Scrivener, but I also write like on the notes app on my phone if I'm out walking and like inspiration strikes, or I like to write by hand too, like especially on legal pads, I always have some scrap of paper and pen by my bed, because sometimes I'll just like wake up in the middle of the night, and I'll like, it will have come to me, and so I'll just jot it down on a receipt, or you know, the back of a bookmark, or something. I just, I'm somebody who feels like sometimes whole sentences or paragraphs come into my head fully formed, or you know, the solution to a problem that I've been working at comes into my head fully formed and I want to write it down as it has come to me right in that moment. And so the editing process looks like bringing those pieces together and then again extracting whatever I deem to be unnecessary to the central argument or piece of the story that I'm trying to tell, I end up with like just a lot of writing that never shows up in the book or the article that I'm working on.
Kate Carpenter 21:09
How do you end up deciding what should show up?
Tara Mulder 21:14
That's a great, that's a great question. For me, the guiding principle for this book was, I guess, there were two guiding principles, and the first was, is this in some way true, and the second was, is this entertaining? And I think even the second one was even more important than the first one. I wanted everything I was writing to be based on a source of some sort, but even more than that, I wanted every, I wanted every part of the book to have momentum towards the next part of the book. So, at the level of the sentence, I wanted each sentence to just hurdle you forward with interest into the next sentence, into the next paragraph, into the next chapter, and so I was constantly asking myself, like, is this something that the person reading this would, would find interesting, or is this, am I going off on a boring tangent right now? And so that would determine what got cut and what what stayed in.
Kate Carpenter 22:18
I want to ask a little bit about how both your lived experiences, but also those of the people in your life, shaped the way you wrote this particular book, right? So this is a history of pregnancy and childbirth in ancient Rome. You mentioned that your mother is a midwife. You also, I see in the acknowledgments, you talked about observing other people's home births. You have had a child yourself. How did those observations, how did those experiences affect the way that you researched and wrote this book?
Tara Mulder 22:46
Yeah, I think in terms of my experience with childbirth and midwifery, that's that's been a constant part of my life. I say at some point in the book, my mom started to take me to births when I was about seven years old, so I was, I was witnessing other people give birth at home. My mom is a home birth midwife, so witnessing other people give birth at home from the time I was seven, and just having that particular experience of childbirth, which is very different from hospital birth, informed the way that I went about writing this book. It informed the kinds of questions that I asked of the material of my sources. It informed the way that I thought about birth, the way I imagined these birth stories and these birth scenes, and I think that, and then especially combined with my, my own experience giving birth at home, really allowed me to have this unique perspective on childbirth in ancient Rome. So I didn't, I didn't see a hospital birth until 2023. I was, I was the doula for a very good friend of mine in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was having her first baby, and she wanted to do an unmedicated birth in the hospital, which is a tall order, that's a challenging thing to do, and so I said, well, if you want me, I'll be your doula, and she loved that idea. So that was my first exposure to hospital birth, and then I've since then seen my, my sister's birth, which also took place in the hospital, also unmedicated. So I've actually never, never seen a birth where there was an epidural, and I've never, I've never seen a C-section before, but just to give, like, one little example of this, is very small, but a difference between, like, a home birth or a hospital birth. In home birth, it takes two pushes to get the baby out, and this is what I had always seen, right, dozens of dozens of births. Once the baby has descended all the way down the vagina, all the way down the birth canal, there's a push and the head comes out, and then there's a pause, and we all wait for the next contraction, and then the rest of the baby comes out. And that's just how I thought birth worked. And then I saw these, I saw this hospital birth with my friend, and they don't do that. The baby comes out in one push, right? They expect as soon as that push, where the head comes out, then the rest of the baby should come out too. So they kind of guide the rest of the baby out with that one push, which was so striking to me, because it just a completely different rhythm of birth, right, and a kind of different pattern of expected movements there at home or in the hospital. And there's just lots and lots of small examples like that that kind of add up between the two, and so I think having home birth as my baseline, and then hospital birth as the thing that was strange to me made me a unique writer about childbirth in ancient Rome.
Kate Carpenter 26:11
Do you think it changed the way you approached the sources too? Maybe you saw things that other people might not have.
Tara Mulder 26:17
Yeah, definitely. Just to give one example of that, people have often been perplexed at some of the directions for how to manage difficult birth in the Hippocratic corpus. So, the Hippocratic corpus was this collection of texts from the fifth century BCE, written in written in Greek, and several of these texts deal with gynecological and obstetrical matters, and they will give recommendations for how to handle a difficult birth. And so some of those recommendations involve things that sound very strange to us, like having a strong man in the household, so probably an enslaved man in the household, pick the laboring woman up underneath her arms and shake her around, or having the woman lay out on the bed on a bed, and then having again strong helpers, men or women, like lift the foot of the bed up and then drop it back down, or another example is having the female helpers at the birth like dramatically jiggle the thighs of the woman who's lying there in labor, right, and people have been like, "Wow, look at all these like really strange things they thought would help in a difficult birth. And I looked at those and I thought to myself, Those aren't that strange. We do those kinds of things at home births all the time. If a baby is not descending in the right position, right, and by that I mean you want the baby to be coming down head first with an occipit anterior position, so with the face of the baby towards the back of the laboring person, and that's how the baby can most easily navigate out of the pelvis, and then down the birth canal, and if the baby's not coming like that, if the baby's coming face up or sunny side up, as we call it, or with its head tilted, right, or maybe there's like a hand up by the face, we call that a nuchal hand. If any of those things are happening, what you have to do is you have to get the baby to disengage from the pelvis, and then try to re-engage in that more appropriate position, and so to do that at a home birth today, you might do something like have the laboring person get into a headstand position off the couch to kind of get the baby to pop out and disengage, and then you know, you get out of the headstand, and the baby re-engages, or you might use a rebozo, which is like a big shawl or a big scarf, to shake the laboring person's hips again to try to disengage and re-engage that that baby to come out in the right way, and I was like, this is just their version of that, right? It's not, it's a little bit strange, and maybe some of these things wouldn't have worked as well, but that's, that's what they're trying to do, and it's not misguided or weird. It's actually, we can see continuations of this practice over 2000 years.
Kate Carpenter 29:19
I want to talk about how you conceptualize this book. You describe it as a composite birth story, which I really like. How did you settle on that structure? Was it always clear to you that that was how it would work best?
Tara Mulder 29:31
No, I spent five years trying to write a different book. I spent five years trying to write a book based on my dissertation, which was about ideologies of reproduction in ancient Rome. So it was very theory heavy, and it was about what people thought about birth, and about, you know, the relationship between the woman and the fetus, and that a lot of that stuff made it into my book, but I ultimately realized, like, it was not a very interesting book, or I couldn't write that book until I wrote this other book first, because at this, at the time that I started trying to write the book in 2015 there was no book about childbirth in ancient Rome. Now there are actually several. My good friend Anna Bonnell Freidin's book came out a couple years ago, Anna Tatarkiewicz's book about childbirth in ancient Rome also came out a couple of years ago, so there's clearly this like hole that needed to be filled in the scholarship, but those didn't exist in 2015. So I said I can't write about their ideas about childbirth until we just like know what childbirth was like back then. And so it was now six years ago that I actually wrote the first sentence of the book as it exists now, and actually that's one of the interesting things, I think, about the book is that the first thing I wrote was the first sentence of chapter one, and that never changed, I never changed that sentence, but I have to credit my good friend, colleague, writing partner, I call her the midwife of my book, in my acknowledgement, Kat Humoeller, who is a great Roman historian at the University of British Columbia. When I was in that place of, like, I can't write the book I've been trying to write, I need to write a different book. I don't know how to start, and she said, "Why don't you tell a birth story?" And that just made instant sense to me. I was like, Yes! I, yes, like I.. I know what a birth story is. I love birth stories. I've been hearing them all of my life, but I knew that it wasn't.. it wouldn't be able to be one woman's birth story, because we just don't have that, and so it would have to be a story that was made up of snippets from a lot of different women's experiences. And Kat said to me, so I started thinking about, okay, what's my first story going to be? And I knew I wanted to write about this, this episode of a woman, where people aren't sure whether she's pregnant or not, and it's a, you know, a case, a medical case history that we get from the doctor Galen, who is writing in the second century CE, and Kat said, why don't you give her a name? Because she doesn't have a name in the story, she's just, you know, so and so's wife, right? And that just really sparked it for me. I was like, yes, I'm going to tell her story, I'm going to make up a name for her. And then that became just kind of the driving principle for me through the book, is bring these stories to life, bring these women to life, base the details on evidence that we have, but embellish where needed, and just, just be open about that, that embellishment.
Kate Carpenter 30:17
Well, I think to kind of show more of what we're talking about here, I will have you read an excerpt. So I've grabbed this excerpt from the opening of chapter 10.
Tara Mulder 32:53
“December 15, 34 CE A contraction seized Agrippina as she lay on the hard bed. She cried out to Juno Lucina for help. The midwife matched her vocalization, drawing it down from a high shriek into a low moan. The other women in the room joined in. Agrippina gave a guttural grunt and water gushed onto the bed. The midwife gently slid her oiled hand into Agrippina’s vagina. She could feel a small foot already partway down the birth canal. A slight expression of concern crossed her face, which she quickly masked. She ordered the assistants to fold thick wool cloths and place them under Agrippina’s hips. She motioned for an oil lamp to be brought closer. Two assistants on either side held Agrippina’s knees open as the midwife reached up into her vagina, running her finger around the opening of the cervix. She gently pushed the little foot back up through the cervix, caught the second foot and guided both legs down together. Agrippina let out an involuntary shriek. Two enslaved women helped Agrippina out of bed and onto a birth chair. One of the midwife’s assistants hurried over with a pot billowing thick, fragrant vapor. Placing it under the opening in the birth chair, she directed it up toward Agrippina’s vagina. The midwife rubbed a rich, greasy unguent on her vulva and perineum. Agrippina leaned into the sturdy body of the woman standing behind her, who gripped her firmly under the arms. A doctor readied his tools on a nearby table, speaking in low tones to the midwife. With each contraction, the two enslaved women pressed down on Agrippina’s belly from above. The baby descended quickly. Very soon, everyone in the room could see that it was a boy. A flutter of excitement and nervous anticipation went through the room. A look of grim determination passed over Agrippina’s face. With one final long push and a high shriek from Agrippina, the baby turned, and his head was released. As the sun rose on a crisp December day in the year 34 CE, the future emperor Nero slipped into the waiting hands of the midwife.”
Kate Carpenter 35:00
I read somewhere that this was one of your favorite sections of the book. What went into writing this?
Tara Mulder 35:05
It is one of my favorite sections of the book. I debated for a long time whether it should be the start of the birth chapter or the difficult birth chapter, because it's obviously a story of a somewhat tricky birth, since it's a breach birth, but part of the point I'm making in the chapter that it heads is that breach birth was a kind of variation on normal that wasn't sort of the abnormality that we see today. So I debated, and I ultimately decided to put it in the difficult birth chapter, so that I could kind of make that point about, like, it may seem like this was a difficult birth, but you know, not, not entirely. In terms of what went into writing it, I wanted to write this story because we know that Agrippina told her birth story, so she was not yet the empress of Rome, but the future empress of Rome. At this point, she was the sister of the current emperor Caligula, and she was, would be married to the next emperor, Claudius, who was also her uncle, and then at this point in the narrative, she's giving birth to Nero, who will also be the next emperor after Claudius, so just very, very connected into the Julio-Claudian dynasty in the mid first century CE, and she wrote memoirs or an autobiography. She wrote some account of her life that does not survive from antiquity, so we know she wrote this account of her life because it was used as a source by other contemporary male historians, and they tell us that in her memoirs she wrote about her breech birth, and so I was like, okay, we know she had a breech birth, they call it a footling breech birth, and so I was like, great, that, I can anchor there, right, we have a real person, and we have this evidence, contemporary evidence that she had a breech birth, and that she wrote about it. But I wrote so much of the story. I started many, many days. I started the story many days before she went into labor. I imagined her like hanging out at the villa of the Emperor Augustus, who is her great great grandfather. That's, so we know that Nero was born there. This is in, this villa was in Antium on the Tyrrhenian Sea. So I had her there like many, many days before the birth. I had her swimming in the Tyrrhenian Sea every day to kind of help with the pains of being that pregnant, and we, we know she could swim, because there's a, there's accounts of her swimming in some of the contemporary histories that we have of the time. So I was like, okay, she can swim, she was, you know, staying at this villa on the sea, I can make this plausible, plausible guess that she, she would have been going out swimming for fun while she was pregnant. I wrote like paragraphs and paragraphs about her feelings about the other people that would have been there with her and her relationships to them. I continued the narrative like well into after the birth had happened, so I just, I wrote this like very, very long story, and then I said I want it to feel immediate and fragmentary, so I just pulled the center out of it and made it brief. I wanted the sentences to be short, I wanted it to feel like we were just getting a snapshot, right, and so I pulled that out, and I stuck that in at the start of the chapter, and I think there's a few vignettes like that throughout the book. I try to, I don't know how many I have, they're not in every chapter, but those, the more imaginative parts of the book, right? I include some of these little vignettes, and same thing for every one of them. I just wrote so much extra material around the fragment that I ended up extracting and putting in the books. I wanted, I wanted everyone to have that sense of, like, there's so much more to this story, there's so much going on around the edges, but we're just going to just take this one moment of time and peek at them.
Kate Carpenter 39:16
It's so interesting, too, because you're often working with fragments in terms of source material, and then to create something much larger, and then pull it back to a fragment itself, I like that. As you've sort of alluded, one of the things you do in this book, in order to write it the way that you do, and to write scenes like this one, which are so vivid and so much brought to life, is that you're using evidence, of course, but then you're partly embellishing often based on other sources or adding a name, things like that. I want to talk a little bit more about how you thought about that approach. It made me think of Saidiya Hartman's critical fabulation, this idea that, you know, there are stories that are lost to us through traditional archival methods, and that this kind of embellishment is the only way that we can tell these sort of stories. But I know that that can sometimes make people uncomfortable, because you know we're historians, we don't write fiction, right? How did you think about that? How did you think about writing those ad the line between what did and didn't work?
Tara Mulder 40:14
I'm really glad you're asking me this question, because the methodology of Hartman is growing in popularity in my field, and this is this is a question that has come up around my work, and one that I grappled with too, while I was, while I was writing it. I ultimately decided not to use the methodology of critical fabulation, or not to refer to it in my book, because I decided that what I was doing was different in some fundamental ways. That's that's one reason I think what's what's really key to Hartman's work, and which can sometimes get lost in our excitement about the methodology, which is, which is really exciting and really great, is that she's working with like very, very oppressed and marginalized individuals, and that when their stories come to us from the archive, they come to us at these incredibly violent and painful moments, right? If we look back at her, like, "Venus in Two Acts," right, she's saying one of one of the issues that she's grappling with is that we only hear about these enslaved women at the moment of their deaths, when they've been raped, when they've been tortured, right? So we're dealing with an archive of pain and dehumanization and degradation, and trying to be ethical on both sides of that, right? She says it's an ethical imperative to imagine their stories, but it's also an ethical imperative to not reinscribe the torture and the pain that come to us from those archives. That's so, that's one thing that's key to critical fabulation. Another thing that is key to critical fabulation, as, as Hartman lays it out, is telling the story from multiple angles, so imagining the story from multiple angles, and I said, well, I'm not really doing either of those things in the book. I do, I do have one vignette that involves an enslaved woman, though she's not the main character in the, in the vignette, that's at the end of my midwife chapter, but for the most part, the women I'm writing about, and the stories that I'm telling, don't come to us from these moments of intense degradation or pain, right? Like the story of Agrippina, you know, it's it's a violence of the archive that we lost her memoirs, she experienced oppression as a woman in misogynistic patriarchal ancient Rome, but at the end of the day, she was the most powerful woman in the Roman Empire while she lived, and the thing that's lost that I'm trying to reclaim is this very powerful story that she told about how amazing she was, because she gave birth to a breech child that would go on to become the emperor of Rome, right? And so that that's a very different thing than critical fabulation. So I just, I didn't want to kind of muddy the waters about what critical fabulation is doing, which is really, really important, versus what I was doing, which is mostly just like trying to entertain, as I said, right, and trying to tell a story about, about triumph, really, right, to try to tell a birth story as a story of triumph, so not to be telling, telling these stories of pain or dehumanization, necessarily. I think what I'm doing has more in common with, like, the work of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in her Midwife's Tale, if you're familiar with that book, where she is taking these pages from Martha Ballard's diary, Martha Ballard was a midwife in the late 17, early 1800s in colonial America, and she'll, you know, give us the page of the diary, and then kind of go into depth explaining what's happening on that page, and kind of embellishing with other historical details from the time. So that was more my inspiration for what I was doing here, where it's like I start from a nugget, a kernel of information that we have, and then I just read a bunch of other sources to try to flesh that out more. So within the story of Agrippina, there are contemporary medical accounts of breech birth and how they should be handled, so a lot of the details around the medical management of that birth come from these these contemporary sources, right? Laying Agrippina out on the bed and propping her hips up with stacks of wool cloths, that's what you would do if you had to do a manual procedure during a difficult birth. Having her get up and go to the birthing stool right at the moment of pushing, that's what we're told is supposed to happen by the medical sources, the contemporary medical sources. I also just did a lot of researching of how vaginal breech birth works today, so reading stories about vaginal breech birth, listening, listening to stories, watching videos, right? At the time that I was writing this scene, my mom had just done a training with the organization Breech Without Borders for how to manage vaginal breech birth, so I was using all of her materials from that course, and that's why I have these like small subtle details about, you know, the baby turned and his head released, because that's a movement that needs to happen in a vaginal breech birth. There has to be this turn and the shoulders and the head need to release, and then, and then the baby comes out. And if that doesn't happen, that's where a manual intervention would be necessary. I also learned, you know, that breech births happen really fast, which is kind of unsurprising, right? Because in a head down vaginal birth, a lot of the pushing phase is just trying to get the vagina open enough for the for the head to come out, which is the largest part of the body, and that's why you want it to come out first, because then the rest of the body can come out easily. Whereas in a breech birth, it's the more narrow part of the body that's coming out first, so the whole, the baby will just slip out right and then the concern is getting getting those shoulders and getting that head out, which can be tricky, but what happens is like dramatic water breaking, the water gushes out, the baby slides down, and and so I wanted to capture those realities of vaginal breech birth in the story as well, which don't come from antiquity, but do do come from modern accounts of breech birth.
Kate Carpenter 40:14
Wow, and it strikes me that, I definitely see how the Midwife's Tale is also an inspiration in the way you're writing, but you are doing a little more than just sort of like providing fascinating context, right? You, you take these sources that I have to imagine, having not read them myself, are probably pretty dry, really, in the way that they're written. Sometimes they are, you know, visual sources, amulets, things like that, and you bring them very vividly to life for us. You really put us in these scenes. I feel like I can imagine the light and smells and textures that we are experiencing. What are your techniques for doing that?
Tara Mulder 43:40
That is a good point. I should say, I will refer back to my, I guess we would call it non-traditional path, though I think more and more it is the traditional path through academia, which is this, you know, series of contingent jobs, and you're not on a tenure track research line. I'll point back to that as being very freeing for me in terms of writing the book I wanted to write. This is a trade book, so it is published through an academic press, but it's their trade arm, so it's aimed at a general audience, and because I wasn't writing it for tenure, I wasn't writing it to, like, appease scholars in my field, it didn't, I felt very free to just kind of experiment with the techniques of historical fiction, techniques of fiction writing, to bring those in as a way to bring the stories to life and really engage the reader, I think if I had been on the tenure track writing a book to get tenure, I would have been a lot more hesitant to do that kind of thing. Now, of course, ironically, I'm in the position where I am in a tenure track job and I am trying to use this book to get tenure, so I have, the book has very robust footnotes to engage with the scholars in my field and to engage with some of those scholarly debates, but I was already, I was already too far into it by the time I got to this job. So yeah, I think those, those parts just come from my history of creative fiction writing, not in any formal kind of way, but I still write creative fiction for fun. Nobody ever reads it. It's just mostly in the notes app on my phone. I'll write fan fiction or poetry, or just whatever, whatever strikes my fancy, and it's just a creative outlet for me. So I allowed myself to bring, bring some of those creative writing techniques into the book, just trying to be really clear and forthright about what parts were invented or embellished and what parts were were based on on evidence.
Kate Carpenter 49:34
I think you do a beautiful job. Another thing that you do really well in this book, and that I find so interesting, it also sounds like you do it in your next project, which we're going to get to, is that you make the distant past feel really relevant, really immediate to our circumstance, although you managed to do that without being didactic about it. You know, I never felt like you were like hitting me over the head of, like, oh, this is.. doesn't that sound familiar? How do you think about writing in that mode of bringing sort of the ancient past into our present day?
Tara Mulder 50:02
Yeah. Again, I think that being didactic is boring, right? People don't want to read something that's didactic, so those, any parts that were didactic got cut in that process of, is this interesting, is this something people care about, or want to hear about? And I always had very firmly in my mind my reader, who was my midwife mother and her friends, that's my reader, and so I don't need to tell them explicitly all the time when something from the past resembles something from the present, right? I just need to like lay it out in the right language so they can draw those connections. Yeah, just so much got edited out of the book, and so I think in that, in that distillation process, I just always got rid of things that were that were boring or didactic or that didn't speak to something that would be interesting to a person in this moment here and now, or at least that's what I tried to do. I don't know how successful I was throughout, but that was always my attempt. At the sort of my last stage of editing was that I printed out the entire book and reverse outlined the entire thing by the paragraph, and just cut or changed or rearranged paragraphs if it wasn't meeting that criteria of a story you know flowing forward or a story like hurtling forward and then also of just like being interesting and if it didn't, if it didn't, wasn't like, if the story wasn't rolling forward, if the argument wasn't making sense or if it wasn't interesting, it just cut, cut at that stage.
Kate Carpenter 51:41
I love that so much. I want to know, I want to get to that next project, but first I want to ask, what's the most influential writing advice you've ever received?
Tara Mulder 51:49
I feel like this is so boring, but it essentially amounts to just do it, and that was from my mentor, Johanna Hanink. She was my mentor in graduate school at Brown University. She's a great writer. She's a great, great scholar. And I was a second year student, I was 26 I think, and she was a first year professor, and she was 30 or something. So, you know, we're literally not that far apart in age. There's obviously her career is way farther along than mine is. She just was like, yeah, don't be precious about it, right? Just, you just have to sit your butt in the chair and just do it, and just get it done, which is like, obviously way easier said than done, but I think what it amounts to for me is, it's like, I don't care if you don't feel well or you don't have inspiration or everything you're producing is utter crap, you've just got to sit down and do it, and I just, that just kept me going for all those, those many, many years, because I always, I think it's just this kind of faith in future me, right, in future Tara. I'm like, current Tara is not feeling very good. I'm depressed, I'm tired, I have postpartum psychosis, like whatever it is, right? But future Tara will be able to deal with it, as long as current Tara can like just get some writing down on the page, and so just that kind of like just do it, just get it done.
Kate Carpenter 53:19
Man. That's pretty good, not boring at all. I saw, as I was prepping for this interview, that you were recently named an ACLS fellow for a new project, which, congratulations for that, titled The Invention of Abortion in Ancient Rome, which sounds very interesting, very relevant to today. Could you tell me a little bit more about that project, and what does it feel like to be working on it now, when you are in a stable job, when you, when you have a fellowship to support it? It's a very kind of different circumstance.
Tara Mulder 53:52
Yeah, I'm so excited. This is like the dream that I've been working towards for more than a decade, is to be in a tenure-track job, and to have won a prestigious fellowship, and have won some time for myself to do this writing. Before I cared about birth even, I would say I cared about abortion. I started writing about abortion before I started writing about birth. I have worked for a lot of different abortion funds around the country. I've done, you know, activism around abortion, which makes sense, as a, you know, as a 20 something year old woman, abortion was much more interesting to me than childbirth, right? Figuring out how to, how to not be pregnant was much more important than figuring out how to be pregnant. And so it does, it feels like a kind of return to my, my original scholarly interests, and I essentially am going to argue that the Romans in the first couple centuries CE, basically the same period I'm writing about in this childbirth book, invent an idea of abortion that had not previously existed in the cultures of the Mediterranean, this idea that abortion is the killing of a living child, and that women are culpable for that murder. Women who have abortions are culpable for that murder, and how this is the origin story for ideas about abortion in the modern United States as well, and not that this hasn't, this moment hasn't been noticed before, but it's, it's been largely attributed to Christian influence at the time, so Christianity is on the rise in the first couple centuries CE in Rome, and they seem to have this unique view of fetal life, fetal personhood, the unborn. But I'm going to show that Roman secular or pagan ideas were just as if not more important to these new sentiments about abortion that were starting to proliferate at this time, so I'm just like really, really excited to have some some teaching-free time to work on this and I know I have a good sense of of the sources I want to start with and where I want to look and it just yeah I'm very optimistic about the project and very grateful to have have this time to work on it.
Kate Carpenter 56:20
Fantastic I love that. I'm so glad for you, but I'm also so glad that that you wrote A Womb of One's Own. I loved reading it. Thanks so much for joining me to talk about your writing process and what went into it.
Tara Mulder 56:30
Thank you so much. This has been such a delight.
Kate Carpenter 56:33
Thanks again to Dr. Tara Mulder for joining me on this episode of Drafting the Past. You can find a link to her new book, A Womb of One's Own in the show notes. Thanks for listening to this episode of Drafting the Past. If you enjoyed this episode, why not text a friend right now and tell them about it? After all, friends don't let friends write boring history.
