The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat
An Interview between Melody S. Gee & Jerrod Schwarz
Jerrod Schwarz: Let me start off by saying how much of a joy it’s been to read and publish this chapbook, Melody! I want to begin our discussion by looking at one of the chapbook’s major concerns: the intersection of faith and identity. Specifically, I’m struck by how these poems investigate stark symbols of American Christianity (easter eggs, stigmata, sacraments) through the lens of childhood. What aspects of this belief system felt crucial to include in your chapbook? Inversely, were there any elements of this faith that you chose to exclude?
Melody Gee: Thanks, Jerrod! This is thrilling for me.
I’m looking at Catholicism through the lens of an adult convert. I received my first sacraments at age 35, after three years of seeking and discerning within the church. My conversion surprised me as much as anyone and I’ve been trying to understand it since it began in early 2013.
I’ve known callings before—to writing, to motherhood—but faith pulled me in quickly, unexpectedly, and hard. The demands were part of the attraction. At times, I felt positively pursued—by the Gospel, the numinous, the awe, the obligations to love everyone as you love yourself. Something in me just keeps saying yes.
These poems are my trying to ask and answer the questions of what I am doing and who I am becoming in conversion. I look to my childhood for clues, but as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, my family was non-religious. However, there was a spirituality in our home. We lived among the dead—ancestors whose presence in and effect on our lives was real. Nearly everything we ate, wore, did, or said could influence our fortune, which hinged on our ancestors’ appeasement or wrath. In some ways, I was primed for a life of faith. The poem, “The Convert Receives the Sign of the Cross on Her Feet” is trying to comb the past for traces of faith or gaps that faith is trying to fill. I think I’m searching for a cohesive narrative that includes and perhaps explains this unexpected turn. I’m trying to see if the girl is the same since the convert was born, to see if the story is big enough to contain them both.
There are so many ways that faith feels like a rejection of my past—this sense of betrayal was the hardest thing for me to reconcile, and the reason receiving my sacraments took so long. I was raised to avoid and fear strangers; my faith teaches me to encounter them. I was raised to save and build wealth; my faith asks me to give it away. I was raised to deny my desires; my faith says that desires are God’s gift and voice. I was raised with filial piety as my ultimate concern; my faith pushes me out beyond. So, yes, the book is concerned with faith and identity because I’m living the tension of a change that is part of my life and my entire life. What does conversion mean for my past? What does it do to the “before?” Is there room for all the past and the present? Does a new ultimate concern mean a rejection of another? In truth, my conversion haunts me. I wrestle with what it’s asking of me. Sometimes I feel like I’m gathering my past to me, reassuring it that it will not be abandoned.
JS: I love your phrasing here, that spiritual conversions and affirmations of faith can “haunt” us. These are obviously massive metaphysical inquiries, but I wondered if you would be able to share how your writing has evolved post-conversion. Perhaps more specifically, how have the daily writing and spiritual practices coalesced?
MG: There are parallels to my writing and spiritual lives, especially in my daily practices. I don’t write every day. For me, it’s not a reality with working and having kids. But I do work on my writing every day. Sometimes it’s committing time to read, listen to a rich podcast, journal, meet with a friend—doing things that feed me with language and connection. Much the same is true for my faith life. It’s rare that I get a length of time to sit contemplatively, but I get the daily gospel in my email, go for a walk, work in ministries at my parish—things that push me toward prayer and connection.
While I long for stretches of uninterrupted time, and I do give that to myself in the form of retreats or sabbaticals, I try to not separate my life into “family”; “work”; “spiritual”; or “writing” anymore, so time doesn’t feel scarce or competitive. Fifteen minutes of revision between client calls isn’t a failure or a cheat. Meeting a friend for lunch on a weekday isn’t stealing from work time. The absolute hardest part of my writing and spiritual discipline is to stop asking, What do I have? and ask instead, What am I in the presence of? I succeed and fail, get resentful, and feel defeated all the time. What sustains me is my community—my small circle of incredible writers and my parish community. When I get too much in my head trying to control or bargain or excel my way into dominating time, it’s Mass or a writing meetup that pull me back. Their gifts are the same—I am made part of something larger and outside myself.
JS: These poems are largely delivered through a unified speaker, but they still span multiple generations, with motherhood being a key focus. What are the challenges and joys inherent in writing about these profound relationships?
MG: I guess I’m haunted as much by motherhood as conversion. As an adoptee, I know the longings, breaks, limitations, and grief of motherhood through the eyes of a daughter. As a mom of two biological daughters, I understand these even more keenly now. Beginning with pregnancy, I have known motherhood as paradox: intimacy and separation; growing and dying; shelter and exposure; betrayal of daughterhood. I write about motherhood because it is a constant negotiation of identity, desire, love, sacrifice, envy, fear, and mystery.
The parent-child relationship was easily defined when I was a child. My role was obedience and service, to take care of my parents. This duty is heightened for children of immigrants who have to help their parents navigate the English-speaking world. To be an independent, separate person, I can’t occupy that role the way they want me to anymore, and it’s both necessary and a betrayal. When I became a mom, I knew my daughter and I needed to exist separately and still be intimately connected. I write about motherhood to answer the questions, Who am I to you? Who are you to me? These are the same questions I ask God.
JS: This is a powerful distinction that rings true in these poems, the idea that maturity and growth can be at the same time personally essential and negatively felt by others. To that point, have you noticed any shifts in writing as the role of daughter and mother starts to switch?
MG: Becoming a mom transformed how I understood my own childhood and gave me access to write about it in new ways. One example is when my oldest daughter turned nine months old, I was hit by a profound grief at seeing how much she understood and could communicate by that age, how much her world and her identity had been built, because I was adopted at nine months old. I thought about what must be lost at that age, even in the best adoption circumstances.
My daughters bring me back to myself like this all the time. When they ask about their birth stories and coo over their own baby pictures, expressing love for the person once were, I see them integrating the self that existed before they knew themselves. In telling them their birth stories a thousand times, I realized how deep the same need was in me, only I didn’t ask questions about my origin. My family’s single narrative was the typical and most acceptable one about adoption—being chosen and lucky. While those are part of the story, there’s also grief, loss, and a constant shadow of what-if. When I’m taken back to that part of my story, I feel more integrated myself, and newly able to write about what had previously felt inaccessible to me.
JS: There is a harrowing balance of tenderness and violence in these poems. One haunting section calmly states “Fawn, an open / meadow is spread / with harm.” As an editor, I am always fascinated by a poet’s process for rendering dense and complex topics in their writing. How conscious or subconscious were these themes when you set out writing these poems?
MG: The theme of danger is a conscious one for me. Safety and exposure are things my immigrant family worried about. Our take-out restaurant was our livelihood, and it felt easily and continually threatened. People vandalized the restaurant, broke in, left without paying, threatened to call the health department or tell people we served cat meat just because they didn’t like the food, or shamed us for not speaking English well. Institutions were hostile too—the health department, the police, the IRS. Most days, it felt like us against the world. I am used to armor and isolation as responses to danger and uncertainty.
As a mom, I have to confront risk beyond myself, and I have to let go of armor and isolation. My greatest love and my worst fear are walking around today in 8- and 11-year-old bodies. “Learn to Walk” is the most explicit about how mothers navigate risk and the strain of my ambivalence about protecting them. Every moment can feel like this: the fawn eager for the meadow that is brimming with sustenance and danger. The choice is between hiding, which means safety and starvation, or exposure, which means nourishment, learning to walk, and being hunted. How do we make our calculations? How do we discern natural desire from temptation?
One of the things that attracts me to Catholicism is the emphasis on the human body, and all the risks that entails. Mary experiences pregnancy and childbirth. Jesus is born amid animals and lives the whole of human experience, including hunger, astonishment, pity, pain, grief, fear, abandonment, death. Our liturgy involves eating, drinking, singing, anointing the body with oil. The world is sacramental. Kathleen Norris writes, “The Incarnation remains a scandal to anyone who wants religion to be a purely spiritual matter...It remains a scandal to Christians who fear and despise the human body.” My struggle with all of this vulnerability, with tolerating mystery, with not being in control, is the place I write from.
JS: It’s interesting to hear how many parallels exist between a writing life and a spiritual one, especially your thoughts on mystery and vulnerability. I admit to not knowing too many Catholic theologians or thinkers, but I’ve always been struck by the Merton Prayer and how he opens with “I have no idea where I am going.” In terms of what’s next for you, are there any vulnerabilities or mysteries that you want to dive into next?
MG: That is one of my favorite prayers! While it is starkly honest about doubt, it is one of the most grounded prayers I know. Merton calls out to “My Lord God” even while he wrestles with not knowing what he is doing. There is such deep trust alongside that vulnerability and uncertainty.
Part of my next project, a book of essays on my conversion, is writing about parent-child attachment, adoption, and faith. I’ve had a hard time with images of God as parent—that is not a grammar I find natural. I’m also writing about different forms of grief—from adoption, immigration, disruptions in attachment, alienation. Aside from vulnerable topics, I find writing in prose and putting together a longer project pretty daunting. Writing a book proposal scares the daylights out of me.
I’m in my 40s now, and my kids are tweens and very independent. My freelance work is steady and I’m in control of my projects and my time. I feel like all the rush of life has quieted down. I’m done advancing my career, saving for a house, or chasing after little kids. So much of what I worked to build has been built and can be simply enjoyed. The quiet is terrifying but it’s inviting and beautiful too. I don’t miss the hustling, but its absence makes me nervous, like I don’t know how to gauge the value of what I’m doing without external pressure. One of the next vulnerabilities I’m turning toward is the midlife transformation of urgency into the work of waiting (this is also terrifying).
JS: When I set out to write an interview, one of my favorite ways to investigate a poet’s work is to look at word frequency. Now, word frequency does not always directly correlate to author intention, but I think it can reveal interesting insights. In your chapbook, I appears sixteen times, but you shows up nearly forty times. While these poems certainly feel confessional, there is a powerful exteriority being revealed as well. One of my favorite stanzas reads “There you are, nothing / to me. Who gathers you”. How do you see the speaker functioning in these poems? How did the speaker of these poems evolve from their first drafts?
MG: There are several different “you” figures in the poems: God, the unborn, the fawn, the immigrant parent, the immigrant’s child, the convert. I hope the address and dialogue contribute to the poems’ confessional feel and intimacy. At the same time, the figure of the convert offers a way to explore my own faith journey with some distance, to try and interrogate my experiences from outside myself. I didn’t think all these poems would work together until I read Charles Yu’s novel Interior Chinatown, which achieves piercing interiority through the distance of a screenplay and imagined performance.
I think the exteriority is a recent development in my writing. Usually, I write by tunneling into myself, trying to find language for an intensity of feeling. Then I shape the poem for a reader after there are some guts on the page. I draw out the feeling with place, sensory detail, question, action, story, and hopefully fresh language. But the story of the convert is something I myself find curious—strange, even. The convert poems got composed very differently. I looked at my catechumen ceremony or my baptism to figure them out, sometimes wondering if they really happened, if they happened to me. I needed to figure out what conversion reshapes, redefines, and changes. In doing so, these poems end up telling her story. I’m not trying to pretend it isn’t my story, but the distance felt right and needed to hold all of the curiosity, awe, fear, and guilt that conversion has meant for me.
JS: I love this, the idea that a pathway to the intimately confessional includes second-guessing and even dissociation; I am always most excited by poetry that truly grapple with its concerns, and your poems do not shy away from the very questions they ask. To that end, are there any themes or concerns in this chapbook that you will want to return to? Inversely, are there any aspects that you want to set aside?
MG: I’m not setting aside any topics specifically. I’m grateful for whatever moves me to write. I’m not yet done writing about conversion. I hope to finish a memoir project about it next year. I think I’ll always write about immigration, adoption, motherhood, and nature. If my family is reading this, they are laughing because they know I don’t actually like to be in nature—I much prefer the indoors and only maybe will venture onto a screened-in porch. But it’s our relationship to nature and the unseen mechanisms of nature that work in and on us that I’ll always write about.
