10 Questions for Anne Schuchman

She became a lactation consultant, perhaps to help people like me, whose babies shrieked when breastfed as though the milk were poison, and then she became a Lamaze instructor, perhaps to help people like me, whose birth plans were ripped apart by malpositioned babies and maternal exhaustion.
—from “What We Weren’t Expecting,” Volume 66, Issue 1 (Spring 2025)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I was around 5, I submitted a poem to Highlights magazine. It was declined, perhaps preparing me for future rejections. Now when one of my pieces gets rejected, I take whatever cash I have in my wallet–I don’t keep much–and stash it in an envelope marked “Italy Travel Fund.”

I can still recite the Highlights-reject poem:

I saw a frog,
on a log,
in a bog.
I heard him sob.
Then down the river
went the log.

What other professions have you worked in?
—Birth, postpartum and bereavement doula (currently, part-time).
—Adjunct professor of Italian language, literature, and general humanities classes.
—Along with a friend, I took care of a donkey named Bravo who had been helicoptered out of the Grand Canyon and brought to Long Island. We tried to teach him to ride with a saddle, but he wasn’t having it. There’s a children’s book in here!
—I have four kids, which probably wasn’t a very sensible thing to do, and then decided to homeschool them, which was even less sensible. So, although caring and raising children is mostly unacknowledged and totally unpaid, it’s been the hardest work I’ve ever done.

What did you want to be when you were young?
A writer or a famous actress–not that I necessarily wanted to act; I just wanted to wear long, low-cut dresses with lots of sequins and look like Cher.

What inspired you to write this piece?
This litany of these “mommy friends” that are so crucial during those first years of parenting  kept running through my head and I began to see them as something like a Greek chorus. I started with “There was…” and the rest came out very quickly.

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Easy one. I’ve always been drawn to Italy, even before I went there for the first time when I was 20 to work as an au pair for an Italian family. My obsession with Italy got me through high school Latin, since I was a terrible student—except when it came to Roman culture. When I arrived in Rome (first time on an airplane!) I had a strange sense that I had been there already. That feeling of Italy as “home” has never left me. Maybe I feel like I can write myself there.

Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I usually need silence, especially no lyrics, but occasionally a song acts as a kind of conduit to a place or time I need to return to. I listened over and over to a pop song played by a cellist in an Italian piazza, which I visited with my sister shortly before she died of cancer. The lyrics have little to do with grief, but something about transferring that pop song to cello was similar to the way that happy time coexists with the loss that followed. 

Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I make a cup of coffee and then try to find absolutely anything and everything to distract myself from doing it–wait, was that the dryer beep?

If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I do sketch and watercolor, and I think the close attention needed for that is very similar to writing.

I would like to write more fiction. I’m especially drawn to short stories.

And I’ve only recently come to realize what an art form dance is. I was at a doula training where we were asked to close our eyes and dance to some music, and within ten seconds I was crying uncontrollably. I don’t even know why, but it tapped into something very deep. So maybe I could dance and cry—sounds like the world’s worst exotic dancer. Later, at the same doula training, everyone was invited to jump into the swimming pool naked. I declined, blaming my period—but mostly, it just felt very contrived to me.

What are you working on currently?
I am finalizing a translation of Sardinian folktales by Grazia Deledda, and revising a translation of a 19th-century memoir by a Neapolitan noblewoman who was forcibly enclosed in a convent for twenty years.

I am trying to decide if the series of short essays I’ve written (like this one) add up to something that is not only book-length, but is actually a book. If so, I’ll revise some more and start looking into publication.

And I would like to write more about losing my sister, and about sibling grief in general. Of course, I am also terrified of writing this, which means I should do it.

What are you reading right now?
I usually have several books going on at the same time, so I can pick up whatever I’m in the mood for. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction, especially memoir, but also love a really good novel. I just finished Black Milk, by Elif Shafak, translated by Hande Zapsu-Watt, and am currently reading Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit, Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s book on (sort of) DH Lawrence, and Suzanne Roberts’ Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail. But mostly I’ve been reading a guidebook to a pilgrimage walk in Italy, the Via Francigena nel Sud, as I’m going to be spending two weeks walking with my youngest child (18yo). We will basically be walking from Rome to nearby Naples where we’ll catch a train into the city (because even I’m not crazy enough to actually walk the roads into Naples). I asked my daughter if she thought we’d be ready to kill each other by the end of our trip, and she said, “I think we’ll be ready to kill each other before we even leave JFK.”

ANNE SCHUCHMAN is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in academic and literary journals, includingThe Southern Review, The Saranac Review, and The Journal of Italian Translation. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian studies from NYU and an MFA in creative nonfiction and literary translation from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and her work has been recognized with awards from Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.