J.J. Starr-McClain is a fifth-generation Chicagoan whose ’90s childhood was split between city and suburb, father and mother, steel and sky. In life and in her poetry, she still tends to drift between two places: moving on from the past and diving into the wreck of it. But now, a decade into a poetry project that reckons with her relationship to her mother, she has claimed new agency in oscillation.
Starr-McClain, a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, first came to town in December 2022 for a reading by her husband, Nathan McClain, a poet and creative writing professor at Hampshire College in Amherst.
It had been about a year since her mother had died of cancer — exactly 63 days after Starr-McClain gave birth to her daughter, Zora. It had also been about a year since she had written any poetry. In Provincetown, out of the blue, a fully formed poem came to her. It brought her back.
Starr-McClain will read from Nearly the Absence, the working title of her current poetry collection, during a group showcase at FAWC on Friday, Feb. 23 from 5 to 8 p.m. Work by visual artist Oscar Morel and writer Seth Wang will also be featured.
Nearly the Absence, she says, is themed in part around a line from one of its poems: “A story of your leaving takes your place when you’ve left.” The collection plumbs the depths of loss, love, disappearance, disconnection, extraction, erasure, apology, and forgiveness.
“I don’t want to atomize my mother down into a stereotype or caricature of who she was,” says Starr-McClain. “I’m writing for those of us who have had difficult relationships with our mothers and caregivers.”
Reaching this place took more than 20 years of creation and reflection.
In the fourth grade, Starr-McClain began writing poems with a friend who lived down the street. The poems weren’t about her mother then. The granddaughter of a pastor, she says she was influenced by the literary traditions of the Bible — particularly the Book of Psalms, a collection of 150 Hebrew poems and prayers speaking to and about God.
Around that time, her mother’s mental health was declining. “Over the course of about four years, she kept getting darker and darker,” she says.
When Starr-McClain was 12, her mother left for a man she met on the Internet. She packed up everything they owned while Starr-McClain was visiting her father and headed for California.
“She seemed fully convinced that this was going to work out even though she was lying about herself in almost every respect — her age, her looks, her job, her money.”
That sort of hopeful, if naive, quality Starr-McClain saw in her mother shows up in the poems, too. In “Day Trip With Missing Binky” — a memory of a childhood drive on the back roads of Illinois that was published in 2019 — Starr-McClain writes: “she liked the fields this way and up close … and the clouds so perfect and numerous and floating/ like a fleet of wish and cool whip/ something for the angels to rest on/ she would say/ and mean it….”
Things ultimately didn’t work out with the California man, and her mother came back to Illinois. In the scheme of life’s great befores and afters, Starr-McClain says this was a big one. There was no apology; rather, her mother expected emotional support from her daughter. This lasted a few years before Starr-McClain moved in with her father to finish high school.
Starr-McClain left Illinois to attend Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., where she majored in English without a clear idea of where it would lead her. A professor who saw promise in her poems encouraged her. Readings by poets Gabriel Fried and Gabrielle Calvocoressi also proved revelatory.
“It was one of the first times I encountered living poets and realized that poetry wasn’t some dead art but something that was still happening,” she says.
After graduating, she lived in Colorado, Montana, and Oregon, where she worked at ski resorts and other seasonal gigs while honing her writing. It was while she was working on an M.F.A. at New York University that she realized all her poems with any emotional charge were about her mother. At the time, her mother’s mental and physical health declined further; the two sometimes lost contact altogether.
“I would sit down to write about something else and then, suddenly, my mom would show up,” she says. “I realized there was no stopping myself from writing about her.”
Starr-McClain admits she has a tendency to go off on tangents when she talks. In writing, she pares the details into economic phrases and concrete images that ground the reader with an invitation into grief and reconciliation.
“I see you as you once were to me, my heart a little stone pumping cold into the night,” she writes in the 2019 poem “My hurt for your missing is filed soft with few smokes.”
It continues: “My heart is filled with longing for the earth/ to be healthy again & this helps me forget/ about you.”
These poems were written before her mother’s cancer diagnosis and the care Starr-McClain then gave her. But this emotional displacement — from mother to environment — is a clarifying tool in Starr-McClain’s earlier work. She seems to find a model for stability and understanding in nature, particularly the familiar ecology and geography of the Midwest.
“What I tend to write now isn’t fully detailed,” she says. “I don’t go into exactly what happened and when and where. But throughout my work, I’m hinting that there is this betrayal and loss. I’m still trying to find a balance between knowing the history, acknowledging my limitations, and witnessing the natural world as it truly exists.”
Nearly the Absence
The event: A showcase with FAWC fellows J.J. Starr-McClain, Oscar Morel, and Seth Wang
The time: Friday, Feb. 23, 5 to 8 p.m.
The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
The cost: Free
