Interview Part 2: The Old Woman Who Lives in My Belly

"When I speak of the “old woman who lives in my belly” and I encourage my students to find that feature inside themselves, I’m referring to the instinctual part of myself that is sometimes suppressed by the intellectual part that may be trying to control what we write. 

Tapping into the instinctual part of ourselves allows us to get to the truth of our lives and gives us the courage to go to places we don’t believe we can go or are afraid to go. 

I feel that I only realized this and really learned to trust that voice when I was about 40 and my first book (Flowers from the Tree of Life) was published. I trace this point of view back to graduate school when a professor said to me that it was in a poem about my father that I had found the story I had to tell. At that moment it was as if a lightbulb went on and I started to believe that there might be a space in the world for poems written by a lower-class, Italian-American daughter of immigrants, and poems written by a wife, mother, granddaughter, and later grandmother.

Later I realized that I could help others who also had come from poor backgrounds or who felt for whatever reason that theirs was not a voice anyone wanted to hear.  I realized that by sharing my stories I could form a bridge between myself and other people and let them could walk back into their own past and find their stories."

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's new poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets which pairs her poems with her paintings. Maria's artist's website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.