TENDERS- #1 APRIL 2025. Launch of the TENDERS Interview series - with yours truly!
In which I ask myself the questions I'm asking of others... how did I do????
Dear Readers-
In graduate school one of my mentor professors jokingly said from time to time that I needed to start a podcast, "You could call it A Piece of my Mind with Eleanor Burke! or "Don’t get me started…” Other people have said this over the years, and so last summer I decided it was time, working with my therapist to figure out a time line to make it happen for a goal of launching in January 2025.
A long distance friend was in town last summer and came over for a visit; he is a professional musician and also runs a music school online. I told him my idea of starting a podcast and he also loved the idea and thought through some logistics with me. Later he texted me a link to a good starter microphone he recommended, "Look! It’s even pink like your studio!”
Alas… do you even know HOW MUCH TIME it takes to produce a podcast?
While you are also keeping a trying-to-walk baby from too many head injuries and eating dried up old food from up off the floor? While your oldest child is working on getting their driver’s license and yells at you every time you push down on the imaginary brake pedal and holler “ten and two!!”? And the almost 4 going on 17 year old is fussing at you while you prep garden beds- “Mama don’t dig that Worm!!” AND you are also fielding your Mother in Law’s Parkinson’s induced anxieties and memory issues- “Are there people in the house?” she asks… and the next day breaking into her automated pill dispenser and hiding important papers despite her writing herself a note that says "DO NOT TOUCH.”
Unless a person has no children, has also a very well paying job or is willing to take out a sizable loan in order to have the start up costs to fully produce a podcast- and pay people for their time to consent to being interviewed- all things I do not have time and capacity for- I conceded, rather quickly last year, that a podcast, a well executed, regularly programmed, well edited creation, is not feasible in my current stage of life. In lieu of that I am turning to a less labor intensive form of interview- the written correspondence type!
The TENDERS interview series aims to introduce you to people I think you’ll appreciate knowing are in the world. Tender people tending good things!!! You’ll hear from writers and artists, midwives and doulas, grief facilitators and song birds, educators and activists, carpenters and gardeners, elders and young people…
In my monthly mothers support group the facilitators follow the same guidelines month after month. One of those guidelines is that they don’t ask anything of us that they themselves aren’t willing to do. After the reflection and opening prompt is read, a facilitator always shares first to break the ice, risk vulnerability, and help us feel more comfortable to share what’s on our hearts and minds.
So in the spirit of that guideline… and to give you some idea of what the bones of this interview series will look like, I present to you this month’s Tenders Interview Series… with me! Thanks for humoring me! By answering my own questions, I can feel out how I want this go and tweak prompts as needed. Month to month I have planned for a blend of stock questions I ask everyone and personal/avocation specific questions. I suspect this series will illuminate though, that there are more common threads between TENDERS than not.
Next month you’ll hear from one of my favorite people in the world, an Emmy award winning producer, writer, Mother, grandmother, homesteader, Buddhist, abolitionist, and one of the biggest hearted people I know…. stay tuned!
And if you have someone you think would be a good fit for the TENDERS interview series- please send me an email. I always looking forward to hearing from you.
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Tenders Interview Series
with Eleanor Burke
How is the weather in your corner of your world these days? Your physical, mental, spiritual weather?
It’s SPRING here in western Washington and the local weather Facebook page I follow said we just passed a record mark for how much rain we’ve had recently. We had a torrential rainstorm that was so loud it reminded me of rainstorms in my home state of South Carolina so that thrilled me. We got for our first Nettle harvest recently and tromped around our neighbors woods so that really filled me up! It’s a beautiful lively time of year with the pacific chorus frogs singing us to sleep every night in our seasonal pond, trees blossoming, mud- luscious (as ee cummings calls it) as it is, and everything greening up. I’m logging 5-6 hours of sleep a night unbroken, which any parent of young children knows is a win! Noting seasonal transitions is more and more my spiritual practice and keeps me tethered amidst the awful political climate we have found ourselves in. Attending my local Unitarian congregation most Sundays I can, after not being part of a church community in over twenty years keeps me going.
What are you tuned into/praising and/or grieving in particular?
Rage and grief wise- in the past couple months it’s become clear to me that my ex-partner, my oldest son’s father is a Trump supporter. That’s been really weighing on me- more than I’d like to admit and I got into a stupid text argument with him- yes I know…. What’s wild to me is how beyond-critique MAGA folks are of Trump- like I don’t know a single Democrat who was not also critical of Biden, Obama and any other democrat we’ve ever had in presidential office. He and I split up almost 13 years ago, but met in our early 20s at a retreat for young people hosted by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which is one of the oldest peace organizations in the the US. He was a key influence in a lot of my alternative and hippie views- got me into the organic food growing movement, supported my desire for a midwife out of hospital birth and we were really active in community building work for many years together. I’ve been surprised by how deeply hurt and betrayed by this I am. He’s also refused to answer a straight question about concerns I have like most MAGA and it’s bewildering to say the least. We already don’t have a great relationship to begin with so this isn’t helping things.
I’ve been following the recent case of ICE illegally and violently seizing local farm worker activist, Alfredo "Lelo” Juarez; it’s clear he was targeted for his organizing work for farm workers. So if you’re WA based please call your local and state reps, Governor Ferguson’s office, as well as Attorney General Nick Brown’s office and ask for Lelo’s immediate release if you have not already. Link to ways to support him are all here.Praise wise- I’m going into my second month of solo parenting three children while my husband works out of state. I think I’m doing a hell of a job all things considered! I’m putting my first garden since 2021. My basic needs are met and I’ve got some wonderful people in my life. I finally have jeans I love that fit my postpartum body!! The SUN is returning to western Washington which is always a huge relief.
Thanking my former self for tarping this area last winter so I can chunk out the work of making beds- one bed takes at least an hour to prep just to get ready for seeds/starts. You’ve been writing for many years. You are also a Mother. I think Mothering/parenting can be a form of art as well. Has your definition of being an artist, being a writer, changed since having children? How does your work as a writer inform your parenting and vice versa?
I think I am still debunking the ingrained myth of what being a WRITER is "supposed” to look like, i.e. Thoreau in the cabin alone, undisturbed. (Lest we forget, Thoreau’s MOTHER brought him food she cooked for him and did his laundry!!!! I mean damn!) The reality for me as a MOTHER WRITER is that I write when and where I can- especially not having consistent affordable childcare.
When I was pregnant with my first child, my son Weston, 2008/2009, a local writer mother raved, "just wait til after your baby is born, you’ll write so much, all this creativity will flow out from you!” That was a hard expectation to put on me. I very much did not experience this. In fact quite the opposite- any writing life I had was subsumed and halted by Motherhood. I put together a collaborative zine with a handful of people but only had time/bandwidth to produce one issue. I had postpartum depression and anxiety that no one caught as there was hardly anyone talking about PMADs back then. I wanted to start a blog but my partner frowned on that idea and was too cheap to buy us internet and I was the default stay at home parent so had no money of my own and my imposter syndrome got the better of me and I didn’t start a blog until after we broke up.Then, after my daughter Aubrey was born in 2021, a Facebook ad targeted me for writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s school Corporeal Writing, and specifically for a class about writing and motherhood with writer-mother Amanda Montei. That class was really powerful for me, and it was Amanda who later encouraged me to start this Substack newsletter. In class I met other Mothers who were/are in the process of figuring out what being a MOTHER WRITER looks like- turning that hermit in the woods and very masculine trope on its head. I’ve learned to embrace the notes app on my Iphone as well as voice memos to capture ideas- I also do a lot of thinking out loud with my husband and some close friends, via text with certain friends, and I use my Instagram stories to “think” out loud about things I am connecting the dots about. Writing as a person with ADHD can also be incredibly challenging as my brain gets CROWDED with so many brilliant thoughts haha, connections pinging quickly/I’m time skipping all over the place trying to piece it together- so in that way I am so grateful for this practice and my training as a writer where I can SLOW down enough to write it or type it out. Like any creation the VISION realm moves much faster than the physical realm and that is something that has stymied and depressed me. I am getting better at recognizing that the socially sanctioned pace for creative work is not in alignment with my particular pace. I love looking to other creatives like Fiona Apple - genius writer/poet-pianist/chanteuse that she is, who has taken seven and eight years between some of her albums.
Over the past few years of mothering I continue to be inspired by bell hooks who was writing about the need for tax funded childcare in 1984, that care work is NOT GENDERED and that black women in the US continue to bear the brunt of so much systemic injustices; Silvia Federici tracing the roots of capitalism to the violent persecution of witches- aka traditional midwives and healers aka women, Amanda Montei on standing up for feminism, Robina Khalid on midwifery and raising activist children, Angela Garbes on essential labor, Virginia Sole Smith on mothering and diet culture, and Ericka Hart on sexuality, queerness, blackness and parenting.
I’m trying to weave the personal-is-political and vice versa more so into both my writing and my Mothering work. Writing as art in the sense that an artist’s role is to resist dominant culture, speak truth, make beauty, bear witness, and IMAGINE other modes of being and loving. Mothering as a form of resistance work.
I keep this print in my living space to remind me.
Art by Radical Emprints
In 2023-2024 you completed your training to become a community grief ritual facilitator while pregnant with your last child. Tell us about this work, why grief work, and what do you hope to do with this training?
I attended my first grief retreat in 2020 a month before WA state went into lock-down. I had a full body feeling of "THIS IS IT!!” like total kinship/attraction to/with this work and knew I had to figure out how to be more involved. I’ve attended several more retreats virtually and in person since that first one, and then got the opportunity to apply for the mentorship program fall of 2023.
Now, end of this month I am going to be facilitating my first grief ritual for the women of my Unitarian congregation at our annual women’s retreat (which will also be my first time attending). I would love to incorporate community grief ritual into birth work as well- so many people are walking around with birth trauma or fraught origin stories because of the medical industrial complex, infertility, pregnancy loss, birthing and becoming parents in a village-less time where you can literally go into debt for having a baby. Birthing humans and becoming mothers and parents when healthcare is not a guarantee and family leave is nearly non-existent is not ok. Not to mention the history of systemic racial gynecological abuse, the legally sanctioned and violent pushing out of black and indigenous midwives from practicing and serving their communities - you understand how that history then is directly linked to the horrific outcomes we see now for maternal outcomes in those communities, and why it’s so important to support projects like Jamaa Birth Village a black owned midwifery center in Missouri, or here in WA- Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services.As a trained full spectrum doula who has supported people around miscarriage/loss, abortion, traumatic birth, perinatal mood disorders, being trained in grief ritual facilitation is a great tool to have. Grief work and birth work absolutely go hand in hand. In the future, I would love to collaborate with some other Birthworker/Grief Tenders I know to offer retreats focused on pregnancy, birth and postpartum.
What self care or community care practices have you found most helpful in doing the work that you do?
ALONE TIME!!!!! (which I rarely get). Writing and reading. Getting outside. Dancing, walking, swimming, listening to music, singing. One on one deep friend time. Keeping an intellectual life is key to my sanity with small children right now. Staying engaged to local issues, networking, cooking good food for my family and not giving myself a hard time when I go on my regular cooking and cleaning strikes. Setting and re-setting boundaries. Resisting the very real hermit that lives inside me and getting out of the house. ADHD medication seems to be helping? Weekly therapy with my wonderful therapist and for WA state low income health insurance for paying for my therapy. Baby-wearing my baby in one of my beautiful carriers that I’ve collected over the past year so I can get things done.
What teachers/practitioners/beings and or places (lived or dead) have been instrumental in your life?
My mother Anne in particular has been a huge influence in my philosophical and intellectual life, in my mothering, in my home making, in my multitude of intersecting interests. My father Lewis and his work as a law professor, a birder, and a historian and civil rights activist. I’m one of six siblings and we all get along and they are amazing Aunties and are all doing good work out in the world.THE SOUTH as a region/zeitgeist/climate where I was born and raised has had a huge influence on my life- so much more to say on this- from being raised adjacent to southern good old boy white christian nationalism to southern hospitality in a very real way to the deep and sustaining contributions of black people.
The suburbs and mall culture and a very cliquey hellish public high school.
So many kind and brilliant writing English teachers and professors.
So many singers and musicians!The sea islands of Fripp and Edisto off the coast of South Carolina.
Lopez Island, WA where I lived for a decade and where I became a mother. It was such culture shock to me coming from the suburban South. The back to the land hippie culture, epic potlucks and summer weddings, the inter-generational community, the anti-capitalist means of bartering and support that people still engage there, the deep female friendships I forged there, the small town intimacy of it all, all really challenged and wooed me. BUT it’s very much a bubble existing within/and because of things like Seattle wealth and white privilege; there’s truly an aspect of what I’d call 21st century feudalism that just felt really hard for me to ignore after all. (Some day I’ll write more on this)
My husband Carsten and I have navigated a lot in our relatively short time together of seven years- me completing graduate school, moving in together pretty quickly, him taking on my son, then us getting pregnant and having two babies in the last four years, non-monogamy off and on, global pandemic, his mother’s declining health/Parkinson’s (he is her only child), countless renovation projects, food growing, tending ten acres, buying a complete fixer upper of a house across the country in South Carolina, and getting legally hitched. Not only does he have a brilliant mind and we can really engage on that level, but he can also fix or build just about anything. He’s a wonderful friend and father.
And of course my children- Weston -15, Aubrey age 3, Lars- about to turn 1. I feel really in awe of these humans I get to share life with.
A key influence in your life, Stephen Jenkinson, grief practitioner and founder of the Orphan Wisdom School, often told students that “to look good you gotta look good.” By which he meant that looking deeply at things, sometimes means we need to dress in certain ways to aid our approach. We know that around the world costume, clothing, and adornment carry rich meaning especially when it comes to ritual and ceremony. Do you have any particular items of clothing or accessories that are sacred to you and why?
Two things come to mind:
1- This very faded gray green bandana that I was given at a community building workshop close to 18 years ago in Berkeley, CA. It was given to me by an older friend George Moskoff, who was really dear to me and my partner at the time, as we were all into this form of deep circle work called community building from FCE- Foundation for Community Encouragement. I ended up crying buckets of tears and snot, and at one point, George kindly, handed me this bandana. I’m assuming he said I could keep it as I never gave it back. At this point this bandana is incredibly thin, edges frayed and I’d estimate has had gallons of tears and snot wept/blown into it! Any time I go to a grief retreat now or a deep ritual of any kind I bring this bandana.
and
2- Horse hair earrings (I have the long pair on the right) made by a friend of a friend on Salt Spring Island- these earrings were made for me in a trade for some herbal elixirs I used to make. They have traveled to Scotland and back with me. Any time I wear them I feel like a key part of myself- sexy, grounded, fierce as fuck.
screenshot from Seven Sisters Adornment IG page
What are you working on these days?
Tending home. Driving children to and fro their various schools and play dates every day of the week. I do SO MUCH DRIVING RIGHT NOW it’s wearing on me. Getting my seeds in the ground- marveling again at the work it takes to grow food and praising the genius of SEEDS- all that information and energy and power in a tiny ass seed- it’s truly humbling and inspiring.
Making key decisions about our house in SC as well as dreaming and planning for projects here at our home/my mother in law’s land here in WA.Trying to figure out how to get the folks I asked to interview for this TENDERS series to answer the questions hahahah- I am realizing due to the nature of these questions it’s not an interview you can just sit down and answer in an hour- full disclosure- answering my own questions thoughtfully took close to four hours- and all the people I’m interviewing are not being compensated for their time, so I need to figure how to cull some of these questions!
I’m hoping to do a TED talk style presentation/show and tell about my baby-wearing carrier obsession sometime this Spring. And end of April, I am facilitating my first ever Community Grief Ritual to women in my church community at our annual women’s retreat- this will be the first time I’ve attended this retreat, and so I’m excited all around - my husband will be home by then since being gone from Washington since December!!! And I will finally get a weekend away from home and children, to connect to myself, to connect to other women, and facilitate work I deeply love.And… last but not least- what is a favorite sad song of yours that can be added to the ongoing Tears of Things playlist?
As folks know I LOVE a good sad song…. what comes to mind right off, is not one I’d classify as sad so much, but is definitely tender to me, and deeply personal to me as this song has been a steady companion for the last year.
It’s called You and I, and was written by Port Townsend based community song leader and elder, Laurence Cole. Laurence was one of of my mentors during my Community Grief Tending Mentorship. In March of 2024 we gathered in person for a four day retreat, and I was nearing my last month of pregnancy. So baby Lars was with me for the duration of that training, which makes me wonder what role grief work will take in his life. The last day of our grief retreat, they got me and the other pregnant mama in the middle of a circle and sang this song to us- right to our wombs and the babies inside- it was over forty people or so- I cried the whole time. Later, we sang this song as a church congregation to dedicate ourselves in a community way to baby Lars, my daughter Aubrey, and our family. Now It’s the song I sing to Lars every night when I put him to sleep, so it feels very much a part of me these days. My daughter sings it to him too now.
It’s also a great song to sing with others!