Catherine Ricketts writes about the arts, grief, joy, and spirituality. She studied writing at the University of Pennsylvania and holds an MFA in nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University. Her essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review Online, The Christian Century, Image, The Millions, Paste, and the Ploughshares blog, among other publications. While writing, she has supported the work of other practicing artists as a live arts presenter, having held jobs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia’s FringeArts, and the public radio station WXPN. Ricketts lives with her family near Philadelphia.
It was a particular joy for me to meet virtually with Catherine this summer, as her new book The Mother Artist has been my favorite book of 2024. It’s a book that I feel like I’ve wanted in the world for so long. In Catherine’s words, its thesis is that the world needs art made by those who spend their hours looking at the vulnerable among us.
Catherine brings a gentleness, curiosity, and grit to her writing and her life — when we spoke, she was expecting her third child in the next few weeks, and was balancing caring for her family through a difficult time, working her day job at a university, and talking about the book as it was newly out in the world. We are so grateful she took the time to speak with us, and hope you pick up her book, The Mother Artist.
Oxford English Dictionaries
These dictionaries were my dad’s. This was not even his only set of Oxford English Dictionaries; he had a collection. I’m not totally sure how much he used them; I think they might have always been a little more like an emblem, but my dad was a writer. Professionally, there were seasons of his life when he worked as a freelance journalist, and then other times where he had other jobs. He wasn’t always writing full-time, but language was really important to him. I think his admiration for great writing sparked my own interest in writing. Growing up, both of my parents took a real interest in my writing; they would help edit writing I did for school and spend time with me on it, in a way that trained me on what good writing sounds like and how to produce it. I owe a lot to them when it comes to my vocation. From a young age, I knew I wanted to study English, because I loved the way those classes drew out questions about the human experience. That was where I felt connected, human, and alive together. I keep these dictionaries nearby to remind me that I come from a legacy of the love of language.
Cup / Day Job
I’ve never been either brave enough or entrepreneurial enough to try to make a living as a full-time writer. I don’t think the brand of writing I do is very marketable that way. So I’ve always taken the path of looking for paid work that also fuels my creativity. I’ve worked mostly in the arts; I worked for a long time in concert production for both a museum and for public radio. I got to be around artists and musicians all the time, and felt like it kept my creative energy going. During the pandemic, there were no concerts happening, and so I had to find something new. I was really fortunate to get a job at Villanova University, first as part of a grant awarded to their Humanities department, and then more recently in a role helping to lead their Honors Program. It’s a special program that is really focused on nourishing the whole student, in a way that I fear higher education is often failing to do right now. I also sometimes teach classes. This job is more responsibility and leadership than I’ve had in my day job before, which means more money to support my family, but it also means more of my attention. For the foreseeable future, my energy might be used up between my job and care work, with less time for purely creative writing.
Gifted Garlic
We are in an intense moment in my family life right now because I am eight months pregnant and my partner is very sick. So I am carrying the care of not only my two small children and the baby I am growing, but also of my husband. This photo to me is emblematic of the circle of care that surrounds us as we make our way through a difficult time. We have a neighbor who is not the most warm and fuzzy on the outside, but has been showing up for us in surprising ways. He owns land near our house and he gardens and I think takes pride in taking care of it, and he has insisted on mowing our grass for us lately. The other day, after mowing, he stopped by and gave us this garlic from his garden. It was so kind, and it’s so beautiful. I love looking at the purple color, and noticing everyday beauty inspires my prose. It’s important to me.
Memoirs
These are the books that I read to teach me how to write. In grad school I was part of a very self-directed program, where we shaped our own curriculum with the help of a mentor who could notice what we needed. There are some books in this shelf by my faculty mentor, Lauren Winner, who was the best teacher I’ve ever had [as well as being, coincidentally, one of Lynnette and Krystiana’s favorite writers during college ❤️]. Joan Didion is in here, whose lyricism and incisiveness really inspires me, as well as Annie Dillard, for the way she writes about spiritual questions.
Villanova is an Augustinian college, and every student has to take a class on Augustine’s Confessions. Each professor who teaches it shapes it in their own direction depending on their interests or areas of study, so I taught it as memoir. Some of the books here are books I used in that class in conversation with the Confessions, pulling from contemporary memoir to see how the questions Augustine asked are questions people are still asking today. This book near the bottom left, Samra Habib’s We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir is one example. She is grappling with her relationship with her parents, her heritage, and her faith of origin, which is also what Augustine was doing so long ago. It’s all still happening.
Running Shoes
Sometimes, I run! I love the way that movement opens and clears my head — particularly in transitions, like at the point in the day or week when I need to switch between my paid work and creative work, or paid work and family life. The movement can help me to switch gears and reset in a way that is otherwise hard for me. I’m not an intense runner; I don’t train for things or run races. It’s just me and my body, and it comes and goes seasonally. Right now, I’m not running — I’m eight months pregnant, and while I have run before during previous pregnancies, this time it just isn’t happening. That being said, the activity and the option also means more to me now that I do have children. Rather than ugh, I have to run, it becomes I’m going to leave my house and RUN AWAY! It’s like a treat just to be with myself. I love my family, and also I sometimes want to run away from them.
Art By Mother Artists
I just hung these on the wall recently, and they are all by women artists who are parents. I guess I’m starting a collection. On the left is the print that is used in the cover of my book, by a UK-based printmaker named Amy Hiley. I shared her work as inspiration in a meeting about the cover of my book, and the publisher ended up commissioning her to adapt it for use on the book. It makes me so happy. Then to celebrate my book launch, some of my friends and family pooled their resources and got me this Madeleine Donahue print of the mother and child. And at the top is a piece by my friend Lisa Abaya, who makes work that engages with light so that it looks different depending where you stand to look at it.
Book of Common Prayer
The Book of Common Prayer is the Episcopal prayer book, and I pray a lot. I have had seasons of my life, particularly when I lived in a more dense neighborhood, where it had been a communal practice. There was a time when I gathered with friends who lived nearby to do the morning reading together most days. It was really precious to me. These days, my husband and I do the evening reading together. Returning to this practice is fundamental to my writing. I start each day of writing with the prayer that God would give me the words.
Gifted Eggs
This is similar to the garlic — a friend came over to visit, and she brought us eggs from her neighbor’s chickens. People are constantly bringing us things right now, mailing us gifts, stopping by with a little something to show us care. It feels like an embarrassment of riches. In a time when I am giving a lot of myself, I am also receiving a lot. And the eggs are just so beautiful. I haven’t eaten them yet; I’m hoping to cook them soon. My children actually don’t eat eggs; my five-year old is allergic and then because I don’t make them for him, my three-year-old doesn’t eat them either. But I will eat them.
Quotation Cards
I had a professor in college who had a big stack of notecards with quotations about writing or craft that had been helpful in his practice, and he would begin each class by picking up five cards at random and reading them out to us. He was a really seasoned writer; he had worked as a profile journalist for the Washington Post and had collected all these little tidbits over a long career. Inspired by him, I started writing down lines that informed my own work in a similar way. On one of my first Christmases with my husband, I gifted him this box of cards. But we both use it. In retrospect, it was kind of a gift for myself.
The Mother Artist
This is the book I made! The others here are some books that are inspiring me right now. When you are responding to urgent needs of another, it’s hard to be self-reflective. But writers and artists practice self-reflection, and through their work they share it with you by proxy, like a gift. If I spend time reading about care work, I find myself loving the work more when I return to it. So that is what I wanted to provide.
I started writing my book when my oldest, who is now five, was a baby. And then I paused, while I worked on getting a publisher, and then started the second part when my oldest was a toddler and my second was nine months old. Writing it was intense — I had my full-time job, plus my children. I tried to write at a pace of a chapter a month. When I wasn’t sleeping well at home, I would go away for a night or two — first to sleep, and then to get a start on my next chapter and do some of the research, so that when I came home I had momentum. That way, if I had even one hour in the day, maybe with access to childcare after I’d finished with my job, I could drop back in. There was angst when I got behind, and moments of breakthrough when I got ahead. I engaged very physically with it, with a big storyboard on my wall where I mapped things out and moved things around. It was hard work to write, and also I’m proud of it.
Learn more about Catherine and her work on her website or follow on Instagram: @bycatherinericketts. Order The Mother Artist and share with a friend. ❤️
This interview took place on June 10, 2024. Catherine’s words have been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness. All images shared courtesy of the artist.
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