I’ve been trying to find an in on writing about motherhood in non-canned/non-conventional way that doesn’t just sound like the millions of other stories, fiction and non-fiction, that are already out there. I’m particularly interested in the intersection of motherhood, queerness, desire and loneliness. The failure of commonly held wisdoms and guidance surrounding the pregnant body and the post-partum body. I’ve done a lot of research this last year for my fiction project about the placenta. I’ve been struck by how it remains so mysterious in both science and culture. In terms of AI, I’ve been thinking about where motherhood and AI can overlap. I mean, AI certainly can’t breasteed your baby but what does that frontier look like? Can AI help us move beyond the heternormative reign of What to Expect? What’s the dark side here? I found myself asking ChatGPT a lot of questions in my son’s first year that I could have asked Google but maybe I was looking for some sort of connection while in the lonely throws of sleeplessness and second guessing myself. I’ve recently really enjoyed the hybridity and perspective of Shelia Heti’s Motherhood and Louisa’s Hall’s Reproduction. Both works are somehow very intimate/ and also quite clinical/removed from the subject matter– a hard balance to stike when writing about motherhood.

This was an interesting experiement. I recently starting writing about my first year of motherhood. Right now, it’s formless so I took this opportunity to ask ChatGPT about what forms I may consider for writing this CNF essay.

Simple but I liked having a list here. I dug deeper into the “lyric essay.” GPT gave me a decent list of examples of lyric essays I could read, though it mostly listed full collections instead of specific pieces which would have been more helpful. I fed GPT some of my work and asked it to “translate into a lyric essay:”

I kept gettig this message no matter how many times I changed my prompt. Finally I realized that my own writing had the word “molest” in it. Sure enough, after I changed out molest for “assault,” it worked. The examples GPT generated, however, were crap. I tried to direct GPT a little more but asking to write in the style of writers like Maggie Nelson but it was pretty bleak. For example:

In the realm of longings and choices, our journey with Teddy unfolds. From the depths of desire to the weight of revelations, we navigate the intricacies of expectations, the shadows of the past, and the boundless possibilities of the future. Each moment becomes a lyrical note, and every word contributes to the symphony of our voyage.

This sounds pretty, I guess, but is about nothing. GPT’s responses any real lack substance.