Mainstream publishing frequently sanitizes stories surrounding female pain, maternal hardship, and bodily vulnerability. Societal pressures often force women to process pregnancy complications, infertility, religious disillusionment, and identity shifts in total isolation. Without candid literary representations of these struggles, readers facing personal loss or systemic silence are left without authentic reflection or communal connection.
Unsolicited Press directly addresses this void through its Year of Womxn catalog, releasing four boundary-pushing books that confront the complex terrain of the female experience. By prioritizing raw truth and creative freedom over market conformity, the Portland-based independent publisher provides a platform for unapologetic storytelling. In this Executive Q&A, we speak with featured authors Laura Gaddis, Summer Stewart, Amy Gallo Ryan, and Savannah Cooper about their respective titles and the lived experiences shaping their work.
Q: In Mosaic, you document five challenging years of high-risk pregnancies and personal loss. How did writing this memoir help you articulate how grief and resilience can coexist during early motherhood?
Laura Gaddis: Writing Mosaic in such a modular, fragmented way showed me how life is broken into so many pieces and how those pieces co-exist whether we intend for them to or not. When I began writing the sections about my daughter, her birth story, and trying to understand her disability, it became clear how loss both in my own story and that which I witnessed from others was ever present. We don’t get over it, nor should we. Digging into specific memories and scenes really highlights this.
Memoir writing is such a journey of exploration, which seems counterintuitive since we may think we are just writing about what we already know. But what we remember and how we understand it in retrospect are vastly different. For example, when I began the project, I never intended to write so much about my own mother and moments from my childhood. I didn’t think they played into my current situations as much as I found they did. The ties between my own orthopedic issues with my spine and my daughter’s need for an orthopedic surgeon was a bit rattling to me when I discovered it. The essays about my earlier losses delved into the emotions I felt at those moments–how it felt to hold a baby breathing her first and only breaths–and there was a lot of angst there in that moment. But at the time of writing, that angst was softened and the story highlighted the path I took to where I was five years later.
By the end of writing all the essays and vignettes in Mosaic, which felt so fragmented during the drafting process, I was astonished to see the bigger picture. Only by stepping back into my art and taking the time to investigate these ideas did I see that. Hopefully readers see that too and feel the gestalt by the end of the book.
Q: MOTHER! blends lyric poetry and sharp essays to explore sexuality, feminist identity, and maternal life. What societal expectations surrounding modern motherhood were you most determined to dismantle in this collection?
Summer Stewart: Honestly when I talk about what I’ve written, I talk a lot about the process of being made, choosing to unmake myself, and to then be remade. During the writing process, I was most determined to dismantle the idea that motherhood requires a woman to disappear.
It’s funny how women raise other humans, and that just never settled well with me. I can be a mother and a woman at the same time, right? I constantly looked at that.
We still romanticize the mother who gives everything away: her body, her ambition, her sexuality, her anger, her privacy, her time. We call that devotion or selflessness. But, we rarely ask what happens to the woman underneath it, or what it costs her to remain legible only as someone else’s mother.
MOTHER! pushes against the expectation that a good mother should be endlessly grateful, always available, and somehow untouched by resentment, desire, boredom, rage, grief, or the strange violence of watching your body and identity become public property. Mothers are expected to love without complication. I wanted to write directly into the complication.
I was also interested, maybe hyperfixated, in the cruelty of the binary we create for women: mother or sexual being, caregiver or ambitious woman, nurturing or angry, good mother or selfish woman. Why the heck can’t women be all of the above? I want to get naked and dive into a river. And I want to be the first person my daughter calls when something great happens. And I want to be vocal about things that are hurting women (and society as a whole) every day without being called aggressive or rude. Motherhood does not sterilize us. It does not erase us.
Maybe the darkest expectation I wanted to dismantle is the belief that maternal suffering is noble simply because it is maternal. I don’t think women should have to be consumed in order to prove that they love their children. I wanted the collection to insist that a mother can love her child with terrifying force and still refuse to vanish.
Q: In You May Feel a Bit of Pressure, you map the emotional stages of unexplained infertility, including hope, shame, courage, and grief. How does putting words to this often invisible struggle help break the isolation so many individuals experience?
Amy Gallo Ryan: Well first I will say that my favorite moments as a reader happen when I experience recognition, encountering something on the page that I have known or thought or felt or lived on some level but that, until that moment, has rattled around inside me in an unformed, unarticulated way. It could be as tiny as a single facet of the dynamic between characters that is familiar somehow, something I have observed in life but not quite assigned language to. And then I read it and there is a beautiful unfolding, my opaque, subconscious understanding clarifies into clear thought, and I am left feeling more human somehow, more connected because someone else out there also sees or feels or gets that exact one thing.
In the case of You May Feel a Bit of Pressure, my deepest hope was that a reader would experience moments of that type of recognition, which are even more powerful when the thing being given language is painful or private or both, as is the case with infertility. While our culture has become comfortable engaging in a robust surface level conversation about infertility and IVF—of course people conceive this way!—I think the discourse has not yet deepened to touch on what it looks like—I mean really looks like—to sit with the existential uncertainty of whether you will get to have children. The raw truth of all those moments behind closed doors, the emotions we find painful to admit even to ourselves, are largely unsaid.
So I set out to say them. On some level, I think every woman experiencing infertility understands she's not alone. She's familiar with the stats—1 in 6 couples struggle to conceive—she scans all the faces in her clinic, registering just how many of us there are. Millions and millions. She can know, intellectually, she's not alone, and still feel alone all the same. Which is the unique, singular power of a book. In it, a reader might find traces of the darkest and loneliest and most intimate moments of her own life articulated back in the context of someone else's story. She doesn't need blanket reassurances, to be told You are not alone. She gets to experience a flash of recognition and feel it for herself.
Q: Mother Viper explores the intersections of religious disillusionment, pregnancy loss, and healing through haunting poetry. How did engaging with these liminal spaces of faith and sorrow guide your path toward artistic transformation?
Savannah Cooper: I grew up in the Baptist church, so faith has always played a significant role in my life, even when I left religion. Grief often feels like it doesn’t have a proper place in the Christian faith, with your eyes and heart meant to be focused on the hereafter. The collision of my born-again faith, which I had tried for so much of my adulthood to hold onto, and facing life-changing grief and trauma was a recipe for a seismic shift.
Writing has been my comfort since I was a child, and while I took a break from writing poetry for a long time, pregnancy loss drew me back as a way to process and cope with my feelings. This small, personal exorcism kept me from falling to pieces, while at the same time forcing me to examine more closely everything I’d been raised to believe. The resulting group of poems was angry and sorrowful, hurt and healing. It all felt very visceral in the moment of writing—words that poured out of me without stop. I wouldn’t have really thought of myself as an artist or poet before these poems; I’d given up writing without thinking about it for some time. But once it returned, I couldn’t let it go. And in many ways, it became my salvation.
Q: As part of the Year of Womxn initiative at Unsolicited Press, your book presents unvarnished perspectives on personal struggle and survival. How has working with an independent press protected the integrity of your story?
Summer Stewart: Working with a small press meant that nobody was standing over my shoulder asking me to make the story more readable. I never felt that I had to tone it down. MOTHER! is angry, sexual, contradictory, funny in places it probably should not be, and unwilling to turn pain into something inspirational. That mattered so much to me because women are already expected to package their suffering for public consumption. We are supposed to come out wiser, softer, healed, grateful. I had no interest in doing that.
There are things in this book that are unresolved because that is how life works. You can love someone and still be furious with them. Motherhood can be beautiful and claustrophobic all at the same time. Survival does not always make you noble. Sometimes it just means you survived and you are still carrying the wreckage around with you.
The book ultimately came out on my mother’s birthday the following year, which we hadn't planned on. Once I realized it, though, the timing felt almost obscene in its perfection. Here was this book about mothers, daughters, sex, bodies, rage, inheritance, and all the garbage women are expected to carry, arriving on the day my own mother was born. It worked out for the best.
Publishing independently gave me the freedom not to be forthright and raw. I could leave people complicated. I could be pissed off without reassuring the reader that I’d forgiven everyone, or myself. I could write motherhood without pretending it purified me.
Q: For readers who are currently navigating their own silent battles with grief, loss, or self-reclamation, what core truth do you hope they take away from your pages?
Laura Gaddis: Let life be messy. Don’t look for explanations as to why things happen, but rather find your new way of being. See beauty in things. Let life’s forward propulsion carry you with it.
Fighting against these things added to my anxiety because what we cannot control can be troubling. Acknowledging the pain alongside the peace and joy creates a more sustainable existence.
Honest literature provides an indispensable mirror for the complexities of modern life, dismantling the stigma that often surrounds reproductive struggles, trauma, and identity loss. By confronting heavy truths with vulnerability and lyrical precision, these four authors validate the diverse paths women walk toward healing and autonomy.
As the literary world continues to evolve, independent publishers and courageous writers remain vital to cultural progress. Championing raw, boundary-pushing narratives ensures that authentic human experiences are recorded, respected, and shared across communities.
To learn more visit https://www.unsolicitedpress.com/
