Standish woman pens novel about midwives

By TESHA M CHRISTENSEN

It took 12 years for Standish resident Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew to write her first novel, “Hannah, Delivered,” which was released in 2014.

It’s not because she’s a new writer.

Andrew has written three memoirs and numerous essays, and teaches writing classes at The Loft Literary Center. She is a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board artists’ fellowship, the Loft Career Initiative Grant, and a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award.

“I’ve studied and taught memoir writing for my whole adult life; I’m conscious of how creative nonfiction functions,” said Andrew, who lived near the Riverview Theater from 1998 to 2004. “With fiction I’m riding my instincts.”

She has been surprised by how much more exposed she feels with this novel. “My memoir [“Swinging on the Garden Gate”] is about coming out bisexual and reconciling my sexual identity with my Christian faith—you’d think that would be the hard book to put into the world, and not a novel about a made-up character in a profession that’s completely different from mine,” remarked Andrew. “But if you peel back the surface of Hannah’s story—the midwifery, the births, the small towns, Hannah’s professional challenges—underneath is my bare psyche. It’s like I’m dreaming in public. It’s terrifying!”

Inspired by her sister

“Hannah, Delivered” (available locally at Moon Palace Books, 2820 E. 33rd St.) tells the story of a Minnesota woman who gives up her safe job at a hospital and heads to New Mexico to become a midwife. She then returns home to practice during a murky time in Minnesota’s history. Up until the late 1990s, it was legal to attend a home birth but only with a license, but the Board of Medical Practice refused to issue licenses and would have midwives arrested for delivering babies.

It was her sister Marcy Andrew, a midwife herself at Taos Homebirth and Midwifery in New Mexico, who suggested that Andrew write a novel about midwives. “I wasn’t especially inspired until she invited me to the birth of one of her clients. I stood in the corner holding the warming blankets, scared out of my wits. The mother lay on her side on the bed with her legs pushing against my sister’s body, and my sister said, ‘Push through your pain. Your baby is on the other side of that pain.’

“I suddenly knew I needed to write this book,” recalled Andrew.

She added, “It seems to me that much of what we cherish about life—creativity, growth, babies—comes on the other side of pain. But in our culture, we do our best to avoid pain with denial and medication. I was curious to know what normal birth, without medical intervention, might have to teach us about coming alive in other arenas, especially spiritually, emotionally, and relationally.”

Birth is feminism's final frontier

Andrew set the book in Minnesota and New Mexico because they were the two places she had connections to midwives. “This turned out to be fortuitous, because they’re very different states with very different attitudes toward birth,” Andrew noted. While Minnesota is the home of big medical systems, big insurers, the Mayo Clinic and a Board of Medical

Practices that sought to arrest midwives, home birth has always been legal in New Mexico with Medicaid reimbursing the bill.

There are still states in the United States where it’s a felony to deliver a baby at home, Andrew pointed out. “I wanted to show how culturally shaped our attitudes toward birth and safety are, and that similar dynamics might be inhibiting our ability to live fully manifested lives.”

Her research included lots of reading, interviews, observations at hospitals and birth centers, as well as attending a Midwives Alliance of North America conference. Early on, a midwife remarked that birth is feminism’s final frontier. “If we really loved women, we’d trust their bodies,” she told Andrew.

“I was very curious about what she meant, and this question spurred a lot of my writing,” said Andrew.

Andrew was deeply inspired by the stuff she talked about on the phone late into the night with her sister: her daily professional conundrums, her moral questions, her struggles with the insurance industry and Medicaid reimbursements, her undying passion for birth, and the way birth brings her into every corner of her community.

Midwives at the cusp of life

“I have tremendous respect for almost all the licensed midwives I’ve met,” said Andrew. “They know how to listen very carefully to others and how to pay close attention to women’s bodies. They’re living right at the cusp of life and they’re aware of death all the time.”

Two characters in the book, Hannah’s New Mexico mentors Sunny and Maria, are based on her sister’s mentor, Elizabeth Gilmore. “She was a real pioneer and visionary for midwifery,” noted Andrew.

Midwives have been the first readers of “Hannah, Delivered,” and they’ve loved it. “It’s been very gratifying,” said Andrew. “A few have thanked me for writing their story—a real surprise and honor. I worked very hard to get the medical information and the emotional work accurate, and midwives have told me I succeeded.”

Fixing a broken system

Through the character of Stuart, a male midwife, Andrew explores the ideas behind why it is culturally acceptable for men to be OB/GYNs and deliver babies in the hospital, but it’s taboo for men to enter midwifery, an ancient and very female role.

“I think if we’re going to fix our broken maternity system, we’ll need to follow northern Europe and create a system that’s porous — where doctors and nurse midwives and home birth midwives all work together,” observed Andrew. “Along those lines, I also think that the amazing wisdom inherent in natural birth has been kept hidden and marginalized, but it belongs to all of us, men and women, straight and queer, in the hospital and at home.”

Story of a writer

Andrew won two gift certificates to McDonalds for a short story she wrote in fourth grade (called “Oh, Sister!”) and had an ecstatic experience during a writing assessment in fifth grade. But it wasn’t until sixth grade, when she discovered poetry, that she decided she wanted to be a writer. “I memorized ‘The Jabberwocky’ and formed romantic notions about writers that year,” recalled Andrew.

Her writing process doesn’t begin with an outline or even a specific character. “I like to muck around in my journal, asking questions and listening for themes that are rising up through my days,” said Andrew. “Then I begin gathering thoughts in a project notebook. This is usually a mess of ideas, quotations from readings, snippets of scenes or memories — nothing you’d recognize as writing.” Eventually she goes to the computer and opens a file.

With “Hannah, Delivered,” Andrew wrote random scenes from New Mexico and Minnesota without really knowing where she was going. Only once she had a bulk of material written did she begin to play with structure and character development.

Her writing group read draft after draft, and gave her straightforward, useful feedback. “My partner is also a smart reader, so I rely heavily on her,” said Andrew.

She did countless revisions of “Hannah, Delivered,” including four major overhauls after she signed on with her agent. “Writing a first draft is great fun, but the real work of writing a book (finding its heartbeat, helping it to grow) happens in revision,” observed Andrew. “That’s where the important discoveries take place—the deep joy of writing.”

Her next book is a book for writers that she’s currently calling “New Vision/Revision: Opening the Writer’s Heart and Art.” “It’s about how writers need to open themselves to the possibility of personal growth through their writing if they want their work to develop,” explained Andrew.

Connect with Andrew at www.spiritualmemoir.com and www.elizabethjarrettandrew.com