Bassey Ikpi is a writer, performer, mental health advocate, and author of the instant New York Times-bestselling book, I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying, a debut collection of essays about living with bipolar II disorder and anxiety. Bassey first gained public acclaim as an internationally recognized poet featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. She has been published by The Root, Huffington Post, Essence, and elsewhere. As the founder of The Siwe Project, a mental health organization, Bassey created the global movement #NoShameDay, an initiative that aims to reduce stigma and increase mental health awareness. RM: Can you talk a bit about the process of writing a memoir and deciding how much or how little to include about your motherhood experience? BI: I was very clear with my editor and even my first agent about this. The agent thought I should add something about motherhood, and I said, “No, I’m not even going to put it in the proposal because it’s not happening.” So it was a firm decision made on firm ground. I told …

  Mama’s Writing is Raising Mothers’ monthly interview series, curated by Deesha Philyaw. Are there days when you feel like a mother who writes, and others when you feel like a writer who is a mother? I had my first baby, Daya, in the fall of 2019 as a forty-five year-old, seven years into my writing career and just months after my first book Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar was published. During her first few months, when I was fortunate enough to have childcare, I saw myself as a writer who was a mother. I was struggling with figuring out “what next” after my first book, which had been a passion project but also with feelings of guilt for leaving my child with someone else while I scurried to my writing space to wrestle with words on a page. But then the pandemic hit, and I no longer had childcare and a strange thing happened as my husband and I juggled child care on top of our work. I found that although …

  Mama’s Writing is Raising Mother’s monthly interview series, curated by Deesha Philyaw. Are there days when you feel like a mother who writes, and others when you feel like a writer who is a mother?  At this stage in the game, I feel like a woman who is a mother and likes to write. I don’t identify as a mother, if that makes sense. I’m a woman. A Black woman. A Black woman who does many things, primary among them – mothering. I also write and dance and do makeup and read bones and on and on. I’m waiting for that moment when I feel like a capital W Writer and beyond that, an Author. I think once I’ve had my pieces published in a few different outlets, get paid for it, and folks engage with the things I’ve written, I’ll feel like a Writer. But when I see my book on a shelf with Maya’s and Toni’s and Octavia’s and Stephen’s … well, then … Bitch, you’re an Author! How has parenting influenced …

  Mama’s Writing is Raising Mothers’ monthly interview series, curated by Deesha Philyaw. Are there days when you feel like a mother who writes, and others when you feel like a writer who is a mother? Although I embraced writing before motherhood, I became more a writer since becoming a mother, so I am a mother who writes. How has parenting influenced your writing? Parenting has been the catalyst for much, if not all of my writing. Not that I write solely about my daughter, but being a mother has been the space where I have been prodded to explore the relationships with my own parents and grandparents, and how those relationships and lives have been impacted and are intertwined with history. Parenting has also been the catalyst for my thinking and writing about the future and world making. How has writing influenced your parenting? Writing has affected my parenting by showing my daughter that she will need to create the space that she needs to do what she needs and wants to do. I have …