The Myth We Learn to Survive: Kate Gough on Childhood Lore
Kate Gough does not speak about childhood as something safely behind us. In Childhood Lore, her poetry collection published by Sunday Mornings at the River, childhood is not memory but structure: a system of beliefs, myths, spells, and stories that quietly shape how we learn to survive the world.
For Gough, “lore” names the invisible architecture of early life—the fairy tales, rumours, nursery rhymes, saints, toys, and whispered rules that become a private theology. Childhood, she suggests, is not simply lived; it is authored. Its currency is candy and lost teddy bears, collections of acorns and invented rituals, fragments of language that slowly harden into belief systems. Lore is what children inherit, but also what they invent in order to endure.
That tension—between magic and violence, fantasy and harm—runs through the book. Gough’s poems dismantle the sentimental myth of innocent girlhood, exposing the darker undercurrents of purity and perfection. Having grown up within purity culture, she sees innocence not as a virtue but as a dangerous fiction. “We are fleshy animals,” she says, “trying to make sense of the world in fragile bodies.” Against the relentless demand to be kinder, more productive, more beautiful, more pure, her work insists on rest, imperfection, and embodied reality. Childhood Lore becomes a refusal of the moral economy that teaches women to measure their worth through self-erasure.
Her poetic method mirrors this refusal. Rather than separating imagination from lived experience, Gough deliberately intertwines them. She begins with visceral, often uncomfortable questions—about apathy, knowledge, sin, growth—and overlays them with mythic and religious imagery. Saints, biblical figures, tragic heroines, and cultural icons appear throughout the collection, not as distant symbols but as bodies reclaimed from myth. By rewriting figures like Joan of Arc, Ophelia, or Frida Kahlo, Gough dismantles the flatness of cultural myth-making and restores complexity, grotesqueness, and humanity. Fairy tale, in her hands, becomes a tool not of escape but of exposure.
Storytelling, she believes, is always political. It is how we remember, how we cope, how we harm and heal. Children, she argues, do not merely receive stories; they create them to survive. Myth becomes a strategy of endurance—from the small comforts of Santa Claus to the devastating historical fact of Anne Frank reading fairy tales in hiding. Art, in this sense, is not ornament but resistance. To tell a story is to refuse erasure.
Throughout Childhood Lore, certain images recur with insistence: dolls, flowers, domestic interiors, bodies. Dolls fascinate Gough because they mirror the impossible expectations placed on women. If even toys must embody perfection, how can children learn to play without fear of failure? Flowers, meanwhile, evoke the secret language of nature—a coded system of meaning that mirrors poetry itself. Domestic spaces blur into bodily spaces; home becomes both sanctuary and site of pain. Living in a chronically ill body, Gough explores the uncanny experience of inhabiting a home that sometimes feels hostile, yet remains the only one available. Her poetry becomes a way of making that home inhabitable, of building an inner world where pain can be held without being aestheticised.
Beneath the softness of the book runs a quiet but unmistakable rage. Gough speaks openly about her long fear of anger, shaped by religious and gendered expectations that framed female rage as unfeminine and dangerous. Repressing anger, she learned, does not eliminate it—it relocates it into the body. In her poetry, anger becomes neither destructive nor sentimental but generative: a force that demands expression through language, movement, sound. Creativity becomes a way of metabolising rage without denying it.
Structurally, Childhood Lore resists linear narrative. The collection unfolds cyclically, like an incantation or a recurring dream. Gough wanted the book to feel haunted, repetitive, spell-like—because trauma, she says, is not chronological but looping. Repetition becomes both symptom and remedy: a way of reprogramming the mind, of whispering safety into existence. Writing, for her, is a form of counter-magic, a slow undoing of internalised violence.
Pain in Childhood Lore is never sensationalised. Chronic illness and trauma appear not as spectacle but as atmosphere—pervasive, ordinary, embodied. Gough rejects the romanticisation of suffering with visceral clarity. Illness, she insists, is not aesthetic; it is bodily, messy, humiliating, and political. She is outraged by a culture that simultaneously shames disabled bodies and glamorises the myth of the tortured artist. Against this contradiction, her poetry insists on dignity without glamour, truth without decoration.
If childhood is a story society teaches us to romanticise, Childhood Lore refuses that romance. It rejects the aestheticisation of mental illness, the fetishisation of pain, the idea that suffering is beautiful. Instead, it exposes the cost of such myths and the violence of turning lived realities into costumes. Gough’s work demands that we see illness, madness, and vulnerability not as metaphors but as conditions that deserve compassion and structural change.
Yet the book is not only a critique. It is also a call to nuance. When asked what she hopes readers carry with them after closing the book, Gough does not choose between beauty, discomfort, or recognition. She wants all three, but above all, she wants humanity to linger. Humans, she reminds us, are simultaneously tender and grotesque, luminous and broken. Childhood Lore asks readers not to resolve these contradictions, but to stay with them—to feel more, repress less, and allow complexity where culture demands simplicity.
In the end, Childhood Lore is not a nostalgic return to childhood but a radical re-reading of it. It is a book about the stories we inherit, the myths we construct, and the spells we must unlearn in order to live. It does not offer innocence as consolation. Instead, it offers something more unsettling and more honest: the possibility of seeing childhood not as paradise lost, but as the first language of survival.
Kate Gough is a Canadian-based poet (Treaty 7 region) and an active member of the online poetry community. Her work modernizes romantic literary sensibilities and explores recovery from trauma and the lived reality of chronic illness. Watch the video interview here. Get your copy here: US | UK | DE | FR | ES | IT | NL | PL | SE | BE | IE | JP | CA | AU