🔖 Read

Motherhood Is Antarctica: On the Underexplored Landscape of Postpartum Loneliness lithub.com

🔖📚 Read This Is Dedicated To Anyone Who Ever Left - Kelly McMaster interviewed by Lyz Lenz.

🔖📚 Read “I think, like marriage, home is a fantasy” - Kelly McMaster interviewed by Amanda Montei

Here are all of my intellectual intentions and here is this adorable, smiling, chubby baby, swallowing it whole.

When writing real life, there is always going to be a connection between what is happening at the breakfast table and how you are showing up on the page.

🔖 How Does Motherhood Impact Your Creativity? It’s Complicated vogue.com

Read: www.vogue.com

My inhibitions were methodically ripped to shreds by the pure chaotic energy of the small children and carers around me. I stopped caring about whether what I was doing made me feel silly, and that is a huge boon to anyone wanting to express themselves creatively.

🔖🎨 Read On growing alongside your artistic practice (The Creative Independent).

Mother-artist Bailey Elder talks about growing as an artist and being a mother. Elder is starting a blog to interview other artistic mothers!

🔖📚📝Read Is Parenthood the Enemy of Creative Work? by Kim Brooks (The Cut)

That’s one of the major things parenting is teaching me, the balance between letting go in writing and practicing craft, the balance between being ferocious with my imagination and rigorous in my practice. Shape and chaos. Learning to shape chaos.

🔖📚 Read The books that help define motherhood – for mums everywhere to read

Is it ever possible to reclaim yourself without endangering your child?

I don’t know. Because for me it’s been more about reconstructing myself rather than reclaiming myself.

🔖📚 Read Art or Babies.

you can make your art without being an art monster: You can do it as… an art mother.

🔖📚 Read Why are we only talking about ‘mom books’ by white women? by Angela Garbes (The Cut).

I love Angela Garbes’s writing. This is another old one.

🔖📚 Read The Stranger Guest: The Literature of Pregnancy and New Motherhood by Lily Gurton-Wachter (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Another old bookmark.

How will having a baby disrupt my sense of who I am, of my body, my understanding of life and death, my relation to the world and to my sense of independence, my experience of fear and hope and time, and the structure of my experience altogether? Dr. Spock is silent on these topics.

By the time a new mother has the time (or free hands) to write again, the most extreme experience is beginning to fade from her memory.