Creative Mothers
- Why Are We Only Talking About ‘Mom Books’ by White Women? by Angela Garbes for The Cut
- We Need to Talk About Whiteness in Motherhood Memoirs by Nancy Reddy for Electric Literature
- As A Queer Woman, I Can’t Afford To Be Ambivalent About Motherhood by Katie Heaney for Buzzfeed
🔖📝 The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer ‹ Literary Hub
if you’ve read a book penned by a woman with young children recently, there’s a significant chance it was written while hiding, losing sleep, or using inventive distractions. (Or even all three.)
there is no separation between mother and writer, nor can I tease apart the time I spend tending to my child from the time I spend thinking about my writing, or actually doing it.
Finding Literary Spaces Amid the Intensity of New Motherhood 🔖📚💬
🔖📚 Sara Fredman’s How Motherhood Helped Me Reject the ‘Father Tongue’ of Academia is both about writing the kind of thing I want to write and is itself the kind of thing I want to write.
💬🔖📚 Kate Zambreno on her new book "To Write as if Already Dead" - Los Angeles Times
The postpartum experience isn’t just expensive; it can also be one of psychic trauma and creative crisis. Someone who was a person becomes a mother. “You’re not a person. You don’t have a name,” says Zambreno. This feeling of erasure is a current that runs through her work, reaching peak intensity in “To Write as if Already Dead.” “I need to restore myself after being made into a ghost,” Zambreno says. “I always feel like writing the most when I’m being made invisible.”
Kate Zambreno on her new book "To Write as if Already Dead" - Los Angeles Times latimes.com
At Literary Mama, Victoria Livingstone writes about how the tasks of motherhood that “cannot be commodified or marketed” help us learn how to let go of the need to always be productive, and instead grant us space to let our creative spirit wander.
From Parul Sehgal: In a Raft of New Books, Motherhood From (Almost) Every Angle
In this piece that is mostly a review of Jacqueline Rose’s book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, Parul Sehgal offers more titles to add to the motherhood reading list.
“Mothers “are not in flight from the anguish of what it means to be human,” Rose writes. She quotes Julia Kristeva: “To be a mother, to give birth, is to welcome a foreigner, which makes mothering simply ‘the most intense form of contact with the strangeness of the one close to us and of ourselves.’”
Isn’t it pretty to think so? Recent books on motherhood, however, frequently and sometimes unwittingly, illustrate a different phenomenon: how motherhood dissolves the border of the self but shores up, often violently, the walls between classes of women.
Sehgal names some of these walls: pay gaps and maternal health outcomes, both hinging on race. She points out:
…so many of these books (almost all of them are by white, middle-class women) seem wary of, if not outright disinterested in, more deeply engaging with how race and class inflect the experience of motherhood.
The books listed in this article and in Elkin’s are a beginning. As a canon, the list has glaring gaps, most noticeably around race and queerness. The following articles seek to fill those gaps, and I’ll be discussing them in depth in the coming days:
From Lauren Elkin: "Why All the Books About Motherhood?"
I’ve been sitting on Lauren Elkin’s article asking “Why all the books about motherhood? for a year and a half and only read it fully for the first time today. It offers an immense reading list of books related to motherhood. Many of them are written by mothers, and so I think by default curating their writing counts as curating stories of creative mothers.
Elkin quotes Jenny Offill in an interview with Vogue:
“Early on, I took my colicky baby to one of those new-mothers’ groups. I wasn’t sure how to connect with them, but I desperately wanted to. But the affect seemed odd. The new mothers seemed to be talking in these falsely bright voices; all the anecdotes were mild ones of “the time she lost her pacifier on the bus” variety. No one seemed to feel like a bomb had gone off in their lives, and this made me feel very, very alone. Gaslighted, almost. Why weren’t we talking more about the complexity of this new experience?”
This resonates immensely with my new mom group experience. I would go. I would not know what to talk about. Our babies would be cute. I would feel awkward. I would leave knowing it was good that I got out of the house, but only feeling a little less lonely. I didn’t know how to reach out. Maybe the moms in these books will reach me.
Elkin says:
The new books on motherhood are a countercanon. They read against the literary canon with its lack of interest in the interior lives of mothers, against the shelves of “this is how you do it” books, and against the creeping hegemony of social-media motherhood.
I welcome this countercanon.
From Hillary Frank: The Special Misogyny Reserved for Mothers
Despite receiving multiple rejections from radio station editors, journalist and author Hillary Frank kept her podcast about parenting, “The Longest Shortest Time,” going for three years before it was picked up by WNYC and then Stitcher.
She learned a lot making the show:
That parents can be civil with one another on the internet. That naming an episode “Boobs” will make it your most popular one ever. And that there is a special kind of misogyny reserved for mothers.
Her success with the show didn’t halt the misogyny, but it does show that moms can create success in their creative endeavors. Not only did she keep the podcast going without outside funding for three years, she continued to host it for four more years before transitioning to the role of executive producer. She also wrote Weird Parenting Wins, " a collection of personal essays about parenting, as well as crowdsourced parenting strategies from the worldwide LST community" (source).
From Austin Kleon: Books on art and motherhood
During my son’s first few weeks, I spent most of his naps reading about matrescence (the process of becoming a mother) and identity crises. What did I even care about anymore, besides keeping him alive? Writing? Performing? I’d spent the past three years developing an identity as an improv comedian. Where had that identity gone? Would I ever get it back? Did I even want it back? What about all the other creative identities I’d had before? I’d been a writer, singer, actor, dancer, cross-stitcher, crocheter… Were those people still inside me? At some point in all of my browsing, I ran across Austin Kleon’s recommendations for books on art and motherhood. I’m still on the first book on his list, but the fact that he could make a list gave me some hope that I could figure this out.
Welcome to Genetrix: Curating Stories of Creative Mothers
Yesterday, I talked about my project, Genetrix: Curating Stories of Creative Mothers and how I would be incorporating it here into my personal site rather than keeping it in its own place anymore. Today I’m posting the introduction to the project that I wrote a year and a half ago, with some notes afterward on things that have changed in the past year and a half.
How did we get here? I’d been collecting articles and books about motherhood and art for months when Electric Literature published Grace Elliott’s “Why Do I Have to Choose Between Being a Writer and a Mother?” in which she writes:
I am having such trouble finding narratives of women who are mothers and artists, or mothers and musicians, or mothers and writers — stories in which women are both, without their struggle to be more than a mother overwhelming them… [I am] looking for a narrative in which creative women do not have to choose between abandoning their work or their children. I hope to find a story of women who live as men do: loving and ambitious, child-raisers and artists.
As a mother and a writer, this spoke to me on a soul level. Reading this immediately followed my participation in Kim Werker’s Daily Making Jumpstart Live, two weeks of attempting to make something daily. In the course of that process, two weeks during which sometimes my two year old son didn’t nap, I found my relationship with creativity and making changing. At first, I had ambitions of crocheting rows and rows a day, preparing elaborate meals, maybe taking up woodworking. In the middle, I started to count mixing some chai concentrate with almond milk as my making for the day. But by the end, I was, in fact, chugging along with crochet, knocking out a giant doily shawl over the course of a week. Some days I could be a mother and a creative person, and other days I couldn’t.
Elliott’s writing and this experience confirmed for me that I needed to seek out the stories of other creative mothers. And my natural inclination is to share the stories I find.
What are we doing here? Like motherhood itself, creating and curating this project will be a process of trial and error. I’ll be sharing links to blog posts and articles that inspire me and can serve as a launching point into our journey at the intersection of creativity and motherhood. I’m hoping to include reviews of relevant books and media, and conversational interviews with actual creative mothers. But please tell me what you would like to see in this space. I’m especially interested in ideas for how we can build a community of people interested in stories of creative mothers.
Who am I? I’m Kimberly Hirsh, and I’m a mother, performer, writer, and crafter. Most of my creativity these days is used to produce academic writing as part of my doctoral work toward a PhD in information and library science. If you want to get to know me better, you can check out my website.
I’m a white, American, raised Christian but currently agnostic and a little witchy, chronically ill but without other disabilities, vaguely straight, monogamously heterosexually partnered, legally married, postgraduate educated, middle class cis woman. I’m a full-time graduate student with a part-time assistantship.
My son was conceived after three years of PCOS-driven anovulatory infertility via intercourse with no medical assistance other than metformin, born of my body, delivered vaginally, and while the labor, birth, and aftermath definitely came with some trauma, it was relatively uncomplicated.
I’m blessed/lucky/privileged to have my parents, my partner’s parents, and our siblings all living close by and able to help with our son. He and I spend five mornings a week at a coworking space/Montessori School, but I am his primary caregiver. We live in a suburban neighborhood in a medium-sized city with many organizations and activities designed to support young children and their families.
A note on inclusion… All those characteristics and experiences mentioned above obviously affect my lens on creativity and motherhood. I’m going to deliberately seek out perspectives different than my own, but I’m also going to mess up. Please feel free to let me know when I do and to share stories and perspectives I miss.
Who counts as a creative mother? For our purposes, a mother is anyone who identifies as a mother. As for a definition of creativity, well, I’m thinking here of writers, artists, performers, designers, architects, crafters… But that definition is a floor, not a ceiling.
What has changed since January 2019? My son is three, almost four now, rather than two. Our Montessori/co-working space closed at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic and will not re-open in the time we had left to spend there. We are socially distanced from most of our family members, though my husband’s mother does come over most days to help with our son so I can get literally any work done on my dissertation at all. The many wonderful organizations and opportunities for families with young children in our city are not currently available to us, either because they are closed or because we are continuing mostly to stay at home, as I may be at higher risk of complications from COVID-19 if I should contract it.
Thank you for joining me. If you’re interested in receiving a weekly email that includes all of my Genetrix posts, please sign up here.
Curating stories of motherhood and creativity, esp. writing
Exactly a year and a half ago, I started a newsletter called Genetrix after reading Grace Elliott’s article, “Why Do I Have to Choose Between Being a Writer and Being a Mother?” for Electric Literature. It lasted exactly 2 issues before I got overwhelmed by my own perfectionism and stopped sending it out.
In March of this year, I planned to resurrect it, as an automatically generated newsletter with a feed from a tumblr. Then the pandemic happened.
But today, as I was reading Avni Doshi and Sophie Mackintosh in conversation about writing about motherhood, I realized that I need these stories. I crave them. And I know other people do, too. So I’m going to use the lowest-friction way to share them.
And that way is a category here at kimberlyhirsh.com devoted to them, with its own RSS feed that goes out to an automatically-generated newsletter. More and more, I think everything of mine is going to come from this one space, and I think it’s for the best.
Anyway, more on this project tomorrow.