🔖📚 Read Maggie Nelson: Inflections Forever New by Ariel Lewiton (Guernica).

We’re all human beings with bodily needs living within a system. We don’t need to prove that we’re not a part of the fabric of the culture in order to want to change it.

🔖📚 Read Why All the Books About Motherhood? by Laura Elkin (The Paris Review).

Another bookmark I’ve been sitting on for years.

These new books recast motherhood not as the reactionary choice, the choice made because it’s what’s socially expected, but as something hard won, intellectually demanding, a form of creative labor. Not something that takes you away from your work but something that is now both frame and canvas for it.

🔖📚 Read We Need to Talk About Whiteness in Motherhood Memoirs by Nancy Reddy (Electric Literature).

I bookmarked this 4 years ago & am only reading it now. Reddy points out admitting you’re struggling carries a different risk for moms of Color.

🔖📝📚 Read The parent trap: can you be a good writer and a good parent? by Lara Feigel (The Guardian)

Feigel writes about motherly ambivalence.

🔖 Read Writer Moms: Can We Do Deep Work While the Kids are Home? by Sara Bates.

Before we do… the practical things we need to do in order to create space for deep work, we need to cultivate the belief that our creativity is worth all that trouble.

🔖📝📚 Read I left my baby to write this. How do artists balance creativity and the ache for their child? by Rhiannon Lucy Coslett (The Guardian).

Coslett has as many questions as answers and mentions a lot of books I’m keen to check out.

🔖 Read How Writing and Motherhood Coexist for Author Taylor Harris by Ravynn K. Stringfield (Shondaland).

Great interview! I need to go track down Harris’s work.

🔖 Read Rebecca Solnit on Women’s Work and the Myth of the Art Monster (Lithub).

I want to be an art monster like Grover: lovable and loving and imaginative.

🔖📚📝 Read The Mother, the Artist, and Me by Caroline Hagood (Elle).

This is a great essay about what can happen when we bring our kids into the work of art with us, when our kids become part of our creative community.

🔖 Read Should I learn coding as a second language? by Meghan O’Gieblyn (Wired).

the most celebrated historical revolutions (those initiated, that is, by humans) were the result of mass literacy combined with technological innovation.