Links
🔖🎨 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 Durham Officials Push for Affordable Housing in Southpoint Redevelopment.
Pleased with my city’s Planning Commission members.
🔖📝 Read When You Aren’t Sure Whether Your Writing Is ‘Important’ by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).
You just need to find one person who understands and appreciates what you’re trying to do and why, and then you look for the next person…
🔖📝 Read Kids Will Still Read Banned Books by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).
Chung doesn’t minimize the harm of book banning, but discusses how it’s impossible (and a bad idea) to try to control kids' reading.
🔖📝 Read How Can You Write About Pain Without Retraumatizing Yourself? by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).
🔖📝 Read On Pitching and Rejection by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).
pitching is not just about figuring out what editors or publications may be interested in—figuring out what you are most interested in is vital.
🔖 Read Lois Before Clark: In Defense of the Superhero Girlfriend.
Dreamed I decided to get obsessed with Lois Lane, decided this meant I should actually get obsessed with her, knew this essay by Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield was the place to start.
🔖📝 Read “I Hate the Idea of Healing” A Conversation with Maggie Smith
One thing that mothering has taught me is that I can’t be precious about where I work. When I work, I cannot demand uninterrupted space and time…If I got completely derailed every time somebody needed me, I’d never do anything.
🔖📚 Read Ladies of Leisure.
This one bummed me out. I think it sells Dept. of Speculation short.
🔖📚📝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.
🔖📚 In a Raft of New Books, Motherhood From (Almost) Every Angle by Parul Sehgal (The New York Times).
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.
🔖📚 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.