Kimberly Hirsh

🔖📚📝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.

🔖📚 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 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 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.