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).

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.

I’ve been looking for ways to read more books and talk to more people about them, so when the Book Riot piece, Will You Join The Sealey Challenge? came across my radar, it made sense to answer YES.

During the month of August, participants read a poetry chapbook or full-length collection a day for 31 days while sharing their reads on social media using the hashtag #TheSealeyChallenge, named after poet Nicole Sealey and coined by Dante Micheaux during its first year.

Here are several links where you can learn more about the challenge and find suggestions of what to read:

• Nicole Sealey: Why I Read a Poetry Book Every Day For a Month (Bookmarks)
• The Sealey Challenge: An Expansive Way of Reading Poetry (Lithub)
• 31 Poets Recommend 31 Poetry Books to Read Every Day in August (Electric Literature)
• Every Poem Is a Love Poem to Something: An Interview with Nicole Sealey (The Paris Review)
• On the value of reading poetry together—and apart—in the current moment. (Lithub)

I myself will be reading a combination of library ebooks selected from recommendations linked in the Book Riot piece, e-chaps from Sundress Publications, and whatever I’ve got lying around the house. So you can expect that in addition to modern new-to-me poets, there will be some children’s collections of e. e. cummings and Emily Dickinson, one day of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and maybe even a YA verse novel or two.

Let me know if you decide to join in!

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.

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.

Posting this list of books here in case others might find it useful. It will probably grow with time.

• ‘Making it’ as a contract researcher : a pragmatic look at precarious work - Nerida Spina, Jess Harris, Simon Bailey, Mhorag Goff
• Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers - Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly and Thomas J. Tobin
• The Freelance Academic: Transform Your Creative Life and Career - Katie Rose Guest Pryal
• Succeeding Outside The Academy: Career Paths beyond the Humanities, Social Sciences, and STEM - Edited by Joseph Fruscione and Kelly J. Baker

Last updated: August 1, 2020.

By far, my most visited blog post ever is my Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow and honestly, I return to it myself fairly often. I sent it to my EdCamp friend Allison Rae Redden when she was writing her first critical lit review in grad school. I also tweeted a couple more advanced lit review tips at her, and I wanted to gather those here. So here goes!

Make a concept map before you outline. If you haven’t concept mapped before outlining, go back and do that. (I scoffed at my prof who suggested this. I thought I was so good at lit reviews I didn’t need it. I was wrong.) I like to use bubbl.us, which I learned about from Dr. Summer Pennell.

Synthesize. It’s tempting and easy to just summarize studies, but putting them in conversation with each other is much better. Synthesizing the results of multiple studies is a good way to bring them together. Focus on grouping them by findings and briefly mention context and methods as you introduce each article.

Explicitly articulate critiques of studies. Identify gaps and point them out. I usually say something like ”It’s worth noting that none of these studies address…" or similar. I try to be descriptive rather than speculative - noting what’s missing - without directly pointing to how a specific study could be improved, but that’s just me.

If you simultaneously synthesize instead of summarize AND provide a strong description of each study’s context, methods, and results, you’ll be way ahead of most people.

I hope in the future to provide more specific examples for these tips like I did in my earlier post, but I decided it was more important to go ahead and get this out in the world than to wait until I had perfected it.

Cross-posted to: Twitter

What if we considered our creative time to be meditation time? Repetitive crafts like knitting, crochet, and cross-stitch can have that effect. (The scholar-librarian in me wants to track down a reference/link for this. The human in me is granting me a pass.) What if this wasn’t an indulgence, but a matter of health? What if it were like a dietary supplement or a daily medication?

I think the circumstances of my learning crochet help me think this way. I bought my first hook, yarn, and pamphlet while I was stopped at Wal-Mart to grab supplies to help with a migraine that was debilitating enough I had gone home from student teaching because of it. I took them back to my boyfriend’s house (I don’t think he was there, but I preferred his house to mine, always. Now he’s my husband and we have just one house between us) and in addition to my usual migraine remedies, I applied crochet. I think having it to focus on helped me ignore the pain, almost. So I really do think of crochet as an OTC migraine remedy.

If you aren’t motivated by the capitalist notion that your productivity is the highest good (I am, though I’m trying to break myself of it), what if you think of your creative time like food, exercise, or a nap? Something that, if you grant yourself the time to do it, will leave you renewed, with fresh vigor to apply to your other tasks?

This post is lightly adapted from a post in Kim Werker’s Community of Creative Adventurers. If you need a community to support your creative adventures, please come join us! You can join for free. We’ve got a forum and weekly Zoom hangouts. And if you choose to be a patron and support Kim’s work, you get access to her amazing classes and extra forums.

I think a lot about dreams. Following them. Achieving them. Making new ones.

The first dream I remember - one that felt aligned with my life purpose - was to be a big sister. I achieved that at age 4 1/2.

There was a very long time when my dream alternated between being a celebrated science fiction and fantasy novelist and being a Broadway star. I think that dream was, I don’t know, from maybe ages 8 to 18?

I toyed briefly with a screenwriter dream when I was in college, and then after that I kind of didn’t have a dream for a while. After a few years of teaching, being a librarian became my dream. And when I went to school to achieve that dream, I found a new dream: working for LEARN NC full-time, instead of in my position at the time as a graduate assistant. I spent a year working as a school librarian and then achieved the dream of getting a full-time gig at LEARN NC. I had that job for two years before it became clear that our supporting department’s priorities were changing and the organization would not be supported in the coming years, so I left for what I thought was maybe a dream, but was definitely an interest, getting my doctorate.

Getting my PhD wasn’t actually a dream and still isn’t, but it does remain an important interest, and one that I intend to achieve by May. But I still HAD a dream once I started on that one and confirmed it was more interest than dream, and that was to be a mom.

Of all the dreams I’ve achieved, that one was the hardest to accomplish. But I did it, and it has been every bit as fulfilling and exhausting as you might imagine.

So for 3+ years, I’ve been flailing a bit for a new dream. Was it to swim in a mermaid tail? Or with manatees? No. Those were more interests than dreams. (The difference between an interest and a dream in my mind/experience is the level of visceral desire involved. If you think in your head, “Wow, that’d be cool! I hope I get to do that!” it’s an interest. If you feel in your gut, “That would fundamentally change who I am and how I define myself in a way that I really want to be changed,” that’s a dream.)

But today I found it. I was reading Derek Sivers’s description of his book Hell Yeah or No in which he writes that after selling the business CD Baby and realizing that rather than just building a business again he could make a real change in his life,

For the next ten years, I wrote for hours a day in my private journal, asking myself questions and answering them. Then often taking experimental and radical actions based on these thoughts.

The thoughts and experiences that seemed useful to others, I’d share on my website, which are now collected here in this book for you.

I read that and I thought to myself, “I want to write useful things.”

Then I thought about the word “useful” for a moment.

I decided no, that’s not it.

I want to write helpful things.

It might seem like a small distinction, but to me, if something is useful, its value is defined purely by utility. What can you do with this information? Something that is helpful might be useful. But its value might be defined by something else. It might be defined by how it makes you feel: less alone, understood, moved. That’s a little different than useful.

Writing these things, of course, isn’t enough if they just stay with me. Rather, I want to write them, but I also want to share them.

So that’s the dream.

I want to write and share helpful things.

Let’s get started.

I binged the Netflix Babysitters Club series last weekend. Growing up, I was not a Babysitters Club obsessive like many of my peers. They were one of the many series on offer that I enjoyed. The main thing about them that thrilled me was that, unlike many of the other books I read, they were books that other kids had also read and would talk to me about.

So. Not obsessive. But I’m still filled with nostalgia for them. And, unlike many of my peers seemed to do, I read them mostly in order, so the Netflix series sticking with the order for the first few episodes made me really happy. I told W. the other day that much as women older than us did with Sex and the City, many girls my age strongly identified with a particular BSC character. (In case you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, the main characters on SitC were Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda, and you could buy lots of merch that proclaimed things like “I’m a Samantha.” In case you’re curious, I’m a Charlotte with aspirations of being a Carrie.) Lucy Aniello, director of the Netflix BSC series, describes herself as “a Kristy with a Stacey rising” (and in case you aren’t familiar with that, it’s a reference to astrology. I’m a hard Mallory with some Kristy tendencies, who wished to be Claudia but was too good at school and bad at art to come close. (I did wear coordinated-but-mismatched earrings and hide candy all over my bedroom, though.)

I loved the show. Its tone is amazingly perfect. The performances are great. I would like Alicia Silverstone to be my co-parent, please. All of the things done to update it are beautiful and none of them feel weird. I don’t have a lot to say about the show itself besides that.

What really hit me this time around was Stacey. When I read the books, I was relatively poor, unfashionable (though not without style), and the only big city I had ever been to was Miami. Stacey was so far out of my reach. (By the way, the costume designs on the new show perfectly evoke the original characters; of all of them, though, Stacey’s outfits look the most like I think Stacey’s outfits should.) I was sickly, catching every virus that came my way and maxing out my 10 allowed absences before I started being considered truant, but I wasn’t ill.

Life is different now. Now I’m diagnosed with four chronic illnesses (two mental), with another one undiagnosed but likely. While illness doesn’t define me, it strongly shapes my experiences and decisions. And watching Stacey deal with that moved me so thoroughly. Stacey’s not wanting anyone to know about her diabetes, because then she won’t be a person anymore, she’ll be a sick person. Fearing the consequences. And, the point that actually brought me close to tears: after Stacey goes into insulin shock on the job, her having to face a room full of clients (along with her fellow BSC members, blessedly) and listen to them say things like “Do I even want her watching my kids if something like this could happen again?” (I’m paraphrasing here.) Y’all, the impact of chronic illness on work and hireability is real, and to see it in microcosm for a twelve-year-old was every bit as affecting as seeing it for an adult would be, if not moreso.

Anyway. That was a new perspective. A part of me wants to go read the books again and pay close attention to how my feelings about Stacey are different now.

So. I didn’t have a lot of insight to offer on the series, just my personal response, but if you want to read more about it, here are a bunch of interesting and relevant articles:

• ‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ Is Back: Help Yourself to the Fridge (New York Times)
• The Baby-Sitters Club Taught Me Everything I Needed to Know About Literary Fiction (New York Times)
• ‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ Defies and Exceeds Expectations (New York Times)
• How The Baby-Sitters Club raised a generation (Vox)
• ‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ Gives Us Intersectional Feminism Without the Angst (Gen)
• Why THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB Netflix Series is Even Better Than the Books (Book Riot)