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)

On my last birthday, I set out a list of things that described who I wanted to be in the coming year. I’m pretty satisfied that those describe who I have been this year and who I will continue to be. So a couple of days ago, I asked myself again, Who will I be next?

So here’s who I want 39-year-old Kimberly to be:

I want to be someone who brings all of herself into play as often as possible. I want to pick up parts of me that I’ve let lie fallow for a while and nurture them again. As Austin Kleon says, “Don’t throw any of yourself away.” See: Me taking CS50x. Me remembering that OH RIGHT I LOVE MUSICAL THEATER.

I want to be someone who connects with her friends. I spend more time than is fair to anyone feeling like people don’t respond when I reach out, but when I take a look at myself I see that I, too, am prone to not responding when friends reach out to me. So I want to be a more responsive friend, to respond to my friend’s bids by turning towards them, not away from them. And also to remember that when people don’t respond to my bids, it’s not necessarily because they don’t want to be friends anymore.

Loftier:

I want to be a civic hacker.

I want to start a microbusiness (the business will be called Kimberly Hirsh; I’m currently considering two possible income-generating projects for the business called Kimberly Hirsh, and may end up pursuing both of them).

Not so lofty:

I’d really like to be a doctor of philosophy by my next birthday. 🤞

About 10 years ago, when I shared that I usually take at least a week to celebrate my birthday and consider it a season, my friend Dr. Alison Buck suggested that I refer to this season as Kimbertide, and so I do. I usually plan several different celebratory possibilities so that if friends can’t make it to one event, I still get to celebrate with them at another. (If you have questions about why a woman as grown as me still celebrates, you can email me and we’ll talk about it.)

This year, obviously, is a bit different. At first I was going to try to coordinate a number of virtual activities, some synchronous and some asynchronous, but instead I’m going a bit more free form. So instead, I’m providing a menu of possibilities for fun things you might do to celebrate. If you do any of these, I’d love it if you comment here and share a link!

1. Bake something. Bonus points if it’s cupcakes. I’m going to be making myself chocolate cake using this gluten-free vegan mix and vegan frosting that I discovered at Target. I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to have a gluten-free, corn-free, potato-free cake mix that I don’t have to create myself. And canned frosting! That’s something I never thought I would eat again. (If you know me, you know that I tend to be a cake and frosting snob, due to having a strong obsession with cupcakes when I was getting my MSLS. But more than a cake and frosting snob, I am a tired doctoral candidate looking for something easy to make as an activity with my kid, so. Mix and can.) I’d love to see what you bake!

2. Cosplay. I’m planning to spend tomorrow morning painting the belt buckle for my Kitty Pryde cosplay. You can go elaborate or casual. Whatever you want. Closet cosplay is always a good option. My favorite fandoms are anything Whedonverse, X-Men, and Disney. I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to wear tomorrow. But if you dress up, SEND ME PICS!

3. Have a Darkwave Dance Party. You can put on this Spotify playlist created by my friend, author Nathan Kotecki/DJ Twentieth Century Boy. Grab a little video and tell me where to find it! Or just do it and tell me you did, you don’t HAVE to make a video or anything. Alternately, you can attend the Zoom party [Facebook link] he’s hosting tomorrow night, which may be more just strange and a little less dark.

4. Watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m probably going to watch “Once More with Feeling” in the next couple of days, because I’m just feeling that vibe right now. (Hulu is probably the best place to stream BtVS.) Never seen it before? Need a starter episode? The double pilot is a solid introduction, but if you can’t commit to more than 45 minutes, you can jump in with the Season 1 finale “Prophecy Girl,” Season 2 Episode 7 “Lie to Me,” or Season 3 Episode 11 “Gingerbread”." If you want to have the full Kimberly Hirsh experience, start with Season 4 Episode 8, “Pangs.” (I’m pretty sure that was the first episode I ever saw. It’s possible it was an earlier one but I think what I’m recalling when I recall bits from the earlier episodes is probably what was in that night’s “Previously.”)

5. Watch The Little Mermaid. For my ninth and twenty-ninth birthdays, I had The Little Mermaid-themed parties. For my thirty-ninth, I might try to talk my kid into watching The Little Mermaid, The Little Mermaid II, and the prequel. (Well, maybe not the prequel.) I’ll be all IT’S MY BIRTHDAY! and he’ll be all I WILL WATCH ANYTHING YOU’LL LET ME!

6. Play a game. Video or board, your choice. I’m actually thinking about trying to pull together a Jackbox games remote play, maybe for Sunday, 7/19, around 2:30 pm ET. Let me know if you’re interested.

7. Make something. My go-tos are cross-stitch or crochet, but you make whatever sounds fun to you.

There you go, seven ways to celebrate my birthday/excuses to do something fun. Thanks for joining me!

I started reading Because Internet, by Gretchen McCulloch, this morning. I first became familiar with her work when I listened to her on an episode of the Fansplaining podcast. I’m not quite sure what pointed me to her Weird Internet Careers series of blog posts, but I have read and re-read these posts, working toward building a roadmap for myself to have a Weird Internet Career. Because it seems like of all the people in the world who could have a Weird Internet Career, I’m one of them.

In her bio for the book, McCulloch says she “lives in Montreal and on the Internet.” Me too, Gretchen. I mean, I live in Durham rather than Montreal, but also on the Internet. We are of a kind, Gretchen McCulloch and myself.

So. Go read those posts. If you’d rather read them all smooshed together in one Google Doc, you’ll get a link sent to you after you sign up for Gretchen McCulloch’s newsletter.

Do you know of any people with Weird Internet Careers? Here are my favorites, besides Gretchen McCulloch.

Kim Werker - Kim Werker started the online crochet magazine Crochet Me back in the early 2000s, which led to an offer to be editor of Interweave Crochet. She did that for a few years, and moved on to other work. She is a freelance editor who probably gets most of her clients from Internet interactions. She is a speaker and instructor. You can sign up for her latest class, Crochet for Challenging Times and get access to an ever-growing library of instructional videos and patterns, as well as access to a class-specific forum on her Community for Creative Adventurers, which she crowdfunds through both Patreon and the community software. Use code STUDENTLOVE40 to get 40% off the cost of Crochet for Challenging Times through the end of July. Now’s a great time to buy, since the cost of the course is going to increase in the future. Kim has a lot of other classes you can find on her website. too. And if you join her online community, you can jump in on video calls, which are a great source of delight and help to stave off loneliness in these super isolated times. Kim has also edited and written books; all of this has been fueled by stuff she does on the Internet.

Austin Kleon - Austin Kleon’s first book, Newspaper Blackout, was the result of him posting a newspaper blackout poem on his blog every day starting in 2005. He is one of the most generous people online and has four other books you can check out, videos of him that you can watch, and is currently experimenting with doing more online speaking.

Leonie Dawson - Leonie Dawson is a freaking rainbow hippie goddess, artist, writer, and multimillionaire. Her career started because she was a blogger; she created custom artwork for clients she met online, hosted women’s retreats for Internet friends to meet in person, and for many years offered a subscription community that included access to everything she made, including ecourses, ebooks, and meditations. Now she offers several ecourses and, like both Kim and Austin, is immensely generous.

So these are my favorite people with Weird Internet Careers and the thing is - NONE of them monetize their blogs through ads. While they might do some affiliate marketing, it’s unobtrusive and not their main source of income. I’m thinking if I want to have a Weird Internet Career, too, these are the models I should look to.

Who are your favorite Weird Internet Careerists?