“Have you ever felt pain in literally all of your joints at once?” I asked W. last night.

“No,” he said. “No, I never have.”

“Oh. That’s how I feel right now,” I told him.

On fibro pain days, the pain is most noticeable in my fingers and toes. (On thyroid/autoimmune pain days, it’s in my knees and ankles.) There are 30 joints in each of my feet. There are 27 in each of my hands. (If you have more or fewer than 10 fingers or toes, you have a different number of joints.) I can feel each one a little bit as I move. As I type. As I walk. As I wiggle my toes. The pain isn’t intense, but it is pretty much constant. It disrupts my day.

I often don’t tell people how I’m feeling, physically, because I’ve gotten to the point where it’s a baseline of not great (but, like, kind of okay? tolerable, we’ll say) and I just assume they’re tired of hearing me enumerate the ways I feel not good. But I thought it might be useful to get specific, today.

So today, yes. I feel all the joints in my fingers and toes creaking. My knees, elbows, shoulders, same thing to a lesser extent. I can feel all of my cervical vertebrae stacking on top of each other. I have a headache mostly concentrated over my left eye. It’s like a migraine, but I think it might not be a migraine. All of this is, I believe, because my muscles just sit in a constant state of tension, without my having much control over it.

Please don’t suggest your favorite remedy: I have a plan of action and am working on it. My doctor gave me some advice and I’m working through The FibroManual: A Complete Fibromyalgia Treatment Guide for You-and Your Doctor.

In other news and kind of related, I got some really good work done on my dissertation yesterday, tackling a problem that I’ve been struggling with for about two months. I think a couple of shifts in my working process are responsible for this:

I’ve given myself permission to work in bed. All the sleep hygiene people will tell you that you should only use your bed for sleeping and sex. That’s all well and good, but I think that advice is for people who aren’t dealing with chronic pain. Esmé Weijun Wang has a bed in her home office, which is brilliant, but I’m not about to buy an extra bed. (The home office doesn’t have room for it anyway.) Leonie Dawson was put on bedrest because of hypermobility problems and stayed productive in bed:

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Anyone else love working from bed?⁣ 🛌 ⁣ I just had a wildly productive work session in bed.⁣ ⁣ 🧠 Brainstormed a brand new course 💡 Networked with my mastermind 🗯 Told my accountability partner the HUGE new business and money insights I'm getting ✏️ Did some illustration work ⁣ Did you Get Shit Done today too?⁣ ⁣ #getshitdone #money #moneymaker #mastermind #ecourse #illustration #productivity #goals

A post shared by Leonie Dawson (@leonie_dawson) on Jul 21, 2020 at 4:46pm PDT

I did some reading of journal articles in bed the other day and it was brilliant.

I’m doing my thinking in a different space than I do my research and writing. I’ve been thinking while lying on a hammock, looking up at green leaves and blue sky. If you can get into nature for your thinking, I highly recommend it. But even if it’s just that you move from one chair to a different chair, I think that might work. Having my laptop in front of me, I feel like I need to be producing. But thinking time requires a different mindset. Lying on the hammock was more productive than many of the hours in front of my computer have been.

Next steps: So my next step is to embrace this mindset. I’m going to keep a backrest pillow and a lapdesk under my bed. At the end of my work time, I’m going to shut down my laptop, put it in my backpack, and carry it up to my bedroom so that if I’m struck with inspiration at 3 in the morning I don’t have to go downstairs to get to work. I asked for The Book Seat and got it for my birthday, so even when my arms are weak or achey, I can read.

I’m feeling really optimistic about the effect this set up will have on my productivity. We’ll see.

via GIPHY

In this piece that is mostly a review of Jacqueline Rose’s book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, Parul Sehgal offers more titles to add to the motherhood reading list.

“Mothers “are not in flight from the anguish of what it means to be human,” Rose writes. She quotes Julia Kristeva: “To be a mother, to give birth, is to welcome a foreigner, which makes mothering simply ‘the most intense form of contact with the strangeness of the one close to us and of ourselves.’”

Isn’t it pretty to think so? 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.

Sehgal names some of these walls: pay gaps and maternal health outcomes, both hinging on race. She points out:

…so many of these books (almost all of them are by white, middle-class women) seem wary of, if not outright disinterested in, more deeply engaging with how race and class inflect the experience of motherhood.

The books listed in this article and in Elkin’s are a beginning. As a canon, the list has glaring gaps, most noticeably around race and queerness. The following articles seek to fill those gaps, and I’ll be discussing them in depth in the coming days:

• Why Are We Only Talking About ‘Mom Books’ by White Women? by Angela Garbes for The Cut
• We Need to Talk About Whiteness in Motherhood Memoirs by Nancy Reddy for Electric Literature
• As A Queer Woman, I Can’t Afford To Be Ambivalent About Motherhood by Katie Heaney for Buzzfeed

I’ve been sitting on Lauren Elkin’s article asking “Why all the books about motherhood? for a year and a half and only read it fully for the first time today. It offers an immense reading list of books related to motherhood. Many of them are written by mothers, and so I think by default curating their writing counts as curating stories of creative mothers.

Elkin quotes Jenny Offill in an interview with Vogue:

“Early on, I took my colicky baby to one of those new-mothers’ groups. I wasn’t sure how to connect with them, but I desperately wanted to. But the affect seemed odd. The new mothers seemed to be talking in these falsely bright voices; all the anecdotes were mild ones of “the time she lost her pacifier on the bus” variety. No one seemed to feel like a bomb had gone off in their lives, and this made me feel very, very alone. Gaslighted, almost. Why weren’t we talking more about the complexity of this new experience?”

This resonates immensely with my new mom group experience. I would go. I would not know what to talk about. Our babies would be cute. I would feel awkward. I would leave knowing it was good that I got out of the house, but only feeling a little less lonely. I didn’t know how to reach out. Maybe the moms in these books will reach me.

Elkin says:

The new books on motherhood are a countercanon. They read against the literary canon with its lack of interest in the interior lives of mothers, against the shelves of “this is how you do it” books, and against the creeping hegemony of social-media motherhood.

I welcome this countercanon.

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