Notes
🔖📚 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.
Want to read: A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle 📚
Want to read: How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and Other Parents) by Hettie Judah 📚
🔖📝📚 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.
Want to read: This Boy We Made by Taylor Harris 📚
🔖 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.
Want to read: Weird Girls by Caroline Hagood 📚
🔖📚📝 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.
Finished reading: Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill 📚
I want to write a long response to this one but don’t have time today. It’s less about art-making than I expected. It’s also excellent.
Look, I’d love to play in an improv jam but I can no longer do things that START at 10 pm so I guess I need to organize an improv jam for sleepy people or you know, parents of young children.
Finished reading: Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders 📚
I love this so much! Charlie Jane Anders says to invent imaginary friends to hang out with and write about them, which inspired me to write stories about characters friends and I invented a while back and now almost 10K words later I feel capable of writing fiction again. Highly recommend.
Finished reading: Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn 📚
I might love this even more than Legendborn, which I didn’t think was possible. Tracy Deonn goes broader and deeper and is my hero.
I cannot recommend Book Riot’s censorship coverage highly enough. They’re doing great work, with Kelly Jensen leading it. If you’re in the US, you can also get their e-book How to Fight Book Bans and Censorship for $2.99. It’s helping me cut through feeling helpless. 📚
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I do weird things like buying a Krang cosplay t-shirt or getting all 3 The Librarians movies on Amazon Prime. Tonight, I subscribed to the newsletter of every local theater company I could find. How will daytime Kimberly feel about this?