Kimberly Hirsh

If you have access to it, watch The Simpsons, Season 1, episode 3, “Homer’s Odyssey.” This bit happens at around 12:50: Depressed due to losing his job, Homer decides to throw himself off a bridge. He ties a rope around a huge boulder, then ties the other end of the rope to his waist. When he goes to open the gate in the fence around the yard, struggling to carry the boulder, he finds the hinges squeak. He then interrupts his suicide attempt to get a can of oil and oil the gate’s hinges. This cracks me up because in the middle of a devastating act that he is carrying out in a ridiculous way, he stops to take care of this mundane problem.

Is he doing it because he doesn’t want to wake his family with the squeaking? Could be. The rationale is irrelevant. It’s the juxtaposition of the extreme and absurd with the quotidian that makes this moment work for me.

Just recorded a conference session. I’m really happy about the accessibility remote conferences provide but everything feels so formal. It’s like I can’t rely on charisma and humor to carry 90% of the presentation.

Watched @patrickrhone’s Micro Camp talk Want to write a book? You probably already have this am & it shifted a lot for me in terms of my own self-conception as a writer. Look out for a lot of small essay books coming from me in the near future.

🔖💬 Parents Are Not Okay:

Through these grinding 18 months, we’ve managed our kids’ lives as best we could while abandoning our own.

Shout-out to Kelly J. Baker for naming archivists and librarians first in the acknowledgements of her book, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930. (If you order through this link, I may receive a commission.)

there is no separation between mother and writer, nor can I tease apart the time I spend tending to my child from the time I spend thinking about my writing, or actually doing it.

Finding Literary Spaces Amid the Intensity of New Motherhood 🔖📚💬

🔖📚 Sara Fredman’s How Motherhood Helped Me Reject the ‘Father Tongue’ of Academia is both about writing the kind of thing I want to write and is itself the kind of thing I want to write.

Want to read: How to Write Qualitative Research by Marcus B. Weaver-Hightower 📚

Want to read: Thinking Inside the Box Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them by Adrienne Raphel 📚

Finished reading: Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan 📚