Kimberly Hirsh

🔖📚 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 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 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.

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.

🔖📚📝 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.

Want to read: Weird Girls by Caroline Hagood 📚

🔖 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.

🔖 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.

Want to read: This Boy We Made by Taylor Harris 📚

🔖📝📚 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: How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and Other Parents) by Hettie Judah 📚

Want to read: A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle 📚

🔖 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.

🔖📝📚 Read The parent trap: can you be a good writer and a good parent? by Lara Feigel (The Guardian)

Feigel writes about motherly ambivalence.

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.

I just want to fight censorship 📚 and make theatre 🎭.

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. 📚

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.

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?

Yo Internet, why does the Voyager theme tug at my heartstrings so? I barely remember the show but it always gets me misty.

📺💬🖖🏻 “I can’t say being equal parts irritating and endearing isn’t slightly familiar.” Picard 3x06, The Bounty. IT ME.

🖖🏻 Brent Spiner is my hero.

🔖 Read Should I learn coding as a second language? by Meghan O’Gieblyn (Wired).

the most celebrated historical revolutions (those initiated, that is, by humans) were the result of mass literacy combined with technological innovation.

🔖 Read

blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/03/01/moving-slowly-and-fixing-things-we-should-not-rush-headlong-into-using-generative-ai-in-classrooms/ blogs.lse.ac.uk

Read: blogs.lse.ac.uk