Kimberly Hirsh

Hello Internet! I’m having a vampire night due to migraine. I’m going to get up and take my morning medicine so I can wait an hour and then have coffee, food, and pain meds.

I’m really enjoying reading a lot.

How are you?

Want to read: Strange and Secret Peoples by Carole G. Silver 📚

🔖📚 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.

🔖📚 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 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.

🔖📚 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 Art or Babies.

you can make your art without being an art monster: You can do it as… an art mother.

🍿 Want to watch: Tully.

📺 Want to watch:

• SMILF
• Catastrophe
• Motherland
• The Letdown
• Workin’ Moms

🔖📚 Read The books that help define motherhood – for mums everywhere to read

Is it ever possible to reclaim yourself without endangering your child?

I don’t know. Because for me it’s been more about reconstructing myself rather than reclaiming myself.

🔖📚📝Read Is Parenthood the Enemy of Creative Work? by Kim Brooks (The Cut)

That’s one of the major things parenting is teaching me, the balance between letting go in writing and practicing craft, the balance between being ferocious with my imagination and rigorous in my practice. Shape and chaos. Learning to shape chaos.

🔖📚 Read Ladies of Leisure.

This one bummed me out. I think it sells Dept. of Speculation short.

Finished reading: A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow 📚

This one took me a little while to get into but once I was in, I was all in. Super fun while also dealing with all the ways our stories can be garbage. Highly recommend.

Want to read: The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler 📚

Want to read: The Classic Fairy Tales (Norton Critical Editions) by 📚

🔖 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.