Essays

The kids are fighting again: “She keeps goin’ in my room!” “He hitted me!” “She push-ted me first!” “Mama!” “Mama!” I wipe a Clorox-coated rag across the blue paint-splattered pattern…

I write between the cracks of my life, the narrow space I have left between potty training and ballet practice, laundry loads and dinner on the table by six. Because…

This is how I keep from sneaking wine on a school day: alone in the empty, silent house, I write, write, write. The party’s in my head: protagonists in exotic…

The bough breaks? The baby falls? Why do we sing such things to our infants? It strikes me as downright sadistic to gaze into my baby’s eyes and sing a…

At the library, tummy flat on the bright patchwork carpet, my seven month old son mouthed a board book called Baby Faces. When I could manage to get it away…

When my older son was 2 1/2 and my daughter a mere 6 months, a pigeon became caught in my cat’s self-feeder. It had been trying to eat her food,…

Barbara Delinsky does not need me. She’s had seventeen New York Times bestsellers, including her most recent novel, Family Tree, which just cracked the list at number twelve. It’s her…

Here it is, another Sunday night, another week gone, and I haven’t written one word worth keeping. My characters refuse to communicate anything needed for this story to progress. It’s…

In June, just weeks after we found out I was pregnant, a purple finch built a nest on the fuse box outside our back door. The nest was small and…

When I discovered I was pregnant, I was knee-deep in research for a book on an adventure-loving woman who, 300 years ago, at the age of 52, sailed to South…

In “This Is Where You Write,” Jennifer Ruden writes about her relationship with her desk, “a Mack truck of a desk with a marble slab on the top, filing cabinets,…