Profiles

A lot of parenting, I think (and a lot of being a child, too), can benefit from a sort of expansive boredom—an invitation to seeing. Call it parental loafing, if…

We are always parenting on this fine line between giving kids enough structure and letting them make their own decisions. Being exposed to new methods of parenting changed the way…

I’m concerned with two risks for my novels. The first is that people will dislike the story and criticize my writing. I’m in for this risk; I’ll take that on.…

Society tells us: Don’t complain too much, mom. If you do, you’ll look like you don’t love your children. You sound like you don’t understand how privileged you are to…

I think my comedic voice is a variation on the commentary that’s always running in my head. When I started writing and doing standup, the challenge was to take all…

To speak about family trauma is not enough. My job as a memoirist was to do more than simply dump a lot of anguish in the reader’s lap; my job…

I also believe motherhood is an inherently creative activity that lends itself to creative output. Mothers are always improvising. Finding ways to meet the needs of one or multiple children…

Some days you lean in toward your family while other days the writing pulls extra weight. And there are deadline weeks when I know my magazine work won’t leave me…

For me, writing has allowed me to unpack some of the assumptions I made about who I was and what children are supposed to be and how this all works.…

My very first poems wanted nothing more than to rub my father’s face in the truth of his shortcomings, and so that’s what they did. I wrote piece after brutal…

I’m not sure how poetry influences my parenting, but parenting has certainly influenced my poetry. Just recently—after a reading—a woman came up to me and said: “That was the most…