Writing

Sylvia Plath. Anne Sexton. Many other mother writers dead by their own actions. And now Allison Crews. I never knew Allison. But I was impressed with her writing and her activist work. I wrote about how my students responded to her piece When I Was Garbage in a Mothering in the Ivory Tower column here […]

A few years ago, I took the summer “off” to write. That is, I didn’t teach any classes. “Off” for a mother-writer means that you still have all the same child-and-family related duties (or more, as, after all, you aren’t “working”). So there I was, with a couple of months in front of me to […]

Everyone knows about the writerly obsession of checking your Amazon ranking on an hourly basis. Luckily, I don’t have to go to the trouble of doing that anymore — of actually opening up my browser and checking to see what my Amazon rank is — because a kind and enabling friend built me a Konfabulator […]

Oprah has a whole page of writers talking about balancing writing and motherhood. It’s a hobby of mine — seeing how other writing women somehow manage to product readable work between diaper changes, sandwich making, and carpooling. No majorly new insights here (was hoping someone had a magical tip guaranteed to make it all swing […]

More on writing frankly about one’s children: I always, always, always look forward to Catherine Newman’s weekly column about life with Birdy, her two-year-old daughter, and her five-year-old son Ben. Bringing Up Ben & Birdy is published every Monday on the commercial site ParentCenter and in my opinion it’s the very best feature that site […]

There’s been a lot of negative buzz online lately about Ayelet Waldman’s new column on Salon, which she recently started after giving up posting on her addictively readable parenting blog, Bad Mother. I have to admit that at times I’ve been surprised, even taken aback, by just how much Waldman reveals but it’s… interesting to […]

This story is more than a week old but I’ve still chosen to link it now because it’s of particular interest to women who write about mothering. The Guardian recently took British writers Ali Smith and Toby Litt to task for characterizing the work of many women writers as “dull, depressed and domestic” in their […]