Writer, with Kids: Kate Hopper

Posted on by Cari — 4 Comments ↓

KHopper-UYW-Headshot1[1]

Kate Hopper’s first book, Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers, has just been released from Viva Editions. Kate teaches online and at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, where she lives with her family. She blogs at www.motherhoodandwords.com.

One morning a few months ago, my older daughter woke up on the wrong side of the bed. She’s not really a morning person and she’s eight, so morning time often involves high drama at our house. But this was a particularly challenging morning—Stella’s pants were too tight; or we didn’t have any eggs left; or Zoë, her younger sister, who is always naked, sat too close to her on the couch. I can’t remember exactly what precipitated Stella’s flinging of her body onto the dining room floor with whining laments, but I was clearly not responding the way she wanted—I could not restart the day for her on a brighter note. Finally, she looked up at me and wailed, “Mom, you don’t even love me!”

I knelt down, took her shoulders in my hands, and said in my most reassuring mother’s voice, “Honey, you know that’s not true. I love you and Zoë more than anything in the whole world.”

Stella narrowed her eyes. “Do you love us,” she said, “more than your book?”

Ouch!

I must admit that at the time I was neck deep in copyedits for my book, and I’d been spending a lot of time either at the coffee shop or in my tiny office with red pen in hand. I was waking up at 5 to try to get an hour of editing in before my girls got up, before the lunch-making ritual, before wrangling Zoe into some clothes, and getting myself showered and off to my day job. Put plainly: I’d been working a lot.

That morning, I hugged Stella and said, “Of course I love you more than my book—If I had to choose, of course I’d choose you girls.” I squeezed her tight, and then I added, “But I’m glad I don’t have to choose.”

She seemed satisfied with that, and I was able to coax her off the floor.

When I thought about this after the fact, I realized that when I said I was glad I didn’t have to choose between my daughters and my writing, I meant in a life or death kind of way. Like a bad joke—my writing is in one boat, my girls in the other and I can only save one boat from going down. My daughters would clearly win that contest.

But I also realized that I regularly—weekly, daily—make a choice between my family and my writing. Some Sunday mornings, I decide to skip the coffee shop and take the girls to the park. But more often, I pack up my lap top, leave the girls at home with my husband, Donny, and head out the door even though I know they’d rather have me stay home with them.

This is a choice I’ve made since they were little. When Stella was 16 months old, we enrolled her in a Montessori preschool 8:30-3:30 three days a week. At the time, I was finishing my MFA and I needed to write and teach. When I finished my MFA program, however, she stayed in preschool three days a week.

Over the next few years, I spent those mornings writing. Later, I added teaching and some freelance work and some stints at part-time jobs into the mix, but writing was always my priority during my work time. The challenge always being to make enough money through my odd jobs to cover childcare (and a portion of household bills) so I could continue to write.

When Zoë turned 16 months old, she joined Stella at the preschool. Stella is, as I said, now 8, and Zoë is four, and both girls have only known me as is a working writer. The truth is I can’t imagine motherhood without writing or writing without motherhood. Perhaps this is because I believe I really became a writer when I became a mother.

Before Stella was born, I didn’t actually write much. Well, I wrote enough to get into an MFA program—and I did my assignments for my classes. But I spent a great deal of time procrastinating, waiting for inspiration and generally wasting time.

But motherhood—and the need I felt to reflect on the larger issues that came up in my life as a result of me becoming a mother (faith, marriage, writing itself)—made me into the writer I am today. And now, if I have two hours, I write for two hours. I no longer have time to wait for the muse to shine her light on me (she’s incredibly unreliable anyway).

Sometimes it’s a tricky balance. What I always tell my students is that if you want to write, you need to make it a priority in your life. It doesn’t need to be number one on your list, but it needs to be on your list. I’m not someone who believes you need to write every day to be a writer. That’s just not realistic for many of us. But you need to figure out what is realistic. Maybe it’s an hour or two on a Friday morning. Maybe it’s Sunday afternoon at your local wine bar. (Yes!) You need to figure out what works for you, and then communicate with your family and partner about how important it is for you to write.

But it does take some sacrifice. You have to make choices, as I now realize I have done. But even though I sometimes choose my writing over my children (in that non-life-threatening way only, of course), I hope that my daughters understand how important writing is in my life—and grow to someday respect my work as a writer.

I love what novelist Julie Schumacher said when I interviewed her a couple of years ago. She said, “I think my kids understand what are for me the two enormous truths of this parenting/writing experience: 1) I love my children wildly, unreservedly, and 2) I can’t live my life without writing things down.”

She couldn’t have said it better.

(Adapted from a presentation I gave on the panel “Barefoot, Pregnant and at the Writers Desk” at the 2012 AWP conference.)

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“Nobody loves to research more than Cari.”

Posted on by Cari — 4 Comments ↓

My neighbor said that a few weeks ago, in response to the infodump I’d just delivered about keeping backyard chickens. I hadn’t thought of myself that way, but when he said it, it felt true. I do love to research. Every new interest sends me straight to the library web site where I’ll put way more books on hold than I’d ever have time to read.

It’s no different with the novels. A few of the books I read as I was working on The Revolution of Every Day: War in the Neighborhood, Resistance, Suffer the Children, Dark Remedy, and The Revolution of Everyday Life, from which the epigraph* is drawn. And then, of course, there were the hours of digging around on the internet, turning up firsthand accounts of squat evictions in the East Village and in Amsterdam, newspaper articles and listserv posts. I researched as I wrote and revised, weaving the facts in with the narrative.

For the new book (no longer known as Cold Black Stars because that doesn’t fit it anymore. For now let’s just call it the Portland novel), I’ve been reading up on farming. Farming memoirs (It’s a Long Road to a Tomato, The Dirty Life, The Seasons on Henry’s Farm), and of course lots of Wendell Berry. But farming? You need to get your hands dirty, too.

I contacted a farmer who I’d taken a class with a couple years ago and asked if I could come work with them (in whatever capacity would actually be helpful rather than slowing them down) and ask them questions, and she kindly said yes. They needed me to come on a Wednesday, because that was the slowest day in their schedule. It seemed like it was working out perfectly. I would drop Kiddo off at school, arrange for the girlchild to be at daycare (she usually goes on Tuesdays and Thursdays), and off I would drive to work on the farm and do my research. I was so excited.

But. (Yeah. You heard that but coming, right?) But turns out there wasn’t room for the girl at the daycare on Wednesdays. There had been flexibility in the past and I just assumed that flexibility would continue. So that takes care of that assumption. I can’t leave my kid with just anyone and drive a half hour out of town and be away for hours. That’s way outside of my comfort zone. It would have to be her daycare provider or Billy or nothing. Billy doesn’t have a desk job. He’s got patients in pain who count on him showing up. So nothing, then. I missed the early spring window. The farm is now too busy for me to come on any day of the week. Cue sighing violins, right? I know. Let this be my biggest problem.

The farmer has agreed to answer questions sent in a Word doc, and I’ve done that. And the farmer we buy our meat from is doing the same, and we’ll be heading down there to visit once the mud dries up. All great, all helpful. But the only dirt under my nails comes from my own garden. Nose still firmly planted in books. I can admit to being disappointed without sounding like a petulant brat, right? Though I do feel a little bit like that, stamping my feet, not able to research the way I want to.

Our overgrown backyard. The closest I'm getting to a farm for a while...

Our overgrown backyard. The closest I'm getting to a farm for a while...

*“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths.”

—Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

Posted in parenting, writing

Writer, with Kids: Brad Green

Posted on by Cari — 11 Comments ↓

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Brad Green, author of: mostly unrequited hope

Age of kids: 1, 4, 10

What is lost:

No time most of all. There’s also no space. Everything is crowded as a room full of elbows, a hallway of mother-in-laws. Reach out a hand and there’s a wall or a task or some child’s warm face demanding a pat. Something must always be done. Homeschool, diapers changed, bills paid, a dish that needs a scrape, fourteen balloons having popped now demand their shattered skins gathered up, the trash, of course, don’t forget that, and where the little one drew on the wall, please clean there, dust too, laundry as well, and the TV’s messed up, please check that and help me upload these pictures to Facebook, a faucet’s leaking too, the furnace appears congested, some squeak or squall, perhaps a burning, plus there’s something foul in the east corner, a mouse got in or worse, another skunk—we’re out of oranges too, get the organic kind as the store brand tends to be bitter, or perhaps the potatoes have sprouted roots in the bag or the tub of butter is suddenly lacking, the dog’s eaten all her food, the baby is hungry, or my (she’s always mine when being difficult) daughter will only eat ketchup or cupcakes today and all afternoon she cried, look at her, she’s regressed, the baby has a rash, the diapers are bad, the diapers are sick with chemicals, look what they’ve done to between her legs, my god the rash! so let’s try cloth, or wet napkins, or the off-brand, the softer kind, the sensitive-skin ones, the package with the pleasant picture, you know, the fluffy clouds as those can’t possibly burn, or the flowers perhaps, which would be the best? Look at my hair! Look at my hair! It’s a mess. I can’t do this. The cat howls. The dog barks. A baby cries. What are you writing? Can’t you spend a moment paying attention to us? Can you get a glass of water? Can you be part of this? Press and the heart grows smaller, self-obsessed, the way a folded sheet can no longer spread easily beyond its shape, having come to love the crease. There’s a leak in the water line from where the ground clenched with ice. The car’s dirty, a tire looks low, the snow broke another branch on the old oak. There’s two novels to write that both need a horizon for thought to roam, some quiet at least, an hour of gentle breath. There’s an essay, a post for a blog long ignored, submissions to be read, feedback to offer, interviews to be done, days and day to labor through. There are things to be done. Everywhere I’m crowded and I have no time, no time most of all.

What is learned:

That a baby’s foot clenches in the shoe, that birth is a wet affair, that the cord is a deep moon blue unlike any color you’ll encounter elsewhere. You learn to crave sleep and to do without. You learn that people assume it’s ok to pick up your child, that it’s expected that she be passed around. You learn that showers by yourself are a rarity, that sex is a hushed, panting affair done with constant worry that the baby will rise to stare at you through the crib mesh as you labor to be human. You learn that corn syrup is everywhere, in everything and you worry. You worry that you won’t learn enough, that you won’t be able to meet her needs, that you won’t know the answer later, that she’ll hate you because you’re frail, or fat, or self-obsessed. You learn that a baby’s cheek against your chest is a singular warmth. You learn that language is a game and arbitrary. You learn that your concerns pale. You learn that your work comes second, often third, and occasionally it won’t come at all. You learn to write in smaller snippets of time and with your thumbs on a phone. You do whatever is necessary. Or you don’t. Sometimes you give up, sometimes you snap and bark because a sentence was interrupted. Sometimes you wonder what it would be like if you were alone. But then you remember. You recall the way she waddles and clutches your leg. You recall her belly laugh, her questions, the wonder that takes her face when you fly her through the air. One day she’ll believe you invented the grilled cheese sandwich and another she won’t. Nothing waxes without a wane. What you learn most of all though is that children enrich and bring depth to what’s likely an otherwise superficial plane. They help to deepen your fiction with concerns that matter. But sometimes you’ll stand in the light of the refrigerator stunned that you’ve done this thing, made this person. Sometimes you’ll stand at the square of the black window in the kitchen and stare out into the night. Your breath will fur whitely on the glass. You’ll watch that white bloom rise and fade, rise and fade, content that you’ve done something so ordinary it’s a miracle. But then you worry that she’s not breathing and creep over to the crib or to the bed, concern lodged in your throat. You hold your wrist over her open, sleeping mouth. She’s so small. Her limbs pale in the moonlight. The little toes, the hand balled to a soft fist, those soft fingernails. Panic seizes you. The tops of your ears warm with fast blood. You think she’s blue, that she’s been tangled in the blanket, that she simply stopped working, that she’s been taken away because you’re not good enough. But then she senses you and stirs. Her chest rises. Your hand finds her head, strokes the fuzzy hair there and you watch her chest fall. And that’s all you needed, really. That’s what gives you hope. The warm blush of her breath reaches you.

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Posted in Writer with kids

My knitting mojo is back, sort of. It isn’t ready to commit yet.

Posted on by Cari — 9 Comments ↓

It might stay. It might take off again. It just wants to be friends, really. And while it’s here, we can bang out a few pairs of socks. You know, that might be cool. But nothing too heavy. No sweaters, no scarves. For fuck’s sake, don’t even think about breaking out that Habu jacket kit. Nice and easy. We’re just having fun here, just going to see what happens, yeah?

sock yarn

The sock yarn has started to accumulate on the bookshelf closest to my standing desk. That is, right at eye level as I work. I may have even completed a few pairs of socks while watching the kids on the playground after school every day. If I talk about it too much, the will to knit might disappear again. So let’s just keep between us, okay?

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Writer, with Kids: Yannick Murphy

Posted on by Cari — 1 Comment ↓

yannick
Yannick Murphy, author of:
Novels: The Call; Signed, Mata Hari; Here They Come; The Sea of Trees
Short story collections: Stories in Another Language, In a Bear’s Eye
Children’s books: Ahwoooooooo!, Baby Polar, The Cold Water Witch

Age of kids: 15 (omg!), 13, and soon to be 10.

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

My writing schedule changed when I met my husband, a racehorse veterinarian who had to wake up at 4:40 a.m. every morning to get to the racetrack on time and treat the horses. Because he went to bed early, I started going to bed early. Before that I liked to write at night, usually from 8-11 p.m. When we had children, I would sit down with just a cup of tea and write after my husband left the house and while the kids were still sleeping. When the kids woke up around 6:30, I would cook breakfast and we would eat together. I often had to remind my husband to be quiet in the morning when he’d get ready to go off to work, I was always on tenterhooks that a flushing of the toilet, or an early morning throat-clearing, or a squeak from his leather boot sole would wake them up too early and I wouldn’t get in my writing time.

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deeply into a current project?

I don’t work certain hours of the day when they come home from school, so they know I’m around for them then. I used to think there was something the matter with me, that I wasn’t present enough for my writing and that it couldn’t possibly be quality writing if my thoughts and concerns about it weren’t seeping over into my daily interactions with my family, but then one day I actually realized that I do think about my writing while I’m cutting the carrots and going over irregular Spanish verbs with my kid. There are many levels to my thoughts, I realized, and I’m always scanning a situation or event or a bit of conversation in order to mine it and see how it could work with my writing. When I regroup and sit in front of the computer, the events of the day inform my writing. Nothing I do away from my writing is in vain, not the chopping of the carrot or the irregular verb tense review or the reprimand to pick up a dirty sock. It’s all the stuff that stories are made of.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

I had a teacher once tell me that when you start writing, everyone and everything will be against you. I think he was right, if you want to look at it in that light. Nothing about being a wife or a parent (or a teacher, which is what I also do part time) is conducive to writing. Being those things takes up your time and energy. You’ll always be pulled in ten directions. As much as I hate that feeling, it’s good for my writing. It makes me fight harder for my right to write. The more I see it as a challenge to spend time on my writing, the more I struggle to do it, and the more productive I become. In that way it benefits me.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

I think you have to do what works best for you and what you’re comfortable with. I can count the number of times my kids ever had a babysitter on one hand. I think I toyed with the idea when they were younger. (All three are relatively close in age.) I thought, “Yes, I’ll get a baby sitter for them three hours a day, and then I’ll work on my writing,” but that never became a reality, simply because it was easier for me to be around them than to have to fit some babysitter’s schedule into our busy day. Also, I very much wanted to be around them when they weren’t asleep or napping. Because the time they were awake was the time I knew I wouldn’t be able to write, I felt the urge to make up for it when they were sleeping and I could write. I didn’t waste time at the computer, and I decided any project I was going to undertake, since I had such a limited window of time to do it in, was somehow going to be an artistic endeavor worthy of my life. Ideally, the only guilt a writer should let themselves feel is the guilt that they’re not working enough on their writing.

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In which I do a great public service by revealing the state of my kitchen

Posted on by Cari — 25 Comments ↓

In the realm of trashed kitchens, we hit absolute bottom this weekend. It got so bad I was compelled to post a photo on Twitter. I think I made a lot of people feel a hell of a lot better about the state of their own kitchens. No matter how bad they are, they likely didn’t look like mine.

kitchen before

Ready for the excuses? See, the whole house was spotless last weekend (confession: because we had a house guest). And then last week I had a cold and had a tight freelance deadline and didn’t have the energy to clean at night after working on the freelance because of that cold and…and… Yeah. I never clean at night when I’m on deadline because there isn’t time to do both and deadline with a paycheck at the end of it trumps clean house.

What really happened is that the kids usually get screen time once a week, after Kiddo gets home from school on Friday. I love Friday movie day. I look forward to it all week. I clean the kitchen and straighten up the downstairs and get dinner going while the kids sit on the couch all glazed eyes and slack jaws. It’s about as luxurious as it gets around here. This past week, though? The same week that I had a cold and a tight deadline? I went and shot myself in the foot and took away movie day as a consequence for bad Kiddo behavior. I regretted it as soon as it was out of my mouth. Couldn’t I have taken away his Legos for two days? Made him clean the bathtub? Put him on compost duty for the week? Nope. Had to right off the bat go to the consequence that punishes me. I’m quick like that. Losing that bit of cleaning time was enough to let the whole mess slide into absolute chaos.

And then this weekend we had two glorious days of sun, the first in a very, very long time, this being Portland and all, and there was no way anyone was staying inside to clean this weekend. (Gotta keep your priorities straight.) By the time the kids were asleep last night the kitchen was more than I could face so I cleaned the living room and dining room (no small feat) and left the kitchen for today.

And then came downstairs this morning and wanted to run away from home.

So don’t tell Kiddo, but this morning I plugged the Girlie in to some Yo Gabba Gabba (on a non-movie day!) so I could tackle the kitchen. The fact that I felt so guilty about this that I had to confess it on Twitter probably bears some looking at. The kitchen now looks like this:

kitchen during

Yeah. Miles to go before I sleep. Am I missing something? Some key instruction I was supposed to be given when the kids were born? How am I supposed to keep the house reasonably clean without plugging the kids in to hours of screen time while also working a freelance job at night and writing novels and every once in a while actually hanging out with my husband? (And yes, Billy does some cleaning, too.) I look at the kitchen and I want to gag, but I’m not sure how to keep it from sliding into that absolute hell all too often.

One of our neighbors, who has two teenagers, has on more than one occasion walked into our house and looked absolutely horrified, which I can only assume means her house didn’t look like mine when her kids were younger. So what did she do that I’m not doing? I refuse to ask her, because of those horrified looks. (Shhh. Don’t judge. She’s a wonderful woman.)

I suppose I could cook less. Somehow that doesn’t seem like the right solution, though.

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Writer, with Kids: Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Posted on by Cari — 85 Comments ↓

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Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, New York Times bestselling author of At Knit’s End, Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter, Free-Range Knitter, Things I Learned from Knitting, Casts Off, Knitting Rules, All Wound Up, and her blog: Yarn Harlot.

Age of Kids: 18, 20, 22

I began to support my family by writing books (although I’d always written, just without the pressure of any real success) about eight years ago when my daughters were ten, twelve, and fourteen. At the time, I remember people telling me that they thought that it was a great match, being a mum and a writer. After all, I worked from home, my workspace could be wherever my kids were, I worked the hours I wanted to, and I had great and tremendous flexibility, so I could always be there for them.

At the time, I believed everything people were saying to me. I could see how it was all true, and I kept trying to feel lucky, and like my life was easier than theirs, but for some reason I couldn’t quite puzzle out, every single time someone told me how great it was, I wanted to pluck their nose hairs out just to watch the tears well up. It has taken years for me to clarify my position, and Cari said I could write whatever I wanted for this blog post, so I’m using it to do what I hope is a little favour for writing parents everywhere. Read this next sentence carefully. It’s the important one.

Writer is not a synonym for stay-at-home parent.

I have a job. I know writing looks like it isn’t a job, I know it sounds super fun, and I know I get to do it from home, and I absolutely concede that it is pretty amazing to be able to go to work in my underpants, but I feel like after almost a decade of trying to balance my culture’s perception that I’m unemployed with the reality of having a full-time job, I’ve decided it’s a diaper of a different colour. Like most parents – or at least, like most good parents, I have always put what my kids need first. Absolutely first – so I did feel lucky that when one of my girls re-enacted the vomiting scene from The Exorcist I could put down the work and pick up the kid, but like all parents who work, it didn’t change the amount of work that had to be done. All of the allegedly amazing things about my job turned out to be big challenges. Enormous challenges, and as the years went by I became increasingly jealous of the parents I saw who had guaranteed and protected time to work every day. I had to work very hard to learn how to defend the time I needed to write, and how to explain to the people around me that while I wanted to be there for my kids 24/7, and how I knew that it looked like my job made it possible to do that….that I really was going to need some time to work that was protected the way that leaving the house and going to an office protected the productivity of other people with jobs. I needed to learn what I was going to say when people were surprised that I needed childcare now and then, and I needed to learn how to explain to my family, friends, and community, that writing wasn’t play time, or personal time, or fun time, or a hobby. It was the same as the work they did. That last part turned out to be harder than anything else.

One summer, a mum and I chatted about how she’d just managed to secure summer daycare for her kids – and I responded with envy. I think I said I had a ton of work to do, and was really worried about how I was going to manage once the kids were off school, and this mum expressed surprise that I would want or need childcare when I had the flexibility of being a writer. Didn’t I want to put that time with my kids first? Weren’t they my number one priority? At the time I was on a book deadline, and while writer isn’t a synonym for full-time parent, writer on a deadline is absolutely equivalent to lunatic – and it was all I could do not to smack her. I asked her why she needed or wanted childcare. Why wasn’t she putting her kids first? She owned her own business – there was no boss to stop her, I mean, why not just take that pack of hooligans to the office? What could possibly be the problem with that?

She laughed that way people do when they’re a little bit frightened of you, and said that she absolutely could not take the kids to work with her. She had work to do, and though she tries to put her kids first, if she had to take care of her kids nothing at work would get done. She’d have to let them watch too much TV or spend their whole summer photocopying parts of their various anatomies, which (while fun) was hardly good for them. She giggled with the ridiculousness of it. I stared – and in that moment I realized something. She didn’t just think that I had all that flexibility about when I worked, she thought I had flexibility about how much I worked at all. After all, I was a writer.

If a writer doesn’t work, they don’t make money, just like any other job. The other real truth is that there’s more than one way every parent needs to care for their family. Meeting their physical need for a loving parent is one thing, but what part of not buying them food is helpful? For most writers with kids, the gift of flexibility means that on those days when one of the tykes has barfed for nine hours, a writer can put absolutely put off their work. That gift then pays off as the writer starts typing after the kids are finally in bed, after they have put the disgusting sheets in the washer… and then they stay up half the night pretending that drinking a whole lot of coffee is good for you because of all the antioxidants in it, and silently pray that the dose will mean they live long enough to finish the book. For writers who need to write (and I don’t mean that in a spiritual, but financial sense) being a writer and a good parent means that you are sometimes going to have to choose between your kids and your work, just like if we had office jobs, and while we’ve accepted that – it would be a hell of a lot easier if we didn’t have to deal with a world around us that thinks that being a writer means that we’re the parent on the committee who has the time to bake those 98 cupcakes the school needs for the bake sale, because of all our fabulous work flexibility.

From the outside, I know that the perks of our jobs must seem pretty amazing to parents who don’t have them, and I bet that right now, some non-writing parent who’s searching for good daycare is scoffing the snot out of the idea that I’m envious of them, but I have been. The reality of the writer/parent is that the stuff about working full-time outside the home can look like heaven to us. Every writer/parent I know does a huge chunk of their writing after the kids have gone to bed, working into the wee quiet hours, and then staggers through their day with the kids. The ability to use what flexibility the job granted me was amazing – but the difficulty of having that work respected, and protecting the time to do it was almost impossible. I know I’m not the only writer fantasizing about a world where every day they went to a small room that their kids weren’t allowed in, and worked without interruption. Being a working writer who has a child or three, and who can’t afford or doesn’t choose childcare means that parent/writer is actually doing two jobs at once, with both being disrupted by the effort. Like someone working outside the home who has to leave their kids to get it done, the writing gets interrupted by the parenting, and the parenting gets interrupted by the writing and the writer struggles to find some kind of balance.

Over the years that I’ve been a mum, I’ve watched the phrase “working parent” disappear, and fairly so, it’s been replaced by the idea that all parents work, either inside or outside of the home. As the ideas around work and where it happens change, as more and more people telecommute or work from home, maybe the next step is to work on our creating a way of thinking about the dilemmas of working artists at home with their kids, cleaning up puke, baking cupcakes, trying to nail a word count, drinking way too much coffee, and thinking a whole lot about Virginia Woolf and how right she might have been about having a room of one’s own. All that flexibility has a price.

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Writer, with Kids: Court Merrigan

Posted on by Cari — 7 Comments ↓

court merrigan fb

Court Merrigan, author of Moondog Over the Mekong, forthcoming from Snubnose Press, and Spingetingler Award-nominated “The Cloud Factory.” Stories upcoming in Weird Tales, Big Pulp, Noir Nation, and Border Noir.

Age of kids: Ada, 4 and Waylon, 1

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

Before kids there was this freedom – which I now palpably recognize as amazing – to sleep when you wanted. All I had to get up for was my day job. My wife and I were living by the beach in Thailand and we had breakfast at cafes. And sometimes lunch. And dinner. I’m painfully aware, now, of how much time I wasted. Mainly because I could. A long evening stretching before me, leisurely sipping a beverage, taking my time deciding what to do.

My wife used to work the night shift at a factory and I’d get up around 4 AM and write for a couple hours, go pick her up at 6 AM, then write for another hour or so before hopping on the motorcycle and going to work myself. Nighttimes I’d go to bed as early as 8 or 9, depending on my proximity to whisky and / or mood. My mood, see, not the kids’.

Nowadays I’m unable to work the Ben Franklin routine. Instead I stay up late. The kids go to bed at 8 on a good night, later on the weekends. Then I go to work. I try to get to bed by midnight but sometimes things are going well and I stay at it till 1 or 2 AM. Which makes the next day dark and long, but it’s like my dad used to say, you can sleep when you’re dead.

Getting up early hurts. Staying up late is more a matter of endurance. And the occasional nip of bourbon.

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deeply into a current project?

I come from a long line of workaholics. One of the things I promised myself when I had kids was that when one came to me, I would set the writing aside. I’ve held to that pretty well, I think; but it comes at great cost to getting things done. In short, I only get sunk deeply into my own stuff when the kids are unconscious.

On account of the growing inequalities in America, it’s an ever-more Darwinian struggle to obtain the goods of American life, and this competition will only increase as our kids get older. Not being in the private French tutor and $30k-a-year preschool set, basically the only resource I have to give my kids is my time. I don’t feel like I can or should deny them that, not when I’m fifty percent responsible for thrusting them into the struggle in the first place.

My wife’s a quick study, but she’s only lived in the USA for three years, not sufficient time to master the delicate language of mild hypocrisy that characterizes American middle-class life, the little white lies, the smiles and premeditated body language. To say nothing of the endless forms, the phone calls, the queries and follow-ups, the consumer choices and social arrangements. So I’m probably more involved in the minutiae of my kids’ lives than I would be if my spouse were fully cognizant of the daily viscera through which we swim.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

In lots of ways, but here’s the most solid, for me: my daughter has made me vastly more conscious of women and girls in my own writing. For example, I’m currently reworking, page by page, a manuscript that I originally finished when Ada was just a cute little belly bump. I am continually astounded at what wasteland for women characters the story is. Needless to say, that is changing in this go-around. It’s a post apocalyptic Western and now the women are right in there, throwing body blows. The short stories I’ve written recently also usually feature women who aren’t just props to the desires and dilemmas of men.

Now, my writing tends to feature morally challenged individuals, so it’s not like I’m writing exemplars for my daughter or something. The women partake of the darkness just as surely as the men. But they’re there, is the thing, and they’re not fucking around.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

Keeping focused. Come home from work, my wife giving me a Tebow-worthy hand-off with the kids, and who can blame her, the rambunctious little shits. Engage in a nightly Long March to get the kids into bed relatively unscathed – “Your tooth is only chipped? Not broken? Okay, sleep tight, honey!” – so that by the time I get to the computer to work, all I really want to do is mix funny cat pictures on Reddit with bourbon.

I may be blaspheming the Holy Writ of The American Church Of All-Consuming Parenthood but I’m going to say it anyway: I’d be a better writer without kids. But so what. I only learned what love was when I held that little baloney loaf for the first time. Love is nothing if not sacrifice. No words I’ll ever scribble will hold a torch to that.

In Thai culture, children are considered to bear a karmic debt to their mother and father and are thus expected to provide for their parents in their old age. My plan is to stress that half of their cultural heritage, in order to enjoy my golden years on their dime.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

Have kids. By all means. It won’t make you a better writer, at least in the short term – I can’t speak to the long term yet. But it will make you a better human being.

NOTE: Court’s forthcoming story collection will include “The Cloud Factory,” which has been nominated for Best Story on The Web. Do check out the story, and if you like it you can vote for it here. Voting is open until the end of April.

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Domesticated

Posted on by Cari — 10 Comments ↓

I got lucky today. Billy took the kids so I could go write at a cafe for several hours–one of my cherished writing Sundays. Before I could get out of the house for the afternoon, I had to get dinner going in the slow cooker so there would be food to eat when I got home. Billy is a wonderful man with many talents, but getting things done while watching the kids isn’t one of them. In all fairness, accomplishing anything practical while hanging out with two very young kids is a hard-won talent and I’ve had way more practice. So I had to brown a pork roast and chop some stuff and measure some other stuff and throw it all into the slow cooker. No big deal. Except that the kitchen was trashed and I had to clean it enough that I wouldn’t be completely disgusted by cooking in it. And we had no clean spoons (which is to say we had nearly no clean dishes at all), so the dishwasher had to be loaded and run. And then the kids needed lunch and then I had to get the girlchild down for her nap.

And then I left. I walked the 30 minutes to my writing cafe. It was a beautiful walk, sunny and warm. (I highly recommend choosing a working cafe a decent walk away from home. I use the walk there to transition from Mom to Cari, and to start to think my way back into the book. I use the walk home to bask in the glow of Having Written, and to try to settle my brain back down into Mom mode so I can be present for them when I walk through the front door.) When I got to the cafe, I snagged my favorite table–the only one next to an outlet. I sat down to work for four hours. It was glorious.

With everything that had filled my day before the walk to the cafe, is it a huge shock that the new novel could be accused of being a bit…domestic?

Remember how I wrote the first draft of this novel differently than I’d written the first two? How I moved quickly, no looking back? How when I’d finished I wasn’t sure at all of what the hell I’d done, or if it was any good or even salvageable? Well, when I finally sat down to read through it after the one-month cooling-off period, I found that I’d written a good first draft. Very good in some spots, absolute crap in others…a normal first draft. Overall, I was very happy with it. Except for this one thing, and it felt like a big thing. As I read, I kept muttering, “Shit! This is so domestic. This is a fucking domestic novel. Shit. Can I do that? Can I write a domestic novel?” Etc etc etc until I was sick of myself. Then I noticed that one of my main characters, a mother, was struggling against her idea of herself as she’d been before kids in contrast with the postage stamp-sized life she’s now found herself in. She was struggling against her own domesticity as I was struggling against the perceived “smallness” of what I’d written.

But it isn’t small. It’s about adultery, and mothers and sons, and farming. You know what other book is about adultery, and mothers and sons, and farming? Anna Karenina. No, I’m not comparing myself to Tolstoy (but damnit, I am also not saying that I do not have the potential to one day write at that level). This isn’t a light book I’ve written, this isn’t fluff. And the tone is literary, the themes explored in a literary way because that’s how my brain moves and that’s how my voice naturally falls when I write fiction. And still, this fear. “I’ve written a domestic novel! I’m going to lose all my literary fiction cred!” Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. Where does this come from?

Well…have you read this Meg Wolitzer piece yet? Or Roxane Gay’s brilliant response to it? If I’m lucky enough that this manuscript finds its way to publication, I do run the risk of being taken less seriously with this novel than with The Revolution of Every Day, which is also about relationships but with the “more literary” backdrop of class warfare and housing rights. It’s not paranoia. Were I to publish this book under a male pseudonym, the book would likely be received differently. But no. It’s my book. This is my name. And it’s the book I want to write. It seeks to answer the questions I wanted to ask.

I’ve so internalized this bullshit that as I read through my first draft, part of my brain wanted to hide the book away and pretend I’d never written it. I need to get over that. I need to move past it. I’m embracing this book exactly as it is. I’m going to revise it to the best of my abilities not to move it away from “women’s fiction” but to make it as true to itself as possible. Even if that puts it at grave risk for a pink cover. And if my courage flags, I’ll come back to this, from Roxane Gay’s essay:

“I don’t care if my fiction is labeled as women’s fiction. I know what my writing is and what it isn’t. Someone else’s arbitrary designation can’t change that.”

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Writer, with Kids: Caroline Leavitt

Posted on by Cari — 3 Comments ↓

curlycaroline

Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, Girls in Trouble, forthcoming Is It Tomorrow

Age of kid: 15

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

Before I had my son, I foolishly thought that I could never be a writer and have kids–though I loved them. But then, after I married Jeff, I began to feel as if I would die if I didn’t have a child, if I couldn’t be a mother. I had no idea how we were going to manage having a baby in our midsts and do our work, but I was determined. Before I had my son, I wrote all the time. I figured I would work while he napped, or work very early or late. I was sure I would figure it out.

When my son was born, nothing went as planned. First, I got critically ill! I wasn’t writing at all then, much less able to do much for my beloved son. But when I did get well, I set up his bassinet by my desk and every two hours I would write until he woke up. Then I would feed and cuddle him for two hours until he went to sleep again. I was astonished how focused I was, how much more work I got done.

My son always came first–and I wanted him to come first, but this new kind of “super focus” allowed me to write at any odd hour I could find. Once my son was in school, I wrote when he was in school, and stopped when he came home.

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deeply into a current project?

This is a great question. My husband and my son both know that sometimes, if I am deep in thought, one or the other could say, “The house is burning down,” and I would not be aware that they had said a thing. If there really were a fire, I wouldn’t smell the smoke! I’m really lucky to be married to a guy who is also a writer/editor who has long and erratic working hours, so he understands that frame of mind. He’s completely supportive when I have to shut myself off and work until the wee hours. But I’m even luckier that he knows I tend towards obsessive-compulsiveness and he will pull me away from work to go see a movie, watch a video, go take a walk, etc. He grounds me and makes sure I live my life in the real, not just on the page. I want to make sure that I feed my relationship the same way I do my art. It took me a long time to find the right person and I want to honor that.

When my son asks me for something, I stop work for him. It doesn’t matter what I am doing, If I’m on a deadline or panicked, I spare a half hour, but I give him some time, as much as I can. I know having a kid is a real privilege, and a sort of miracle for me, really. Childhood is for such a short time, that I want to grab those moments when I can. The page can wait, but he cannot.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

It’s definitely made my work deeper, richer and more focused. And suddenly I seem to be writing about boys more! (Gee, I wonder why…) Having a child made me think more about all the tragic, frightening things that can happen, too.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

Balance. I’m happiest with both in my life. If I don’t work, I feel crazy, but if I don’t interact enough with my son, the longing kills me. Also, for a woman, I have had to fight against some people who feel that I should be working, that parenting is my one and only job. Others feel that writing is a hobby and therefore not important (that one really ticks me off.) But I think I’m showing my son that having a passion, that working really hard, and that loving what you do, is part of the key to real happiness.

Obviously money is a concern. Not having a traditional job means we two writers have to pay our own health insurance, which is roughly the cost of a small country. We have other freelance gigs, but they ebb and flow, and our income is never stable. But I wouldn’t trade it for a steady corporate job, ever, ever, ever. I never wake up with the sick feeling I had in the pit of my stomach when I worked in a corporation. Every day feels new to me.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

Nothing will be the way you expect it to be, but it will be better, richer, and more wonderful. Don’t worry if you seem to have less time to write. It won’t always be that way, and in the meantime, you will find yourself more focused in the hours or even minutes you do have to work. Kids open you up, they break your heart, they heal you–all things that will make you that much better a writer and your work that much richer. Truthfully, I wish I had more kids!

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