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Posts tagged ‘writing’

Oct 21

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Motherhood, writing, and nature

website-image-launchComing in January 2010: The Motherhood Muse, a new blog and literary magazine that you will definitely want to read. You might also be inspired to submit your own work. Check it out:

The Motherhood Muse is a literary magazine, created to encourage mother writers to rediscover and reconnect with nature through their bodies, minds, and souls. It is a creative writing source that inspires mother writers to share nature’s gifts with children through our actions and messages. Upon the birth of my second daughter I created The Motherhood Muse to bridge the gap between mothers and nature, so our children will not be detached from nature. This site will help mother writers find freedom, creativity, and privacy in nature, which will encourage our children to play where the wild things are. Through literature we seek connection with nature for ourselves and for our children. Why is this reunion between nature and people crucial? The answer is here!

The Motherhood Muse literary magazine and blog features original, brilliant creative writing that explores motherhood through the lens of nature, the female body, mind & spirit, and our children’s relationship with nature. We publish creative nonfiction essays, articles, fiction, poetry, columns and photos. The Motherhood Muse goes beyond a walk in the woods to rejuvenate our creative writing minds. We seek writing that explores the nature of motherhood on a deeper level to open our minds to the wonders of mother nature and our place in it.

Here at The Motherhood Muse mother writers find a comfortable, supportive nook for writing and discussing our journey in discovering ourselves as mothers and women in nature. The Writer’s Workshop provides literary information to help mother writers develop their craft in new, original ways.

The Motherhood Muse blog is a second resource for mother writers who wish to share more ideas and learn more about creative writing.

The concept of The Motherhood Muse is unique as it connects mother writers with nature through our bodies, minds, and souls. We strive to support mothers in their journey through the wild beauty of motherhood by sharing these works of literature.

Good luck to all at The Motherhood Muse — I look forward to reading the first issue.

Oct 14

9 Comments

Mom Bloggers Club: Timing is everything

mombloggersclubaprilbannerfallNo offense, Mom Bloggers Club, but the recent post on My Favorite Writing Habits and Approaches left a few rather gaping holes.

This part was reasonable enough: “To develop your writing and/or passion, first make your presence with it a priority. It is simple. Make time and space for it.”

But this is all that the author has to offer for making that time and space:

TIME
Find the ideal pocket of time in your usual routine. Whether you develop a little bit of it daily or focus on it once every week, find the spot that is just right; one that flows with your energy.

Use this as a “rock” in your flow. Allow other things to move around it; keep it your priority.

I prefer mornings when the energy is fresh and it is more likely to be nice and quiet so that I can really be with my self and am not as easily distracted.

SPACE
Set up a space customized for developing your passion; one that is attractive to you and draws you in. Place all the essential tools customized for you and this project within easy reach. Make it so that it prompts your creative flow and feels great to be in.

Visit it every day, a few times. Even if just for a check in. Allow it to serve as a keystone to always keep you connected.

Uhm….what about the kids who are climbing up onto your lap with peanut-butter fingers, impaling their thumbs on your stapler and trying to electrocute themselves by sucking on the end of your PC’s power cord?

I think the topics of time and space merit more exposition. For content geared specifically to mothers, we need HELP. Well, I do, anyway. Perhaps, given that this post was directed toward bloggers, not “writers,” I’m being too harsh. I probably shouldn’t critique ANY attempt to be helpful. I’m sure the author has the best of intentions, and judging from the comments, there were those who found inspiration in the post. But considering that this piece was featured in the Mom Bloggers newsletter, I think there is room for a little more exploration.

Glossing over this terrain only adds to my existing frustration. There are mothers who want desperately to express themselves creatively — mothers who are crying in the frozen food aisle right this second, because they are so painfully separated from the creative part of themselves and can’t figure out how to reconcile the dichotomous pieces of their lives — and this kind of advice doesn’t really apply to them. When you have very young children at home — and limited resources — I don’t think that it’s as easy as finding a pocket of time in your usual routine (let alone a pocket that actually optimizes your biorhythms), and setting up some space for your work. Isn’t that the whole reason why this blog — our blog — has the following that it has? This stuff isn’t easy or simple, even though we wish it were. Maybe, for some women, it isn’t so complicated. Those are probably the women who have FINISHED their novels, too.

<sigh….>

Oct 13

4 Comments

Brittany: Creative Journey

*cross-posted from my personal blog*

Today was a good day.

We all have runny noses around here, and since the weather is pouring-down-crappy and there’ve been confirmed cases of swine flu at the preschool, I decided that was reason enough to let Sam play hooky today.

After John took his morning nap, the three of us went to paint pottery at a nearby studio, which has quickly become my go-to activity with Sam. The boy has some untapped artistic abilities, and he really seems to enjoy it. Sam and John worked in tandem on a Christmas gift (I can’t say for who because they might read my blog on occasion) and I bounced back and forth between them, pouring more paint and encouraging them to go nuts.

When I pictured motherhood, this is not what I saw of myself, strangely enough. I know I probably come across as artsy fartsy and free-wheeling, but I really have a hard time with the whole “going nuts” aspect of life.

If you think about it, all my hobbies have pretty stringent rules. There’s writing, with enough rules regarding structure, grammar, and spelling to give anyone a migraine. Embroidery, with its color-only-in-the-lines patterns, as well as the edict from above that the back should look as seamless as the front. And although I’ve tried it a couple of times, I’ve never been able to pull off anything but a realistic-looking doll.

In my personal life, too, I can’t look back on any period of my life and say “I was totally out of control then.” I attempted, on a few rare occasions, to get drunk and throw caution to the wind, but my conscious, an internal-harping-elderly-kill-joy quickly badgered me into returning to the straight and narrow. I’m just not comfortable saying “Do whatever you like.”

But I did it today.

The pottery the boys made today is going to look gorgeous after it’s fired, and it is 100% their work. I have a strict “Mommy-Hands-Off” policy when it comes to their artwork. And that is why there are drool marks in the paint, handprints, finger-painted swirls, drips, streaks, brush strokes, sponged dabs, and streams of colors not found in nature.

There is a saying for teachers — “The one who’s doing the work is doing the learning,” which basically means that if you want someone to learn something, you as the teacher must facilitate the experience, but then take a step back, and let your students do it, explore it, internalize it and learn it for themselves.

In stepping back, I’m learning a lot from my boys. Little boys can make stunningly beautiful objects with minimal supervision. There are no bounds to their creativity. They know how to go nuts. And they do it spontaneously and joyfully, just like they do everything else in life when they are allowed to act freely. It makes me happy watching all that joy pour out of them. They are overflowing with pleasure and satisfaction and a sense of “I did that” without feeling constrained by any pre-conceived notions.

It’s a lesson I should put to use in my own work. Lately, even though I have a new-and-improved plot for my novel, I have a pre-conceived idea in my head of what it should look and sound like, and I can’t even get an outline written that will translate to the page. I wish I wasn’t so overburdened with plans and could just let go and write.

But even though my own creative output has currently slowed to a trickle, I can feed my need to create, at least vicariously, by facilitating the boys’ creativity. It gives me the same rush as if I’d done the art myself, because art is all about exploring possibilities, and wherever my boys go, my heart travels with them.

Oct 8

5 Comments

Cathy: The Next Big Thing

crossposting from musings in mayhem

Why is it even when I have several projects I could be working on, narrowed to two that I am working on (read procrastinating) that I generally have at least part of my writer’s eye on The Next Big Thing?

This is also true in the home improvement arena, you should see what I’ve come up with for the addition now that we are paying a mortgage and have a yard of our own rather than renting a condo.

I mean I could also be focusing on getting those wonderfully folded piles from last week into dressers before starting this week’s loads. But I’m already a day late anyway, and have no earthly idea how it is that I wash the same five outfits per family member twice a week and there are still piles of folded and sorted laundry sitting from two weeks ago.

I’m planning next spring’s gardens while the plots are currently filled and continuing to fill with weeds. I really need to buy more sand to add to my clay soil which needs to be turned and covered, with compost, too, before I start plotting next year.

I am also dreaming baby names, when I know, logistics and physicality have set in stone that C is the last of my progeny. I am thinking of new baby names instead of being present with the three kids I have now.

I can use the baby names for characters, but that is the only technical resolve I have for this dilemma I have that the next thing is better than the present. It’s sparklier, it’s as tempting as a dessert sitting on the counter while I’m preparing dinner.

Something about the new, the imagined, the dreamed is much easier because I can keep my hands clean thinking about it while the dirty work of the present is a constant.

Maybe I just have trouble with finishing, with letting go, with saying finally, for the last time, that this version of the poem, the children’s novel, the article is good enough just the way it is.

I’m sure there is a psychological disorder with a big fancy name for this. It has conveniently slipped my mind.

Oct 6

4 Comments

Kristine: My Love Affair

When anyone asks me why I stay up until all hours of the night writing fiction when I could be sleeping or getting a number of domestic duties done around the house, I tell them it’s because (a) I have insomnia, (b) I hate cleaning just about as much as I hate exercising, and (c) I love it.

Yes, I have a love affair with my writing. I believe all writers do. It’s what keeps our butts in our chairs crafting scenes, wrestling with the demands of our characters, and spending an hour trying to think up the perfect metaphor for how our characters are feeling when we could be watching Dancing With The Stars or clipping grocery store coupons. (Okay, I do clip coupons—we’re still in a recession, after all.)

As any serious writer will tell you, building a career as a novelist is hard. It will break your heart most days. You can spend years on a project only to have it hidden in a drawer after having it rejected by every agent in the country.  You can go broke if you don’t have a supplemental form of income (i.e., a day job). You can read every how-to book and attend every workshop out there and still sit in front of a blank computer screen feeling lost.

So why do we do it? Why do we suffer through the frustration and the angst and the tears in pursuit of the cherished published novel boasting our byline on the cover?

It’s the dream of someday breaking through the barrier and emerging into the inner circle of published authors. It’s the hope that one day our words will reach the masses and make a difference, perhaps even change the world. It’s the feeling of having achieved our life’s mission—to write a novel and prove to ourselves that yes, we can do it and yes, we are good enough.

At least, that’s how it is for me.

I’m closing in on the last part of my rewrite on a book that has taken me two years so far to write. Yes, I could tackle the piles of laundry sitting in my basement or the dust balls hidden underneath the bed, but not yet. As with anyone involved with a love affair, I’m going to follow my heart, and my heart tells me that the only place I need to be at this moment is at my computer. Writing.

Sep 29

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Brittany: It All Starts With the First Line

*parts cross-posted from my personal blog*

Last week I took my How Home Improvement Saved My Marriage manuscript up to the attic and stuck it in a box with other things I don’t want cluttering up my life right now. Lately, I’ve been in a very foul mood toward my novel and my inability to get anywhere with it, and I decided it just wasn’t worthy of my continued devotion anymore.

My novel is flawed. Profoundly and maddeningly flawed. The beginning lacks momentum. It lacks bite. Alex, the narrator, doesn’t sound like anybody I’d want to hang out with for 200 plus pages. Partly that is due to point of entry problems. The beginning of my book was once funny as hell, with snappy dialogue galore, but that was before I realized that while it was highly entertaining writing, the plot was languishing under all that talking. So I cut, and I cut, and I cut some more. And I reached what I thought was the perfect point of entry. But no matter what I did, the book could just not pick up any steam at that point. It went mwah mwah mwaaaaah from the get go. And then there was the counter plot. I’ve never been particularly happy with how much of the novel is taken up by Alex’s job woes. It was one of those cases where I let the book meander into psychotic acid-trip craziness and hoped the reader was game to read absurdist fiction. But still, with all the lunacy going on in the plot, the story just sat there, staring at me, willing me to do something new with it.

When I hauled my gigantic white binder full of rough-draft novel up the attic stairs, dumped it unceremoniously in a Rubbermaid container full of books, and jammed the lid on it, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the action it had in mind. But as I resolutely turned off the attic light, I thought to myself, “This is an appropriate metaphor for how I feel about you. You suck. It was nice while it lasted, but good-bye forever.”

And I had not made it down even two rungs of the attic ladder before I was hearing Alex’s voice (muffled by the Rubbermaid container lid, but clearly Alex, nonetheless) and she said, “You want to put an offer on this house?” I asked my husband Will, who up til now had always seemed like a perfectly rational individual. And suddenly, my whole novel was re-organizing itself in my head. Here was the perfect point of entry. Here was the set up for funny dialogue. Here was a girl I could spend an afternoon with.

“You bitch,” I cursed, as I climbed down into the laundry room. “Where the hell have you been? It might have occurred to you to tell me this nine months ago when I was begging for your help.”

“I just thought of it,” said Alex.

Now she’s absolutely full of suggestions.

“You know what your problem is?” she asked me this weekend while I was cleaning the bathrooms. “You’ve got two different novels spliced together into some kind of weird Franken-fiction. Take out all the stuff about my teaching woes and stick to stories about the house.”

“That’s all fine and good,” I grumbled, “but I don’t have any more stories about the house.”

“Yes, you do,” she said.

“I do?” I asked.

And she proceeded to point out that I watch a bazillion home improvement reality shows on tv, and said, “What if Alex applied to be on one of them so they could afford to make the repairs on their new house?”

At this point, I was sprinting to my office for a notebook.

“The  reality show will pay for all the repairs,” she continued, “but the catch is that they have to do all the work themselves, with no outside help whatsoever, they have no clue what they’re doing, Alex is still messy and laissez faire, Will’s still an obsessive-compulsive neatfreak. and now there’s a film crew following their every move…”

And then the heavens parted, and a choir of angels appeared, singing in triumphant chorus…

I really feel like I’m on to something here — that this is a huge breakthrough for me — and it is going to take my book off in a new, and better, direction. And I’m sure there are lessons to be learned here about patience, and always remaining open to trying new things, and letting energy flow and ebb naturally, but it all gets so spiritual and metaphysical that it’s not easily described.

But the universe has worked her magic, and I’m here and I’m writing again.

Sep 28

3 Comments

WOW! Women on Writing

wowWOW! (Women on Writing) is a useful website and complementary blog that the writers among us may enjoy browsing. The website hosts a flash fiction contest and a collection of useful articles, including:

From the site’s About page:

WOW! is a global magazine, designed to support women’s creativity, energy, blood, sweat and tears, throughout all stages of the writing process. We envision Wow! being a favorite watering hole for professionals, the up-and-coming, and the recipients of our labors — the avid readers.

Our concept is unique, as it fills in the missing gap between writing websites and women’s magazines. We are dedicated to raising the overall standards within the writing community, and devote an active profile within writing industry associations, organizations and websites.

Ultimately, WOW! hopes to contribute to the love, enjoyment and excitement of producing quality writing — so that the reader in all of us will never want for good material, in any form.

Sep 25

11 Comments

Cathy: Not selling myself short

Crosspost from musings in mayhem.

The question of balancing motherhood and creativity arises constantly. The other day, I read a very interesting wake-up call over on and her head popped off. I loved the photograph of the mom going ahead with painting whilst her toddler hung upside down, squiggling on her lap. The mom in the photo is continuing her creative work regardless of being a mom as is the photographer and author. The essence of what Terri wrote was just shut up and do it. If you really want it, you’ll make it happen.

I think that’s why a lot of us mother-writers blog. It’s a piece of writing, that while it may not necessarily change the world or be the next Great American Novel, keeps us going. We can do it in the snatches of time during naps, or a bit of quiet while school aged kids are out of the house, in between loads of laundry and sinkfuls of dishes. We can focus for a few minutes, while our Big Project waits sometimes patiently, sometimes not so patiently for a chance to be the focus. We can do it while a wiggling toddler cuddles in for a snuggle while our fingers click away on a keyboard, like at this very moment that I write.

My old photography self of eons past has been relegated to largely okay pics of the kids and whatever catches my eye, with a little automatic easy camera rather than one I could make adjustments on, given the time and the perogative. The old dancer self still throws down in the kitchen periodically, albeit stiffly and ungainly. The old performer self regales at the dinner table in silly voices and fake opera, when I can get a word in edgewise among the constant stream of noise from all three kids. The old drawing self, will doodle now and then, and more often pretend large invisible canvases in sweeping gestures with my arms while I sit vegging out in front of the tv of an evening, too exhausted to do anything more. Honey must wonder what I’m doing over there, but is too polite or exhausted himself. Other times, I am making chi pottery, sitting with my hands balled around or manipulating invisible clay.

And I blog. I post something every weekday since I started this with the exception of when I took a summer excursion.

I know I have a manuscript that really wants to be finished and shopped. Believe me, if I could focus on that right now, I would. But when it comes to the big writing, I need more mental energy than I currently have. I also have three horizontal file drawers of poems and short stories that could use editing, compiling, submitting, as well as how many on the hard drive that need the same, and the three journals in my bedside drawer, dog-eared where good ideas are languishing. And then there’s that screenplay idea from about eight years ago that still won’t die, and I’ve lost the outline for ages ago.

But, for right now, This is what I can write, while I chase C away from the dog food again when things have gotten a bit too quiet. I’m doing a pretty fair job of it. And yes, I just wrote another very self-referential blog about blogging. But I’m doing it. I am writing.

Sep 10

5 Comments

Jenn: Rotten Orange

Apologies for dropping off the face of Earth. My first book, a textbook called “Natural Disasters and Catastrophes” is done (in quotes) and I’m now going through the mind numbing editorial process of getting all the figures, figure legends, tables, appendices, copyright permissions, etc. in order.  Though it is time intensive, it is so boring and dreadful, I haven’t wanted to live through it the first time, let alone relive it on this page and bore Miranda’s readers to tears.

But now I’m in the process of pitching another book, tentatively titled “Rotten Orange” about the Syracuse University Football Program.  I know NOTHING about football and I despise spectator sports, but I tutored the football players at SU for five years and in that time I was intimately acquainted with what the guys went through.  It was not fair that they were asked to do two very difficult full time jobs (athlete, scholar), accept no compensation, and handle fame and stardom like few other schools (Syracuse has no pro teams in the NFL or NBA or whatever, so the entire community was pro college sports like crazy).  I also saw what the coaches and academic support staff went through.

I’m mulling over how this book will go, but my rough idea is it will be marketed as the seedy underbelly of the SU program, but end up being a feel-good story about triumphing in the face of adversity, where the guys are now (many went pro, more did not), and reflecting on what a precious, special time it was for them. I’ll include race relations, politics of NCAA, romance, academics, and will have help with the sports side of things from my dear friend Dave who was an Earth Sciences major and starting defensive tackle.

I also plan to interview many of the guys, who are eager to have their stories told. But I’m going to take a sort of mother hen approach. My friends used to call my apartment “The Jenn Rivers Home for Wayward Football Players” because they would come to my apartment to feel safe and to not be treated based on their performance on the field (I gave then, and still give now, a flying eff about football games), just on the quality of their character and their academic performance.

I know this sounds scatterbrained right now, and it is. But I’m so excited to have another project, and would love to hear any feedback on this blog on what kinds of things you all think people would be interested in as I put the proposal together and start shopping it around. My friend at Wiley also said it would be a good idea to submit a few articles to newspapers and include them in a proposal. And then maybe flesh out the articles into chapters.

I hope you all have been thriving this past year, I’ve lurked and followed your creative efforts often.  I’m most impressed by the collective efforts of Creative Construction’s participants!

Aug 20

2 Comments

Cathy: I can’t even peek.

In my travels over a week ago, I retrieved one well inked copy of my first manuscript draft I had sent to a dear friend in the Boston area for critique and suggested edits.

Many moons ago, I lived in a 2nd floor walk-up on Newbury Street dubbed the shoebox, and he rented a room in the former servants’ quarters on the fourth floor (even more stairs, I had to take them two at a time at a momentum run to survive the ascent) of an old Commonwealth Avenue townhouse that had been broken into condos. We regularly spent entire days walking around Copley Square, sitting on benches on Comm Ave, in the BPL Courtyard, a few regular cafes, Newbury Pizza or each other’s humble abodes, discussing Literature, Art, listening to Mozart, Schubert, old time Rockabilly, Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours, and critiquing poetry and plays each wrote. We really dissected each other’s work, at times taking personal affronts, at others, able to make useful and take useful suggestions. Sometimes another friend joined us, but mostly it was just the two of us, picking apart each other’s work in order to build it back up again into something better. That was fifteen and then some years ago.

When he handed back my baby, er, first draft in Cambridge, he very kindly told me it was a great story and excellent characterizations. He gave a few verbal points of interest. But mostly, I noticed just how much ink he laid on each page in my quick thumb through in the dark of the rainy night under a street light.

How very film noir.

I still can’t look at it.

Jul 27

3 Comments

Writers changed by motherhood

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, highly recommended reading on writing and motherhood, including finding the time, missing the kids, and integrating the experience of being a mother. A brief excerpt from the article, written by Geeta Sharma-Jensen:

When Milwaukee poet laureate Susan Firer’s son was young, she’d often determine the length of her poems by his fingers.

Holed up alone in her writing room, she’d look up to see his fingers running back and forth in the space beneath her door. From the other side of the closed door, she says, he was wordlessly signaling that “it was time to come out and play.”

Her poems, then, were necessarily short; she never knew how long it’d be before the little fingers would slip under her door.

“I tend to be pretty obsessive about my writing, so my children have brought more balance to how I live,” Firer says. “Both my life and, consequently, my poems would be something very different, in fact unimaginable, without my children, who have greatly impacted both what I write about and how I write.”

Writing moms, like all writers, take life in all its aspects and use their imaginations to transform it into art. But motherhood does things to writers – from stealing their time to swelling their emotions to making them silly and dizzy with this strange, overwhelming protective love for another human. They’d often rather be with this human who’s taken over their life, their thoughts, their fears. And yet, there is their artistic impulse, a call so strong they cannot go long without yielding to its siren song.

Somehow, then, they have made time for their work, and the children are there, too – in their art, the result of the twinning of maternal instinct and artistic impulse.

The full article is here. Whatever you do, don’t miss reading this essay by novelist Alice Mattison (opens as a PDF), which is linked within the article. It’s an absolute gem.

Jul 22

5 Comments

Writing with the family around

From Mom Bloggers Club, a post by Rosemary O’Brien on writing from the domestic trenches: “Writing with the Family Around“:

I don’t know why, but I have a difficult time writing even a blog post when my family is around. Maybe it’s because when they come home from school and work, I may as well hang up my keyboard and give up until they go to sleep. If it’s not breaking up a dispute about a ball that magically flew threw the air and knocked something over in a house where balls are not allowed to be thrown, then it’s to stop and feed someone because they are “staaaaaaaarrrrrrrving!” even if they had a snack and it’s almost time for dinner (that I have to stop and make).

That is why I look forward to bedtime. It is when I creep back to my computer, which I left on, and create with abandon. I find I am more productive at night for some reason. Mornings rarely only happen for me because my kids need to get to school. It seems to be a law in this country. Before I had them, I woke up at 9 and began writing at 9:30 with my jammies on and a strong cup of coffee in my hand. At that point, I skimmed and answered simple emails, deleted files and was not required to speak to anyone about anything unless I wanted to. It was not until early afternoon when my writing would come alive and I would write with abandon. Some of my best work was written during this time. In fact, this is when my first novel was produced and found a publisher.

Read Rosemary’s full post here, and check out Mom Bloggers Club while you’re at it. I joined about a year and a half ago — and the newsletter often has an interesting tidbit or two.

Many of this blog’s readers rely on evening time for creativity (definitely works for Kristine) but by the end of the day, others among us feel less like Edith Wharton and more like dog meat. Of course, our schedules and rhythms adapt with the ever-changing needs of our children as the grow — and start sleeping, or stop sleeping.

In my own experience, I’ve found that my little ones are now reliably asleep by 8:30 every night — but my older ones are often just waking up at that time, in terms of being interested in interaction. On Saturday night, I stayed up until 4:00 a.m. talking with my oldest son, who will be leaving for college in a matter of weeks. I hadn’t intended to stay up that late, of course, but the conversation — important conversation — just happened. Some things can’t be rescheduled. Did I note the irony that I finally had the baby tucked up in his crib, weaned and sleeping through the night — but the firstborn had me up all until all hours? I sure did, but still managed to feel like a kid in a candy store. Now, if only I could steal some of those wee hours for my writing….

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