Clik here to view.
Knocking Off Mom (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love G-Rated Murder)
I first noticed it when my daughter was three years old, but I kept my mouth shut. Who was I to spoil her enjoyment of classic children’s movies? Maybe I was imagining the trend. Still, once I’d...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mother-Reader
“The Mother and Sister of the Artist,” Berthe Morisot In retrospect, I did everything wrong when I opened Emma Donoghue’s excellent story collection Astray. I didn’t check the author notes explaining...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Writers With Responsibilities: Be Who You Are
Dear Sally, Do you have the magic spell that can inspire me to write again? I have not written anything in so long. Whenever I write about parenting or families, I feel like “this has all been said...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Writers with Responsibilities: I’d Like to Click My Heels Three Times…
Dear Sally, I’m a single mother with four kids—everything from tweens to a would-be adult—and I just went back to work full-time. I tell people I’m a writer, but lately I’m a just a thinker, collecting...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Writers With Responsibilities: Patience is a Way of Life
Dear Sally, I want it all, NOW! What do you have to say to that? Your friend, Veruca Salt Dear Veruca, You can stomp and jump up and down all you want—but the truth is, if you’re a writer with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Writers With Responsibilities: Damn the Dog Days!
Dear Sally: In June, when I was running around from school picnics, to award ceremonies, graduations, lacrosse jamborees, school plays and concerts, I longed for the dog days of summer and no morning...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Writers with Responsibilities: The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
Perhaps, you’re one of those people who cry on the first day of school. For those of you putting your eldest on the kindergarten bus for the first time, I’ll give you a pass. For the rest of you, get...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From Swaddles to Slang: Creative Problem Solving in Translation and Motherhood
In late February I finished up the translation of a novel. In mid-March my son was born. Caring for a baby is not all too different than dealing with a challenging translation, though granted the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Searching for Artifacts: An Interview with Sara Majka
Author photo credit: Chris Ward In the opening piece in Sara Majka’s haunting debut collection of linked stories, Cities I’ve Never Lived In, the narrator announces that she is in the middle of a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Review: A WOMAN OF PROPERTY by Robyn Schiff
A Woman of Property Robyn Schiff Penguin Random House (Penguin Poets Series), March 2016 96 pp, $20.00 Buy: paperback | eBook A new kind of writing about motherhood may be emerging. Rachel Zucker’s and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Keeping the Faith: How Anne Lamott Can Save Your Life
Last summer, when my baby was four months old, we traveled to Israel to visit our families. My husband and I had been moving around the East Coast for several years–from Princeton to Brooklyn just...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“Hyperconsciousness of the Historical Instability of Words”: An Interview...
Monica Youn’s poems are precise, sharp-edged and fleet-footed; they always seem to be moving in three different directions at once. She is the author of three books of poems: Blackacre, Barter, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Elephant in the Room: How Elissa Schappell Broke My Heart Twice
In March 2015, I went off the pill. I had gone to my local Planned Parenthood clinic in Ithaca, NY, where I was living at the time, and had been instructed to start taking prenatal vitamins and expect...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“Becoming A Parent Made Me A Ruthless Editor of My Own Work”: An Interview...
Elizabeth Onusko’s poems are sharp-edged, sometimes bleak, but also very funny; they feel timeless, but also of the moment in their portrayal of a hopeless modern world—ours—and the struggles and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Shirley Jackson, Madeleine L’Engle, and Motherhood
I read much of Shirley Jackson’s memoir of raising four children, Life Among the Savages (1952), on a weekend when I was caring for three children. For a brief stretch—maybe five pages—we achieved a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rachel Cusk and the Unbearable Lightness of Being
It is only when I walk through the front door to my house that I realize things have changed. It is as if I have come to the house of someone who has just died, someone I loved, someone I can’t...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Band of Mothers
A few days before my son was born, my parents and sister came to Princeton, where my husband and I lived at the time, to witness the birth. They had found a sublet a few blocks away from our apartment,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“A Wilderness of Being”: Maternity in the Apocalypse
In Louise Erdrich’s latest novel Future Home of the Living God, the laws of physics have gone haywire and evolution has started moving backward. Animals have stopped “breeding true,” and pretty soon,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Domesticity and Anne of Green Gables
I was an angry little girl. Angry that when I expressed something I thought was important and profound, adults smiled at me like I was a soft kitten. Angry that I was skinny and awkward, angry that I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Kudos by Rachel Cusk
Kudos Rachel Cusk Farrar, Straus and Giroux | June 5, 2018 Amazon | Powell’s In 2013, Rachel Cusk became the subject of a book review so scathing, The Guardian declared it “Hatchet Job of the Year.”...
View Article
