Creating a writing group for parents

How cool that I'm hitting on a trend - day after I posted about writing groups, THIS appeared by an NYC agent!


Some people asked about creating your own writers group. Yes—absolutely possible. Easiest is to be the only person with kids in the group, but that can get depressing – everyone else is happy to read 100 pages to finish a manuscript, while you have to go to a PTA meeting with Quentin’s teacher, and then the next day you have to take Francelia to her one-year Pediatrician appointment. Harold comes down with a two-day stomach bug, and there goes your reading time. It’s far easier to schedule non-parents (except the ones that travel a lot for work)—on a regular basis.

But like I said, a writing group is your community. It’s nice to have people in it who actually “get” your writing issues.

If you know two or three other writers that have kids, see if they would be interested in a trial writing group. This is a great option for single parents. If the kids are little, you can even do it during the day – just jointly hire a babysitter to look after the kids, and remember to keep an ear out (or set up a signal – a bell or something will do) so that kids don’t walk in on writerly conversation that might not be appropriate for them to hear. You have to be very free and open in a critique session. Voices can get raised, and if you’re really pushing the boundaries in your writing, the topics can get inappropriate for young ears – I’m not even talking about sex or violence. I’m talking abuse, lying, suicide, abandonment …the big ideas that inhabit serious literature of all genres is not something a four year old need to be asking about.

Other parents that are writers have formed groups that meet in various homes after bedtime. Sometimes this means sitter, often it means hero-spouses who not only have to deal with “girls/boys night out” but also “writer’s night” – because this is your career, your writing group counts as a business outing. Yes it does. Even if you like the people in your group and are friends with them. This is not you going out and getting hammered – so save the wine for AFTER critiques. Keep the crit session to a certain allotted time and keep it serious. This is your career. Don’t waste it talking about which school your kids got into.

Single-Parent Writers

It’s not fucking fair.

That’s what Cara Hoffmann announced after listening to the rest of the Pen Parentis panel talking about how they so appreciated their spouse for taking the kids for four hours here and two hours there so the writer could finish a chapter of the latest book. She raised a son on her own as a writer – and it was hard and bloody work. Well, ok, maybe not terribly bloody…but if you’ve read Cara’s phenomenal breakout novel, So Much Pretty, you might wonder.

How did she do it? The same way Mahogany Brown raised her daughter alone – as a poet it might be even harder than as a fiction writer – she told her kid that this was her career and she taught her child to treat that career with respect. Really, it’s no different to tell your child “Daddy has to write this proposal so that his company will earn 5M in the next merger acquisitions deal, so please watch Dora on the TV for a little while and then I’ll read you a story.” What you are doing is prioritizing work. And that’s damned hard, but guess what, life isn’t fair. Only people can be fair: and what each of these women admitted was how grateful they were to the industry people who understood when they were told that the deadline would be missed by a hair because, as a single mom, there was nothing to be done about it. 

But here’s what’s gorgeous: both Hoffman and Brown instilled a real respect into their kids. Writing wasn’t a hobby. It wasn’t something done for fun and laughs. Writing was a career. And by incorporating their kids into their lives this fully, these single-moms raised kids who not only respected and admired their mothers, but the kids themselves grew up to be successful artists: Hoffman’s son is in a quite-popular band, and Brown’s daughter won a writing award.

We can do this for our kids. Single parents more than anyone with a double income, should also take advantage of all the grants and fellowships out there that want to fund great writing. Try for a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. A Jerome Foundation Grant. Even the NEA grants are not out of your reach, if you are serious. I went to a presentation they made at AWP in Chicago, and discovered that the judges for the NEA grant change every year – you can apply with the same material up to five years in a row without any penalty. In fact they want you to reapply! We all know that taste is subjective, why not keep trying? You can’t win the lottery without playing, and getting grants is a lot like winning the lottery. Find out how these things are run, follow the rules, and apply. Your hardship bio will likely turn a few heads that otherwise are stuck in academic clouds. 

I have absolutely no idea what I'll be writing about next week. I just had a birthday. Maybe that's the problem - saw time, slipping slowly through the glass...

Flee for the Weekend

At the AWP conference in Chicago, I was lucky to attend the panel on pregnancy called Writing Motherhood. I was surprised by a few things 1) how many of the people in the audience were not pregnant, and 2) how many of them were men. It was standing room only in a rather large room (more than a hundred attended) – and the Q&A ran so long the next panel was hovering impatiently at the door.

This is clearly an issue, people.

At the panel, one of the writers admitted that her means of securing real mental space to write is to leave her daughter with her husband for the weekend, every other weekend, while she was working on a book. In case of emergency, mommy was a phone call and a ten-minute drive away, but otherwise, someone else was cleaning, cooking, hugging, reading bedtime stories, curing boredom, shopping and schlepping, and mommy was working her fucking ass off. Again, the guilt-factor was at work. She knew she was 1) spending family money on a hotel. Parents don’t take large expenses lightly. 2) incurring spousal debt. Believe me all favors this big get paid off. 3) only allowed to do this if she really did produce great work.

The power of guilt. It’s astonishing. The writer, by the way, is Hope Edelman and she is the author of 5 books and two memoirs and has a lovely happy daughter.

She is not the only writer to check into a hotel for the weekend. There were lots of parents in the audience nodding in empathy as she discussed her method. Even more writers, particularly, those that are urban-based, pay to use a writing center. Easily 2/3 of the writers we have presented on the Pen Parentis stage are or have been members of an offsite office space. Some have chosen writing centers for the flexible hours, but others have signed up for rental workspace or even leased small offices away from the home.

I myself did the best writing I have ever done when I won a fellowship to the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg Russia. There's nothing like leaving all your responsibilities behind, immersing yourself in art and thoughtful seeing and just living a writer's life. I came back with a rewritten opening to a novel and a short story that will be published this coming March - after making the short list on three different contests. It's great writing - and it reminds me how high the bar has to be set...even if I have to pick up the kids after school in the middle of writing the best paragraph ever.

I hear all you single parents – I agree it’s not fair to hear solutions that require not only dual incomes but also free babysitting. Next time I’ll talk about what two successful single moms said at our Salons.